The Evolution of Man

by Skye Warren

  Instead there’s only a ringing silence.

  Hugo looks pained. “That’s the reason she insisted on coming here.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Bea says, her green eyes filled with regret. “I know it violates the man code but I couldn’t break the girl code, and you really needed to know.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “The library,” Hugo says.

  Bea grimaces. “It’s never going to be fixed. Sutton lied about that. Maybe he was doing it to protect you. Or maybe he did it for… other reasons. But the construction crew that’s there isn’t going to be able to salvage it. It’s not even safe to be inside.”

  The words don’t make sense. “What?”

  “I’m sorry,” Hugo says. “He feels bad about it.”

  “Not bad enough to tell her the truth,” Bea says in an arch tone that sounds more like herself than she has in the past few minutes. There’s a little pink in her cheeks, too. Indignation looks good on her, but I’m still stuck on the word lied.

  “Sutton lied to me?”

  There’s a scuffing sound from behind me, the sole of a shoe against the large square tiles underfoot, and I turn to see Sutton in the doorway, a large paper bag in one hand, a balloon with roses on it trailing behind him in the hallway, bobbing uselessly in the air-conditioner draft.

  “Perhaps we should leave them alone,” Hugo says, sounding somehow both guilty and accusing. I suppose I should be glad he was willing to defy his friendship in order to tell me the truth, but it feels a little too late—kind of like me reading the Death Plan.

  “I’m staying right here,” Bea says, but she’s completely green now.

  “Please go home,” I tell her fervently. “I’m only going to worry about you if you stay. And I’m pretty sure Hugo is about to have a stress aneurysm.”

  She presses her hand to her mouth, eyes squeezes shut. “Honestly. Yes. Okay.”

  Hugo looks immensely relieved as they give me a hug and kiss to say goodbye. Then I’m left alone in the room with the man I can’t quite look in the eye. I’m not sure whether I’m mad at him. Yes, I decide. I would be mad if I had any energy in my body to feel things.

  “Why didn’t you tell me the truth?” I ask, but the question feels far away.

  “Would you have let me stay if I had?”

  I shake my head, but it’s not really an answer. It’s too hard to think in this room with people, even if it’s just one person. One person I shared my body with. Maybe even my heart, but never fully my trust. Maybe I knew Christopher was telling the truth about the library.

  There’s only one man I’ve ever really trusted, even though I shouldn’t. I’m not sure if that makes me foolish or in love. Is there even a difference? I love Christopher, but like my mother’s love for my father, it doesn’t mean anything good. Love is a chain around my ankle. It’s an anchor bearing me to the bottom of the ocean.

  It’s this feeling of brokenness as I watch my mother die.

  She wakes up so calm and casual it’s like nothing is wrong. “Harper.”

  There’s a lurch in my throat, and I can taste stale coffee and hope. “Mom! You’re awake. Let me call the nurse. Are you in pain? Are you hungry?”

  “No—Harper, wait. I don’t need anything.”

  My stomach sinks. “What can I do?”

  “Can you just…?” She blinks, a little too fast to be normal. “I lied about the plan. About being okay with everything. I’m afraid, baby, but it doesn’t hurt anymore.”

  Tears leak down my face. There’s no pantry or closet to hide in. No pillow to scream my pain into. There’s only her thin body to hold, and she holds me back, her hands shaking.

  “I was—” She pauses, seeming to struggle to find the words. “I was looking up. With your father I was looking up, and I could never walk again.”

  For a terrible moment I think she might be hallucinating, not really with me even though she seems clearer now than she has in months. Except I don’t think she’s hallucinating. She was looking up, like Deborah Kerr in the movie. She was hit by a car because she was so in love. What a cautionary tale, that movie. It had a happy ending, though.

  Not like my mother’s love life. “I’m so sorry,” I whisper.

  “Don’t be—sorry.” She grasps my hand, her head falling back, eyes closed. The distance widens between us, and I hold her tighter. “Love you. That’s the plan.”

  And then she goes quiet.

  The beep beep beep keeps going. No one rushes into the room, but there might as well be a ghost in the room with me. That’s how quiet and still my mother’s body is. That’s how lifeless she looks. There are a thousand cracks in my foundation, but this one is the deepest. I press my face into her body, into the warmth that isn’t quite alive, and cry.

  The little squiggles on the machine bump up regularly enough, but that’s just electricity. Those are electrons firing inside a circuit. That’s not what makes my mother a person. That part is already gone, so it’s not a surprise when she starts breathing in a terrible sound that fills the room. A good thing, Freida says when she hears it. It means my mother is so relaxed that she can no longer be bothered to wake up. She is too relaxed to live. Can you imagine that?

  That death is just the ultimate spa vacation, after all.

  The afternoon sun presses hot against my neck, squeezing through the cheap white blinds on the window, marking my skin in a completely random place. The middle of the day seems like a strange time to die, but that’s when the horrible sound of her breathing stops.

  When she’s so relaxed she leaves me completely alone, as if it had been so much effort to stay with me as long as she did. Every piece of art I’ve ever made flashes in front of me—empty, empty. There’s nothing to explain the hollowness of this room.

  The hollowness of my heart.

  All that protesting did not accomplish anything—I couldn’t save the library. I couldn’t save my mother. I hold her hand where it rests on the bed, and it’s still warm. A lie, because she’s gone. Her body is still. Her chest does not rise and fall.

  Eventually the nurse comes and makes the machine stop beeping. She puts her hands on my shoulder, but she doesn’t insist that I leave. That must be part of the Death Plan, which suddenly strikes me as funny.

  I start laughing, and then Christopher is there. “Harper,” he says.

  “You’re a dream. You aren’t real.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says, and it sounds like he means it. Like he’s really sorry that I’m alone, even though he’s the one who made me this way.

  “Why didn’t you come?” I say, my words garbled by the grief in my throat, the tears in my eyes. The black in my heart. “You should have come. She asked you to. She wanted you to.”

  “She didn’t,” he says with a sigh that is a thousand years old.

  I hit his chest with my fists, but he may as well be made of granite. Granite like his eyes. Black and hard and cold. “I hate you. I hate you. I hate you.”

  He lets me hit him until I collapse. His arms are around me, and I shatter.

  The house is dark when Christopher’s car pulls into the drive. How many times have I come here after working late in the library? I shouldn’t have been in the library, though. It wasn’t safe, which feels ridiculous right now. Who cares about safety? Death is inevitable.

  I’m Scarlett come home after the war, the place a husk of its former self. The walls aren’t blackened with fire, but they might as well be. The house rings hollow.

  Christopher puts me to bed with gentle insistence, undressing me like I’m a child. I press my face into his chest and breathe deep, taking comfort I don’t deserve from his scent. My mouth opens to taste him, to bite him. I would swallow him whole if I could, but he sets me back an inch. “Not tonight,” he says, and I hiss at him like an animal.

  “Yes, tonight.” This is when I need him—rough and animalistic. If he won’t hurt me then I’ll hurt him. It’s the only thi
ng that makes sense in this topsy turvy night. It’s the only thing I can trust.

  I grasp his shirt and press myself against him, my lips mashing his. It’s isn’t graceful or seductive. There’s a violence inside me that needs to get out. I bite at his lips, but it seems to work. It seems to work because his breath catches. His body goes stock still—not in the way where he’s fighting me.

  He’s still in the way where he’s fighting himself.

  I give him a rough shove, and he lets himself step back. “Fight me,” I say, panting.

  A low growl. “You don’t want this.”

  I want it to stop hurting inside me, and maybe if he hits me, maybe if he hurts me, I won’t be able to feel the ache on the inside anymore. All I need is one minute of relief. All I need is one minute to forget. I step forward and raise my hand—he catches my wrist.

  His face is in an inch from mine. “You don’t want this,” he says again, but this time it doesn’t sound like concern for me. It sounds like a threat, and my body responds with a rush of adrenaline. My heart pounds ten thousand seconds in the time it takes him to let me go.

  And then I’m on him, climbing his body, knocking him to the floor. He cushions my fall with his body, his grunt half pain, half pleasure. I scratch my nails down his chest, and even through the fabric of his shirt I know I’ve drawn blood. A sound escapes me—something angry and grieving and wild.

  He should be scared of me right now. I’m a little scared of this. God knows Sutton would be; he only ever treated me like a lady. Skittish like his beautiful golden horse, but a lady nonetheless.

  Nothing about this is ladylike. It’s not even human, this grief inside me.

  Christopher doesn’t look shocked. He looks at me like I’m the same as always, like he always knew that I’m a she-devil, a siren. A mythical creature with eyes that will turn a mortal man to stone.

  He isn’t mortal. He burns under my gaze. “Go ahead,” he says from the floor, leaning back, offering up his body to me. “Take what you need. Let me give it to you.”

  The words should be enough to jolt me back to sanity, but I’m too far gone. I gasp him everywhere, everywhere, my nails raking him, my teeth bared to him. He pushes his hands above his head on the floor, as if they’re chained there. As if he’s Prometheus and I’m the fury of the gods, torturing him until the end of time. And he likes it. He likes it.

  I rock my hips over the hardness pressing his jeans. He jerks against me, unable to hold still at the heat of my covered sex, at the rock of my body, even though he accepted my pain in silence.

  My head falls back, and I close my eyes. It’s like water to let my hips move over him, liquid movement, the path of least resistance to rub my clit against his erection. Pleasure arcs through my body, sharp through the muted agony. It’s almost unbearable, the friction too much. I make myself feel it, and my climax rises with an overwhelming hurt that comes from deep inside. I rock and rock and rock—and against him with a terrible cry and tears streaming down my cheeks.

  It fills my head, the knowledge that I will never see her again. We’ll never watch an old movie. She’ll never tell me that I’m strong and brave and good, because I’m not, I can’t be. I collapse on Christoper’s battered chest, sobbing salt-tears into his cuts.

  His arms come around me, and he soothes me with nonsense words, with soft caresses. I know with certainty then that no frat boy, no other man could have withstood me. Only this man, more god than human. He absorbs all my grief and pain into his body, and I know he’s strong enough for more.

  I cry against him for what I’ve lost, but more than that I cry for what was never found.

  For the love my mother never had. For the peace and security in those black-and-white movies that never came true—and now they never can come true. She’ll never know how it feels to be held forever.

  And the worst part is, Daddy never knew it either.

  They could have been everything together. Instead they were nothing.

  The fabric beneath my cheek is drenched in tears. The floor hard beneath my knees. Through my tears I come to realize that we’re lying on the floor, my body draped over Christopher’s, his cock still hard between my legs. “I’m sorry,” I mumble, reaching for him, fumbling. “Sorry.”

  I’m not sure what I can offer him with my heart still broken, not sure why he’s even still aroused when my eyes are red and puffy like this, but he stops me with a sharp sound.

  “Absolutely not.” His voice is rough with need, but his tone leaves no room for argument. As if we can’t cross some invisible line of sexual ethics that says I’m allowed to rub myself off on his body, but he himself can’t come. It’s ridiculous, especially when he’s throbbing the inside of my thigh. He must be in pain. But then he pulls me down to his body again, pushes my head on his shoulder. I sink into the cradle of his body. That’s all I needed—an orgasm, fast and rough. A forceful cuddle. And sleep claims me, dragging me down into the inky black.

  When I wake up again, it’s the middle of the night.

  Christopher’s face looks softer in the moonlight. This man has been jerked around by my family, his life twisting at our whims. First my father’s will and then my mother’s Death Plan. He’s so beautiful and tortured. Maybe the best thing I can do is finally leave him alone.

  Last night feels like a dream.

  The only thing I know for sure is that I can’t stay in this house.

  I’m half asleep as I find my keys and head out the door—without my purse or my phone. I don’t need those things, not for what I need to do. Not for where I need to go. Isn’t that what a library used to be? A place where you didn’t need money to read. Where you didn’t need the newest, biggest iPhone to learn something about the world.

  An outdated idea. A defunct building. The world still needs books and knowledge, but it’s not going to get them here at the long-closed Tanglewood Library.

  There’s no saving it.

  No saving me.

  The library looks almost sinister in the moonlight with its rough planes and jagged edges. The girl stands at the corner, selling her body. She’s breaking apart, just like the building. I should give her whatever cash is in my wallet—except I didn’t bring my purse. There’s nothing but my hands now. That’s all I ever had, the ability to create. The ability to destroy.

  Harper St. Claire distilled down into a single goal.

  She gives me a strange look, a little concerned, mostly wary. Like an alley cat I’ve disturbed in the middle of her dinner. “What are you doing here?” she spits.

  “What is anyone doing here?”

  “I’m trying to stay alive.”

  “Same, girl. Same.” I don’t have a death wish; I never did. I want to stay alive, to feel alive, and there are only two things that have ever done that—Christopher and art. I’m in a destructive mood, and I’ve already torn up his chest, so now it will have to be art.

  Not anything as clean and pure as creating art.

  Tonight is about falling off a yacht.

  “You don’t know anything about what I have to do to survive.” Something in her reminds me of me with Christopher—defensive, because she’s been hurt before. Because people who’ve been hurt like knowing it will happen again. There’s comfort in the familiar.

  “You’re right,” I say, because the library isn’t going to help. What is it a monument to except for the way things used to be? For the patriarchy and the goddamn men who keep this girl on her knees instead of building and creating and living without fear.

  She disappears around the corner, leaving me on the sidewalk.

  It’s easy enough to slip through the temporary barriers. The wall seems more majestic at night. A beautiful lie, because it will never survive what comes next. I’m furious that it let me believe, even for a moment. Part of me knows I’m not thinking straight, but the other part is sure that’s a good thing. I’ve had too much straight thinking. Tonight I’m all the way twisted.

  The ladder
s are propped against the sides of the library. The scaffolding stands where I can reach it, but I need something more than height and clay tonight.

  Out back there are vehicles the construction crew leaves behind. Most of the tools are stored in a white van, which is locked. This isn’t a safe neighborhood after all. Luckily I learned some very bad things over the years, including how to pick a lock. With a bent wire hanger in the doors at the back, I manage to get it open.

  I have my pick of weapons—a shovel. A crowbar. Yes, that will work.

  It’s almost too easy to climb onto the scaffolding that’s waiting for me at the back of the library. I plunge the sharp end of the crowbar into the crack and lever my whole body, throwing my weight against the iron. Wood splits with a satisfying thwak.

  I keep breaking the wall until my hair is full of wood shards.

  Thwak.

  Keep fighting the wood until it comes apart.

  Thwak.

  I lose track of time doing this, lose track of my limbs and muscles. Lose track of my thoughts. Even so it’s not quite a surprise when I feel the metal beneath my feet shiver. Christopher climbs onto the scaffold with me, but I ignore him. There are splinters in my hands. I only feel them when he pries the bar from me.

  “Look what you’ve done,” he murmurs, smoothing a thumb over my bloodied palm.

  I swallow the pain. “Better me than you.”

  He swears softly. “Is this what I’ve done to you?”

  “No,’ I say, but that feels like a lie. It’s made me feel crazy to love a man who won’t love me back. To have him look at me like he’s burning alive for me, only for him to push me away.

  “Come with me.”

  “But—” I want to keep going until the building comes down on me. Isn’t that what everyone said would happen? Without a yellow hard hat on my head. I would buried.

  I want to be buried right now.

  Christopher doesn’t take me back to the Gone with the Wind house.

  Instead we pull up at a contemporary home making angles over a sloping hill. I step inside and stare dully at the large piece of rubble with Cleopatra’s eye. It doesn’t seem strange that he should have it. Of course he paid some exorbitant amount of money online. Lord knows he made much more money from the deal than that.