by Paula Cox
Chapter Twelve
Kayla
Over the next three months, as spring turns to summer and then summer to autumn, I often look out of Dante’s bedroom window watching the leaves turn deep green and then green-brown and wonder if this is real.
If this blossoming—this blossoming what? That is where I always stop, wondering. The first night we shared together, the first whisky-infused night, and then the subsequent nights, some of them whisky-infused and some of them not, have all been incredible. They have allowed me to feel pleasure I have never felt before. And yet . . .
I am sitting at the window now, hand pressed against the glass, a light autumn rain making the green-brown leaves heavy. The trees stand beside the road, overlooking it like sentinels, and as I watch them I wonder if Dante is my sentinel, if there is a deep connection here, or if I am just being used for his purposes. I do not want to think this way. I do not want to question him, but I can’t help but think of Master, of how he made everybody believe he only wanted what was best for them, and then how, in the end, he only wanted what was worse.
I look into Dante’s jet-black eyes and I cannot decide if what I am seeing is real or if it is fake or if there is anything there at all. I curse myself for it. I talk to myself: Get yourself together, Kayla. Of course he wants you, Kayla. He wouldn’t sleep with you almost every night if he didn’t. He wouldn’t keep you around. But the thing is, he often behaves distantly toward me, seemingly at random, and a couple of times he has even snapped at me and told me to leave him be for a while. I do not understand behavior like this. I do not understand men’s behavior at all, even at the best of times. They bring you close, and then they push you away, as though angry at you for being so close, forgetting it was them who pulled you in to begin with.
I still cook, and sometimes I clean, too, but only the main bar area. It is good to feel like I am earning my keep, like I am not here just for Dante’s amusement, and yet, when you get down to it, I am cooking and cleaning for him, and fucking him, too. I am doing all this for him and trying to tell myself there is some real emotional connection here. I don’t know how to handle it; I was never trained. Dad died before I was born and Mom never had a boyfriend, unless you count Master, which I don’t. Anyway, what kind of example is that?
“Ah!” I mutter, walking away from the window and sitting on the edge of the bed. These past three months, I am sure something has developed between us. Sometimes, we just talk for hours on end, about nothing in particular, about everything.
He tells me about his mission to find the man who burnt down the Wraiths’ warehouse, which is going poorly, tells me about his business with guns and protection games, all things I know little about but am glad to hear about from him. And then he tells me about other things, like how when he was a boy in an orphanage he used to bare-knuckle box kids twice his age to prove himself. Once, he tells me how he stole a tub of red paint and spilled it onto a bully’s head at the orphanage, while the kid was asleep, roaring as he did it that it was blood. The kid cried, and that was the end of the bully. I tell him things, too, about running from State to State, about stealing, scurrying. I tell him how, when you run for a long time, you start to feel like a rodent, always looking for a hole to crawl into.
And that is a bond, isn’t it? Surely?
I wring my hands together. The nails are bitten down to stubs. I don’t remember biting them; I must be doing it in my sleep. There must be something there. Surely he is not just using me, just some girl to fuck, to get burger out of, a convenient cleaner.
People are so complicated. I wish you could just reach into their brains and pull out their thoughts and hold them up to the sun and see, without any possibility for confusion, what exactly they were made of. If my life in the Movement taught me anything, it’s that you can never truly know what another person is feeling. What appears on their face can easily just be what they want to appear, and the sounds which come from their lips can be just that—sounds. How can I know if Dante really wants me for me, or if he just finds it convenient to have a girl waiting for him every night? How can I ever know for sure?
And I will not be used, I reflect, squeezing my hands together so hard the skin reddens. No, I will not be used. I am not that sort of girl. I will never allow that to happen. I have seen what being used can do to a person. I remember Mom, knitting all night because she couldn’t sleep, the way she was always looking over her shoulder when she passed people in the Compound, afraid of—afraid of what? That they would just attack her? No, I think she was afraid that the person she’d just passed would turn into a demon behind her back, a horned demon, because she never knew if a person was a person or a monster.
I laugh to myself, but it is a humorless laugh. That’s the thing, I reflect as I return to the window, watch cars drive lazily by on the road. You can never know if a person is a person or a monster, not until it is too late.
And now that I’ve crossed that line—now that I’ve started wondering if Dante might be using me—I can’t uncross it. I can’t go back to blindly accepting his affection as affection, his attentions as positives. When he snaps at me I tell myself it’s because he’s had a hard day. He’s looking for the Wraiths’ killer and he’s having no luck; he’s working on gun deals and things like that, things any man would find stressful. And yet I can’t accept that I am not just here to be snapped at, and then, occasionally, seduced.
The door behind me opens. I turn, and Dante walks in, his leather in his hand. He glances at me sitting by the window, and then at the bed. “What’re you doing, sitting there?”
I don’t respond, just stare out at the cars. Dante makes a huffing noise and drops onto the edge of the bed. I hear the squeak of the mattress as it weighs down beneath muscle and leather and oil and sweat and anger.
“Is somethin’ got under your skin, or what?” Dante says. His voice is tired, as though he can’t be bothered to deal with me. “What’s wrong with you?”
“It’ll be autumn soon,” I say.
“It already is.”
“I mean, real autumn. Deep autumn.”
He makes that huffing noise again. “So?”
“So the leaves will turn. Everything will change.” I hardly know what I’m saying myself; I’m just letting the words form and sound; I’m just not blocking them. “Summer to autumn. This is the longest time I’ve stayed anywhere since the Compound.”
“Good,” Dante says. “That’s good. Good for you.”
I turn to him, study his face. For a moment he meets my eyes, but then he looks down at the ground. Dante finds it difficult to meet my gaze. I don’t know why that is. Maybe he’s just tired of looking at me. Maybe he’s tired of seeing the fuck-toy he scooped up from a burning building developing feelings for him. Maybe he wishes this fuck-toy would cut out her tongue and eyes and become nothing more than her body. I am being cruel. I am exaggerating. I tell myself these things, and yet I cannot believe it.
“Good for me?” I ask. My voice is whining, the voice of the woman I promised myself I would never become, the nagging girlfriend, the where-is-this-going girl. “Not good for us?”
He rubs his jaw, shakes his head, lets out a sigh. All whilst I sit here, staring at him, waiting.
“Good for us,” he says eventually.
“That’s not what you said at first—”
“Goddamn! Can’t a man sit down for five minutes without being fuckin’ hassled?”
He lies on the bed, on his side, facing away from me. I hear his chest heaving. I don’t respond to his outburst except to lean back near the window. He shouted at me. How long before he does something else? How long before he hurts me? That’s the way it goes, isn’t it? One moment, you’re deep in the valley of love, the next you are being dragged into the blistering desert of pain. I smile sadly to myself; that is the sort of strange thing Master would say.
We sit in silence except for Dante’s heaving chest. Slowly, he calms down. Then he says: “I didn’t me
an to shout at you, Kayla. But goddamn, are you tryin’ to pick a fight with me?”
“No,” I say. “I’m not.”
That hangs there for a time, and then Dante leaves the room, going into the office, and then into the bar. I hear him, talking with the men, making them laugh, them making him laugh. I hear them clapping each other on the back and talking nonsense. And as I listen, ear pressed against the wall, I can’t but think of those men who told me to undress back in the warehouse. Would these men behave any differently if Dante told them it was okay?
If Dante set them on me, would any of them behave differently than hungry dogs?
“Maybe it’s time to leave,” I mutter under my breath.
As soon as the words are said aloud, I know I am right.
Chapter Thirteen
Dante
I go into the club and shoot the shit with the guys, drinking a whisky, and then going into the corner and sitting down with Dogma. He leans back and smooths down his ginger hair, an oddly feminine gesture. Dogma is oddly feminine in many ways, I reflect as I sit here, but he’s efficient and it makes no difference to his results. He offers me a smile, and I force a grin back. Got to keep up appearances, after all.
“Don’t worry about it, Boss,” Dogma says, as Ogre and a few of the others shoot pool at the other end of the bar, the pool cue looking like a little wand in Ogre’s paws. “We’ll sort it.”
“Sort it?” For a second I think he’s talking about Kayla; for a second I think he means he’s going to go in there and sort Kayla. Then I look into his face, into that soft, open face, and I realize he means the situation with the Wraiths’ killers. He thinks I’m pissed because we haven’t found them yet. “Damn right we will.” I nod gruffly. “Goddamn right.”
Dogma pours us both a whisky.
“You’re a good man, Chuck Riley,” I say aloud after a couple of whiskies, me and Dogma watching the pool game.
Dogma grins. “Don’t say that too loud, Boss. The men might hear.”
One of the men—a tall, blonde-haired man named Fritz—clearly has a problem with something Ogre did in the pool game. I watch as he squares up to him, and then as Ogre turns and shrugs and offers the men a reshoot. Ogre, three times the man’s size, offering him a reshoot.
“Weird, ain’t he?” I say, gesturing with my glass of whisky at Ogre.
Dogma nods. “Yes, he is.”
“Trust him?”
Dogma tilts his head at me, and then sips his whisky, and finally says: “He’s never fucked up his job, except for killing that guard outside the warehouse. And that—that was just some weird Ogre shit, I guess.”
“I guess,” I agree.
It’s good to sit out here, with my men, pretend I’m a whole man. That’s the fuckin’ problem with Kayla and getting close and holding her and kissing her and all that lovey-dovey shit. It makes me remember the time I almost became half a man, makes me remember worm-fingers writhing and needles probing and a crevice-faced man grinning down at me and makes me remember that I could’ve become a young desperate thing just like Kayla, makes me remember that I can huff and puff all I want but it don’t change the fact that once upon a time I was at the mercy of some perverted old man, makes me remember that we’re all just a couple of steps away from the pain and the humiliation—
“Boss?”
I snap my gaze to Dogma. “Yeah?”
He nods at my glass of whisky, which is empty. “Another?”
“Sure.”
He pours. I sip, the whisky burning down my throat, reminding me of that first night with Kayla, the night I learnt about her life in the Movement. Since then, we’ve shared. I’ve told her stories about life in the orphanage, the soap-in-sock beatings and the fist fights and cigarette-trading business I started at age thirteen, told her about Dong, an old bastard I met at a junkyard when I was twelve who taught me all about bikes, told her about how me and my pals used to go to the junkyard when it was closed and shoot air-rifles at cans. And she’s told me about how her mother would put on Johnny Cash and read to her from Of Mice and Men, of how her mother would sometimes go into fits of madness and close all the windows and turn all the clocks facedown. She’s told me about how she ran from state to state living like a rodent. We’ve pried each other apart, but there’s one part of myself I cannot share, one part which has left a scar on my soul—if I even have a soul after all the shit I’ve done in this life.
I just can’t look at her without seeing that naïve boy, that old man, the first life I ever took.
I can’t look at her without being reminded that loose slats on the bed I was tied to were the only difference between who I am today and who I might’ve become, and once you start thinking like that, you start drifting back into the past and livin’ that other life, the life that never was.
“How’re the fish, Dogma?” I ask, to change the subject.
Dogma talks at length about his tropical fish collection: how you have to feed them at certain times and keep the tanks at the correct temperature, his words punctuated only by the pool-players’ talking and the pool balls clicking against each other.
“You have to be careful, then,” I say.
“Yeah,” Dogma says.
Be careful. You have to feed them at the right time, keep them at a certain temperature, or you’ll come home one day and find them belly up on the surface of the water. And that’s the same as me, I reckon. I have to be careful. I have to keep the right distance away from emotion; I have to regulate myself to the right dosage of closeness. Or, just like Dogma’s fishes, one day that naïve boy will float right to the surface and I’ll be fucked.
For the rest of the day, I stay with the men, doing my best not to look at Kayla as she prepares our food, and then when evening comes I go into my office, lock the door, and go into the bedroom.
Kayla is there, sitting on the edge of my bed, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, both of them tight-fitting, both of them showing the subtle curves of her body. It’s a body I know well, now, and yet a body which still seems fascinating to me. The best sex I’ve ever had has been with that body. That small, lithe, dancer’s body. Kayla stretches her legs to their full length and points her bare feet and I swear to Christ she doesn’t know what she’s doing, doesn’t know how beautiful she looks. And that’s part of the problem: she’s too beautiful; she’s beautiful enough to unman a man.
I force myself to walk past her and to the window seat. Then I take a toothpick from my leather and chew on it, focusing on the chewing, just chew and chew, emptying your head. It’s like meditation, I guess, just got to keep chewing so your mind doesn’t stray, because the second you stop you realize you’re thinking of shit you shouldn’t be thinking of.
“I hope the meal was okay,” Kayla says.
I don’t know if it’s just me or if it’s really there in her voice, but I’m starting to wonder if maybe Kayla’s sensing something. Sensing my distance. Or maybe there’s shit of her own going on behind those huge brown eyes. I don’t know. All I know is there is a distance between us, much greater than the distance from the window to the bed.
“It was fine,” I say, and my voice is stiffer than it’s been with her before.
“Good,” she mutters. “I thought I might have overcooked it, but that’s really good.”
We sit in silence until the sun begins to set, but neither of us makes a move to turn on a light. I get through four toothpicks, chewing them to tatters. She needs to leave. If I am going to be the President I have to be, she needs to leave. But I can’t look into that wide-eyed, vulnerable face and ask her to just get out, just up and get the fuck out of here. I don’t think any man could do that, not with Kayla.
When night comes, I undress and climb into bed. Kayla does the same. We don’t move with the same passion or hunger which gripped us that first night; we don’t fuck, and we definitely don’t make love. We just lie there, Kayla in my arms, me holding her stiffly. I’m hazy from the whisky, which is good because it makes
falling asleep easier, but which is bad because it makes staying asleep harder. I wake every half hour, groggy, and I know that Kayla is still awake. She lies with her eyes closed, feigning snoring, but there’s just something about how tense she is in my arms. It’s like she’s steeling herself up for something whilst pretending to be asleep. Her breathing is too quick, her hands fists, her face warm and flushed against my chest.
And then I wake when the sun is rising, and Kayla is no longer in arms. She’s creeping around the room, shoving things into one of my rucksacks, her hair tied up in a ponytail. I open my eyes halfway, as though I could still be asleep, and watch her blearily as she goes around the room in a businesslike way, shoving clothes and cash into the rucksack.
Then she goes to the window, opens it all the way as quietly as she can, and looks back at me. I close my eyes, but I can feel her eyes on me. This is the moment: this is when I lean up and declare my affection for her and stop her leaving and tell her that it’s time for me to let go of my past and bring her into my present. This is the moment in a movie where I’d jump out of bed and fall to one knee and propose to her. This is the moment where we’d finally decide we want each other. How foolish we’ve been, and we’ll laugh about it . . . but this ain’t a movie, and when I hear Kayla climb out of the window and into the street, when I hear her footsteps grow quieter across the tarmac, I do not follow.