Or maybe he’ll have her bent over the bed, pounding into her from behind like a man possessed, the way he used to fuck the initiates, so lost in his own lust he doesn’t remembersheexists.
After the crew girls, it’s hard to fuck a girl normally, but I guess they worked it out. Rae wouldn’t stick around if she wasn’t into his game. She’s a runner, after all.
Which will only make it that much sweeter to catch her tonight. To let her cry and beg, and make her think I’ll have mercy, only to take what I’m owed in the end.
I don’t have to worry about treating her right or having her stick around.
I’m not the one marrying her tomorrow.
I’m just here to take what I was promised last year, when things were simple and she was just a piece of ass. When I still had a brother.
Tonight, he’ll pay for what he did.
And she’ll pay for making him do it.
one for sorrow
one
Two Years Before
#1 on the Billboard Chart:
“Hypnotize”—The Notorious B.I.G.
Rae West
I look up from my book at the sound of a hard, insistent tap on the window startling out of my fictional world. I’m on the second floor, so there’s no way a person could be tapping, but before my rational brain can supply that information, my heart lurches into my throat and I almost fall out of the window seat. My eyes don’t meet that of a person or a tommyknocker from a nursery rhyme, though. They meet the solid black eyes of a crow.
“Poe,” I say through a startled laugh. “You scared me.”
I rise carefully, and the bird hops back a few steps and caws demandingly. After only a few weeks, she’s barely afraid of me.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m hungry too,” I mutter, crossing my room to grab the sandwich waiting on my plate for when she—or he—came back. I’m not really sure how to tell a male from a female crow. In fact, I named her after Edgar Allen Poe thinking she was a raven. By the time she cawed at me in her bossy, impatient way, it was too late. I figure Poe’s a good name whether male or female, but I’ve decided she’s a female looking for a place to make a nest.
I set the plate down and heave the window up with both hands. It was painted shut and doesn’t have a screen, so I know it’s not meant to be opened. But what my parents don’t know won’t hurt them. The porch roof extends under the window, so it’s not like I can fall. Whichmightnot be their number one concern if they knew that my only friend in Faulkner is a bird that eats carrion as well as my bread crusts.
Holding the window with one hand so the impossibly heavy thing won’t fall shut and behead me like a guillotine, I quickly stack up a dozen fat paperbacks to hold it. Poe hops closer, giving me an impatient caw and cocking her head like she’s trying to figure out my methods. She’s a smart bird. I bet if she had hands, she’d show me an easier way to keep the window open. At this very moment, she’s probably thinking how ridiculous I am.
Picking up my sandwich, I lean down and slowly push the plate out so as not to startle her. She hops onto the edge and caws angrily at me before I’ve even released the plate.
“Hungry little thing, aren’t you?” I ask softly, tearing off a crust and dropping it onto the plate. She snatches it up with her beak right away. The poor bird always acts like she’s starving.
The first few days, she stood on the porch roof and stared at me while I ate my sandwich in my reading nook. I felt bad eating when she had nothing, so I started to throw out the crusts and close the window before she arrived. But within a week, she knew she could trust me to put food out while she was at the far edge of the roof. Now, after only two weeks in the big new house, I’ve gained her trust enough that she’ll eat off my plate while I’m so close I could touch her.
I’m working up to that, but I don’t want to scare her off. For now, we share our lunch in companionable silence. I tear off each bread crust and toss it out when she finishes the last one. I hear other crows in the neighborhood, but she’s the only one who visits.
Maybe she’s new and without a flock, alone like me.
“Honey?” Mom calls, her voice a soft plea as she taps on my door. “Can you come downstairs? Your father wants to talk to you.”
I quickly toss out the last crusts of bread and pull the plate in, close the window, and brush the crumbs off my cushion. Then I pick up the book I left open, keeping a finger in the yellowing pages of the battered paperback. Until I get a library card, I’m rereading the handful of books I snuck here in the bottom of my box of clothes before the move. My parents think books are not a necessity and should be left behind.
I hugThe Tommyknockersto my chest like it might hear those ugly words echoing in my memory. “What does he want?” I call back.
“You need to get outside,” Mom says. “You haven’t left the house since we got here.”
“Gee, I wonder why,” I mutter to myself. I know it’ll just piss off my stepfather if I don’t obey, though. I quickly tear off the corner of a page in my composition notebook and slide it between the pages of my novel to mark my spot. I leave it in my window seat—the best thing about the new house—and join Mom in the hall. She smiles nervously and tugs my shirt straight, picking at me like a nervous little bird, nothing like Poe’s assertive demands. If Mom was a bird, she’d be one who was scared of shadows. Her thin face is tense, her mouth drawn into a thin line and her eyes drooping with exhaustion.