Page 75 of The Worst Kind of Promise
“What are you hiding, Kit?” Gage grills.
The blood vessels in my forehead are gonna burst. “I’m not hiding anything!”
Fulton, witnessing the tension underlying this whole interaction, decides to step in not a moment too late. “C’mon, Gage. We’re gonna be late to the kickback.”
“Right,” Gage replies, starting up the boat propeller, all while his unnerving stare never leaves my face.
I swallow. There’s sweat dripping into my trunks from the heat and the bitter taste of lies. And I have no idea how Faye’s faring down there. She’s going to be so pissed at me if we make it out of this alive.
“Have fun catching yourgoldfish, Kit.”
And just like that, I watch as their boat speeds off into the distance with a hydrodynamic drag, sending a ripple through the eerily calm lake. Jesus Christ. That was worse than a police interrogation. Not that I’ve ever experienced one. I’m just guessing.
I tentatively peer over the side of the boat to where I last saw Faye, and lo and behold, she’s bobbing in the water, giving me a Medusa glare.
“I hate you,” she growls, though half of her words are drowned out by the water sloshing into her mouth.
This is going to be a long boat ride back.
28
THE GHOST OF TRAUMA’S PAST
FAYE
As messed up as it is, I forgave Kit about an hour after the boat incident. But he’s been making it up to me ever since, and I haven’t had the heart to turn him down. Let him think twice about throwing me off steep ledges in the future. Plus, what sane girl wouldn’t want flowers, a foot massage, a few orgasms, and chocolate-covered popcorn?
My brother’s pretty much been occupied with Aeris, which is good news for us because slipping out of the house is a lot easier when you don’t have to find death-defying ways to do it. Casen and Josie have been living their happy life, Bristol’s been training down at the rink to gear up for the upcoming season, and Gage and Fulton have probably been getting into trouble with whatever shenanigans they’re usually up to.
“Where are you taking me now?” I ask Kit, struggling to keep up with his long-ass strides. If we could just, I don’t know,hold hands, it would force him to slow down a bit. But we still can’t take that risk in public.
“It’s a surprise,” he says, winking at me.
I’m grateful that I didn’t opt for heels today because my feet would’ve been blistered by now. It’s around midday, with an orange bloomage feathering over the sky, the heat bearable enough to cap my usual amount of sweat excretion. We pass by a few quaint shops—ranging from flower stores to book emporiums to antique menageries—and the space is bustling with a few more bodies than usual. I can smell the wafting aroma of freshly baked pastries from around the corner, and I feel the whoosh of air-conditioning whenever I pass by open doors. Bushels of lilac asters line the sidewalk, scattered arbitrarily among green, overgrown foliage.
Kit slows once he realizes we have two verydifferentstaminas, and he walks shoulder to shoulder with me—or more realistically, shoulder to head.
“You’ll like it, I promise.”
“You don’t have to keep doing things for me, you know,” I tell him, wishing I could reach out and waffle our fingers together.
I want to treat him to something for once, spoil him, show him how grateful I am to have him in my life. I tell him all the time, but it’s different when someone’s actuallydoingsomething to express their feelings. And it doesn’t help that my L-word plans got totally ruined when Gage and Fulton showed up. I need something bigger than a boat at sunset. Though I am on a college student’s budget, so that might be kind of hard.
His eyes click down to me, the brown of his irises brightened by the sunlight overhead. “What if I want to keep doing things for you?”
A laugh bounces out of me. “Then I’d say that I—”
But as easily as that laugh came, it’s gone within the same second, like an apparition skating between realms. I don’t know what compelled me to look ahead—maybe just natural instinct—but a few feet away from me in the teeming crowd is an all-too-familiar silhouette. A silhouette that I wouldn’t be able to miss anywhere, no matter what hemisphere of the earth I was in. A silhouette that strikes a chord of fear in me, stronger than the fear I feel whenever my brother gets too close to the truth. That kind of fear is amateurish in comparison. Maybe fear is too soft of a word.
This…person…begets a howling pain within me, one that’s been long dormant since I made my great escape to California. It’s been buried deep within me, stirring and stretching like some kind of creature exiled to the very depths of my belly. And now it’s awake. It’s awake, and the pain rears up. It’s as if my body’s experiencing rigor mortis. My breath slows to the point where I’m not even sure my heart is still beating. The edges of my vision fuzz into an ebony haze.
I don’t know if Kit’s still talking to me. I can’t really see him in my peripheral. All I can see is that man’s face, staring straight into me, the exact same predatory eyes that once violated my body all those years ago. Behind his well-liked façade lives my everlasting sentence to hell.
People never know what the devil looks like. They have preconceptions, sure, but they’re wrong. The devil can be your next-door neighbor, your partner, your mother, your ex-friend,you. The devil can be someone you barely know, or someone who’s infiltrated every aspect of your life to bring you the most unimaginable types of torture. My devil is Saxon Thompson—the man who raped me.
There’s no possible way he can be in California. It can’t be him…can it? I’m seeing things. It’s only someone that looks like him. He can’t hurt me anymore. He can’t hurt me anymore. He can’t hurt me anym—
“Faye!” Kit’s voice is like a life preserver, reaching out to me in the dark chasm of my mind, offering security, safety. All I have to do is swim toward it.
