The Hate Vow by Nicole French

Twenty-Five

“Jane!” Eric shouted, his footsteps thumping over the grass after me. “JANE!”

No. The voice inside whispered, yet somehow was louder than the sobs I could no longer stop. I swiped viciously at the tears, kicking off my shoes so I could run. The party—the lights, the music, the cackling voices—fell away as I approached the beach, diving into the narrow path that ran through two grassy dunes toward the open ocean. The paint on my dress dripped all down my legs and my feet. I looked like the victim of some heinous crime. Maybe like a woman who had just had a miscarriage, or suffered something even worse.

Penny in the tub.

I had never seen what the girl looked like when she ended her life, of course, but I’d imagined it plenty of times after Eric told me. Too late, I wondered if this was all a threat. Harbingers of things to come if I continued to sully this world with my messy, imperfect existence.

Either way, I was a disaster. Anything but the impeccable vision of pristine, perfect white the evening was supposed to be. I didn’t belong here.

“What are you doing out here?” I cried over my shoulder, though I didn’t stay for an answer.

I didn’t want Eric anywhere near me. I could easily picture him, storming behind me in his linen that never wrinkled, hair perfectly combed. Eric. Mr. Poise. Mr. Together. He was everything I wasn’t.

“Go!” I cried, flapping my hands at him as I ran. “Go dance with your Lucy. Go back to those people. Go back to where you belong!”

But he didn’t listen. His feet pounded through the sand, urging me in front of him. So I kept on. Past a rickety white fence marking the path through the dunes. Past the rows of driftwood swept in from previous storms. I ran clumsily, kicking up sand until I reached my goal and pelted straight into the water.

“Goddammit, Jane!”

Eric’s voice was broken, and I glanced behind me for just a second to find him dancing along the shore as the ocean crashed in front of him. I had long since lost my other contact lens, and now he was a blurry mess as he started taking off his shoes, hurling them, along with his jacket, onto the dry sand behind him.

I turned back to the waves. Everything seeped into everything else. Even me.

“Fuck! Jane, WAIT!”

No, I thought as I floundered farther into the chilly ocean. If this would keep him away, I’d do it. I didn’t care about the fact that the salty Atlantic was ruining yards of gorgeous fabric. That red was spilling out from the skirt like ribbons of blood or that the new black dye would probably run off my scalp in torrents. Every part of me was basically being robbed by the ocean. And it could have it. I didn’t care anymore.

Was this what Penny had felt like? She had done this for years, not months. How many times had she been sabotaged this way? High school…college. She and Eric had been together a long time. I wondered vaguely if she had only considered suicide after they got engaged, or if it had started before then. If these people only let their crazy out when their property was truly threatened.

The ocean came up to my chest, pulling hard, splashing on all sides. For a second…just a second…I wondered if I should let it take me too.

“Jane!”

Just as I reached the edge of the sandbar, my arm was grabbed from behind, and I was jerked back. Eric found his footing and pulled me close, anger splashed across his beautiful face right along with the surf. His shirt and pants were ruined as well, the pure, wet white completely transparent in the night. His five-o’clock shadow glimmered under the starlight.

“Oh, God,” I whimpered as I crumpled against him. He was so warm, a solid island in this frigid sea. “Why? Why did you follow me out here? Did you come to see me fall to pieces too?”

The anger melted off Eric’s face, but instead of being replaced by his normally cool mask, all I saw was sorrow. Pity. I hated it.

“I’m sorry,” he called over the surf. “I’m sorry I ever brought you here. You don’t deserve this. What those jackals did to you. I’m sorry I ever asked you to do any of this, Jane.”

His regret, his utter realization that I was so wrong for this place in spite of what he said earlier, broke me even more. The sobs crashed through me right along with the surf, and I fell backward into the waves.

“Jane!”

Eric dove after me, catching me under my back and lifting me above water. When we emerged again, we were both soaking, our white finery pasted onto our bodies, a watery parody of silk and linen.

“Let me go!” I screamed. “I don’t want to do this anymore! I don’t want to be a sideshow! Some freak your family will titter about over Manhattans for the next twenty years. Some fucking lark for you while you’re presiding over your fucking company! You can take your twenty million and shove it because I’m done!”

“Is that what you think I’m going to do?” Eric yelled. “You really think that’s what I think of you?”

“I don’t know what you think of me anymore,” I sobbed. “You’re so hot and cold. You’re nice one day, and like an ice cube the next. But you were straight with me from the beginning, Eric. You asked me to do this because I’d piss off your family, and I can take the abuse, right? Well, turns out you were only right about one of those things. Because I’m not fucking cut out for the other. I’m just not!”

“That’s fucking it.” When I tried to turn away, he reached out and grabbed my wrists, holding me in place so I couldn’t run. “Listen to me, goddammit!”

My face turned from side to side, a pathetic headshake. He shook my arms right back.

“Jane,” he said. “Jane, look at me!”

His voice commanded me to stop. And damn me…I did as he ordered.

His gray eyes were big. So open. So wide.

“Why do you think I call you pretty girl, Jane?” he asked. “Why?”

The tears poured. The ocean and I were one. I could feel nothing else.

“I don’t know,” I wept. “I never knew. Was it a joke? I know what we look like together. We are the oddest couple in the entire fucking world. The freak and the playboy. It’s like pairing Jackson Pollock and Leonardo da Vinci; e.e. cummings and Shakespeare.”

“But it’s all still art, Jane. It’s all still poetry.”

I shook my head. “It’s too different. We’re too different. I’m not good enough for this world, Eric. For—for you.”

In my mind’s eye, I could see my father shaking his head. He would have never allowed me to talk like this.

Oh, Daddy, I thought. Where are you now?

“Goddammit,” Eric said again between rough, harsh kisses that scraped up and down my neck. “You never fucking listen, do you? You never see what’s in front of your fucking eyes.”

“My eyes? My eyes?” I laughed, the sound choked. “Do you not see what I did for you tonight?”

I yanked on his hair, forcing him to look down at me. His expression razed everything.

“Look at you,” I continued. “You’re perfect. You’re so beautiful. But me…there’s too much ugly in my pretty.”

“If that’s really what you thought, you haven’t been paying attention,” Eric cut back with a face full of fire.

“Wh-what?” I asked, disbelieving.

“I call you pretty girl,” he said slowly, “because you’re fucking magnificent, Jane. The best things in the world aren’t perfect. The most beautiful things have a little bit of dirt.”

“Stop.” Every touch of his was splintering through me. Every word shattered.

But he didn’t stop. Instead, he framed my face with his big hands, diving deep with his stormy eyes and holding me still. “I call you pretty girl because you’ve always been a work of art to me.”

I searched his face for evidence of a joke, anger, something that would show me that truth I knew to my core: that he was lying. That he had never thought of me that way and never would.

I was nothing to him. A bit of fun, right? Just a challenge, entertainment at best.

But there was no sign of anything other than concern. Adoration. Maybe even…love?

He pulled me closer, dragging me through the water, and bent down.

“D-don’t,” I whispered.

“No,” he said, his voice somehow low, but still thundering over the surf. “I’m done respecting your fucking boundaries when it comes to this. You want to walk away from me after tonight, Jane, fine. I won’t come after you. But I’m not letting you go without telling you in no uncertain terms that I’m in love with you. I’m crazy about you. I knew the second you walked into that fucking bar, all the way back when we were practically just kids, that you were the only one for me.”

I shook my head, teeth chattering. “N-no. It’s not true.”

“It is true. You stunned me then. You stun me now. You’ll stun me every day for the rest of my life, because it’s not what’s on the outside that does it, Jane. It’s what’s in here. You’re not just my pretty girl. You’re the most beautiful fucking person I know, inside and out. And I love you. I never stopped.”

My mouth dropped. I hadn’t dared hope for those words for years, and now here he was, saying them out loud. And I couldn’t believe it. “No, you c-can’t.”

Eric’s face was fire. “Don’t tell me what I can’t do.”

And then he kissed me again. Despite the cold water washing over us both, the kiss burned, through the waves, through my clothes, down to my toes that were starting to numb, to my fingers that began to wrinkle. It was a kiss that seared straight to my soul, branding me the way that only Eric de Vries could ever do.

I kissed him back. I did more than kiss him back. I opened myself to him for the first time in years—maybe ever—letting him inside not just my heart, but my soul too with every biting, nipping, tongue-deep kiss we gave, awash in each other just like the waves all around us.

“Come,” Eric said after he had taken his fill again and again. And before I could answer, he bent down and slipped a hand under my knees and swept me into his arms to carry me back to the beach.

“Seriously?” I joked, unable to help myself even though I was still hiccupping through my tears. “We’re going to damsel-in-distress this moment? I can walk, you know.”

“Jane,” he said, not yelling, but not particularly gentle either. “Shut up.”

So I did, while he carried me out of the water, hoofed us both back up to the beach while streams of water fell from my drenched clothes. The red paint blended onto his immaculate whites, turning us both aglow in rosy pink to match our chilled skin.

In our frenzy we had been washed at least a hundred feet down the beach. The party glowed in the distance, but we were out here alone with nothing but the stars and the ocean to witness this moment.

“Come here,” Eric said as he dropped to his knees, laying me carefully down on the hard, semi-wet sand, just a foot or two from where the surf washed up around us.

“Are you going From Here to Eternity on me, de Vries?” I teased, though I feared he would say no. I felt so fragile I would break if he even took one step away.

“Hush,” he said as he covered my mouth again, then reached down and literally tore my skirt apart, one wrenching rip up the center so that I was bared to him completely from the waist down.

“I need you,” he said. “Every fucking inch of you, pretty girl. No arguments.”

His words, seemingly cold and harsh, were naked with their truth. He didn’t just want me. He needed me. Like, I realized, I needed him.

“If that’s how it’s going to be,” I said as I fingered his sopping wet shirt, “then it’s my turn too.”

I grabbed the collar of his shirt with both hands. Eric met me with another bruising kiss. I bit his lip. He groaned. And I tore his designer shirt open, scattering buttons into the sand.

“Fuck!” he shouted as he collapsed over me, his desire throbbing through his wet clothes. His fingers dug into my hips as he ripped my underwear off, and he bent, burying his face between my legs.

“Jane,” he breathed. And then he feasted.

“Ahh!” I cried toward the sky as his tongue began to explore. He devoured me like a starving man, licking and sucking, teasing that most sensitive spot, lifting my hips to him as if I were being served on a platter. I arched back, taking his sweet torture. The world was open and wide around us, and yet I could sense nothing but this moment, his touch, his mouth,

And then, I couldn’t take it anymore. I needed more than just one part of him. I needed all of him.

I shoved hard on his shoulders. He fought it for a moment, wanting to continue his work. But then he sat up, eyes gleaming, full mouth glistening.

“Come here,” I ordered, pulling on the soaked tie that still collared him in spite of his open shirt.

“Don’t tell me what to do,” he snapped again, but covered me nonetheless. My hands slipped all over his dripping wet chest, his body glistening under the moon. Eric was a star, shining in the dark.

“Eric,” I whispered, unable to think anything else but his name.

“Come here,” he whispered, “my pretty, luminous, fucking beautiful girl.”

He reached down and released his cock, hard and long against my thigh. And before I could say anything else, he slid home, filling me completely with his light, his love. With all of himself.

His name was lost on the waves as I called it again and again, a cry as guttural as the gulls flying over us, as the roar of the ocean crashing on the beach, just as he crashed into me.

“Say it,” he demanded as he drove us both closer and closer to home. “Say it, Jane. I need to hear you say it too.”

When I didn’t respond, his movements stopped. I moaned my discord. Eric pushed up on his elbows so I could see his face clearly. The moon cast a shadow over the square lines of his jaw, the hollow of his cheeks, the straight line of his nose. I stared, transfixed. Because if I was a work of art, then this man was an utter masterpiece.

“Say it,” he whispered again. “Please.”

I opened my mouth. There was nothing else I could do but obey.

“I love you, too.”

Eric shuddered. And then he drove forward with a howl as ancient as the world itself. The abyss we had both dug for years opened up between us. And we toppled into it together.