Shelter(58)

“What happened to you?” he asks.

She swats him away and the pendant falls to her chest. “What happened to me? What happened to you? Why are you acting like this?”

There, he thinks. There’s the girl he remembers from so long ago. Insolent, angry. Not afraid to raise her voice. This is the girl who threw a chalkboard eraser at their English teacher for picking on her, the one who always smelled like smoke and patchouli and sex.

“I liked you better in high school,” he says. “You were more honest back then.”

“Honest? What am I not being honest about?”

“About who you really are.”

She shakes her head. “I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean.”

“It means I think you’re a fake. You and everyone else from that church, but you in particular.”

Molly’s mouth is open, but she doesn’t make a sound. She just backs away and braces herself against the edge of the sink. She looks like she’s about to cry, which would disappoint him. The old Molly would never cry.

“Maybe that’s your opinion,” she says. “But you haven’t spent enough time with us to really know.”

He opens the refrigerator and rummages through its contents until he finds a six-pack of beer, hidden behind the gallon jugs of milk and juice.

“You’re having beer now? It’s not even ten o’clock yet.”

He stares at her over the rim as he downs half a can. “It’s been a long day.”

Molly looks away, embarrassed or uncomfortable—probably both. “So where did everyone go?”

“To the Cape.”

“And they just left you here?”

“Maybe I wanted to be left.”

She nods. “I’ll get going too, then. There’s food in the cooler if you want it, but it has to be refrigerated soon.”

“You still haven’t answered my question.”

She blinks at him. “What are you talking about?”

“What happened to you? What brought on your … conversion?” He makes no effort to soften his ridicule as the word slides from his tongue. He wants to see the old Molly, the real one. He wants the truth that only she can tell.

“You’re too closed off to God to hear anything I say.”

“Try me.”

He stares at Molly in profile, at the way her long black hair falls over her shoulders, appearing almost red in the sun. He’s tempted to push a strand away from her face, but her expression is too pretty to disturb. She’s looking out the window into the backyard, her eyes framed by a thick sweep of lashes. There’s a pale brown mole on her cheek—he’s never stood close enough to notice it before—and another at the base of her collarbone.

“I wasn’t a good person when I was younger. I think everyone in school probably knew that. I had problems, lots of them, and after a certain point, it was hard to forgive myself for some of the things I’d done. But I was lucky—the people I met at college, my friends, they helped me realize that it wasn’t my forgiveness I needed to seek.”

“That sounds like your husband talking, not you.”

“It’s the truth.”

“But what good is that? It’s not like you had a conversation with God. It’s not like you said ‘I’m sorry’ and heard him accept.”

“No, but I have faith that he heard me.”

“That kind of forgiveness is all up in here.” He taps the side of his head too hard. “It’s what my son does with stuffed animals. It’s make-believe.”

Molly takes a sponge from the sink and wipes a puddle of juice off the counter. She goes over the area again and again, long after it’s dry. “Maybe it’d be better if you talked with my husband about this. I don’t think I’m expressing myself very clearly.”

“It’s not about being clear or unclear. I just don’t buy this devout little wife act. You’re either fooling yourself or the rest of us—I can never tell.”

Molly throws the sponge down and squares her shoulders, appearing much taller than she did before. “You don’t have the right to talk about me like that, like you actually know me. You never tried to befriend me—not back in school and not as adults either. You have no idea who I am.”

Her tone is barely civil now, and he likes the unguarded spike of hostility, returning like a memory she long ago blocked out. All these years, he had it wrong. Being kind to Molly, being a gentleman—that wasn’t what she wanted. Some part of her still responds to being abused.

“I didn’t try to befriend you because I felt sorry for you. Everyone knew how easy you were, how you’d go off during lunch with anyone who asked. I didn’t want to be one of those guys who just used you in the back of his car and then never gave you the time of day.”

“Ha,” she shouts, thrusting her face just inches in front of his. “I saw the way you always looked at me. You still do it now. You were just too shy to do anything about it when you had the chance.”

Her expression is angry and defiant, a break in her carefully composed veneer. Kyung sees the victory in this, the dare. One second, his arms are crossed over his chest. The next, he’s clutching the back of Molly’s head, pushing his tongue into her mouth. The effect is ugly and sloppy, more probing than kissing until a switch goes off somewhere, wired deep in the back channels of her brain. Gone is the woman so prim and eager to please. In her purest state, Molly is all instinct and aggression. She wraps her arms around his neck, snakes her leg around his leg, kissing him so furiously that her teeth knock and scrape against his. They stumble against the sink, and a pitcher falls off the counter and shatters on the floor. He can feel bits of glass crunching under his shoes, but the strangeness of this sensation quickly gives way to another—her hand on his pants, tracing and retracing him through the fabric.