“Bud never showed it to her. He said it was only for insurance.”
“I suppose he got more bang for the buck by showing it to Baxter.” Neither laughed at Max’s small, unintended pun. She now understood Baxter’s demeanor the day she’d shown up at his house, the thing he couldn’t reveal.
Angela sniffed suddenly, breaking the thoughts going round and round inside Max’s head. “I never wanted to hurt them. I certainly didn’t want it to end up like this.” She turned to look at Max. “You don’t really think she’d try to kill me, do you?”
“You’re the one who had sex with her. Why don’t you tell me?”
“Do I detect a little censure there, Max?”
“Yes. Despite everything, I like Julia.”
“I do, too.”
“And I don’t like that everyone ended up using her.”
“Neither do I,” Angela whispered with real feeling.
“Didn’t you mind that Bud forced you to have sex with her?”
“You mean because she’s a woman?”
Max nodded. It was another thing she wanted to know, to wend her way into Angela’s psyche.
“No. I wouldn’t call myself a lesbian or even bisexual. More like a humanitarian. Julia felt better about herself. She’d been lying for years about who she really was. I let her see it was okay.” With a deep breath, she glanced at Max. “I’d do you if I thought you’d feel better about your husband and your uncle.”
Max laughed instead of screaming at her. “Thanks, but I don’t think sex is going to make me feel better about anything.” It certainly hadn’t last night. It had only driven her deeper into a hole with Witt, one she was sure she’d never get out of.
“Sometimes sex is the only weapon we have.”
“I’d like to stop thinking of it as a power tool.” Max shifted in her seat, stared out the side window at the cars racing by, listening to the slosh of the tires on the wet concrete.
Angela slid her hands down to the bottom of the steering wheel, holding it with a relaxed grip. “I once went to a psychiatrist who said that when you’re taught the power of sex very young, you’ll use it the rest of your life to get what you want. You force it, you tease with it, you withhold it, you cleanse someone with it. But in the end, it’s all about getting your own power.”
Max watched the spit of the tires on the car next to her, their speed, for one short fraction of time, matching.
“I had no power until the day I turned thirteen,” Angela said.
Max’s stomach tightened. Thirteen, such a bad, bad age. Terrible things happened to thirteen year-olds. “What changed?”
“I almost died.”
Max didn’t want to know, wanted to cover her ears and close her eyes. Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. “Why?”
“He made me”—Angela’s voice dropping to a whisper—“kill it. It almost killed me, too.”
Max struggled not to scream, Cameron’s words echoing in her ears. Ask her why she can’t have children.
Angela never said what it was. Max’s hand fell to her abdomen, her womb, the seat of motherhood. She didn’t have to ask to know.
Silence in the car, dark and threatening. Max’s hand went to the door handle, some vague notion of yanking it open, throwing herself out, just to get away ... away. Please, please, please let me out of here.
But Angela saved her, pulled them both back from the brink, voice returning to normal, calm, like she was telling a story about someone else, someone she didn’t even know. “My father didn’t always use sex, though. Sometimes he used other things.”
Max breathed in the scent of the leather seats, brushed her fingers over the butter softness of them and found herself forced to ask, “What else did he do?”
“He had this game he liked to play. And he punished me if I didn’t play it. He’d hold out his fisted hands, and he’d make me put mine beneath them. He had ... things in there. Sometimes there were good things, like a handful of change or candy. And sometimes the things were very, very bad.” Her voice had dropped once more to a whisper. “You’d never know which it was going to be.”
Max wondered what would have been bad for a child. What could have been the worst?
“One time it was a slug out of the garden.” Angela shivered. “A huge ugly slimy thing. I ... I...”
Angela would have thought she’d die when it touched her skin. It probably stuck, too. She would have had to shake and shake her hand to get it off. Max caught her breath. Yes, that’s exactly how it would have been.
“That’s why you wouldn’t hold your hand out for the key, wasn’t it?”
“What?” Angela sent her a strange, shocked look.
“Lance. He had a bracelet in one hand and the key to your new apartment in his other. But you wouldn’t play.”
Angela’s lips tensed, though she kept her gaze straight ahead. “How do you know that?”