She looked again to Stellan.
“But it was his excuse. He was trying to impress them. Draw them in. Doing stupid shit, such stupid, stupid shit, a man his age winning prizes at a fair for girls he wanted to fuck. After it happened, I would tell myself he never grew up. He was good-looking and always had been. The girls dripping off him in high school. He talked about it all the time, how he was the big man, about those good old days that were all about parties and pot and pussy. But as you get older, that has to translate to something more, or the girls won’t keep coming around. And he was nothing. He was a loser and a dealer and a cheat, and his life carried on being about parties and pot and pussy, with the addition of more drugs and dealing them, and that was worse. So he had nothing. Was nothing. And he was left to target the girls who could be won over by cheap stuffed animals earned at a carnival game.”
She put the crocodile on the ottoman and again spoke to it.
“That’s just an excuse though, I understand that. An excuse for what he was, what he did. He was just evil. In his early forties, seducing sixteen-and seventeen-year-olds. Getting them high. Hooking them on drugs.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “There were no excuses. He was just a monster, and the only way he was not was that he never touched me. Not even when he was drunk or high. But I almost wish he had. I almost wished he’d gotten from me what the monster in him needed so he wouldn’t have hurt anyone else. But I had to protect Simone. So I was sure to stay well away when the danger lurked. She had to remain safe. It was the only thing I had. The only thing I could do. I sacrificed friends to it, trying to be normal, to give Simone a chance at something good in her life. I sacrificed friends to keep her safe. But at least I did that. At least she was safe from him. He never touched her, and to make that so, he never touched me.”
“Sweetheart—”
He said no more when she reached into the bag and pulled out a folded-over double frame.
She opened it.
“Corny,” she muttered, staring at the pictures. “And sick.”
She took in what she’d seen thousands of times.
One side, a bride and groom. The groom was in clean blue jeans and a crisp, ironed white shirt, his long, dark hair tamed in a ponytail at the back. The bride was wearing a tacky, shiny satin, cheap, white, strapless dress with a peplum and a too-short and too-tight skirt, hair teased out huge, face made up in Vegas-showgirl-with-a-palsy.
They were making out like they really needed to get a room.
The other side of the frame, a picture of two hands together, the woman’s on top of the man’s. It was akin to those traditional photos taken at traditional weddings, but on the ring fingers were bulky silver rings in which were etched in black the word HITCHED.
It might have been cute, if it wasn’t them.
But it was them.
So it wasn’t.
Not looking at him, she handed the frame to Stellan.
“He was a user,” she said when he took it. “Coke mainly. She wasn’t. She was the brains of the operation. He wasn’t her husband, the father of her child. He was her lackey. She used him as an enforcer. A bag man. A delivery boy. An available cock. I was a mistake, and she told me so, more than once. Looking back, I see that I was the only thing she gave him, because when they found out she was pregnant, she wanted to get rid of me, he wanted to keep me, and she wanted to keep him at heel. So she had me so she could use me to keep him where she wanted him.”
She looked up at him, then her eyes again dropped to the frame in Stellan’s hands that he wasn’t looking at because he was looking at her.
And she kept talking.
“I don’t know what went on between the time those pictures were taken and when I came around. He looked happy in that photo. But she always looked like that. Vulgar and common and mean. They’re kissing, but I know them. I can see the looks on their faces and read them. He looked like he had the rest of his life in front of him and was looking forward to facing it with the woman in his arms. She looked like she was ready for him to get on with it and give her an orgasm. It never changed. For the rest of their lives, it never changed. He hoped. He dreamed. She used and schemed.”
She realized she was wringing her hands in her lap and stopped doing that.
But she didn’t stop speaking.
“He loved me. He was a mess and he was an addict and he was under her thumb so he wasn’t good at looking after me.” She closed her eyes tight and turned them back to Stellan, opening them. “So Sixx did her best to look out for him too.” She shook her head. “It wasn’t what you might think. The trauma of what happened in that room didn’t split me in two. I had been that way for a long time. What I couldn’t handle about what happened in that room was that he died for me, instead of the way it was supposed to go for Sixx. That happening the other way around.”
She vaguely noted he looked ill, as he would do with all this filth exposed, when he asked softly, “Can I speak now, sweetheart?”
But it was like he didn’t say a word.
She kept going.
“I did those things, in the sketchbook, to prove I was better than her. Not much better, but I didn’t ruin lives for a living. I have skills. I’m good at what I do. I was in demand. I had respect. I did them because I had this … this weird sense of invincibility. Like I survived that room, and I had to test life to see if that feeling was real. I did them because that was who I was, that was what they made, and I didn’t think there could be anything else. And if that was the life I was born to lead, I was going to best it, best her. I did those things because it was all I knew, and I was scared of breaking free and how that would affect me, harm me, affect Simone, harm her. I did them because I constantly had to take risks to keep sharp so I could keep Simone safe. I did them because that was just … it was just…” she choked out the last word, “me.”
“And each act you deemed unworthy scarred you,” he noted quietly.
She gave a jerky nod. “You see this Sixx, but she hides the real me. It’s a disguise. The Sixx in my books is the real me.”
He nodded once, but his was firm, not jerky. “And I’m assuming, to escape the anger and blame that dogged you due to your uncle’s activities, you left school the minute you turned eighteen, never earning your diploma or GED. However, you had to survive, feed yourself, and there were a variety of things you could have done, including going into the family business. You did not. You used your network of contacts to hire yourself out for anything but that. Illegal activities to be sure, aiding and abetting in the background, but never committing any felonies you masterminded for your own ends or your own gains.”
“Now it’s you who’s making excuses, Stellan,” she whispered.
“When you speak to me in that tone, darling, especially when we’re talking about something this important, this intense, you call me ‘baby.’”
Sixx sat up straight and blinked.
“And I’m not making excuses,” he went on to declare. “I’m pointing out realities.”
“Did you read my sketchbooks?” she asked dubiously.
“Every page, every word. It was the honor I expected it to be, from the minute I knew they existed. They moved me, they touched me, they filled me with anger as well as fear. But they didn’t surprise me, and they absolutely did not repulse me.”
“That’s impossible to believe,” she breathed.
“How?” he asked, not expecting an answer. He immediately went on, “Do you think I, or anyone else who knows you, would have preferred you were the spunky girl who got your GED, went to beauty school, and set up shop doing hair? No. Because that wasn’t the route you took to the you we all know and want in our lives. Would you be more worthy of the people who care about you if you fought and scratched to get your diploma and then a law degree and worked at that firm where you work now, except doing it as an attorney? No again, for the same reasons.”