Art of Sin: Illusions Duet : Book One

by Halloran, L. M.

  * * *

  I step out of the car, dimly registering my aching body, the result of driving over two hours with every muscle clenched. The desert air soaks into my skin, burning and harsh. Unforgiving.

  Just like me.

  There’s something magnificent about the sheer oppressiveness of the high desert. It gives zero fucks about life—at least the kind that most mammals require. But humans, we’re an odd beast. The only one that insists on living in places we’re biologically opposed to.

  The trailer park has changed in the last twenty years. Stubborn, spiny trees have grown several feet with regular watering from their caretakers. Fools, criminals, and the unlucky people who can’t afford to survive anywhere else.

  Bumpy, narrow asphalt streets waver with mirage in the early afternoon sun, crisscrossing between rows of tired, dilapidated trailers. Here and there, signs of life persist. A faded collection of fake houseplants bracketing screen doors. A plastic kiddie pool filled with water, an upside-down rubber ducky floating on the surface.

  My restless gaze finally lands on a trailer both familiar and foreign. Abandoned, unlivable, rotted from the inside out. The flimsy carport has collapsed, so we’re parked in a gravel-coated easement nearby.

  Our trailer is the only one on this small stretch of road. While the rest of the park is occupied, here there’s a sense of vague unease. Decay. Like the land remembers all the things that happened here.

  Memories crowd my mind, clog my ears.

  “Your daddy was a murderer. Killed my innocence and gave me you in return. A demon’s own child.”

  Mama’s words pluck me like a chord, halting my hand mid-stroke. The stubby brown crayon in my fingers thuds onto the yellowed newspaper.

  She’s having a bad day. I stayed outside most of the morning, until it got so hot black spots danced across my eyes. I thought hiding under the kitchen table with my crayon—stolen from the trash at school before it let out for summer—would at least give me a few more hours of peace.

  But wishes are for other, better children.

  “He never loved you. When he found out I was pregnant, he wanted me to abort. But the Lord forbade it.” Her voice grows nearer but softer, dreamy and slurred. “I took his money, though. Damn right, I did. I took it and bought vitamins so you didn’t come out small and sick. I tried to love you, even if he didn’t.”

  As she intends, the words punch holes through what little heart I have left. They don’t make sense—my daddy left just this morning. He said he loved me more than all the stars.

  “You’re lying. Daddy loves me,” I whisper, unable to quench that final shred of rebelliousness.

  She cackles. Hoots. Slaps her skinny thighs like I’ve told a joke.

  “That ain’t your daddy, girl. And there’s only one thing he loves about you—your sweet, innocent face that keeps people from shooting his lying face off. When you’re old enough, he’s gonna sell your soul to the Devil just like he did his own.”

  I don’t feel the tears leaking from my eyes. But I taste them. Salt and despair.

  “He’s not my daddy?”

  Her footsteps shuffle away, back toward the saggy couch. “You look just like him, too. We all pay for our sins, don’t we? You’re my restitution. The Lord understands and will reward me.”

  24 fear

  “Deirdre?”

  Gideon’s voice shatters the memory. I blink, eyes watering in the fierce glare of the afternoon sun off the windshield. Slamming my door closed, I propel my unwilling feet around the hood.

  “You wanted to see a place that was meaningful to me? Well, here we are. Maybe you should be more careful what you wish for.”

  Gideon straightens, dropping his arm from the passenger door. His gaze brushes my face, featherlight. Heavy as iron.

  “Never.”

  The word is final and grave, punctuated by his car door closing.

  I’m not surprised. Oddly, his answer blunts the edge of my tension. Allows my shoulders to drop a fraction. Not for the first time, I feel the irrational effect his presence has on me—safety, stability. Comfort.

  Like our madnesses are a perfect match. Our sins the same. He saw it from the beginning, but I’m beginning to see it now.

  I grab the warped handle of the screen door. The merest tug and the frame pops from the hinges, narrowly missing my face as it sails sideways and clatters to the dusty ground. I stare at it, frozen in surprise.

  “I take it no one’s home?”

  My laugh is rusty nails. “Not likely.”

  Grabbing the inner doorknob, I turn and push. The warped wood doesn’t budge.

  “Allow me.”

  Without waiting for a reply, Gideon brushes past me and with one shove of his shoulder, the door jerks inward. A dank, moldy smell rolls out on a wave of shadow.

  I wince. “Lovely.”

  Gideon squints into the darkness. “Mice. Or rats.” As an afterthought, he adds, “Hopefully. Want me to go first?”

  I roll my eyes, stepping past him into the trailer. Dust billows from tattered curtains as I yank them away from the windows. Light pushes stubbornly through filthy, cracked windows.

  I turn. Looking around. Seeing but not seeing. Anything of value has been taken over the years, from appliances to furniture to magazines for burning. Even Mama’s crosses are gone, dark spots on the wood siding the only hint they hung there for years.

  But I don’t see what is—I see what was.

  “Tell me a story.”

  Breath whispers against the nape of my neck. I sway back, am caught by his chest. An arm wraps around my waist. Anchoring me.

  “Tell me a story, Deirdre, so I can paint something beautiful with your words.”

  * * *

  I tell him a story. One of the worst, though it doesn’t feel that way. It comes smoothly, flowing like silk from my chest to my lips to his ears.

  “My dad and I had a code for the nights he had company—the lackeys of the distributor he worked for. They always came here. For effect, my dad said, so we’d know how much trouble we’d be in if he fucked them over by skimming money, cutting their drugs, whatever. Since they always came in the middle of the night, usually unannounced, my dad had a special knock for my door.”

  “Your closet, you mean.”

  I slant him a wry look. “Don’t be a snob. Just because you grew up with bedrooms twice the size of this trailer doesn’t—”

  “I didn’t, but you’re right,” he says soberly. “That was stupid of me to say.”

  My nod of acknowledgement is so stilted and emotionally uncomfortable that his eyes twinkle. Escaping his knowing stare, I walk into the six-by-six room that was mine. The only sign of my childhood is a faded, moth-eaten blanket, a warped box spring, and a decaying pile of children’s books.

  It’s depressing as hell.

  “So anyway, whenever the cartel people showed up, my dad would knock on my door. He called it Mouse Music, a series of light taps and scratches. He made it a game, and for a while it was exciting.”

  Crouching, I notch a finger into a tiny hole in the floor and pull upward. The section of flooring comes up with surprising ease, like it was last lifted yesterday instead of decades ago.

  “Whoa,” murmurs Gideon. “I was not expecting that.”

  Standing, I peer into the cavity. Light slants through the tiny grates around the base of the trailer, crisscrossing the dirt below. The hole dug into the earth just beneath where I stand is starkly shadowed, half caved in. There’s just enough light to see something white in the bottom. My old, ruched comforter.

  Gideon moves up beside me, his gaze veering from the dugout to my face.

  “You hid in a hole.” His voice is neutral, carefully without horror or pity.

  I nod. My lips feel stiff and pinched, like I’m in dire need of water. I have no idea what else to say.

  I blurt, “It’s fucked up, huh? But what’s even more fucked is that I liked it. I used to imagine it was a little nest
in the bottom of a giant tree. I called it my root cave, and toward the end, I slept in it most nights.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I see Gideon clench his fingers into fists. A glance at his face confirms that he’s struggling with something.

  “Just say it,” I sigh out.

  Wild eyes find mine. “It’s not okay. How they treated you. You know that, right?”

  I shrug. “Am I aware that we weren’t a normal family? Yes. That there was physical and emotional abuse? Yes. But I’ve met people who had it a lot worse.”

  “Is that how you rationalize it?” he asks in that careful, muted tone.

  I shake my head. “I don’t rationalize anything. Besides, if not for my cave, I probably wouldn’t be here today.”

  The rest of the story isn’t mine—how the last time all three of us were together in the trailer, horrible things happened above me. Horrible, horrible things.

  The next day, my daddy was gone.

  Three months after that, my mama.

  And seventy-eight days later, I packed my faded, secondhand backpack with a change of clothes, a toothbrush, and a hairbrush, and made my way in the damp dawn to the truck stop outside town, where I would find someone to give me the money I needed to get the fuck out of here.

  25 envy

  Gideon drives us back to the city. It’s dark by the time we pull into his driveway, and the long silence and many miles thicken the air. Like we’ve been traveling our whole lives to this moment.

  He turns off my car but doesn’t move to get out. Something’s coming. We both feel it. Energy zings beneath my skin. Potent. Boiling.

  “You haven’t seen your mother since the day she left?”

  I shake my head. “And I haven’t seen my stepfather since a few months before that.” I pause, weigh the consequences of the following truth, then decide it’s too late to care. “He’s doing twenty-five years for a drug deal gone wrong. Someone died, and he took the fall.”

  I wait for the questions he hasn’t asked—what I did from the time I left home until enrolling in community college at nineteen. How I managed a degree without a high school diploma. I’m also half-expecting a veiled assumption that I must have slept my way to success, because how else could I have secured my position at the PR firm before I was thirty…

  But for whatever reason, he doesn’t. Maybe he doesn’t care about those details. Maybe he’s heard enough.

  “My mother was schizophrenic.”

  His voice in the quiet is as shocking as the words themselves.

  “Around a year before she died, my father had her committed. Fancy place. We visited on Sundays. She was there a few months, then came home. Exactly one week later, she killed herself.” Heavy sigh. “It was too soon, but my father wanted her out for an important business dinner. He went against the recommendation of her doctors and sacrificed her health for his greed.”

  The magnitude of it all—what I shared with him today, what he knows about me now, what I know about him—sinks in. Anxiety crawls over the back of my scalp. My stomach rolls with nausea.

  “So we’re comparing fucked-up childhoods now? How quaint. I gave you what you wanted, so this is over.” I reach for the door handle, but he seizes my bicep.

  “This isn’t a game to me, Deirdre. I know I’ve asked a lot from you. I’ll keep asking. I want all of it. And I won’t apologize.”

  I wrench my arm away. The indents from his fingers tingle warmly. “Fine. So your mother was crazy and your dad’s a dick. I bet he never put you in pigtails and used you as a shield during drug deals, or killed a man right in front of you then made you help bury him.”

  Gideon can’t hide the flash of horror. The following sympathy. It makes me want to scream.

  “And because you couldn’t save your mother, now you have a God complex and try to save broken women. Even women who don’t fucking want it!”

  “I told you,” he snarls, “I don’t want to save you.”

  I growl. “Right, I’m supposed to be saving you. How? By giving you all my secrets so you can finally accept that some of us had it worse and stop feeling sorry for yourself?”

  His grin is cutting. “Your anger is so fucking stunning.”

  This time when I reach for the car door, he doesn’t try to stop me. Seconds later I’m rounding the hood and pulling open the driver’s side. All I want in the world right now is a stiff drink and a sleeping pill. Maybe three of each.

  Gideon gets out of the car, but only crosses his arms over his chest, blocking my entrance.

  His head tilts, eyes curious. No trace of pity, only that intense focus. “Why do you hide? There’s nothing wrong or shameful about the life you’ve lived. Byron said ‘The great art of life is sensation, to feel that we exist, even in pain.’ You have felt more life than most, mon bijou. It makes you precious to the world.”

  A breeze lifts a tendril of my hair across my face. I brush it away, but not before seeing the brown strands. The darkness is still a shock, my reasons for returning to my natural color still baffling.

  Because of him.

  He uses pretty words, weaves a seductive sense of security around me, but what he wants is raw and dark and there’s nothing precious about it. Some secrets aren’t mine to tell. Some are better left buried.

  Sometimes, even in the midst of insanity, there’s a kernel of reason. Sometimes, even in the dark, there is a promise of light. Nate is my light, and he means far more to me than anyone will ever know. I will protect him until I die.

  My shoulders slump, my mind and body wrung dry. I want my safe hole in the earth, the protection of my imaginary tree above. Emptiness and darkness, where no one can touch me. I want to be alone—without this horrible need for something I don’t deserve and can’t have. Intimacy. Companionship. I thought I’d made peace with my fate.

  Until him.

  I massage my temples. “Either fuck me or fire me, Gideon, because you’re making me deranged.”

  He huffs a soft, short laugh. “And what is it you want of the two options? Because if it means you don’t abandon this project, I’ll do either right now. God knows I don’t want a publicist. Just you.”

  My heart flits against its walls, needy and trapped, as my gaze snaps to his face. I’m paralyzed. Astounded by the offer of a choice in the matter. And the outright lunacy of it.

  “You’d prostitute yourself to me so long as I keep letting you pry into my head for the sake of art?”

  He bites his lower lip, smothering a smile. But his eyes gleam. “You are the single most fascinating, contradictory woman I’ve ever met. Strong yet vulnerable. Soft but hard. Frigid and at the same time filled with fire. I’m still considering marrying you, just so I can study you for the rest of my life.”

  I blink, then laugh. This time, it sounds normal. Once again, he’s effortlessly guided me back from the edge.

  “Move it, Don Juan. I’m going home.”

  Hands up in surrender, Gideon shifts away from the door. His impish grin follows me as I pull it closed, start the car, and roll down the window.

  “Don’t think I don’t know what you just did,” I chastise, which only makes his smile grow. “If I wasn’t so annoyed, I’d thank you.”

  Ducking his head through the window, his lips graze my cheek in a fleeting caress. “Good night, mon bijou. Text me when you’re home safe.”

  I nod, put the car in reverse, and back down the driveway. I don’t look in the rearview to see him one last time. And I ignore the feeling that every mile toward my empty condo takes me farther away from that elusive place called home.

  26 desperation

  When I see the manila envelope propped against my front door, I figure it must be a delivery from Maggie or Trent. I had my phone off most of the day, which is more than unheard-of—it’s against every professional rule I’ve maintained for years. In fact, it wouldn’t have come as much of a surprise if they’d reported me missing after not being able to reach me for a few hours.

&
nbsp; Keys in hand, I swoop the envelope from the floor and read the word scrawled in black. First, I recognize the sloping writing. Second, I register the meaning.

  No.

  My lips go numb. My hands spasm, then clench on the envelope until it crinkles. Buzzing fills my ears, the signature herald of shock. I should know.

  The envelope tears. Falls to the ground in pieces. A single sheet of lined paper remains, the corner where I grip it slowly turning red from a paper cut.

  The paper slips from my nerveless fingers, fluttering to the floor. After a quick, tense glance around the empty hallway, I notice something sticking out from the torn halves of the envelope. A newspaper clipping. Dropping to my knees, I pull the fragment free, knowing what it is before I even see it.

  A picture from the L.A. Times from the gala last weekend. A candid shot of Gideon and me standing in a group of people. One of those token crowd pictures where everyone looks happy and rich. Even though it wasn’t, the smile on my face looks authentic. My dark hair contrasts my skin, untouched by a tanning bed in weeks.

  And I see it. What he must have seen.

  The ghost of a young girl he claimed as his. Used and warped with twisted love and pain.

  All grown up.

  * * *

  I don’t enter my apartment. There’s no overt sign of a break-in, but the handle turned with no resistance. Unlocked—not how I left it. I don’t know how he got past the deadbolt, but he always was a resourceful bastard. He was inside my home. My space. There’s no telling what calling cards he left behind.

  Was he here last night, too? When I woke up to the smell of his cologne?

  The possibility is enough to send me sprinting back to my car, adrenaline like lava in my veins, thick and hot. Once I’m safely away from my building, I call Nate. He doesn’t pick up. I call him five more times before finally dialing Crossroads. To my relief, London answers.