by A. J. Downey
Whoever had died that night had likely had powerful backers that had had the mess cleaned up. No cops looking for Mali and her dad meant an increased shot at revenge. I rolled my lips together and nodded as pieces fell into place before finally asking, “Why didn’t you try to let me know, or tell me?”
She shook her head and wouldn’t look at me, wouldn’t answer me, and for now, I let it go, applying a sort of triage to the situation. Deal with the immediate threat first, and then we would have all the time in the world for the rest.
“Look, get a hot shower, I’ll get the clothes you’re in washed up in the laundry here… for now…” I flipped open one of the packs I’d shoved into the saddlebags on my bike. My shit had been gone through but nothing was missing and I had a sneaking feeling that’s why the older guy back at the exit point I’d chosen had let us go. I pulled out a pair of my boxers and one of my black wife-beater tanks and handed them over. “This is the best I’ve got.”
“Yeah, thanks,” she said quietly and whatever hint of vulnerability that’d been in her voice minutes before was firmly locked behind a new veneer of steely resolve.
“Bathroom’s there, just throw your clothes out the open door. You’re good.”
She jolted like she hadn’t realized she’d just been standing there staring at me and took the shiny, nickel plated revolver out of the back of her waistband and went with my wadded up offering of dry clothes in her other hand to the dark portal of the bathroom door. She reached in and flipped on the light, letting her eyes roam over every corner and then finally stepped in. I heard the shower curtain rattle then the click of the gun against the countertop. The door shut, leaving about a five-inch gap and after some rustling, a handful of clothing appeared.
I went over and took it, keeping my back turned, which was hard for me, and held out the arm that I had her shirt and bra over. I heard her kick off her boots and her jeans flopped over my elbow.
I think she snorted and she said, “Not exactly body shy as an adult.”
“Yeah, well, maybe I am,” I said with a rue grin.
“Huh,” was her soft reply and the light from the bathroom dimmed as she swung the door an inch from closed and the water started up in the bath.
“Be back in a little bit,” I promised.
“Bring food?” she called back.
“You got it.”
I switched out my own wet gear for some dry drawstring pants and another one of my undershirt tank tops. Dry was only half the battle, though. I went in search of the laundry facility with a Ziploc sandwich bag full of quarters and got it going in one load with some of the shitty powdered soap that came from the dispenser. Someone had one of the dryers going in here and so I lingered, giving the wash enough time to finish washing while I soaked up the warmth and smell of clean clothes.
I was pretty sure Mail was going to kill every bit of hot water anyway, and I needed to think, which was tough with her right there. I was torn about that, too. Seventeen years I had been dreaming about that face and now that it was right in front of me, I needed a minute away from it to get my shit straight.
3
Amalia…
I jolted awake, the lighting in the room soft from the bedside lamps which were both on but it was the way that light fell on Kyle’s face that made my breath catch in my throat. There were these times, when we were kids, that we would lay under this huge oak tree in this field out by our neighborhood and the light would come through the leaves –
I quickly banished the thought. Those days were long gone; over with… and nothing about them would ever come back or be the same. Still, I didn’t wake him right away, I traced lines that hadn’t been there before with my gaze. Deep brackets to either side of his mouth, and I remembered that easy smile that always graced his lips. Light crow’s feet fanned out from the corners of his eyes, too, but you had to be close, like we were now, to see them.
There was a decent expanse of empty bedspread between us. He kept himself a healthy and respectful distance away, but still, the warm weight of one of his hands rested familiarly against my side, just below where my ribs dipped, before the rise of my hip.
Reassurance that I wasn’t going anywhere or insurance that I wouldn’t without his waking? I couldn’t tell, I didn’t know, and it brought home just how much I didn’t know about him. Not now, not anymore… seventeen years was a long, long, time without so much as a whisper.
I did know one thing for sure: not once in a million years did I ever picture nerdy, intelligent, and honest Kyle Cochran joining a notorious motorcycle gang. I mean, what was that all about? That was way more along the lines of something I would do.
His thumb smoothed back and forth over the light material of his borrowed undershirt and I jumped slightly. He opened his eyes and the grave expression in them made my breath catch for an entirely different reason. His features turned, lessening to something akin to sadness and he said, “Come to Jesus… time to talk.”
I felt my heart sink in my chest and tried to stall because I didn’t feel like breaking his heart all over again. It was clear my disappearance had hurt, and this conversation was only going to open up old wounds that had never fully healed… for both of us.
“Did you get food?” I asked, trying to deflect.
“You were out when I got back to the room, so no. I’ll order up some room service but then I need to know.”
“Why I left without saying goodbye?”
“No, you explained that part well enough, more of why you never reached out, not once, in all these years.”
I swallowed hard, “That one’s easy. It wasn’t over, clearly, and I didn’t want to drag you into my mess.”
“Well I’m glad you finally called out to me, and I’m here now,” he said, and dragged his hand from my side to plant it firmly against the mattress so he could push himself up.
That wasn’t why I had posted what I did, but how to tell him that? How to tell him I had given up and made peace years ago that I would never see him again? Which clearly, he was the better man than I was on that front. I was still a little bit shell-shocked that I was even here, looking at him, looking at me… like that.
Heavy emotion played out in the air between us, thick and cloying, shimmering between us like something tangible, touchable, if only we would reach out and grasp it – own it, but I wasn’t ready to. I couldn’t. I was ridden by a deep sense of shame. I was my father’s daughter and I was supposed to be tougher than all of that. Amalia Rose Junix wasn’t supposed to be a woman who gave up or gave in but I had… I was tired. Tired of the game, of being alone, of living with what I’d done and with what I’d had to do since. Of stealing from good people, of grifting our way from one place to the next relying on people’s good will while they were none the wiser as to who and what my father and I had been.
I swallowed hard and pushed my way up into a sitting position alongside Kyle, wondering at how he was here and at how the years may have changed him. How I may have changed him.
“Here.” He handed me the room service menu and I didn’t even look at it, setting it aside.
“Just get me a burger,” I said and sniffed, not wanting to know or to look at how much this joint cost. The guilt of him footing the bill for a place like this was already starting to creep in. You see, Kyle had changed me, from the first day we’d met. He’d taught me honesty and core values that my father had clearly lacked, and I didn’t know whether to kiss him or curse him for it because now, I was a screwed up mess on the inside over all of it.
“Burger it is,” he said softly and picked up the phone to order two, charging it to our room.
Silence hung between us as he moved around the space. None of the ungainliness he’d had as a boy, none of the awkwardness of being a teen remained. He’d gained muscle in the intervening years, bulked up a bit in a way I hadn’t expected. He was still slender but wasn’t skinny anymore and those arms… How I would love to put needle to his smooth skin and decorate him with art and poetry.
He had the arms for it, holy god did he ever, not that I would say anything about it. I mean, the awkward going on now was already awkward enough.
“What did you save?” he asked and at least that was somewhat of a safe topic of conversation. Too much adrenaline, maybe my hormones were raging, I don’t know… but I’d never thought of Kyle as anything but my best friend and confidant before, certainly nothing especially romantic had crossed my radar from him. For him is another matter entirely… my rebellious brain whispered. I couldn’t even tell you if what I was feeling between us was any kind of romantic now, I mean, I was still reeling.
That, and it felt like there was a chasm between love and sex that most people didn’t realize existed and it was a tight-wire act to cross it. I didn’t know if Kyle felt the same way about it that I did, though, and I wasn’t about to friggin’ ask. Instead, I got up, and complained “I feel like I got raped by a couple of horses.” Which was both true and enough to put a damper on my jumbled thoughts and feelings for the moment. Bonus points, it made Kyle laugh and he shook his head.
“Not used to riding?”
“Not used to riding for like hours and hours at a shot like that,” I said.
“I have something for that. After dinner, though.”
“Fair enough, make me suffer.”
Again with that laugh and it felt, for a moment, like there was really no time lost between us. I smiled some and hauled my messenger bag across the carpet, upending it onto the bed.
Mostly my art supplies fell out first. Black, hard bound sketch books, pencils both graphite drawing and Prisma colored, in their fancy hand sewn roll-up case that a fellow artist had made me. Two hard cases that looked like they should hold drill bits or a handgun or something, but really held my favorite tattoo guns, and a myriad of other sentimental crap that amounted to the most important parts of me.
“You didn’t think to pack clothes?” he asked and I moved my laptop and cord aside to pick up the battered tarot deck that Kyle had bought me for my fifteenth birthday, wrapped in a silk scarf a girlfriend had bought me three years ago. She’d been fun, but I couldn’t ever be anyone’s serious sweetheart. Still, she’d known all the sweet spots and I could let her eat me out for hours. At the end of the day, though, there still wasn’t anything like the ‘D’.
“Clothes can be replaced,” I said. “This stuff? No way.”
“Fair enough,” he said nodding and moved a sketch book or two aside, his long fingers plucking one in particular out of the bottom of the pile. I froze. “I remember this one,” he murmured.
“First one you ever bought me…”
“My mom bought it, I begged her for like a week and she didn’t want to get it for me. Knew I was shit at sketching, I mean, I was failing art. Didn’t bat an eye when I rolled my eyes and said it was for you, though. Asked why I didn’t tell her so in the first place.”
I smiled a bit ruefully, “How is Mom?” I asked.
His face grew solemn and he opened the fragile, well-turned pages, “She and my dad died four years after you disappeared.”
“Oh, shit…”
“Yeah,” he cleared his throat. “Freak thing, actually. A storm caused a tree to fall on their car. Mom hung on for a few days longer than dad but succumbed to her head injuries.”
“Shit, Kyle… I didn’t know…”
“How could you?” he asked, “You were long gone by then.”
Ouch… I sighed and didn’t say anything. I mean, what the fuck was there to say?
“Look, I didn’t mean it like that…” he started and I held up a hand and shook my head.
“No, it’s all right, it came out exactly the way it was supposed to and you have every right to be pissed…”
“Mali…” he drew my name in that tone that had always meant to expect a lecture and I looked at him calmly. I kept the expression on my face as tranquil and as blank as I could make it. I didn’t want him to see the truth, the hurt, the shame… His breath left him in a rush and he hung his head, scratching the back of his neck when a knock came at the door. He snapped my old sketch book, my first sketch book, shut, and laid it in the pile with the rest and went to get it.
“Yeah?” he called through the door.
“Room service?” a male voice, young, called back.
Still, Kyle checked and then opened the door carefully. He took a scrap of paper, filled it out and handed it back and said, “Thanks, man.”
He brought the cart into the suite and I raised an eyebrow. He shut the door firmly and re-locked it.
“Dinner is served, I guess.”
“Fan-fucking-tastic, I’m starved.”
He set the table, and I didn’t stop him. One of the things about being a kid in Kyle Cochran’s existence that I had appreciated was that his family worked like a family was supposed to. You know, the whole Norman Rockwell painting? Dinner around the table every night… One of the things I missed the most, were all the times they made me feel like a part of their family.
My dad was a single dad, he worked and couldn’t always be home to fix me dinner and so it was microwaved mac & cheese and Top Ramen a lot. Every time I could have a real meal at Kyle’s place was a good night. Some of the best nights, but at his house, you always ate at the table, there just wasn’t any other way of doing it. It was how they were. Some things, I guess, didn’t change. The normalcy of it, the dependability, even while the world was on fire around us… well, it hit me right in the feels. All one of them that I had left.
“Come and eat,” he said and pulled out one of the chairs for me, going around the table and pulling out the other in front of his own plate. He dropped into it and I went and sat across from him.
“So what happens now?” I asked and he arched an eyebrow at me as he put his first bite of food into his mouth.
He chewed slowly, swallowed deliberately and said, “Now, you eat your dinner, then I call up my President and we start to figure this shit out.”
“Just like that, you ride in like some white knight to save the day?” I asked and I couldn’t help the smirk that crossed my lips. I knew it was a cruel one, but he honestly couldn’t be that naïve.
“Not our first rodeo,” he said and took another bite, assessing me coolly. I returned the favor, chewing my own food thoughtfully as I assessed him right back.
“How the hell did you even get involved with a club like the Sacred Hearts in the first place?” I asked finally when the silence had stretched on far too long between us.
“I was in college, my folks had died, and I decided to build a motorcycle from parts. Found this classic frame that needed to be rebuilt from the ground up. I was blogging about it, reaching out over the internet on message boards and shit to help piece things together when I got stuck and I ran into this guy went by the name of Unkind1 as a handle. We started a dialogue. He was a Sacred Heart. We became friends and when we figured out we were local he actually came over and helped me out a few times on some tricky shit. The bike was done, and the rest became history.”
“Funny, the bike you picked me up on doesn’t look like a classic.”
“It’s not, I sold the classic bike to buy that one and to start my business,” he said.
“Which is?” I drew the words out carefully, half expecting him not to answer.
“I started in IT services with a focus on cyber-security and went into installing state-of-the-art security systems. The private investigative work was a side gig, but eventually, I integrated it into the rest of what I was doing and became a one-man show.”
“A PI, huh?”
“Like I said, it was a side gig at first.”
“How’d you get into that?” I asked, knowing the answer already by the way he looked at me alone.
“Don’t be cute, Mali.”
“I hate that word,” I said and it was true. I would much rather be called a cunt than cute any day of the week. Kyle smiled at me and it was heart-stopping, always had been and probably always would be.<
br />
He nodded and said, “You. It’s always been you. I looked high, low, and everywhere in between. Do you have any idea how aggravating it was being able to skip trace with the best of them, finding anyone and everyone under the fucking sun I put my mind to but the one person I wanted to find?”
My breath was stolen by how intently he looked at me, his eye contact level and sure, refusing to let me look away. I swallowed hard enough I felt my throat click and reached for my coke. I took a sip and swallowed and when I was sure that my voice wouldn’t waver I said, “I call that success. I mean, I didn’t want to be found, so I guess I was doing it right.”
He barked a laugh and it was a bitter thing. He dropped his chin toward his chest and shook his head, letting out a harsh breath before returning his gaze to mine. I raised my eyebrows and dared him silently to argue with me but he knew he couldn’t.
“Well,” he said and scraped his top lip between his teeth, “I guess I can’t argue with you there. You didn’t want to be found…” he stood up abruptly and I realized that I’d hurt him, that my words cut deep.
“Where are you going?” I demanded and it came out surprised but could I really be?
“To make that call. Eat, I’ll be back in a bit.” He called the last back over his shoulder, moving swiftly past me, through the room. Before I could open my mouth to protest the door to the suite was clicking shut. I stared after him, my gob shut, teeth gritted grimly at his vacant seat, and I felt my eyes grow hot. I’d be damned if I would actually cry but I felt like a real asshole.
It wasn’t that I hadn’t wanted him to find me. I’d missed him with every fiber of my being at first. It’d been a sharp, aching hole in my heart and the absolute hardest thing about the night we’d fled – even above and beyond pulling the trigger. Kyle was and had always been, my best friend and a part of me and there hadn’t been a day that’d gone by that I didn’t think of him.
I stared down at my partially eaten plate, cheeks burning with a mixture of rage and shame with myself at making him feel like I didn’t want him around which was a conundrum in and of itself. I desperately wanted him as far away from me as possible if only because I was afraid of what they might do to him if they found out about him or that he was helping me.