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“Poor Bonnie, always in love with the wrong person.” It is Annalise’s voice in her head, again. “Someone should cure you of that habit.”
(But she can’t seem to stop.)
.
She is twenty-three when she meets Annalise Keating. Twenty-three and lost and scared and in need of someone to break her.
(And Annalise had complied, of course she had.)
.
She is on the floor.
“I need this, Annalise,” she says.
She would be ashamed, but she has not yet learned how.
(But she will. Oh, how she will.)
“I know you do,” Annalise replies, a benediction.
She offers Bonnie her hand. Tears fall down her face. She takes it.
.
“You can stay here till you get your feet under you. But you’ll work for your place,” Annalise tells her in the car outside her house.
Bonnie nods. “Of course. Anything you need.”
Annalise looks at her for a long moment. Then she turns and opens the car door, steps out. Bonnie stays for a moment, exhales, tries to shake the tension from her body. It cannot be worse that what you have already endured, she says to herself.
(She is still so young.)
.
“Where’d you pick this one up?” Sam asks when she first enters the house, face bruised, head ducked.
Annalise eyes on her are blunt, cursory. Bonnie blushes.
“Where do I find any of them?” she replies dryly, kisses him on the cheek. Bonnie averts her gaze, steps back.
(You learned quickly with Annalise to know your place.)
.
“I’m scared, Annalise,” she says, voice breaking.
Annalise does not look up from her papers.
“We’re all scared.”
Bonnie stands in the doorway, shifts on her feet, waits. Annalise looks up (finally).
“There’s work to be done,” she says, at last.
(It is not what Bonnie had wanted her to say, but then again Annalise never did what anyone wanted her to.)
.
“You’re not like her usual sort,” Sam tells her, leaning against the side of the kitchen counter.
Bonnie fidgets with her hands.
“No?” she asks. “How’s that?”
This is the man Annalise married, she thinks. Handsome and smart and kind. Better than you’ll ever be.
He’s watching her with sharp eyes, like he’s dissecting her in his head. A psychology teacher, she remembers.
“You’re more delicate,” he says, places his hand on her arm. Bonnie feels every place where they’re connecting.
She steps back.
“I’m not,” she says, tucks her hair behind her ear.
(She wants it to be true.)
.
“Yes?” she asks, answering the door.
She is wrapped in her robe, her hair a jumble atop her hair, her armor off.
Bonnie is struck speechless.
“What is it Bonnie? I don’t have all night,” Annalise says, even disassembled still, irrefutably fearsome.
“Here are the files you asked for,” Bonnie says, finally.
Annalise’s face is set in stone, but her eyes, Bonnie thinks, look soft.
She takes the folder, closes the door.
.
“I’m not like one of her students,” she tells Frank, two weeks in.
“Sure you’re not,” he says, smirks.
He leans against the side of the doorway, sips from the bottle in his hand.
“Are you even old enough to drink that?” she asks him, because she needs to say something.
He’s two years younger than her, though he looks older. Too cocky and self-confident to be believed. He doesn’t even bother to reply, just takes another drink, raises his eyebrows.
“I’m not like one of her students,” she repeats.
(She’s not wrong. But she’s not right either.)
.
She never forgets that she is living in a house of strangers
“I didn’t realize anyone was still up,” she says, when she walks into the kitchen late one night and finds Sam sitting at the table, nursing a glass of bourbon
He looks up with an unreadable look in his eyes. And then she blinks and he’s smiling.
“Come sit,” he says, patting next to him. “Tell me how you are settling in.”
Her bare feet scuff on the floor. He pours more into the glass in front of him and then pushes it towards her. She looks up hesitantly, raises it to her lips. It burns on the way down.
“I’m--I’m good,” she says, tries to smile.
“I’m sure my wife is keeping you busy,” he says.
“Of course,” she replies.
He tucks a piece of hair behind her ear, his fingers brushing the curve of her jaw.
There is a cough from the doorway. Annalise’s eyes are cold.
(There are always consequences, Bonnie learns that early.)
.
(In retrospect, she shouldn’t have been surprised.)
She opens the door and meets Annalise’s eyes over Sam’s shoulder. He doesn’t see her, just kisses his way down Annalise’s neck. She smiles with something like triumph in her eyes, holds Bonnie’s gaze, tightens her grip on him. Bonnie closes the door.
.
“Have you thought of a career in law?” Annalise asks her, the next day. She does not look at Bonnie. Bonnie wishes she would.
“Law?” Bonnie asks.
“Yes. Law. I can’t continue to have you working here if you’re going to be of no use to me.”
“Frank isn’t a lawyer,” Bonnie says automatically.
“Frank is useful to me,” Annalise says. Her gaze, when it cuts to her, burns.
Bonnie is silent for a long moment.
“Annalise, if this is about what happened last night, I just-”
“I’m not interested in hearing your excuses Bonnie,” Annalise says. She has a way of making Bonnie feel smaller than she ever has before. Smaller than when her father had yelled and her mother had cried. Smaller than when her brother left and her sister died. Smaller even than Matthew had made her. “If you’re not going to be helpful, then I don’t have a purpose for you.”
“Right,” she says. “I’ll go then.”
Annalise doesn’t stop her.
(It’s not Sam that I want, she does not say.)
.
She’d never thought she would be a lawyer. Her mother had been surprised when she’d asked to go to college, her father enraged. She’d gone to the hospital with a broken jaw the day her acceptance letter came in. She’d checked herself out.
.
“Annie tells me you’re going to be starting at Middleton next semester,” Sam says.
Bonnie fiddles with a strand of her hair.
“That’s right,” she says.
“She’ll make a lawyer out of you yet,” he says.
He smells bright, like something clean and fresh. Matthew had smelled like old wood, like cinnamon, like sweat. Bonnie finds herself moving closer.
“Annalise is looking for you,” Frank says from the doorway.
His eyes, when they meet hers, hold nothing good.
.
Bonnie feels pleasantly drunk, a steady hum running through her body. Frank, from his position next to her, seems unchanged, just takes shot after shot with a sort of grim determination that Bonnie doesn’t want to think too much about. It would kill her buzz.
What are you drinking for? she wonders, reaching for the bottle.
“Don’t sleep with Sam,” he says suddenly. Bonnie freezes.
Frank just looks at her, gaze steady.
“I don’t know what’s happened to you in your life. I imagine it’s pretty fucked up if you ended up in the Keating household, but if you wanna stay, the husband’s off limits.”
“I know that,” Bonnie says, suddenly, irrationally angry. “I’m not as stupid as you think I am.”
His smile is wicked. “You sure about that?”
(And of course he’s right. For all his faults, he usually is.)
.
“Don’t sleep with Annalise either,” he says, much later in the night.
“What?” she asks. She thinks perhaps she heard him wrong.
“Nothing good can come of it,” he says.
The whole conversation feels surreal. She turns to look at him. He’s staring at the ceiling, tracking the path of the fan with his eyes.
She watches him for a long time.
“Your apartment is a piece of shit,” she says, finally.
He laughs.
“Yeah, tell me something I don’t know.”
.
“You’re not like one of her students,” Frank will tell her, much later. “You’re something much worse.”
“Yeah?” she will ask, downing her drink. “And what’s that?”
“You’re her charity case.”
(Annalise doesn’t do charity.)
.
Bonnie feels tired all the time now, like her bones are filled with some sort of metal, lead or iron or steel.
The students laugh in the next room over, she can hear the dull, uninspired notes of their chatter. She puts a hand to her temple, massages the skin there, wonders why she didn’t just let Matthew kill her when he’d wanted to.
“Bonnie,” Annalise calls and even ten years later, her heart still clenches in her chest.
“Yes,” she calls back.
Maybe she shouldn’t answer, shouldn’t always answer, but she just keeps doing it.