“I don’t know, I guess you like the power,” he said. “I mean, why else do you kill people?”
Her jaw dropped. She got up from the bed. “You don’t understand anything about me, do you?”
He shut his eyes. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said it. I didn’t mean it.”
She headed for the door.
He was on his feet. “Don’t go. Stay, please. If I don’t understand you, help me understand.”
She hesitated at the door. “It’s not about power.” She shook her head. “Or maybe it is. But it’s not like you think. I’m not some power-hungry crazy. It’s only that I was powerless for so long. So, it’s about proving to myself, over and over, that I’m not the dirt under anyone’s boot anymore, okay?” She threw the door open.
He caught her by the arm. “Don’t leave.”
“Let go of me.”
“This is what you do, what you always do. You run off. Maybe it’s because you want to know if I’ll chase, I don’t know. But you don’t have to run. I will chase. I’m not seeing anyone, and I don’t care if you reduce me to some pathetic, needy version of myself. Don’t go.”
She looked out the door into the hallway and then she looked back at him. Her eyes were wide and she looked surprised or possibly terrified, one or the other. “Nash…”
He tugged her against him. He kissed her.
She shoved him away with a violent amount of force. She tumbled out into the hallway.
“I’m sorry,” he said again.
She didn’t look at him. She squared her shoulders, turned her back on him, and stalked away.
Damn it.
He shut the door and rested his forehead against it.
Damn it all to hell.
He hit his forehead against the door.
Ouch.
He did it again.
Damn it, damn it, damn it.
THE PAST
The kissing went on for hours.
Nash had never felt anything like it. It was the sweetest, most wonderful thing in the universe—better than ice cream sundaes, better than jacking off and looking at pictures of Jessica Alba in a bikini.
He didn’t know it at the time, but making out like that was something special. It was a piece of youth—a perfect, beautiful piece of being a teenager—that was never properly recaptured. It was innocence. Wondrousness. The ability to do nothing but kiss for hours on end and both be perfectly enthralled by it, both need nothing more, both be caught up in just the kissing without trying to push things to another level.
Kissing like that wasn’t the least bit boring, partially because it was all so new.
When Siobhan opened her mouth to him and her tongue touched his for the first time, he felt like he’d been transported to another plane of pleasure. He hadn’t known things could feel so good.
They’d eventually ended up on the bed, mostly because it was more comfortable to be sitting than to be standing.
And they lay down because it was more comfortable to be lying down than to be sitting.
But Nash was too enchanted with kissing her to even attempt anything beyond that, and she seemed utterly satisfied by it too, even if she was more experienced than he was.
So, it was perfect. Perfect in a way that it would never be again, because it would never be so new and fresh and sweet. By the time Nash was in his midtwenties, he would realize that he never kissed like that anymore. That kissing between him and whatever girlfriend he had never lasted longer than ten minutes before one of them had their hands in the other’s jeans. He would feel wistful towards making out, then, remembering how perfect and sweet it had been.
But some things couldn’t be recaptured.
That night with Siobhan, those precious hours together in that room, that was something sweet and sacred. He would always think so.
Of course, it was all tainted by what came after.
They were interrupted near 11:30. The door burst open.
They both sat up, alarmed.
It was Daisy. She looked them over. “Well, it’s about time, you two. But you’re going to have to put that on pause.”
“Daisy, what the fuck?” said Nash, getting up from the bed. “Why don’t you go out and—”
“Heather’s missing,” said Daisy. “So’s Pike. He went out looking for her like forty-five minutes ago, and he never came back. I’m starting to get freaked out.”
Siobhan stood up too, combing her hair with her fingers. “Heather? She’s my ride.”
“She is?” said Nash.
“Yeah, we’re doing this project together in history, and we were working on it together before we came here. That’s why I was late.”
“You didn’t come in with her,” said Nash.
“Well, she told me to go ahead while she parked. I was late, so I didn’t wait for her.” Siobhan rubbed her forehead. “I can’t believe this is happening again.”
“Well, maybe it’s not,” said Daisy. “This time, we’re not going to hole up in a bedroom and talk about space and stars and our fucking feelings. We’re going to go out there and find them.”
“I thought that Pike and Heather were kind of hanging out,” said Siobhan. “She said that he specifically told her to come to the party tonight.”
“Well, yeah,” said Daisy. “I mean, that’s why Pike went looking for her. He was busy doing host stuff, though, so he doesn’t know how long she’s even been gone. And now he’s nowhere to be found either. He won’t even answer his phone.”
“Maybe they’re with each other,” Nash said.
“Maybe they’re not,” said Daisy. “I’m getting everyone together, and we’re going to find them.”
Except they didn’t.
Well, Pike turned up, but it was after Nash had left the party. He had a curfew of midnight, and he couldn’t get out of it. He tried calling his mom and saying he wanted to stay at a made-up friend’s house, but his mother was too smart for him. She knew that he’d said something about meeting a girl, and said that Nash needed to come home right away, and that they should probably have a talk soon.
Luckily, the talk never happened. His dad just came by with a pack of condoms and said, “You know what to do with these, right?”
And Nash said, “Right.”
End of “talk.”
All of which was beside the point, though, because Heather never resurfaced. No one knew what had happened to her.
And Nash wasn’t paying any of that too much mind, because he was focused on Siobhan. All he could think about was kissing her, touching her, the way it felt with their bodies pressed close. He was falling for her. No, that wasn’t accurate. The falling wasn’t in progress. It had happened. He had fallen for her, the end. He was head over heels for her.
He’d had the presence of mind to get her phone number before they parted ways at the party.
On Saturday, he called her.
She didn’t pick up.
He debated leaving a message, and decided against it. Instead, he just sent a text. What’s up?
She never responded.
That night, he called her again.
Straight to voicemail. This time, he left a message. “Uh, hey, Siobhan, it’s, um, it’s Nash. I was just kind of wondering—uh, I was calling to say hi. See what you’re up to. So, um, if you get this, you could call me back, I guess. Okay. Yeah.”
God, he sounded like an idiot.
She never called back.
He was too embarrassed to try to call Sunday, so he didn’t.
Anyway, he remembered the way it was after the dance. How she went completely incommunicado. He was starting to feel a niggling prick of fear that this might be going the exact same way, and he was terrified of that.
It had hurt when Siobhan had cut him off before, but that was before he knew how she tasted.
Now, if she didn’t want him, if she did the same thing, he’d lose his mind. He couldn’t even begin to imagine the possibility.
At least not at
first. But as the hours went by and she didn’t call back, he found he could imagine it quite well. He lived it. He felt the pain of her rejection. He cycled through it, over and over.
He couldn’t sleep Sunday night.
On Monday morning, he resolved that he was going to pretend it didn’t bother him.
He didn’t look for her in the morning. Sometimes he could find her in the halls before first period, but he didn’t see the point. He didn’t want to start the day with her snubbing him.
He skipped Advisory. He’d never skipped a class in his life, but he skipped that one. He hid in one of the bathrooms on the first floor. Every time the door opened, his heart leaped into his throat, because he was sure it was the vice principal come to take him back to class.
But he didn’t get caught.
He saw her after school. He was on his way out to his car, and she was in the parking lot.
He looked her over and kept walking.
She called out, “Hey, Nash.”
He called back, “Hey, Siobhan.” He waved. He could pretend like he wasn’t the least bit bothered.
“Come over here,” she said.
He hesitated. And then he did as she asked.
She smiled. “Hey. You weren’t in Advisory.”
“Yeah, I wasn’t feeling it today.”
“Oh, really?” She gave him an odd look. “You never skip class.”
He shrugged.
“I’m sorry I didn’t call you back,” she said.
He shrugged again. “No big deal. Don’t worry about it. You don’t have to call me if you don’t want.”
“You don’t want me to call you?”
“Do you want to call me?” He glared at her.
She gave him a funny look.
“You know, I have to drive my sister home.”
“Oh,” she said. “Yeah. Okay. Fine.”
“See you whenever,” he said, turning and walking off.
He never turned back to look at her. Maybe he should have. Maybe she was hurt by the way he acted. Maybe she had a good excuse for not calling him back. But if she did, she never did tell him what it was.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Well, he’d screwed everything up.
Maybe he’d screwed it all up back then, too. He didn’t know. But he was pretty sure that he wasn’t going to get an interview with Siobhan now. So he decided to cut his losses and call up the Coopers, like she’d told him.
She was right. They were open to being interviewed. They were very, very angry with Edward Carston.
He met Faye and Graham Cooper in the lobby of his hotel. They hadn’t wanted to meet in their home, because they didn’t want to discuss the matter in front of their son, Holden, who they’d left behind with a sitter. Faye and Cooper sat together on a couch, and Nash took an adjoining chair. He wired them for the interview quickly.
“It’s better if Holden doesn’t talk about it too much,” said Faye. “I mean, if he wants to talk about it, we’re there to listen, of course. For a while, he talked about it a lot.”
“But it’s tapered off now,” said Graham. “He doesn’t really bring it up, and we’d rather he not be reminded of it too often. We don’t want him to be hurt or sad.”
“I’m afraid you’re going to have to fill me in a little bit,” said Nash. “I’m not sure exactly what happened to Holden.”
“Right,” said Graham. “That bastard has gone around bribing various news organizations not to run stories about it all. It’s hard to find any information.”
“Exactly,” said Nash, not wanting to admit he’d spent all his time lately kicking himself over Siobhan instead of doing research.
“Well, it’s not easy to talk about,” said Faye, shaking her head. “But we’ve gotten better at it over time, I have to admit.”
“Why don’t you start with how you came to meet Edward Carston?” said Nash.
“He was doing volunteer work at the after school program where Holden attends,” said Faye. “He wasn’t actually paid by the organization, but he’d done some snow job on the people who ran the place, claiming he loved kids and all that. They ate it up like idiots.”
Nash suddenly started to understand what this might be about, and he felt his stomach turn over. His mouth was dry.
“They let him volunteer at the place,” said Graham, “and they didn’t do any looking into his background or anything else. I’m sure the big donation check he’d cut them helped as well.”
Nash’s jaw worked. “But he didn’t work there. Certainly, they didn’t allow him to be in charge of the children. Certainly, there was an actual employee with him at all times.”
“No,” said Graham. “I think it was meant to be that way, but he was too ingenious for that. He started offering to take children out of the classrooms who were behavioral issues or who were very upset or something like that.”
“It was ingenious because the kids were afraid of him,” said Faye. “They would see him and they would start screaming, and he would say, ‘Oh, let me take him off your hands for a bit, get him calmed down.’”
“No,” said Nash, shaking his head.
“Yes,” said Faye. Her lower lip started to tremble.
All Nash could think of was Ariel. He thought of her with some horrible person like Carston, and he felt this rage come over him. It made his hands shake. He gripped the arms of his chair. “Where did he take the children he was ‘calming down’?”
“On walks in the woods,” said Graham. “There were trails in the back of the center. He’d take the kids out into the middle of nowhere. And it wasn’t just Holden, you understand. There were other kids he took out there, too. We don’t know what was offered to the other families, but we figure that they took the bribes. We didn’t.”
“Wait, bribes?” said Nash.
“Sure,” said Faye. “Once we found out, we raised a big ruckus.”
“Of course,” said Nash. “You would have to. How could you not?”
“Right?” said Graham. “Anyway, we made a lot of accusations, and they stopped letting him volunteer there, and then we got contact from some people involved with Carston, who said that if we’d take it all back and say that Holden was just making it up, then they’d be willing to give us something like fifty thousand dollars for our silence.”
“That’s horrible,” said Nash, gripping the chair harder.
“They didn’t use those exact words, of course,” said Faye. “But that was the gist of it. We told them to fuck off.”
“And we did use those exact words,” said Graham grimly.
Nash gave them both a hard smile. “Good.”
“But I can see why someone might take that money,” said Faye. “You think of what you could do for your child with it. You could start a college fund, put it in some high-interest bearing account, or even invest it for him.”
“You did the right thing,” said Nash. “Forcing your child to deny it, that would be worse.”
“Exactly,” said Graham.
“So, how did you find out?” said Nash.
“Well, at first we didn’t know what was wrong, we only knew that Holden was acting out. He never wanted to go to bed anymore. He wanted to be near one of us all the time. He threw fits whenever we took him to school, and he said that he just wanted to stay at home all the time,” said Faye.
“And the only physical thing was that he was, um, constipated,” said Graham.
Nash got a bad taste in the back of his mouth.
“He said it hurt to go to the bathroom, and he didn’t want to. It got really bad, so we had to take him to the doctor,” said Faye.
Nash’s fingers dug into the arms of the chair.
“He told the doctor, not us,” said Graham. “He said it hurt to use the bathroom, and he told the doctor why.”
“Because Carston made a mistake,” said Faye. “He told Holden that if he told his parents or his teachers what happened that Carston would come and kill us, but he didn’t sa
y anything about doctors.”
Nash clenched his jaw. “Thank God for that,” he managed to get out.
“The doctor told us,” said Faye.
“But the funny thing about the doctor is that he later reversed it all,” said Graham. “He claimed that he hadn’t told us anything.”
“We think Carston got to him too.”
“With bribes?” said Nash. “But doctors make good money. How much money could Carston have possibly offered him that would have swayed him?”
“We don’t know,” said Faye. “I wonder if maybe he threatened the doctor somehow? Threatened his family? Carston is a horrible, horrible person.”
“Anyway, we tried to press charges,” said Graham, “but we were told that there wasn’t enough evidence to pursue the case and that it would be a waste of time to arrest him.”
Nash shook his head. “That’s awful.”
“I know,” said Faye. “When I think of what this man did to my little boy, to my precious, tiny—” She broke off, her eyes filling with tears.
Graham put his arm around his wife.
Nash dug his fingers even deeper into the arms of the chair. He was glad that Siobhan was going to kill Edward Carston. He was very, very glad.
THE PAST
They never found any of the girls that went missing Nash’s senior year of high school. Not a single one.
But Heather was the last girl to disappear. And from what Nash understood, no other girls had gone missing after that, not the following year, not the year after, not ever.
So, whatever had happened, somehow, it had stopped.
He and Siobhan never really talked much after that day in the parking lot. In Advisory, she was apparently caught up for the year, so she did nothing but read all class period.
He never tried to talk to her.
She never tried to talk to him.
Winter faded into spring. Spring faded into summer. The year was over and school was out for the year.
That summer, Nash got a job working at the local coffee shop in town, which was a hangout for high school kids. He got to know lots of other kids in his school that way. He got so he knew almost everyone’s signature drink by heart. He found it was easier to talk to them from the other side of the counter somehow.
The Feminine Touch Page 20
