Page 44 of Hell to Pay

“Right, and Lilah’s mom sounds like a whack job,” I said.

Nolan sighed. “Let’s just focus on being here for Lilah. For her and her brother.”

He made it sound so easy, and I guess for him, it was. Nolan always knew the right thing to say, to do. He knew how to make people comfortable, how to look out for them.

It was like listening to someone speak a language I didn’t speak, like watching some kid play Bach or draw like Renoir or Monet or some shit. On my better days, I admired it, but who was I kidding? I didn’t have a lot of those, and on the other days, all the days in between, I was jealous as fuck and also confused because Nolan hadn’t had a dad around at all and somehow he’d become what some would call a “good man” while I was a fucking monster.

“Exactly,” Jude echoed. He looked pointedly at me. “This is something we can do for Lilah, and we all know you want to do things for Lilah, so don’t even try to sell us your pissed-off, annoyed bullshit.”

Denying it would only make me look guilty as charged and it was already annoying as fuck to live with two guys who knew you better than you knew yourself.

I stalked to the kitchen instead, trying not to think about the way Lilah had looked when she’d come in with her brother, the protective arm she’d had around him, the worry in her eyes.

Trying not to think about the fact that her whole fucking life, she’d been protecting him and herself too.

Resolve hardened in my gut. Protecting was something I could do. Something I was good at. And protecting Lilah was something Iliked, something I could do for her, like Jude said.

But that didn’t mean I had to announce it to the world.

31

LILAH

I pulledMatt into my room and closed the door, then asked him if he was hungry, if he wanted to take a shower or use the bathroom.

He shook his head and sat on the end of my bed, looking around the extravagant room. I saw him take in the sleek expensive furniture, the wall of windows, the door open to the attached bathroom.

“What is this place?” he asked. “Who are those guys?”

My heart thudded in my chest. “I’ll explain all that.” I sat next to him on the bed. “What happened?”

He stood and paced the room like a caged animal. “She’s just so… hard. Like I try to do everything right, try to follow all the rules, but sometimes… sometimes I just can’t, and then…”

“She makes you pray,” I said. “She gets worse.”

I remembered: how every infraction made her more strict, more convinced we were being tempted by the devil, more sure the answer was to isolate us with nothing but her and the Bible.

“It was my fault this time,” he muttered, running a hand through his hair. It was longer than usual, like he hadn’t had a haircut in a long time. “I can’t even say it wasn’t.”

“It’s never your fault.” I watched him with alarm. This wasn’t Matt. He was the calm one, the one who didn’t push against our mom’s boundaries, the one who defended her. Now he was stalking around the room coiled with energy that had nowhere to go. “Just… tell me what happened.”

“I was watching porn, okay?” I flinched, but not because my sixteen-year-old brother had gotten caught watching porn. His cheeks were bright red, his eyes bright. He looked a little crazy, and I had a flash of my mom when she was on a roll, talking about God and the devil and damnation. “I was watching porn and she found out, so yeah, this time it really was my fault.”

My mind spun. We weren’t exactly the kind of family — the kind of siblings — that talked about sex. I mean, I hadn’t been allowed to date at his age so porn had probably really sent my mom over the edge.

I swallowed my discomfort, tried to think about the right thing to say, the thing a good big sister — one who hadn’t been taught that literally every human feeling was something to feel guilty about — would say.

“It’s totally normal to be curious about sex and stuff,” I said.

His cheeks flamed and he covered his face. “Oh my gosh, Lilah! You’re not really going to talk to me about… about that, are you?”

Sadness washed over me. Matt was sixteen. In another life — with another mom — I would have had to worry that he might get someone pregnant, that he might not know how to treat girls with respect, that he might not understand the emotional parts of sex (something I was just starting to figure out myself).

He would have been talking with friends about sex, sliding into the DMs of girls from school, hoping he might get lucky at prom. We lived in a society that talked about sex like it talked about grocery shopping, like it was no big deal, but here we were, both of us struggling to even look at each other.

“Well… somebody has to,” I said. “Right? I mean we can’t just be freaks who never acknowledge the fact that sex is a thing people do, a thing people think about.”

“Yeah, when they’re married!” He was practically shouting, and his eyes had taken on a feverish shine.

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