Page 151 of Risky Passion

LikeImeant something.

That was the day she became mine. Not in a creepy way. Not like those bastards. Mine like family. Like blood. Like the only fucking thing in the world worth protecting.

We made rules. We made plans. We buried the past and built something new . . . something just for us.

For a while, it worked.

And we fell in love.

Yeah. You read that right.

Alice and I were lovers.

Lesbians.

Girls in love, and then women in love. Head-over-heels, screw-what-the-world-thinks, blindly, absolutely in love.

But that was the problem . . . gay love was illegal back then.

We had to keep it secret.

It was shameful. Disgusting. Evil. Likewewere the criminals. Us, and not the fuckers who raped or beat us.

“I did it, Alice. We’re out in the open, sweetheart, just like we always wanted . . . to show the world that our love was normal and kind and sweet.”

Well, Alice was the sweet one. And pure. And I would do anything to keep her that way. Including murder.

I returned to the pit, and I was still fucking digging when the sun cracked the horizon in a smear of red and gold.

The earth was fighting back now, clumped and wet, packed tight like it didn’t want me to bury Alice there. My arms felt like they were filled with broken glass. I tried to push myself to go faster, but my body had other plans.

So I stopped. I picked up the notepad again with fingers that wouldn’t stop trembling and sat on the porch steps. My brain hurt too much from thinking, like it was splintering under the weight of the deepest, rawest sadness I’d ever felt. So instead of going into great details, I just wrote a quick list of the assholes I’d killed.

I made three columns: Name. What he did. Where the body was. Or if there even was one.

When I couldn’t focus anymore, I dragged myself back out to the grave and dug some more. As the sun crept higher in the sky, the stretches of writing were getting longer. The stretches of digging, shorter.

Maybe that was my body’s way of telling me I wasn’t ready to put her in the ground yet.

Maybe I never would be.

I grabbed another beer, sat on the porch again, and wrote:

For twenty years, we didn’t commit a single crime. Not even jaywalking.

“Didn’t we, Alice? Twenty beautiful years.”

Two decades of peace and quiet. Where we laughed over burntpancakes she could never quite get the hang of and took early morning walks when the birds sang the loudest.

We built a nice, safe, simple life. We thought we’d escaped the past. The violence. The men who made monsters out of little girls.

We were wrong.

Alice’s illness started with bruises that didn’t fade. Fatigue no amount of sleep could fix. Nosebleeds that ran too long.

Alice was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia.

I scratched the fucking words onto the page. ALL. They reduced that vile disease down to three letters. ALL.

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