Gun Shy(46)

But goddamn it, I just want to see her. Get a glimpse. Know that she’s okay after her mother died and was buried.

I look up into the window, her bedroom window. The shades are open just a crack, and I can see movement. Bodies. Two people, joined together, moving as one.

I should look away, but I can’t. I know immediately what I’m looking at - hell, the window is fogged up - but I don’t look away. I can’t be with her, but I can stand here and look up and watch as Cassie presses her palm against the windowpane as somebody else makes the girl I love feel things she will never let me give to her as long as I live.

I’m so busy looking at her face that I don’t notice his at first. Could it be Chase? Pike, even? Chase was close with Cassie many years ago, and he probably hates me, so I don’t see him filling me in if he is seeing Cassie behind closed doors.

But something about the guy looks… familiar. I can’t get a good enough look to make out either of their facial features, but I’d know Cassie anywhere.

I’ve got those binoculars in my pocket. I don’t want to get them out, but if I can see her better for just a moment, I’ll do it.

I don’t take my eyes off that spot she’s touching on the window as I take the binoculars from my pocket and hold them up to my eyes.

I focus again, still standing behind the chestnut tree, thankful for its size and position. With my spare hand, I run my fingers along the rough bark, remembering the way my palms broke and bled when I pressed Cassie up against the trunk of this very tree and fucked her. Now, my palms are scarred from the accident, and she’s up there in her house on the hill with some other guy.

I turn a little dial on the the binoculars and everything comes into sharp focus.

Suddenly, I can see the guy who has his hand around her throat, pressing her up against the window as he fucks the shit out of her.

It’s… oh, shit.

Her hand is pressed against the glass, and he’s got one hand on her hip, rutting into her like… well, like I want to. Like an animal.

It’s not Pike.

It’s not Chase.

It’s Damon.





CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO





CASSIE





The morning after my mother’s funeral is…quiet. Everything is deathly still. There’s a buzzing in my ears, a static hiss that the sound of her medical equipment used to fill.

It’s been so long that, even though I know she’s dead, that she’s buried in a shiny black coffin six feet under at the Gun Creek Memorial Cemetery, I still shuffle downstairs, get her liquid nutrition mixed, and am standing in her empty room with the syringe in my hand before I realize what I’m doing.

The bed is gone already. The room is devoid of the medical equipment that used to crowd around the bed. It’s just an empty room that smells like bleach.

I wonder who cleaned it out. Part of me wishes they hadn’t touched it. Another part is grateful that I don’t have to deal with the aftermath. It’s like it never happened. There’s not a trace of my mother here. Except for the scars on my heart, the reflection in the mirror whenever I see myself and recognize her, the burns on my wrist. They’ll never go away.

It’s been snowing again. The curtains are open; it’s so beautiful out there. So empty. From the window, I can see the spot in the far corner of our yard where Damon dug a hole and buried my dog.

“Good morning,” Damon says behind me. I turn away from the snow, my retinas pulsing and blind in the center of my vision from the stark white light outside. It’s like someone has set off a camera flash right in my eyes.

“Sleep well?” Damon asks, sipping from the mug of coffee he’s holding.

I’m so tired. I can feel my eyes, puffy and red from all the crying I’ve done in the past forty-eight hours.

“Like the dead,” I reply. Ha. I barely slept at all.

“Come out of there,” he says, his eyes flicking around my mother’s dying room with clear discomfort.

I try to blink away the blind spot in my eyes. It persists. I decide I can’t really fathom a fight right now and follow Damon into the kitchen. The pot of coffee is still there, and I pour myself some. I sip it and almost gag. He really cannot make coffee to save his life.

Damon smiles lazily from across the counter, his eyes still puffy from sleep. “I can see the cogs turning in your brain, Cassandra. What are you daydreaming about?”

I lean my elbows on the edge of the counter. My legs are tired and my head hurts. I don’t have it in me to lie.

“This novel I read about a sociopath.”

“Oh, yeah?” He drains his coffee and rounds the counter, setting the empty mug in the sink. Turning to me, he reaches out, tucking messy blonde hair behind my ear. And he leaves his hand there, his palm against my jaw, the pad of his thumb just below my bottom lip as he gazes down at me. “Enlighten me.”

The snow outside reflects off his blue eyes and I feel so heavy.

“A sociopath is… somebody who’s empty inside. Somebody who needs to take from everybody else to fill them up. Because they were born wrong. Because there’s nothing inside them.”

Damon smiles; his lazulite eyes crease up ever so slightly at the edges. I imagine how beautiful he would have looked as a young child; how his mother would have melted whenever he smiled up at her. Because his eyes deceive. They don’t look empty. They’re beautiful, full of the souls of everyone else he’s sucked dry and left in his quest to find that something, that perfect thing to fill him up.