Cruel and Unusual (Somewhere In-Between)

by C. E. Wilson

  My body was shouting at me, begging me to call her back and talk some sense into the damn woman, but my brain knew better. The Mauve I remembered—the Mauve from all my paintings—was gone. Her heart and soul could finally be at peace, or so Mark would tell her, I’m sure. My back remained to her as I heard the door open.

  “I wish you the best of luck in your future when you are done paying for my crimes.”

  And then she was gone.

  I cradled my hands in my face and finally released the wracking sobs I was too scared to show Mauve. Even with her sudden turn of humility, I couldn’t bring myself to be so weak in front of her. Her visit hadn’t heralded a beautiful new spring as I had dreamed it would. Instead she had burst upon me like an unexpected storm, blowing through my life and leaving the wreckage of two long years in her wake. She wasn’t taking me back. In fact, she was warning me that I should never try to contact her again. She never mentioned the restraining order, but I assumed it would go back into effect and stay there. Always. She had Mark and God, and so she no more use for me. I was her past.

  My body ached with the heaving cries I allowed myself as I heard the boat shuttling off and a horn alerting that its departure back to Sand Point had begun. Gone. No Mauve. Not now. Not ever. Not even a chance.

  I wiped my mouth and looked around my apartment. Suddenly, I didn’t want to see those fucking pictures of her. That woman I had painted was dead. Long dead, and buried quietly with no mourners. Except me. The thought made me angry. With a new purpose, I stood and thrashed about, ruining everything in my path. I ripped and tore apart every painting, every sketch, and every trace of the woman who had left me. I became like an animal on the hunt. Every time I spotted blue eyes or red hair, I ran forward and tore it apart with my bare hands. Damn that woman! Fuck her! What was the point of coming to see me if she just wanted to rip my heart out again?

  Another painting destroyed.

  Another sketch ripped into pieces.

  I didn’t even bother throwing away the scraps. Let her broken face lie on the floor. I didn’t care. I had no reason to clean. I had nothing to hope for.

  No hope, no peace. Only Mauve had those things, and she had taken them with her when she left.

  “Where’s my peace?” I shouted at the top of my lungs.

  Where the fuck was my inner peace?

  Why had I let myself believe that Mauve would want me back after all that time?

  Why hadn’t anyone tried to warn me?

  I stopped for a moment.

  Someone had. Verity had. And I had laughed at her.

  “Fuck,” I growled. I was exhausted. I must have been raging for a while. I quickly went to the window and looked around. A trace of pink—that was all I needed. I wouldn’t ask her to come back, but I wanted to see her, to know she was there. Angrily, I went to the front door and called out her name. To hell with what Flynn thought. I was alone now anyway. Silence answered my calls. I jogged around to the side of the house, hoping she was waiting for me, but bushes and empty air were all I could find.

  No trace.

  No trace of her.

  Maybe she wouldn’t come back. She said she would, but after everything I had done to her the past few days, what did she owe me? Nothing. I was a horrible person. Walking back to the front of my shack, I took a seat on the stoop and waited. I wanted to see her the moment she crested over the horizon. I wanted to tell her I was a fool and I should have never convinced myself that I stood a chance with Mauve.

  She didn’t come.

  I sat outside for an hour.

  And then another one.

  Thunder rumbled overhead as a large storm formed over the water. I wondered if Verity was still out there somehow. Rain fell in buckets for another hour or so, but no sign of Verity yet. I began to feel what little hope I had slipping away.

  By the time the sun started to set, I felt any trace of hope fall into the puddles of rain and mud below my feet. She wasn’t coming back.

  Honestly, I didn’t know if I blamed her.

  “Dammit,” I muttered, standing up and walking into my house. As I went to shut the door, I realized it didn’t matter. So what if I got a cold? So what if animals crawled in? What did it matter? So I didn’t bother to close the door but instead collapsed on the floor like a child. The cold, hard floor felt right.

  I curled into a ball as I used to when my mom and dad used to fight and I hid in the closet. The rain falling outside finally put me to sleep.

  Verity didn’t come home that night.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I awoke in the gray before dawn shivering on the floor with one thought in my head: I had lost Verity. She wasn’t coming back. I had fully and truly revealed that I was a complete asshole living in the past. I couldn’t let go of Mauve even though she had obviously let go of me.

  I still couldn’t get over it. A new boyfriend. A new outlook on life. The bullshit about her wanting forgiveness from me and for me to forgive her. The woman I had seen the day before wasn’t the woman I was in love with. She was gone. Dead. She might as well have fallen off the balcony that night when I accidently killed Emmett.

  I wanted Verity back.

  I knew it was horribly selfish to think for even one second that I could have her back, but I did. I missed her hair, the color of freshly chewed bubble gum. I missed those blue eyes, so electric a shade of blue that they couldn’t have been real. Moaning, I rolled around on the cold floor of my shack, inwardly cursing myself for not shutting the door. I hoped Verity would come back. I’d made mistakes. I’d gotten ahead of myself.

  What I had done to Verity wasn’t forgivable.

  I closed my eyes and slept again.

  The morning passed, and no Verity. I couldn’t find the strength to get up from the floor. Maybe I was giving up. Maybe I no longer saw a point in living. I should have never convinced myself that Mauve wanted me back. I was a fool. And if a shred of the old Mauve was still there under all this newfound born-again Christianity thing she was rocking, she was probably still laughing at me for even thinking I stood a chance to be with her again.

  The sun rose, but the temperature didn’t. Maybe I didn’t feel it. I lifted my head now and then toward the door, hoping that a tiny figure would be silhouetted in the doorway, but the odds were diminishing with each passing hour. My thighs and my back still stung. Everything hurt.

  I closed my eyes again.

  I was a fool.

  When I opened my eyes again, I was surprised that the air was warmer. Had I actually overslept into the next afternoon? That would have made sense. I groaned loudly as the dull pain in my back throbbed. The door was still open, but the sky was dark. Late night. Early morning. One was just as good as the other. As I went to sit up, I felt something shift against me.

  “What the hell…” I grumbled as a sheet of loose fabric slid down my frame as I sat up. Had I done this without realizing it? I reached down and realized the texture of the fabric seemed familiar. My blanket? I pulled it up and held it in front of my face. It was the blanket from my bed, but why was it on me?

  Mustering the strength, I finally sat up completely, expecting my hands to touch the papers from my rampage the other night, but found nothing but floor.

  “Huh?” I asked the empty room.

  With a new wave of shock, I stood and looked around the shack. It was dark, sure, but it was clean. All the papers and all the paints were gone. Everything had been cleaned up, as it had been before I threw my tantrum. Hardly a trace of Mauve was left behind. I had heard of sleepwalking, but sleepcleaning?

  I walked over to the door, pushed it shut, and looked around again. Only one light was on in the entire place, but it had clearly been cleaned. The sink was empty, and a few dishes were drying to the side. My table was organized. Even my chair was tidied up except for… Verity’s blanket. It was gone. What had I done with it? It was one of the only things I had left to remember her by, and I had carelessly thrown it away, like the rest o
f my shit that reminded me of Mauve, probably.

  I ran my hands over the top of the chair, taking in its coarse texture with my fingertips. Verity would never sit there again. Already, she was turning into a memory, a way to cope with my loneliness. I felt tears threatening all over again, and I covered my mouth in shame. I had to get it together. With both women gone, things would have to return back to usual. Me, myself, and I would just have to find a way to deal with the remainder of my sentence. Maybe I could even try to patch things up with Flynn. What choice did either of us have? We didn’t need to be friends, just civil acquaintances again.

  Sniffing loudly, I started to turn away from the chair when a flash of color caught my eyes, a color that didn’t belong in my dank, dismal prison. My breath hitched as my eyes adjusted to the little bit of light as the color registered in my mind. Pink. A flash of pink. I wiped my nose with the back of my hand, and like a moth to a flame, was drawn to the color. It was on my bed, which was odd, but I didn’t want to question it. If it was a mirage, I was more than willing to accept it.

  My steps were light as I approached, but even my most pessimistic thoughts couldn’t override what was right in front of me, a mound of soft pink hair on my bed, the rest of it, hidden by…

  “Verity’s blanket,” I whispered.

  The object on my bed shifted, but it didn’t move. Oh, God. It was her. It had to be. I knelt down, letting my knees hit the hardwood, not caring about the pain in my knees or back. I looked over my shoulder. The clean place, the blanket…realization struck me all at once.

  “You came back,” I said in a hushed voice.

  She stirred again but didn’t move.

  Almost unable to admit to myself that she was real, my hand started to act on instinct before my brain even realized what I was doing. It was shaking, but I tried to keep it steady as I pinched the end of the thin blanket with my finger and thumb and slowly pulled it away. My eyes danced over each piece of her as it was revealed to me. The hair. The slope of her frail shoulders. Her pale, exposed back. She shuddered, and quickly I put the blanket back over her and tucked it gently. She was there. She had come back. Why? What did she owe me? Was it because she didn’t have any other options? I leaned forward as she stirred in her sleep.

  “Why?” I asked, knowing she wouldn’t answer. “Why would you come back to me after everything I’ve done to you?” I felt my eyes sting with tears but held them back. Was I aiming to be the least manly man in the world? I dropped my hand over her body and gently rubbed her back with my thumb.

  “You could have gone.” My voice croaked softly. “You could have gone anywhere. You could have gone to someplace warm and escaped all of this…all of me. Why?”

  “I had to know you were okay…”

  My hand immediately flew away from her body, from those tiny words. My stomach fluttered. “Verity, you were listening to me?”

  “Well, you’re always so loud.” She didn’t move to get up but remained on her stomach, her cheek pressed into my pillow. I wanted to say I detected a hint of playfulness in her voice, but I didn’t think I would be so lucky.

  I was still stunned. “H-how…how long have you been here?”

  “I came back a few hours ago. You were passed out on the floor.” Her blanket rose and fell, as she must have sighed. “I don’t know what happened, but I’m going to assume that things didn’t go as you planned based on that reaction.”

  “You’re right.”

  “I see. I’m sorry if you didn’t want me to, but I cleaned up while you were still snoring away.” She sounded as though she was smiling. “And then I guess I got tired, and I figured—since you always said I could use your bed and you were already on the floor—that you wouldn’t mind.” She finally turned her head so I could see her tiny blue eyes looking up at me. “Do you mind?”

  “No,” I said immediately. “I told you before you could use it.”

  “Yes, well…if you want to keep the pictures you ripped up, I only put them in a bag and left them on the side of the house where your neighbor couldn’t see me.”

  “You did all of that?” I asked incredulously. “After everything—”

  “Malcolm, I know what I am,” she interrupted. “I didn’t appreciate how lucky I was to find someone who opened their home to me, fed me, kept my secret, and occasionally made me feel like a normal person. Like a fool, I got greedy and thought that maybe there was something more than that. I guess I really am still a person because only a person would think so selfishly.”

  “You’re not being selfish—”

  “I wasn’t respecting what you and Mauve had… or have—”

  “Had.”

  “The point is, I should have been more supportive. Malcolm, you’ve done so much for me, and you’ve asked nothing in return. I didn’t think about it. You could have told anyone about me, but you’ve kept my secret. You could have given me up to save your own skin, but you stood up for me. And I…” her voice cracked, “and I assumed that you were treating me like more than a doll who needed to be cared for. That was my own stupid fault.”

  “Verity.” I couldn’t believe she was apologizing to me. She didn’t have to! I was the fool. I was the one who had acted so impulsively. I wouldn’t let one thing slide. “Verity, I haven’t been secretive about how I feel about you.”

  She shook her head. “Maybe not, but things would never be settled until you saw her again. And I was right. One call, and all was forgotten. You forgot about me. And that’s when it dawned on me. I was special to you, but not like her. No one could ever be like her in your heart. So like a fool, I wanted you to be happy. I did what you asked, and though I didn’t necessarily do it with a smile, I did it.”

  Strong. Verity Nine was the strongest person I had ever met. “So you really were planning on leaving me, huh?” I asked. “That morning before Mauve arrived. I was so sure you were saying good-bye.”

  “I was,” Verity answered. Her answer was so short and so simple that it took my breath away. “I had every intention of leaving you that morning. I figured that, either way, I couldn’t come back here. I didn’t want to see you excited to see her again, and I didn’t want to see how much she affected you by leaving. Like I said, I was greedy. I wanted more. I wanted too much.”

  “So why,” I tilted my head down at her, “why did you come back?” I nearly stumbled back on my heels at the intensity in her eyes when she lifted her head and crossed her arms over the blanket.

  “Because like I said, Malcolm… I’m greedy.” Her eyes fell as though this was the most humiliating admission she’d ever revealed. As my lips started to part, she continued, words spilling out. “I wanted to see one last time if you were okay. I was afraid I’d see you humming and dancing around, working on pictures of her. I was shocked when I saw the door was open. I was going to peek in through the windows, but I assumed it was safer to come inside. And then I saw you on the floor.” Her eyes shifted to a space past me. “And I knew something had gone wrong. I felt ashamed. Because for a moment, I was so happy! I saw the pictures ripped up and ruined, and I knew that what I had thought would happen, did.”

  “Thanks,” I couldn’t help muttering.

  “I’m not finished. For a moment, I felt that way, but then I looked at you, and all those feelings went away.”

  “You felt sorry for me.”

  “Will you stop interrupting?” she hissed, pushing herself off the blanket so she could sit up. She kept the blanket bunched in her lap and rested her hands on top of it. When I fell silent again, she continued. “I felt horrible for how I had acted, but more than anything, I was pissed.”

  “Pissed?”

  She nodded without reprimanding me again. “Pissed at her. Pissed at what she had done to you.”

  “It wasn’t her—” I started to explain.

  “It’s all right.” She held up her hand to silence me. “You had every reason to be upset, and that’s when it hit me. I should have been supporting you all the
way. Despite what I want, I need to be honest about who I am now. I’m not a person, Malcolm. I want to be, and maybe I used to be, but I’m not anymore. I’m this.” She ran a hand through her pink hair so she could push it away from her eyes. “There was a way to help. There was something I could do for you. So I did it.”

  “You cleaned up the place.” I dared to smile. The smile wasn’t returned.

  “I know it isn’t much, and like I said, if you want those pictures back, they’re in a bag outside. I would never take them away from you. I wanted to do something for you—anything to say thank you for letting me stay here, for keeping my secret, and for making me feel as though I wasn’t some freak experiment.”

  “Stop it.” My voice came out like a growl. Verity’s expression contorted as though trying to figure out what I was so angry about, but she only grew more confused.

  “Stop what? Stop helping? Are you mad that I did something without asking?”

  “No, it’s—”

  “Because I’m sorry then, Malcolm.” Her words were flowing quickly, and I could barely get in a word edgewise unless I shouted. “I didn’t take them away from you. I would never try to take them away, but—”

  “That’s not what I mean, Verity!” I bellowed. “Fuck, Verity. That’s not what I mean.”

  “So what do you mean?”

  “Don’t talk about yourself like that, okay? You know I don’t like it, so shut the hell up about it. You’re not a freak, and you’re not just some experiment. I know I didn’t always believe you when you told me who you are, but that’s in the past now. Just like Mauve and me.”

  “So you mean—”

  “When you’re under my roof you are never, ever to speak about yourself as anything other than a person. You may think I’ve done a lot for you, Verity, and though I don’t agree, if that’s truly what you think, then you can do something in return. Stop punishing yourself for things you can’t control. What happened to you happened, and it sucks, but it doesn’t make you less of a person.” I flicked my eyes up to meet hers. “Not to me, at least.”