Precious and Fragile Things Read online

The word dripped with a vehemence so thick Gilly could practically see it. She found herself apologizing to him again for remarks she’d made about his upbringing. “Sorry.”

  The set of his shoulders said the apology hadn’t been accepted. Gilly told herself she didn’t care. It was nothing to her if she hurt his feelings. Situation and circumstance should have given her the perfect reason to forget the sort of fake politeness she’d always hated and never been able to stop herself from offering.

  Todd shook himself slightly, then set the eggs on the table. “Eat.”

  “I’m not hungry,” Gilly repeated. “What are you going to do, force me?”

  He cocked his head. “Uncle Bill always said if you had to force someone to do something it probably wasn’t worth making them do it.”

  More words of wisdom from Uncle Bill. Gilly sat back in her chair and fixed him with a glare. “Oh, really?”

  He stabbed a pile of yellow fluff with his fork. Before he brought it to his lips, he paused. Searched her gaze with his own in a manner so forthright it brought heat to stain Gilly’s cheeks.

  Todd pointed with his fork to the snow-laden window. A drift had formed outside, one large enough to nearly cover the glass. “Even if I wanted to let you go, I couldn’t.”

  “But you don’t want to.” She teased out this truth between them as though he’d tried to deny it.

  Todd set down the utensil with its uneaten clump of egg still clinging to it. His eyes glinted but his voice remained soft when he answered her. “I can’t go back to jail, Gilly. I just can’t. Don’t you get it?”

  “I get it.”

  Todd paused, gaze not shifting from hers. Serious. “And if I get caught for this, that’s what would happen. They’d put me back in jail. I’d rather die.”

  Her fingers tapped a random pattern on the faded tabletop before she stopped them. Her voice went tight and hard, unsympathetic. “You should have thought about that before you kidnapped me.”

  His sigh was so full of disgust it made her flinch. “I didn’t kidnap you.”

  Gilly shoved away from the table and went to the sink. Nothing outside but white. She gripped the edge of the counter, forced herself to lower her voice. “Don’t act like you picked me up in a bar during fifty cent draft night.”

  She’d had moments like this before, days when every little thing worked at her like a grain of sand against an eyeball. One minute close to tears, the next ready to scream until her throat tore itself to bloody shreds. Seth knew to stay out of her way when she was like this, blaming it on her hormones or menstrual cycle with a man’s bland acceptance that the mysteries of a woman’s body could be blamed for everything. Her temper was hot but brief, and Gilly had learned to hold it in as best she could. She had to.

  Her mother had screamed a lot, when she wasn’t facing Gilly with cold silence that was somehow worse than the shrieking accusations. Her mother had alternated between rage and despair with such little effort Gilly hadn’t known until adulthood there could be a difference in the emotions.

  Counting to ten. Counting to twenty. Biting her tongue until it bled. Sometimes, most times, those tactics worked. It hurt, holding in all that anger, but she wasn’t going to put her kids through what she’d gone through as a child. Some days that had meant hiding in the pantry, clinging to the very last shreds of her patience with everything she had, just to keep herself from flying apart.

  She wasn’t feeling very patient now. Not even counting to a hundred was going to work. Angry words wanted to fly from her lips, to strike him, to wound. She bit the inside of her cheek. Pain helped her focus. Fury wouldn’t help her. Todd was right about the snow and their situation. He couldn’t let her go, and she couldn’t realistically, practically or logically escape. It was keep her temper or lose her mind.

  “You should just kill me,” she said through clenched jaws, knowing even as she said it she was poking him too hard.

  Todd shook his head, facing away from her. He hunched over the table, stabbing at his plate with the tines of his fork. “Shut up.”

  But she couldn’t. The words tumbled out, bitter and nasty. Harsh. “You could’ve let me freeze to death out there. You wouldn’t have to worry about me, then. You should’ve left me in the truck. Then I’d be dead and you’d have nothing to worry about.”

  “I said,” Todd muttered tightly, “shut up.”

  She’d never pulled the legs off daddy longlegs, never tied a can to a puppy’s tail. Gilly had never been the sort to tease and torture. But now she found a hard, perverse and distinct pleasure in watching Todd squirm.

  “The only way you’ll ever be safe is if I’m dead,” she continued, gleeful, voice like a stick stabbing him in tender places. “So you should just do it. Get it over with. Save us both the hassle—”

  “Shut up, Gilly.”

  She slapped the counter hard enough to make some dishes jump. “Do it or say you’ll let me go!”

  He stood and whirled on her, sending her stumbling back against the sink. The chair clattered to the floor. The cold metal pressed against her spine; her elbow cracked painfully on the counter’s edge.

  “I only wanted the truck. I told you that. I was going to dump you off by the side of the road, but then you had the kids in the back. I didn’t want to hurt the kids. I just wanted to come up here and stay away from people, to get away! I didn’t want to keep you, for fuck’s sake! But now here you are, right? Right up in my fucking face. Yeah, I could’ve left you out there to freeze, but I didn’t. But that doesn’t make me a hero, right? Just makes me an asshole. I’m fucked no matter what. So why don’t I just kill you, Gilly? Why don’t I? Because I don’t. Fucking. Want to.”

  She’d thrown her hands up in a warding-off gesture, but Todd didn’t touch her. He raked one hand through his hair instead and backed off. It would’ve been easier if he’d hit her. She was waiting for it. She was pushing him to do it. She wanted him to hit her, she realized with sickness thick in her throat.

  “Uncle Bill died. He left me this place, and the money. Five grand,” Todd said in a low, hoarse voice. A broken voice. “Not a whole lot of money, but nice. I was doing okay without it. I was making it. Doing whatever I had to, to get by. Working shit jobs, never doing anything but work and sleep. Shitty apartment, piece-of-shit car, mac-and-cheese for dinner four times a week. And not the good kind,” he added, this affront clear. “The four-for-a-dollar crap from the dollar store.”

  Gilly remembered the flavor of that kind, made with water instead of milk when her bank account had run low. She could taste it now, the flavor nostalgic and gritty on her tongue. It wasn’t necessarily a bad memory.

  “The money was going to make a difference, pay some bills, so that was good. I thought I might actually get ahead for once instead of always being behind. But it didn’t get released right away. Some bunch of legal shit I had to sift through and I didn’t know how. But I was doing okay.”

  He shot her a narrow-eyed look, emphasizing it. “I was doing okay. Then they fired me at the diner for being late. I was late because my car broke down. My buddy Joey Di Salvo was going to sell me a car, real cheap, but he needed a thousand bucks. It was everything I had. I mean everything. Rent, food, everything. But no car, no job. That son-of-a-bitch took my money and ran off….”

  The words tumbled out of him in a rush, breathless, but with the same precise manner she’d noted about him before. As though every word he spoke had been carefully thought out before he pronounced it.

  Todd paced the worn linoleum. There wasn’t really enough room for him to do that, not without bumping against her, but he didn’t seem to notice or care. He stalked to the pantry door and slipped a crumpled pack of Marlboros from his shirt pocket. Without pause, he lit a cigarette from the stuttering flame from his lighter and drew the smoke deep into his lungs. It streamed forth from his nostrils as he paced. Her eyes watered at the acrid stench as he passed.

  He talked and smoked, the cigarette tipping against his lip