under the headline “WORST. DATE. EVER.” The thumbnail was a photograph of Jake’s brooding face with a pair of devil horns Photoshopped on the top of his head.
Cait clicked on the link with a fizz of nerves. The website wasn’t in the big leagues, but it was gaining some cultural traction, and she was hoping that the article could put her on the ground floor of the new Jezebel or Man Repeller. She skim-read it, making note of what the editor had changed and what she hadn’t. She thought it held up—it was funny and caustic and, yeah, maybe a little brutal, but the guy was a total asshole. He deserved to get it with both barrels.
She read it again, sent it to Alyssa, put on her uniform, and went to work at the bar.
When she checked her phone, after the bar was shut and the bottles had been married up and the back mirrors wiped as clean as she could get them, she realized that the piece had blown up.
It was what every writer wanted, right? As many eyes on the work as possible. But not in this way, not like this. The comment section was filled with his fans calling her worse than he had. A lot of them were women. There were men on there, too, telling her that she was a whore, that she deserved to be raped in order to be taught a lesson, that women like her were dirt, that women like her deserved to die. The word “skullfuck” was used in more ways than Cait had previously thought possible.
She felt sick to her stomach. Who were these people, and why did they hate her so much? Okay, so maybe she’d played it up a little in the article, but everything she’d written was fundamentally true. He had choked her when they were having sex. She had been scared, though maybe not quite as scared as she’d made herself out to be. Though that was only because she knew how these things usually played out. Jake hadn’t wanted to kill her or even hurt her. He’d just wanted to show her he could, because he got off on the power. He wasn’t exactly a rarity in that respect.
Still, a wave of shame washed over her, hot and thick. She must have done something wrong for people to hate her like this. It must somehow be her fault.
She was asking for it.
She read that line over and over. She had pursued Jake, it was true. She’d known what she was doing when she was dancing in front of him, had known the kind of promises she was making with her body. She had gone home with him willingly, had sex with him without asking any questions. Did she really have a right to complain just because his version of pleasure was different from her own? Hadn’t she always known something like this would happen to her one day? Wasn’t she lucky that it wasn’t worse?
There was an email from the editor waiting in her inbox. The subject line was “Holy Shit.” “Your story has had more clicks in the past eight hours than anything we’ve published before!”
And a text from Alyssa. “No one knows you wrote that piece, right? You need to keep it that way, because people are going CRAZY.”
Cait pulled a glass off the stack, poured herself a few fingers of bourbon, sank it in a few swift swallows. Poured herself another. She’d have to write it off as wastage so JB wouldn’t get pissy when he did the stock take. She felt the liquor slide down into her stomach, warming her fingers and toes, loosening the knot at the base of her throat.
Alyssa was right: she was lucky no one knew she was the one who’d written that article. Because right now, it was looking like a huge mistake.
Farwell, Texas—232 Miles to Albuquerque
Rebecca’s mind kept tugging her back to the dead fox lying by the side of the road back in Sudan. She could see the steam rising from the pool of blood and the dull black beads of its eyes. She had first seen those eyes as a kid, when Bugs, her pet bunny, was mauled by the neighbor’s dog. She saw that dog every day, twice a day, walking to and from the bus stop. His name was Fletch and he would track her the length of his yard, growling, penned in by a chain-link fence. One morning, she heard