And then I’ll understand why she left me.
I won’t go to the police and tell them about her, because that part of our life is over. I’m not dwelling on the past, on the shoulda, coulda, woulda. I’ve moved past all that. I’m not angry. I never really was with her. How could I ever be?
She was my love, my life. She was my everything.
And it’s all going to be okay now.
I smile, and then I clean myself up, and then I laugh and know it won’t always be like this—coming into my own hand in my kitchen. I turn and start to make some soup for myself, because fuck it, I’m hungry and I can’t let myself wither away. Not today.
I pull out a can, it’s leek and potato, and that makes me happy. I think I deserve something good tonight. And this soup makes much more sense to me. The consistency and the color work in harmony with one another.
I open the can and tip the soup into my pan, and I smile because I know that one day soon I’ll be making this soup for the two of us.
And a tea for her and a coffee for me.
We’ll have breakfast in bed, and make love three times before noon.
We’ll take long walks on Sundays. And we’ll get a fucking dog and call it Shep or Fluffy something equally stupid like that because we’re going to be so deliriously happy. We’ll be one of those annoying couples that holds hands and kisses in the rain. And I’ll love the rain, not hate it like I do now.
“It’s all going to be okay,” I say to myself. “It’s all going to be okay now, Ethan.”
The banging upstairs has stopped, and I hear the man groan as he comes and I cheer for him.
Loudly.
Probably too loudly.
And then I clap.
And if he were here I’d probably pat him on the back and tell him well done, because good for him. At least he’s fucking living!
His wife might be a miserable, ugly bitch for all I know. She might nag and nag and never fuck him. Never even give him blow jobs no matter how hard he works. This might be the only way he can get his kicks, and who am I too judge so harshly on that?
I’m no one, but I won’t always be.
Soon I’ll be Carrie’s no one.
Which means I won’t be a no one at all.
I’ll be her everything.
And she’ll love me like I love her.
Like we promised we would forever.
And she will always fuck me.
And always give me blow jobs.
And she’ll never make me go see a prostitute because she’ll be a good fucking wife. And a good fucking mother.
“Fuck,” I say with a laugh, dragging my hands through my hair.
Because I realize that this is it.
This is the turning point of my life. The moment that people wait for, where everything changes and things start to get better.
We’ll get married. And one day she’ll be carrying my baby in her beautiful stomach. And she’ll still fuck me even then. She’ll worry, and I’ll tell her it’s okay to have sex when you’re pregnant because I read it in one of our baby books. And she’ll be happy and smile because I read the fucking baby books like she asked me to. And then she’ll give me a blowjob because she’s so happy to be my wife.
And I’ll be happy because I’ll have a beautiful wife, full and pregnant with my child, on her knees, sucking my dick like the good fucking wife she is.
And then we’ll fuck afterwards anyway, because she can’t stay away from me because I make her so horny.
And could life get any more perfect than this?
Fuck no, I’ll scream from the rooftops as I come.
And then I actually do cum, again, right here right now, in my pants while I stir my stupid fucking soup and think of Carrie’s lips wrapped around my hard dick. I cum all over myself and I feel it running down my leg.
And then I laugh instead of get freaked out, because…
This is everything!
Thump, thump, thump…
Someone’s at my door. The sound of their fists hitting my cracked red paint vibrates through my apartment. I’m pulled from my reverie and brought back down to earth with a euphoric crash.
“One minute,” I yell to whoever it is.
There’s cum on my hand and stomach and trailing down the inside of my thigh. I stand at my kitchen sink and clean it quickly. I rinse the sink out and squirt some bleach down it, hating not being able to clean it properly. But it’s okay, I tell myself; it can wait two minutes while I answer the door.
I pull my top off and throw it in my machine and I notice that there’s a stain soaking through my pants, but I can’t do anything about that now because I’m walking to the front door, looking for something to throw over myself because I don’t like answering the door half undressed with cum stains on my pants.
Whoever it is knocks again, louder this time.
“I’m coming,” I yell again and peer through the peephole, almost laughing at my own statement.
And when I look through the peephole I see it’s the prostitute from upstairs, and she looks really pissed off, and for a fleeting moment I wonder if she knows that I just came all over myself and she’s annoyed because I didn’t ask her for help.
But I wouldn’t ask her for help.
Not ever.
And especially not now; not with Carrie back in my life.
Because who needs an ugly whore like her when I have beautiful Carrie to bring me pleasure?
Chapter ten:
I grab my zip-up hoodie, and I’m pulling it on and zipping it as she raises her hand to hit my door again, so I yank it open to stop her. She looks startled and nearly falls inside my apartment, but it’s only for a split second and then her startled face is replaced with her pissed-off face again.
“What?” I ask, realizing immediately that that was rude of me.
She’s never knocked on my door before. In fact, no one other than my parole officer has knocked on my door before.
This woman might need my help.
Maybe her john hurt her, or her pimp stole her money.
Or maybe she just needs a cup of fucking sugar for all I know.
“I’m sorry,” I start again. “Hi, how can I help you?” I say with a smile.
‘Manners, Ethan, manners are everything.’ That’s what my mom used to say.
The prostitute lifts her hand and slaps me across the face. And now it’s my turn to be startled. It’s not necessarily that the physical act itself hurts me, because the emotional one hurts way more. I don’t know this crazy bitch. Yet she’s at my door, hammering away on my red chipped paint and slapping me across the face like she knows me.
I scowl. “What’s your prob—”
She slaps me again, mid-sentence. “Listen here, you little pervert. I know you listen in, and we both know there’s nothing I can do about that, but if you ever make a fucking peep while I’m with a client again, I swear to God”—and she makes a cross sign over her chest and points to the ceiling—“I will fucking kill you. Do you hear me?”
There’s three things I realize in that moment. And I shake my head as I realize them.
One.
This woman is not as attractive as I first thought she was. Firstly, her blond hair isn’t even real. It’s a bottle-blond bleached color with bits of fake hair clipped in to make it look thicker. But she’s not fooling anyone because it just looks tacky and gross. Her teeth are also gross, and I can tell from her extremely bad breath that she smokes like a hundred cigarettes a day, maybe more. Her body isn’t lithe like I first thought either—it’s skinny. And trust me, there’s a difference between the two. Her skin isn’t pale like snow; it’s gray like the dead. Her eyes aren’t any color at all. They’re just a mix of gray and brown and they don’t even glow like Carrie’s do. They’re just dead like her skin.
Two.
Manners don’t always get you everywhere.
And three.
The crying walls are uncomfortably silent when a prosti
tute knocks on your door and starts screaming and shouting at you.
She spits at my feet and storms away, heading back out into the night to find her next—what did she call them?—client? And then the crying behind the doors and windows starts up again.
I go back inside, closing my door behind me. A couple of minutes later I head back to my door, open it, and then I’m on my hands and knees with bleach and a sponge cleaning up her spit, that probably has who knows what kind of germs in it because she’s a dirty skank that sucks cock for a living!
And I will never bring my Carrie back here. Never!
When the spot she just soiled is clean, I head back inside for the third time tonight, locking my door behind me. I look through my peephole as I hear someone coming up the stairs, and I see that it’s her again. She flips my door the bird when she walks past, and then she climbs the stairs to her apartment with her client trailing behind her, his gaze on the sashaying of her flat ass.
“Good luck to you, buddy,” I say.
But I don’t really wish him any luck. If he’s stupid enough to leave his beautiful wife and kids at home, to come out and fuck a dead-eyed, gray-skinned, bone-thin, ugly prostitute with bad breath, that’s on his head, not mine.
I finish making my soup and I sit in my living room eating it, listening to the thump, thump, thump coming from upstairs. She’s really noisy tonight; her groans of fake satisfaction are leaking through her floorboards and seeping through my ceiling. I think she’s doing it on purpose, trying to rile me up to do something.
I ignore it.
And I ignore her.
And I think of Carrie instead.
And that makes me smile again.
My belly is full of soup that makes sense, and my heart is full of love, and that makes sense too. Love it better than hate. And for the first time in a really long time, I have an abundance of hope.
Carrie broke my heart when she left, when she disappeared without saying goodbye. I never understood what it was that I did that made her go away.
My counselor, Mr. fucking Jeffrey, says it’s because of what I did, and that’s why she went away. But I know that’s not it. He doesn’t understand.
He says that I’ve blocked it all out, that it was too traumatic for me to cope with. That’s what the courts said too. And apparently that’s what happens when something really traumatic happens to a person. When the mind can’t cope…it shuts that memory away. The human body is a glorious thing, and it will do anything to survive. Shutting out memories is just one of the ways it does that.
And I believe Mr. fucking Jeffrey. It’s not that I don’t, because I do. I’ve read up on it in the library. There was even a book called “Trauma and How to Deal With It,” so I know he’s not just bullshitting me. I know he’s for real with what he’s saying. But I just know that I’d know.
Ya know?
I think back to Carrie—how she was back then. I didn’t see her for a month, and when I did, she was different. Suddenly—or maybe not if I was paying attention at all (and I call myself a friend!) —her home life wasn’t just about having cracked paint and lice in her hair.
It was more.
It was less.
It was all of the above.
It was dirty, but much worse than dirty windows.
It was the sort of dirty that could never be washed away, no matter how hard you scrubbed.
The first day I saw after her month-long vanishing trick, her dad hit her across the face and I had wanted to vomit.
And so I did.
I puked in my mouth and then I swallowed it back down.
And I’ll never forget the taste of the acid, burning in my throat. Just like I’ll never forget the look on her face as he dragged her away.
Her lip dripping with blood.
She never asked me to stop him.
She never asked for help.
She just let him take her.
I thought she’d given up.
But she hadn’t.
She was just accepting what could not be changed, what had to be, until it didn’t have to be that way anymore. I didn’t know then that she was already forming a plan.
The taste of acid stayed with me well into the evening, so much so that I couldn’t even eat my food. My mom was worried because I never left my dinner. I was a good boy. I was grateful. I ate my dinner and I did my homework on time and I was respectful and polite, and I prayed to God before bed every night. But that night was different.
And so my mom knew something was wrong, she just didn’t know how deep the wrongness had gone. How much it had seeped inside of me. It was like blinking and seeing the world in its rightful state.
Carrie’s dad was a bad man.
Carrie would make me just as bad soon enough.
But it was worth it.
She was worth it.
Chapter eleven:
I sit at the bus stop for hours and I’m glad my work is two blocks from here so I don’t risk being seen.
Even though I don’t think she’ll come during the day. It was nighttime when I saw her, and him, last. And I haven’t seen him today either.
I wish I had paid better attention to him. If I had, I may have noticed some clues and then maybe I would know where he worked. And if I knew where he worked, I’d know where to go. But I didn’t because I’m an idiot, and now I’m stuck here, freezing my balls off, waiting for her—or him, but mainly her—to show again.
And I’m missing work, which is not a good thing to do. And my parole officer will be pissed when Charlie tells him. That is if Charlie tells him.
And all I know about Mr. Fancy Asshole is that he wears an expensive suit, has a slicked-back haircut, and uses a black umbrella and rides in yellow cabs.
And I know I’m fucked, because it’s not enough.
That’s like every one of these pretentious assholes that work round here.
I can’t find her—or him, but mainly her—with this pitiful amount of information.
But I have hope that maybe the universe will take pity on me and throw me something good. Give me a clue as to how I can find her. After all, it was the universe that helped me find her again, and why would it show her to me only to snatch her away from me again?
I keep myself busy with thinking about what I’ll say to her when I do find her again. When that moment comes and we’re face to face, nose to nose, lips to lips, body to body. I’ll pick her up and spin her around, I know that for certain. It will be like in one of those old black-and-white movies we used to watch as kids. And she’ll probably laugh and tell me I’m crazy but that she knew I’d find her eventually.
Then she’ll tell the fancy asshole to fuck off.
And then I’ll look at his shocked face and tell him to fuck off too.
And we’ll be laugh and shout “fuck off” to him, and then he’ll storm away like the prick he is, back to his wife and kids.
I smile at the thoughts, all tumbling around in my head.
It hasn’t rained today. Not yet, anyway. But I can feel it in the air. The moisture hanging heavy, waiting for the storm to finally arrive. A gushing downpour from above, a bolt of lightning, the crack of thunder.
It’s going to be glorious when it comes.
I don’t like the rain, but I respect a good storm.
You have to, you see.
A storm is dangerous.
It’s a warning, a threat.
It’s violent and untamable.
You can’t hide from a storm.
You can’t blot it out.
You can’t pretend it isn’t there.
There’s no hiding under an umbrella to keep your hair dry.
If you get caught in a storm, you could end up dead.
I once read an article about a guy that got struck by lightning. The guy had waited outside, hoping to be struck, because he thought he’d get superpowers if he did. I still remember reading it to my roommate, and we both laughed and said the guy was crazy, because life wasn�
��t like in a DC movie. You don’t get superpowers if you get hit by 10,000 volts of electricity; you get killed.
Then we’d argued over the newspaper because he’d wanted it to wipe his ass with it because we’d ran out of toilet paper, but I wasn’t done reading it yet.
The argument escalated into a fight, and then the fight got out of hand and we both ended up in isolation. I had a new roommate after that, which was a shame because I had actually liked the other guy. Most of the time anyway.
I look up into the sky. It’s gotten darker, so I know the storm will hit soon. I watch the heavy clouds and I tap the fingernails of my right hand onto the fingernails of my left hand. I can’t see any shapes in the clouds today; they’re just one giant smudge across the landscape.
I look away, and glance across the road, and I see him!
Mr. Fancy fucking Asshole!
And I can see my luck is about to change, and everything is going to start going my way again, and I want to air punch the sky and shout “yeah!” But of course I don’t, because I don’t want to draw attention to myself.
He’s standing with his arm out, hailing a cab like he’s done every time I’ve seen him. He looks into the sky several times, like I did, sensing, like I do, the storm that’s about to arrive. He doesn’t look happy about it.
I stand and look both ways, looking for Carrie, but she’s definitely not with him, and that makes me angry because I’ve wasted all day sitting here. And Charlie will be mad because I didn’t show up for work. And Mr. fucking Jeffrey will be mad when Charlie tells him that I didn’t show up for work. And if my mom or dad did ever bother to check in on me, Mr. fucking Jeffrey would tell them that I got into trouble at work and then they wouldn’t be happy with me!
That’s how this world works, see. It’s a giant roundabout. And no matter where you try to stop it, it continues on relentlessly.
One thing leads to another, which in turn leads to another.
There’s no denying it, and no escaping it.
It just goes on and on and on…
A cab pulls up to the sidewalk, and just as Mr. Fancy Asshole is about to get in, his cell phone rings. I can hear the obnoxious ringtone all the way from over here. It’s the James Bond theme song, and I want to laugh. Because this guy thinks he’s James fucking Bond. He thinks he’s rich and popular and he gets to have all the women and right the wrongs and save the world.
Beautiful Victim Page 5