I push him away and roll toward the far side of the bed, trying to get away from his clinging hands.
“Why’d you do that?” I demand. “You know I didn’t want to do that.”
“I asked,” he protests, sitting up. “I didn’t make you do anything.”
I jump up from the bed and turn to face him. “You made me want to do it!”
He gives me a look that says I sound just as crazy to him as I do to myself. “You didn’t want to orgasm?”
“No,” I say, throwing my hands up. “I knew once I started to believe in this marriage, once I started to feel something, I’d never get away. I don’t want this tiny life as your maid and your cook and your sex slave. I want my own life, my own freedom. And I can’t have that and this, too.”
“Eliza,” he says, looking so earnest it makes my heart twist. I turn away so I don’t have to see him when I hurt him. I don’t want to hurt him. I already care about him way too much. But I know this is my last chance, and it makes me desperate. I came so close to falling in a way I’ll never get up from.
“What?” I snap, hating the sympathetic tone in his voice. I don’t want pity. I want a life where I’m in control of my own choices. Why didn’t I run when he gave me the chance? Why didn’t I realize that this was where it would lead? I think I love him, but it doesn’t feel good. It’s terrifying, and even though I know I’m sliding backwards into the way I was at first, I can’t stop it. The instinct for self-preservation is too strong inside me.
“I never asked you to be any of those things,” he says. “After everything that’s happened over the past few weeks, you’re really going to accuse me of wanting you for asex slave?”
“That’s what marriage is,” I say, repeating the words I’ve been saying since I was too young to understand their meaning.
“Obviously it isn’t,” he says. “And I don’t want it to be. Our marriage can be whatever we want, whatever makes you happy. Only we can define what it will be.”
I don’t want to hear his promises because they sound too rational, and I’m not rational right now. I’m shaking with emotion. I don’t want to think about marriage as protection and support, the way it’s felt lately, because then I’ll need him, and what happens when he walks away from me then? It’s easier to fall back into the ingrained ideas I’ve held so long.
“It’s the end of freedom,” I say, clinging to the empty words I heard so many times, and now I’ve repeated so many times like a mantra.
“What do you want the freedom to do?” he asks. “If you want to go to school, or get a job, or travel… Eliza, I’m here to support you in that, or work through whatever you’re going through, or figure out what you want to do. Just let me be part of it.”
“I don’t know what I want, okay?” I say, fresh tears springing to my eyes. “I just want to be free.”
“As long as it’s not the freedom to fuck other guys, you can still have whatever freedoms you want. Just talk to me, Eliza. You seem obsessed with this idea, but I don’t know what you want the freedom to do.”
“To live my life,” I say, throwing my hands up. “The lifeIchoose. As I please. Just like my mom did.” A life not controlled by him or my father or anyone, not even my own body. Most of all, I want to be free of my demons. But they are clawing their way out of me, tearing me apart from within, and I can’t stop them. I know I’m ruining this, all the progress we’ve made, and it’s not even his fault. It’s mine. But I keep on doing it because I want him to go, to show me that he’s one more person who wants to use me in the name of love, to hurt me and twist my heart around until I don’t know what’s right and wrong, what I want, how I feel, because everything is all wrong.
King is quiet for a minute. “The freedom to leave your daughter to grieve both youandthe death of her brother because you can’t handle the child you chose to have?”
“You don’t know anything about my mother,” I snap. “She was protecting me.”
“I know that if one of your parents is a hero, it’s not your mother.”
I don’t want to hear his words, don’t want to think about them. I can’t. I have to hurt him more than he hurts me, hurt him before he can destroy me. So I give a derisive snort. “Of course you’d think the killer is a hero,” I say. “Because you’re a pussy, and you’d rather follow in a monster’s footsteps than admit it.”
I don’t know where the words are coming from, it’s like they’re someone else’s, the last words of that wounded animal that lives inside of me with one instinct, the instinct to protect me, to keep the secret, to keep others away because if they know, they’ll destroy me. It’s telling me that I don’t need anyone else, that they’ll always leave, and it’s all I will have left. It’s been with me since I was a little girl, this little monster of my own, born in the bottom of a bathtub where there was no air, because I was a bad girl.
Good girls obey. Good girls get to breathe.
Bad girls get fingers around their throats, pushing them down, and lungs that burn for oxygen, and a head that thunders like waves crashing against the shore in a storm, and the yearning for one abstract idea that worms from the back of their black eyelids into their brains and makes a home there until it takes shape when they’re old enough to understand what they’ve wanted all along.
Freedom.
“Your father might be a killer, but he also raised you on his own,” King says quietly. “I know how fucking hard that is, trust me.”
I take a deep, shaky breath and give my eyes an angry swipe before I turn back to him, so relieved for the opening that I could cry all over again. “How would you know that?”
He pauses for a moment, his dark eyes troubled. “I wouldn’t,” he says at last.
“What, you’re a dad?” I ask. “Where’s this kid you raised all alone?”
“I’m not a father,” he says, turning away.