The bottle was Gwen's, which meant it was cheap and it was hidden, and it took Courtney forty minutes of bitching to get her to admit where.
"Under the floorboard," Gwen said, and when Courtney just stared at her, she rolled her eyes and kicked the edge of the bunk. "The loose one. Everyone's got a loose one. You've never had a loose one?"
"I have never hidden alcohol in a floor."
"Yeah. That tracks."
The bottle came up dusty. Gwen wiped the neck on her hoodie sleeve and cracked it, and the smell that came off it was closer to paint thinner than anything that had ever been near a grape. Courtney took it anyway. That was the thing about Courtney — she took it anyway, and then made a face like she hadn't.
They were in the girls' cabin, which at this hour was empty, the other girls off somewhere doing whatever the other girls did. The mattress Gwen sat on had a stain shaped like Florida. She'd stopped seeing it months ago.
"So," Courtney said, and passed the bottle back. "Justin."
"Justin," Gwen agreed.
"I spent weeks on that."
"You spent weeks on a mirror with a face."
"He had a jawline —"
"He had a jawline and nothing behind it. You know what he said to me once? He said, 'You're like, really dark, and I mean that in a good way.'" Gwen drank. "That's the whole man. That's the entire interior."
Courtney laughed — an actual laugh, not the clipped little thing she did in front of cameras — and Gwen felt it land somewhere unexpected, low in her chest, and looked away before it could mean anything.
"Duncan," Courtney said, quieter.
"Don't."
"I'm just saying his name."
"You're saying his name in the voice you use when you're about to say a lot more than his name."
Courtney pulled her knees up onto the mattress and the bottle went with her, and the two of them sat shoulder to shoulder against the wall with the Florida stain between their feet like a third person. The liquor burned going down and burned coming back up and somewhere around the third pass it stopped burning at all, which Gwen knew was the dangerous part, and didn't care.
"He was mean to me," Courtney said. "And I kept— I kept fixing my hair before I saw him. Every time. Like it would—"
"Like it would matter."
"Yeah."
"Yeah," Gwen said. "Trent wrote me a song and I cried about it for a month and then he wrote a song about that, and I still—" She stopped. The bottle was getting light. "God. We're pathetic."
"We're not pathetic. We're—" Courtney searched for it, and the searching took a while, and that was funny, and they both started laughing at the search itself, and the laughing didn't stop cleanly, it just ran down into something looser.
Gwen didn't remember finishing the bottle. She remembered Courtney's head getting heavy against her shoulder, the weight of it, the smell of Courtney's shampoo — something expensive, something that didn't belong on this island. She remembered thinking, distinctly, that this was the first time all season she'd felt like a person instead of footage.
Then the floor went sideways and stayed there.
—
The van smelled like gasoline and hot vinyl and something underneath both, something animal, and the floor was vibrating against Gwen's cheek hard enough to rattle her teeth.
She tried to open her eyes and only got one of them. The other was stuck. There was grit in it, or there was grit on the whole world, and the world was rocking, and her body was not answering when she told it to move.
Her wrists were behind her back. That was the first clear fact. Zip ties, or cord, or something with a bite to it, and it had already gone tight enough to leave marks she couldn't see.
Courtney was beside her. Gwen knew it before she looked — knew it from the breathing, fast and shallow and wrong, and from the smell of that expensive shampoo now mixed with sweat and dust and the floor of a van that had never once been cleaned.
"Court," she said. Her voice came out like gravel. "Courtney."
"I'm—" Courtney's voice cracked in the middle. "I'm here. I'm here. Gwen, I can't— my hands—"
"I know."
The van hit a rut and both of them slid an inch across the metal floor. Gwen's shoulder took the brunt and she bit down on the sound, because there was someone up front, and she could hear him now — the low idle of the engine, and under it, nothing. No radio. No talking. Just the road and the man and whatever he was.
She got her one good eye working and looked. The back of a head. Salt-and-pepper, messy, longer than it should be. Shoulders under a worn canvas jacket that had gone grey-brown with dirt at the seams. He didn't turn around. He didn't need to. He'd already done whatever he was going to do about the two of them waking up, and the fact that he hadn't turned around said he'd decided it didn't matter.
That was the part that made Gwen's stomach go cold. Not the rope. The not-turning-around.
"Hey," she said. Louder. "Hey."
Nothing. The van rolled on. Out the back window, past the grime, there was nothing but dark and the occasional shape of trees going by, and the trees looked like the trees on the island, which meant they hadn't gone far, or they'd gone very far, and she couldn't tell which was worse.
"Where are you taking us," Courtney said. It came out in her real voice, the one she used for challenges, the one that had never once worked on anyone who mattered. "Do you know who— do you know who I am —"
The van slowed.
Gwen felt it in her teeth before she felt it in her body. The engine dropped, the road noise dropped, and the man up front finally moved — one hand off the wheel, reaching down beside the seat, and Gwen heard the click of something being set down on the dash.
He turned around.
His eyes were the colour of a storm coming in off water, and there was nothing behind them at all. He looked at Courtney first — the way you look at a thing you've already decided about — and then at Gwen, and the looking took its time, and Gwen made herself look back, because looking away felt like a door she didn't want to open.
"You're awake," he said. His voice was low and it scraped. "Good. Saves me the trouble of carrying you."
"You're going to let us go." Courtney again. "Right now. And when they find out—"
"Nobody's looking," he said. Just that. Flat. Like a fact about the weather.
And Gwen, who had spent her whole life being the one who saw through things, understood in that moment that he was right. The island was a production. The production had wrapped. Nobody was looking. Nobody was ever looking.
He climbed into the back of the van.
—
He took Courtney first, and Gwen watched, because there was nowhere else to look and because closing her eyes felt like giving him something.
He got a hand in Courtney's hair — that long dark ponytail, still tied, still neat, the last neat thing about her — and dragged her up onto her knees. Courtney made a sound Gwen had never heard her make. Not a scream. A short, high, airless noise, the noise of a person whose whole body just learned something it didn't want to know.
"Open," he said.
"Go to—"
He hit her. Not hard enough to knock her down — hard enough to be a decision. The back of his hand across her mouth, and Courtney's head snapped sideways and came back with a red mark blooming on her cheek and her eyes wet and wide and suddenly, terribly quiet.
"Open," he said again.
She opened.
He worked his cock out of his jeans one-handed, and Gwen saw it — thick, already hard, the head dark and wet at the tip — and something in her chest went very still and very small. He fed it into Courtney's mouth and Courtney's jaw stretched around it and she made that airless sound again, muffled now, and he didn't wait. He got both hands in her hair and pulled her down onto it, and Gwen heard it — the wet, choked sound of a throat being used, the sound of Courtney gagging and being held there anyway.
"Breathe through your nose," the man said, like he was giving directions to a stranger on a street. "Or don't."
He fucked her mouth in long, even strokes, no hurry in it at all. That was the thing Gwen couldn't get past — the evenness. He wasn't angry. He wasn't excited. He was doing a thing he'd done before, and Courtney was crying around his cock, tears cutting clean lines through the dust on her face, and her hands were still tied behind her back so all she could do was take it, and she took it, and the wet sound of it filled the whole back of the van.
Gwen's own body was doing something she hated. Her thighs were pressed together without her deciding to press them. There was heat low in her stomach that had nothing to do with the liquor, and she hated it, and she couldn't make it stop, and she watched.
He pulled out of Courtney's mouth with a sound like a cork. Courtney folded forward, coughing, strings of spit and pre-cum hanging off her chin, and he let her have exactly three breaths before he dragged her up by the hair again.
"Your turn," he said, and looked at Gwen.
—
He put her on her back on the metal floor of the van and cut the cord off her wrists with a knife he didn't bother to hide, and the whole time his knee was between her legs and his weight was on her hips and she knew exactly how little the free hands mattered.
He got her jeans open. She fought — she did fight, she wanted that on the record somewhere, even if the only record was her own head — and it didn't slow him down by a single second. He peeled the denim down her thighs and off one ankle, and then his hand was between her legs and his fingers were sliding through her and finding her wet, and he made a low sound in his throat that was almost a laugh.
"Look at that," he said.
"Fuck you."
"Sure."
Two fingers, straight in, no warning. Gwen's back came off the floor. He crooked them and found something that made her vision go white at the edges, and he did it again, and again, watching her face the whole time like he was reading something written there. Her hips moved. She told them not to and they moved anyway.
"That's what I thought," he said.
He pulled his fingers out, wet to the knuckle, and put them in her mouth. She bit down and he let her, and then he pressed down on her tongue until her jaw gave, and she tasted herself, salt and copper and something underneath, and her eyes were burning and she was so wet she could feel it cooling on her thighs.
He turned her over. Face down on the floor of the van, cheek against the metal, and he pulled her hips up and back, and she heard him spit, felt it land, felt the blunt head of his cock drag through the mess between her legs.
He pushed in.
She'd never — she'd never, and it split her, and she made a sound that wasn't a word. He held there, all the way in, letting her feel the whole shape of it, and then he started to move, and the van rocked with it, and every thrust drove her knees into the floor and her face into the metal and she could hear Courtney somewhere behind her, still coughing, still crying, and she could hear herself — the wet slap of skin, the sound she was making, the sound she couldn't stop making.
He fucked her slow and deep and then fast and hard and then slow again, and he never once said anything, and the silence was worse than anything he could have said. His hand came down on her ass and the crack of it rang in the metal box and she felt the heat bloom there, and then his other hand was in her hair, pulling her head back, arching her spine, and she was so full, so full, and something was building in her that she did not want and could not stop.
"Don't," she said. "Don't—"
He didn't answer. He just kept going, and his hips stuttered, and he drove in one last time and held, and she felt it — the pulse of him inside her, thick and hot, spilling into her, and her own body clenched down around him and came anyway, without her permission, while she was saying don't.
He pulled out and she felt the wet rush of him follow, running down the inside of her thigh onto the floor of the van.
—
He wasn't done.
He got Courtney back up by the hair, and Gwen's cum was still on his cock, and he put it in Courtney's mouth like that — Gwen's wet and his own — and Courtney took it, because by then Courtney had learned the shape of the deal. He fucked her throat until his cock was slick with her spit and Gwen's, and then he pulled out and pushed into Gwen again, into her mouth this time, her head hanging off the edge of the mattress-less floor, her throat open, and she gagged and he held her there and told her, flat, "Breathe," and she breathed.
He went back and forth between them like that for a long time. Mouth, cunt, mouth, cunt. Gwen lost the thread of it somewhere — the floor, the metal, the smell, the sound of Courtney's voice going raw, the taste of herself and of him, the way her jaw ached and her cunt ached and her knees had gone numb. At some point he had them side by side, both on their backs, and he finished into Courtney first — Gwen watched it, watched Courtney's whole body seize and then go slack, watched the white of it spill out and down — and then he pulled out and put himself back into Gwen and fucked her until he came again, emptying into her, and she felt every pulse of it, and she was crying, and she didn't know when she'd started.
He finished in their mouths after that. One, then the other. Held Gwen's head down on him until she had no choice but to swallow, and she swallowed, and it tasted like salt and like the inside of a body, and then he did the same to Courtney, and Courtney swallowed too.
Gwen's last clear thought was that the floor was very cold and that she was very tired, and that Courtney's hand had found hers somewhere in the dark and was holding on, and that this was the first time all season anyone had held on.
Then the dark came down and took her.
—
She woke up on concrete.
The light was grey and flat and the air smelled like rain that hadn't fallen yet, and there was a sound she didn't recognize for a long time and then did — traffic. Real traffic. Somewhere above her and around her, the low constant wash of a city.
She was in an alley. Brick on one side, a dumpster on the other, and a puddle near her knee with a rainbow of oil on top of it. Her jeans were back on. They were buttoned wrong — one button off, her own hands wouldn't have done it that way — and they were wet at the crotch and she could feel the rest of it, tacky and drying on the inside of her thighs, and when she swallowed, her throat was raw and there was still the taste of him back there, at the root of her tongue.
Courtney was three feet away, curled on her side, her ponytail come half undone, a red mark still on her cheek, and her mouth was open and there was a line of dried white down her chin that she hadn't wiped off, because she was still out.
Gwen got up on her hands and knees. Her wrists were raw where the cord had been. There was a smear of her own blood on the concrete and she didn't know from where.
At the mouth of the alley, past the dumpster, she could see the street. A bus shelter. A man in a puffy coat waiting with a coffee. A sign on a pole that said something in two languages, and the second one was French.
She crawled to Courtney and shook her shoulder, and Courtney's eyes came open slowly and found Gwen's face, and neither of them said anything for a long moment, because there was nothing that fit in a mouth.
Then Courtney sat up, and looked down at herself, and put her hand over her mouth.
Gwen looked back at the street. The bus was coming. The man in the puffy coat picked up his coffee.
"We're in Canada," Gwen said.