He pulled me up from the floor. Dragged me to the couch.
It was more violent than I expected. His hands around my arms, biting into my flesh, ripping me from the floor like I was nothing—I was nothing; I weighed one-hundred and five pounds on a good day.
It was dark in the living room. I couldn't see.
"Wait," I cried. It fucking hurt. "Wait—"
He shoved me down into the couch, face first. I barely had time to brace myself, although I realized too late how little good it did me to have my arms trapped between my chest and the cushions.
His weight on my back then, heavy. Crushing. Hot. He shifted against me, and my nightgown rode up over the backs of my thighs, where he was happily seated. I felt my face burn hot. He pressed a hand between my shoulder blades to hold me down.
"Let's do this," he said, excited, breathing a little heavier from the exertion of manhandling me. "I want all the gritty details," he murmured.
I puffed out a breath against the cushions, worked up, sweaty, spine prickling from the heat of his palm. My dried tears had left my cheeks feeling tacky.
I turned my head to address him, tasting the stale, worn fibers of my couch. "What are you so desperate to prove?" I hissed. "That deep down I'm as terrible as you?"
"No, no, no, no," he tutted, and more of his weight came down, settling over my back, making goose bumps ripple along my arms and legs. "It's not about good and evil," he said. I noted the touch of exasperation, like he was annoyed having to explain this. "It's aaaabout… limits. What people are capable of when pushed." His hot breath wafted near my ear, and it was hard to breathe with his weight on top of me, hard to get my lungs to fully expand. I felt like I was suffocating.
I shuddered underneath him, helpless. He'd never done this before—exerted his power in such a physical way. The threat was always there, of course, but never like this. Before, the threat of violence had been teasing—flirtatious almost, like an open invitation for me to accept, a dare—but only if I wanted. Here it felt heady—dangerous. I didn't know if I liked it or not; the genuine, intimate thrill of being gutted by the Joker—split from throat to sternum. He'd want to see all of me from the inside, wouldn't he?
"Just the right amount of force…" he went on, "and people will crumble under the weight. Like you did." He pushed down a little harder on my spine, and his lips brushed my ear. "They always do."
My lip curled in anger at his words. Before I even knew what I was doing, I was rearing my head back to hit him, catching him square in the jaw. The back of my skull hurt like a bitch, after, but I hoped it hurt him even more.
I heard him groan, sitting up some, so I could breathe, finally, and then the telltale smacking of his lips. Had I drawn blood? Was he tasting it?
"Ow," he said. "That wasn't very nice."
I arched underneath him, trying to displace some of his weight. "Get off me—"
"So impetuous," he chided. I felt like a scolded child. He leaned over me again, forcing me down, one hand on my waist, the other closing over the back of my neck, cupping my spine, forcing my head down into the cushions so I couldn't repeat my earlier performance. I tried to breathe in and out. In and out. But all I smelled was sweat. His unwashed hair. The overwhelming stench of blackened smoke. "Why are you so worked up, hm? Is it because you know I'm right? Did I hit a nerve?"
"You don't know anything," I spat, venom in my voice. My blood was so fever-hot, it felt like it'd been spiked with poison, like I would burn from the inside out.
"Don't I?"
His hands were rucking my nightgown up my back, and I gasped when I felt him smear something warm and wet on my skin—maybe the blood from his mouth? I hope I chipped one of his teeth when I hit him. He deserved it.
I tried to pay attention, tried figure out what he was drawing, but I kept thinking about what he'd said. Just the right amount of force….
Isn't that exactly what had happened to me? Hadn't I snapped after finally having been pushed to the brink? Were we all really just one bad day away from embracing our true selves? Were we really all inherently evil? Were we all just waiting for someone like the Joker to come along to show us our true colors?
My dad was one of those stalwart, Christian men who believed in God and guns, and his constitutional right to defend both in equal measure. Mom was having her Fourth of July picnic she hosted every year, the one that drew the whole congregation, and, as was tradition, some of my dad's friends brought over their gun paraphernalia to set up shop in the woods behind the house, where there was a makeshift gun range just down the hill, beyond the creek bed. It was a dry summer, so the creek was little more than a trickle. I remember that detail because when Mason's dead body crumpled into it, he barely made more than a splash.
Maybe it sounded crazy to an outsider, but this was life for us in the backwoods county where I'd spent my entire life growing up. This was normal. I'd been raised knowing how to load and fire a gun, how to set my shoulders back, how to plant my legs into the earth. Dad kept the guns in one of those massive fire-proof safes in his office. I didn't know the four-digit code to get in, but I knew he kept a Ruger LC9 under the bed—his side, of course, not my mom's.
Mason and I were middle school sweethearts. Friends since grade school, when he'd given me a concussion during recess. He was a mean boy like that, always a little too rough, too aggressive, but I liked him—I think even back then, I had a proclivity for violence, for things that I knew weren't good for me. I'd always hungered for things that hurt. I had a taste for scar tissue and scabs, broken ribs and yellow bruises that took months to heal. I wore all of these flesh-wounds proudly, carried them like badges of honor, or some secret rite of passage.
I think maybe, deep down, I was just eager to prove my worth to my dad. He never said, but I think he'd always wanted a boy. All men do. Mom couldn't get pregnant again after me, and I think she resented me for that, like I'd broken her after I'd come out of the womb. I often wondered if maybe I did; maybe I wasn't ever really supposed to be here.
When I was little, I used to kneel at my bed and beg God to take me back, rebirth me into a little boy instead. I just wanted to make my parents happy.
Mason epitomized the fantasy I held in my mind of what boyhood was supposed to look like. He was strong, and tough, and fast. He had that easy confidence about him that girls could never had. He was everything I wanted to be.
My attraction to him, at first, was confusing. I wasn't sure if I wanted to be him or be with him. But I got my answer when he pinned me down beneath the bleachers in third grade and thrust his tongue in my mouth, groped my nothing-tits and told me I was pretty.
Our relationship became very physical, very fast. Mason knew my upbringing—he went to church every Sunday, too, even though it was a different one—but he wasn't plagued with the same religious guilt that I felt, the way I was so guilty all the time because of all the nasty, indecent things we would do. Dad would have killed him, if he'd known.
It was kissing and heavy petting in grade school, but during freshmen year, it escalated even further, and I would find myself kneeling in the woods behind the football field, trying to take his cock into the back of my throat, my eyes watering so bad I could barely see. Sometimes I would ask him to stop and he just wouldn't, threading his hands in my hair, tugging me closer even though I choked, telling me I could take it, and didn't I want to make him happy? Sometimes he'd spit in my mouth after and call me a slut, but I chalked it up to him play-acting some fantasy, and he'd hook his arm around my waist in the halls at school and parade me around like I was the best girl ever.
I should have ended things then, but I didn't.
We were each other's firsts for everything, and he was good at touching me in the backseat of the little Honda Civic my parents had gotten for me during my junior year. I liked when he put his mouth on me and groaned, sending vibrations up inside me that I felt slithering all the way to the tips of my fingers and toes. We had sex for the first time when I was only fifteen. It hurt, and I cried. But it got easier after a while, and I came to the startling realization that I liked it when he was rough. Maybe, subconsciously, I felt like I deserved it. Like I deserved to be punished for not being a boy, for not being what my parents had wanted me to be.
That was around the same time I started skirting curfew, going to parties I shouldn't have, wearing the kind of clothes I knew a Christian girl shouldn't wear. I wasn't a wild-child by any means, and the most trouble I ever got in was when one of the parties I'd been at got busted by the cops, and Deputy Merrill, who went to our church, escorted me home in the back of his cruiser. He deposited me onto my own doorstep at two AM, my mom and dad staring at me in my ripped, hip-hugger jeans and my crop top like I'd personally invoked Satan and invited him to preside inside my body. I was grounded for a month, but Mason would still find ways to sneak in, climbing through my bedroom window on the second floor, fucking me so hard into my mattress it was a miracle my parents didn't hear.
When we graduated, we planned to attend the same university upstate. He was getting a degree in business—God knows why, because we all knew he was going to work at the logging mill when he was done, just like everybody in Maychester County did—and I pursued a degree in education. I wanted to teach first grade, just like my mom, and I knew I could get a position at the elementary school when I finished.
Mason had changed a lot during our time together, and his parents went through a really nasty divorce during junior year that tore him apart. I could tell the effect it was having on him, the way he wanted sex more often—we were already going at it a couple of times a week—and the positions he wanted me in. It felt degrading, the way he'd push me to the floor and take me from behind, pounding into me like I was just a sack of flesh, an empty receptacle, rather than his girlfriend of almost nine years.
It was when the violence extended beyond sex that I started to worry. Mason had always been a little bit of a hothead at times, a trait he said he'd inherited from his daddy, but it worsened as he got older, and the first time he hit me—slapping me across the face in my own kitchen, when my parents weren't home—I knew things would never be the same. He immediately apologized after, and my face scrunched up with ugly tears and I started to cry. He wrapped his arms around my shoulders and whispered how sorry he was. I think maybe he was crying too, and I felt bad for him, wondering how his anger could be strong enough to inspire him to such cruelty.
But it didn't stop there.
The hitting became more frequent, and so did the screaming matches. We'd fight over the dumbest stuff, like how I was going to live in a dorm with my friend Joanna, and how he wanted me off campus instead so that he'd be able to come over whenever he wanted so we could fuck. It was stupid. Trivial. It always was.
The worst part was that nobody saw the abuse but me. Nobody knew about his moodswings, his affinity for violence, the way he got when he was drunk, which was another nasty habit he'd picked up after his parents' divorce. His daddy—a police chief in a neighboring county—used to beat on his mom before the divorce, and sometimes I wonder if Mason got it from him. My dad had never laid a finger on my mom, so I knew it wasn't something that all men did, but I wondered if violence was something that inherently lived inside all men, or if it just bedded itself down inside certain ones. I'd seen the way my dad would get riled up about politics or sports, and sometimes he'd slam a door or smack a fist down on the table with enough force to make the dishes rattle, but he was never violent towards me or my mom.
You have to understand how bad it was, Mason's blossoming violence. I was so scared of him sometimes, walking around on eggshells, finding excuses to put off sex.
We'd just graduated that spring, and it was supposed to be our last summer before university in the fall. The day of the Fourth, we got into a huge fight. Per the request of my mom, we'd gone to the supermarket to pick up those big bags of ice for the open coolers my mom planned to have out on the back deck. Mason had one of those clear bags of ice slung over his shoulders like a dead animal, the way I'd seen him carry deer out of the woods when he'd go hunting with his daddy.
We were walking through the parking lot towards his pickup truck, which he'd parked what felt like a mile away, just so he could leave it beneath the shade of one of those small trees they plant inside the concrete dividers. I think I resented him in that moment for parking so far away, making us trudge through the hot, stinking black asphalt—freshly paved—carrying such heavy bags of ice. I was carrying mine like a baby, trying to cradle it in the crook of both arms, but it weighed a ton, and it was slippery.
"Why did you tell that girl at the checkout that you haven't decided on a school yet?" he asked me, and I was too dumb to downplay it as something else. Maybe I'd wanted to antagonize him.
"I don't know," I mumbled. Sweat was beading along my forehead and I was sweating hard through the pits of my shirt. I'd have to change when I got home, which annoyed me. "I was just saying it isn't written in stone yet. There are a lot of better programs out there than—"
"What are you talking about?" Mason stopped point-blank in the parking lot, and it forced me to slow my steps too, even though all I wanted was to put down this heavy bag in the bed of his truck and finally rest my arms.
"Do we have to talk about this now?" I whined. The truth was, I had been looking at other schools. Some of them farther north, some of them out of state. I thought maybe some distance between us would do us some good. I didn't want to break up—he was my best friend, and I loved him, I did—but I knew we needed some time apart. I felt like I was starting to unravel. I imagined myself as a big spool of thread that had been left to roll across an infinite length of floor. Eventually I'd run out of yarn, and then there would be nothing more of me left. I didn't know how much more of his abuse I could take. It was wearing me down, and it was getting hard to explain where all the bruises were coming from. You could only claim the "fell down the stairs" excuse so many times before people started to get suspicious.
"You're damn right we have to talk about this now," he said. He stalked towards me, readjusting his bag of ice, and then angrily snatched my own from my arms. My shirt was wet from where it had melted against my belly. I followed after him towards the truck, where he slammed both bags of ice down so hard that one of them tore in half.
"Jesus," I said, watching as ice cubes spilled all over the pavement, melting instantly. "What's wrong with you?"
"Are you seriously asking me that after just dropping that bombshell on me? You're thinking about going to a different school and you didn't even bother to tell me?
"I was gonna tell you!"
"Yeah? When?"
"I don't know! I just needed some time to think everything over first. I promise I was going to tell you—"
"Riley, you are so full of shit sometimes, I swear to God…"
He slammed the flap of the trunk door back up, and it made me jump. I crossed my arms and glanced into the expanse of parking lot behind us, looking beyond the blurry mirages of heat wafting above the pavement, wondering if anybody else had witnessed our screaming match.
There was an old lady staring at us from across the parking lot in her handicapped spot near the entrance, and I turned away from her with a sigh, squinting at Mason, having to lift a hand to my forehead to shield my eyes from the sun.
"We'll need another bag of ice," I said, after a long beat of silence had passed.
"I'll wait," Mason snapped. He glared at me, and then rounded to the driver's side, the car door slamming behind him.
I rolled my eyes and stomped back into the store, hating his guts, thinking about how fucking childish he was, how he'd already ruined this day for me.
The car ride was silent. Back at the house, where most of the guests had already arrived, Mason acted like nothing had happened, smiling at everybody, helping my dad with the grill, chasing some of the little kids around the yard until they screamed and collapsed into a pile of giggles in the grass. He was good with kids, when he wanted to be. I had always liked that about him. Now it just made me nauseous to think about how he could be so nice to everyone but me.
Later on in the afternoon, after a late lunch, when everyone was sated and nursing their full bellies, lounging in various areas around the house—in lawn chairs on the back patio, inside the living room with mom, near the front of the house outside the garage where there were some games set up for the kids—I decided to follow Mason down into the shooting range. I watched him from the top of the hill for a few moments, where he was pacing around, tinkering with some of the targets. Mom's old frying pans were my favorite targets. I liked it when they swung on the rope me and Dad had hung them on, and then going down there to see the aftermath, tracing my fingertips over the smooth edges of the bullet holes. It was satisfying to see something so sturdy, so impenetrable, with holes of light bleeding through its center.
I crossed the little slab of wood my dad had laid down to act as a makeshift bridge over the creek bed, and I knew Mason could hear me approach, my shoes crunching over dead leaves. It was peaceful back here, quiet. No one could see us. There was chittering birdsong, and a thick canopy of trees overhead, blocking out most of the sun, so it wasn't as hot as it was in the backyard. We had spent a lot of hours here playing as kids—and as horny teenagers—and there was an old deer stand farther back that we had climbed into and made out in one time. Everything was lush and green and cool back here, and I loved it. My own sanctuary.
"Hey, you feel like shooting a couple of rounds?" I offered, standing behind him. I knew from years of experience that I was going to have to be the one to thaw my anger first. Mason could ice me out for weeks.
He whirled on me, and I was surprised to see how angry he was. "What the fuck is wrong with you?" he snarled.
I stared at him, taken aback. "What?"
"What's wrong with you? You've been acting weird for months. Always coming up with excuses for why you can't hang out, or why you can't have sex—"
"We just had sex yesterday!"
"You know what I'm talking about." He stepped closer to me, and I suddenly felt afraid of him here, alone, in the woods, these woods I used to find so comforting. "Are you trying to break up with me?"
"Mason—no," I said. "That's not what this is about." I took a slow breath. Steeled myself for the inevitable truth. He deserved at least that much from me. "It's just—you scare me sometimes, okay?" My voice quivered, and I hope he wouldn't notice. "You've been so… volatile—" I chose that word carefully, "—since your parents divorced, and it's been—"
"You're really going to blame my parents?" He gaped at me. "Fucking Christ, Riley. You're such a piece of work sometimes."
I took a step back, placed a hand on my chest. "I'm not blaming them! I—"
"Save it. Whatever you're going to say, just save it." When he stepped forward, I instinctively took a step back, but his hand was around my throat before I could move out of reach, and it was the most scared of him I'd ever been. He'd never done this before. My eyes were wide, terrified, but he didn't apply pressure, just held me there, tilting my head up, so I was forced to crane my neck to look at him. "You're gonna come to school with me, like we planned, you're gonna live off campus—like we talked about—and then when we graduate, we're gonna move right back here, and we're gonna get married, and buy a house, and do all that other shit we talked about. Why are you trying to ruin everything?"
His fingers around my throat were tightening the longer he talked, and my mouth parted as I could feel my windpipe narrowing.
"Mason, you're—you're hurting me," I gasped.
I don't know how much longer it went on for before he finally released my throat, but it was apparently long enough that it had me gasping for breath after, falling to my knees in the dirt and leaves and clutching at my throat as I desperately sucked in air.
Tears burned my eyes, but I stubbornly wiped them away with the back of my forearm when they started to fall. It took me a moment before I could stand. My legs were trembling.
"If you act up like that again, I might not be as nice next time," he said, tossing the threat coolly over his shoulder.
His words gutted me. My heart felt void—empty—like he'd stabbed a dagger straight through it and drained all the blood from it, bled the chambers dry, dissected the valves. There was nothing there but a hollowed out shell of dead muscle.
I felt like screaming at him. I felt like crying. I felt like throwing a tantrum. I felt like breaking up with him. I felt like holding him in my arms and begging him to tell me how we could fix this. How I could get back the sweet boy who used to tuck love letters inside my locker every day, who used to sit behind me and braid my hair in history class instead of taking notes. The boy who, on every anniversary, presented me with a certificate from the national star registry, where he had proudly named another star after me. The boy who had told me he wouldn't stop until there was a whole constellation of stars with my name on them.
I watched him turn away from me, and I couldn't think straight. I didn't know what to do. I didn't want this Mason anymore. I wanted my old Mason.
I walked fast over the wooden slab of bridge, back up the hill. I just needed to get out of here. I wanted to tell my mom, and I especially wanted to tell my dad, who had been side-eyeing me for months at the dinner table, watching my bruises change color only to re-blossom a few weeks later. I'm not sure if he knew. Maybe he was just waiting for me to come to him, but I wanted him to take care of this. I wanted him to sit down with Mason and talk to him, set him straight in a way I never could. Man to man, or whatever. That's what I wanted.
At least, that's what I thought I wanted. But when I stood on top of the hill and looked back down to find Mason standing near the edge of the creek, staring at nothing, I felt angry all over again.
Who would believe me, really? That was the problem. Mason was the perfect boy. He got along with everybody. He was holding down a job at the hardware store and did handyman jobs all around town. He'd graduated with honors. He went to church. He was the son of a respected police chief. He'd been with the same girl since third grade. Everyone who knew us knew we would get married. We were supposed to be one of those forever couples, the ones who held hands in the nursing home and were interviewed about their secrets for a successful marriage.
I can hardly remember taking the gun in my hands. I knew it was a shotgun—one of my dad's—because the texture of the barrel was so smooth and familiar in my hands as I stroked my hand over it. And the wooden stock felt right as I fit it beneath my collarbone, bracing it against my shoulder like I'd been taught. I don't remember what I was thinking. I don't remembered if I'd just wanted to scare him or if I'd wanted to hurt him. Maybe both. But I didn't want to kill him. I didn't.
The gunshot was ear-splitting, but afterwards I heard nothing, not even my own bloodrush in my ears, and it was as if all sound just ceased to exist entirely. Mason's body crumpled like nothing I'd ever seen. It was sickening, the way he was standing there one minute and then the next was not, lying face down in the sandy creek bed.
I dropped the gun. I screamed.
Everyone came running. I was inconsolable. Blubbering. It was an accident, I sobbed. It was an accident. I repeated it like a mantra, saying it over and over and over again. Maybe I thought the more times I said it, the more I would actually start to believe it.
There were no Fourth of July fireworks that night. Not for miles.
Yanking myself from this painful memory was almost impossible, but I managed it, the Joker's shifting weight behind me bringing me back.
How did he possibly expect me to tell him all of this? What did he get from this? Did he just want to humiliate me? See me cry?
"Y'know," he said, "we can do this one of two ways—"
"Save your spiel," I grunted, trying to shift underneath him. I just wanted him off of me. It felt too much like him. Like Mason. "I swear if you don't get off me in five seconds, I'm gonna break your spine."
The Joker hummed, a low, guttural sound, something that surprised me when it made heat simmer in my lower belly. Made the place between my thighs throb.
"Ooh," he cooed. "I just knew my girl was capable of such violence." He sounded pleased by this, but then a moment later, he was yanking my head back, gripping my hair with a force that made me cry out. "But don't threaten me again."
He let me up after that, and I scrambled to pull my nightgown back down. I felt like a newborn colt as I stood from the couch, my knees knocking together. I had to brace a hand against the side table next to the couch to gather my bearings. Steady myself.
When I looked up, he was staring at me. Grinning.
"Well?"
A part of me was afraid to tell him. What was he going to do with the information? Would he find some way to tell my coworkers? The police? Would I go to jail? Could they even prove that it hadn't been an accident, after all these years? Nobody knew the truth, nobody but my dad, I suspected, and he'd never said a word, not even to my mom, as far as I knew. We had exchanged a glance, once—my dad and I—some months afterwards, when I was numb to the world and barely coherent. He had taught me the ins-and-outs of gun safety well enough to know that it couldn't have been an accident. But I don't think he thought I was a killer, either. He didn't turn me into the police. Didn't hang me out to dry.
The other part of me—the one that secretly longed to unearth the weight of this burden, this memory that lived inside me like a big ball a chain, permanently tethering me to my guilt—that part of me wanted to tell him. I wanted the Joker to know.
"Everyone thinks they're the hero in their own story," he said, and I didn't even realize he was behind me until his breath was on my neck, and he was leaning in too close, and I drew my shoulders up to my ears out of protective instinct. "But not you. You know you're the monster, don't you?"
Tears stung behind my eyes again, and I squeezed them shut, feeling his breath wafting over my neck.
"It—it was an accident," I gasped. "I'm not like you."
"Now, now." The Joker's breath was curling over my neck, lighting up the nerve-endings along my spine. I could feel the heavy warmth from his body as he crowded himself around me, pressing himself into my back. "We both know that's not true."
I swallowed, knowing he'd tear this truth from me one way or another, knowing it'd be painful. Unbearable. A vivisection of all my most secret, intimate parts.
"You show me your secrets, and I'll show you mine," he said. There was almost something seductive about the way he said it. He didn't have to say it, didn't have to offer something of himself in return, but the idea of him sharing some secret piece of himself was tantalizing, and I wanted to know the man behind the mask—needed to know.
I stepped away from him, forcing myself to walk the short distance to the hallway leading to my bedroom, and then craned my neck to look at him from over my shoulder. I tried to veil the quiver in my voice.
"Are you coming?"
Author's Notes: I'm still determined to finish this story, but I also plan to do a little cleaning up of old chapters, if I can, so don't be surprised if you start seeing some changes, or even entire chapters disappear. Also, I wrote this chapter entirely in one sitting, and I'm quite proud of that. It's gone through very minimal editing, so I hope it's up to par!
If you're still out there, I'd love to hear from you. I'm not really sure if anybody is still wanting to see this story continued. Feedback is much appreciated and help keeps me going. Thank you all so much for reading and for your time!