Not just for my own selfish curiosity, I tell myself as I open the drawer and reach for the stack of photos.
But when I look at them,reallylook at them, I wish I’d just fucking left well enough alone.
My breath catches in my throat. There’s a different girl in each one, some older than others, all of them seemingly of legal age, but just girls—not models or porn stars. They’re in ordinary clothes, hair down or pulled back or atop their heads, smiling or laughing or serious.
There’s a name at the bottom of each Polaroid—Chelsea, Liesel, Beth, Grace, Marie,and on and on.
Every single one of them is very, very beautiful.
And every single one of them has a flaw.
One is blind in one eye. One is missing a hand. One has a cleft palate, another has a missing tooth. One is in a wheelchair, another clearly deaf, from the way she’s signing to the camera.
Every. Single. One.
I’m crying before I realize I am. Not for the girls, but for myself, because I’d been stupid enough to think I was special. To tell myself that Yvette was making it up about the other girls. That she was talking aboutactualpets. That this wasn’t something Alexandre justdid, collecting damaged, beautiful girls the way he collects damaged, beautiful china and books and art and rugs.
I wish I hadn’t seen. I wish I didn’t know. Or if I had to find out, I wish I had before we’d slept together, before I’d started to fall for him, because now all I can see is each of these girls in bed with him, riding him, feeling him hard and thick and solid for them, his gasping moans as he gives in to his body’s urges despite himself, fucking him to a fast, desperate climax after weeks of wanting, wanting, wanting—
I forget where I am, that I shouldn’t wake him up, that I’ll make him angry. I forget everything except my heart breaking inside of my chest. A heart that never should have been even the slightest bit his in the first place, and I feel as stupid as I did the day he caught me in the study, as stupid as I did when he made me eat off the floor, as stupid as I ever have.
I was never special. There were always other girls, and Iknewthat; I just pretended I didn’t.
And now I’ve made it so much worse for myself.
I don’t hear him wake up. I don’t feel him sit up. I’m clutching the photos, tears dripping down onto the pictures that I’ve watched him jerk off over a dozen times, girls he owned, girls that are gone, girls that he clearly still wants since he getsfucking hard just thinking about the pictures, and I want to scream. I’m completely insensible to anything except the sudden, bone-chilling sound of Alexandre’s voice behind me, still thick with sleep, and I know I’ve fucked up horribly once again.
But this time, I’m too heartbroken to care.
“What thefuckare you doing, Anastasia?”