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“Can I ask you something?”
Alice glanced up, eyes coming to land on the man whose lap her legs were currently draped over. Such a domestic position, so unlike anything she had ever imagined herself doing, and yet with him it felt perfectly natural.
“Well you can ask,” she smiled coyly, one brow twitching slightly. “But I can’t guarantee an answer.” Even now, together and living by the coast, she couldn’t make it too easy for him. Given the low chuckle she received in response, he expected no less.
“When we first met,” John started, a small crease forming in his brow. “You said you’d matured very early. Sexually.”
“Yes, I did,” Alice nodded, recalling the conversation very well. How could she forget it? It had been in that very interview that John Luther had first caught her attention, though she could never have foreseen where that interest would take her.
Realising that she wasn’t going to say any more unless he prompted her, John continued on.
“What did you mean by that?” Though he was still frowning, there was a softness in his eyes. A genuine concern for her and whatever she may have been through. It was enough to set off a small fluttering in Alice’s chest, a feeling that had once been so foreign and yet had started to become frighteningly familiar in the time she had known John.
“Exactly what it sounds like,” she shrugged, her tone as casual as if she was responding to a question about the weather. John had broken through a lot of her walls, but there were still plenty still standing.
“Alice.” Brown eyes locked on blue, silently asking her to say more. As much as John wanted to know the answer though, he wouldn’t push her. Whatever had happened, it was up to Alice to decide when she was ready to tell her story. Besides, he knew better than to try and force her hand. If she chose to brush the subject under the carpet he would accept it; the choice was entirely hers, and she knew that.
Alice remained quiet for a moment, her face a perfect, unreadable mask, concealing the thoughts running through her mind. Her expression didn’t change even as she glanced away, training her eyes on some object of nothingness in the corner of the room. The silence stretched on a beat longer before she spoke.
“Like you noted at the time,” she started. “I was thirteen, my classmates were all around twenty. No friends my age.” How different her life could have been if her parents hadn’t pushed her. Exceedingly clever as she might have been, they could have allowed her to stay in school. Perhaps she would have been bored, but at least she would have had people of her own age around her, even if she was far more intellectually advanced than any of them. “It was quite lonely. The others would talk among themselves, thinking how strange it was to have a child in their class. I don’t know whether they thought I couldn’t hear them or simply didn’t care that I could. Either way, I knew that I had to grow up if I wanted them to accept me. So I did.” It was almost laughable now to think how she had wanted their approval. Their friendship.
“I did my research, found people who could help me, and I had my first fake ID before I even turned fourteen. I started showing up at the clubs and bars I knew my classmates frequented, my clothes and makeup done just right to make me look old enough that the bouncers rarely questioned my age. The bartenders were a bit trickier, but I quickly learned how to sweettalk men into buying me a drink or two.” It had been quite simple really; a flutter of eyelashes, a tilt of her head, a little bit of a smile, taking advantage of their lust-addled brains.
“My classmates started to pay attention to me, and eventually they started inviting me to sit with them. Even asking me to join them when they were planning their nights out. I was still the odd one out of course, but at least I was included.” For once, she’d felt almost like she belonged among her peers. “Then one Thursday night, not too long after I turned fourteen, we were all out for drinks. I started to feel a bit tipsy so one of the boys, Paul, offered to walk me back to campus. We lived in the same halls, so when we got back we just hung out in the common room for a bit. It was the first time I’d really spent any time alone with someone and it was… it was nice. It felt like I finally had a friend.” Like there hadn’t been seven, nearly eight years difference between them. Like she wasn’t still practically a child, and him a legal adult.
“Some of the others came back a little while later and joined us for an hour or so before finally heading to their rooms. Paul and I stayed a bit longer, and at some point during our conversation he leaned in and kissed me.” First kisses were something a lot of people could look back on and smile about, but not Alice. “It seemed to come out of nowhere but I didn’t mind. I quite liked it.” She wasn’t talking about the kiss itself, though she supposed it had been adequate enough, but about the acceptance and belonging she had felt. Or rather, believed she felt. How naïve she had been. “We talked for a bit longer after that and then he offered to walk me back to my room.” So naïve. So very, very naïve.
John didn’t need her to say any more to know what happened next, and his chest ached. He had suspected it had been something like that from the moment Alice mentioned it in their interview, but it didn’t make the confirmation any easier to hear.
“You know the funny thing is,” Alice continued, the slightest hint of a humorless chuckle in a tone that had, up until then, seemed completely disconnected from the whole story. “I hadn’t had any more to drink on that night than I had any other night. And yet, somehow, I was considerably more drunk than I had ever been.”
Of course the bastard had drugged her. John knew it and, despite her casual use of the word ‘somehow’, he knew that Alice knew it too. She was too clever not to; he’d wager she’d figured it out the next day, probably even sooner.
“Alice-“
“Don’t.” She cut him off, eyes finally pulling away from the void they’d been staring into as she told her story and meeting his once more. “Don’t pity me.”
“I won’t.” Alice was a great many things, but pitiful was not one of them. She was a strong and capable woman, forged in fire. Imperfect, unquestionably flawed, but resilient. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t be sorry for what you went through.”
“Nothing to be sorry about,” she shrugged, the neutrality returning to her voice. She may have reached a point in her life where she was allowing herself to feel certain things, such as her love for John, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t still suppressing a hell of a lot of others. “It was a wake-up call. Both what he did and the fact that not a single one of my classmates bothered to check in and see why I wasn’t in classes the following day. He told them all what we’d done, though of course he acted as though it had been consensual. They were happy to believe him. I suppose it was easier than letting themselves acknowledge what he really was.”
“And you were okay with that?”
“I refused to be a victim. I knew that even if I spoke up and people believed me, it would change the way they looked at me and not in a good way. So I chose to keep quiet. I went along with his story, and I took control of the situation. I changed the state of play.”
Gone was the naïve little girl her peers had first met, and as the time went by she learned how to play each and every one of them. The boys were simplest, their foolish hormones making them easy prey once they knew sex was on offer. The girls took a bit more effort, although there had certainly been a few sexual experiments there too. For the most part though, it had all come down to pretending to play the caring friend; offering a shoulder to cry on as they sobbed about finding out their boyfriends had been texting other girls or whatever other ridiculous crap they seemed to think was worth their tears. Alice never had any real sympathy for them, but she had got very good at pretending she did.
“Did you… you know.” The question was obvious: had she killed them?
“No.” Her lips twitched up slightly, a quiet chuckle sounding in her throat. She didn’t take offence at what he was asking; it was a fair question considering who she was, and in all honesty she would have been surprised if he didn’t ask. After all, they had first met when she had killed her own parents, and she’d added another few bodies to her count since then. “I won’t lie and say I never considered it, but no. I found other ways to get back at them.” In playing her game, she had become a confidant to several of them, trusted with their deepest and darkest secrets. Of course she had learned things that she couldn’t expose without them being traced back to her, but it was hardly her fault if Jessica Green’s boyfriends suddenly found out about each other, or if a teacher discovered that Lucas Wyman had been cheating in exams. Even at fourteen, Alice had been cunning, every move carefully planned. No one had ever realized she was behind anything, and on more than one occasion she had even ended up being the one they cried to after being caught out. She played her part perfectly, feigning sympathy whilst masterfully hiding the smirk of satisfaction. There was no need to hide that smirk in front of John though. He knew who she was, the things she had done and the things she was capable of doing, and yet still he chose to be with her. That was acceptance. Not the kind she’d deluded herself into believing she had at thirteen, but real and true. It was, and this was the part she could hardly believe, love. It wasn’t something she’d ever felt before, not for anyone and not from anyone, not even her parents, and yet she knew without a doubt that’s exactly what it was. Love.
Pure, unconditional love.