In the three weeks I’d been watching the house, I never saw her cry. I’d see her go up to her bedroom after he’d spewed fury into her face, and stand in front of the mirror and just breathe until her shoulders dropped back down. None of it touched her. The woman had so much self control she awed me. I’d never seen her raise her voice at him once, but when she got up to her room she’d hang a punching bag in the corner and go at it until her knuckles were raw, her t-shirt stuck to her back and her legs too shaky to keep her on her feet.
I knew that way of keeping demons at bay all too personally. She was strong and capable, why hadn’t she left? Why endure all this? I couldn’t figure it out.
Watching her, even from the distance I had to maintain, I saw a woman who might have a chance of understanding who I was in a way nobody else ever had. I’d given up on thinking there would be a woman who’d align herself with the instability and violence that was my day to day. I told myself a woman was a weakness waiting to be exploited, but I wanted Elizabeth Harrington in ways I hadn’t wanted anyone for years.
She was eighteen and vital, against all odds, and I was going to show her what it was like to be protected by a real man. With me in her corner, she’d find out what it was like to know no one was ever going to touch her again, unless she wanted them to. Everything that had led me to this point had been to get me here, to her. And I wasn’t going to let her down.
Pierce Sutherland had to die for all he’d done, and I was going to be the one to end his life and set her free
Elizabeth
Cassie folded her arms across her chest as she leaned against the wall around the side of the hotel bar we both worked in, slumping against it with a heavy sigh. She looked old in the dim streetlight. Tired and worn out. I could see the spider web of lines branching out from the corners of her eyes. But she still had a smile for me.
“Thought that last guy was going to flood the bar with all the drooling he was doing over you. This is why I button my shirt all the way up, kid.”
I rolled my eyes, watching her light up a cigarette. She was old school. One of the last remaining refusers to vape. “Yeah, yeah.”
It didn’t bother me who looked. Maybe it should have. Maybe I’d have cared more if I didn’t have other things to worry about. But it was just my body. That was a mantra I’d learned pretty well.
“You’re attractive, Elizabeth. They’re going to look if you give them something to look at.”
“Maybe I don’t care.”
Sometimes, I thought it would be amazing to have some gorgeous guy with a perfect smile touch me and kiss me, and treat me like I was just another pretty girl. That was the part of me that slipped my top button and made sure my shirt fit right, the part of me that thought it would be nice to have a little fun, like all the rest of my classmates.
But most of the time I didn’t think that at all. I thought about my stepdad, because the men here were closer to him in their fancy suits with their Pinot Noir and their Cabernet Sauvignon than any idea of someone who was going to come and whisk me away. At the gym I went to, they were all tough guys who didn’t know what to make of me in my baggy clothes and standoffish attitude. There weren’t any boys at school. And I’d nearly broken the hand of the last customer who decided it was okay to grab me.
Cassie was the only reason I didn’t get fired on the spot.
She’d been good to me since I tried to con her into believing I was old enough to serve alcohol when I walked in trying to get a job with a cringe-worthy fake ID and the idiocy of fifteen year olds all over the world.
I think she saw the desperation in my eyes when no one else did, because I can’t think of another reason why she would have humoured me and my cut-glass accent and juvenile snark enough to give me a job in the back washing glasses.
A year on, she never replaced me with anyone else to stack the dishwasher when I graduated to bar work for real, and two years after that, I was still here. I owed her so much more than she could ever have known.