“You may not go to a party, Coralie. You may not socialize with teenaged boys. They’re only after one thing. It makes me sick to think of them undressing you with their eyes. I’d fucking kill anyone who tried to touch you. You know that. And I know there’s always alcohol at these parties. Those little shit heads would all be wandering around with their dicks hard, their brains addled with beer, and you’re so innocent, Coralie. You’re so sweet. They would take advantage of you, okay?” He stands, running his hands back through his thinning hair. “So no. You’re going to stay here with me. Come on. Stand up.”
I stand, and my legs feel like they’re about to collapse right out from underneath me. I’m so full of adrenalin and panic that my vision feels like it’s narrowing, blurring around the edges. He goes from crazy to overly affectionate sometimes, and that’s what I think has happened for a moment. I think it until his fist comes flying at me out of nowhere and hits me on the side of the head. My brain feels like it rattles around the inside of my skull like a pinball, hitting every single bell on its way around. Staggering back a step, I hit the side of the bath, and there’s nowhere else for my momentum to take me but down. My back spasms with pain as I collapse into the tub, all of the air rushing out of my lungs in one agonizing grunt.
Overhead, the light fitting above the mirror sways, throwing crazed shadows up the walls as my father steps closer to the bath. He looms over me, his face obscured by the blazing light behind his head, and I realize that he could easily kill me. It would be so, so easy for him to end my life right now. He’s in such a dark place; he probably would regret it later, but now, here, with so much alcohol flooding his body, he wouldn’t think twice.
“I’m sorry, Daddy. I’m sorry. I—I don’t want to go. I want to stay here, with you.”
He just stands there, and I still can’t see his face, so it’s hard to know what he’s thinking. My vision is blurred, and the outline of his body seems fuzzy and distorted. He seems to flicker, like a ghost in a bad horror movie. I’d be less afraid of a ghost, though. After a dragged out minute, he slowly, slowly turns away. My heart is in my throat as he silently leaves the bathroom and closes the door behind him.
I cry without making a sound. I lay in the bathtub, my arms and legs tangled up, ears ringing, back in so much pain I can hardly move, and I cry for what feels like a lifetime.
I stay there for hours. Only when I hear the low grumble of the television kick in downstairs do I cautiously climb out of the tub, body aching, and creep back into my bedroom.
It seems strange that only a few hours ago I was trying on my mother’s dress and thinking about a boy. Now, Callan Cross is the furthest thing from my mind. Maybe if my life was a movie, he’d somehow know I was hurt and sad and he would climb up some conveniently placed tree outside my bedroom window. He’d tap on the glass and climb into my bedroom, and he’d somehow make all of this miraculously better. That’s not what happens, though. Callan doesn’t show up at my window, and I don’t go to the party. I drag my duvet off my mattress, and I slide myself underneath my bed, and I stare at the shining silver weave of wires three inches from my face, and I see how long I can go without drawing a breath.
I heard once that it’s impossible to kill yourself by holding your breath. It really is.
CHAPTER FIVE
CALLAN
Shane
NOW
I wake up and my dick is throbbing like crazy. It’s not normal morning wood. It’s an insistent, painful demand, courtesy of the fucked up sex dream I was just having. Coralie was on her hands and knees, looking up at me from behind tousled, dark bangs—I know for a fact that she doesn’t have bangs anymore, but in my dreams her hair is exactly as it was when we were seventeen—and she was whimpering, making soft, urgent sounds as she crawled across the hardwood flooring of my apartment in New York. Funny how my brain blends the Coralie from my past so seamlessly into my present. I dream about her often. All the time, in fact. There have been times over the years when it’s almost driven me insane. Seeing her so vividly every night when I closed my eyes, smelling her hair, feeling her skin on mine, then waking and not finding her next to me? That has been pure torture.
Lying in bed with the morning sun flooding through my bedroom windows, it’s even more torturous that I know she must be here by now. Wild horses couldn’t drag her back into the house next door, but she must be close. Maybe she’s staying with Friday. Maybe at a motel on the outskirts of town. Wherever she is, it’s as though I can feel her presence, like my body is a tuning fork and I’ve been struck, every molecule in my body ringing with electricity at the prospect of seeing her.