Page 27 of The Good Girl

Pressing the warm, sticky blade into my cheek, he drags it down from my eyebrow until it falls off my jaw. Our eyes are locked and I refuse to flinch. I don’t even fucking breathe as he breaks my skin, and I feel the sharp stinging of his cut. The silence stretches out between us, his fingers squeezing tighter, but I still stand my ground.

“Useless piece of shit,” he mutters before shoving me aside and storming upstairs.

With my thumb, I wipe away the blood I can feel trickling down my face and give Jaxon from Newtown one last glance, knowing I won’t even see his face in the paper as he vanishes from the face of the earth.

Turning on my heel, I leave this nightmare mansion in desperate need of alcohol, and the opportunity to learn about other people's fucked-up lives. Let the chips lie where they fall, because tonight I wanted to be anyone but Tristan Radcliffe.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Elena

Ifeel like a weight has been lifted once I see Serena climb inside her Mini Cooper and drive away. It had been less awkward between us this morning, but I still felt like something was wrong and the easiness of our relationship had changed.

Grabbing some lemon water from the fridge, I head outside to do some yoga by the pool. It wasn’t as good as dancing for relieving the tension I felt locking my body up, but it might help limber me up, ready for the week ahead.

When I walk through the large bay doors, I find my mother on a lounger in a huge black sun hat, drinking margaritas in the smallest white bikini I’ve ever seen.

“Oh, I wasn’t expecting you to be home,” I say as I grab my yoga mat from the storage box next to the pool bar. Usually when my mother went out alone, she rarely came home. Not that it was any of my business, and if it was an issue or had scandal potential, I’m sure my father and his publicist would have handled it by now. I suspected she returned to the Thorn House, her childhood home, and spent the evening with Rowan and other members of the Hawthorne family.

“Hmmm, I wanted to spend some quality time with you before your father returned.” She reapplies sun cream to her perfectly porcelain skin and re-positions the umbrella so that she’s still in the shade.

I’m aware that my mouth is hanging open when she lowers her Dior sunglasses to watch me over the rims. Repeating the words, I virtually breathe, “Quality time…”

My mother rolls her eyes, giving me a look as if she thought I had suddenly become dumb. “Yes, darling.”

“Why?” It slips out before I know it and there’s silence for a moment as we both stare at each other. My mother wasn’t one for bonding or ‘quality time’, I didn’t even know what that entailed. I sit down on my mat, getting into a lotus position as I stretch my arms and neck.

She takes a sip of her drink, before stirring the slushie contents with the straw. How was it possible to look like she did at the age of forty? It was like a predator, every movement deliberate and seamlessly elegant. “We need to talk about your engagement.”

I was still in denial about the fact that this engagement was creeping up on me, the closer we got to graduation. Moving into a King Pigeon pose, I huff, “No, we don’t.”

Undeterred, my mother carries on as if I’d never spoken. “Your father wants to announce the engagement at the masquerade ball next month.”

“What?” I wobble out of my position. Why did he want to announce that soon? Keeping my breathing even, I shift into a revolved head-to-knee pose, sweat beginning to trickle down my spine in the warm lunchtime sun.

“Is that a sex thing, darling?” My mother sits forward and tilts her head while sipping from her straw. Her eyebrows raise as I flash her an irritated look. “Seems very uncomfortable. Anyway, it fits with his timeline apparently.”

With a low growl, I move back into a sitting position and slap my hands on the mat like a toddler, much to my mother’s amusement. “How am I supposed to marry someone my father tells me to? Someone I don’t even like. He’s a stoner with a motorbike.”

“I had to.” Shrugging, my mother’s tone is careful. She has never been one for emotions, but when she talks to me like this, there’s something she’s not saying as if she’s afraid to open the floodgates. “At least Tristan is nice to ogle.”

“How did you do it?” This strange heart to heart we were having was the most my mother had spoken to me in years. For some reason, I was reluctant for it to end. I wanted to know more. I needed to understand how she could put me, her own daughter, through this. I wasn’t a prized cow to be traded at the state fair. I was her flesh and blood.

“Because that’s the way things are done.” She avoids my gaze as she stands, stretches, places her glass down on the bar and grabs her wrap. She was closing me out again by acting as if I didn’t exist, something I knew only too well.

I lay back and bring the heels of my feet together, staring up at the cloudless sky, a beautiful shade of pale blue. “So, I’m just supposed to marry Tristan, give up all my dreams and pop out ten children for him.”

“One.”

“Huh?” I sit up on my elbows, and watch as my mother runs her fingers delicately over her cesarean scar. If we weren’t talking, I would assume she’d forgotten I was still here.

Swallowing, her perfect face slips. “You only have to give him one. There are things that can be done to prevent any future…accidents.”

Is she implying what I think she is? “Mother...”

She smiles, but it’s not her normal dazzling step-ford wife smile or even the restrained politician smile. It’s heavy with sadness and gone in an instant as she brings herself back up to her full height. “One child, and then they leave you to your own devices.”

I bite the inside of my cheek, confusion and anger beginning to build in the pit of my stomach. My mother, who for a single second, looked human and vulnerable, was happy with subjecting me to the same fate she endured? The sadness that she will live with, forever, she was fine with exposing me to that? Everything just simmers away inside me, eating at my core. The Society was messed up and the women seemed to get the raw deal, but that’s just the way it was, and I was supposed to swallow that.

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