“This is bullshit,” she grumbled. “I was bad. The bad seed, the troublemaker. What happened at the asylum was just… me taking it too far.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Casey said.
In the basement, they hadn’t heard the storm brewing outside, but now the rain pounded loud enough on the house’s roof that it reverberated downstairs.
“You can’t possibly believe that.”
“I can and I do,” he insisted.
The lights flickered, and Riza jumped, her gaze lingering on the lines of dark text. Descended, destined, cursed. “We killed people,” she whispered.
“They were going to kill us. If you don’t recognize that then you need to sit down and remember. Stop forgetting and go back to what it was like there. They killed Harriet and Bruce. Killed them. It was only a matter of time.”
“We don’t know that.”
“We did know it, you and I. We all knew it. That’s why we formed the Six.”
The lights flashed again, and the basement turned black.
Riza sucked in a breath and held it. She no longer saw Casey in front of her.
“Hey.” His fingers touched her wrist. “It’s okay. Hold on.”
She hated basements, she never went in them, and as the seconds ticked past, panic wriggled into her belly.
From the opposite side of the room, a lighter clicked on. She saw Casey holding the flame to a squat red candle. He brought it over and set it on the table, pushing papers aside.
“Just like old times, eh?” he cracked.
Fear made her angry. It always had. “I’m done, Casey. I left this shit behind.”
She scrambled up the black stairs and into the equally dark hall at the top, running smack into the wall.
“Ouch, fuck,” she yelped, keeping a hand on the wall as she hurried toward the front door. Her fingers hit a picture, and it fell, the glass shattering, but the sound was nearly drowned out by the driving rain. It pummeled the roof and windows. When she ripped open the front door, the black night and the thrashing storm turned the world into an alien landscape. She plunged down the steps and across the lawn. When she reached her car, she found her door locked, and she’d left her keys in Casey’s.
“No,” she moaned.
He was there when she turned back, just behind her in the pouring rain. He put his hands on her arms. “For once in your life, fucking face it! Face it so we can finish this.”
“Face it? I can’t. I won’t!” The rain and wind turned their screams into small pale rages compared to what existed on the inside. Even that infuriated her.
He kissed her. His mouth suddenly pressed against hers, the rain surging into their mouths, but she kissed back, hungrily, madly. She wanted to consume him.
7
In the darkness, Riza had not seen the images inked on Casey’s body. Now the morning light trickled into his bedroom. His torso, sides and back were covered in tattoos and as she studied them, familiar objects and names emerged. The turrets of the asylum with a face peering from a window, its eyes long and black and its mouth gaping. Sandy’s name written in cursive with a dangling rabbit’s foot hanging from the Y. Beneath the name was Jaws, a boy with a short stocky body and a shark’s head. She found her own name, Riza, a sleek black cat slithering between the letters. There were gnarled trees and a doorway tucked into the forest, a full moon with heavy clouds passing over, a woman with a pale tear-streaked face, knees pulled to her chest, shackles hanging from the cot she sat upon.
She gazed across his body to the opposite side and caught the start of another name—M-E-R—but it wrapped around his back, concealing the picture that accompanied it.
Merlin. She closed her eyes and tried not to see him.
Quietly, she stood and pulled on her jeans. Unable to find her t-shirt, she grabbed one of Casey’s, a black thing with the words ‘Race to Stop Abuse’ in bright orange letters. She slid it on and crept out of the bedroom. Her shoes lay next to the couch, and she shoved into them and hurried out the door.
She tried not to think about the night before, of the angry, ravenous way they’d torn at each other. Filled with lust and fear and anger, that same old anger, she’d plunged over the line she’d been so determined not to cross.
She drove home and threw on clean clothes, brewed a cup of coffee and drove to Amy’s house.
Riza sat in Amy’s office and chewed her fingernails.
“Nibbling again?” Amy asked, studying Riza from her red leather office chair. She wore her usual attire, black slacks and a long-sleeved black blouse. Her thick auburn hair was secured at the base of her neck in a ponytail.
Riza met Amy at her home office, which she used only for patients she was especially close to. Everyone else met Amy at the TC Psychological Center, where she shared a group of offices with eight other therapists. Technically they were not patient and doctor. Money had never been exchanged, privacy agreements signed, but there was an understanding between them. Riza needed help and Amy provided it.
“It started after I went on the forum. I haven’t been able to stop.”
“Would you like me to set a visit with Dr. Bayshore? He could prescribe some of that cream?”
“Yuck, no. That stuff tasted like bitter chemicals.”
Amy smiled. “That’s the point. If it tasted good, you’d keep on chewing.”
“They’re fine,” Riza said, stuffing her hands beneath her thighs.
“Let’s talk about Casey then. You decided to see him?”
Riza nodded. She thought of his tattooed body. Beneath the ink she’d seen the remnants of his childhood scars, a spattering of white puckered flesh on each of his shoulders. He’d been punished severely once and forced to wear a harness in solitary for more than a week. The harness had worn his skin clear away. “He seems… okay. I think a part of me always thought he died or ended up in prison.”
“You said the forum implied he’s obsessed with the asylum? And with the things that happened there?”
“He is, but I get it. You know?”
“I do. But you’ve said before your relationship in childhood with Casey was volatile, violent even. I don’t want to be an alarmist, but I am concerned about him drawing you back in. When someone has been traumatized, we’ll forgive them anything. We tell ourselves it’s not their fault. Their dad hit them, their mom left, they were hurt as a child. And it’s true and real. That’s the problem. They really are acting out those same old patterns and wounds, and it really wasn’t their fault. Is it their fault now? That’s the big question. Maybe the answer is that it doesn’t matter.
“What matters is that we have to protect ourselves. If we’re involved with a traumatized person who’s dragging us into their darkness, our priority has to be to step up and out of it, set the boundaries and stick with them. Where this really gets hard is when you put two traumatized people together. Usually they fall into roles, abused and abuser. Often the roles flip and flop. It’s a struggle for power and it will never end because power is an illusion. You can never control another person. Never. The power will always be subverted and the person who held the power will lose it and lash out. That’s why this relationship scares me, Riza. You’ve come so far.”