Mr. Match (Mister #5)

by JA Huss

  “Are you gonna play games with me, Match? Because I can play along if you want. I’m a player.”

  “I’m just fucking with you. It’s—”

  “We’re not coming.”

  I sigh. “It’s just a few days. Ariel wants to see Ivy and shit. All the other girls are here.”

  “Ellie’s not there.”

  “I think they’re coming though. Last I heard one of the girls was gonna call her up and send and invite. For dinner tonight, I think.”

  “Don’t count on it.”

  “Why? What’s going on?”

  “Do you really have to ask? Your ass is hot, Shrike. You’re next, motherfucker. And my wife is pregnant, do you get me? She’s not coming all the way out there just to be dragged into whatever bullshit is coming your way.”

  “Nothing’s happening.”

  “Yet. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before some girl comes knocking on your door. Some long-lost friend, lover, whatever it is you have going with the girls you fuck these days. It’s only a matter of time. And you know what?”

  “What?” I ask, getting back up to look out the window again. Maybe when it gets darker I’ll be able to see into some of those lofts.

  “I wouldn’t even trust you to tell me first.”

  “Don’t be a dick, Nolan.”

  “You’d tell Five, probably. Pax. Your sister. But that’s it. You’d let my wife be bait. Because that’s just the kind of guy you are.”

  “Whatever. Don’t come then. Like I give a fuck. As I said, this was Ariel’s idea, not mine. Everything is cool here with me. No long-lost girlfriends have showed up. No weird knocks on the door.”

  Dead air.

  I look at my phone and shove it in my pocket, still scanning the buildings across the street.

  What if she’s got an apartment on my side of the street?

  I look out at the Fort Collins Theater across Jefferson Street. Katya’s not in there. There are no apartments on the upper floors, only offices. Besides, all of them belong to Sparrow’s family and most of that building has been turned into the new haunted house in town.

  I look to my left. My feet are moving that direction and I’m pulling the curtains aside before I can even process.

  My window is glass on three sides. A bump-out. A bay, whatever the fuck you call them. So I can see a lot of things up here. And there is a building. Brand new, sleek, and modern lofts priced in the high five hundreds. Two buildings down, six stories high—which makes it the highest building on the block and gives a clear view right into my office. Every light is on in the windows facing me. Every light but one.

  “I got you, Kat. I got you.” I’m pulling on my jacket, about to do some recon over there to try to flush her out, when Hook-Me-Up dings me a notification on Katya’s profile.

  I sit in my desk chair and just stare at the video. The still shot is her. Her whole body, including her face. The scar I thought I’d grown accustomed to all those years ago shocks me tonight. She has no makeup on. Nothing to hide the elliptical white line that starts at one ear, crosses her throat in a near-perfect arc so clean it looks surgical, and ends at the other.

  My fingertips reach out to touch it. “What really happened to you? Why wouldn’t you ever tell me the truth?”

  She doesn’t answer. She never did, never will. I begged her once. I was drunk and sad and I begged.

  But her lips are silent. Her secrets safe.

  “They’d be safe with me too,” I say out loud.

  But it’s a lie and she knows it. If she told me I’d never stop looking for the bastard who did that to her. I’d never stop until he was dead.

  I have to take a deep breath to calm the thumping inside my chest and then I press play and wait for her voice. Some kind of greeting, or explanation, or direction.

  None of that ever comes. There is no smile, no tears, no emotion at all. Just her, in the bathroom, undressing, then fondling herself. Scratching at herself to make those long red marks appear on her milky-white breasts. On her ribs, across her hip. All places I’ve kissed, over, and over, and over. All places I’ve left my own marks.

  And then she gets into the tub and bathes in the glow of a million flickering flames.

  I am transfixed. Caught in the spell she cast on me four years ago. Lost. My finger clicks the heart button underneath her post and I start writing a comment.

  “Knock, knock?”

  I slam the computer closed and stare at my sister, standing at the top of the stairwell. “Fuck, you scared the shit out of me.”

  “Not an easy thing to do.” She takes a step towards me. “Which makes me very curious what you were watching on that screen.”

  “Nolan’s not coming.”

  “I know. I talked to Ellie.”

  “He thinks I’m using him as bait.”

  “He’s a dick. But Ellie and Mac are here. And they’re all at my house right now making dinner. So let’s go. I’m fucking starving. Did you eat lunch?”

  “Lunch?” My thoughts are still on Katya. That scar across her throat. There is only one explanation for it. It was a threat. It’s too clean to be an attack.

  “Yeah, you know, that meal between breakfast and dinner? Aren’t you hungry? You’ve been locked up here all damn day.”

  “I wanted to get the deletes done,” I say, pointing to the empty folder on my desk. “So no time.”

  “OK,” Ariel says. “Great.” And then we just stare at each other for a moment. “What?”

  I shake myself out of it and smile. “Nothing. Yeah, I’m starving. What are you guys making?”

  “Victoria has some Argentinean meal—”

  “Aw, fuck.”

  “Don’t be an asshole.” Ariel laughs. “Cindy says it smells great and she’s picky. So just relax. You look tense. Are you tense?”

  “No,” I say, shrugging. “Not at all. Things are fine. Great, even. The website is having a great month.”

  “Hey,” Ariel says, grabbing my shoulder as I try to pass her to go down the stairs. “If something was happening”—she looks me dead in the eyes—“you’d tell me, right?”

  “Of course,” I say, smiling in that charming way I like to use against people. “You’re my best and favorite sister. So of course I’d tell you.”

  She stares at me a little longer than necessary, which says, without saying, that I’m a bullshitting liar. But she nods and drops it. “OK. Then let’s go eat.”

  We hop down the stairs, both pairs of boots clunking on the old wood, and head to the back door once we’re on the first floor. “You wanna ride bitch tonight? Or you gonna walk home?”

  She always walks to work. She only lives a few blocks down on Mountain Avenue. Hell, I only live a few blocks down Jefferson in the other direction, but I ride the bike every day. Fuck that walking shit.

  “Sure,” Ariel says, smiling at me, making her blue eyes bright in the glow of the yellow-colored streetlamp. “I’ll be your bitch tonight. Why not?”

  I shake my head at her. I do trust Ariel to have my back. I should tell her about Katya. Not that she’s ever known anything about us, what we had in the past. But Ariel would not tell anyone. Especially Nolan Delaney.

  I don’t though. I don’t say shit. I just hand her my spare helmet, put on mine, and swing my leg over the seat. I kick the starter and walk the bike backwards a little before Ariel settles in behind me.

  I take off down the alley, looking up at the condos two buildings down.

  I gun the throttle on the bike as I pass.

  Making Katya a promise to come back.

  Chapter Eight - KATYA

  This is the cycle of life.

  You struggle, fail, win. Struggle, fail, win. Struggle, fail, win. Nowhere in there is actual success because it’s a cycle and it never ends. What is success? Something final, right? Well, there’s only one final outcome to life so I’m convinced that success does not exist. It’s just struggle, fail, win.

  I have won enough t
imes. More times than I ever expected after the complete and total fuck-up that was my teen years.

  I have enough money, and a nice-enough car. The condo isn’t mine. I can’t afford something this fine. But I have my own business—regardless of how people view it. It’s legitimate. I pay taxes on it and it has a steady track record of paying the bills.

  I am almost free. That’s a big deal. Money is worthless without freedom. Hell, everything is worthless without freedom.

  And I’ve been on my own since I was sixteen and I’m still alive, never been to jail, and managed to raise my sister through some turbulent times over the past several years.

  So I’ve had a few wins. But it’s the failures that haunt me.

  My parents are dead. My dreams shattered. My future as uncertain as it has ever been. I have no love life—have never had a love life aside from Oliver Shrike. And the scar on my neck is a constant reminder of my complete and utter defeat eleven years ago.

  Half my life, I realize. I’ve been living with that for half my life. More than half. The anniversary of that incident was a couple weeks ago.

  In those last eleven years I had one brief interlude of… not quite happiness, but I’d certainly call it contentment. And that was during the few months I spent with Oliver Shrike back when I was seventeen.

  I was minding my own business the day we met. Kind of depressed, filled with hopelessness and defeat, and sitting at a bus stop wearing a mismatched Parson School for Girls uniform—a white silk scarf wrapped around my neck to hide my scar—as I waited for my first client.

  He liked underage rich girls, which is why I was wearing the uniform. Lily and I were living in a hotel off Prospect, miles away down near the interstate, and I really needed this job if I was going to keep my promise to get her life back on track.

  I can’t even laugh at my level of self-delusion when I think about that day.

  I had been doing private camming using the back-door access on the Hook-Me-Up website to make connections, but it wasn’t enough money since I was too young to actually take off my clothes. I wanted everything on the up and up. So it was just dirty talk.

  God, I was delusional back then.

  Eighteen was only a few months away so I was thinking about building an escort business. Not whoring, not exactly. I didn’t want to sleep with them. I only wanted to fulfill their fantasy. But one goes with the other, doesn’t it?

  The guy I was waiting for was a good prospect. He wanted to seduce his daughter’s best friend, he told me. Not for real. He just wanted to live that fantasy… without actually living that fantasy. The threat of a pedophile charge was enough to keep him in check, I guess.

  So I agreed to be Charlotte. I went to the Goodwill store down the street and pieced together a school uniform from the Parson School for Girls. We agreed to a time and that bench as the pick-up place, and I sat my ass down to await his offer of a ride home from school.

  He was handsome enough for a man in his mid-forties and even though it was not how I planned my life before it all fell apart a few years earlier, I could think of a lot of ways in which things could be worse.

  I had a condo lined up for us. Hotels were a no-go for me. I had to keep some semblance of self-respect. So I used the guy’s credit card to get a short-term vacation rental and that’s where we were gonna play out the fantasy. The key was left in a lockbox on the property, so I had picked it up that morning just to keep the fantasy seamless.

  I did it all with no feeling whatsoever. Like nothing. I wasn't afraid. I had vetted this man carefully. I had his credit card, did a background check (courtesy of Hook-Me-Up, once again) and had the name of his employer and his wife, just in case I needed to make threats. I also had a gun tucked into the waist of my tartan skirt, hidden by my blue blazer, if I needed a little extra persuasion.

  Fool me once, right?

  My fingertips automatically go to my neck and I trace the thin white line down to the little dent at the base of my throat.

  I wouldn’t be fooled again.

  He drove up next to my bus-stop bench in a large black Mercedes. Rolled the window down on the passenger side and said, “Charlotte? Is that you?”

  “Oh, hi, Mr. Jones. Yes, it’s me.” I stood up and walked to his car. Leaned into the window, hoping I was flashing the appropriate amount of cleavage to get him excited.

  “Do you—”

  He was going to ask me if I needed a ride home. And I was going to bite my lip, like I was mulling it over, and then agree and get inside the car with him. We’d chat about my fake best friend relationship with his daughter, school sports, classes… shit like that. He would take me to that vacation rental. And then when we got to “my house” I’d tell him I was afraid of being home alone and might he possibly come inside and keep me company until my father arrived in a few hours.

  He was going to agree, of course. And then… well, his fantasy illicit relationship with his daughter’s best friend would start to unfold in the most natural way we could possibly plan. A hand innocently brushing against my leg as we sat on the couch, maybe. Or me stumbling into him, forcing his arms to reach out and steady me. An excuse to pull me close. Kiss me. I did agree to kissing on the first “date”.

  We’d have an afternoon of fantasy play. Small touches, maybe fondling each other. Me worrying out loud about my father coming home and getting caught.

  But that’s not how it happened at all.

  At least not with him.

  Because I spent that afternoon playing out my own, much dirtier fantasy, with Oliver Shrike.

  Chapter Nine - OLIVER

  Ariel’s massive Victorian house used to belong to my mother’s family. They owned it jointly for like a hundred years or something. Ever since my gramps won it in a card game sometime last century. It’s on Mountain Avenue, the most desirable downtown neighborhood in Fort Collins, and it’s huge, so it’s worth a crap ton.

  But Ariel bought it about three years ago after my Uncle Vic had been using it as a seasonal haunted house every Halloween for more than a decade. It looked like a haunted house. Straight-up Munsters, or Amityville Horror, or any of the other insert-iconic-creepy-place-here houses.

  Unfortunately for my Uncle, and Ariel too, the house is part of the Fort Collins historical record and could not be renovated without approval. Which is why Vic had a hard time convincing buyers that the million-dollar price tag, as well as the million-dollar renovation, was going to be worth it.

  It just so happened that Ariel and I were flush with money that year from the website and she needed a tax writeoff quick.

  Eighteen months of missed deadlines and a blown budget later she was ready to move in.

  Four months after that the local kids forgot it wasn’t a haunted house anymore and trashed it on Halloween when she was out of town.

  Yes, long story short… Ariel lives in a huge six-thousand-square-foot money pit with six bedrooms, seven bathrooms, and it still looks creepy as hell, even though she painted the whole thing pink and white.

  The Munsters in Pink. And. White.

  It looks like a strawberry milkshake.

  Only one of my princess sisters would paint a haunted house pink.

  Ariel lives on the other side of College Avenue from me, so I don’t go over that way much. I stick to the office, Shrike Bikes, the tattoo shop, the theater, and my house when I’m in downtown.

  So color me surprised when I pull up in front of the Milkshake Mansion and see a twelve-foot-tall inflatable Santa Claus waving at me from the front yard and holding a digital sign that is counting down the days to Christmas.

  We get off the bike and take our helmets off.

  I give her a look.

  She shrugs. “What? These fucking kids around here. I just got one last week asking when we were gonna have a real ax murderer again. Can they not see the bazillion signs all over town telling them the FoCo Theater is the new haunted house? I’m skipping Halloween and going straight to Christmas.”
/>   I shake my head, but she’s already walking up her front sidewalk.

  Those kids are probably gonna trash it anyway because an ax murderer is a bazillion times cooler than a strawberry milkshake Santa. But I don’t say that. I just follow her inside.

  The aroma of something delicious permeates the air, and since Ariel was in the mood for gutting the entire downstairs when she renovated, you can see the kitchen from the front door, and it’s filled with women.

  Victoria and Ellie are doing something at the stove and sipping drinks while they do it. Cindy is sitting at the breakfast bar slurping down what might be a strawberry margarita, and when Ariel approaches, she stands up and hands her one too.

  West, Mac, and Pax are sitting at the real bar on the other side of the massive main floor, looking up at a Bronco game with a bottle of Stoli in front of them.

  Good to know we’re all gonna be liquored up for this conversation. Because obviously this is a Mister meeting. The only problem is that we’re missing a Mister.

  I walk over and take off my leather jacket, draping it over the back of a barstool, and then point to the bottle. “Since when do you drink vodka?”

  I’m looking at Pax, since he’s the drinker—which kinda pisses me off, since the last thing I need is his drunk ass as my potential brother-in-law.

  But West is the one who answers. “It was a gift,” he says.

  “From who?” It’s not her, I tell myself. It’s not her, it’s not her. Every one of these college kids in this town probably drinks Stoli…

  “It was in the apartment.”

  “My dad’s place?” Hmmm.

  “Yup. What’s that condo for, anyway?” Pax asks. “Just a crash pad so he doesn’t have to drive home late at night?”

  “Yeah,” I say, still thinking about that bottle. “He’s had it longer than I’ve been alive. Usually he rents it to students but he kicked the last tenants out for partying too much and hasn’t bothered to put it on the market again.”

  “Fucking college kids,” Mac says, still looking up at the TV.