by Liz K. Lorde
“Jesus,” I whisper.
“They told us that our father skipped over to America and left us as collateral. I spent years trying to work off our father’s debts, trying to make enough to let them send Phedre free – and eventually I did. I did finally make enough acting as their spy, as their gunman and fall guy.” His voice becomes strained now, “and I was a day late and a dollar short. Phedre, rest her sweet heart, she was pimped out and treated horribly. Like she was just a piece of fucking meat. Well, about a week before I could clear her, no matter how much I begged not to let them keep putting her out there, they sent her anyway. She would be gone for days at a time, but this time she hadn’t come back.” Connifer’s Adam’s apple bobs. “They wouldn’t tell me nothing, they just let me panic over what happened to her, over where she was. When they got tired of my complaining, they finally up and told me that she… that she was suffocated. One of their clients ended up choking her to death, and I just wept that whole night.”
My heart aches for him and I want to say something, but it feels like nothing could possibly lift that terrible weight from his soul.
“At some point I was smart enough to realize they were never going to let us leave, especially not me, they could see the way I hated them. But I was patient, very patient,” the coldness in his voice makes the hairs on my neck bristle. “I learned everything I could about my captors; what they read, what they ate, who they fucked, when they slept, who was lazy and who was vigilant. For two years I tunneled through my cell, smuggling in anything and everything that I could to chip away at the foundations of the place. When I finally found my freedom at the age of seventeen, I fled to America.”
Connifer brushes a hand through his hair, and his eyes lock with mine, seemingly considering if he should continue any further. “Took me a long time, but when I got work as a bouncer in Chaos, and I met Leonardo Ligotti’s father, I became fast friends with the both of ‘em. With their resources, I found that my father was hiding up in a private estate in Seattle deep in the woods.”
I can feel the hesitation in his voice, so I grab his hand and squeeze it gently. “It’s okay, you don’t have to go any further if you don’t want to.”
“No,” he says, “no. There was this knife that I used back when the IRA had me as their puppet, I carried it with me the night that I broke into my father’s place at night. And he knew, Viv, I could see it in his eyes just how terrified of me he was. I’ll never forget the way that I beat him senseless, the way that I hung him up and let him bleed out… left him to rot. Told him that he got his daughter killed. You ever hear of a Glasgow Kiss?” I shake my head, and a grim frown colors his face. “The local authorities found his body some six weeks later, with his face cut on each side from mouth to ear.” He looks away from me now, is he ashamed? “I think that’s enough for one day.”
I bring his hand up to my mouth and press my lips against his knuckles, kissing softly. “Thank you for that.”
His blue eyes meet with mine once more, and he cracks a faint smile. “Your turn.”
“THAT’S IT, LAY DOWN just like that,” Connifer instructs before getting off of the bed and moving towards the door, giving me a fantastic shot of his pert ass.
“Where are you going?” I ask.
“I have to get something,” he calls back without looking at me. Just like that, he disappears from my sight.
Not a second later, and he returns. He has something in his hand. It has a silver chain, but his hand is closed so I can’t make out precisely what it is.
“What’s that?” I ask curious.
“This is a Focus.”
“A focus,” I repeat.
“It’s what your eyes are going to look at, and what your mind is going to consciously focus on,” Connifer explains, moving to the bed and climbing back on it.
“Right now my eyes are very much not focused on that,” I feel my lips upturn as I try and catch a couple of more glimpses of Connifer’s impressive package.
He closes the remaining distance between us, sending an invisible punch to my gut filled with excitement. “For just having your pussy taken for the first time, you know, you’ve got a dirty mouth. I like that.” Connifer has this look in his eyes, like he wants to give me some kind of affection – but he restrains himself, and I don’t know why.
For some reason, this plants a seed in my mind and in my heart.
This is the first time I’ve ever felt like this for someone. The first time that I’ve seriously slept with anyone, like, had sex.
What if gets bored of me? What if this doesn’t mean the same to him as it does to me?
“Now,” he says, opening the fist that was balled earlier. This reveals a silver pocket watch, the watch itself being no larger than a golf ball. “This is what I want you to focus on, it’s very simple now lass. You watch,” he instructs in that soothing and deep voice. He stands on his knees and picks up his hand to chest level, letting the silver watch pendulum back and forth at a slow, steady pace.
“I watch the watch,” I smirk, “you should really watch what you say.”
“Careful or I’ll reprogram the humor right out of your pretty little head,” he jokingly threatens and we share a quick chuckle.
Following the watch is easy enough. Left to right, right to left, left to right.
“Now,” he says, “I want you to focus on the sound of my voice.” How can I not? “Let yourself relax and slip away. Keep your eyes on the watch. Let the steady rhythm of it spirit you away. I’m going to count backwards from ten, and when I get to three, I want you to close your eyes and imagine the focus in your head.”
“Alright,” I say, still skeptical of this whole thing working.
“Ten, you feel your worries escape you.” The silver watch turns and turns, almost calling me to watch it’s movements. “Nine, you’re in a safe place where nothing can hurt you, Vivian. And at any time if you need to leave, I want you to latch onto my voice.” Okay, I think I can do that. When Connifer gets down to five, this peculiar sense of relief blooms through my body, and I feel myself sink deeper into the bed. Deeper than should be possible.
“Three. Now close your eyes and imagine the focus.” Darkness overcomes my vision, and a dull current, not invaise or anything, just a faded sort of sensation roots itself in my bones. “Two, you are going to let your mind wander and explore – nothing can harm you – you are in control of both body and mind.” That dull current starts to turn into a heavy weight, and I feel my breathing begin to slow. “One. Remember this mantra now. Body asleep. Mind awake.”
Body asleep.
Mind awake.
Body asleep.
Mind awake.
It feels like the room has expanded to twice it’s size, and the sound of Connifer’s voice has drifted from my ears – filling my body with a sense of sweet sleep. “Stop thinking of the watch,” I hear a distant voice instruct, and the silvery implement dissolves from my mind’s eye. Body asleep, mind awake. “Search the corridors of your mind.” Black mist swirls and dances like ink on a white blank page. The vision of my Mother begins to crystallize in my mind, and I see her face, her long and curly black hair from the photo’s that Dad used to show me. Body asleep, mind awake. The mantra skitters across my brain and takes me over, and everything becomes more and more clear. “Let your heart be free,” a voice I can’t even recognize suggests, and I feel compelled to trust and listen to it. A red curtain rolls over the image of my mother, and the sights of Belle when we were kids sleeping over at her house fill the chamber of my mind. Butterflies of memory glide through the picture, and in their wings I can see all the smiles that we shared, and it hurts. It hurts so bad to have shrugged off something that was once so important.
“Tell me what you see,” the voice sounds like my own internal monologue now.
“Memories,” I breathe, feeling a bizarre mix of hot and cold ribbons crawling beneath my stomach, bubbling up past my neck and climaxing in the back of my skull. “So many
,” I add. “I see Mom and Dad, and Belle, and I’m back at school. They’re swirling together so fast.” The thought of my Dad teaching me how to ride a bike slips into my vision, and how he’d spent so many nights teaching me how to read when I struggled at a young age.
But this brooding sensation sinks it’s fangs into me.
Cool waters touch my skin, but they soon turn to ice.
My heart quickens and I let out a tremulous breath through my nose. Suddenly, I feel my head plunge into a lake of icy cold water, and I want to scream. There’s a burning in my throat and I have to scream: But I can’t.
“You need to be clean,” a dark voice calls, and I want to curl up and fade away.
“Vivian,” another voice calls, and I try and cling to it – only vaguely perceptive of how my body’s tossing and turning on the bed. “Vivian,” it repeats more sternly.
What did he say to do? It feels like I’m drowning and I can’t breathe. Oh god.
I remember how the focus that Connifer was talking about looked like, and I draw it in my mind trying to remember every little detail.
“Vivian you need to listen to me,” I think that’s Con.
“Pure,” that dark voice sings.
It feels like I’m going to die, and I try and remain focused on the silver watch in my head, to the sound of Connifer’s voice cutting through.
Everything comes back in a hot rush, and my eyes pop open. The first thing I do is take in a huge breath, a breath that I never thought I’d be able to take again, and it tastes so sweet.
“What the fuck was that?” I say panicked, quickly regaining control of my faculties, scrambling to sit up on the bed because I don’t want to lay there anymore. Because I don’t want to somehow drift back into that scary place. “Jesus.”
Connifer closes the distance between us and pulls my head against his chest, “It’s okay Vivian, you’re okay.” He holds me tighter and I can’t stop freaking out internally. “What did you see?”
“Lots of memories, I don’t know,” I tell him, “it was all hazy and really fucking scary at the end. I was drowning all over again and it was so, so much worse than my nightmares.”
“That must be something you repressed… your mind doesn’t want to think about it, but it’s still there beneath the surface. We’ll stop there that really seemed to rattle you.”
“Thanks, I’m amazed at how well that worked though – it always seemed like bullshit to me.”
Connifer gives me a crooked smile, “Told you.”
I FEEL CONNIFER SLIP OUT of bed in the morning, and even against the sleep thick in my eyes, I manage to open them and catch his hard and rippling with muscle back. He’s sitting there on the edge contemplating something. Bringing my hand up to my face, I pick at the sleep in my eyes and pull them off my face, making whining morning noises that I can’t help. Waking up shouldn’t be so hard, but, I suppose I should be happy I was able to sleep as well as I did last night. Sleeping next to someone, sleeping next to Connifer, really seemed to help me with that.
And even if that bizarre therapy session last night was, well, bizarre. It was therapeutic in a sense. I hadn’t even dreamed of anything at all last night, which was infinitely better than being trapped in a nightmare with no way out.
Connifer cranes his head over his shoulder to look at me. For some reason it surprises me that he can look like he just woke up; it wasn’t that I had the impression that he was some super human entity or something, but at times, with all of his beauty and intimidation and the whole ‘I work for the Mob’ thing… it was humanizing to see him struggling to wake up just like me. “Mornin’ sunshine,” he groans like it took all of his energy and concentration just to say those two simple words. His eyes are practically slits, and he’s wavering almost imperceptibly as he sits on the edge of the bed.
“Hey,” I respond quickly, clearly still wanting to collapse back into bed and sleep another hour.
“Didn’t mean to wake you up,” he says. “I’m gonna hit the showers.”
“Great I’ll come and join you,” I try and thumb the remaining sleep from my eyes, yawning.
“Oh, it’s okay,” he says, “I’ll let you go first.”
He’ll let me go first? What? I pick myself up from the bed and crawl over to Connifer’s side. Thorns of hurt press against my chest, for some reason it does not sit well with me that he doesn’t want to shower together. Is it really that big of a deal?
“What’s wrong?” He asks, and scratches around his armpit.
“Nothing,” I reply without even thinking, but I can already tell that my tone of voice was too short. Much too short.
There’s a smile that forms on his lips then, “Now to me, nothing, typically isn’t just nothing.”
I look over to him and internally debate for a second as to if I should actually approach him about this. But, seriously? “Why don’t you want me showering with you?”
Connifer looks right back at me with those lake blue eyes, and he doesn’t say anything for a beat of time. “It’s not that I don’t want to shower with you,” he replies groggy.
“So…” I turn my head away and to his master bathroom, and then bring my gaze back to him, “you do want to?”
The look on his face told me that he was truly lost for words, “It’s not something that I’ve done before.”
I inch closer to him on the bed, so that I’m feeling the touch of his perfect skin against mine; the heat of his body is unreal, was he powering some small town that I’m not aware of? “It’s only fair that I get to take your shower virginity.”
Connifer laughs, but it comes across as forced. “Go on lass,” he points with his head towards the bathroom before scooting further back on to the bed. “I’ll catch in some more rest while you’re in there.”
“No it’s okay,” I tell him with electric lines forming along my shoulders and running up my spine. “Get all the sleep that you need,” I stand up from the bed, “I’ll be back when it’s time for Morgana to be watched.”
“Vivian…” Connifer reaches out a hand.
I start putting on my clothes and give him the finger.
CHAPTER 14
CONNIFER
AFTER SHE GIVES ME THE FINGER and puts her clothes on, I spring up from bed and follow her as she moves out of my bedroom. Fuck, I really said the wrong thing there. “Vivian, “ I call out louder than the last time that I’d said it. Why is this such a big deal to her? I get that she’s young but it’s just a stupid shower.
“I don’t want to talk to you right now, Con,” she says we move through the kitchen and in to the living room.
“Viv I don’t understand—“ I move faster than her, get in front of her and block the front door. “Stop and talk to me,” I snarl like I’m talking to one of my underlings.
“Either get out of my way,” she says with a deadly calm, “or tell me why you won’t go and so that simple thing with me. Tell me why.”
“Because it’s not something that I do,” I say with a much louder voice than I needed to use. It’s true though, “none of this is what I do, Vivian. Why do you think I waited so long to sleep with you?”
“You waited the equivalent of five seconds in guy time,” she yells back.
“And that’s an eternity for me,” I try and explain calmly, but I know it’s coming out differently. “I waited as long as I did because you’re different, because you’re not like them. All of this is new to me – I takes lives Viv. I don’t live them.”
She gives me this cold and terrible look, “If I’m not one of them to you. Then you need to stop treating me like I am.” The words that spill from her stab at me, and I’m stunned with the truth of it.
I step aside to let her get by, and I watch her as she leaves.
Fuck if it wasn’t so hard to convince myself that I can have a normal life. Or at least, normal-ish. I want to punch something, anything, preferably one of those Brenaise assholes. Since there’s no such luck at doing that, I fore
go my old ways of getting intimate with the walls and my fist, and I shut and lock the door behind Vivian. Maybe it’s the pride in my blood, but I can’t seem to find the will to say that I’m wrong. To acknowledge that I’ve just got to change.
I’ll have to leave a key and a note because I have to get ready for that score tonight.
CHAPTER 15
VIVIAN
STUPID, STUPID MAN. Stupid me. It feels like I’ve wrapped myself in brambles, every step that I take down the sidewalk only irritating and hurting me further. That wasn’t something I should have been mad at him over, just because he didn’t want to… I don’t want to be treated the way that he’s treated every other woman in his life.
Because I… because I want to be everything to him. Like he’s become everything to me. He’s infected my mind with his dark poison, and he’s ruined my heart with his perfect touch.
Feeling the morning sun beat on my back, I pass by a local Starbucks and stop in my tracks. Maybe something bad for me will bring me back down from the sky.
Opening the see-through front door, I step inside to the sound of someone’s Spotify clearly hooked up to the speakers. They’re playing some pop song from the top one hundred. My punk rock instincts immediately deem this place unfit. It’s a corporate establishment. Therefore, it is part of ‘the man’.
When my mouth begins to water at the thought of drinking a nice ice cold caramel Frappe, I make a fitting argument with my punk sensibilities and declare that ‘the man’ happens to sell bottled deliciousness.
For some reason it feels like every customer in the room is staring at me. With that in mind, I move over to the line and wait behind two other customers.