by Naomi West
“What?” I ask, stupidly. Like I really want to know.
“Let me put it this way. You were always a very loyal girlfriend, Kayla. You always understood that it wasn’t your place to question how I spent my days, never badgered me when I got home.” Because if I did, the abuse would start, the word-traps that seem ridiculous now but were deadly then, the self-esteem-crushing tirades. “Oh, there were grumblings at the beginning, but you soon grew out of that, didn’t you? So perhaps I should explain something to you, you poor little tyke. I operate in a world of criminality. I won’t be specific. But let’s just say that I know people, bad people, and these people have access to all sorts of markets.” He stands up and goes to the crib. I inch toward the bathroom, even if it pains me to go in the opposite direction to Cormac. “There are couples in this life who are oh-so-desperate for a child. The poor people, all they want is a baby of their own, but for whatever reason they cannot adopt, and they are infertile. So, what to do, especially since many of these people have quite a lot of money, and could give any child a very decent life?”
He stands with his back to me, looking down on Cormac. My veins are ice. My throat is tight. He wants to sell my baby.
“You’re a fucking animal,” I snap. Then I dart into the bathroom. He turns, smiling at me as though I’ve gone mad. But when I return with the pepper spray in hand, he isn’t smiling.
“Ah,” he says. “It looks like little Kayla finally became a vertebrate. How wonderful for you. What now, little Kayla? Are you going to spray me? Is that your grand plan?”
“If you don’t get out of here. I’ve seen this work on people, you sick bastard. They can’t do anything except cover their eyes, and while your eyes are covered I’ll just start punching and kicking you and then I’ll get a knife and—I will, I swear I will!” He’s shaking his head.
“Maybe you will.” He shrugs. “I’ve made myself clear. I’ll give you some time. I’m nice like that. But one day, and one day soon, you will either by my wife or be that poor woman whose baby was kidnapped. Those are your choices. I hope you enjoy the rest of your day.”
I follow him to the door, pepper spray aimed at him. He stops at the threshold, hand on the doorframe, looking as calm and collected as a man who just popped around for lunch. “Look at those legs.” He glances down at me. “Did he ruin you, the kid? Your cunt, I mean.”
“Get out!” I scream, taking a step forward.
He leaps back, grinning. “You startled me,” he says. “That won’t happen again. See you, tough girl.”
I slam the door behind him and slide on the latch, which seems like a pitiful defense after he just tricked me with the mailman routine. Once I’m sure he’s gone, or as sure as I can be, I run to Cormac’s crib. He’s not even crying, just staring up at me with his wide innocent eyes, punching the air with grasping fingers.
I lift him up and take him to the couch, holding him close, smelling his hair and kissing him over and over. If anything happens to him, I promise myself, I’ll kill Connor.
Chapter Nine
Xander
“What do you think, X?”
“About what?” I ask him.
He sits on the swing, his hair flowing in the wind, wearing beat-up sneakers that are two sizes too small. We’ve always been dirt-poor but it still breaks my heart to see him like this. All around us, other kids are playing, but their parents tell them to avoid the swing set. Those kids are dirty. Those kids are dangerous.
“What if we just killed him?” he asks, ten years old, staring at me without a hint of emotion in his face.
“You don’t know what you’re saying.” I kick off the swing and walk toward some nearby bushes, go around them, and light a cigarette out of view of the park. “You’re just talking.”
“I’m not!” he protests, waving at the air to dissipate the smoke. Kid wants to kill someone and he can’t even stand a bit of smoke. “Why should we let him hurt us all the time? It isn’t fair. He’s a mean old man and I hate him.”
“That’s not what you were saying a few months ago.”
“That was when I was little!” he snaps. “All my friends love their dads so I thought I had to love my dad but now I know that I don’t because—because he’s mean and he’s not very nice.”
“Have you seen him, Arsen? He’s three times the size of me, and I ain’t small. He’s probably five times the size of you. He’s a goddamn giant. How would we kill him? Tell me that.”
“It’s not hard,” he says, lowering his voice. “We just get one of those big knives he uses to cut meat and wait until he falls asleep, you know, when he’s been drinking too much. Then we stab the shithead right in the heart, just keep stabbing. He’ll die then. People usually die when you stab them over and over in the heart.”
“What if he wakes up? What if you miss?”
“What if I miss?”
“What?” I flick my cigarette to the ground, where Arsen stubs it out, ever the conscientious one. “You puttin’ this on me? Our old man is a fucking monster so I’ve gotta kill him? It’s your plan, so if you really wanna do it, you’re gonna have to be the one to do it.”
“Now you’re just being silly,” he says, walking to the fence and then vaulting over it. “You’re just saying this because my black eye has healed. You even said it was really bad. You’re just being a shit, X. Just a big shit.”
I open my eyes, groaning as the first waves of the hangover come crashing down on me. I rub my eyes, rubbing away the memory, although it plays in the background as I go into the bathroom and gulp water from the faucet. We never enacted Arsen’s grand plan. We never even got close. Instead, we rode out his beatings until his drinking and smoking caught up with him and he dropped dead of his own accord. But I’ll never forget the way he looked at me, all the anger in the world in his face but none of the grit, too much empathy, too much squeamishness. He’d never do it. But he wanted me to do. Maybe I should have. At least then I wouldn’t feel so shitty about this whole thing. At least then I could say to myself: I did that one thing for him, at least, I’ll always have that.
I nuke myself a pizza in the microwave, wolf it down, and then take a shower. When I’m washed and changed I sit on the couch, staring at the TV and trying not to think about the whisky under the sink. The sun has almost set, the apartment is dead quiet, and suddenly the rest of the night seems like a long, long time. It’s half past eight o’clock, which means I have at least a few hours of sitting here sober. I guess I could go to the clubhouse, but all that’d mean is hearing shit from the fellas about drinking, Christopher asking me if I’m coming to the next meeting, did I read his pamphlet. I pick up the pamphlet now, but before I can go over it the apartment buzzer rings.
“Yeah?”
“It’s me. It’s Kayla.”
“You spent that money already?” I snap, though I don’t mean to. Why would she come here again, especially after the kiss? She knows we want each other. She must know it. There’s no way in hell she’s that naïve. She knows I want her and she knows it’s wrong. “I gave you a grand. You want more money? How much? Two? Three?”
“This isn’t about that!” Her voice trembles. She sounds like a pledge in his first gunfight, like she’s ready to cry or run at any moment. “I need your help. Please.”
“What sort of help?”
“Can you just let me up?”
I take my hand off the intercom button and let out a groan. I want to let her up. Hell, I’m pretty sure I’m going to let her up. But that don’t mean that the guilt isn’t somethin’ savage. “All right.” I press the door button, unlock the apartment door, and then go into the kitchen and take five quick sips of whisky. As soon as it hits me, my body fills with its warmth, its rejuvenating energy. I feel like this is what waking up really is. That shit about getting out of bed and showering is just a preview to real waking up.
I take the bottle into the living room and sit on the couch. A few moments later, she knocks on the door.
<
br /> “Come in!” I call.
She shuffles in behind me. I don’t turn, but I hear her. I hear the kid oohing and ahhing and her light footsteps. She walks to the couch and switches on the lamp, and then sits on the couch next to me with the kid on her knee. “Hello,” she says.
“Hi,” I reply. “How’s it going?” I take a drink.
“Thank you for letting me up.”
Her eyes are wide, full of the fear of someone who’s just encountered something grim, something they ain’t used to. She’s wearing the same clothes as earlier, and her hair is even wilder.
“Sure,” I mutter. “Why not?”
“Have you gotten any sleep since earlier?” she asks.
“A little.”
“So this is your second drinking session of the day, then?”
“I didn’t invite you up to be lectured.”
“No.” She shrugs. “I don’t want to lecture you, anyway.”
“Are you gonna tell me what happened?”
That’s my nephew sitting on her knee. The little kid in the park had a kid of his own and he’s sitting right across from me. I won’t look at him, ’cause if I look at him there are gonna be some emotions I can’t properly handle, and I’m in no mood to battle with emotions. I’m tired of it. I’m done with it.
“Okay …”
She tells me about Connor, about being with Connor before she was with Arsen. She was at a bar and she was feeling low and the spidery motherfucker walked in and told her everything she wanted to hear, and before she knew it she was in his clutches. Just like a fly trapped in the web, she couldn’t get free, although this web was made of words instead of silk. She lived with him for almost two years, two years in which he turned her into his lapdog. Then she tells me about today’s meeting and his threat to Cormac. By the time she’s finished I’m on my feet, at the window, taking deep breaths because all I want to do is hit something and I don’t think that’d be a good idea with the woman and the kid here. I want to let out a roar. My whole body trembles.
“Fucking Connor.” I take a drink and click my neck from side to side. “The world is a strange, strange place.”
“What do you mean?” she asks. “Xander, talk to me.”
“Connor, that prick. You’re right. He does look like a spider. Acts like one, too. He’s an animal, for sure.” I want to hurl the whisky bottle at the wall, but somehow I restrain myself. The three slugs help. “Connor … Connor!”
“Xander!” she snaps. “Talk to me. Please.”
I take a deep breath and turn to her. I can’t stop thinking about how cute her face is, her lips, her wide eyes, and her body, too … And the way she looks at me. It’s right there, behind the eyes, a lust neither of us wants to acknowledge. I push it aside. “Connor has been an enemy of the club for a long time. He’s a bigtime outlaw, Kayla, though he ain’t an outlaw in the riding sense. He’s more of a businessman, only a businessman who deals in drugs, guns, women, whatever comes his way. But that’s all a front for what he really enjoys, which is hurting folks. He gets a thrill out of it. You know that. You’ve seen it.” I close my eyes. “And there’s something else, too.” I see a blackened corpse, pitted eyes, no nose. “He’s the one who set fire to that bar when Arsen was inside. He’s the one who blocked the doors. We’d just fucked him over on a heroin deal—we don’t mess with that shit, and we don’t want it here—and he didn’t take too kindly to that. So he found out one of our boys was in a bar, and he decided to take his revenge. You might be wondering how I know that. The bastard left a calling card at the crime scene.”
“Oh,” Kayla says, shoulders slumping. “So my ex-boyfriend killed the father of my child.”
“That’s pretty much the size of it, yeah.” My shoulders slump too.
She raises an eyebrow, nodding at my whisky bottle. “Can you get me a glass, please?”
Chapter Ten
Kayla
Connor killed Arsen. Connor burnt Arsen to death. Connor murdered Cormac’s father. It’s difficult to get the fact of these words into my head, really into my head. It’s difficult to bend them into my reality. My first instinct is to deny the truth of it, but I don’t see any reason why Xander would lie. If it’s true, though, I have to face up to the reality that I am inextricably tied to this, because why would Connor choose Xander, if not because I was with him?
“You’re probably right,” Xander says, when I voice the concern.
We’re sitting on opposite sides of the couch. We’ve made up a place for Cormac to sleep on his bed, a makeshift crib of blankets, with everything secured down and cushions in place to stop any nasty accident. Even so, I check on him every half hour or so. He’s sleeping peacefully now, muttering every now and again, sounds which are almost words. I sip the whisky, my first drink in months. It’s good. I can’t deny that. It infuses my body with a warmth which, for now at least, blocks out the cold from the past few months.
“Really?” I say, hoping it’s not true.
“It’s not your fault, but yeah, I reckon Connor would’ve chosen Arsen ’cause of that. It fits with what I know about him. He likes to go for maximum pain. So if he could cause you pain as well as get back at us, why wouldn’t he?”
“But …” I sigh, sip the whisky. I can’t do it like Xander, sip it and then not react. It’s too potent. I screw my face up every time, which makes Xander grin wider the more we drink. “Aren’t you angry with me?”
“No,” he says. I think I detect some surprise in his voice. “I’m not. I’m really not. The fuck were you gonna do, fight him? Maybe I’m just sexist. I reckon I’d be a hell of a lot angrier at you if you were a man.”
“Then I guess I’m glad for your sexism.” I roll my eyes. Am I flirting? My tone of voice is flirtatious, and I can’t stop looking at his arms, his body, his intense bright eyes. He’s wearing a black vest and gym shorts, nothing else, his tattooed arms bigger than my legs, his chest bulging, his belly a sheet of rock. I wonder what it would be like to trail my hand down his abs, just for a moment, just to feel them—I need to kill these thoughts, kill them stone-dead, but they keep coming back nonetheless. “I’m glad you don’t blame me.”
“Me, too.” He glances at my chest. I see it. I should call him on it. I don’t. Because I want him to glance at my chest. The whisky has made everything warm: my belly, the air, my clit.
“Oh, before we go on, I wanted to ask you something.”
“Shoot,” he says.
“Can Cormac and I stay here tonight? After Connor—”
“Sure. I’ll take the couch.”
“Just like that?” I ask, shocked.
“Just like that,” he says, sounding just as shocked. “I don’t—fuck, I don’t know. I don’t want to have to explain it. I just don’t want you to get hurt, is all. And from what I know about men like Connor, there’s no way he ain’t gonna swing by again, especially after you threatened him. A man like that can’t let a threat stand.”
I smile. It’s a nervous smile, but it’s a smile, and that in itself is a feat these days. “I have a confession to make, then. I brought a bag with me. It’s in the car. Can you watch Cormac while I run down and get it?”
“Screw that.” He laughs, standing up. “Give me the keys. Like I said, I ain’t no babysitter.”
When he goes downstairs, I run into the bathroom, switch on the light, and do the quickest beauty routine any woman has ever performed. I find a comb in the cabinet and brush my hair as best I can, splash some water on my face, wet some toilet paper and dab under my armpits, and then return to the couch. I don’t let myself think about why I’m doing all this; the whisky helps with that. A blotted mind is best here. Tonight isn’t about thinking. Cormac and I are safe. That’s all that matters. I should enjoy myself. Justifications piled atop justifications, but sometimes a tower of justification isn’t such a bad thing.
Xander returns, drops the bag onto the table, and then sits on the couch.
“Why don’t you te
ll me something about yourself, Xander?”
“What?” He tilts his head at me. “Is this a date?”
I blush. I don’t want to blush, but I feel the red creeping up my neck and into my cheeks. I wish I was wearing more foundation, more makeup in general. I haven’t cared to apply any since Cormac was born because the idea that I was sexual seemed silly. I touch my neck, as though I can hide it. “I’m just asking you a question.”
He smirks at me. “And I’m just asking you one, too.” He has a devilish smirk, dark and naughty, the sort of smirk which leads to other things. “All right, I’ll tell you something. My dad was a piece of shit who beat on us every chance he got. My mom died giving birth to Arsen, and maybe when I was a dumb little kid I blamed him for that. Maybe that was why I was such a prick to him sometimes. Maybe that’s it. But I tried to make up for it—no, I can’t even go down that road, that self-pitying road. I was a prick to him. End of story. The-fucking-end.”