I try to focus on the flickering candle. To not listen.
“Where are the feminists, Cock Sleeve?” he bellows in mock concern, throwing his arms out. “Where are the swinging tits lady warriors when you need them the most? Aren’t they meant to ride in on white horses, or some shit? I’m gonna tell you where they are. I’ll do that for you. They’re too busy helping the girls who deserve it.”
At that, I wince—not just my brow, but deep down in the places where my veins and arteries converge.
“I know, I know. Bitching about the feminists…I’m so predictable. But do I look like a feminist to you?” He snorts, throwing his arm about again. A glob of his water lands on my cheek before running down to soak into the pallet.
Please, God, take the pain in my belly and my shoulders. Make this all go away.
“You know why men hate feminism?”
I shake my head, eyes closed, trying to locate the soft rush of the waves. But it’s not easier in the dark.
“Feminism wants women to come together and be kind. And sure, there’s all the patriarchy crap—destroy the patriarchy, dethrone the dudes—but really, it’s all about the sisterhood. Because women have to stick together. You know when men are told to stick together?”
I shake the chain of my handcuffs in response.
“When we’re fighting! That’s the only time. When we’re playing a football match or fighting a war, then, we’re brothers. And then the rest of the time, we’re pitted against each other for sex and jobs and turf and dead baby jokes and whose name got misspelled the worst at Starbucks. Vaginas get together just to braid each other’s goddamn hair, but men are competing for everything. It’s fucking exhausting.”
And it’s lonely.
I know.
“Though my boy in there, he got awful good at it, awful fast. Have to say, I was impressed by the stories his mother told me. I wasn’t around much. I should’ve been, I know—you don’t have to tell me that, Cock Sleeve. But I always kept tabs on what was going on.”
It feels like a stone plummets into my stomach, burying through layers of ache to make me nauseous. Mr. Abel here, if he’s telling the truth, isn’t just Aeron’s biological father—he’s Asher’s, too. The resemblance is too strong, and why else would the FBI have wanted Ash’s DNA sample?
“I thought I was fucked up.” He peers over at me, his eyes greasy in the candlelight, like glass blotted with fingerprints. “I always thought, maybe if I was just a better person, I’d have made more money. Had more status. You know? Only my boy’s on a whole ‘nother level, and he hit the fucking Forbes list before his thirtieth birthday. Explain that to me. That’s the world we’re in? That’s how it works?” He pauses. Then a chuckle bursts from the back of his throat; it sounds almost like he’s gargling. “You’d have probably hit the list in a few more years, eh? All through your own efforts, obviously. Not because he’d ever have made you a Lore.”
I don’t know what hurts more; the assertion that I won’t be around to make the Forbes list, or that Aeron would never marry me. It all just spins together in the dark, circling down to catch me in its cold shadow-hands.
“Now there’s no windows in here,” he says in a quieter tone, “so you can’t see outside, but it’s night time out there. Blacker than a tar pit. I’ve been thinking about how I’d like to do this, and I want to make it real scenic. Not romantic—don’t get it twisted. You’re really not my type. The problem with doing it in busy places is that you have to be so careful, and yet I realized, the more I did it—”