Page 20 of Poisoning Ivy
“Brilliant deduction, shitbag,” Monty scoffs, his patience with Ivy’s husband waning.
The reminder about the last time we saw her seems to have soured his mood a little more.
“I’m not a killer,” Ivy says again, though this time, something tells me the person she’s trying to convince is herself.
I laugh, appreciating the irony of her sentiment. “Keep telling yourself that.”
PART TWO
Before
Chapter fourteen
Ivy
Age Eighteen
The summer sun is low in the sky, cicadas singing their nighttime symphony in the darkness outside the windows. Nervousness coils in my stomach as I tiptoe into the living room and get a glance at Uncle Vitoli on the couch, an arm slung over his forehead as if he'd simply fainted there. He didn't, of course. I know the truth of it—the bottle of vodka that's currently hanging loosely in his fingers.
My breath is stale in my chest as I debate about taking the bottle from his hands and setting it on the floor. If I do, I risk waking him as I get close, but if I don't, I run the risk of him waking up when the bottle clatters to the floor.
I decide to go for longevity, so I creep close to him, trying not to breathe in the scent of the alcohol he's been marinating in as I let my fingers wrap around the neck of the bottle. I don't dare take my eyes off his pudgy face as I ease it away from him, letting his fingers slip away from the glass little by little. When he rolls over, I bite down on my lower lip and take advantage of his newfound comfort to slip the glass out from under his hand andthen scramble away before his eyes can pop open and see me out of my room.
I'm eighteen, technically an adult, but he terrifies me as much as he did when I was eight, when I was twelve, when I was first old enough to realize that the way he regarded me wasn't normal. If he catches me slipping out of the cabin, he'll likely chain my door from the outside, and then who knows when I'll get my freedom back?
Once the vodka is in my grasp, I decide that I'll be taking it with me. He's drunk enough that by the time he wakes up and wonders where he put the bottle, I'll be back in my bed safe and sound, and he'll simply open a new one. I'll leave the evidence in the woods, and no one will be any wiser about where it came from.
I slip out of the front door without incident and let go of the breath I've been clinging to as soon as the door clicks into place—a click that sounds like a thunderbolt in the balmy evening. Sound carries here, and yet no one has ever come running when they hear the screams. Maybe it's their attempt at hospitality to leave the tourists to themselves, or maybe they just know it's in their best interest to look the other way. Regardless of the reason, nobody seems to care that we're here… Just like at home, I'm invisible.
It's why I like the pain; it reminds me that Iamalive, and I guess as long as I am, there's hope for my life to change. It's not the pain of my father's hand across my face or the feel of his leather belt against the backs of my thighs that I crave, though. I don't want to sit around and wait until I breathe the wrong way and get slapped across the cheek or say something that's considered disrespectful and get kicked to the ground. I crave the predictable pain I can give myself—the bite of a blade, the drag of nails against sensitive skin. I almostliketo see my own blood when I'm the one bringing it out of me. I think it's whyI like vodka when I first take a sip. It burns against my tongue, but I've got it curled, creating a funnel to drink it down. It burns again at the back of my throat as I pull the liquor away from my lips and gasp for air, coughing at the sting.
I wonder if Uncle Vitoli likes vodka for the same reason. I have a hard time imagining him liking pain, though. He just seems to enjoy inflicting it and then forgetting that the world exists beyond the bottle.
It's getting dark, and I've never traipsed along the mountainside at night before, but I couldn't stay in that cabin a second longer. I needed to get out and breathe fresh air, even if it meant that they'd punish me for it.
Since visibility is bad and I didn't bring a flashlight, I decide not to take the mountainside up to my favorite getaway place, deciding it's better to stick to the road that I can see enough of thanks to the moonlight slipping between the breaks in the canopy of trees. No one will be coming up the road at this time of night—we aren't just the last house on the left, but we're the last house on the entire hill.
My parents are out for the night, which is why Vitoli is here to babysit me as if I'm not entirely capable of handling myself... as if he does anything when he's here anyway.
The further I get from the house, the more distance I put between myself and that prison, the more I can breathe. It’s like his hands are loosening from around my neck. And the more I drink, stopping for a few seconds at a time to tip the bottle back and let it work its magic, creating a path of heat down my throat and into my stomach, the better I feel. I'm liberated when I'm alone in the open, but the moments are so rare that I sometimes feel lost without the security of my cage, my collar. Not tonight, though.
Tonight, the moon is on my side and my problems are all behind me, which is how I end up walking a little too fast downthe hill and stumbling, my toes catching against the gravel. It bites into my palms as I fall to the ground, the bottle of vodka rolling away from me. It was low enough that none of it pours out onto the ground, and as I reach for it, I'm grateful.
The headlights come at me fast—I barely have a chance to scramble to my feet before they're there, blinding me as I look up at the sudden intrusion, confusion numbing me for a moment. I hear the screech and the kick of the gravel as the car comes to a quick stop, and as I'm moving out of the way, the driver's side door opens, and someone steps out.
Shit.
Killian.
It's the first time I've seen him this summer, and I hate that it's like this. As much as I secretly crave running into him, I don't want it to be when I'm in his way.
The resident bad boy, he's made no qualms about how he feels about me—I’m annoying, spoiled, petulant, a waste of the precious mountain air that exists for him and other locals. He's hated my family from the moment he was sentient enough to realize we existed, and I don't exactly blame him. I have also hated my family for as long as I can recall. The difference, though, is that Killian hates me more than I hate myself—an impressive feat given that I don't understand why I am still walking around this earth. Maybe because it's always treated me with such apathy that it feels wrong to do something so dramatic as take my own life to leave it behind.
The weirdest part is that he didn’t seem to hate me from the first time we met, when he found me trying to run from home. He’d been kind then, or at least notcruel. He introduced me to his friends, and even though they were all boys, we got along so well. They called me weird, and they made jokes about me being such a girl when I wouldn’t catch toads with them, but they made my first few summers here tolerable whenever I could find them.
And then, out of the blue, everything changed. It’s like they flipped a switch, and instead of being friends, I became a nuisance to them. That was about five summers ago, and it’s been five lonely summers. Five summers of hiding mostly in my room, finally obeying my father’s demand to ‘stay away from the mountain trash’.
"Watch where you're going, bitch!” Killian growls, shoving me in the shoulder to demand my attention. “I almost hit you!"
