For a moment, I’m tempted. When he smiles, I see the man I fell in love with two years ago. He was smart and passionate and brave and everything I wanted to be. Everything I’d still like to be. But now I see beneath the gloss to the dull scratched surface. He isn’t using his mind and bettering the world, and his only passion is his next buy… he sold his hopes and dreams for the future.
And now he’s sold mine.
If he’d taken anything else to sell, it would have been easier to forgive him and fall back into bed and into his embrace and pretend that everything will be fine. That he’ll get help and the monsters won’t come for me…until the next time he does something.
“I thought you were getting help. You told me you were trying to stop. We’ll never be able to move out and get somewhere better to live if you don’t find work.” I hear the bitchiness in my voice. I’m creating expectations for him and trying to run his life.
He withdraws the offered embrace and rubs his hand over his face. “It’s too early for this bullshit.”
No, it’s too late. This time he’s gone too far.
“I need that necklace back. You don’t understand—”
“No, you don’t understand. Where else am I going to get the money from? Do you want me to go to jail? Do you want me to be forced to steal?” His voice becomes wheedling and desperate. Last time he used this tone I felt sorry for him, he’s stuck, and he knows it and I should help him. I’m his girlfriend. There’d been a time when it was cute the way he’d kind of beg me to suck his dick like he didn’t even want to be asking. Now he barely touches me.
Today, the tone of his voice sets my teeth on edge.
My loss has shattered the rose-colored glasses I saw him through. “If you quit, then this wouldn’t have even been a problem. If you got a job, then this wouldn’t be a problem.”
There’s a steel in my words I don’t recognize and I don’t like. I step back from the edge of the bed like I expect a clawed hand to reach out from the shadows and grab me.
I force a slow exhale, knowing I’m letting my anger got control of me. I need to do better and be calm.Don’t become like them.
Fighting the monsters is what changed my grandmother. I uncurl my fingers. I will not be angry or violent. I will not give the monsters a crack to work with. But my teeth remain gritted.
“Fuck, babe. I’ve been applying for jobs, but you have to understand how hard it is to find something decent.”
I stare at him. “Then find something that pays minimum wage.”
“Minimum wage is bullshit.”
“It’s better than no wage.”
“We’re a team, babe.” He smiles at me, but it doesn’t melt the frost that has formed around my heart.
“I want my necklace by the time I get back from class.”
“Or what? You’ll leave?” He laughs. “And go where? Who’d have you?” He laughs like the idea of me leaving is a joke. “Even you mother didn’t want you.”
That’s not true. She did, but she was taken.
My hand automatically reaches for the claw that should be hanging around my neck, but there’s nothing there. Not even the chain.
I told everyone the lie that she left me with my grandmother to go traveling, because the truth is something that normal, sensible, sane people don’t want to believe.
Gran had saved me, snatching me from my mother’s arms, but she had lost part of herself. Two of her fingers are withered and dark with pointed nails, and she walked with a limp where one foot had, over the years, become twisted and clawed. When I was ten, I caught her filing the claw growing out of her heel. That was when I’d learned the truth about where my mother was and why Gran was always warning me about my attitude. She’d cut off a claw and given me the necklace as protection, telling me that if I wore it, the monsters wouldn’t be able to see me.
Without the necklace they’d come for me because I know they exist. I escaped their clutches once, and that’s enough for them to reach through from Under—the place I had called it since I was ten—and take me.
The shadows beneath the bed already seem darker. I force my words out through gritted teeth, knowing that once said I won’t be able to take them back. “If you don’t have my necklace by the time I get back, then you’d best be gone, too.”
He sits up. “Babe—”
I shake my head, not wanting his pleading to infect me. “I mean it.”
“Jules, we’re a team.”
I take another step back. No, I was the horse, and he was the cart I was pulling around. We’d been a team once, and I’d been holding onto the hope that he’d sort himself out and it would be like that again. Maybe it had never been how I remembered.