Filthy: A Dark Bad Boy Romance

by Paula Cox

  It calms me.

  First, I think about dogs in general. Not even a particular breed, just dogs. I imagine I am standing at the turnstile of a giant field, a horizon-touching field, the grass stark and bright and lush, and then, as I walk farther into the field, hordes of dogs bound over the horizon toward me, tongues dangling between smiling teeth, tails wagging. They jump around me, bumping into each other for attention. I stroke as many as I can, giggling like a maniac. I know this would be some people’s idea of hell: being mauled by dogs. But I can’t stop smiling—in the dream. But soon my smile spreads from the daydream and into the locker room, and Gina taps me harshly on the shoulder.

  “Planet Earth to Stella,” she says.

  My head snaps up and I see Gina staring down at me, her lip curled in mock disapproval. Gina is tall, sleek, and red-haired like some kind of Viking princess: an inversion of me, in many ways. I am short and blonde and busty.

  “You were thinking about the field of dogs again,” Gina comments, with a small grin.

  “Maybe.”

  I made the mistake of telling Gina about the daydream whilst we were drunk about half a year ago. First she nodded along, listening. Then she began laughing, and then chortling. But she never told any of the other girls, and that’s how I knew Gina saw something in my daydream, the peace of it, maybe. It doesn’t matter that this is her aspiration, she is living it; she wants to be a cheerleader. It doesn’t matter that perhaps I make the other girls feel uncomfortable when I talk about veterinary college, but I think Gina sees the sense in my dream.

  What in the name of all that is holy am I doing? I ask myself, as the girls begin to file out of the locker room.

  I’m standing here, caught up in my thoughts. Gina tugs at my wrist and I grin sideways at her. “I was miles away,” I say.

  “Oh, I know,” Gina says. “You had that goddam puppy love look in your eye. Makes me sick.”

  People who don’t routinely work with crowds will see them as one big bulk of a thing, one beast, sprawling and many-armed. Like a giant mound of insects whose movement becomes something larger than any individual ant. But whenever I stand in front of a crowd, I see the individual people. As I walk onto the court today to the raucous cheers of thousands of Nicks’ fans, I see a man with his collar pulled up around a sausage-fat neck, face beetroot-red, clutching onto a huge pot of popcorn with two hands. I see a mother sitting with her daughter on her knee, both of them looking up at the man to their side, who leans forward and ogles us and even licks his lips. I see half a dozen frat boys, each of them with a letter drawn on their chest, red cups clasped in their hands. I scan their expression, and in each one there is something subtly different: here open lust; here resentment; here shame; here anger.

  But whilst we cheerleaders—or stand-up comedians or actors or ballerinas or motivational speakers—can spot things in the crowd, little snapshots of people, a crowd member would have a difficult time if he tried to spot something in us. All of us are smiling widely, all of us are grinning like madwomen.

  We bounce onto the court with our pom-poms waving and our butts wiggling, smiling radiantly at the crowd.

  I get into position without having to think about it. I’m twenty-five now and high school seems way further back than it should, but I was a cheerleader then and my body remembers. I’ve danced this routine live four times now; it’s rote. My arms and legs pump to the beat without me having to think about it.

  As I dance, my gaze moves naturally over the crowed. I can’t look here or there whenever I like. I have to turn my head as the dance dictates. About halfway through, my gaze moves across the most handsome man I’ve ever seen.

  I’m not one for ogling, gawping, leering, creeping—or any other nasty verb which means openly declaring to a man with my eyes: I want you! I’m shy by nature. So I don’t ogle or gawp or leer or creep. I just glance at the man each time my eyes move to him in the course of the dance. I’d guess he’s around my age, perhaps a few years older. He’s blonde with close-cropped hair, and he wears an expensive-looking gray suit. His face is square, clean-shaven, strong. And his eyes, even from where I dance in the court, are blue. Not just blue, but summer-sky-blue, deep-ocean-blue.

  My body responds to this man almost instantly, my heart speeding up past what the dance demands, my palms sweating more than they usually do. Because this man is watching me. His piercing blue eyes are trained on me. And then they move. I follow their trail. They glance to his left, to the man two people over from him.

  It takes all my training as a dancer not to fumble. I have no idea how I manage to keep still. I’m reminded of when you’re walking a dog and a car backfires. No matter how well-trained the dog, it will invariably bolt—at least on instinct—before you call it back. But somehow I manage to keep going.

  The person who the gray-suited man watches is my ex-husband, Jeff. Jeff.

  Until just now, I didn’t know he was out of prison.

  Jeff.

  A hurricane of violence and stress and anger and hate. The kind of man to hurl a mug at the wall and watch as it shatters into dozens of pieces and then gesture at you with a broad-faced hammer. Pick it up! And what the hell are you supposed to do, exactly? What the hell is a nineteen-year-old girl in too deep meant to do against a brute of a man like that? More of a silverback gorilla, without any of the nobility. Just a big lumbering ogre, all bulging mounds of muscle, a dormant sack of power waiting to twitch into action. Two heads taller than me and three times as wide.

  He was charming at first, as they always are. I know that now because I’ve read up about it on the internet. That’s how narcissists and psychopaths get you. They play the proverbial Prince Charming, make all the right gestures and do all the rights things. They compliment you and they give you flowers and they always open doors for you and they make you believe—believe without question—they are this man they’re pretending to be.

  And so you move in, and get married. Then it starts. Odd little things, that was the way with us. I remember putting on a dress for one of my friend’s birthdays, a short pink dress I’d bought in the January sales a few weeks ago, a dress I’d been waiting for a chance to wear. Standing in front of the mirror, looking myself up and down, thinking: Pretty good, Stella, not bad. But then Jeff appeared at the door, filling the doorway with his unnecessary bulk, and sniffed the air as though something rotten. What the hell is that? Are you tryin’ to show the world your slit or what? Slit! He’d never used the word before.

  Take it off. Wear something that doesn’t make you look like a goddam hooker.

  He’d never been like this before. He’d always been kind. So if he’s getting angry, the logic of my warped brain told me, it must be my fault. Instead of nipping this in the bud, defying him and wearing the dress and showing him that I wouldn’t be bullied, I changed. I changed, and that was it. He had me.

  Two years of my life wasted on that man. I’d wanted to go to college earlier, but Jeff insisted that I worked as a waitress so he could have a wage packet from me every week. When I asked to put some aside to save, he laughed. Save, for what? When I told him, he laughed even louder, a mean laugh which didn’t reach his eyes. You’ve got a life, haven’t you? You’ve got a husband and you’ll have a kid soon. But I didn’t want a child, not with him, and I didn’t want the life I’d been tricked into.

  The first time he hit me, it was because I’d accidently dropped the television remote and the batteries had fallen out and one of them had rolled underneath the dresser. The gap between the bottom of the dresser and the floor was too small for even my hands, and when I stood up and told him it was no good, he backhanded me across the face. Casually. That was the worst of it. It wasn’t dramatic in the least. It was mundane. Just a casual backhand across the jaw.

  It took every ounce of willpower I had to leave him, gathering my things in the night and running into the dark corners of New York’s underbelly, staying at hostels and women’s refuges until I could get back
on my feet. The only things that really made it alright—apart from the restraining orders—was when I heard he’d gone to prison for assault. A bar fight, apparently, and Jeff was locked up.

  I was staying at a women’s refuge at the time and when I returned to the room I shared with a Nigerian women called Asor and fell into my bed giggling like a hyena, wrenching giggles that sounded barely human. She asked me if something was wrong. I told her: No, everything is alright now.

  I thought it was. Assault and he’d gotten eight years for it. That was three years ago.

  And now he’s here, looking at me with that big dumb bulk of a face, his eyes deep set and shadowed beneath a Neanderthal’s jutting forehead. As I watch, he rubs his hands together.

  The handsome man moves toward Jeff, stands behind him, and then begins talking. It looks like they’re friends. When Jeff turns around, he laughs, a strange sound even in the arena, with thousands of people cheering and screaming. It cuts through the noise like a foghorn, alien-sounding. The two men laugh and talk together.

  The dance ends and it’s like I’m being carried off the court, even though my legs are carrying me. It’s instinct, part of the routine, and before I know it I’m back in the locker room and Gina is grinning at me, exhilarated as she always is after a dance. I’m rarely the same. Mostly, after a dance, I’m thinking about the wages and doing equations in my head. How many hours of college did I just buy? How much closer am I to becoming a vet? But today, as Gina babbles on and I get changed, all I can think about is Jeff.

  I think about asking one of the security guards to walk to my car with me, but I decide against it. I don’t want to have to explain why, open a crack to my past life and the woman I used to be. Gina and the other girls respect me. That’s how it seems, anyway. If I tell them that I was once beaten, defeated, that might change. Instead, I get out my college book and begin reading.

  “Aren’t you coming?” Gina asks, standing over me.

  “Just going to sit here for a little while,” I answer, as calmly and casually as I can.

  Gina nods, looking at me suspiciously, but she doesn’t press. The sight of me sitting there with a book in my hand, reading it when I don’t have to, isn’t suspicious enough to cause any problems.

  Soon she leaves me, the locker room empties, and I try to focus on the book.

  My plan is to wait until the game is over and the car park is full of fans. There’s no way Jeff will be able to find me in all that mayhem. And even if he did, what’s he going to do with all the security around?

  ***

  The car park is crowded with police. Not security, but actual police. Their blue lights bounce off the asphalt. It’s dark, autumn, and the car park is glazed with a fine sheen of rain. The moonlight and the police lights combine to make the floor seem bright, too bright for my eyes. I walk through the crowd, squinting. I try to ignore the police cars and the people, but soon I realize I’m walking through the crowd, toward the lights. A coincidence, I tell myself. The lights just happen to be in the same direction as my car. Anyway, I’m constantly scanning the crowd, waiting for Jeff to spring out on me. A can of hairspray bulges from my pocket. If he appears, I’ll blind him and run.

  Finally, I thread my way through the crowd and reach my car. I stop abruptly at the police barrier. An officer waves his hand in front of my face and tells me to back away. People nudge me from all sides, peering over my shoulders at the car: the car which the police surround. My car. My car.

  My mind conjures up stories which make no sense. I imagine Gina planting drugs in my glove box. She would never do that, doesn’t do drugs as far as I know, but I imagine her all the same dropping the drugs into my car with a sly smile. Or perhaps someone has attached a bomb to my car. Or something . . . what? What?

  “What . . . what . . .”

  I realize I’m shouting above the crowd. The officer who waved me back—a beanpole man with a thick brown mustache above thin lips—approaches me.

  “Ma’am, step back, please.”

  “What happened?” I shout.

  “Nothing to worry about, ma’am—”

  “That’s my car!” I roar.

  My heart gallops in my chest, hooves thudding against my ribcage.

  “Oh,” the police officer says. “Wait here.”

  The news reverberates through the crowd, but I barely hear it:

  “It’s her car!”

  “Who is she?”

  “A cheerleader! The short blonde cheerleader!”

  “Her car? What the hell?”

  A man wearing a long black coat returns with the beanpole officer. His face is haggard and his eyes are pits and he looks world-weary. He’s a detective, I guess.

  “This your car?” he spits.

  “Yes,” I answer.

  “Can I ask you, ma’am, if you’ve ever heard of a Jeff Sykes.”

  I swallow. “He was my husband. He’s my ex-husband.”

  He leans in, and already I know it’s a detective’s trick. Perhaps I saw it in a crime documentary once. He’s going to tell me something and gauge my reaction, try to see if I’m in on it. Whatever it is.

  He leans right in, his lips close to my ear so only I can hear. “We’ve just found him dead in the trunk of your car. Please, come with me for questioning.”

  I take a stunned step back. “Really?” I gasp.

  The officer chews his lip, studying me. “Really,” he says, and some of the tension seems to go from his face. He lifts the tape and waves me through. “We may need to take you to the station. Nothing to worry about. Just a few routine questions.”

  “Fine. But . . . Is he really dead?”

  The detective nods. “Dead as dead can be.”

  Despite the shock of it all, despite the gawping eyes of the crowd, and despite the arm which leads me away from the car toward a police car, I can’t help but smile to myself.

  Jeff is dead. Jeff is dead!

  But then the smile slips.

  Who the hell put him in my car?

  The police car pulls away, and I sit in the back, forehead resting against the glass.

  Too late, I realize I left my college book back in the locker room.

  Chapter Two

  Max

  One last job, I tell myself. One last job and then I’m done. New York can go to hell. I’ll go away, somewhere, anywhere. I’ll meet beautiful women and see beautiful things. I’ll screw a woman from every country in the world and I’ll stand on the Great Wall of China and piss off the edge of it.

  The life has been kind to me, because I’ve always understood the life. My dad was a killer and so am I. That’s what I am: a killer. Not an assassin or a hitman or a contract man. Just a killer, and when you can come to terms with that, really accept what you are, this life will be kind to you. You kill, you get paid, and the cycle continues until you’re where I am: twenty-nine and rich, all my limbs intact, my face remarkably unscarred. These days I do less work, only take contracts I have some personal belief in, sort of like an artist who’s earned enough to paint or write or sing only what they want to now.

  But if I’m an artist, I’m a Jackson Pollock type, the only difference being that my paint is blood.

  In this case, it’s the blood of a worm of a man, a barely-human creature who doesn’t deserve to breathe and should’ve been put down a long time ago. A half-life man. Less than a slug. Less than an atom. I was never much good at school—deep in the life, even then—but as I understand it an atom is the smallest thing there is. He’s less than that, this man. Taking him out for a large paycheck won’t be a struggle, and that’s a fact.

  I stand a few people over from him, watching Stella Langston. It was her father who hired me, a big-time businessman, wealthy, but with a complicated relationship with his daughter. I knew before I even met with him what he was going to ask me to do. I make a habit of researching my clients. He’s richer than god, or close, and yet his daughter dances to pay her way through college when he could
easily pay it. He wants to pay it, too; I managed to get that out of him. So Stella Langston is dancing because she does not want to take his money. Instantly, I respect her. Working for it means more. That’s what my old beast of a father used to say.

  Her father, Simon Langston, told me that Jeff Sykes was married to his daughter once. I already knew this. But he also told me that he has contacts in prison, and all Jeff’s talked about to his cellmates is that when he’s finally free, he’s going to kill Stella. He used to beat her, too, when they were married. This from a man who was released early for good behavior. God bless the justice system.

  The man will be dead by the end of the night. The evidence is conclusive, as the boys in blue would say. One of my hacker contacts found encrypted emails on his hard drive, sent through the dark web, containing all sorts of juicy details about how he was going to slice and dice his onetime beloved. Three different cellmates confirmed that he’d bragged about wanting to kill her.