Livia liked Portland. Rick’s apartment was small but comfortable, just as he’d promised. And he never entered her room without knocking first and then waiting for her to invite him in. He never said anything about her locking the bathroom, either—in fact, he probably didn’t even know whether she locked it, because when the bathroom door was closed, he stayed away until she was out.
The apartment was on the top floor of an old five-story brick building in the southwest of the city—a neighborhood called Goose Hollow. Rick’s office, now Livia’s bedroom, overlooked Interstate 405, and Livia had a little trouble at first adjusting to the sounds of highway traffic so close to her window. But in less than a week, she couldn’t even hear the cars anymore unless she listened for them.
The high school was called Lincoln, and it was less than a ten-minute walk from the apartment. Compared to Llewellyn High, Lincoln was enormous—almost fifteen hundred students, grades nine through twelve. With so many students, Livia thought she would be harder to notice, and was glad. But word had gotten out about the wrestling phenomenon from Llewellyn. Some pretty girls asked her to sit at their table in the cafeteria—the popular ones, the queen bees. Livia knew the type, and wanted nothing to do with them. She had survived a nightmare trip across the ocean, then a childhood in a land whose language she didn’t know and where her “savior” was in fact a filthy, disgusting rapist. And she had killed that rapist, killed him with her own hands using the skills she had painstakingly acquired, then engineered her own deliverance to a new life in Portland. Most of all, she had a sister she would die for. What would she have to say to a bunch of manicured socialites who cared for nothing but fashion and makeup and trying to impress popular boys?
So she sat at the table with the nerdy kids instead. They were nice. And smart. And more interesting. At least they knew what it was like to grow up without everything just being given to you and making you think you had done something to deserve it all.
But despite her efforts to steer clear of the popular crowd, various football players and other jocks kept inviting her to parties on weekends. She never went. None of them asked if she was “into chicks,” at least, but they probably speculated. She didn’t care. She didn’t know what she was into. Sean, she supposed. The way her body had felt when they were kissing . . . she had never felt anything like that.
No, that wasn’t quite right. She felt something similar when she remembered killing Mr. Lone . . . the same excitement, the same tingling, the same feeling that she needed something more, much more, even though she wasn’t sure exactly what form that thing might take.
Sometimes, she imagined killing Mr. Lone just to bring on the tingling. And one night, while she was lying in bed, restless, her eyes closed, remembering, the tingling became so intense it was unbearable. Without thinking, she touched herself, and was shocked at how good it felt. She pressed harder. She was wet, and her fingers slipped easily inside. That felt so good it made her gasp. She imagined more—his red face, his bulging eyes, his tongue sticking out. She brought her other hand down and rubbed, panting now. The bones of her forearms slicing into his neck, cutting off the blood, the oxygen. Oh, that was so good, it felt so, so good. The rattling sound from his throat while she looked into his dying eyes—
Something seemed to explode inside her, a shockwave of pleasure and relief she could never have imagined. Her body shook and she clamped her jaw to keep from crying out.
It went on for a long time, cascading through her. When it finally abated, she lay there, sweating, gasping, stunned. That was it. That’s what an orgasm was. That’s what people were talking about when they talked about “coming.” She was so revolted by what she knew of sex, she hadn’t really believed orgasms were real. Or, if they were, she thought it would be impossible for her. But it wasn’t impossible. She started laughing in delight, and put a hand over her mouth to muffle the sound. And then the laugh changed to tears. This was what Skull Face and his men and Mr. Lone had tried to take from her. And what they had taken, almost certainly, from Nason.
She waited for the tears to pass, then lay there for a while, her limbs heavy, her mood languorous, sleep slowly infiltrating her mind. She supposed it was strange that she had made herself come while remembering killing Mr. Lone. She knew other people wouldn’t understand. But then, they wouldn’t understand her, either. She didn’t care. As long as no one else knew, as long as what she did and what she imagined were hers and hers alone, the rest didn’t matter.
The safest things were secrets.
41—THEN