Silas (30 page)

I lowered my face, resting my forehead
against the forest floor.

And guilt surged through me.

The guilt I ran from every
day of my life was flooding me, and I couldn’t do anything to stop
it.

None of my glib ways of
shrugging things off worked for me right now. I couldn’t
think,
So what if I am a horrible
person?
Because the answer was right in
front of my face.
You
are
horrible, and because of that,
Christa’s completely fucked up.

“
I did this,” I muttered
into the dirt. “Griffin told me to leave it alone. Sloane said I
should wait until after the wedding. But I couldn’t let it go. I
had to go after Rolf. If I’d left him alone, then none of this
would have happened to you.”

Overhead, birds chirped as
they flew through the sky. They were oblivious.
Carefree.

“
You should never have been
part of this,” I said.

“
No,” she said.

I raised my face to look at
her.

She looked through me.

I shook my head. “You
shouldn’t be here. This shouldn’t have happened to you.”

She hugged herself. “I want
to go home.”

And then I
did
start crying. I
turned my face away from her, and I sobbed into the
dirt.

* * *

Christa
’s hands fluttered over me. “Silas, you’re tied
up.”

I twisted to face her. I’d
been lying there for a long time without trying anything. When I
stopped crying, everything had seemed hopeless. There hadn’t seemed
to be a reason to do anything at all. So, I’d given up.

Her fingers worked at the
knots on my wrists. “I’m sorry. I should have untied you before. I
don’t why I didn’t—”

“
Stop apologizing,” I
said.

Her breasts were bare and
streaked with blood, and I didn’t want to see them like that. I
shut my eyes. I felt sick again.

“
I just—I just—I just felt
out of it.”

“
Christa…” What was I
supposed to say?

I felt the pressure of the ropes ease.
My hands were free.

I rolled over and sat up,
stretching and massaging my wrists. I took off the hunter’s jacket
I was wearing and gave it to Christa. “Put this on.”

She shrugged into it and then pulled it
tightly closed over her skin.

I started to work on the knots on my
feet.

“
I think my pants are okay,”
she said. “He ripped my shirt, but he couldn’t rip my jeans. So, I
think they’re here somewhere. I just need to find them.”

“
No, hold up,” I said. “I’ll
find them. Give me a second to get these knots.”

She got up, still holding
the jacket tightly closed. “No, it’s okay. You weren’t even awake
when it was happening. You don’t know where he put
them.”

God, why was she being so
calm now?

I wasn’t sure which was
worse. Her blank, out-of-it stare from earlier, or her talking
about it so matter-of-factly.

I shuddered. This was bad. This was so
bad.

She wandered a few feet away
and then knelt down in the grass. She fished her pants up and held
them up. “See? Here they are. My underwear are a lost cause, but
that’s okay. I don’t need underwear.”

“
Christa, you don’t need to
act like—”

“
Yes
, I do.” She glared at
me.

I winced.

She started to put her jeans back
on.

I looked away. I felt like I
never wanted to see her body uncovered ever again. I went back to
the knots on my feet, concentrating on unraveling the rope. When I
untied myself, I looked back up, and Christa was sitting on the
grass, tugging on her shoes.

“
Do you think we’ll be able
to find our way back to the cave?” she said.

“
I…” I hadn’t thought about
it. We’d been following the hunter for hours before he saw us, and
we’d got all over the woods behind him.

The hunter.

I leapt to my feet and
hurried over to look for his body.

It was still there. Rolf had
stripped away his gun, but he hadn’t taken the body. The hunter was
wearing a backpack like the other one had. I pulled it away from
the guy and slung it over my shoulder.

“
Maybe we shouldn’t even go
back there,” she said. “Maybe he’s out there watching us. Maybe
he’s going to follow us wherever we go.”

“
I don’t think so,” I said.
“Tracking us is part of the fun, I think.”

She grimaced.

“
Not that I think it’s fun,”
I said.

She fumbled with buttons on the front
of the jacket. Her hands were trembling.

I went to her. “Here, let
me—”

“
Don’t.” She held up her
hands to ward me away.

I backed off. I was half-afraid to
touch her anyway.

“
We can follow the stream,”
she said. “The stream will take us back to the cave,
right?”

I swallowed. I nodded.

CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN

We made it back to the cave
fairly easily. Christa was right. We only needed to follow the
stream. But when we got there, Christa didn
’t want to go inside.

“
I’m all… sticky,” she said.
“From—from blood mostly.”

I shivered again,
involuntarily. I didn’t want to think about what other kinds of
fluids could be making her feel sticky.

“
I want to go wash off in
the stream,” she said.

“
Okay,” I said. Good,
that would help her. She wouldn’t have to be so uncomfortable, and
she could cleanse herself of any trace of him that was still on her
or… in her, or—
Fuck.
“Well, you should do that. I’ll stay here and go through the
guy’s backpack and see what’s in there.”

“
No, I don’t want to go
there alone,” she said.

“
Oh,” I said. “Well, okay. I
can come.”

She nodded.
“Good.”

I stowed the backpack inside the cave,
and together we trudged through the woods to the stream.

At the edge, she started to
unbutton the jacket.

I looked away.

“
What’s the matter?” she
said. “You don’t want to look at me anymore?”

I flinched.

She laughed bitterly.
“That’s kind of funny, don’t you think?”

I forced myself to turn back
to her. “Nothing about any of this is funny.”

She yanked the jacket over
her head and tossed it on the ground. “I’m fine, Silas.”

Her body was bruised and bloody. She
was so skinny. She looked like a war refugee.

Bile rose in my throat.
“You’re not fine.”

“
I am,” she said,
unbuttoning her jeans. “I’m fine. I’m going to be okay.”

“
No,” I said. “You’re
not.”

She wriggled out of her
pants.

I couldn’t stand the sight
of her. I felt ill. My stomach reeled. I turned away from her and
vomited.

“
Wow,” she said. “That’s a
new one. I’ve never had anyone react that way to me getting
undressed.”

I wiped my mouth. This was all so
fucked up.

When I turned back around,
Christa had waded into the stream. It was shallow. It only came up
to her knees. She knelt down, huddling in the water, and she
started to scrub herself with her hands.

“
See, it’s not a big deal,
Silas,” she said. “I can handle it. It’s just like any other time
that I’ve had sex with someone.”

“
Christa.” I shook my head.
“Don’t.”

“
I’m glad you didn’t see
it,” she said. “That would have made it weirder and worse, I think.
It was better that you didn’t see.”

“
I should have stopped it,”
I said.

“
You couldn’t,” she said.
“You were dead. You died on me.”

I hung my head. “I’m
sorry.”

“
It’s not that big a deal,”
she said.

“
Stop saying
that.”

“
Look, let me tell you about
the time that I lost my virginity, okay?”

“
What does that have to do
with anything?”

She splashed water over her
shoulders. “I was fourteen years old. I was with the track team at
a state tournament, and we were staying in a hotel, and there was a
hot tub there. And it was late, and we were supposed to be in bed,
but we snuck down to the hot tub. I was the only girl. It was me
and Jared and Ezra and Jamie.”

Wait a second. I already had
an idea of where this was going. “Christa, you don’t have
to—”

“
It was my idea for us to be
naked,” she said. “It was all my idea. I mean, there was only one
of me, and there were three of them, and we were all kind of
curious, and I started all it, because it was cool to have all of
them so interested in me. Three of them. They were all focused on
me. And I liked that. It felt…”

I kicked at a rock on the
shore. “Powerful.”

She looked up at me, as if
she was surprised that I would understand. “Yeah.” She
nodded.

“
Motherfucker,” I
said.

She scrubbed at the blood on
her forehead. “Well, it was kind of awful, because I was a virgin,
and it just kept going on and on, and the hot tub sort of washed
away all my natural wetness, and it hurt. It really hurt. But I
started it all, so I couldn’t back out. I just had to… let it… And
I did.”

“
Christa…” My hands were
shaking.

“
Anyway,” she said, rubbing
at the blood on her torso, “all I’m saying is that this was just
like that. It hurt, and it was awful. And Rolf hit me and stuff,
and he said horrible things. But I’m okay. I can handle it. This
isn’t that much worse than anything I’ve been through before. So,
I’m fine. I’m totally fine.”

Why
did she keep saying that?

Right next to me, an old tree had a
tangle of roots in the stream. It had a wide, gnarled
trunk.

I balled my hand into a
fist.

I slammed my fist into the tree
trunk.

It hurt. The tremors of the impact
traveled up my arm.

I gritted my teeth. I hit
the tree trunk again as hard as I could. It hurt less that time,
somehow, but my knuckles started bleeding.

I hit the tree with my other
hand. “No.” I pounded the trunk. “No, Christa, you are
not
fine.” I smacked my
other hand into the trunk. “You are not fine at all.” I began to
pummel the tree, my fists punctuating each sentence that I spit
out. “Just because you got
gang
raped
when you were fourteen doesn’t make
it cool for you to get fucking
raped
again. It only means that
you’re like
doubly
fucked up.”

“
Shut up,” she
said.

I looked at her. Blood
dripped off my knuckles. I could see that I’d stained the tree red
as well.

She was standing up. Water
streamed over her naked breasts and hips. She was clean now. She
was beautiful. And that made it worse, because for some reason, all
I could think about was the way it had felt to have my lips on her
skin.

“
Fuck you, Silas.” Her voice
shook.

I turned back to the tree. I
didn’t want to see her like that. I didn’t want to see her naked
and vulnerable. Ever again.

“
It was my idea,” she said.
“It wasn’t what you said.”

“
It couldn’t have been your
idea,” I said. “You didn’t know what you were offering them. They
should never—”

“
It was
my
idea,” she said. “And
I’m
fine
. And I
can handle this fucking Rolf thing. So, you just
shut up
.”

* * *

There was more trail mix in
the backpack I
’d brought back with us.
There were also two more cans of Coke. I gave them all to
Christa.

At first, she tried to tell
me that we should share them, but I wouldn’t take one. So,
eventually, she just gave up and drank them both.

We ate some more beef jerky and some of
the trail mix.

We watched as the light outside the
cave faded away, until it was night outside.

I didn’t know what to say to
her. I didn’t know how to act around her.

I knew I needed to be doing
something for her, but I couldn’t figure out what it
was.

I thought about trying to be
comforting, but that didn’t work for lots of reasons. For one
thing, she was still insisting that she was fine and that none of
it was a big deal. For another thing, I didn’t think I should touch
her. I didn’t think she’d like it. And I was afraid to touch
her.