Page 51 of When Sinners Fear
“You could be.”
She walks on, staring out into the evening light. “I don’t want to be. I want to be back at college, and if I go home, I’ll have to do all the things I did before. As you quite rightly said when we first met, I shouldn’t have to. I shouldn’t have to deal with that and postpone my future for her death.” A small smile broadens my lips. Logical. “But I feel awful about that,” she continues, tapping her chest. “In here. It hurts to feel that way, and whilst I’m with you and your callousness, it feels more acceptable to feel detached from it. You help me see clearer. Albeit, wrongly.”
“Who says its wrong?” She turns to look at me, swinging her long, blonde hair around that fragile neck.
“I do. The world does. I should be mourning a loss coming, or at least helping to preserve her life for as long as I can. Instead, I’m here with you trying to quantify what happened to me and what that means. It’s a selfish position to take. I’m selfish.” She stares into me as if selfishness should be considered inappropriate. “I don’t suppose you’d understand that, though.”
“My eldest brother killed my father when I was young, my mother accidentally killed herself a short while ago, and my brother – Elias – had his neck broken a while before that. I understand loss and its effects on the psyche.”
Her eyes widen. “That’s a lot of death. I’m sorry.”
“Are you?”
She looks affronted. “Of course.”
I smirk and turn from her, walking us onwards towards the small fountain. “No, you’re not. You think you should be and you’re saying the correct thing in the circumstance, but you’re not. And, considering the world you’re from compared to mine, you’d be right to believe their deaths useful to society.”
She doesn’t respond, as we keep moving slowly, and I can’t help but think about her and that cage we were in. My own hand brushes across the pads covering the burns on my chest at the imagery as if cementing the time we were in. Part of me enjoys the memories, revels in them, even – skin, lips, tears and moans – but every step she takes in this open ground and free air makes me consider how long I should allow her in this space. We’ve become connected because of what happened, and prolonging the engagement seems detrimental to both of us. I’m softening, and she’s forgetting what my hands did to her.
“How long do you think you’ll need to be here?” I ask as we approach the steps to the pool area.
“Are you telling me I have to go?”
“I’m telling you you should.” She looks at the water as we walk towards it, and frowns. “This isyourlife, Peyton. Not your mother’s, or your father’s. You have a bright future waiting for you. Being here will only halt that, and being anywhere near me will drag you somewhere you’re not meant for. You’ve been there enough already. Being selfish for your own gain isn’t something to be ashamed of nor feel guilty about. You survived me, and what you went through because of me. You have every right to put yourself first for a while.”
I watch her sit down at the pool’s edge and dangle her legs into the water, seemingly thinking about that honesty. I stand behind her, hands in my pockets as she considers the thought, and look at her bruised legs. It doesn’t matter what was, or what could be if I chose to let this carry on to wherever it could go.
“I didn’t need to survive you,” she murmurs. “You held back. We both know you did. You protected me from what could have been.” I stare at her clean, light hair, and am taken right back to that dirty ground and our nakedness on it again. Not the fucking. Not the beatings, either. Just us two in a hole of darkness and fear. That’s the reason she’s still here from my perspective. Something happened between us. It was intimate, almost sweet-natured, given my normality and learned inclination. “Why did you do that for me? Why did you protect me from them?”
I look out at the grounds, unsure how to answer that. Jealousy at first, followed by some low-lying sense of blame. “Would you rather I hadn’t?”
“I’m not saying that, I’m just trying to understand why you’d bother. I saw you take those beatings. I saw how close to death you were because of them. Yet you still dragged yourself from the ground to make sure you were the only one who touched me. Does that mean anything?” I frown and keep staring at her back, unsure where I want this part of the conversation to go, or even if it should go anywhere at all. “I want to think about what happened as being forced and …” Her leg swipes the water, splashing it around. “… being raped. But it doesn’t feel like that, at least not completely. I’m confused about that. I don’t understand it. You’re right. I don’t understand why I’m here with what’s happened to me. When that’s whatyoudid to me.”
I don’t speak. This part is for her to work through on her own. I did the only thing I could in the situation to make it somewhere near bearable for her. For all my callousness, in those moments and for that time, I used my past to ease her future. And this … emotional fucking request from her is beginning to grate on any last care I have.
“Knox? You have to talk to me about this. You were the only one with me. I don’t know how to feel about any of it, and I didn’t deserve what happened.”
My fists tighten. “I don’t have to talk to you about anything. You’re here to heal. Heal. And then move the hell on.” I back away from her to head for the deck into the house. Water sloshes behind me, and she grabs my arm sharply to stop me.
“Yes, you do.Youwere the one who did that to me, andyouwere the reason it happened. This is all you. The men, the horror of it all. You knew them – Logan and Reed? You knew them and you knew why we were there. Naja? Who is that? And a priest?” I stare at her fingers wrapped around my arm, close to a bruise I got for shielding her. “And heal? How do I heal from that? How do I get it out of my head or find the logic in any of it when you’re the one I have to look at?”
“This is why you should leave.” She lets go and gets herself in front of me.
“No. Tell me why you protected me from it all.”
“Why will that make it better for you?”
“Because … Because I’ll know then. I’ll know if there was something between us that means something – an explanation of sorts – or if I should run and try forgetting it.”
“You’ll never forget it, Peyton. My hands will be on you forever. There’s nothing I can do about that now.”
“That’s it? That’s all you’ve got to say to me? To help me?”
My jaw clenches. “I have helped you. I helped you in the only way I could.”
“But did it mean anything to you?”
Tension flows through me, and I keep staring at eyes that are too familiar to me. Her hair wisps around her face in the light breeze, and her gaze pleads for answers I don’t have. What does it matter if it did mean something to me? If, deep down inside, she means more to me than I’m choosing to acknowledge? She’s as far away from my world as it gets, and, regardless of our time, she was only ever supposed to be an innocent plaything outside of that world. She’ll never accept who we are going forward, or what we do. I’m not running the same roads as Dante has with Wren.