“I love you,” she whispered, her lips tracing kisses against my neck, finding my lips in a crushing, desperate kiss. I was already pulling at her shirt, throwing it off and revealing that smooth, creamy skin and the white lace bra underneath. I moved my mouth down to kiss her stomach, her torso, that perfect spot between her breasts. I pulled at the straps and she helped me unhook it, and as I licked her nipple, teasing her, taking it into my mouth, she gasped – a surprise, a revelation – and I remembered. “Do you want me to stop?” I asked. I knew exactly what Lottie would have wanted; I knew nothing about what Kyrieana wanted.
“No,” she breathed, “don’t, please.” I smiled at her, sat up and took off my shirt and she caught her breath again. “Kyrieana,” I asked, “have you ever … before coming here, had you …” My mind was so twisted into so many different corners; this was Lottie. How many times had we had sex before? And yet I was trying to ask her if she was a virgin? Why hadn’t I stayed on the couch.
“It’s not the same, Dietrich. We’re not the same. And with you … I mean, I remember it, but to feel it.” She reached for me, pulled herself closer to me again so that she could slide underneath me, and brought my lips down to kiss her again. I couldn’t bring myself to question her anymore. She tugged at the zipper on my jeans and I pulled off her shorts and the rest of our clothes came off, cast aside quickly, as we ravenously ran our hands along each other’s bodies, these bodies that were alive with a lust that could only be born from those years of physical separation, of a love that burned so deeply that even death could not extinguish it. As I slid into her, she gasped again, wrapping her arms closer around me, tightening as I thrust into her and I moaned with the pure pleasure of feeling Lottie surrounding me again. Lottie’s body responded, her back arched and her fingers dug deeper into my back as I thrust harder and faster, filled with the ecstasy of making love to Lottie. And it was only us then. I was with Lottie. Somehow, impossibly, I was with Lottie again. She was kissing my neck, my lips, licking my ear and whispering, “Dietrich, don’t leave, please don’t ever leave me, stay here.”
I’m almost positive that it’s a universal truth that the quickest way to get a man to orgasm is to whisper something in his ear. And as my body pulsed with the intense pleasure of those final thrusts, I whispered back, “Ach, Lottie, du bist mein Himmel.” Afterward, as we lay there together, our bodies still tangled, Lottie running her hand through my hair and I breathing deeply as the strong smell of her encircled me, Lottie finally shifted out from underneath me and lay on her side facing me, looking at me, happy, but serious, determined. “I can be her, Dietrich. Just her. I will try for you.” And, like that, another layer of this Hell of an afterlife opened up beneath me.
Chapter 11
I wanted to talk to Eric but I never had the chance. I wanted to tell him what I had done, what Lottie –or Kyrieana – had offered, what she was willing to give up because I had selfishly, stupidly, only cared about resurrecting my dead fiancée and had never considered what it truly meant for her. Kyrieana wasn’t offering to die for me. I think if she could, she would have done it to make me happy. But instead she would always be there: hidden, silent, forgotten. She had offered to bury herself alive for me. It was worse than death. And I was the biggest asshole on the planet.
I hadn’t known what to say then, and I had only kissed her forehead, told her to sleep now, and she did, lying against me, her arm draped loosely over me and I lay there beside her for a very long time, watching her, wondering how I could possibly love someone so much and yet not know them. And of course I thought about her sacrifice. I had been consumed with finding the woman I had loved, the woman I had lost and buried, and had treated the woman she was now as that same person with a few eccentricities. Because I wanted to believe that was all there was to it: it was Lottie, resurrected, a little changed by time and experience but my Lottie. I knew I was wrong, but I wanted to believe it so badly that I had allowed myself to live in an illusion where Lottie was alive again. And Lottie knew what I was doing. That was the worst part. She knew I was only looking for a ghost and was willing to live in that illusion with me.
In the morning, Lottie was thoughtful, observing me carefully as she sat across the table sipping on her coffee and I tried to explain to her that I had to leave town for a few days but that I would be back as soon as I could, that Eric would stay with her and that she would be safe with him. There were more thoughts there than I could read; my Lottie trusted me. She knew I would return. She understood whatever I was doing, I was doing for her. But Kyrieana hadn’t forgotten her promise to me the night before and whatever doubts she had, whatever anxiety my sudden departure was causing, was suppressed. She wouldn’t voice it.
And so I had left that morning in a daze of my own making: filled with a hope for a future I thought had been lost, and with the self-loathing for a man who was willing to destroy an innocent person, a good person, to get it. It would be so easy to disappear with her; to pick somewhere in the world – anywhere – and just go, start all over with her, have the family she had always wanted, have the life we had both planned for. But instead, I decided to go to Waco. I would find out what Jackson had been hiding from her; I would try to save them both. What else could I do? Of course, I wanted Lottie back. But I reminded myself that she was dead and that future was gone, just a fantasy that would remain an illusion in my mind; that we were dead, and in this afterlife, in this new Hell that I had made for myself, there was only one path to redemption.
Eric wasn’t in his room when I got back to the hotel. I called his phone and got his voicemail. I told him I wanted to leave soon, that he needed to get his ass back here, then showered, repacked the few personal things I had brought with me, having expected this to be a shorter trip than it was turning out to be. Eric finally knocked on my door about an hour later, with a colleague of ours with him. I let them both in, eyeing Eric curiously. Mark was about Eric’s age, competent, trustworthy, and we had often requested to work with him when we needed extra help - it had been Mark who had helped us with the transcription - but his presence here was unnerving. Eric had never told me he was coming.
“Check out of here,” Eric said, “There’s a vacant three bedroom in their complex. We signed a short-term lease on it this morning. And take the car Mark drove over in when you go to Waco. Leave your car at the apartment.”
I nodded. What was he even doing here? “I already packed the car for you,” Eric continued. I was still waiting for him to get to the part where he explained Mark’s mysterious presence. Lottie had never met Mark. Having a stranger here wasn’t going to help her anxiety about Jackson’s ominous warnings, her promise to me last night, my sudden departure this morning. Eric was still talking, telling me what he had put in the car I was supposed to be driving to Waco, but I was preoccupied with Mark, and finally lost my patience.
“Mark, why are you here?”
Both of them stared at me. Eric took a deep breath. Shit. “Dietrich, this is … it was one thing when we came looking for a couple of girls that we knew were harmless. I was fine with keeping this between us. But,” he inhaled slowly again, raking a hand through his short brown hair, which made it stand up in spots in a messy, spiky, just rolled out of bed kind of way, “these guys … look, I don’t care where they came from originally. Those bodies are human. Those people are human. We can’t just let them … Jesus, Dietrich, we don’t even know what they’re really planning on doing, but they think they can come here and steal our friends’ bodies and not have to live by our laws?”
“I get that, but it still doesn’t explain why Mark is here.”
“Because if this judge prick shows up while you’re in Waco, I don’t want to be here alone.”
I was too surprised to respond immediately. I had never heard Eric admit that he was scared before. Nothing ever seemed to rattle him. He had been the one who recognized my potential at 18 and recommended my recruitment, and he had been my mentor as he taught me every
thing he knew. I soon gained his respect and admiration with how quickly I learned, how adeptly and efficiently I could work under all sorts of conditions. Within a couple of short years, he had become my equal, my friend. “Eric, are you worried?”
Eric didn’t seem to know. “Maybe. But, we were talking about it with Daniel…”
“Goddamn, it, Eric,” I interrupted.
“Dietrich, just let me finish. We all decided we needed to make it clear that they can stay, but this kind of shit they’re trying to pull with Lottie needs to stop, and if it doesn’t, then they’ve worn out their welcome.”
Eric definitely watched too many movies.
“We didn’t all decide that, Eric,” I countered, “I wasn’t part of this conversation. You went behind my back and,” now it was Eric’s turn to interrupt me.
“No, not really. Nothing’s changed. This is still your ballgame. I made that clear and everyone agreed. We all understand Lottie’s our biggest priority here.”
“Dietrich,” Mark finally spoke, “are you sure you want to go to Waco on your own? Seems like there’s a greater risk for shit to go wrong there than here.”
I looked back at Eric, still wishing I had just a little more time with him alone to figure out what I had done, what I should do, hell, what I should even tell her, but there was no more time. And we were not alone. So I just nodded and said, “Yes, I have to do this alone.”
The drive to Waco from Baton Rouge has to be one of the most boring drives I have ever taken. Endless miles of monotonous pastures and fields were sporadically punctuated by small towns with single traffic lights and the even rarer larger town where I could stop for gas or a drink or to pee because, God knows, there was nothing else to do. This meant the seven hour drive gave me entirely too much time to think. I tried to distract myself with music, but Lottie and I had listened to too many of the same artists and if I were trying not to think about her, then this wasn’t going to work. So I drove in silence, and I thought anyway.
I thought about Jackson, what I was going to Waco to do, how this dark space inside of me took pleasure in the thought of it. I thought about Lottie, my fiancée Lottie, the woman who should still be alive, who should have been my wife by now, maybe with our first child sleeping peacefully in her arms. I could see her face – that look of utter devotion and unconditional maternal love burning so strongly within her that I wanted to somehow pull this vision from my mind, capture it, encapsulate it, preserve it forever. And of course I thought about Kyrieana, a woman whose love for me was so powerful, so intense, that she was willing to pretend she no longer existed. It wasn’t the same thing as dying; death would have provided a reprieve. A person does not know they are dead. She would know she was alive. She would always know she had been pushed aside, disregarded; she would always know she had been unwanted. And I would always know exactly how she felt.
The golden dome of the Ferrell Center gleamed brightly from the rays of the setting sun as I drove into Waco and headed toward the Hilton on South University Parks Drive. I had never been to Waco. Like the rest of Texas in late June, even with the sun setting, it was overbearingly hot but far less humid than south Louisiana. Flocks of black birds swarmed from tree to tree, and I found myself relieved that I was in a strange car – that many birds had to be dangerous for the paint. After checking in, I carried my bags upstairs and carefully inventoried everything Eric had already told me he had provided. I needed to know where everything was now, feel their weight, imagine their possibilities. I didn’t plan on Jackson living through the night.
Downstairs in the lobby, I found a restaurant and ordered a salmon Caesar salad, but mostly I just picked at it. There were multiple wide screens in front of me, each one displaying a different sporting event. I occasionally watched one of the baseball games while I picked apart the pink, fleshy fish on my plate. Lottie loved salmon. She probably would not have appreciated me massacring this one. It wasn’t Jackson and what I was going to do that night that had curbed my appetite. I was still hungover on the memory of Kyrieana wanting to sacrifice herself for me, believing it would keep me from leaving her. My mind was definitely fucked up. I paid my bill and went back to my room to wait.
By 2:00 a.m., I was standing inside of Dr. Jackson Garrett’s home. He lived alone, no pets, in a peaceful, well-kept neighborhood. It was dark, mostly quiet except for the occasional snorting breaths of the man who was deep in sleep. It was a ranch style home, an easy lay out to navigate; how thoughtful that he had even bucked the trend of hardwood floors and kept wall to wall carpeting so that my footsteps were soundless. As I stood outside his bedroom door, the slow steady snore never pausing, I took off the mask I had been wearing; I wanted him to see my face as soon as he woke up, because from then until the time he died this morning, my face would be the last thing this man would ever see. I entered his room.
I stood by the side of his bed for only a few seconds, feeling that hatred sweltering inside me, before reaching down to clasp my hand around his neck. Jackson’s eyes shot open, wide, terrified, panicked, recognition then surprise passing through them so quickly while he gasped and sputtered, trying to breathe. I pulled him out of the bed, allowing myself only the briefest moment to feel relief that he wasn’t the kind of man who slept naked, and shoved him back down, so that he was sitting up now, his back against the headboard, my hand still around his neck. He was choking, trying to beg me to let him breathe, but I knew he could breathe enough – he wouldn’t die yet.
The zip ties were in a pocket, and when he realized what I was going to do, he let go of my arm that was holding his neck and tried to hit them away. It was rash and pointless. I was stronger, smarter and already had an advantage over him; I had the training, the experience. But he didn’t realize any of this yet, he was still panicked, consumed with shock and trying to fight off a man he must have thought was just a heartbroken lover wanting revenge for what had happened to his fiancée – or maybe for what was going to happen to her now. I quickly hit him across his cheekbone, felt something break through the leather gloves on my hand as blood spattered across his ivory sheets. I couldn’t help wondering if Lottie would have called them creamy ivory.
Jackson wailed, or tried to, but my right hand was still around his throat. The zip ties were prelooped. I slipped one around his wrist and one of the posters of his headboard and tightened it until blood began trickling down his arm. He tried to scream. “Do that again,” I warned him, “and I’ll fucking sever it.” Jackson closed his mouth but I kept my hand around his throat. I would let him speak when I was ready. You’re in my world now, asshole.
When his other arm was tethered to the other poster, I released my grip on his throat just enough to let him speak. If he tried to scream again, I could stop him almost instantly. “Dietrich,” he panted, “what …”
“Shut the fuck up.” He closed his mouth again. Blood was still pouring from his nose, dripping onto his chest, the sleeve of my shirt. I thought about breaking the other side. “Why was David with you in Baton Rouge?”
“I don’t kno…” I broke the other side of his nose.
Jackson moaned as loudly as he could, a fresh river of blood rushing from his left nostril. “Every time you fuck with me, I will break something else. There are 206 bones in the human body, and I will break every single one.” I didn’t actually know if that were possible – how would I even reach those tiny bones inside his ears? But I was willing to give it a shot. “Why was David in Baton Rouge?”
“You’re just going to kill m...”
I broke the radius in his right arm by shoving it into the headboard. I heard it snap. I tightened my grip around his throat before he could scream, then gave him a few minutes to think about how he was going to answer me the next time I asked him. “Why was David in Baton Rouge?”
Jackson was silent for a moment; he was in shock, but he hadn’t passed out. I was about to break his other arm when he stopped me. “Wait!” his voice was hoarse, weary. There was
only so much pain any human could take. “We knew you were there but we didn’t know … how involved … you were. David was …” he flinched, anticipating my reaction to what he was about to tell me. I wasn’t in the mood for him to take his time parsing his words. I slammed my fist into his broken arm. A strangled, gurgling cry rose up from his throat, and I ordered, “Finish.”
“To kill her! David was there to kill her!” he hissed.
My grip on his neck tightened and his eyes bulged; I had to force myself to relax my fingers. He couldn’t die yet. “Why?”
Jackson’s eyes closed. If this fucker thought I was done with him, I would remind him who was in control now. I had been straddling him on the bed to keep him from moving, and I lifted myself just enough to bring my knee into his groin with as much force as I could manage in this position. His face turned the color of mulberry wine. I knew he wouldn’t be able to talk right away so, again, I waited. One of the reasons I rarely watched movies was that Hollywood made everything so complicated; as I watched Jackson’s face, waiting for the color to return to its pallid shade, I wondered if anyone who ever worked on those ridiculous spy movies realized how little technology was needed to torture a person. Jackson didn’t seem very comfortable to me.
The blood from his nose had crusted over, but thin drops continued to trickle down his arms from where the zip ties were cutting into his flesh, falling off onto the creamy ivory sheets and spreading larger and larger crimson pools around us. I had decided these were definitely creamy ivory, if for no other reason than my wedding day, my bride, had been stolen from me; but some part of her still lived, and this asshole wanted to steal her from me again. Maybe I had already fucked that up myself. I should have kept our relationship platonic, so that I could love Lottie, so that in some small way she was still in my life and I could find some new meaning to this afterlife. And by doing so, I would have still respected Kyrieana, appreciated that she was herself, and deserved a life of her own. But that was for her to decide – not me, and certainly not this fucker.
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