Taming Cross

by Ella James

  I can’t decide if my sixth sense, doom and gloom paranoia bullshit is a headache coming on, or something more. I guess for the first time ever, I hope it’s a headache. I take a seat at the table and watch as Merri cleans up the first aid stuff. I should be helping her, but my neck feels so tight, I want to do whatever I can to try to relax.

  I rub my eyes and tell her, “Thanks for patching me up.”

  “Same to you.” She smiles, and I find myself smiling back.

  “You know, we still need to make our trade.”

  “We need to find some food first,” she says. “Aren’t you starving?”

  I’m not, but I nod anyway. Ever since the accident, my appetite hasn’t been the same. I think the feeding tube messed it up. My shrink at NVIR thought it was a nervous reaction.

  “Do you think there’s food here?”

  “I know there is,” she says. “Food and wine. Ammo. Jesus had this place well-stocked.”

  I frown down at the table. It's weird the way she talks about Jesus. So...neutrally. Like she's talking about her cousin or something. It makes more sense now that I know he never fucked her, but it’s still weird. Dude committed horrible crimes, and she doesn’t even sound like she dislikes him.

  “You up for some wine?” she asks.

  I haven’t had any alcohol since the night I crashed. It used to conflict with the meds, and then I guess I just never had a reason. But right now I feel like I could really use a drink.

  “You gonna pop the cork?” I ask her.

  I lean over my shoulder to see what she’s doing, and my neck zings a little.

  She’s got a loaf of homemade-looking bread out, and she’s spreading something on it that looks like jelly.

  “If I still remember how,” she says. “I haven’t had a drink in more than a year.”

  She looks so pretty right now, seems so normal, it's hard to imagine her with Jesus.

  She finishes the bread and pulls out something else—beef jerky—which she sits on the table. Then she disappears, returning a moment later with a bottle of merlot and two jewel-encrusted wine glasses.

  “The bread and jam are homemade. The merlot is local, too.”

  I snort. “What a hostess.”

  “Hey, I don’t have to share.” With some difficulty she pulls the cork, and my vision doubles as I watch her pour. She takes a small sip and sighs. “I'm just trying to be informative. It's my go-to, stressed-out mode, I guess.”

  “Is stressed all you’re feeling?”

  She laughs, but it’s strained. “It’s a good bit more than stressed. Honestly, it’s too much for me to even begin deal with.” She takes another sip of her wine. “So I feel pretty good at this moment. The wine…could be crap and it would still be good.”

  “Is that true for the company?” I joke, and she pretends to consider.

  “It’s not the worst thing about this situation,” she says.

  “Nice.” I take a large drink of the wine. It’s velvety, with a hint of molasses and a taste of plum, but like she said, it’s been a while.

  I rub my eyes, take the bread she hands me, and say, “I shot a lot of people you knew.”

  She purses her lips and just sits there, staring at her plate. I can tell she’s fighting tears, and I think to myself, what the hell is wrong with me? Impulsively, I touch her arm. “I'm sorry. I shouldn't have asked. This whole thing is fucking weird—”

  “Can you say frack please?”

  “Huh?”

  “Say frack.” She wipes her eyes and speaks from behind the shield of her hand. “I really hate the F-word.”

  “Sorry,” I say quickly. “My mom’s Catholic, so I should know better.”

  She shakes her head. “It’s not for anything like that. My aunt taught me it was tacky.”

  “Taaaaaccky.” I say it with what I think is a convincing drawl, and she shrugs.

  “Ooooookay. You can make fuuun of myyyy aceeeeent all you wannnnt.”

  I swallow back some of my wine and watch her eat. I'm like a fracking cat. Curiosity is killing me. I need to know more about this woman—now.

  “I was in a motorcycle accident.” There. I said it. I shift in my seat, automatically searching for a position that will lessen the painful zinging of the damaged nerve endings in my neck. “Fallout was pretty bad and I was laid up for a while.”

  She considers me over the rim of her glass. I can feel her eyes urging me to go on. I take a long sip of my wine, hoping it will take the edge off my zings. “What do you want to know, Mer?”

  “What happened to your neck?”

  “I fu— fracked up the posterior joint, like pretty bad. Fractured C3, C5, and C6. Those are vertebrae near the top of the spine but you probably know that.” She nods. “Couple of herniated discs around that area and a facet fracture.”

  Her eyes are wide, but to her credit, she doesn't bust out with something asinine or overly pitying. She bites her lip and says, “That sucks.”

  “I was in a coma for a little while after.”

  Again, her green eyes pop. “Really? But you look so...good.”

  That gets a laugh out of me. “Good genes.”

  “Good luck,” she says, chewing some bread. “Really, though, it's a wonder you're alive.”

  I nod. “I had a stroke, too.”

  “What?!”

  I scrub my hand over my eyes. Why the frack am I telling her all this?

  She’s looking at me with sadness, but it doesn’t feel like pity.

  “I got moved from one place to another. Like a rehab place, to another rehab. When you're moving people who have head injuries, or I guess any kind of injury that's bad enough, sometimes their blood pressure goes up.” I take a swig of wine and force myself to meet her eyes again. This is so personal, it's hard to get it all out, even though the facts are pretty straightforward. “If they get in too much during the transport...strokes can happen.”

  Her mouth twists. “That’s awful.”

  I shrug, then feel like I’m bragging. Why am I telling her this? “I wasn't awake or anything like that, but sometimes I think I remember it. I just get this feeling... Kind of like dread or...I don't know, doom or something. I think maybe I can remember...almost dying.”

  She's chewing again, beef jerky this time, carrying on with her meal like she talks about these things every day. I heave a deep breath. I'm sweating. I feel awkward. Like I shared too much. Because I did share too much. I take another gulp of my wine and wish that I was Nightcrawler from X-Men. I could vanish in a poof.

  I'm not looking at her, but I can see her out of the corner of my eye, and she looks calm and unperturbed. Just a girl eating. She says, “That must be weird. And awful. I bet no one can relate. That's an experience hardly anyone has had.”

  I nod, and it occurs to me that hers is too.

  “I can't picture you as a sex slave.” Oh fuck. Did I just say that? I squeeze my eyes shut. Drop my head into one hand. “Shit. I'm sorry.”

  “Uh-uh.” She swallows some of her own wine. “Don't be sorry. You just spilled your stuff, so I think we're being honest now. And while we're being honest, thank you. For today. I noticed that you got between David and me.”

  I shrug. “You waited for me to get off the bike before you ran. You grabbed my arm to help me off. Remember?”

  She nods. “It was no big deal.” She takes a bite of bread, then says, “And as far as the sex slave thing, I wasn't really a sex slave in the sense most people think. You know, since Jesus was gay. I was just a beard for him, most of the time.” She says it so naturally, I almost miss the flare in her eyes when she says 'most of the time'.

  I want to know everything that happened to her, and I want to know right now. But it’s not my story to take. And I’m not drunk enough to go there.

  “It was a lucky break,” she says. “I guess. I mean, if there's something lucky about being sold, it would probably be being sold to someone who only wants you for appearances.”

 
“Like my hand.” I hold up my gun-shot palm and make a bullshit face. “When I think about this, I feel lucky.”

  She makes a bullshit face back at me, then sticks out her tongue. “I'm just trying to look at the bright side.”

  “Maybe sometimes there isn’t one.”

  She looks down at her beef jerky. “Maybe.”

  I feel ashamed. I rub the back of my neck and try to move our conversation back on track. “So no one knew? About Jesus?”

  She shook her head. “No. He screwed his way through most of the women in Mexico before he 'settled down' with me.”

  I close my eyes, because the zing is back. It shoots down my neck and through my bicep, down into my fingers. Damn.

  “Are you okay?”

  I flip my eyes open and try to lie. “Yeah. For sure. Just tired.”

  “We should go to sleep, I guess. Or try to.”

  I sit up straighter, ignoring the hell fire blazing down my arm. “Any ideas about when and how to leave without drawing attention from our friends?” I ask her. “I don’t know if I can fix the bike this time.”

  She nods. “I have this fuzzy memory of Jesus having a garage somewhere in here. He should have a dirt bike. Possibly even a car. And there’s a garage nearby where he keeps trucks. You know, like transfer trucks, for moving cargo.” She scrunches up her face. “Drugs and guns.”

  “Okay. Well good to know.”

  “I wouldn’t want to go to the garage because I bet they have that guarded, but if we’re lucky, nobody knows about this place.”

  Jesus, there’s that word again. Lucky.

  Maybe if I’m lucky, I can dip into the wine cellar and dull some of my pain before the neuralgia takes my ass down to the ground. It’s not something I’d ever do in normal life, but then back in California, it’s okay to spend a day or two flat on my back.

  “I hope we’re lucky,” I tell her.

  This guy is a surprise.

  When we met, I bought the whole bounty hunter thing hook-line-and-sinker. He seemed exactly as he presented himself. Chill. Secret agent or whatever.

  But now— He’s had a stroke. He’s in his twenties, and he had a stroke. That's crazy. Crazy bad. And I feel drawn to the crazy. It makes me feel less like an oddity.

  And then he said that thing about being lucky, and I have to admit, it kind of ripped my heart in half. He seemed so...bitter. Sad. But it wasn’t like he was bitter at someone. It was more like he was bitter with himself. I could feel some serious self-loathing coming from him.

  I show him to one of the two guest rooms—the one done in a nautical theme—and when I close the door and go to the one across the hall, I find myself wanting to talk to him more. Not just to find out more of his story, but because my own story feels so heavy tonight.

  The room I’ve picked for myself was done in several shades of brown and beige and cream, with lots of textures: suede, leather, cotton, linen. The rugs are soft. The curtains on the fake-out windows dance gently in the air coming from the air vents. I turn a full circle, taking stock of every inch of the room. Not one thing has changed. I step into the en suite bathroom, and there’s the old claw-footed tub. The bear-skin rug (the one that’s really a bear’s skin). The cabinet.

  I take two slow steps forward, and open the cabinet with shaking fingers. And there it is. My old toothbrush, from the last time I was here. The one and only time I wasn’t in the basement. It’s pink and purple, with a tube of my favorite sensitive toothpaste on the shelf beside it.

  I snatch the robe and gown out of the cabinet and dash back to the bed. I yank the covers down and climb beneath them and I think about my toothbrush in the bathroom and I start to cry. I cry because one time, I was almost happy here. In the basement, there’s a box of books Jesus ordered me. Second-hand books from a used bookstore online, and when Jesus and I came here so he could meet David, I would lie in bed and read all weekend. And my life sucked so much then, I was able to fool myself into feeling almost happy.

  I think about my sweet kids at the clinic and I really sob, because that truly did feel almost perfect but it was never meant to last. And now I'm gone! I'm not in Jesus’s world and I’m not helping anyone and there’s nowhere for me in America and I’m no one! I’m never anyone for long enough to figure out who I am and nothing stays the same, no one can ever make it right—it’s just me. Like a fish living in a sand box or on a table. I don’t know what my version of water is, but I know I’m never in it. I can never get myself straight. I’m not even a real person, and it hurts worse now that I don’t have the children or the Sisters or even Jesus to buy me used books.

  I’m pathetic.

  I just want to go to sleep.

  I cry and cry and cry and cry, until I feel like my insides have turned to liquid. I think of Sean and the tears slow down. I think of family back in Georgia and I can’t feel much of anything. Soon I’m just lying there on my back, staring at the canopy, and I find myself thinking about Evan again.

  The way his face looked when he said he felt lucky.

  I don’t feel lucky either. That’s my secret.

  I want to feel lucky, and I want to be grateful, and I want to be thankful for the breaks I’ve had, but instead I just feel lost.

  I’m hugging my pillow when I hear moaning.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I follow the sound to Evan’s door and when I get there, I’m not sure what to do. Is he having some kind of nightmare? I knock lightly, but the moaning doesn’t stop. I try the door, and it’s locked.

  “Evan?”

  I’m answered with a moaned word I can’t understand.

  I knock there times, hard and loud. “Evan, are you okay? It's Meredith.”

  I pause, weirded out that I gave him my real name. For a long time, I went by Missy and then I was Merri at the convent.

  “Evan?”

  My whole body tenses as I wait for him to answer. Finally he does: “'M okay. Jus' sleepin'.” But I can hear him making some other kind of sound, the kind of sound weight-lifters make at the Olympics when they're trying to lift like two tons.

  I open my mouth to say No you're not sleeping, but I remember there's no reason to be talking through the door. Evan's bedroom has another entrance. Because this is the room Jesus built for other pleasure slaves: the kind who, occasionally, would pass through here before being routed to another market—often European. Male slaves. So the en suite bathroom is a bridge between the guestroom and Jesus and David’s quarters.

  Just as I step back to turn and go the other way, I hear another awful moan, followed by the rustling of bedding.

  “Evan? What's wrong?”

  He doesn't answer, and that really bothers me.

  I take off running toward Jesus’s door before I realize I won’t be able to get in. I don’t have the code for that. Frack!

  I run a few steps back toward Evan's room before I think to check—just see. Maybe David left the thing open. I run a few dozen yards down and SCORE. The door is cracked.

  I've only seen the room once, and I don't bother to see if it still looks the same, or what is in it. I fly into the massive, kingly bathroom, unlatch the door to Evan's room, and burst inside like a marauder.

  I don't know what I was expecting, but what I see isn't it. Evan is lying on the floor, curled over on his side, clawing his left hand with his right one and banging the back of his head into the three- or four-inch space between the floor and the bottom of the low-slung bed frame. His eyes are squeezed shut, his teeth are clenched, and he's breathing like someone who's in a lot of pain.

  I close the space between us and drop down on my knees. I stare into his twisted face, realizing that the dark stuff on his lips isn't a wine stain; it's actual blood. He bites into the lip again, and I clamp my hand over my own mouth.

  “Evan...” I whisper. “What happened?”

  He doesn't make a move to open his eyes, only lifts his face just a little and draws his left arm up to his chest. The fingers of his r
ight hand claw at his forearm; it's already lined with deep red scratches.

  He moans again, and turns his head so the sweat on his forehead and face glistens in the low globe lights embedded in the ceiling. Another moan, one that sounds less human, followed by some more deep breathing. When he exhales, the sound seems like it's coming from the bottom of his lungs.

  “Evan?”

  “Sorry,” he moans.

  He curls over more tightly into himself and brings his right arm behind his head, pushing down against the back of his skull. He whimpers, and I'm pretty sure I'm going crazy watching this.

  My hands are itching to touch him, itching to smooth his hair and find out where he’s hurting, but I'm scared to hurt him more.

  I shut my eyes as low, hoarse sounds of anguish come from his throat. He's tugging at his hair now, flexing the fingers of his left hand—the one he said he couldn't move. He lets out a bunch of little moans, like someone's hurting him and he just can't get away. Then he pants some more, and I get on my knees and move around him, looking for something to explain this.

  “Evan, can you talk to me? I want to help you.”

  “Can't,” he grits out.

  “Was it the alcohol?”

  He presses the palm of his right hand against his forehead, opening his mouth more so he can breathe more deeply. “It's the...wreck.”

  His eyes screw shut, and I'm astonished to see tears slip down his cheeks. He gathers his knees up near his chest and bites his lip again, and I'm positive I've never seen anything more painful-looking in my life.

  I take my own deep breath, sitting up on my heels beside him. “You don't mean this wreck, do you? You mean the one before. The one where you hurt your neck.”

  He sucks back a half-sobbed breath. “It's the nerves.”

  He grits his teeth and his body trembles as both of his hands make fists. I shut my eyes and try to process what he's saying. I'm not a doctor or a nurse, but I know the spine is made of vertebrae, the bones; discs; joints; and nerves. When you damage bones and discs and joints, the nerves can get pinched and damaged.

  “Does this happen a lot?”