Silas (34 page)

“
Uh… I guess,” I said. I was
really having a hard time thinking about stuff like weddings right
now. Mostly I was worried about Christa. Why was she putting on
this act like nothing bad had happened to her? Was it a defense
mechanism? Was it an attempt to run away from it all?

Whatever it was, it worried
me. I was pretty sure it was going to blow up in her face. She
couldn’t run from it forever.

Or maybe I was being an ass.

What happened to Christa
bugged me. Hell, it tormented me. Maybe I wanted the excuse to have
to deal with it myself and that was why I wanted to be able to talk
about it. I wanted to beg forgiveness from Griffin. I wanted to
find some way to do penance for it.

I wanted to fix it.

And I couldn’t.

“
So, how hard can it be to
find a place?” Christa was saying. “Maybe we could even find
someplace where we could have both the wedding and the
reception.”

“
A lot of places are
booked,” said Leigh. “But I guess theoretically it might work. We
don’t have a lot of guests, and most of them live pretty local.
There are a few of my friends from Thomas, but if we push to a
weekend, I’m sure they could make it.”

“
Weekend. Good,” said
Christa. “What’s today? What day of the week?”

“
Wednesday,” said
Leigh.

“
So, this weekend, then,”
said Christa.

Leigh laughed. “I don’t
know. That might be kind of tough.”

“
Oh, come on, I’ll help
you,” said Christa. “So will Silas. Right?”

“
Uh… yeah, sure.”

“
See?” said Christa. “We can
do this.”

Leigh shook her head at
Christa. “You’re crazy, you know that?”

Christa grinned. She popped another
tater tot in her mouth.

* * *

There were girls giggling in my living
room. I stumbled down the steps to find Leigh, Christa, and Sloane
all sitting on the couch holding up lacy garters.

I squinted at Christa. “How
are you awake?” I’d been sleeping all afternoon. We’d only gotten
back that morning. After stuffing myself on Sonic food, I’d tumbled
into bed and slept like the dead. Until now. When giggling had
woken me up.

She shrugged. “Weddings
energize me. I’m not tired, what can I say?”

I rubbed my face.

“
I slept in the car when you
were driving, remember?” she said.

“
For like twenty minutes,” I
said. “Don’t you think you should get some rest?”

She rolled her eyes. “God,
doesn’t he sound just like Griffin? I swear, if the two of you had
your way, I’d sleep the rest of my life away.”

“
Sweetie, maybe you should
nap,” said Leigh. “After everything you’ve been
through—”

“
I’m
fine
,” she said. “I want
to focus on the wedding, not on me. Next garter.”

“
Okay,” said Sloane, pulling
a blue one out of a bag. “How about this one? It’s something blue,
you know?”

Leigh shrugged. “Does it
matter?”

“
It totally matters,” said
Christa. “That’s what Griffin’s going to take off your leg and
throw out to all of the eligible bachelors at the
wedding.”

“
There’s going to be like
five of them,” said Leigh. “Can’t we just skip that?”

I turned my back on them and headed
into the kitchen.

Griffin was sitting at the
table, gripping his cell phone. “Ma, I told you not to get on I-68,
didn’t I? That’s going to take you out of town. You need to get off
on the next exit and turn around… Well, if you would have called me
before you got in the car… Fine…. Yes, turn around come back like
you’re going to the hotel… You have
what?
… Well, then why aren’t you
using the GPS?… Ma, if you have the address, and the GPS is telling
you turn around, then
turn
around
.” He looked down at the phone. He
looked up at me. “She hung up on me. My mother hung up on me.” He
rubbed his head. “This whole thing is a freaking
nightmare.”

“
What whole thing? You mean
the fact that Christa and I—”

“
I mean the damned wedding,”
he said. “I thought I had escaped it, but my sweet little sister
had to kick the whole thing into overdrive, and now it’s all
happening again, and it’s all happening really fast, and it’s
crazy.”

I nodded slowly. “You want a
beer?”

“
Yes,” he said, heaving a
huge sigh.

I went to the refrigerator.
“I had some homebrew stuff in here, unless Sloane drank it.” I
opened the door. The bottles were still there, although there were
less of them than I remembered. I took two out and gave one to
Griffin.

“
Thanks,” he
said.

I sat down across from him
at the table. “What did you tell your mother?”

“
About where you two were?”
he said. “I didn’t say anything. Christa beat me to it. I was
dealing with Rolf’s car, and Christa called her and said that she
went to some party the night of the rehearsal dinner and that she
ended up on the other side of the state with these hippies who
lived on commune and didn’t believe in phones. She said it took her
this long to get a ride home. My mom bought it. She was royally
pissed, but happier to have her home.”

“
Why would she believe
that?” I said. “She knew I was gone too, right?”

“
I don’t know if she even
knows who you are,” said Griffin. “But Christa probably said you
were at the party too. At any rate, it did what Christa wanted. It
made it seem like not having the wedding was a big tragedy, and it
made it really important that she get us all on board to fix it.
And honestly, I’d rather my mom believe that than know the
truth.”

I sighed. “But Christa would
never do something that fucked up.”

He laughed. “You kidding?
Look, I know my sister is a little on the wild side. She can party
with the best of them, as my mother well knows. Before, I gave you
shit about the two of you guys, but I recognize that she was
probably more to blame than I might have admitted at the time. I’m
sorry about that.”

“
No,” I said. “You were
right. If I’d left her alone, she would never have ended up getting
picked up when I did.”

“
Christa says you guys just
happened to be at the same bar,” he said. “I know you feel
responsible, but this wasn’t about you, Silas. It was bad luck. And
Rolf was a bad dude. Trust me, last year, when Marcel came after
Leigh, I felt really guilty about it. And the shit she went through
because of me. She fucking left me and ran off and I didn’t see her
for months. It took me forever to let that go. But you can’t blame
yourself.”

I slugged my beer. Damn,
that tasted good. “This isn’t the same, Griffin. I went after Rolf.
Marcel found you, not the other way around.”

“
Stop beating yourself up.”
He took a drink of his beer. “Hey, this is pretty good. You make
this?”

I nodded. “Yeah.”

“
Look, um, I don’t want to
pry.” He leaned forward. “But speaking of the stuff that went down
with you guys before, Christa says she doesn’t want to stay in the
hotel with mom. She says she doesn’t feel safe, and I get that. She
says that the couch at my place is really uncomfortable, and she’d
rather be in the guest room at your house.”

“
Oh,” I said. “She’s staying
here?”

“
Well, Sloane said it was
all right,” he said.

“
Yeah,” I said. “It’s
absolutely fine.”

“
Thing is,” said Griffin, “I
may have been too harsh before. Thinking that she was dead and
stuff has kind of put things in perspective for me. And if you two
feel like… I mean, if you guys were out there, and everything got
kind of Tarzan and Jane or whatever, and you two want to be
together, you don’t have to hide it from me. Like I get that you
were alone out there, and you had to depend on each other
and—”

I stood up from the table.
“No, it’s not like that.” I walked over to the window.

“
I’m not going to be pissed
off is all I’m saying. If you like my sister, then you can tell me.
I promise I’ll be cool.”

I stared out at my back
yard. It was a decent-sized yard. I sometimes wished it was smaller
when I had to mow the grass. Sloane had done some landscaping out
there. She had a little stone walkway and some flower bushes. They
were starting to bloom.

“
What are you looking at?”
said Griffin.

I looked back at him.
“Uh…”

“
You trying to figure out
how we’re going to fit everyone back there?”

“
Everyone?”

“
Sloane’s convinced we’ll
have enough room for everyone. And Leigh thinks it’s pretty enough
for the wedding pictures, so I guess we’ll try and make it
work.”

“
You’re having the wedding
here?”

“
Yeah,” he said. “Apparently
so. Why do you think my mom’s coming here?”

“
Whoa,” I said.

He got up from the table and
clapped me on the back. “About Christa. You can tell
me.”

I swallowed. “There’s
nothing between us.”

He raised his eyebrows.

I took a drink of my beer.
“She’s not…” I wished I could tell him what had happened, but I’d
promised her that I wouldn’t. She didn’t want him to know, and it
wasn’t the kind of secret that you just blabbed. “How much do you
even know about your sister and guys, Griffin?”

“
Guys? As in plural
guys?”

“
She told me some kind of
messed-up stuff,” I said. “She seems to be kind of promiscuous, and
I don’t think it’s for good reasons.”

He let out a little laugh.
“What the hell are you saying?”

“
You know what? Never mind.
She’s not into me, all right? She’s never been into me. So, it kind
of doesn’t matter how I feel about her, does it?” I drained my
beer, set it on the table, and walked out of the
kitchen.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE

Griffin was right. It was a
nightmare.

I spent the rest of the day watching
the plans for the wedding unfold, listening to Christa giggle like
nothing was wrong.

But every time I looked at her, I saw
her bloody and naked and staring blankly out into space.

It got so I didn’t want to
look at her, so I started to try to stay clear of her.

Staying clear of her meant staying
clear of the wedding plans in general. I went downstairs to my
workout room, where I kept my weights.

I lifted for a long time.

Too long, probably.

I hadn’t been eating
properly, and my body wasn’t strong anymore. I pushed myself, doing
curls and then presses.

Until I was sweaty from the exertion.
Until my muscles screamed.

But when I went back upstairs, they
were all in the kitchen talking about flower
arrangements.

“
They can’t be
red
red,” Leigh was
saying. “They have to be burgundy or maroonish. You know what color
I’m talking about.”

“
Well, roses are generally
that color, aren’t they?” said Sloane.

“
Are they?” said
Leigh.

I pushed past them to get a
beer out of the refrigerator, and then I fled upstairs to my
room.

How could they all be doing
this?

How could they be thinking about this
wedding after what had just happened?

They didn’t know that
Christa had been raped, sure, but they did know that we’d been
through hell. How could they possibly think it was a good idea to
plan a wedding right away?

We hadn’t even been back a
day.

Had they all lost their
minds?

I drank my beer. I wasn’t
sure if I was going to be able to get through this.

Back at Op Wraith, I
remembered that Sloane had gone through training to turn off her
emotions so that she could be a more efficient killer. They’d never
bothered training me to do that. Apparently, I was already good at
it when I got there.

For years, I’d never felt
anything I didn’t want to feel. I’d sidestepped all my guilt and
fear and sadness. It had been easy. It had been like dancing,
moving the thoughts out of the forefront of my brain, taunting the
more stubborn ones. I’d taken it all for granted.

And I couldn’t do it
anymore.

Not when I kept thinking
about Christa’s blood-streaked breasts. Her empty stare.

Fuck.

I went back downstairs for more
beer.

But there weren’t any more
homebrews in the refrigerator. There was only Stella Artois. I
grabbed one, and I saw that everyone else in the house was drinking
beer.