I sit on the bed while I wait for her. I hear the toilet flushing and the taps running, but she doesn’t come out.
She’s been in there a good ten minutes and I wonder what the fuck she is up to. It’s almost dinnertime and my stomach thinks my throat’s been cut.
I get up and knock on the door.
No response.
“Lacey?” I shout.
There’s a few moments of silence where I don’t hear anything at all, so I knock again, harder this time.
“Fuck off!”
And then the shower starts running.
I go back and sit on the bed.
I thought she’d fight me and I’d prepared myself for that. I thought she’d hate me, accuse me of all sorts. That didn’t worry me — I’m good at defending myself. What I hadn’t expected was indifference.
She’s not said anything to me. Not anything real, anyway. I was waiting for her to abuse me and she didn’t. Now I feel like I’m going to have to explain myself, and I don’t like doing that. It’s much easier to defend than it is to explain.
I sit and wait for ages, until I realize that no normal situation calls for a 45 minute shower.
I bang on the door again, and this time I don’t hear anything. Just running water. Another bang. Another silence.
Fuck this.
I take a step back from the door and ram it with my shoulder, breaking the lock. I come in with my back to the shower so she doesn’t hit the roof over me seeing her in the scud.
“Lacey?”
She’s either ignoring me or she’s dead. I turn around. People shouldn’t ignore people if they don’t want to be seen naked.
The glass door is open, and she’s curled up in a little ball on the floor under the shower. The water lands on her head, turning her bright hair dark. It runs over her face and drips off her nose, but she doesn’t look like she cares.
She doesn’t look at anything.
Her eyes are open but they’re glassed over, like she’s staring at some place far away.
I don’t fucking like it.
It’s only when I reach in and turn the shower off that she looks up at me.
She watches me for a moment, blinking a few times and then she swallows. “Why did you do it?”
I sigh, grabbing a towel. This isn’t the time or the place, and even if it was, I don’t know how to explain it.
I hold the towel out for her in the shower, waiting for her to take it so I can turn around and give her privacy, but she just glances at it, and then looks back at me.
She stands up. Naked as the day she was born and with a look in her eye that says she doesn’t give a single solitary fuck about that fact.
I look her up and down, I can’t help it, but it doesn’t matter how perfect her body is, her eyes are where I stop.
“Why?” she says again, firmer this time.
I shrug at her. “Because I wanted to.”
She searches my face, what she’s looking for I do not know, but it makes me feel uncomfortable. I hold the towel out again and this time, she accepts it.
“You can’t just take things because you decide you want them, Shaun. The world doesn’t work like that,” she says, shaking her head.
“Taking what I want has always worked out well enough for me,” I tell her. “And you seem to know a lot about the way the world works for someone with absolutely no idea how much it’s fucking her up the arse.”
She wraps the towel around her and walks past me, shouldering me on the way. I follow her through to my bedroom and watch her as she looks around, not quite sure where to go.
There’s an urge inside me to keep pushing her. Not because I want to hurt her, but because she needs to fight.
Whether she hates me or not, she needs to feel something. She needs to feel angry about what they’re doing to her, pulling and pushing and forcing her into things.
If she ends up being angry at me for doing the same thing, then I’ll deal with that. I’ll win her back. But I can’t win when she’s so fucking unfazed by all of it.
“Do you even realize that’s what they’re doing? Or are you too stupid to work it out? Do you want me to explain it to you, really fucking slowly, so you can understand?” My tone is patronizing as fuck and I watch her body tense.
There’s my girl.
Finally, some fucking emotion.
She turns around to face me. “I know what they’re doing. I know exactly what they’re doing and I know it’s not all that different from what you’re doing right now.”
I flash her a smile. “Except, I’m doing it much better.”
I start casually walking towards her and she backs away from me until her legs are up against the foot of my bed and she has nowhere else to go.
“You’re doing it like a crazy person,” she says, watching me warily.
“It’s what you want though, isn’t it? You like it when you don’t have to make the big decisions. You like it when the choice gets removed from you. Or is it only okay when Daddy is the one who takes the choices away?”
“Liam told me that marrying him meant you’d have to stay away. You couldn’t touch me and you couldn’t hurt me. It didn’t seem like a bad idea at the time and now I’m thinking that it was probably a good one,” she says, looking at a spot low on the ground behind me.
I take her chin in my hands and force her head up. “You really do think I’m the bad guy, don’t you?” I say with a laugh. “And to think, I tried so hard to be on my best behavior for you.”
“It’s not about you being the bad guy. It was, at first. But then, if I’m honest, that stopped bothering me so much. It’s not that you’re the bad guy, Shaun, it’s that you make me weak.”
“I make you weak?” I drop her chin and turn around, because I can’t stand still when she’s getting things so wrong. “Don’t you talk shite, Lacey. The way I see it — it’s exactly the fucking opposite. Your dad decides to sell you and you say yes dad, right away dad.”
Her hands go up to her shoulders and her fingers tighten around them. Her chin goes down, like she’s retreating into a ball, but still I continue. “Liam, the little cunt, manipulates you into marrying him and you don’t even know he’s doing it. Yet I’m the one who makes you weak?”
I’m pacing the room now like a caged lion. I glance over at her and her expression is blank, like she’s still not getting it. “You fight me at every turn, you cut me down constantly with your words, and yet I make you weak? Bullshit. I’m the one who makes you strong, Lace. I’m the one who makes you fight, and if you can’t see that, then maybe you really are the fucking idiot you’ve been acting.”
She swallows and looks up through her long lashes, and I think maybe something is hitting home. Maybe I’m getting through to her.
Clearing her throat, she says, “You exhaust me. Do you know that? Since the day I met you, you’ve been there, in my head, and I spend every waking hour trying to work out what it is that you actually want. What do you want, Shaun?”
I stop pacing and stare at her. “That’s not obvious?”
“No, it’s not obvious! You hated me and then you apparently liked me and I have no idea when that changed.”