I couldn’t stand helpless and just let it happen. I couldn’t stay quiet.
“I said I lost more than a mother when she died.”
He spun on me, and I didn’t realize he was going to hit me again until I was leaning back against the bricks of the house and wondering which hurt most from the blow, my cheek or my neck.
“Tell me,” he barked. “Tell me what you’ve lost.”
I couldn’t speak, so he came at me again. I scrambled back, so only the tips of his fingers connected, leaving stinging scratch marks across my already swollen cheek.
“Tell me how much you love her, now that she’s gone. Say it. I dare you to pretend you didn’t hate her when she were here.” His next blow was a backhand to my other cheek. I tasted blood in my mouth, and realizing he’d hit me whether I spoke or not freed my words.
I ran my thumb along the side of my mouth to wipe away whatever it was that dripped from my lip, and blinked away the tears that fell. “I did love her. And you can hit me all you want, but it won’t make me think I didn’t.”
He raised his hand and I flinched away, so his open hand cuffed my ear. I felt sick and dizzy, suddenly wondering if spewing on him would make him hit me harder or leave me alone.
“And I’m glad she’s dead,” I mumbled out, despite the screeching alarms in my head that begged me to stop. “I’m glad she died before she saw you turn into this.”
He grabbed my hair and pulled back so hard, it felt like my scalp was ripping. He forced me to look at his ugly face. I hated his face. I wanted to shred it with my nails and stomp it from his body. But all I could do was return his raging hate with some of my own. If he was going to kill me, I wasn’t going to let him see me afraid to die.
“You’re pitiful,” I started to say, but his fist slammed into my stomach hard enough to steal my air and send me to my knees. He tossed me away to fall the rest of the way down, and I immediately curled into a ball, expecting his scuffed-up boots to finish me off. I gasped short breaths for longer than I expected—long enough for him to stomp off into the house. But I didn’t move until the music was righted. The warbled piano. The sound track for my escape. I crawled my way into a hunched stand and ran from the house, barely taking the time to grab my bag and keys on the way out. Only one thought screamed through my mind over and over.
Never again.
Chapter 13
I sat out on the front steps of Lock’s house for what must have been an hour. I didn’t know why I was there, but it was dark, and the slats of the metal banister felt cool against the puffy skin of my cheek. I wondered how long I could hide there without being discovered, how long before someone came home or walked out the front door. Perhaps a part of me wanted Lock to find me there, but not so much that I could convince myself to knock.
I shifted my cheek to another slat as my mind riffled through plans of escape for the morning. I could wait until I knew my dad would be gone, pack bags for me and the boys, and then charm the headmaster to get them out of school without Dad’s permission. We could be in another town in mere hours, starting over. I could get a job, present myself as their mum, put them in state school. But with no money for an apartment, we’d be living on the street. Too many of us to hide from the police. Too many ways things could go wrong.
Mycroft appeared at the bottom of the stairs like an apparition, interrupting my thoughts. “When I told you not to leave, I didn’t mean . . .”
Too late, I remembered the state of my face. Before he could say something, I tried to hide it again in the shadow of my hood. I’d already seen enough pity from Mycroft.
“Come inside.”
I wouldn’t have gone in. Had he touched me, blocked my path down the steps, or even brushed by me to hold open the door, I probably would have run off to find a new place to hide. Mycroft didn’t even reach to help me up. He waited. When I was ready, I stood, and clutching my arm to my stomach, led the way up the steps to the door.
I felt the heat of the room against the bruises on my face and yanked at my hood, willing it to better protect me from the light in the hall. “Is he home?” My voice was scratchy and monotone, filled with more disinterest than I felt.
“Tea?”
I stared at Mycroft for a few seconds before I nodded. I followed him into the kitchen and slumped into a chair in the nook. He prepared everything in silence, only speaking with his back to me.
He dropped an ice pack covered with a thin, clean dish towel on the table in front of me, and then walked away before asking, “Do I need to call the police?”
I didn’t reply at first, but the longer the silence drew out, the more it felt like my nonanswer was somehow affirming his secret guess at what happened. “I just came from the house of a DS.”
The kettle got louder as it heated, and Mycroft watched it calmly. “You have brothers?”
“Three.”
“All younger than you?”
“Yes.”
He nodded and said, “Very well,” then poured the water into two mugs, dropped bags into each, and walked out of the kitchen without a word. I held the ice to the back of my head while leaning forward to rest my forehead against the table, and before the tea could oversteep, I heard footsteps on the kitchen floor. Sherlock. He stopped and moved toward the tea before coming toward me.
“Tea?”
I didn’t move or speak. Still, he slid the mug in front of me. I heard the chair next to me slide out, but Lock never sat. Instead, he wandered back into the middle of the room and stood so silently, I was forced to peek out to see what he was doing. He was staring at me.
“Show me.”
I stared back down at the floral-patterned tile floor, knowing I couldn’t hide my face forever, wishing I’d never come inside. When I did finally look up, I turned my right cheek toward him and brought the ice pack to the other side of my face. I knew my dad had hit me there as well, but it didn’t feel as swollen. I kept my head tilted down, too, so that between the hood, the dish towel, and my hair, as little of my face would show as possible. My stomach ached, even when I didn’t move.
“I need to see if you require medical care.”
“I’m fine.”
He stepped toward me and stopped again. “Show me. I need to see.”
I thought about showing him. I wondered what was running through his mind just then. Was he angry for me? Sorry for me? Merely curious? “Never mind. It doesn’t matter.”
“It does. You should at least let me—”
“Leave it.” I clenched my teeth and took a breath to keep from shouting. “I don’t need help.”
“You are being stubborn. I merely want—”
“Leave it!” I glared up at him, but my shouting didn’t make him step back or flinch. His expression was the same one he made when contemplating how much milk to pour in his tea. “I know what I do and don’t need. It’s my body, and I say it doesn’t matter.”
“If you don’t need help, why are you here?”
“Great question.” I started to stand, but my stomach muscles cramped up, forcing me back down into the chair. I rested my forehead on the table again and waited for the cramping to pass. Lock took yet another step toward me, but I slammed my fist onto the table, and he stopped. “I don’t know!” I yelled into my chest. “I don’t know why I ever come here. To be studied like a rat? To play this bloody game with your bloody rules that mean nothing to anyone! Or maybe I just love the way you refuse to act like an actual person, even for a moment.” I glared up at him again. His face was passive. “More awkward staring? Is that all you will ever have for me?”
He said nothing.
“Is it? I asked you a question, Sherlock. Can you not answer me even a simple question?”
I was being completely unreasonable. I knew I was, which was worse—like being forced to watch someone who is not yourself using your bod
y to be cruel and bitter and ridiculous. Lock only repeated his question in his same stupid, emotionless voice.
“Why are you here?”
“I don’t know!” I stood up, staring him down.
I realized then that my face was completely exposed to him. And instead of hiding, I reached up to push back my hood, offering him the full effect of my injuries under the bright kitchen light. He didn’t flinch, didn’t soften. His face didn’t even hint at an expression. He just stared down his beakish nose at me, as though not even my pain could faze him.
But I needed his reaction for some reason. Needed to know I could hurt him. It was ridiculous and petty, and so much more important to me than it should have been. I was willing to do anything to get at him, apparently, because in the next moment I caught myself saying whatever came into my mind, which ended up being nonsense. Or truth.
“I’m here because you’re here.” I tried to stay angry, to cut that statement with something mean, or at least cheeky. But, instead, I left the words to echo between us.
“Why?”
I shook my head. I had no answers for what I didn’t know myself.
“Why me?” he asked. “You must have other friends. Actual people.”
Internally, I winced at the way he lobbed my words back at me. Still, I took what I deserved. He was right, in a way. I knew loads of people from school. There was a time when I was never home before curfew, barely checked in on weekends. It felt like a very long time ago, that. I had Sadie and others, in fact, but I hadn’t called a single one when my mom got sick. I suddenly wondered what that meant.
I didn’t speak for a long while, and every second of the silence felt like a twisting cloth, coiling tighter and tighter, until the very air seemed to pulse like the throbbing in my head. Finally, he spoke.
“I don’t matter to you,” he said, in his very best fact-listing voice. “That is why you come here. You can do what you like and show me the bad things that might drive someone else away, because it doesn’t matter to you if I leave. You wouldn’t care were I gone tomorrow. And that is why—”
“You’re wrong.” I hadn’t spoken loud enough to interrupt even his quiet little tirade, but the sound of my voice stopped his. “You are so very wrong.”
I felt a wave of emotion well up inside me, and closed my eyes to quash it, to no avail.
“I’m never wrong,” he said.
“You are always wrong.” I forced my eyes up to his, wondering if there had been, perhaps, a crack in his stoicism from my words. He quickly covered if there had.
“Then—” His brow furrowed before he stared again. “Then answer me why.”
“You,” I started, as my mind reeled with a hundred things I wanted to tell him, and a hundred I never would. When I did finally offer an answer, he was standing much closer than I remembered, and that made it harder to speak than it should have. “You have somehow become the first and last place I run to.”
“When things are bad,” he said.
“Good, bad . . .” My shoulders slumped, and it felt like all my remaining strength whooshed out of me with my next exhale. “I think of you first. I need you to know and hate to tell you. You are the only person I can tell, but . . .”
“But?”
The blank of his expression should have kept me from revealing any more, but there was nothing left within me to stop the words. “I don’t want you to know.”
Did he soften then? Or did I just wish that he would?
“What don’t you want me to know?” His voice betrayed what his eyes didn’t—pain. I’d done it. I’d hurt him. And now I wanted only to make it better.
I closed my eyes and felt him move closer, close enough for him to reach a hand up to cradle my swollen cheek. I thought I ought to flinch away, but I was desperate for his touch. I would have leaned into his hand if I weren’t afraid of the pain. His thumb gently traced the skin below my eye, and then he leaned in and brushed a kiss just where the ball of my dad’s fist had struck hardest. I shivered and he surrounded me, but not all at once. We moved in awkward increments, Lock waiting for me to step into him before his arms pulled me tighter. Then again. And again.
Soon, I was listening to his heartbeat thump against my ear, hiding my eyes in his shirt, and wondering how long I could stay there before one of us would move and ruin everything.
“Come upstairs?” he asked.
“I can’t. My brothers.”
“Mycroft will see to your brothers tonight.”
A ribbon of relief fluttered through me, even before I asked, “How?”
Sherlock shrugged. “He has his way. I’ll never understand how he makes things happen; they just always go the way he wants.”
We stared at each other for an unreasonable amount of time until I said, “Then, yes.”
His thumb traced gently under my eye once more, his next words spilling out more hesitantly. “What . . . don’t you want me to know?” I shook my head, looked down, but his hands surrounded my face gently and brought my gaze back up to meet his. “What is it?”
“Me,” I said. “I don’t want you to know me. Not like this.” It sounded stupid, but sometimes truth sounds stupid.
He nodded once. “Then you are the puzzle I will never try to solve.”
I didn’t believe him, but it didn’t matter right then. I took his face in my hands and pulled him close enough so that all I could see was his eyes. I didn’t know how to thank him or what to say, so I kissed him like I would never stop. I didn’t want to stop. It was the most painful kiss I’d ever had. Also the most perfect.
x x x
I jerked myself awake, then tried to sit up, but my stomach muscles declared revolt until I lay back down. I tried again and managed to prop myself up on an elbow. It’s always disorienting to wake up in someone else’s bed, even worse because I was pretty sure I wasn’t in bed when I fell asleep. In fact, the last thing I remembered was kissing Lock while he tried to make me keep the ice on my face. How that became me under covers—
“I didn’t suppose you’d be asleep long. You were a bit fitful.” Lock sat in the windowsill, a violin resting between his chin and shoulder. His fingers slid up and down the neck of the instrument, forming practice chords that only he could hear. Instead of a bow, a long, brown cigarette drooped from between the fingers of his other hand. I caught myself following its every movement as he flicked away the ash, pulled it up to his lips. I caught my fingertips brushing my own lips and jerked my hand down onto the bed.
“I’m sorry,” I said. But my heart wasn’t really in the apology. I was too busy remembering everything that had happened before. The trail of my mother’s things. The fire. My dad’s fist. Yelling at Lock. Kissing Lock all the way up the stairs. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep.”
Lock blew a stream of smoke out the window and did a piss-poor job of hiding his small smile as he tossed his cigarette and took up a bow. “There’s been another killing in the park,” he said before he slid the bow across the strings, taking up his silent song right in the middle as if it had been playing aloud the entire time. “Another man.”
I’d never been more grateful for a change of subject. Our eyes met briefly—just long enough for Lock to bow his head in a slight nod—his agreement that we didn’t need to talk about my dad anymore. On any other night I might have nodded back or smiled. But I was too fragile to do anything but stare at him while my eyes filled with tears. Another indignity after a long night of them. Luckily, I couldn’t see Lock’s face. I could pretend that I was imagining the slight strain in his voice as he stopped playing long enough to speak.
“A particularly brutal killing. It appears our killer is losing more of his control.”
“Did you observe the scene?”
He played a few overly complex chords and then stopped once more. “I came to get you, but I was told you weren’t
home. And you weren’t at school.”
Was told. It was an elegant way of avoiding a reference to my father.
“I had to make a copy of the file,” I said. “I skipped school.”
He was told.
“What is it?”
By my dad. Because my dad was home, playing that infernal song.
Sherlock’s playing obliterated whatever I’d been thinking from my mind, and most likely kept him from hearing my answer.
“Nothing.” I dropped my head back to the pillow and tried to ignore the little bruises and cuts I felt. I wasn’t ready to wrap my mind around anything associated with Dad. I felt . . . numb. And I needed it.
I rolled over, putting my back to Lock. I didn’t want to think about him either.
“Do you think . . . ?” he started. “No. I mean, I don’t suppose you could get . . .” I turned back just long enough to watch him shake his head and swing his violin back up under his chin. “Never mind.”
“I’ll get the crime-scene photos,” I said. His walls weren’t painted brown. It was wallpaper. A micropattern that made it all look one color from afar. Was it houndstooth?
“We don’t need—”
“I’ll get them.”
Lock’s hand was suddenly in mine, but when I glanced back at him over my shoulder, he was pondering the still-open window. His violin had somehow crawled back into its case. “Not worth it,” he said quietly. His gaze shifted to our hands. So did mine.
“School in six hours.” Lock’s thumb stroked the back of my hand and then stopped.
I looked up at him, but he was still staring at our hands. I felt the need to speak but didn’t know what to say. I knew what I wanted, just not how to ask. And he was unreadable.
“Do you want more sleep?” he asked.
I shook my head and rolled back over, pulling him down onto the bed with me. For a long time his body was tense against my back, his arm moving every minute or two, like he couldn’t find its resting place. I lay still, waiting. And just when I thought he might finally settle down, he launched himself over me, crawled under the covers, and lay facing me, his nose only an inch or two from mine. “I have something to confess.”
Lock & Mori Page 10
