Page 83 of Thicker Than Water
“Me and Clive?” I frown, inching closer. “You mean in high school? But that was nothing like Gavin and Maeve. You stopped Clive, remember? You saved me.”
“No.” Jason shuts his eyes again, harder this time, as if trying to wring an image from his mind. “That’s not what happened.”
I straighten, nerves sparking along my spine. It’s the same thing Clive said to me this morning, eyes full of pity, right before blood pooled in my palm. I assumed he was lying, deflecting. But Jason’s face is tight with certainty. And more than that: shame.
Nausea whirls inside me. My jaw clenches, as if guarding against the inevitable question, but I manage to push it through. “Then… what did happen?”
He’s still shaking his head, fighting the memory, and for a moment, I don’t think he’s going to respond. Then he licks his dry, cracked lips, reels in a trembling breath, and exhales an answer: “I let him take you upstairs.”
“Youwhat?”
The question shoots from Julia’s mouth, sharp as shrapnel. She’s speaking for me, asking what I can’t, because suddenly my throat is shrinking, my voice scuttling away.
“We got teamed up,” Jason says. “Beer pong. He’d bare-barelyspoken to me before. But he was being friendly. Inclu-cluding me in jokes. Then he started saying things. ‘If I make this last shot’?”—Jason pauses to swallow—“?‘I get to take your sister upstairs.’?”
My heart riots—a fist against my rib cage, trying to break free.
“I thought it was a joke,” Jason says. “I laughed it off. Clive was… popular. I was… me. But he made the shot. Said he was going to ‘collect his winnings.’ And I froze. Froze, again, when I saw him talk to you. Lead you upstairs. And it took me… too long, to go up to that room.”
“Why?” The word has to claw its way out of me. “I couldn’t even— Didn’t you know I was drunk?”
Head tipping back, Jason chews his lip—the only answer he gives.
I hear his silence like a scream.
“Why did you let him do that?” I cry. “Why didn’t you stop him?”
“I was stupid,” he finally says. “I was a junior. He was a senior. I was worried I’d seem… uncool.”
“Oh, Jason,” Julia says, his name weighed down by disappointment and horror.
“Uncool?” I spit out. “He assaulted me!”
“I know. Trust me—I’ve thought about it. Ever since. Sienna, I’m so—I’m so sorry.”
He says this to the ceiling. He can’t even look at me.
Only—that’s not true. He could look at me. He’s tired and he’s weak, but he’s physically capable of pointing his eyes my way. His avoidance is a choice, and it leaves me untethered. No gaze for me to meet or hold. Nothing to keep me from spinning through a memory that’s mutating with every turn.
For all these years, I imagined it like a TV show, the scene deceptively electric: bubbling voices, pulsing music, colorful lights. A good time. But then a hand reached through the crowd to tapJason’s shoulder.Hey, man,someone said to him,Clive took your sister upstairs, she looked pretty drunk.As if burned, Jason leaped away, upending people’s cups, their mouths slack with shock as he barreled through them, charged up the stairs two or three at a time. Then the scene switched, and I saw myself, pressed to the wall in a dark and disorienting room. I saw Clive, his hands hunting for something I didn’t want to give. And I saw Jason again, blowing the door off its hinges, the light from the hallway like a halo around him.
But now I know: that was only fiction. And these are the facts: Clive singled me out as a prize he could win, and my brother said nothing. Clive snaked his arm around my waist as I stumbled up the stairs, and my brother watched, and said nothing. My brother waited then, long enough for Clive to kiss me, long enough for the kiss to turn sour, long enough for panic to bulge in my eyes. And when my brother burst through the door, he wasn’t right on time.
He was almost too late.
I curl in on myself like somebody’s punched me. I grip the blanket beside Jason’s leg, a knot of cotton in my fist. I’m winded and whiplashed and trying to breathe, but the air feels like water—something to drown in. Everything’s knocked off-kilter. The room is tilting, the bed is floating, my hands are empty, I’m anchored to nothing. Even Julia is so far away.
“I let him hurt you,” Jason says, and my chest burns with held-in breath. “And that was all I could think, after I froze again, at the holiday party. I hesi-hesitated. Watched Gavin leave with Maeve. And I think he’d been waiting. Drugged her drink. Because she said she blacked out. Couldn’t remember. No matter how many times I asked about it. For any scrap of mem-memory.”
“Jason, that’s so intrusive,” Julia says, “to keep asking Maeve about something so personal. Something so potentially traumatic.”
“And it killed me,” Jason continues, as though he hasn’t evenheard his wife, “because if he did something to her, I could have stopped it.”
Finally, I exhale, the sound as ragged as a sob.
“I started watching him,” he continues. “Any time he got near her. But not just her. There was some bus-business dinner last week. A woman. He’d been bragging she was hot, was sure ‘business would turn into pleasure.’ So I sat at the bar at the res-restaurant. Watching. Making sure she was okay, that if he put something in her drink, I’d see it. Because then I’d know I was right. About Maeve. But—there was a fight. The night ended qui-quick.”
I swallow. He’s talking about the dinner Henry interrupted. That’s why Jason was there. Not to confront Gavin, like Julia guessed, but to keep tabs on him. And more than that, it seems: to prove his theory.
