WHAT DID YOU?

“Lolita,” she said, covering her eyes. “Don’t look at me like that.”

I left her without another word. She called after me, but then I heard Frank’s truck pulling up the drive. A moment later the water was running in the bathroom, and I knew she was brushing her teeth so he wouldn’t smell the booze on her. She’d probably taken the whiskey from Frank’s secret stash I saw in the barn. There were always two or three bottles of Jack in a crate near the back under a pile of flannel blankets. Twice I’d found Frank passed out in the barn, a bottle nearly drained, cigarette butts in an ashtray beside him. Dangerous behavior in a barn filled with hay.

Later that night I found Marlowe sitting on the floor of the stable smoking a cigarette. We hadn’t spoken since that night in my room when he’d suggested unthinkable things to me. Instead we’d been circling each other ever since. I was simultaneously draw