Page 27 of Freaks
I was fucking terrified of him.
But…
I was also in love with him, more than I’d have ever believed possible, and I trusted him with my life. I knew he would die before he ever let anything bad happen to me. The lengths he’d already gone to in order to keep me safe had gone a long way to proving that. The beating he’d taken at The Barrows simply so he could try and find out what the fuck was actually going on had made me sick to my stomach.
Yeah, he’d been pissed, but I knew he hadn’t killed Rabbit out of anger. He hadn’t done it for the sheer fun of it, either. He’d done it out of fear, because of what had almost happened to me, and he wanted to make sure Rabbit could never pose a threat to me again.
Where did that leave me?
There were so many sides to Fix. He was so damn mercurial. One second he could be making a joke out of something that, nine times out of ten, was definitelynotfunny. The next, he was bending me over a table and fucking me senseless. And the next moment, he was drawing a gun and firing it into the face of a twenty-something-year-old hacker.
I knew what Sadie would be telling me right now if she were here. My friend would tell me to leave, to get the fuck out of dodge before something really awful happened.
She wouldn’t understand, though. This pull that I felt whenever I was around Fix wasn’t something that could be ignored. I would feel it no matter which state I ran to. I could flee to another country altogether and that same tugging in my chest would still be there, calling me to him.
I’d meant it before: when I’d lived under Sixsmith’s rule back in Montmorenci, I’d fabricated this small, limited world for myself. Fear, anxiety and pain had been an ever-present constant within that world, and for a very long time they had been the only things I had felt. Months into the arrangement Sixsmith had made with Sam Halloran, I’d realized that I needed to feel something else or I was going to end up slitting my own wrists. I decided I wasn’t going to feel the fear, or the anxiety or the pain anymore. I was going to blot out the negative by purposefully seeking out and fixating on the positive. Small, brief moments of happiness that I treasured and secreted away inside, so I could close my eyes and draw on them, disappear into them whenever Sam laid his hands on me. Making milkshakes with Amy in the kitchen while our father was at work. The quiet moments after school, where we’d venture out into the back fields to soak our feet in the creek. Stolen minutes in the middle of the night, where I adventured inside the pages of a book, becoming someone else entirely.
I’d only allowed myself to really feel anything inside those moments. I’d carried that practice forward even after I’d escaped out from underneath Sixsmith’s tyranny, and I hadn’t even noticed. For years in Seattle, I’d been numb, only experiencing flashes of emotion whenever something truly unexpected and wonderful happened.
And then something changed.
I hung up a phone in the lobby of a shitty motel in Liberty Fields, Wyoming, and a tall, broad, incredibly sexy, arrogant man had spoken to me. His words had rankled at me from the get-go; he’d provoked such strong emotion in me from the moment our eyes had met, and that had only gotten worse. Or better, depending on how I thought about it.
It was as if I’d been living my life in black and white, and suddenly along came Fix and my world was suddenly painted in startling, vibrant technicolor. I felt the fear I’d become so well-versed at blocking out again with such an intensity that it was almost paralyzing, but I also felt a happiness I hadn’t known before. Wild stirrings in my soul that I’d frankly thought other people were making up before now. Everything was electric, and perilous, and wonderful…
And I wasn’t going to give that up.
Not for Monica, not for the malignant specter that was Carver, and certainly not for the dead man we’d left behind in those crypts.
I made up my mind.
I cast away the image of Rabbit’s ruined face, banishing it from my head. The memory of it was never going to go away, but I would be able to breathe around it now, fucked up though that was. Fix was right; there had to be consequences. The unshakable bond we shared was paramount above anything else. He would go to extraordinary lengths to defend it—defend me—and I would do the same. Other than Amy and Sadie, there wasn’t a person on earth I wouldn’t shoot to save him. No crime was too heinous, if it ensured his safety.
Maybe Iwasfucking crazy for feeling that way, but Fix hadn’t just gotten under my skin. He was a part of my soul, and I wouldn’t willingly part with that. Swallowing, I reached out and found his hand tightly gripping the stick shift. I rested my palm on the back of his hand, loosening his fingers so I could thread my own between them. He glanced at me out of the corner of his eye, and a rush of adrenalin surged through my veins.
Fix exhaled, a long, ragged blast of air leaving his body, and it was only then that I realized he’d been holding his breath. His shoulders relaxed. His features remained strained, his brows banked together, his mouth still pressed into a flat line, but the light in his eyes had changed. Where he’d looked cold and hollow inside a moment ago, now he looked relieved.
ELEVEN
SERA
We didn’t head back to Brooklyn, after all. Instead, we doubled back on ourselves and headed north. The night grew darker as we left behind the tall buildings and the lights of the city, and the hustle and bustle of New York began to fade to indeterminable stretches of highway that whipped past suburbs and eventually small towns with names like Elmsford, and Sleepy Hollow, and Archville.
I’d never heard of half the places we passed, but still I didn’t ask where we were going. I wasn’t one to bury my head in the sand. When I’d left home with Amy, I’d made sure to enter into unknown situations armed with the facts. Made it easier to know what to expect, how to react, and how to handle whatever came my way. But right now, not knowing seemed better than having to face whatever shit storm was about to land in my lap. I needed a break. Ideserveda damn break, even if it was only a temporary one.
We continued to head north.
Soon, the towns we passed grew more and more infrequent and the landscape changed, tall trees looming up on either side of the road like sentinels. Maple. Redwoods. Beech. Oak. Mountain Ash. In autumn, the canopy of the forest we had entered must have put on the most vivid, striking display of color, but now, with little more than the hint of moonlight piercing through the thick cloud cover overhead, everything was painted in black, greys, a deep, depthless shade of royal blue, and shimmering silver.
Monica was so quiet, I swung around to check on her—I didn’t know the girl, but during my brief encounters with her, the last thing she’d ever been was quiet. Her forehead was pressed up against the window, her face relaxed in sleep, the panic and the fear of the night’s events gone from her face. How the fuck was shesleeping?
“She was so wrong to do what she did,” Fix murmured. His eyes were practically glowing incandescent, reflecting the blue glow of the sedan’s dashboard. Normally so angular and sharp, his features were much softer than usual. The bruises that marked his jaw and beneath his right eye were darkening to an angry violet, but I barely noticed them. He was tired. So much driving. So much worrying. So much running. It was finally beginning to take its toll on him. I’d begun to think the man was impervious to the body’s need for sleep, but looking at him now I realized I’d been wrong. Fix had his limits, just like the rest of us. Granted, those limits were beyond those of anyone else I knew, but they did exist.
“She’s from Canada,” he said, his voice a soft lull against the rhythmic rumble of the tires on the road. “She was fragile before she even came to America. Her mother was schizophrenic. Dad left when she was a kid. Sometimes things were okay with her mom, but whenever she had an episode or stopped taking her meds, Monica was put into foster care. Spent a lot of time being passed from one home to the next. Her mom killed herself when Monica was fourteen. The care workers couldn’t find her a permanent place to stay at that age, no one would take a teenager with a tricky background who was likely to cause trouble, so she ended up in a church funded facility. The nuns were good to her. Things became a little more consistent. I think she found comfort in the rules and the routine. So when she finished high school, she stayed on. Became a novice. Decided to help out. When they sent her to the States on exchange, it was meant to be a learning experience for her. Supposed to give her confidence. Help her interact with strangers without flipping her shit.”
His chest rose as he took a breath that never seemed to end. “I knew none of that when she came to St. Luke’s to serve. Her file was sitting on the desk in my office. I’d expected her, but that morning I’d been trying to write my homily, and people just kept walking through the fucking door, needing something from me. If I’d taken a moment to flip through her paperwork, I might have chosen to spend some time with her, making her feel comfortable. Safe. As it was, I was listening to the most pointless fucking confession ever when that bastard came into the church and took her. He raped her while I was trying to stem my own boredom in the confessional. He beat her. He broke her body so badly, it didn’t look like she was going to live.”
A cold, unwelcome sweat broke out across the back of my neck. The shit Monica had been through was the stuff of nightmares. I was intimately familiar with the terrors that plagued her when she passed out each night, and that were probably tormenting her even right now. A tendon strained in Fix’s throat as he rubbed his thumbs against the steering wheel. “The shit she pulled with Rabbit was really fucking bad, and I’m fucking furious with her, Sera, believe me. She could have cost both of us everything. But I owe her. I owe her so fucking much. If I’d been a little more diligent in my responsibilities, she never would have been attacked.”
