Read Online Those Who Favor Fire by Lauren Wolk - Free Book Online Page B

stop. I did not start this.
I
did not call
you
out here.
I
did not badger
you
intotalking about the wreck he’s made of
my
life. All I’ve ever asked of you is a little privacy, which you’ve insisted on denying me. But if you think you have the right to summon me out here, interrogate me like this, then I certainly have the right to answer you the way
I choose
to answer you.”
    She was shouting, her neck webbed with tendons, her arms so stiff at her sides, her hands clenched so tightly they looked like clubs. “All right,” he hissed, holding his palms out toward her, both afraid and half hoping that his father would hear Holly and come striding out to silence her. Kit climbed the steps of the gazebo as if he never expected to leave it again and stood as far from her as he could, his back against a pillar. “All right. Get it over with. Tell me how he’s wrecked your life.” But he was afraid to his bones that he already knew.
    “You won’t believe me,” Holly said. All the anger had gone out of her. She seemed tired and almost as if she, too, wanted nothing less than to talk about her life. “But I meant what I said before. Now that I’ve started I’m going to tell you everything I’ve got to tell. And then I want you to leave me alone. I don’t ever want you to bring it up again.”
    Kit felt as if he ought to be the one saying these things, for it was precisely how he felt. He wanted her to get it all over with and then put it to rest. If it was something she had lived with, then it was certainly something he could live with, too. It had to be.
    But as it turned out, it wasn’t.
    Holly’s father had never raped her. He had stopped short of that. She never said the word
incest
or
abuse
as she told Kit the story, although she might have. Her father had been more subtle than that, at least in the beginning, when Holly was only eleven, and on top of that small for her age. He had often walked in on her in the bathroom, as if by accident, especially when she had just stepped out of the shower. She had sometimes woken up in the night to find him sitting on the edge of her bed, his hands resting on her hips or her legs, but before she’d come fully awake he would walk out of her room without saying a word and in the morning she would wonder if she had dreamed the whole thing. And then she would feel unclean for dreaming such a dream.
    For years she had felt nervous and confused around him, for nomatter how hard she tried to stay out of his way, to do nothing that would draw his attention, he always found a way to cross her path, to stand too close, to collide with her and then reach out as if to save her from a fall, grabbing her around the middle one time, by the shoulders the next. “Clumsy girl,” he would say, and then as she left he would touch her with his eyes. If anything, it was this impalpable touch that left bruises.
    Much as she had hated boarding school in the beginning—still small, her mother newly dead—Holly had eventually come to love her exile and to dread the approach of every holiday, every summer home. Over time, she became more self-assured and was strengthened by her association with a stern, resourceful headmistress, the daughters of other important people, and the world at large. And by her fifteenth birthday she had outgrown the insecurity and confusion that had prevented her from knowing how to behave in the face of her father’s strange interest—whether to be alarmed, how to deflect his advances. She expected her father to notice the change in her, when she went home again: to look at the way she kept her head up, her shoulders back, and her eyes steady, and be intimidated. She expected him to see, in her, a challenge. But she did not expect him to take it.
    When he did, when he walked straight into her bedroom the first night she was home again, a day earlier than Kit, when he shut the door behind him and stood glaring at her as she lay absolutely still in her bed, when he