Page 47 of Worse Than Wicked
“Fuck you,” I say. “I’m not gay.”
“I know.”
“Give me one of those.”
He hands me the pack. I slide one of the long, white sticks out. My fingers shake as I put it between my lips. Colt lights me, and I stare at the flame, hypnotized as it licks over the tip. When it flicks off, the ghost of it dances behind my eyelids.
“Got any Alice?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “I don’t do any of that shit anymore. I don’t even drink. Just these.” He lifts his hand, gesturing to his cigarette.
“You’re lucky,” I say, dragging on mine. “I wish that’s all in needed.”
“Real fucking lucky.” The corner of his mouth tugs up in a rueful little smile. “That’s what everyone tells me.”
“You are,” I say. “I’d trade places with you in a heartbeat.”
“But you got everything you ever wanted,” he says. “Don’t tell me it’s not all you hoped for.”
“It’s not,” I say, climbing the stairs to stand next to him. Every step feels like slogging through mud. “I think… You were right. I don’t think Mabel can ever love me again.”
“Shocking.”
“I know it’s dumb, okay? But I thought… I really thought she could. That she would, once she was with us. I thought she’d remember how it was before. I know you didn’t understand it,but it was good between us. She loved us. She was exactly what we needed. It might seem weird to someone outside it, but inside, we all fit.”
“If you say so.”
“We did,” I say. “I know you don’t think I’m capable, but I loved her. I still love her. But we broke her, and now… Now she’s broken. She’s not the same, Colt.”
He snorts out a breath and taps his cigarette on the railing. “You broke her, but you expected her to… What? Fix herself, and then fix you?”
“She was supposed to fix everything.”
“You mean to tell me your actions have consequences?” he says. “And not just for you, but for all the innocent victims you targeted?”
“Fuck you,” I say, spitting the words at him like poison darts. “You’re not innocent.”
“I wasn’t talking about me,” he says coolly.
“Your sister isn’t innocent either.”
“Assuming you mean because she dared to carry Darling blood, I beg to differ,” he says, like some snooty asshole. “But that aside, even you can’t deny that Gloria and her sisters did nothing to deserve your wrath.”
“It wasn’t wrath,” I say. “We weren’t mad at them.”
“Then why’d you destroy them too?”
“I don’t know,” I say, shaking my head and dragging smoke into my lungs, feeling it turn them black like the videos they made us watch in health class. Everything inside me is black as tar, heavy and cloying, smothering me slowly from the inside out.
“It was like a game,” I say. “I don’t know why I played. I got caught up in it, and it just never ended. My brothers knew the rules, they told me to play, so I did. That’s how it was with your sister too. I’m not going to play innocent and say I didn’tenjoy it. I did. I loved the game. But it didn’t seem real. I loved her, but destroying her was part of the game, so I loved that too. Even when she left, when she almost died… I knew she didn’t mean it. That she was waiting for us. It was just another move, a countermove to what we did. We had to play the long game after she disappeared, to wait and be patient, and then it was our move again. But now the game is over. We won. We got our prize. But it’s not the prize I was playing for.”
“So you broke your doll, and now you don’t want her?”
“She doesn’t want me,” I correct, staring at the sky in misery. “She’s different.”
“Or maybe she’s exactly what you made her,” he says.
“If she was what we made her, she would have made everything good again, like she did before.”
