by Selena Kitt
“No!” I wanted to hit him. “No, I fucking don't!”
His hands around my upper arms bit into the flesh there, hard and bruising. I set my teeth, trying to suppress the urge to smash my forehead into his nose.
“Your strength,” he said at last. “You are so strong. Your scars, your wounds. You cover them up, act like they are nothing. Don't you get it? I want that. I want to be like you, and I can't. You just forge ahead. How do you do it? How?”
Frustration balled my hands into fists. “You just do, okay? You just do because if you don't you might as well give up!”
“Well, why not give up?” His face was terrible to look at, lost and afraid, as though he had never known anything beautiful at all.
I stomped my foot. “Because it's not all terrible, dammit! Why can't you see that? You lost a friend? So fucking what? It happens to everyone. You made a mistake—a thousand mistakes—but so what? So fucking what? Who the fuck doesn't? Stop feeling sorry for yourself and do something.”
Abruptly he let go of me. “Who gave you your scars?” he said. “Tell me. I need to know.”
I clenched my teeth. I wanted to tell him it was none of his business, but I had been betrayed, too. I had been betrayed, too.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, reaching down inside me, searching, seeking out the threads of emotion and thought that connected me to that buried past, that life I had covered up with art and color and all things beautiful and fierce.
“It was my dad, okay?” I said at last. “He gave these to me.”
Malcolm was silent. “Your father?” He sounded slow and stupid, as if he'd never heard of child abuse or schizophrenia.
He made me so angry. Perfect, pretty Malcolm Ward. The best at everything, the king of the world. But one minor setback and he'd collapsed like a house of cards. I wanted to punch him. “He was crazy. Straight up bugfuck crazy. Not like you, I mean... he was fucking nuts. He thought everyone was out to get him, thought that our house was bugged, that my mom was an alien in human skin. He thought I had evil inside me and he had to let it out.”
I shoved my arm in his face. “See this tattoo? The lily? It covers the first one. I think it was the first one, anyway, because I was too young to remember. He'd slice me up and my mom would take me to the hospital, and then to the vet, and then to one of her old friends who was a nurse to get me patched up, and it was only when her friend told her she was going to call CPS that she kicked my dad out.”
“Why?” he said. “Why did it take so long?”
“Because she wanted to take care of him. To save him...” I trailed off, the blood draining from my face.
That was exactly what I'd been doing with Malcolm. I was just like my mother...
I'd always taken care of my mother, but until now I'd never realized it was because she had spent all her time pouring her efforts into my father instead of me. A beautiful, fine woman, and she had chosen the wrong vessel for her love.
Oh my god, I thought.
Malcolm's voice brought me back to the present. “Sadie?” he said. “Sadie, are you okay?”
I shook my head. “No. No, I don't think I am.”
Warmth enveloped my hand, and I looked down to see his palm covering mine. “Sadie...” he said.
“No,” I told him. “No, I've told plenty of people. So she kicked him out and got a boyfriend and then... then one night he came back.”
I lifted my head, exposing the tattooed scar on my throat, the one covered with the final line of Dorothy Parker's poem Resume. Suicide is too much trouble, she said. Might as well live. “Right there,” I said. “That's where he tried to kill me. And he got my mom. Fucking slaughtered her like a pig. And then he killed himself.”
To my shock, there were tears in my eyes. Angrily I swiped my arm over my face. All that was a long time ago. It was pointless to cry about it...
“Sadie...”
“You asked me why I'm always looking for a bedside table even when I'm asleep? What I'm always reaching for when I wake up? That's my gun. I've kept one by my bedside for years. He's dead, and I still keep it with me, because what if he comes back?”
And then I started to cry.
I hate to cry. But I couldn't help it.
For a long moment, interminably long, I sobbed, harsh and ugly and loud. Hideously loud. So loud that I almost didn't notice the sound of a plane passing over us and helicopters in the far distance. When I did realize what I was hearing, I cried harder. The time for choosing was here, and I couldn't stand it. If Malcolm decided to be a complete idiot, there was nothing I could do to stop him. I'd put everything I had into convincing him I was worth sticking around for, and if there was one thing then there must be other things, but now I thought that maybe I had no business telling him what to do. I was a mess. We were a mess.
Then Malcolm's arms snaked around me, holding me close and fast against his hard body, in the safe circle of protection that was his strength, his wealth, his kind heart buried under his father's poisonous teachings, and I cried harder.
I was just like my mother, trying to fix everyone except myself, screaming out things there were no words for in paintings that made no sense to anyone but me.
I was the damaged one. I was the one who should be jumping over the edge of the boat and into the hungry sea below. I was the one who ached and shrieked in silence, all my pain made pretty and nice with ink and color.
How dare he think of leaving, when I was the one who should want to go?
The sound of helicopters grew louder and louder. We were racing towards the waters off the coast of Turkey.
Finally Malcolm released me and pulled away. He stared at my face as the Turkish Coast Guard barreled toward us.
“Tears,” he said at last. “Tears. I've broken you.” Reaching up, he caught one before the sea wind whipped it away. “I thought... I thought I would at least feel satisfied. I wanted you to understand what it felt like to be me...”
He stared at the tiny teardrop on his hand, and I cried harder, until I couldn't even see him. “Why don't I feel satisfied?” he said finally.
I could barely find breath. “Because,” I choked out, “I'm not your enemy. I'm your friend.”
“Oh,” he said quietly. “Oh, no.”
His hands alighted on my shoulders and he drew me to him again. I cried harder, and now the thrumming sound of helicopters was so loud they drowned out the roar of the sea.
“I'm sorry,” he shouted in my ear. “I'm sorry I broke you.”
If I hadn't been so overwhelmed I would have kneed him right in his precious nuts. “You didn't break me, you cock!” I screamed over the helicopters. “Crying doesn't mean that at all!”
I felt his bewilderment rolling off him. “Then why would you cry?”
My hands came up of their own volition, tangling in his hair, pulling him down for a desperate, tear-stained kiss, and when I released him there was a strange sheen in his own eyes “Because,” I yelled, “I do understand. I'm listening to you, Malcolm. I've been listening to you since the moment we met! Everything you say, I've heard it. I'm listening, you dumb motherfucker.”
His hands came up and cupped my face and he leaned in, our foreheads touching. From the corner of my eye I saw men in riot gear sliding down ropes to the deck of the ship. “Then listen,” he said. “Listen to me.”
“I am!”
He closed his eyes. “You win, Sadie. You win. When you get back to New York, the white vase is yours.” And then we were torn apart and thrown to the deck by violent hands, and the last thing I saw as someone dragged me below was Malcolm watching me from where he lay prone, three men standing over him, their yells drowned out by the throb of the helicopters, until the whole world was chaos.
He never took his eyes from mine.
Chapter Fourteen
I cried from the moment we entered Turkish waters, and didn't stop until I was released from custody.
I don't remember much of what happened afte
r I lost sight of Malcolm. Tears made the world blurry and unreal, and in my chest a black hole had appeared, a terrible, unbearable void that would not let me go. My very bones seemed to creak under the strain of withstanding the crushing gravity of a heart collapsed, and I sobbed out my agony.
Malcolm, who I fought so hard to save—I'd saved him. And I'd lost him. And I didn't know what to do about either of those things. My brain had been bleached by the sun, all my rational thoughts faded, leaving behind only the blinding white feeling of loss and longing. I didn't want to be separated from him. Not yet at least. It wasn't time. I wasn't ready.
Outside of my head, the Turkish Coast Guard was the first to deal with me, and after I sobered up and looked back on it I felt sort of sorry for them. People shouted at me in Turkish and English, demanding to know where the guns were stockpiled, but of course there were no guns. At least, I hoped not. The small part of me who still distrusted everyone, who never let her guard down, wondered, briefly, if Malcolm had been playing me the whole time and there were, in fact, stockpiled guns on board.
But if there were, they were stored in another dimension. The Coast Guard found nothing. To their credit, they covered me in blankets after it became clear I was having some sort of mental breakdown and stopped shouting at me for the same reason one doesn't shout at toddlers—it just makes them cry harder. They left me alone until we landed and the US took over.
That wasn't quite as pleasant as getting shouted at. The FBI—or CIA or someone, it was never quite clear to me—interrogated me several times, though they got nothing from me. Thankfully I wasn't being charged with a crime. Quite the opposite, it seemed, as Malcolm's list of sins now included kidnapping as well as fraud and embezzlement, and no one would listen to me when I told them I had been on the boat of my own free will. I may have been incoherent with grief, of course. That might have had something to do with it.
Eventually I just stopped trying to talk. Never talk to the police. That had been drilled into my head for ages. Good advice. I clammed up and hummed aimless tunes, whatever I could think of while staring into the distance. Acting crazy had worked for Malcolm. Maybe it could work for me too.
Then Felicia came to my rescue.
* * * *
It didn't even take her twelve hours to get to Turkey and take me home. She had probably been en route even before I knew that my time with Malcolm had come to an end. Money can do a lot of things, and when she showed up with a small army of lawyers, my release was quick and painless.
She didn't say anything. Just hugged me and handed me a bundle of my clothes, brought straight from my apartment, and I dressed myself before we left for the airport. The old familiar feel of jeans and a t-shirt and one of my comfortable old hoodies sliding over my arms and hiding my face from the world calmed me, and I finally stopped crying.
I hadn't been wracked with enormous sobs the entire time, although that I certainly had been completely incoherent with depressing regularity, but even when I was speaking or humming or forcing myself to think about something else entirely—such as how the orange blankets the Coast Guard had given me totally clashed with my skin tone—huge tears had welled up and spilled down my face. It was only when I was wrapped up in my own clothes, with my best friend, in her private car heading for home that the tears finally slowed to a stop.
A tense silence descended as I wiped my face vigorously. I could hear the horrible rattling sound my chest made every time I took a breath.
Felicia sat next to me in the back seat and watched me, her face full of sympathy and concern. I hate to be worried about. I knew she was waiting for me to say something.
I sniffled and wiped my nose on my hoodie sleeve. A disgusting smear of snot shone on the cuff when I took my hand away. I didn't give a fuck.
"Well," I said at last. "That sucked."
Felicia sighed and shook her head. "Which part? The kidnapping or the international interrogation?"
I didn't even have the energy to shoot her a glare. "There was no kidnapping," I said wearily. "I wanted to be on that boat. You think anyone could make me do something I didn't want to?"
She shrugged. "I don't know, Sadie. Knowing you... no. But everyone has a breaking point. I thought... I thought, what if he really was crazy? What if he pulled a... a weapon on you?"
A knife. The words hovered above us. He could have pulled a gun, yeah. But that was never what I feared the most. Felicia knew my past. She knew me before all my scars had been hidden. Tattoos cost a lot of money. She'd helped me pay for some of them.
“No weapons,” I said with a sigh. None except emotion. “But it was... intense.”
She regarded me for a moment. “Yes, I see that. So... you went on his boat, without telling anyone, and sailed around aimlessly in international waters for shits and giggles.”
I was so tired I could hardly think straight. “No, it was to get away from the police.”
Her intake of breath was so sharp it hurt my ears. “So... you knew about the embezzlement and fraud when you agreed to get on his boat with him?”
I started to feel like I was being interrogated all the more. “Yes,” I snapped. “I mean... no. It's not like that. Malcolm's being framed. He's not embezzling his company, and he's not committing fraud, and he definitely didn't kidnap me."
For a moment I thought she was going to shut me down completely, but then she closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. "I believe you," she said. "At least, I believe you believe him."
I made a frustrated noise. "It's his personal assistant. Or secretary. Or whatever. That guy is the one defrauding the company. Don Cardall. Malcolm said he had proof."
“I see. If he had proof, why doesn't he just hand it over?"
"Because!" I said, annoyed. "He doesn't want to betray Don. Supposedly he's like a brother to him. He was just planning on getting caught by the feds and then killing himself instead of turning Don over. Don's the one who's framing him."
It had made sense when Malcolm had explained it to me. Perfect sense. But as I watched Felicia's face, I realized that it was just as crazy as I had first thought.
Was Malcolm crazy? Really crazy? Paranoid, or... or bipolar or sociopathic or something? He had to have been telling me the truth... right? He had no reason to lie.
Had he really been betrayed... or was Don the one telling the truth, exposing his corrupt boss to the world in the name of justice? And if they were like brothers why Don was only Malcolm's secretary?
I was so tired. I'd believed Malcolm when we were together... why was doubt creeping in now?
My doubts were reflected in Felicia's frowning. "Sadie... Why would anyone remain loyal to someone who's framing them?"
I pitched forward and buried my hands in my hair. "I don't know. Because he's almost as damaged as you?"
That was a low blow. Felicia had her problems, and they all involved remaining loyal even when there was no reason to be so. I didn't look at her.
When she spoke, her voice was quiet. "Do you really think he has proof?"
"He told me he did."
"Did he tell you where he put it or hid it or kept it?"
I sighed and shook my head. "No. Up until we were boarded I was pretty sure he was just going to off himself and it wouldn't have mattered after that.” I looked out the window, wishing I wasn't listening to myself say these things. I sounded like a naïve sap that had fallen for a con man.
Then I remembered. The vase. He'd told me I could have the vase I had broken. But that didn't make any sense either. Why would he give that to me? Why not tell me where the proof was hidden with his last breath as the helicopters drowned out our voices and the men in jackboots closed in?
What the hell was Malcolm playing at?
“He said I could have something of his,” I blurted. “He didn't tell me about where he kept the proof, but he told me I could have the vase I broke at the auction.”
“The Qing dynasty one?” Felicia asked. “It was beautiful, but
why would he give you a broken vase?”
“I have no idea. I don't even know where it is.”
“In his house, maybe?”
I shook my head and it turned into a nod of sleep for a split second. I caught myself and forced myself awake. “No... I think he moved all his stuff out to storage.”
“What? Why?”
I felt a faint smile on my lips. “He said it was because he'd decided to kill himself the night of the auction, but that when he laid eyes on me he decided to live for a little longer.”
God. It sounded stupid when I said it. Felicia thought so, too.
“Oh, Sadie...”
“I saw all his shit getting carted out,” I said. “I saw it when I went to see him... Jesus. I don't even know." I passed a hand over my face, feeling the puffiness of my eyes and lips. "How long were we gone?"
"About three weeks," she said.
Three weeks? Jesus. Jesus.
I leaned back and closed my eyes. "Christ, I'm tired."
"You should be," Felicia said. "You've been through a lot. Why don't you try to rest?"
I yawned. "Won't we be at the airport soon?"
"Yeah, but if you don't wake up I'll ask Ihsan here to carry you." She gestured at our driver, who was extremely hot and who gave me a smile in the rear view mirror that under any other circumstances would have been devastating and cause for a case of spontaneously combusted panties. But I just didn't feel it. I missed Malcolm.
No, more than missed him. Needed him. He'd thought I was his muse, but in a weird way he had been mine, inspiring me to step out of my life, the comfortable, safe niches I had built for myself. I liked safe. I liked comfortable. He had been neither, and yet there was a promise with him... with time... we could be something greater than what we were now...
I didn't even return the nice driver's smile, instead electing to cross my arms over my chest and slump in my seat, turning to glare out the window like a sullen teenager.
"I can walk," I told Felicia grumpily, but I'd been awake for almost twenty draining hours and I was asleep before I'd finished talking.