Carolina Moon

seat belt. There were hands squeezing her heart so it beat in hitchy strikes. “No.” She wrenched open the door, leaped out, and began a stumbling run along the shoulder. “She’s hitchhiking, to the beach. He picked her up, back there, somewhere back there.”
    “Wait. Hold on.” He caught up with her, had to drag her around. “Honey, you’re shaking.”
    “He took her.” It was sliding into her head, images and shapes, sounds and scents. There was a burn in her throat, a smoker’s rasp from pulling deep on one too many cigarettes. “He took her, pulled off the road, pulled off and into the trees. And he hit her with something. She doesn’t see what it is, she only feels the pain, and she’s dazed. What’s happening? What’s the matter? She pushes at him, but he’s dragging her out of the car.”
    “Who?”
    She shook her head, fighting to find herself in the confusion, in the pain. In the terror. “That way. Just up that way.”
    “All right.” Her eyes were huge, unfocused, and her skin had gone clammy under his hands. “You want to walk up there a little ways?”
    “I have to. Leave me alone.”
    “No.” He wrapped an arm firmly around her. “That I won’t. We’ll walk. I’m right here. You can feel me right here.”
    “I don’t want this. I don’t want it.” But she began to walk. She opened herself, overriding her instinct for self-preservation. She didn’t struggle when the images shifted, solidified.
    The stars wheeled overhead, blindingly bright. Heat closed around her like a fist.
    “She wanted to go to the beach. She couldn’t get a ride. She was angry at her friend. Marcie. A friend named Marcie, they were supposed to drive together, spend the weekend. Now she’s going to hitchhike because, by God, she’s not going to let that stupid bitch ruin her trip. He comes along, and she’s happy. She’s tired and she’s thirsty, and he says he’s going all the way to Myrtle. It’s less than an hour by car.”
    She stopped, held up a hand. Her head lolled back, but her eyes stayed open. Wide open. “He gives you a bottle. Jack Black. Blackjack. You take a drink, a long one. To kill your thirst and because it’s so cool to be riding along and drinking whiskey.
    “It must’ve been the bottle he hit you with. Must’ve been, because you passed it back to him, and were laughing, then something crashed into the side of your head. Christ! It hurts!”
    She staggered, and her hand flew to her cheek. The taste of blood filled her mouth.
    “No. Don’t.” Cade pulled her against him, surprised she didn’t slide out of his arms like smoke.
    “I can’t see. Can’t. There’s nothing in him. Just blank. Wait. Wait.” With her hands fisted, her breath in rags, she pushed. Sickness rolled in her stomach, but she slipped through, and saw.
    “He took her in there.” She began to rock. “I can’t. I just can’t.”
    “You don’t have to. It’s all right now. Come on back to the car.”
    “He took her in there.” Pity and grief overwhelmed everything else. “He rapes her.” Now she closed her eyes, let it come, let it burn. “You fight for a while. He’s hurting you, and you’re so scared, so you fight. He hits you again, twice, hard in the face. Oh it hurts, it hurts, it hurts. You don’t want to be here. You want your mother. You just cry while he grunts and pants and finishes.
    “You smell his sweat and his sex and your own blood, and you can’t fight anymore.”
    Tory lifted her hands, ran them over her own face. She needed to feel the lines of her own cheeks, nose, mouth. She needed to remember who she was.
    “I can’t see him. It’s dark and he’s just a thing. There’s nothing from him for me to feel that seems real. She doesn’t see him, either, not really. Not even when he uses his hands to strangle her. It doesn’t take long because she’s barely conscious anyway and hardly struggles. She hasn’t been with him more than half an hour, and she’s dead. Lying naked in the shadow of the trees. That’s where he leaves her. He—he was whistling on his way back to the car.”
    She stepped back from Cade then, in that deliberate way of hers. All he could see was her face, pale as the moon, with those eyes swirling smoke.
    “She was only sixteen. A pretty girl with long blond hair and long legs. Her name was Alice, but she didn’t like it, so everyone called her Ally.”
    The strain and the sorrow swallowed her up.
    Cade caught her, lifted her.