Page 26 of A Killing Cold

If I was four, it was the year—the same winter—his father died.

I see who you truly are, Beth said to me, the last time we spoke. Pure venom in her voice. When people find out who I am, who I really am, they want to get away from me. They want nothing to do with me. I have spent years telling myself the Scotts were wrong. That I am not the damaged goods they claimed. That I have worth.

But they also taught me I was a liar, not to be believed. And that’s a lesson hard to unlearn.

I have to tell him.

The sound of the shower stops. I sit at the table, hands folded. The very edge of the photograph sticks out from between the pages of the book. I’ll leave it there for now. Work my way up to it.

Connor emerges, hair wet, wearing jeans and no shirt. “Hey,” I say, voice soft.

“Hey,” he echoes, slightly curt. “So what did you get up to?”

Tell him.“Just reading,” I say, and I’ve already lied.I was in Dragonfly.The words form in my mind but don’t reach my lips.

“Really.” He sounds like he doesn’t believe me—no, that doesn’t make sense. He just sounds upset. He walks to the fridge, yanks it open. Grabs a beer. Not his usual drink of choice, though he’ll have one occasionally on a hot afternoon—which this certainly isn’t—or when he’s feeling a certain kind of stress, one he wants to stoke instead of soothe.

“Is everything okay?” I ask. Is he angry? Is he angry atme? I can’t think why. He can’t know about the cabin.

“Fine,” he says. Connor has never let his anger hurt me, but that doesn’t make me less afraid of it. Of anyone’s anger. You have to placate it, quiet it, before it builds up. Beth liked to nurture her anger. It would build and build all day, until it boiled over. As an adult, I can see that half of Joseph’s punishments were more like protection—go to your room. You’re not allowed to come down for dinner.Stay out of her way until she calms down.

I slide out of my chair and around the side of the table, standing next to him. My fingertips touch the inside of his wrist. He runs his other hand down my side to rest on my hip.

“You’re upset,” I say.

He takes a long sip of his beer, lets it sit in his mouth a moment before swallowing. “It’s been a weird day.” I almost laugh. Instead I sink into the chair next to him, leaning close with my elbows on my knees. Drawing the world down to the two of us.

“Weird how?” I ask. He rolls the edge of the beer bottle back and forth on the table, doesn’t answer. “Did something happen? While you were out?”

“We had a conversation,” he says. He doesn’t meet my eyes.

“Oh?” I shuttle through possibilities in my mind, but I can’t think of an obvious conversation that would upset him, except— Ah. “About me.”

His lips part—he’s about to say something, but then his teeth clickshut. He lets out a breath. “They think I’m rushing into this. That I don’t know you.”

I rise, only enough to slide into his lap. He tips his face up toward me. I rest my brow against his, my arms around his neck. He presses a hand to the small of my back and shuts his eyes. I don’t. I watch him.

I always have to watch him. I have to stay aware at every turn of what it is he’s thinking. What he sees. I cannot risk him seeing something I’ve buried. I have to be perfect.

“You know me,” I say, willing it to be true enough to blot out all the things hedoesn’tknow. That I don’t know. There’s a photo of me with his father, and I don’t understand why and it terrifies me.

He starts to speak, but I kiss him. Nothing we could say now would help. It’s not words that will remind him of who I am—to him,withhim, which is all that matters. All those other girls—the one hiding from Beth’s rage, the one taking photos of her bruises, the one clutching a knife, and the one holding a stranger’s hand in the snow—let them stay buried.

“You know me,” I say again, and I pull back, look into his eyes. He stares up at me. I stand and put my hand out in invitation. He hesitates for half a second before he takes it. I turn, two fingers hooked around his, guiding him toward the bedroom.

There are two versions of Connor. There’s the one who kisses me slowly, reverently. Soft and tender, his touch an act of worship. Like I am something delicate or a wild thing that will fly away if he startles me. But every gentle touch wraps a sense of suffocation around me. His love is claustrophobic, and sometimes I can’t endure it any longer.

Sometimes, when he trails delicate kisses down the rise of my hip, I want to scream, to dig my fingernails into his skin, to bite down until he bites me back. But Connor wants to be a good boy, a gentleman. And so I grant him all those whispering touches, until I can’t anymore.

Occasionally I meet the other version of Connor. When I bite down on his lip, when I shove him away. When he pulls me roughly onto his lap and traps my hands behind my back. When he tells me I’ll have tobeg for it—but it only ever takes one whisperedpleasebefore he’s pushing me down onto the bed.

He’s never been like this before, though—grabbing my hips, pressing me down, his hand on my chest, fingers splayed to frame my throat. I wrap my legs around his waist to draw him deeper, hold him there against me, and I bite my lip to stifle my cries before I remember there’s no one nearby to overhear. He slows—that gentleness is back, eyes locked with mine in a silent question.Please, I say again, and it’s all the permission he needs.

When we’re done, he lies sprawled, the back of one hand on his forehead, his body stretched out, strangely vulnerable. He looks up at the ceiling, a faint line already forming a divot between his brows as his worries flood their way back. I start to say his name, stop myself.

He takes his hand from his forehead, resting it on my thigh instead, casual but possessive. His head turns to examine me, his bright eyes intense. “Let’s stay here tonight,” he says. “I’ll cook for you.”

Before I understood that Connor was rich, I suggested we cook together to save money on dates. He showed up with quail eggs and fifty-dollar steaks. He loved it, though. Pouring me a glass of wine and telling me to stay put while he flourished his way through fifty-step recipes. He’d produce elegantly plated delicacies on my mismatched thrift-store dishes and wait, eyebrows pinched upward in nervous anticipation, as I took the first bite.

---