Hush - Anne Malcom Page 0,57
to reading that one, but she only had a limited amount of time for reading for pleasure.
“I’m taking a break from Grand Theft Auto at the moment,” Jaclyn said, motioning toward the screen.
“Taking a break from stealing cars?” Orion asked, scrunching her brows.
Jaclyn laughed. “It’s a game, dummy.”
Orion looked at the TV and watched for a few beats, if only to put off what she had to tell Jaclyn. She was being a coward, but she was worried. Jaclyn was hanging on by a thread. It was obvious. They all were, one way or another. But it was easier to worry about Jaclyn’s future and her sanity than it was her own.
“Thing One is dead,” she blurted in the middle of a graphic sex scene that turned her stomach. She usually made herself watch them in movies or shows. Made herself read them in books. All her mind wanted to do was skip over, avert her eyes, so her mind didn’t take her back there.
Sex was meant to be something special. Fun. But it had been ruined for her. It was dirt under her skin. It was pain in her bones. It was filth in her blood.
Jaclyn didn’t look up. “Oh yeah?”
Orion stared at her. “That’s it? ‘Oh yeah?’”
Jaclyn finally met her eyes, and what was in them worried Orion. They seemed detached, out of focus. “What else is there? Didn’t we want him dead all along? That’s the goal, right? Outlive everyone who was planning to eventually kill us when they were done raping us? Stolen girls, two. Things, nothing.” Jaclyn faked a cheer.
Orion flinched at the cadence to her words. At the words themselves.
Jaclyn had always been calloused. Brutal. Orion liked and respected that about her. It was the reason she’d survived.
But this was something more than that.
Something less.
It was like there was no fight in her anymore. She seemed vacant, detached. Seemed to be without the life, the glow, the bad-assery she had exuded in The Cell.
“He killed himself,” Orion said, hoping that this would break something in Jaclyn like it had her. “Hung his cowardly ass with his bed sheet.”
Jaclyn shoved another handful of Hot Cheetos in her mouth. “Not surprising.”
Anger crawled up Orion’s throat. “He didn’t deserve that!” Orion yelled. “He didn’t deserve to get off that easy after only a fucking month in a cell. He deserved to be locked up and ass-raped for the rest of his life. He deserved to feel everything we felt, everything we went through.”
Jaclyn paused the show, turned to give Orion her full attention. “Orion, we are living, breathing, fucked-up proof that people don’t get what they deserve. That justice is not going to be served. But we got out, we’ve got money. We’ve got enough issues to buy our therapists homes in the Hamptons and a fucking private jet to fly them there. It’s the best we’re gonna get. This is life for us now.”
Jaclyn sounded tired. Resigned. Orion had never heard her like this before. Sitting on the sofa, binging junk food, watching TV like she was some normal twenty-something woman. Like this world had turned inside out and Orion was the only one left that had a brain craving blood.
She didn’t know how to reply to that. She could yell some more, maybe try to get through to her. But what was that doing? Was that really helping her friend? By urging her to hold on to that need for vengeance, as if that vengeance was some magic pill that would make all the pain and nightmares go away. It was just shackling another kind of ankle cuff to her. She knew that. But, like the sickos who bought her, used her, sold her had acted on their own innate yearning, unable to deny its wicked calling, she too felt that yearning . . . a yearning for the blood of her abusers, the blood of all abusers.
“Do you ever wonder about the stories we tell ourselves?” Orion asked after a long silence. Long enough for Jaclyn to turn the show back on and take a long swig from her bottle. “About how we cast ourselves all these years in The Cell? Not even to the police, to whatever family is still left, but to each other, and ourselves? Do you wonder if we have been lying to ourselves about what role we played?”
Jaclyn paused the show again. This time she sat up and focused on Orion. She eyed her with that hard stare of