Baudelaire said that humans were deluded if they thought they could wash away all their spots with vile tears, but Baudelaire was French and therefore knew nothing about hygiene or shower gel.
~The Horologicon: A Day's Jaunt Through the Lost Words of the English Language
I woke up in a daze yesterday morning, staring out the patio doors into the sky, more than a little surprised that he let me come back without a fight. And then Lochlan woke up and looked at me and yelled WHAT THE FUCK, Ben bolted upright and stared at me and then they looked at each other for a whole half a nanosecond before jumping out of bed, throwing on yesterday's clothes and running out the damned door. Loch headed to kill Caleb, and Ben to stop him, or perhaps to help.
Loch doesn't listen. He makes all these concessions to my face and then he goes right over my head.
And then I looked in the mirror. I looked as dazed as I felt. A little small. A little vacant. Perhaps no one is home. I had a nosebleed that stopped just before my lower lip and a strange linear bruise that begins in my hairline, blackens my eye and the bridge of my nose and ends on the opposite cheekbone. I had finger-tip bruises all over my neck and shoulders. My chin had the outline of a single hard bite, not enough to make it bleed, just enough to leave a perfect imprint of the Devil's perfect teeth on his little prizefighter.
I wondered what the rest of me looked like so I took one big step back to look.
Oh my God.
***
No one killed Caleb, but only because they reminded Loch he agreed to my behavior.
I don't have to like it, he growled. Duncan has been sitting on him for the better part of an hour.
If you did, you'd be as sick a fuck as the rest of us, Caleb told him from behind an ice bag. Lochlan had planned to kill him, using his fists to break through his face and then once inside he would have systematically destroyed the rest of the Devil for ever after.
The Devil can't call the police. I have enough to secure all sorts of worse scenarios if he does. And we're going to work on what instructions I follow and what ones I relay to the others and they changed the code on the alarm and didn't tell me what it was. Now they'll know if I leave, and apparently that makes everyone feel better. Batman called Caleb a coward and a thug and PJ isn't speaking to anyone but the kids again, who were told I had a wrestling match with Ben and fell off the couch and hit the drum kit and they believed us. Ben asked to take this on, taking whatever disappointment they feel as his own penance for whatever it is he thinks he didn't do that wasn't enough.
August and Sam are going to shift their focus working with me from grief to self-worth and familiar-danger. PJ is going to try to be civilized to everyone concerned, the majority of the boys are trying very hard to mind their own business, and Lochlan is going to let this go.
I can't. I see what he did to you and I can't get it out of my head, he tells me.
Good, then you can have a lobotomy too, I tell him. It's always better when you have company.