Fractures in Ink

by Helena Hunting

  “Who’s Grant?”

  “Head of security.”

  “I thought that was Max.”

  “He’s second in command. Anyway, I’m pretty sure Grant and Dee have something going on.”

  “Like a deal? Like they’re cutting out Xander?” Now I remembered who Grant was. He was a tank. He made me look like a damn dwarf. He and I had had words once, and only once. It was the last time I’d been allowed in the club.

  “No. Nothing like that. I think they’re involved. Grant—he’s different with her. Soft. And that man isn’t soft with anyone.” Sarah took a deep breath, her gaze dropping. “Dee had been pretty worked up about the party. She was nervous enough to tell me about it. I don’t think she wanted to do it, but she’d been pushed, and maybe she needed the money? Anyway, I was worried, so I went to check on her. Something happened back there that wasn’t supposed to. Grant said something about the feed being cut.”

  “You mean security tapes?”

  Sarah nodded. “I think maybe someone messed with the cameras so they couldn’t see what was happening.” She stumbled over the words, her fingers going to her lips.

  She didn’t need to say anything else. It was pretty fucking clear. “Shit, Sarah. How’d you find out about all of this?”

  “Dee was in Xander’s office with Grant. She was... really upset, and Grant was beside himself. She has these fake nails, and she freaking loves them even though they’re crazy long.” Sarah closed her eyes and sucked in a high-pitched breath.

  I couldn’t understand what the hell fake nails had to do with anything.

  When she opened her eyes again, they were glassy with the promise of tears. “Except they’d been ripped right off. Like, her fingers were bleeding and everything. But all she was worried about was not finishing the hour. She told me she was getting two grand for the party.”

  I breathed out an expletive. Two grand was a lot of money. But I could guarantee it was less than half of what those men had forked over to Xander for the services to be provided. I imagined they would’ve expected fairly extensive services for that kind of money. I’d been privy to conversations about that with some of the girls at The Dollhouse, back when I’d been living in the house with them.

  “You see why I didn’t say anything until now? This wasn’t a phone conversation or a text message,” her voice wavered, breaking at the end.

  I cupped her cheek. She’d dealt with this all day without talking to anyone until she saw Lisa and Tenley a few hours ago. And my silence yesterday had made her feel like she couldn’t come to me.

  She closed her eyes and leaned into my touch. “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  When her eyes opened, a single tear leaked out and pooled in the crease in my hand. “For all the drama. You don’t need it.”

  “You gotta get out of there, Sarah. This isn’t good for you.”

  “I know. I want to. I’ll talk to Tenley again about Elbo and see what I can do.” Her soft palm came to rest on the side of my neck, her thumb sweeping back and forth over the vein connected to my heart.

  “Just let me help you if I can, okay?” I ran my hand along her arm. “I want you to talk to me. This stuff about The Sanctuary, I want to know. I just want you to be safe.”

  “Me too,” she whispered.

  I dipped my head to meet her lips. I knew I needed to give her something back, but it wasn’t going to be in words tonight. She was carrying enough of her own burdens.

  I worried that no amount of loving Sarah could change the way things had shaken down recently. I could see the escalation at the club that she refused to. It was like watching a train speeding toward a broken bridge. There seemed to be nothing I could do to stop the fall. Hers or mine.

  * * *

  It was late by the time I woke the next day. I was sprawled over Sarah’s side of the bed, her pillow tucked against my side as if it were her body. I rolled off her rock of a mattress and headed for the bathroom. Next time we were sleeping at my place.

  I passed the kitchen table groggily, knocking into her duffle bag hanging from the chair. It dropped to the ground, the contents barfing out all over the floor.

  A black lace bra and matching boy short panties with a serious ruffle were among the items scattered across the hardwood. They weren’t anything I would ever see Sarah wear in the bedroom. It wasn’t her style; it was her uniform. I knelt down, intending to shove it all back in, when I noticed the wad of rolled cash fastened with an elastic band. Beside that was a bottle of pills—not the store brand variety Sarah always carried with her to offset aching calves after killer heels, but a prescription.

  I picked it up, rolling it between my fingers until I could see the label. The prescription wasn’t for Sarah, but some other name I didn’t recognize. However, it was the contents of the bottle that concerned me most. I knew exactly what the pills were for.

  As a kid I’d had trouble listening in school. They’d decided my inability to focus meant I needed medication to manage my distractibility. No one took into consideration that maybe, just maybe, part of the issue had been that most days I came to school without breakfast. And when I did eat, it was usually white bread with cheap margarine and brown sugar. On a good day there might be some cinnamon to sprinkle on it. Or that sometimes my mom let me have sips of her coffee because it was so hard to get me up in the mornings.

  But then, that’s what happened when my afternoons were spent hanging out in the back office of a store, waiting for my mom’s shift to end at eleven because she couldn’t afford to pay someone to watch me. The rare times she could, it was the lowlife neighbor who let me eat candy for dinner because she was too overworked to make real food. Bedtimes were late, mornings were early. At seven, it meant I was unregulated and often underfed. No shit I had trouble paying attention.

  So they’d put me on meds—back then it’d been Ritalin. The doctor had given my mom samples since we couldn’t afford to pay. It had killed my appetite and made me even more wired. After a while I’d figured out the pills had the opposite effect of what they should’ve, so I stopped taking them and started selling them to the high school kids in the neighborhood. It wasn’t the potheads or the acid trippers who bought them. It was the smart kids.

  I’d used the money to buy lunches at the deli down the street from school—huge sandwiches spread with real butter, piled high with meat and cheese and slices of fresh tomato, crisp leaves of lettuce, sharp rings of raw onion, and real mayo. I’d bought milk to go with it—white, not chocolate. It was heavenly, and nothing like the powdered shit my mom had to buy because we couldn’t afford the stuff that came in the gallon jug.

  I righted the chair I’d knocked over and dropped down in it, still rolling the pill bottle between my thumb and finger.

  I dumped out the contents on the kitchen table, separating them into piles of five. The bottle told me there should be thirty in there. I counted twenty-two, twice. The numbers confirmed what I didn’t want to believe. But why would she have the pills if she wasn’t using them? I finally had to own that Sarah was heading in a direction I didn’t want her to, and maybe she was okay with that. Maybe I had to be too, or I had to bail.

  I scooped the pills back into the bottle and capped it, leaving it on the kitchen table. I left her duffle bag open, the contents still all over the floor. I dressed in my day-old clothes and didn’t bother making the bed.

  Standing in her bedroom, I stared at the mess of twisted sheets, aware of how deep I’d gotten in with Sarah.

  It hurt to think she’d finally opened up last night, had been willing to tell me what was really going on, only to realize she was keeping something else hidden. Just when I was figuring out how to share more of myself in return, I had to walk away. Because I couldn’t watch someone self-destruct again.

  I’d seen it happen to Lisa and witnessed Jamie’s struggle to bring her back. I’d seen Hayden fall more than once; dragging him out of it had been hell the first time. The seco
nd time, when Tenley had left him, I hadn’t figured we’d get him back. But we did.

  I wouldn’t go through that with Sarah. I couldn’t. I didn’t ever want to be so dependent on someone that I’d allow myself to be dragged down into their destruction. Not again.

  I found a scrap of paper and left a note beside the bottle of pills.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Sarah

  This morning had started out bright. Chris and I had talked. I’d been as honest as I could with him, and he’d been understanding, and then he’d been amazingly sweet and attentive in bed—so different from the last time. I’d wanted to believe he could handle knowing more about my life, about who I am. Funny how a few hours could shift all that.

  I’d gone to my internship feeling lighter. I gave a presentation on guerrilla marketing to the senior team, which had gone over well. I’d been armed with statistics and numbers to support the research, and the higher ups had been impressed.

  I’d gone to the break room feeling like I could handle whatever was coming next, and I thought I’d make a coffee since my adrenaline was starting to wane. I’d just gotten started when one of the junior account managers came in after me. He was the same guy rumored to have convinced another intern that a blow job in the copy room was a good idea. It irked me that he’d gotten off with nothing more than a slap on the wrist, and she’d lost her place in the program.

  She’d been on a full scholarship, and now she was out of the program and likely on the hook for more than a hundred thousand dollars. It made me hyper aware of how bad things could get if Xander ever decided to bring my current employment situation to light.

  His too-thick cologne gave me an instant headache as he reached around me for a coffee cup. He grazed my breast in the process. It wasn’t an accident.

  “Sorry about that.” His smile was all fake apology.

  I gave him a look as I dropped a K-cup into the Keurig.

  He leaned against the counter and handed me the mug. “You mind making me one of those?”

  I knew this game, and while it annoyed me that I had to play it with a douche like this guy, I wouldn’t put my placement in jeopardy over some asshole who wanted to treat me like his lackey. If I played my cards right, I’d be using his face as a step on the ladder up to the top of this company anyway.

  “You’re Sarah, right?”

  “Mmm-hmm.” I avoided eye contact, focusing on the coffee.

  “Is that your real hair color?” He reached out as if he were about to touch a loose tendril that had escaped my bun.

  I jerked away. “Yes, it’s real.”

  His grin was more leer than apology. “You never know whether the drapes match the carpet these days. All sorts of false advertising happening with you ladies.”

  I struggled not to give him the fake smile I would’ve offered at the club. I’d come to expect far worse than that from the men who frequented The Sanctuary. Here the men were usually less obvious in their douchebaggery. Far more subversive. And occasionally, I actually encountered someone who was professional. Those were the amazing moments. But most of the time, regardless of where I was, men who thought they had the upper hand continued trying to use it.

  He was two or three inches shorter than I was, even though my heels were low. He was thirty at best, but I could see the beginning of baldness creeping over the crown of his head. I’d heard he was related to someone higher up, which accounted for his slap on the wrist—and perhaps his presence here in the first place.

  I sighed, and something within me hardened. The same something that had left me yelling at Xander the other night after Dee. I was so sick of people thinking they could mess with me. The crap I had to put up with at The Sanctuary was bad enough. I’d made my own mess there, but I wasn’t going to tolerate it here, too.

  The coffee finished brewing, and I gripped the handle and held the mug out with a smile I was sure looked as calculating as it was insincere. He reached gingerly to take it.

  As he did, I stepped in close and found the toe of his shoe with my heel. They weren’t high, but they were pointy. I placed my palm against the back of his hand, flattening it against the hot ceramic.

  “Every time I’m in a room with you, I’m going to record our conversations. If you ever ask me a question like that again, I’ll be sure to broadcast it through the entire building so everyone here knows exactly what a pig you are.”

  He tensed as the heat from the mug became less bearable. “I’d like to see you try.”

  “You don’t think I can manage that? You don’t think someone would help me out if given the right incentive? Besides, my undergrad’s in computer programming. I graduated at the top of my class. Pretty impressive for a stupid blond chick, don’t you think?”

  I lifted my heel from his toe, looking down to note the dent in the leather. Then I released the mug and took a step back. He dropped it right away, the scalding liquid splattering his pants and his shoes, some of the spray reaching his shirt. Hot drops landed on the top of my foot, soaking through my nylons.

  “Oh, no! Are you okay?” I asked, feigning concern. “I’ll get someone to come clean that up.”

  I left him there, red palmed and red faced. I hoped that was his whack-off hand.

  Though my immediate thought was to share my giddy victory with Chris, I couldn’t decide whether I should tell him or not. I wanted him to be proud of how I’d handled the situation, but I worried he’d be upset that it had happened in the first place, especially after Dee.

  And she remained on my mind, while my texts to her remained unanswered. I’d seen her physical and emotional undoing firsthand, and I knew now that it wasn’t going to be as simple as serving the assholes on left stage when Xander decided to collect his favor from me. He was going to break me if I couldn’t get out of there. And if he did, I might never be the same.

  I wished I’d never followed my mother’s advice and taken that job at The Dollhouse in the first place, or trusted Dee’s assurance that The Sanctuary would be better. I should’ve listened to Chris and focused less on my finances. I could see now that no amount of money was worth this.

  I was tired by the end of the day, with all of my worries bogging me down. I wondered if Chris had some time between clients before I had to go to The Sanctuary again. I only had about an hour before I had to leave for my shift at The Sanctuary. I checked my messages on the way up the stairs to my apartment, hoping for a message from him or Dee. I had neither, so I sent Chris another text as I unlocked the door, asking if his day had been busy.

  My apartment was as I’d left it last night, except my duffle bag was lying on the hardwood, half the contents spilled out. My cash tips had rolled across the floor, and my black lace bra and panties from last shift’s outfit were visible as well.

  But that wasn’t what made my heart sink. The bottle of pills Dee had given me the other night sat on the kitchen table. Beside them was a note from Chris.

  Sarah,

  We need to cool it for a while.

  Chris

  Of all the notes he’d left me over the last several months, this was the one I’d never wanted to see.

  I knew I shouldn’t have kept the pills. But I hadn’t wanted Dee to get in trouble. If I’d left them in my locker, though, I wouldn’t be dealing with this on top of everything else. Everything had been such a mess that night. But even worse, there’d been a moment when I’d considered how they might make it easier to get to the end of my internship.

  I grabbed the note and the pills, stuffing both in my purse, and bolted down the stairs. Running across the street, heedless of the traffic, I burst into Inked Armor.

  Lisa wasn’t at her usual post behind the glass-front jewelry case. Hayden worked at the first station, adding color to a sleeve. He graced me with an icy, accusing glare and went back to working on the art. Clearly, Chris had talked to him.

  Jamie, who was across the room putting an intricate flower on a woman’s shoulder, inclined his head to
the back of the shop. “He’s setting up for a session in the private room.”

  “Thanks.”

  The door was ajar, the bass line of hardcore metal shaking the floor. Chris was more of a mellow music kind of guy, unless he was in a bad mood. I slipped inside and closed the door. He didn’t look up from the tray of vibrantly colored inks.

  “You been home yet?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  His eyes lifted, flat, cold. “Then what’re you doing here?”

  “I can explain the pills. They were Dee’s.”

  “So what? You were holding them for her? Real fucking high school of you there, Sarah.”

  “She threw them to me when I was getting changed for my shift, and Grant came to get her, so I couldn’t give them back. Then she did that private party, and well, you know how that went.”

  He regarded me with cold speculation. “So you brought them home with you? Why’d she give them to you in the first place?”

  “She thought she was doing me a favor because I was tired. It was a hectic night. I’d forgotten about them until I saw them on the counter. I never even meant to bring them home.” I crossed the room to stand in front of him.

  He swiveled in his chair, moving away from me. “I’ve got a client coming in ten. You should go.”

  “I could come by your place after my shift tonight. We can talk then?”

  “I’m not really feeling the talking right now, Sarah. It doesn’t seem to get us anywhere.”

  “I haven’t taken them. I wasn’t planning to.”

  He laughed, but it was dark and humorless. He spun to face me. Under the harsh expression and the lines of anger, there was sadness. “Why should I believe you?”

  “Because I’m telling you the truth.”