Page 46 of When Sinners Fear

“No? Okay then.” She chuckles and goes quiet on me, like she’s in her own private amusement about something. More anger flares inside me at the fact that she’s laughing. I’ve had enough of that – enough goddamn laughter aimed at my own misfortune. “Shall I take her home?”

“Yes please,” Peyton says, sharply. “I think we’re done here.”

I don’t turn, but I do nod at Lexi.

She smiles and walks off instantly. “Come on, then. Where am I taking you?”

They talk about addresses, whilst I listen to the sound of them. I’m so close to not caring a damn about anything. I’m compartmentalising like I always do, stuffing shit in holes in my head where they won’t be thought about again until needed, but, fundamentally, and rightly or wrongly, this isn’t done and over for me. Whether I like the thought or not. Whatever happened between us is set down deep inside me: pain, familiarity, touch. It's too much – too close.

Turning, I glare at both of them as Lexi opens the door. Peyton looks back at me the moment I do. The bruises look better covered with makeup, but they still seep through, and Lexi’s clean, close-cut clothes wrapped around her frame are nothing like I’m used to on Peyton.

A sharp breath pulls into me at the vision, and I find my feet walking forward without my brain’s consent in the matter. She backs away a few steps from me, as I pass and head for Lexi’s Challenger.

“Change of plan?” Lexi asks.

I open the car door for Peyton, waiting on her acknowledgement of this being acceptable. She looks down at the ground and then back up to Lexi, who smiles and talks to her about something I probably don’t want to hear. There’s some kind of awkward hug between them, before Peyton makes her way over to me and slides in the car.

The journey goes by in relative silence. It gives me time to look around at the roads and normality, and perhaps gives me a chance to think about something other than where we’ve been. Its fucking hard, though. Exhausting. I’m not fit enough to drive, and every corner and manoeuvre pulls at unhealed swelling and burns. Sun streams down on us through the tinted windows, causing this headache to worsen, but the run of traffic eases me back to some kind of calculated familiarity. It’s all tinged with what was, though, and no matter how much I try to forget, it’s continuously hampered by something beautiful that I destroyed.

Wincing, as I steer around a sharp turn, pain starts catching up with me. I slow and shake my head, trying to gain clear sight and sense. It shouldn’t mean anything to me – she shouldn’t. I destroy lives every day, especially women’s. Maybe I’m not the one who does it physically most of the time, but I am the one who organises it, and I am the one who counts the money we make because of it.

I glance at her hand and scratched-up nails as we pull into the neighbourhood she’s from, and then sneer at the rows and rows of manicured idiocy of family life. Children run and wives gossip. Men wash their cars in some display of manly endeavour. It’s a million miles from me, and a million miles from where we’ve been together.

“Stop,” she says before we get to her avenue. I ease off the gas and pull us over to the sidewalk, unsure why I’ve bothered listening to her demands. “I can’t. I … I can’t go in.” I keep staring forward, my fingers tightening on the steering wheel. “You might not care, but what do I say? How do I … explain?” She fidgets and looks sideways through the tinted windows, probably happy to be hiding behind them. “I can’t. Not yet. Not like this.” She smears the makeup over her face and the damage comes back to the surface. “I’ll call them. Then I can think. Are there any cheap motels close by?”

“I wouldn’t know. I don’t live cheaply.”

Silence.

Killing the engine, I look at her and trace all those curves and lines I’ve devoured so intimately. I shouldn’t even be thinking what I’m thinking, but I am. I can still taste her, and I can still hear those quiet moans under me in the middle of her pain. They’re inside me whether I want them there or not, and, regardless of the senselessness of it all, they mean something to me. Call it a traumatic time shared, or torment halved. Either way, she held my hand. She waited for me to die first.

She chose life as long as I breathed.

She gave a damn and she endured everything I sent her way.

I start the engine again and pull out onto the road, turning the car around slowly. She sure as hell isn't staying in some cheap ass motel. Not while I’m still part of her life, anyway. “You can come stay at mine a while longer.” She doesn’t say anything in response, nor does she speak again for a while. Neither of us do.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

PEYTON

I

glance at the entrance to our road in the wing mirror as Knox drives away. It doesn’t make sense, but I couldn’t move – like I was frozen. Frozen in fear and unable to wrap my mind around articulating what’s happened to me. Nobody would understand — nobody except Knox.

He continues to drive, and I don’t say anything, appreciating his silence. What would I say? There’s no real explanation for my actions. I should want to rush to the safety and comfort of my family and never want to see or have anything to do with Knox Cortez again in my life. But that’s not how I feel, not deep down.

He’s surrounded by people who all intimidate me like everything he deals with is life or death, but at the same time, I’ve never felt safer.

The drive back gives me time to run over the multiple ways to start the conversation I want to have with my mom. Or how I might explain what happened that day I didn’t come home. The need to explain to them that it wasn’t my decision eats at me, and I know why. A part of me resents putting my life on hold for the family, and so it’s my guilt wanting to set the record straight.

I don’t want them to think I’ve run away or abandoned them, and I don't want them to think the worst has happened, either. But as I choreograph conversations, my guilt and shame continue to bleed out into the words, and no matter how I phrase it, I can’t escape sharing some element of truth to the ordeal. There are reasons why I have a cut on my forehead, why my cheek is bruised, with a possible fracture, and why there are hand marks and finger bruises covering my body. They can’t be ignored, and I’m not strong enough to tell the truth. Mother isn’t strong enough to hear it, either.

I can’t hide forever, though, and keeping them in the dark is cruel. So I’ll have to figure out how to tell them I’m not their girl anymore. I’m not the same Peyton as before. Father will be disappointed in me. Telling him the truth will quieten him, but I can’t do that because recounting the words in my head is enough to turn my stomach. It was horrific, the likes of a horror story, and I don’t want to make them suffer a second of that.

I’ll call them when I’m back and safe to stop them from worrying. That’s enough. It will have to be.

“You’re quiet.”

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