by R. J. Lewis
“Well…we’re kind of waiting around, man.”
My heart spiked in alarm. I was not privy to what Nixon said before he left, but the way Roz was tossing glances my way, I had a horrible feeling it had something to do with me.
I tightened the blanket around my body as I anxiously stared at Nixon.
“I’ll get to it,” he simply replied.
Roz was unhappy with this response. His face tightened. “Got a timeline?”
“Shouldn’t you be concerned about other things, Roz?” Nixon turned his full attention to him now, appearing perplexed. “Like how the fuck you’re going to return to the States unnoticed when our time here is over.”
Roz’s face eased as he let out a chuckle. “You heard about that?”
“You fucking Toby over? Who didn’t?”
“I didn’t fuck him over,” Roz explained quickly. “I just skimmed the top off every payment. I didn’t give him the full amount because it meant it would be eating into my cut, and honestly, he didn’t know, and everything was fine.”
“Who was the whistle-blower?”
“Fucking Eman,” Roz snarled, shaking his head. “That fucking guy isn’t an idiot, after all. He’s like a mathematician; his head scrambles numbers around like they’re fucking nothing. On the spot, as I paid Toby, he calculated the amount. He even went a step further and looked over the books.”
“But I thought you and Toby worked it out.”
Roz nodded slowly, going quiet for a few moments, mulling it over. “We were getting there, and then…well, you’ve seen his granddaughter, haven’t you?” Nixon didn’t respond, and Roz’s body went stiff as he forced out, “What happened was a mistake. I…had a lot to drink. Haven’t been on the drink since.”
There were so many gaps in his sentences, my mind worked frantically to fill them.
I didn’t know who Toby was, but he was enough to make even Nixon go stiff. A guy not to be trifled with, clearly.
And whatever happened between Roz and Toby’s granddaughter may have been a mistake but…some mistakes were costly and irreversible.
My curiosity was answered when Nixon said, “You got a bounty on top of your fucking head, and it’s so big, you’re going to be in hiding for the rest of your life.”
Roz didn’t respond. He looked momentarily forlorn, like he understood the ramifications. But the expression soon disappeared when his eyes found mine, and the need in their depths could be felt.
I was so fucked, I realized just then.
I was in a den of monsters.
I should have gone down the mountain instead.
*
I’d tried to sleep on the edge of the bed as far away from Roz as possible, but there was a keenness in his touches. He wasn’t having it. He snaked his arm around my middle and pulled me to him like it was okay, like he had permission to do it.
I realized letting him into bed last night had been a mistake. He’d asked, and I had allowed it. This was the consequence to one moment of weakness, of delirium and desperation for warmth.
I lay shaking the entire time, petrified he would grope me, petrified of my reaction to it because I knew my inner fight would kick in. The defiance in me felt like rockets in my limbs, ready to kick off.
For some bizarre reason he had resisted.
It was unexpected and uncharacteristic.
But it had to do with Nixon. I knew it at my core.
All night Roz had followed me around with his eyes. He had let that charming glow morph into cockiness. He looked at me like he had every right to. His eyes wandered my body when I went to the outhouse. One time he’d offered to walk me through the snowstorm, and Nixon had intervened, telling him he’d take me instead. He left no room for Roz to argue. “I’m taking her,” he’d said in a commanding way, and that was all there was to it.
The walk to the outhouse was short, but it took me minutes to get to it. Nixon had to grab me by the arm and haul me through three feet of snow and freezing winds. By the time we’d gotten to it, my eyes were blinded by the snow and I couldn’t feel my body. And then he’d waited for me in the dark, his face tense, his gaze trapped on the cabin.
When I stepped back out, he took me by the arm and dragged me back with urgency. The snow was so deep, I’d tripped along the way and fallen into it, my bare legs burning from the icy cold. He looked down at me with a tight face but gentle eyes.
“Come on,” he urged me softly, “get up, baby.”
I’d spend several hours later that night replaying him saying those words to me.
Get up, baby.
Simple, doting.
To face the possibility of your demise and be called baby so unexpectedly…
He hadn’t said it in the way Roz had called me sweetheart and Beckett had called me honey. There was such distinction in the tone, in the manner in which he’d looked at me.
Even then, in the snow, I felt my chest heave with indescribable emotion. It didn’t make sense to feel it. It was wrong, wasn’t it? To feel then a sudden surge of hope invade my chest.
I knew, right then, I was starting to lose sense of reality. Of what was real and what was not. Of what was right and what was wrong. Instead, I just felt and felt, and with it, the fear felt was so grand and permanent, it was a war of insanity inside my mind.
How could you feel perpetual terror and warmth all at once?
Two opposing emotions clashed within me, and I was so…insane, insane, insane.
When we returned to the cabin, Nixon’s gaze swept the room while Roz and Tucker looked to be doing their own things separately. His demeanour was edgy, though he returned his focus to that woodstove and let me return to bed.
The bed I was now in.
The bed that was more a jail. Roz’s arm felt like slimy tentacles. I waited for him to sleep, my eyes solely focused on Nixon as he tended to the fire, as he sat with his back against the wall, watching, readying, preparing.
There was something about him…
I couldn’t describe it.
When I was sure Roz was asleep, when I could hear Tucker’s snores, I slipped from Roz’s hold and crept to Nixon. His eyes zoned in on me as I approached him. He said nothing when I sat down close to the heat…close to him.
For some time, it was just silence, and while it was tense for me to be so close to him, it was better than the arms of Roz.
I wouldn’t go back to Roz.
No way.
I would rather sleep on the dirty floor.
I turned my attention to Nixon, desperately trying to find words to rupture the silence between us. I needed to talk. I needed to make my presence known – to show him I was a human being, not a thing, that I had a life I needed to go back to.
It took so much effort, still.
You rehearse the lines in your head, but in the actual event in which you were to say them, the words abandoned you, left you dumb and desperate.
“You guys keep calling this place a hovel,” I murmured, finally doing it. “I’d have come here on a holiday if I had the chance.”
Nixon turned his gaze to me. “You’re easy to please.”
I smiled sadly. Okay, this was my chance. “I grew up in shitty neighbourhoods. You should see the house I’m living in now.” I paused, swallowing hard, astonished that I’d do anything to be in that hellhole. “I have to take three buses to get to school. The day you bought my fare, I’d missed the bus earlier by seconds, and the driver just shrugged at me. Just shrugged, like nothing, like ‘oh well,’ and…to think, if he had just stopped, I would have made it to class yesterday.” Tears clouded my vision. I hadn’t intended on being so emotional. But saying it out loud, hearing myself damn the driver, made it all the more real. I was really in this mess alone, and no one was going to break the door down to rescue me.
“People disappear all the time,” I said through heavy breaths, looking Nixon in the eyes. “But they come back sometimes, they do. And you were trying to let me go before. You took me by t
he arm, and you told me to take the road to the farmhouse. You didn’t want me in this mess. Please, Nixon, I need to go back home.”
I hadn’t realized he was drinking tea until he lifted the mug to his lips and sipped, his eyes never leaving mine. He settled the mug on his thigh and didn’t respond for some time. I watched, waited, hoping he’d run my words through his head.
“It’s not up to me,” he finally said. “This is complicated now.”
“Why?” I implored, desperately.
“You’ve seen all of us.”
“I won’t say a word.”
“There’s a whole other world you don’t know about. It’s a world you’re not supposed to see, and you’ve glimpsed a sliver of it, but that’s more than most know. There are people who would snuff you out just for being alive as long as you have.”
Tears continued to fall. “Not if no one knows about it.”
He let out a dry laugh. “Look around you. You think these guys are going to keep this – you – between us?”
I swallowed the lump in my throat. “If you could understand the helplessness I feel right now, if you could know I’m a human being with a life of my own, maybe I wouldn’t be this nameless nothing in your life.”
He didn’t respond.
I didn’t know if I was getting through to him. He literally let nothing slip, and it was aggravating. “Are you always this quiet?” I asked, though it came out like a snarl, but I was past the point of caring.
Now his lips curved up. “No,” he answered. “You wouldn’t recognize me outside this paradigm, kitten.”
“My name isn’t kitten,” I told him hastily. “I’m twenty-one. I have family. I have friends. I have people who care about me.”
He just watched me as I broke down, that soft smile on his face unflinching. He took another sip of his mug and leaned over, stopping when his face was inches from mine. His eyes locked with mine, and he seemed to study me for some time, tilting his head to the side. Then he whispered, “You’re lying. You have no one. You have nothing. I know an empty soul when I see one, baby.”
He sat back, leaving me quaking.
He saw straight through me, and I didn’t have it in me to tell him otherwise. Because I couldn’t force that sort of lie out of me, not when I was so emotional and fragile.
Was it so obvious? How could he know something so personal? I eyed him now, watching him in his at-ease state, drinking the tea he flared his nose at, and I wondered.
“Are you empty, Nixon?” I asked him, surprised by how genuine my question was.
He didn’t skip a beat responding. “I’m so vacant, I don’t think there’s any more purpose left in this life for me. I have nothing to lose. Nothing to fight for, either. In this life and the next, I’ll be unchained and forsaken. It’s the ultimate freedom.”
“Sounds like hell instead.”
He smiled, baring teeth and all. It startled me how nice he looked. I’d almost forgotten he was beautiful. “When you’re desperate to feel anything, hell delivers. The bad feelings are better than no feelings at all.”
I shook my head, disagreeing. “I watched my mother slowly die from brain cancer in front of me, and now I live with this emptiness in my heart. The pain’s like a worm, wriggling in my chest all the time. I keep deluding myself that she’s here, watching me, giving me hints that I’ll make it out of this, but it’s bullshit. Sometimes I don’t think it’s her at all. I think she died and that was the end, but I can’t accept that. I’ve lost myself in the grief, and I’d do anything to stop feeling it. I don’t want hell. I want to feel nothing at all.”
This time his smile slipped. He had an expression I’d never seen from him before. He looked me over, and I was used to it by now, being stared at by these guys – but I noticed how different it was from him. It was heated, but not in a sexual way. It was so strange to sense that. To feel – for the first time since I’d been taken – that I was being looked at as more than just a thing.
“I know what you’re doing,” he said quietly, breaking the tense silence. His eyes were pinning me in place. “But you need to be careful letting me in too far. It might have the complete opposite effect than what you’re hoping for.”
His warning was strange. It didn’t come with the tone that should accompany one. He’d said it too gently.
“I want some tea,” I then said, looking away from the heat of his gaze.
He stood up and poured me a mug. Handing it to me, he fed the fire and sat back down in place. I sipped the tea quietly, loving the heat in my belly.
Then I curiously asked, “What makes you think I have no one?”
He took me by the hand suddenly and pulled me close to him. My heart jumped, but I was strangely unafraid as he leaned into me. So close, I could see my reflection in his eyes. He opened his mouth, and as he answered, he pulled my sleeve up and brushed his finger along my bare arm. “I’ve seen your scars, little one. They’re only just going white. I’ve imagined what they’d have looked like bleeding. Raw and deep, like your hurt. I know the look of an empty soul. I detected it from you on the bus the very second your big brown eyes met mine. Who was there to help you grieve?”
My voice was small. “No one.”
Tears blurred my vision. He frowned when he saw them fall.
“You’re alright,” he then whispered, easing me with the soft tone of his voice. “You’re okay.”
I let my tears flow as he hushed me gently.
I almost asked him to call me baby again.
Insane, insane, insane.
Finally letting me go, he pulled away.
The silence between us returned. I didn’t go back to the bed. I couldn’t stomach being close to Roz again. I grabbed a blanket from the pile beside the kitchen and curled myself in a ball beside the heat. I watched Nixon feed the fire for some time, locking eyes with him often.
There was a… different look in him now.
He appeared…determined.
Too tired to study his expression some more, I shut my eyes and fell asleep.
Nixon…
She was curled up in a ball, asleep not far from him. She would rather the floor than to be in bed with Roz, and Nixon couldn’t help how good that made him feel.
He fed the fire, unable to sleep, unable to stop looking at her.
She was so pretty when she slept.
She was pretty when she talked too. Her lips mesmerized him when they moved. She spoke slowly, choosing her words wisely.
She wanted him to see her as a person. He always had. He was sure she’d probably picked up some stupid advice she’d read from a crime magazine or from those infinite documentaries that were spat out of Netflix every month.
She was lumping Nixon in with the barbarians she’d watched, which was understandable, sure.
In fact, it was more than understandable.
Because, in that very moment, as he watched her asleep, looking so fucking beautiful it physically put an ache in his side, he felt a powerful impulse that frightened him.
He could have her for himself.
He could, he thought. He really could.
The thought was so shocking. He wound up pacing the room, watching the men sleep, watching her curled there, wanting to punch a hole in his head to stop the poisonous thoughts from growing.
But they stayed, and they were brewing, and when he thought about it some more, he saw the obstacles in the way of this sudden compulsive desire.
Had Roz felt this way too? Was that why he watched her, that hunger so apparent in his gaze? And what of Beckett? Did they both think it was only a matter of time before they could have their hands on her?
Nixon couldn’t resist the surge of anger that possibility gave him.
He wouldn’t allow it.
He couldn’t.
He looked at the girl and felt it in his bones she was here for a reason. Mourning had softened him for this purpose. For her.
It was so she could come into his world and o
bliterate the darkness he’d lived in too long.
*
By the next day, he felt like a paranoid fucker.
He didn’t like how much time Roz and Tucker were hanging around one another. Their smoke breaks were happening every thirty minutes, and they would stand a good distance away from the cabin. Tucker, being the fucking idiot that he was, would glance occasionally at the cabin as Roz spoke.
Sometimes, Tucker wouldn’t even smoke.
When they returned, everything appeared normal, but Nixon wasn’t buying that shit. He pulled his knife out of his pocket and was sharpening it against the sharpening stone he’d kept in the other. He never went on a job without his knife and stone.
Because you never knew when you needed it.
The minute he had started to pace, sharpening his knife, he caught the look Tucker gave Roz.
Nixon and his knife were a complication to whatever plan they were concocting.
Whatever they were planning, it was to get to the girl. Their dicks were pulsing, their bodies strumming with barely bridled testosterone.
Maybe a girl had always been on the table.
Maybe they didn’t think Nixon was going to be a problem until now.
Because it was obvious he was blocking them from getting to her. He let them think that; there was simply no way to hide that he was protecting the girl from them.
As he sharpened his knife, Roz and Nixon caught each other’s gazes from across the room, and they stared at one another for some time, gauging the situation. Roz knew Nixon knew.
And now they just waited.
34.
Vixen…
The tension was getting worse as the next day progressed. By the afternoon, I started to see strange expressions being exchanged. Tucker was twitchy, his sight locked on Nixon every time Nixon turned his back to him.
Roz was quieter than usual, too. He sat next to me on the bed, elbows on his knees, his eyes on Nixon.
And Nixon…well, he was doing a lot of unusual pacing. He sharpened his knife so many times, I started to read it as a power play.