Chapter 19: The Shower and the Reckoning
The front door clicked shut behind them, and the bungalow went quiet.
Kai paused on the step and looked back through the screen. "You good?"
Marc didn't answer. Kai held his eyes for a second, then nodded like that was an answer, and pulled the door shut behind him. The truck started. Gravel spun under the tires. Then nothing but the ceiling fan and the tick of the fridge.
Marc stood in the middle of his own living room and looked at the couch. The cushion was wrecked. Dark and slick in a patch the size of a dinner plate, going tacky at the edges. The case of beer sat by the door. Somebody had left a bottle on the windowsill sweating a ring into the paint, and Pim's boardshorts were still tangled on the floor by the coffee table where he'd kicked them off.
The pipes knocked in the wall.
Water. The shower.
He walked down the hall.
Steam was seeping out from under the bathroom door, curling across the cool floorboards. He pushed it open with two fingers and stood in the doorway.
She was on the shower floor. On her side, knees drawn up, one arm tucked under her head against the tile. The water hammered down on her back. Her hair was a dark gold rope down her spine and she wasn't washing. She wasn't doing anything except shaking, small jerks moving through her ribs, in and out.
Between her thighs, the water had thinned what they'd left in her to pale strings. They slid down the inside of her leg, slow, and broke apart at the drain, and new ones followed. Three of them had finished inside her, one after the other, and it was still coming out.
There were red marks on her hips in the shape of fingers. A bruise was starting to come up on one knee.
He reached past her and shut the taps off.
The silence landed like a slap. Just the drip off the showerhead, and her breathing, and underneath that a fact he didn't want: her mouth was open, her whole body heaving around it, and no sound was coming out of her at all.
He pulled a towel off the rail. Got down on the tile and felt the cold soak straight through his shorts to his knees. He put a hand on her shoulder.
She flinched as if he'd burned her.
"Hey." He kept the hand there. "Hey. Look at me."
She didn't. Her forehead stayed pressed to the wet tile. A shiver rolled the length of her, shoulder blades to heels.
So he sat down in the water, back against the wall, and got his arms under her. She came heavy, dead weight, no help in her at all, and he hauled her across his lap with her head under his chin. She was hot all over, cooked through by the steam, and shaking like the tail of a fever.
"Why did you let them?" It came out into his chest, muffled and raw.
"I don't know."
"You just stood there."
"Yeah."
"Did you like it?"
"No." He said it into her wet hair. "I hated every fucking second of it."
"But you watched."
"I watched." His hand moved up and down her back, flat and slow. "Every minute. I couldn't make myself move and I couldn't make myself look away, and I'll be carrying that a long time."
She was quiet. The drip counted it out. Then, so soft he nearly lost it in the tile: "Did you want to?"
He closed his eyes. The truth sat in his throat like a swallowed stone. "Some part of me did. That's the part I have to live with now."
She turned her face into his shirt and cried. Not pretty. Wet and ugly and loud at the seams, the kind that comes up from behind the ribs and leaves you wrung out after. He held her through all of it. Didn't say anything. Didn't let go, even when his shirt was soaked through and his legs had gone numb on the cold floor.
When it slowed, he got her chin between his fingers and lifted her face. Her eyes were swollen nearly shut. Her nose was running.