Page 44 of What We Bury

We get back to digging, letting the rhythm of it settle—lift, throw, lift, throw. I work the shovel with the same mindless efficiency I use on a treadmill at the gym, my body on autopilot, until the blade hits sandstone and we’re chipping and hauling rock. Sweat drips down my nose, and every muscle sings with the simple, honest ache of work. I like it. I like the way sweat drowns out the rest, the way the horizon out here is clean and silent and you can forget how bad everything is.

I wonder what she’s doing.

I can’t stop thinking about Sage either. Her body clamped in my arms, ribs shuddering as she tried to puke up everything anyone had ever done to her. The knife in her hand, the scream that cut the air, the way she fought me like a cornered animal until she realized she didn’t have to fight me at all.

For a moment, I’d felt her heart against my chest, wild and frantic, then slowing as I whispered to her that it was over, she was safe, she didn’t have to fight anymore.

How long had it been since anyone told her that? That she could stop? A long fucking while, I bet.

I know what it’s like—when adrenaline is still eating you alive, when every memory is a blade at your throat and the only thing that keeps you alive is action.

That’s a look I’ve seen before, that moment when trauma and rage blend into something that tastes almost like freedom. She’d owned her violence in a way that made my skin crawl and my heart race.

There are people who want to die, and people who want to kill, and sometimes you can’t tell the difference till it’s too late.

The world’s full of men like Brock. It’s also full of women who have run out of options.

I get why she stabbed him.

I get why she didn’t stop.

I get it because I’ve been there.

I know what it’s like to be small, to be prey. To disappear inside myself so nothing could get me. To want to hurt something—someone—so bad that all the regular rules of physics and morality just slide off your skin, and you become the weapon.

It happened when I was nineteen. Skinny as a reed and still holding the belief that I could be openly into both guys and girls without it being used against me. My mistake. He was an older guy—friend of a friend of a friend, college dropout, quarterbackshoulders and a handsome face. I suspect he’d never had to apologize for anything in his entire life. He called me pretty, which I was, in a way I’d learned to despise.Too pretty, he’d said, and then fucked the word into my mouth so hard I couldn’t breathe for a week after without tasting blood.

That was along with all the other things he did to me that I begged him not to.

He told me it was a favor. A lesson. He said I’d thank him someday.

And I did. After I slit his throat and watched him die.

He was my first kill.

“Do you think she’d let me braid her hair?” Milo says.

I don’t hear the question at first, or maybe I do but my brain misfiles it under “non sequitur.” I blink at Milo, sweat in my eyes.

“Huh?”

“Braiding,” he repeats. “Do you think murder kitten would let me play with her hair? She has the right type for it. Long. Soft. Slight curl at the ends.”

I stop digging. “What the fuck, Milo?”

Only Milo could turn grave-digging into a brainstorming session for his fantasy romance.

“I’m good at braids—I used to do my sister’s all the time. It’s soothing, meditative, even. I feel like Sage could use some meditation.”

“Milo.”

“What?”

“We’re burying a body.”

“I’m aware. I’m multitasking.” He gestures at the hole around him. “Digging and planning. Two birds, one shovel. Sometimes a pickaxe.”

I don’t blame him for fixating on her. She’s all I think about too—dark brown hair, wild in the moonlight, sticking to hercheeks with blood and tears. I remember holding a fistful of it to keep her head upright, to keep her from choking.