Flawed

by Sara Hubbard

  I can still taste her on my lips and smell her lavender shampoo. She sleeps in my bed. Her quiet snores make me smile. In the jail, the guys that snored would get a punch in the face or be woken with a pillow over their nose and mouth. But not her. I could listen to her snore every night forever and still sleep like a baby next to her.

  She stirs, scratching her nose before settling.

  I climb out of bed and search my jeans for my cell phone. I need to call Yuri. I’ve put off answering him for too long and I worry if I wait any longer it will be too late. He’s prompted me and his message was received loud and clear. I have no choice. I need to see things this way in order to move forward.

  Cell phones. I was never a fan of these fucking things in high school, and they have these big screens now and you can use the Internet. It all seems unnecessary. If I want to search the Internet, I’ll use a computer. I pull my jeans on over my naked ass and slip on a long-sleeved black shirt. Then I slip outside in my bare feet and resist the urge to yell at how fucking cold it is.

  I pull the door to, after peeking at Ivy one more time to make sure she’s still asleep. Yuri is in my contact list and I press his name, listen to it ring while I wait for him to answer. It’s almost midnight and he might be pissed at me for calling, but I need to make this call now, before Ivy wakes. She can’t know what I’m going to do in exchange for her brother. She would insist on another way. I wish I could see one. Jack could run, but Ivy would never. This town is small and closed-minded and has stood still over the years, but she’s always loved this place. Even if she’d made it to university, I know she’d have come back. She’d always come back. If Jack ran, Yuri would set his sights on her. I curl my fists. What would I do if he hurt her? It’s bad enough he put his hands on her. I could smash something just imagining the scene in my mind.

  The phone rings only twice before he answers, his voice normal, and I’m glad I didn’t wake him. Pissing him off would only make this worse.

  “This better be important, Nikolai,” he says.

  I’m not one to beat around the bush when my mind is made up. “When do you want it done?” I ask.

  I hear his smug smile all the way through the phone. Fucking bastard. Using Ivy to push me. He knew I’d do it. I knew it too, though I wanted to believe I’d find another way. I was just buying time. This was inevitable.

  “I take no pleasure in this, Niko.”

  “When?”

  He breathes into the phone, producing static. “As soon as possible.”

  “Done. But stay away from Ivy Parker.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He sounds so innocent. If I didn’t know him better, I might actually fall for it.

  I grit my teeth and my nostrils flare. I try and keep my voice even, but it’s impossible. “The boy…the favor…you can have what you want, but you leave Ivy and Jack alone.”

  “It’s always good talking to you, Niko. Enjoy your night.”

  After we hang up, I stare at the phone. I want to throw it into the woods or smash it with the heel of my foot. And I want to curse into the night, Fuck! But I grip the phone in one hand and curl my fingers into a fist in the other. I let the cool air temper the heat in my cheeks and my neck. And I count to ten. Then twenty. When I realize it’s impossible, I do the only other thing that I can think of to extinguish the fire inside of me. I go inside and sit in the chair across the room from Ivy. I stare at her angelic face with her golden hair fanned out on her pillow. Only then does my mind feel peace.

  I don’t sleep tonight. I’m not even tired. There is too much going on in my head. When I came back here, I wanted her to be in my life, in whatever way she’d have me. I never imagined she’d let me in her bed again. I never imagined she’d still care…still love me. I can feel that she does even if she’s not sure if I’m what she wants. But she’s coming around, bit by bit. I can’t let Yuri destroy this for me, but I feel like either way, he wins. If I don’t kill Brent then she knows I could have saved her brother and I didn’t, but if I do, how can she ever look at me again after murdering her brother’s friend? In cold blood? She’ll feel guilty for asking for my help and she’ll never tell me I’m good, ever again. She’d never be able to mean it. Either way, I’m screwed. But of those choices, only one results in her not burying another member of her family. It’s the only choice I have.

  Through the window, the morning sun peeks in, shining a thin ray of light on the light wood floor. I’ve sat here too long and my body starts to ache, so I move slightly, but the chair groans under me. Ivy’s eyes flutter open and she flashes me a dreamy smile with her eyes straining from the lamp on the table next to me.

  “Did I wake you?” I ask, about to turn out the light.

  “No, you’re fine.” She rubs her eyes and sighs before sitting up. “What are you doing over there?”

  “Watching you.”

  “That’s kind of creepy.”

  “And yet I’m still staring.”

  The sheet slips from her hands and exposes one of her small, perky breasts. Her nipple is soft and swollen and I want to put my mouth on it and suck while I dip my fingers inside of her. Last night put some of my fantasies to shame. The tie I wore yesterday is still tied to the headboard, but her hands are free now. We never experimented as kids, but now, I have a list of things I want to try with her. And it gets me hard just thinking how willing she was last night when I suggested tying her up. What other things will she agree to?

  “Come back to bed,” she says, patting the space beside her. She peels the covers off my side of the bed back and I stand and stalk toward her, choosing instead to settle on top of her, pressing my hard cock in tight against her pussy. She pushes against me, grinds her hips to make me wild, and I think I’ll have her again before breakfast. She was still playing hard to get last night but now she’s game and I worry I’ll never get out of bed again.

  “I’m a little sore,” she says.

  “I hurt you?” The realization hits me like a hammer to the gut. The last thing I want is to hurt her again, physically or emotionally. I sit up, rest my back against the headboard, and pull her into my arms, needing to hold her and to make things better. “Why didn’t you say something?”

  “Because I didn’t want you to stop. I guess I’m not used to having sex anymore.”

  Does that mean she hasn’t been with anyone since me? I want to know the answer so bad but I have no right to ask, especially since I’ll lose my mind if she’s been with someone else—whether I have the right to know or not. I’m trying to be good, I really am, but I’m only human and I’ve always been plagued with a jealous streak.

  She rolls onto her side, her eyes set on my face. I put my hand over her eyes to stop her. Not because I give a shit about her staring. It doesn’t bother me in the least, but I do it because it bugs her and I enjoy teasing her.

  She presses a hand to the faded scar on my neck. Since I trimmed my beard for job hunting, the line is more prominent. I prefer to keep it hidden, but not for the reason people would think, like I feel self-conscious about it, but because I don’t like to be asked how it happened. Punks in prison had a habit of asking that question and I had a habit of reminding them you don’t get in other people’s business. You certainly don’t ask about scars or criminal history. It’s just not something you do. Even criminals have etiquette behind bars.

  “I don’t remember this one,” she says.

  “It wasn’t there.” I wait to see if she’ll leave it alone but her frown tells me otherwise. Lying with her like this is comfortable. Already. This is more than I could have hoped for. And though I don’t want to talk, I do. I have a lot of making up to do and sharing seems to top her list of points. I clear my throat and hesitate, but eventually I get the words out. “In prison, some guys walk in and look for the biggest guy they can find, and they try and fight them to get respect.”

  “You were the biggest?”

  “I guess so. I’d been in for about f
our years at that point. He came at me and I dodged it, of course. I’d been fighting my brother and cousins for years and this guy wasn’t practiced.”

  Ivy presses a tender kiss to my shoulder, encouraging me.

  “I knocked him out. One punch. That was it. He was on the ground for a good five minutes. I think we’d all calmed down by that point. And the guys had turned their attention back to the television. I thought that was the end of it. I didn’t know this guy was a killer. Four murders. All with knifes.” I shrug. “Not that it would have made a difference. I still would have knocked him out. One night he cornered me in the shower and pulled a shank on me. He came at me from behind. The blade was strong enough to cut through skin, but not strong enough to reach my jugular.”

  “Oh my God.” She gasps and cuddles in a little closer. “He could have killed you.”

  “Could have,” I say with a wink. “But I’m a hard man to kill.”

  “Don’t joke about this. I’m serious.”

  “You’re right. I’m sorry. It wasn’t funny.”

  “What happened? How did you get away from him?”

  There is a draft coming in from the window and it hits me on my right shoulder, chilling me. I adjust in bed and pull the sheets up a little higher, making sure to cover her, too.

  I could tell her I struggled with him, that we rolled around in my own blood before I managed to knock the guy on his ass and drive a shank through his neck. Then I could tell her about the investigation and how they ruled it self-defense since they had it on camera. But she doesn’t need to know all that. And I worry it’ll only worsen her opinion of me, knowing I killed someone—justified or not. But as she stares at me, gulping, I can’t lie.

  “I did what I had to do.”

  “You killed him?”

  “They caught it on camera and ruled it self-defense. I spent the next month in the infirmary. Eighteen stitches. And the guy I killed was buried in the lot behind the prison.”

  “Oh, my God, Niko. Don’t you dare feel guilty about that. It was him or you.”

  “I don’t feel guilty,” I say.

  “Don’t lie, Niko. I can read it in your face. You don’t have to pretend with me.”

  She’s right. But I don’t feel guilty about that guy. I know I didn’t have a choice. I’m just used to people expecting the worst from me and I couldn’t handle it if she looked at me like all the cops, and social workers and lawyers and the people in this town. I grip the back of her head and pull her close enough to give her a desperate kiss. This is why I missed her so much. Because she never treated me like a piece of shit. Lots of people in this town would turn their nose up at me, like I was some dirt they stepped in, but she never judged me. And when I had moments where I felt real low, she was always there to make me feel better.

  “You deserve a better man,” I tell her.

  “Who says you’re not a good man?”

  “The things that I’ve done. I just…”

  She sighs and curls her arm over my chest and nestles in tighter. She lifts her head and sets those big blues of hers on mine. “You can’t change the past,” she says. “If you don’t like who you were or what you’ve done, then you have to make a choice to change. And you’re doing that, right?”

  I smile at her, touch her face and slide my thumb over her pouty bottom lip. “If it were up to me, it wouldn’t be a problem, but look at my family—I don’t stand a chance.”

  “Fuck them,” she says, earning a laugh from me. She doesn’t curse much and it sounds wrong coming from her mouth.

  “Fuck them?” I parrot as I roll her onto her back and settle between her thighs. I look down at her. She’s so beautiful and her small smile makes me feel happy and calm. How the hell did I ever manage to let her go? And how the hell has she forgiven me? I don’t know how I did it.

  “There’s good in you, Nikolai.” She takes a breath and her voice is barely a whisper. “Even if it isn’t obvious to everyone else, I see it. I always have.”

  12

  NIKO: After breakfast, Ivy drives me into town to get my car. We sit there, car idling, her cheeks red and my hands itching to touch her again. I wrap my hand around the back of her neck. My grip is firm when I meet her eyes. I pull her toward me and cover her lips with mine. It’s easy to get lost in how I feel when I’m with her and I have to remind myself that I can’t do that. Not when her life could be at stake—or her happiness. So I think about murder and prison showers and hazing new inmates. Anything to get my dick to calm down. Before I get out, I adjust my cock and she chuckles at me, her eyes lighting up.

  I climb out of the car but lean back in before the closing the door, “Call me?”

  She shrugs, “Maybe.”

  I raise an eyebrow in challenge.

  “Don’t push your luck.”

  I shut the door and watch her car as she pulls away. It’s an old beater that she’s had since her sixteenth birthday. It was old then, now it’s ancient—and I don’t mean classic. The muffler wobbles as she goes over a bump and I swear to God it’s going to fall off. Money. I need more of it. I’ll buy her a car that I don’t have to worry about blowing up. But going legit pays pennies, and that’s only if I can get a job. But as I watch her in the distance, with her blinker flashing too fast to be working correctly, I know why I have to keep on the path I’ve set for myself. She deserves more than the kind of life my mother had.

  But job hunting will have to wait. I have a task to complete and it came with a deadline.

  Brent’s address isn’t hard to find. At least that’s what I think when I find him easily online. Then I discover he and Jack got evicted from their apartment after their landlord discovered they’d been arrested. Not sure if that’s legal, but that’s hardly my problem. Regardless, they moved on. Ivy never said where Jack is now and I haven’t asked. I don’t want to raise any red flags. Even in casual conversation, she’d start asking questions and she can’t know about this. Not now. Not ever.

  I have to hand it to Brent. His trail stops cold at his old apartment. I don’t have much to go on after that, so I have to kick things up a notch. This involves asking Vik for an informant at the police department. Lucky me, there are only a handful of cops in this town and most of them are dirty.

  The cop has a burner phone and I call once without leaving a message. That’s the way Vik always does it. And like Vik says, the cop calls me back from the number displayed on his phone—my own burner. I don’t know the guy, but Vik trusts him—as much as you can trust a dirty cop—and he has no idea who I am. It needs to stay that way.

  “This Vik’s friend?” he asks.

  “Don’t matter who I am. You have what I want?”

  He clears his throat and there’s a lot of static on the other end. “He listed his sister as his next of kin but I heard that he’s holding out at some old farmhouse near Briar Lake. Apparently, it belongs to his cousin who is working on the oil rigs right now.

  “Yeah, who’d you hear that from?”

  “The kid himself. He was in today.”

  “I thought they dropped the charges.”

  “For the theft. The guy has two strikes and the DA has him for resisting arrest and possession. Kid had painkillers on him when they picked him up. Opiates, I think.”

  “Interesting.”

  “I saw him sitting in the waiting room looking twitchy, so I asked about him after he met with the DA. Sang like a canary and turned witness for the DA in return for the DA dropping charges against him. He threw that friend of his under the bus. What was his name? Jack Parker? Said the drugs weren’t his. Says he got them from Jack.”

  “Is that so?”

  The wind blows outside and a branch from an overhanging tree taps on the roof.

  “Some people might feel pretty threatened by what he had to say because he had some information about some other things, too. Kid’s not in protective custody. He refused it. Stupid son of a bitch.”

  “Good to know.”

&nbs
p; “Isn’t it? Well I’m always here to help for a fee. So don’t forget to drop a present off at the usual spot.”

  I hang up the phone. Nothing I hate more than dirty cops. On the surface, they want to serve and protect but underneath they’re worse than criminals like my uncle. At least my uncle doesn’t pretend to be someone he’s not. He doesn’t gain your trust because of the uniform and then sell it to the highest bidder. With a criminal, you know what you get.

  Regarding his ‘presents,’ Vik told me earlier that he drops money in the mail for this bastard. $500 in fifty-dollar bills, in an envelope without a return address. Vik usually puts it in a card so it looks like a birthday present. I have my card in hand now. I bought it earlier today. It reads ‘So you’re turning 40’ on the outside with happy birthday on the inside. I resist the urge to personalize it with a ‘fuck you.’

  On the way to pick Vik up, I drop the card in the mail. Another $500 gone, for something I don’t even want. Little by little, Yuri’s task is getting bigger and bigger. And what will he have me doing next? Ivy thinks turning my life around will be so easy. She said I could just choose to be good and everything would fall into place. She has no idea.

  Vik is swopping out the plates on a plain old truck in his one-car garage when I knock on the half open door and walk in. The truck is black without dents or imperfections. Nothing about it stands out. It’s the best thing to use when you’re on your way to kill someone. My old car with its loud engine and racing stripe would only attract attention.

  Fuck, I’m really doing this.

  I’ve hurt lots of people in my life, but I’ve never planned a murder. It makes me sick to my stomach. The kid is barely twenty years old and he has his whole life ahead of him. One stupid decision and this is how it ends for him. I can’t help but think about the poor decisions I’ve made and how my sins are much greater than his, but here I stand. There has to be a reason for it.