The Girls I've Been(39)
The vein in his forehead starts throbbing again. “How—”
“I have ways,” I say. “Which is why I know you made a deal with Pastor Thompkins to help with the rezoning of that land by the river he bought for his megachurch. Twenty percent of the tithe is impressive. Do you think he’d cut your percentage in half if he knew you were screwing his wife?”
The mayor says nothing. His face is like stone. No more toothpaste smile. No more political sheen. Just pure rage racing through him, telling him to hurt the thing that could ruin him: me.
“If you stop hurting Wes, this goes away.”
“You’ll want money next,” he says.
“I don’t need your money. I don’t care about zoning laws or people who throw their money at the whole God con. I care about very few things, and Wes is at the top of that list. So you have my full attention . . . and I can be very creative.”
I look down. Climbing down a rope ladder will put my back to him. He’s big like Wes, tall and broad and powerful, but Wes doesn’t lead with it. That’s the only way the mayor knows how to; he muscles through life and gets his way.
I push off the doorway of the deer blind like I don’t need the ladder. My hair ruffles as I land on the ground, trying to keep my body loose. I know how to fall, but hitting the ground on your feet from a deer blind is different—hit it wrong and you’ve got a broken ankle or leg or both. But I get it right. The impact jolts through my knees and ankles, but I bend at the right moment, using my hand on the ground to steady myself. He’s just a couple feet away as I rise, and his hand is twitching again. So it’s a tell. A murderous one. Did it twitch like that before he took that poker to Wes’s back?
“It’s simple: You leave Wes alone, I leave you alone,” I tell the mayor. “Now I’ve got to head home before it gets too late. My sister doesn’t like it when I ride my bike after dark.”
“You’ll regret this.” He’s trying to get the last word as much as he’s trying to make a threat that he can’t follow through on.
“No. I won’t,” I say. “This is the best thing I’ve ever done.”
That was true then.
It’s true now.
It’ll probably be true forever, because I’m not very good. But I do love full and reckless.
There’s no standing in the way of that. Of me.
— 34 —
11:27 a.m. (135 minutes captive)
1 lighter, 3 bottles of vodka, 1 pair of scissors, 2 safe-deposit keys
Plan #1: Scrapped
Plan #2: In progress
We sit in a little triangle, one of their knees touching one of mine and vice versa. Wes hands me the scissors because they’re poking him in the back. Iris leans up against the cabinets, letting them take her weight. I can feel it when she tenses up from the pain, the barely there tremors as she shifts, trying to find a position that’ll give her some kind of relief.
“You okay?” Wes asks her. She gives him a tight and utterly unconvincing nod.
“Who’s going to start?” she asks, arching her eyebrow, more dare in her than if she was flicking that damn lighter at me.
“I’ve already been pretty truthful.”
“For the first time, apparently,” she snaps, but then she breathes out, closing her eyes for a moment. Her lashes are dark against her skin, fanning out like spiderwebs. “That was mean,” she whispers.
“I get why you’re mad.”
She shakes her head. “No. No. You do not get anything about this. He probably does.” She nods at Wes.
“Most definitely,” he says, and when I bump my knee against his, he says, “Hey, truth for truth.”
“How gullible did you feel?” she asks him.
“Really fucking gullible,” he answers, and five seconds into this and it’s already my nightmare.
From the instant the two of them met, it was like they’d each finally found the sibling neither had. They snipe at each other and they have the most complicated in-jokes they can never explain properly because they end up laughing too hard. And now they’re going to take all that camaraderie and unite to form a Nora lied to me support group?
And I can’t do anything about it, because I did lie.
The thing about conning someone is that if you do it right, you’re not around for the aftermath. The broken heart. The hurt. The betrayal. The working through all the lies. The questioning of everything.
But when Wes found out who I really was, I couldn’t run away from it. I had to be there. For the broken heart and the hurt and the betrayal and the exposure of every single lie and the answering of every single question. That came with my own broken heart and my own guilt and my realization that this could never, ever happen again.
But now it is, because what did I expect when I fell for someone like Iris Moulton?
I know that it says something about me that I’m attracted only to people smart enough to figure me out. Maybe I just don’t know how to live without the risk. Every time I skate too close to the edge of exposure, I smell my mom’s Chanel No. 5 and hear the whisper of silk that always seemed to accompany her. It doesn’t spur me on; it jerks me back, makes me feel young, helpless, and spinning wild again.
“Is Lee your actual sister?” Iris asks suddenly. Then she shakes her head. “She has to be. You look so much alike. Or . . . did you make yourselves look alike?”