Auctioned to Him 7: The Contract

by Charlotte Byrd

  “Come sit here,” he sits down at the dining room table in the kitchen. “I didn’t want to do this, but I guess I have to. There are some things you don’t know about Logan.”

  Reluctantly, I sit down across from him. I hate the way he’s treating my apartment as if it’s his. I wonder if it’s a Truman thing or a CIA thing.

  “This is top secret information. And if you were to ever tell anyone, you could be arrested and sent to jail. And we would deny it, of course.”

  I feel him studying my face. My heart beats so loud it feels like it’s going to pop out of my chest. But I remain stoic, waiting for him to continue.

  “Logan is a CIA agent. He works for a special unit with the CIA. He’s one of our top agents. And we haven’t heard from him since the night of the wedding.”

  “A CIA agent? What does that mean exactly?” I ask. Does that mean he’s allowed to murder people? I want to ask, but I don’t. I’ve seen the movies. I’m afraid that if I tell him too much, he won’t tell me anything at all. We’re locked in a game of who knows what, and neither of us are caving easily.

  “It means that in addition to being in Tulum for his brother’s wedding, he was also there on a mission. The mission was supposed to take place the night after the wedding, but we haven’t heard from him since then. And we are worried. Very worried.”

  “Oh, wow,” I mumble. I shake my head. “That’s not good.”

  “No, it’s not,” Director Truman says. “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but it took a lot of convincing on my part to get permission to reveal to you these details. What we do is covert, and everything is on a need to know basis.”

  I nod.

  “So, what can you tell me?”

  I take a deep breath. I have to tell him everything.

  “I didn’t know he was there on a mission. He just left. Without an explanation. I didn’t mean to do that.”

  “Do what?” Director Truman’s eyes narrow.

  “I followed him. And I saw him in that man’s hotel room. He was trying to suffocate him. And then someone else came in and he shot him. And I screamed and ran away. I thought he was a murderer. I didn’t know he worked for the CIA.”

  “Well, the line is very thin there,” he smiles. “Did you see anything else?”

  “I saw three men enter. But I don’t know what happened. I never heard from Logan again.”

  Director Truman nods and gets up.

  “So, what does this mean?” I ask. “Where’s Logan?”

  “I can’t be sure,” he shrugs. “You have been very helpful. Thank you.”

  Director Truman heads toward the door.

  “Wait, where are you going? What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know. But if it happened as you had described, it’s not good.”

  “Are you saying…” I can’t let myself go there. But I need to know the truth. “Are you saying that he’s dead?”

  Director Truman shrugs. “I don’t know anything more than you do. Someone will be in touch with you in the near future. You will need to come into the office and get debriefed.”

  I nod. He waves good-bye and leaves. I close the door behind him and lean back against it. Suddenly, my knees grow weak and I slide down to the floor.

  Logan isn’t a murderer. He’s a good guy. He was just doing his job. And now…he’s dead. Is that what’s really going on? I search my mind for any details from that night – all the details that only a few days ago I tried so hard to forget. Those three men were armed. And they came there for him. He had just killed someone very important to them. Oh no, this isn’t good.

  Chapter 27 - Logan

  I open my eyes slowly. Every part of me aches and throbs. The sun is so bright, it’s blinding me. I can’t keep my eyes open for more than a few seconds at a time. Squinting helps a bit. After a few moments, I manage to lift up my head and look around. I’m in the middle of a thick jungle. Mosquitos and other insects are crawling all over my body. I’m experiencing everything in third-person, as if I’m watching myself onscreen and none of this is actually happening in real life.

  I notice that I’m dressed in the same pants and dress shirt that I wore to the wedding.

  Except that the dress shirt is drenched in blood. I reach my hand and place it on my stomach. When I pull my hand away, it’s covered in blood. Suddenly, it’s no longer a third-person experience. My stomach hurts like hell and so does my leg. I was in shock. My training tells me that I was in shock, but now I’m coming out of it, and everything’s going to get a lot worse. Shit.

  I look around again. The jungle is a flurry of activity. Insects and reptiles all around. People. I need people. I try to sit up, but I was shot in the stomach and curling up is pretty much out of the question. I try to check my body for other injuries. Both arms seem to move fine, but the left leg...something’s wrong with my left leg. I reach down as far as I can and feel the wetness of my pant leg. More blood. The calf throbs, sending shooting pains up to my spine. I’ve been shot there too. Perfect.

  And then, somewhere far away I hear voices. Little kids. Laughing and giggling. With great difficulty, I turn my head in the direction from which the sounds are coming.

  “Hey! Hey!” I yell. The first one is barely audible. My voice cracks and I cough. I try again. I don’t know how much time I have, but I’m pretty certain that they’re my only chance.

  I try again in Spanish. “Hola! Hola!”

  Their laughter stops as they walk up to me. The kids are two boys, no older than seven or eight. They are very small for their age – must be Mayan rather than Mexican.

  “Help,” I whisper, first in English, then in Spanish. They stare at me and then talk amongst themselves. I can’t understand them. They must be speaking Mayan, an indigenous language of the region, and I don’t know any Mayan. Suddenly, one takes off. The other one stays with me. He rips some leaves off a nearby bush, cleans my leg wound and presses the leaf to it. He whispers something in Mayan. It has a calming effect on me. I lay my head back down on the ground and close my eyes.

  * * *

  I must’ve passed out, because the next thing I know, I wake up in a small wooden cabin with a beautiful old Mayan woman leaning over me and applying bandages to my body. She sings something quietly as she takes off one bandage and puts on another. When she sees that I’m awake, she smiles at me and continues her work without stopping. I look around the place. I’m lying on the floor in the main room. A few hammocks hang around me, attached to the walls. The cabin itself has a thin metal roof and no glass in the windows. Just shutters to keep the elements out. But most of the time, the windows and the door are wide open to let in the sunshine.

  Somewhere near the front door, two boys sit on the floor, eating something wrapped in large green leaves. The place is filled with the most delicious aroma I’ve ever smelled – fresh tamales and spices. My mouth starts to water. As if she can read my mind, the woman finishes with my bandages and brings me a glass of water and a plate with an unwrapped tamale. My stomach throbs as I sit up a little against the wall, but it’s definitely a lot better. I stuff some rice and beans into my mouth and thank her by nodding my head. She just smiles and walks away as if recuperating recently-shot CIA agents who were left for dead in the jungle is something she deals with every day.

  As I sit there, I see a large cockroach crawling on the ceiling. I have already seen geckos and an assortment of other little creatures, but this is the first cockroach that I’ve seen this close up. This area is filled with them – and they are huge with wings. I move my index finger a little and point out the cockroach, expecting the woman to scream and let her two boys deal with it, but everything about this place is a surprise. Without so much as a change in her expression, she walks over to the front door, grabs a flip-flop, and knocks it down on the ground. The cockroach opens its wings, but she catches it between her palms and hands it to one of the boys. From what I understand, she tells him to go deep into the jungle and let him go. Unti
l this very moment, I still had some doubts. But as soon as I saw her do this, all of my worries vanish and I drift back to sleep certain that I would make a full recovery.

  Over the next few days, I keep getting stronger and stronger. The woman continues to give me doses of her medicine, which she grinds up with a mortar and pestle from dried plant ingredients. After each dose, I always fall asleep and wake up half a day later, but every time I wake up, I feel stronger. I eat more, drink more, and sometime later, I even start to move around on my own. My stomach’s healing, and so is my leg. The woman seems pleased with my progress, nodding and smiling during each pivotal step in my recovery. Eventually, I start to make my way outside and walk more and more around the cabin. As I suspect, the woman lives all alone with the two kids in the middle of a thick jungle, with only a dirt road leading up to their house.

  When it’s finally time for me to go, the goodbye is bittersweet. For more than a few days, I actually debated whether or not I should stay here for good. Everyone thinks I’m dead, so what if I actually stayed dead? I could start a whole new life. I used to think that a simple life is nothing to want, but now I have my doubts. This family seems much more content than many middle class families that I’ve seen in the States. They’re actually happy. Genuinely happy. Everything is simple here. Life is about all the little pleasures. Growing your own food. Going swimming under the waterfall. Playing with the chickens and the dogs. There are no worries about careers and mortgages. Those aren’t really my concerns, but I would be lying if I said that I wasn’t a little jealous about their way of existing in the world. And if I stayed here, then I definitely wouldn’t have to fulfill the rest of my contract to Truman and that organization, which I’ve come to despise.

  And I probably would stay here, were it not for one person. The person who I thought about day and night during my recovery.

  Avery.

  I should not have kept this secret from her, but how could I have known what would happen? What the hell was she doing there on the beach? Without context, I must’ve looked like a murderer to her.

  I don’t want to admit it, but I’m a little more than terrified of her not believing me. When I find her again, will she believe me? I mean, isn’t being a CIA agent some perfect lie to cover up being an actual murderer? I think I heard that killers use that lie on more than one occasion in television shows and movies.

  What if she asks for proof? I don’t have any. That’s the point of being covert. I’m not even on CIA’s regular payroll. Only a handful of people within the CIA even know about Daffodil. Besides the extra phone, which is encrypted, I don’t have any other paperwork or physical object proving that I work there and that I was authorized – no, forced – to do what I did. And of course, there’s no way that Truman would ever corroborate anything I’m saying to a civilian. He’s not the sentimental type. So, if she doesn’t believe me…that’s that. She’ll be terrified of me, and I can’t scare her more. She deserves better than that.

  If she doesn’t believe me, then I’ll come back here, I decide. I’ll build myself a little hut a little bit away from this one. I’ll help the woman with her animals and the gardening. I’ll play with the kids. I’ll learn Mayan. I’ll start a new life.

  Chapter 28 - Avery

  Truman leaves and takes life as I know it with him. All of these thoughts that I thought about Logan over the last couple of weeks are completely false. He was completing a mission for this country and died on his mission. And I caused it. If I hadn’t screamed, then none of those other men would’ve come in and killed him. The thought of that is devastating. I can’t breathe. I start to cry, and I can’t stop. Cynthia isn’t here to help me. Not that she could anyway.

  I sob and cry and sob for hours until my tear ducts run dry. And when twilight falls and the moon comes out, I cry some more. It starts like a wave, a tsunami, that I have no power of stopping. I cry myself to sleep and when I wake up, the first thing I do is cry again. The very thought of Logan breaks me down. Suddenly everything in the apartment reminds me of him.

  There’s a knock at the door. By the sound, I can tell that it’s Cynthia. I mumble something and she comes in.

  “Oh my God, Avery, what’s wrong?” she asks. “What happened?”

  I look at her and break down again. My eyes fill up with tears that I didn’t know I still had and then roll down my face. My eyes are so dry that the salt in my tears feels like someone’s cutting at my naked eyeball with razorblades.

  She goes to the kitchen and comes back with something. I can’t see very well. When she presses something cold and soft to my face, I feel a little better. If only you could die from crying, I think to myself. Then I’d be dead already, and maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

  After I calm down a bit, Cynthia asks me what’s wrong again. I don’t know what to say. I don’t want to lie. I can’t. Since Logan is dead, what does it matter anyway? So, I tell her. Everything. As it happened. She gasps and then doesn’t say anything for a while. From what I can make out of her face, she’s in shock.

  “I can’t believe this,” she shakes her head.

  “I know,” I mumble. My throat is dry, and I cough. She hands me a bottle of water. I gulp it all down before either of us says anything else.

  “So, all this time, you thought that he was a killer? That must’ve been so scary for you.”

  “That’s why I stayed at your place.”

  “Oh wow, it all makes so much more sense now,” Cynthia says. “And now he’s dead?”

  I nod. Something about her presence makes the pain not so acute anymore. I still feel it, but it’s no longer like a knife through my chest. Suddenly, I feel a little numb to it.

  “And all this time, I was fearing him. Terrified of seeing him again,” I say calmly. “And now, all I want is just one more moment with him.”

  Cynthia puts her arm around me, and we stay in bed for the rest of the day.

  * * *

  A couple of days later, things calm down a bit. The pain and the heartbreak aren’t as intense. It doesn’t mean that my world isn’t full of regrets of all the things that I should’ve done or could’ve done that night on the beach. It just means that I’m able to go back to work and cut flowers. I’m able to answer the phone and explain our services to customers. I’m able to arrange bouquets and even design a few new ones.

  Being back in my shop puts me a little bit at ease. The splashes of greens and colors swaddle me as if I’m wrapped in a tight blanket. Everything’s going to be okay, eventually, they whisper to me. It might not be as you planned, it might be without Logan, but you will find love again.

  Cynthia walks in with two coffees and a big smile. Her positivity has really played a big role in bringing me around these last few days. After I gained some control over my senses, I realized that I probably shouldn’t have told her about Logan working for the CIA, but Director Truman never did explicitly tell me that I’m supposed to keep his identity a secret. Besides, someone was supposed to contact me for a debrief over what happened, but no one has yet.

  If they do contact me, then I’ll tell them that Cynthia knows, I decide, and that I didn’t think it was a big deal to tell her, because he’s dead.

  The thought of Logan being dead sends shivers up my spine. Instead of breaking down, I bury my face in the daffodils that I’m holding in my hand and try to think of something else. Something more pleasant and not so hopeless.

  The door to the shop opens.

  “Well, hello, there!” the woman says. I can’t make out her face because she’s flooded with light from the outside, but I recognize that West Texas accent anywhere.

  “Hi Dolly!” I say with a newfound pep. I’m not faking. I’m actually happy to see her.

  Cynthia looks up as Dolly comes closer. She’s dressed in a white Chanel suit, which has undoubtedly been tailored to accentuate some of her most prominent features.

  “Oh, wow, are you Dolly Monroe? The Dolly Monroe?”

&nb
sp; “It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance,” Dolly extends her right hand. Cynthia’s eyes focus for a second on a ten-carat diamond ring. I nudge her out of her trance.

  “It’s such a pleasure to meet you,” Cynthia says. Dolly smiles. “I’m not sure if you know, but I’m the one who got the gift certificate for your services for Avery.”

  “Oh no, I had no idea. Well, isn’t that swell?” Dolly asks. “So, this is your shop? It’s very cozy in here.”

  I smile. She’s being nice, but I know that cozy is just a euphemism for tiny. A bit too small, actually.

  She walks around the shop as if she owns the place. Some people I’m sure find her arrogant and full of herself, but I love her confidence. I know that she’s coming from a good place.

  “I love your designs,” she says, holding up one of my bouquets in front of her. “I wish the woman I hired to do my niece’s wedding had half the talent you have.”

  “Thank you,” I say. “I really appreciate you saying that.”

  “Can I get you anything? Coffee? Tea?” I ask. “We don’t make it here, but there’s a coffee shop right outside.”

  “Oh no, there’s no need. I’m fine.”

  She explores the shop a little more, carefully examining the flowers and the bouquets. I get the feeling that she isn’t just dropping by. I wait for her to talk about what actually brought her here.

  “You have a beautiful place here, Avery,” Dolly finally says. “I’m going to get all of my flowers from you in the future.”

  “Oh wow, thank you,” I say, but she continues before I even finish.

  “But I’m also here to talk to you about something else.”

  Here it goes. I take a deep breath. Logan.

  “We are all wondering about Logan,” she says, carefully choosing each individual word.