Page 28 of Boardroom Mask

I just fake it better.

I don’t remember much of the hospital or how I got from there back home. I must have done it, because I’m standing in front of my apartment door with my keys in my hand, but the hours between what happened at the restaurant and here are just gone, eaten up by the loop playing in my head: Elliot’s swollen eye, the blood on the tile, the frantic side-to-side shaking of his head.

I unlock the door, step inside, and lock it behind me. The curtains are still flapping in the breeze, so I slink over and shut the window. They die immediately, limp and lifeless.

I drop my bag in the middle of the floor and walk toward the bathroom to wash the dried blood off my hands. I flip the lightswitch with a clean part of my wrist—but when I raise my head, I scream.

On the shower wall, smeared in rust-red streaks across the white tile in what is unmistakably blood, are six words:

I TOLD YOU NOT TO GO.

11

KIR

TWO HOURS EARLIER

“I’m gonna love you / I’m gonna tear you into your soul / Desire, I’m hungry / I hope you feed me”

— “Desire” by Meg Myers

The latch on Jillian’s window yields far too easily. She really ought to get it fixed.

I slip through from the fire escape, stand in her living room, and breathe.

My knuckles ache. I flex my right hand open and closed, studying the split skin across the second and third knuckle. Both hands are slick with blood. It’s not mine, though.

It’s Elliot Wilkinson’s and it’s fuckingeverywhere.

Smeared across my palms, caked under my fingernails, drying brown in the creases of my knuckles and the lines of my fingers. It’s on my wrists. On the cuffs of my jacket.

He went down after the second blow, but I didn’t stop at two. I didn’t stop at five, either. I kept going, burning up inside as I hitand hit and hit. When he tried to cover his face, I moved to his body. When he curled up to protect his body, I went back to the face. I beat him until my hands were soaked through with him, and then I beat him a little more, because the first hit felt too good and every one after it felt better.

Never.

WHAM.

Touch.

WHAM.

What’s.

WHAM.

Mine.

It’s not the violence itself that worries me. Violence is a tool. My father taught me that young, and he was right about that, if nothing else. Sometimes, you need a hammer, or a scalpel, or a blowtorch, or a gun. Sometimes, all you need is your bare fists and a locked bathroom door.

No, what worries me is that Ienjoyedit.

Ienjoyedthe crack of his orbital bone under my knuckle. Ienjoyedthe way he crumpled. Ienjoyedstanding over him while he shrank into himself on that filthy tile floor, bleeding, crying, and Ienjoyedleaning down and whispering in his ear exactly what would happen if he ever spoke to Jillian again.

My father enjoys those things, too.

I shake my head, pivot on my heel, and walk to Jillian’s bathroom. When I reach it, I use my unbloodied elbow to flick on the light switch, then I stand and survey the scene for a moment.

Her bathroom is small but clean and well-decorated. The shower is a clawfoot tub with a white curtain pulled to one side on a curved rod, resting on black and white hexagon tile. A wooden bath tray sits across the rim of the tub, holding a half-burned candle and a dog-eared paperback. The vanity, narrow and white, sits beneath an oval mirror framed in brushed gold. She’s got her products lined up in neat rows on a little marble tray. Expensive stuff mixed in with drugstore basics. A bottle of Tom Ford perfume next to a tube of Aquaphor. Skincare with French labels beside a five-dollar pack of cotton rounds. A fuzzy pale pink bath mat sits on the floor and two towels hang from a brass hook on the back of the door, both white, both neatly folded over.