Page 78 of Worse Than Wicked
“I haven’t,” she says. “Yet.”
He stands there another few seconds before turning back. “Are you going to?”
“That depends,” she says. “Why don’t you come have a drink with me and we’ll talk about it.”
She pats the bed, but he goes to the single chair in the room and pulls it out from the desk affixed to the wall. He sits stiffly facing her. If I hadn’t seen him checking her out, I’d have a hard time picturing this guy as anything but a nerdy science teacher. He hides it well.
“What do you want?” he asks.
“Hmm, what a loaded question,” she muses, twisting the top off the bottle of wine. The bastard didn’t even bother to get one with a cork.
“If you’re in some kind of trouble,” he says. “If you need money—”
Mabel laughs, cutting him off. “You think I want your money? I don’t care about money. I care about the fact that you—you took advantage of me.”
She’s sitting on the edge of the bed with her back toward the camera, and I can’t help but think she must have done that on purpose. She watched me put it up in a spot where I could see the whole room, small as it is. But she could have sat in a way so I could read her expression to the best of my ability. Instead, I can only see her back, her shoulders that sink a little at her words. I want to know what she’s thinking, want to unlock her skull and swing it open and see everything that’s happening in her beautiful mind.
“That’s not how I remember it,” Mr. Harris says.
“It’s not?” she asks. “You don’t remember that I came to you in desperation, and instead of helping me, you became just another man who took what he wanted because he knew I’d never tell? What is it with you people? Do you have a sixth sense, or do you spend your days watching your students, sniffing out the vulnerable ones you can exploit?”
“That’s not what happened,” he says firmly.
She gets up and thrusts one of the hotel’s plastic cups at him so hard he jumps back like he thinks she’s going to dump it on him. When she doesn’t, he takes it carefully and then quickly returns his gaze to her, watching her warily.
“You asked what I want,” she says, turning and sloshing wine into another cup, not seeming to notice it splashing onto the bedside table around it. “I’ll tell you what I want. I want you to have helped me when I finally, finally, finally worked up the strength to speak after seventeen years of silence. When I summoned the last of my strength after everything they’d done to me, and I went to someone I thought I could trust, I wantthat to have not been a mistake. I want you to have done what you were supposed to do, and called the police, or at least told the headmaster so that he could. Aren’t you required to do that? You’re a mandatory reporter. You should have reported it.”
She stops and throws down her wine like a shot, then turns back to him and takes a breath. I can see her shaking on my screen, and I move toward the door, but she goes on speaking. I hesitate, not wanting to interrupt. She needs this, needs to say what she came to say.
“So, that’s what I want,” she says, pressing her hands to her thighs. “I want to never have let you touch me because I didn’t have the strength to fight one more battle that year. I want to never have gone into your class freshman year, or junior year, or senior year, and thought that because you were nice to me all that time, it meant that I could trust you. I want to not have to wonder if all that time, every time you called on me in class or told me I did a good job on an assignment, you were watching me, biding your time, and waiting for an opportunity. And most of all, I want to know that you’ll never use your position of power to gain someone’s trust again. I want to know that you’ll never do what you did to me to anyone else.”
She’s crying now. Mabel is not a crier, so I know this man did more to her than she told us, that it hurt her more than she let on.
I grip the doorknob in one hand, my phone in the other, and force myself to stay still and not intervene, not go to her. She needs me, but she needs this more. This is her moment, and I won’t take it from her. I watch her shoulders shake as she stands at the nightstand, head bowed, gripping the neck of the wine bottle where it stands in a puddle of bloody red.
“How many more were there?” she asks, so quiet I can hardly hear her through the thin door.
Mr. Harris sets his wine cup aside. “There weren’t any more.”
Mabel is quiet for a moment, motionless. Then she spins around, raises the bottle above her head, and brings it down on his face.
“Liar,” she screams, the sound more animal than human.
I’m out of the bathroom in a second, reaching for her, but she’s already crumpled to the floor on her knees. I sink down and gather her into my arms. She feels so small, fragile as a bird with two broken wings. I pull her into my lap, cradling her head to my chest as she shakes with big, loud sobs that wrack her entire body. I’ve never seen her cry like that, in all the time I’ve known her, after all the ways we tortured her. I know it’s a privilege and an honor to witness her in this state, so I treat it as such. I don’t try to fix it, don’t offer words at all. I just let her cry.
When she finishes, she’s limp against me, warm and still, diminished somehow.
Wine is still trickling in a thread from the neck of the bottle, soaking the carpet. Mr. Harris’s broken glasses lay in the burgundy pool. He’s slumped over in his chair, head back, mouth open. He lets out a low moan, and Mabel shivers against me, burrowing closer.
Like I am her protector.
She has chosen me for that role despite our past, and I know the weight of that decision, what it must have cost her. I don’t take that lightly.
I pick her up and lay her on the bed before bending to pick up the wine bottle. I grip it by the neck and smash it on his face—once, twice, three times. It shatters on the third blow, and I sink it into his neck to make sure the job is done. I’ll never make the mistake I made with Jane again.
When I’ve sliced open his throat and the blood stops gushing and slows to a trickle, I wash my hands in the bathroomsink. I regret that I had to do it while he was barely conscious, that I’ve killed two more men, and each was as unsatisfactory as the last. I still haven’t gotten my perfect kill, to watch the life drain from someone’s eyes, to know that in their last seconds, I am what they see. Their executioner. Their God.
But this was for Mabel, not for me. So I pick her up, cradling her in my arms as I carry her out to the car to take her home. I gently place her in the passenger seat and buckle her in. Then I walk around the car, climb into the driver’s seat, and start the engine.
