“Nyet! No needles. No…no needles,” Alina moans, shifting to try and get away from Sara.
Aiden surges up to the edge of the bed, but doesn’t cross the divide as if he’s just met a Plexiglas wall none of the rest of us can see or touch. “No needles.”
Sara cries out, but I speak before she does. “What about something herbal?”
“What?” Aiden says.
“Herbal,” I repeat. Sara looks confused, her face all scrunched up. “Don’t make me spell it out for you, kids. I mean weed. There’s loads of it around the house. I can roll her a jay right now and…and Charlie even has oil. Just a couple drops of that in some hot tea and she’ll be out like a light. No needles involved.”
Aiden glances to the bed as if awaiting a contradiction that doesn’t come. She’s just crying. Sara leans in close and repeats my proposition. “How does that sound?” She asks, stroking the girl’s hair lovingly.
Silence descends over the world like a thick pall. Then a century later, the girl nods.
“Aiden will you take her to the porch? I’ll grab the medical stuff from downstairs and stitch you guys up while she smokes. Mer, you get whatever you need. Can you also turn the floor on before we get there so there’s plenty of heat?”
The smoker’s porch is insulated and the floor is heated. Makes for a lovely oasis even in winter. I nod and start off towards it, but just before I hit the hall I hear Sara repeat her demand of Aiden.
“Aiden, will you take her?” I glance over my shoulder to see hard ass, hard headed fucking Aiden staring at little trembling Alina with nothing short of pure fear.
Aiden
“I’ll take her,” Clifton volunteers. I turn and jam my thumb deep into the wound high on Clifton’s thigh. Clifton roars and hits me in the face. It’s the only way to knock me off him. As he hits the ground, I bring my bloodied finger to my mouth and drag my tongue across it. “What the fuck?” He shouts up at me. “What has gotten into you? You’re a goddamn lunatic.”
I know.
I don’t contradict him, but move towards the girl like all my joints have fused together. I’m stiff as a goddamn board as Sara makes space for me to take Alina’s arm. Sitting upright, Alina falls into me. Her whole body hits mine and for a second I wonder if I’ll be strong enough for this even though she weighs next to nothing. Her fingers paw across my tee shirt to find my far hand. The other, I drape over her back because there’s nowhere else to put it. Her face comes against my tee shirt and I tighten my stomach. She whispers the names of both of her brothers and I walk stiffly, her feet stumbling over mine as she moves at this awkward pace I’ve set.
Clifton stands at the door massaging the growing welt on his right cheek and a ripple of fire rockets across my lower back when I hear him follow. I saw the way he looked at her in the bathroom and don’t want him near her. He looks at her like he’s consumed. Fascinated in ways I thought only I was. Nothing special, I remind myself. Just another fan. A faceless aggressor. The bastard who pulled her body out of a bag. Not her brother.
Down the hall, to the left. The French doors are flung wide open and music drifts softly through the opening. Something R&B by an artist I can’t name, but that I enjoy. The singer’s deep, effeminate voice helps soothe me. I keep my right arm fixed beneath Alina’s clenched hands and my left fingers on her waist so that she doesn’t fall. A glass table is framed by two wicker couches and two wicker chairs.
Mer is seated on the far end of one couch. When she sees us, she stands. “I have everything rolled and the tea is ready. I’m not going to stay though. I’d like to be with Charlie.”
I don’t care, so I don’t respond. Instead, I pause as I reach the edge of the hardwood and step onto the natural stone. It radiates heat. Clifton says something. Mer passes me as she heads towards the stairwell at the end of the hallway. Alina presses herself closer against my chest.
Wanting only to get away from her, I take another step while she teeters on the threshold. Her hands are still clenched around my right forearm and my left continues to hover lamely over her spine. She hisses the moment her feet touch the porch floor and steps back. Her body wavers as she’s separated from me. Clifton is quick to come up behind her and a low growl purrs out of my throat as I move back to her side. I glare at Clifton and he returns the expression. I want to hit him again but Alina’s got my arms and my attention.
She moans. “Ouch.” She takes a few soft steps, and moves nowhere. “It hurts.”
“Step on my feet.” The words come from deep within me and they’re the first I remember ever saying to her. I know I’ve shouted at her before, but now I speak.
A balm eases through my chest, erasing the fire that had been there. She glances up at me quickly, sniffles, then looks down. She eases her bare toes over the tops of my boots. They’re freckled too. Her toenails are painted pink and she struggles to balance just holding my hands. I know I’m going to have to wrap my arms around her waist. I am gutted as I do.
I slide my palms around my sweatshirt, focusing only on the cotton and trying to ignore her weight, and her smell. Even in all my shit, she still smells strongly of her perfume. Cardamom. Rain. My eyes close and I inhale. I try to hold my breath but can’t. She smells too good. My hands hold her harder against me. She hardy expels heat and I know she’d warm more quickly if I kept her close. The thought makes me twitch. Hell, spasm. I practically throw her down on one side of the couch.
She sinks into the cushions and I move as far away from her as the sofa will allow. I don’t know why I don’t take the chair. Clifton seats himself on the couch across from her, but not before he hands her a blanket. I hadn’t seen him holding it. He helps fan it over her shoulders and wrap it around her back. She thanks him in her shaky pitch. The first time she’s ever thanked any of us for anything and it’s Clifton. I hate that. I hate him. And before now, he’s never inspired anything in me but apathy.
I’m behaving strangely. I know I am and I’m equally aware that I can’t control the compulsion, the rage, the docility – they’re all there broiling on the surface, emotions I thought I’d kicked like a habit worse than heroin. I’d had them beaten out of me when I was young. I don’t know how old. Never had a birthday. Only reason I know how old I am is because of the fucking doppelganger sitting across from me. From her.
The bastard who coerced me off of the streets and into this pathetic, patchwork family picks up the tea and passes it across the table, then the jay, then the lighter. At the same time, Sara bursts into the room. It’s not the first time she’s kept me from fantasies of killing him.
“Here. I have everything.” She dumps what’s in her arms onto the floor and begins rummaging through it. “I only have two more of these so I need to assess which of you is in worse condition. The other can wear these for now.”
“I’m fine,” I grunt, gaze pinned to Alina seated not three feet from me. It’s too close. Never thought we’d have to be this close with both of us conscious.
Alina’s body is curled tight, but her face is angled my way. She reaches up and touches her mouth. I can tell it’s sticky by the way she swallows. I grab the mug of her tea from the table and bring it to her hands. My body moves without conferring with my mind. My mind is a mud slab in the rain. Clean and worthless.
She gasps a little, and looks up at me through her dark brown eyelashes. She seems surprised and stares at my face for a moment longer before her gaze pans south. She’s taking me in, assessing me, and I feel like a fucking fool when the prickle of a dangerous heat creeps across the back of my skull. This is a different kind of fire. Not the one I know that accompanies homicide. But the one I felt when I was ten. I had a crush on my foster sister. So the eldest foster boy in the house raped her, then burnt her alive.
“You…you…are shot.” She points at my leg and takes the tea in two hands. I keep my own fingers around the base, because she doesn’t hold it steadily. When she lowers it from her lips she licks
them and looks at me again. The color in her cheeks blazes a stronger red.
“Spasiba.” Tears fall from each of her eyes at the same time, as if choreographed, and a shiver twists my spine.
“Aiden, can I look at your leg please?” Sara is kneeling in front of me with a pair of scissors in hand.
I don’t kick her. I don’t send her away. But I look at Alina. She’s watching Sara in a curious way. Then she looks at me. “Are…are…are you hurt?” Alina says. She hiccups, gulps, shakes again.
“No.”
“But you bleed.” Her accent is strong and exquisite. I want to hear her speak all day. She takes another sip of tea and I realize I’m staring.
“Fine,” I bark, turning my gaze back to my shredded pants.
Sara moves quickly, first slapping the bandages on Clifton before returning to me. “Where are you hit?”
She cuts her way up the length of my right pant leg until she reaches my thigh and picks cloth out of the wounds with tweezers. I twitch several times involuntarily, but the pain is nothing but a sensation to be endured. I don’t let her stab me with her morphine or her local anesthetic and I don’t take Percocet pills from her.
“For heaven’s sake, Aiden. It’s cringe worthy watching you take pain this way. At least smoke with Alina.”
I glance to my right. Alina is watching me. Has been watching. She starts when we make eye contact and a little bit of tea slops over the side of her glass. She stretches forward and tries to pick up the jay from the edge of the table. Her fingers are clumsy though and the Zippo falls. I snatch for it, but I’m too far and Sara yelps when I move so suddenly.
It clatters over the ground and when I straighten back up, my arm brushes Alina’s shin. I see her face. Her full face. For the first time since the car. She looks at me with that watery gaze. Her rounded cheeks are flushed. The tip of her nose is pink. Her mouth is a deep, dark cherry. Like her hair. I hand her the joint and then the lighter, but she takes neither. Instead, she clutches her tea closer to her chest and curls even tighter in on herself, like she’s afraid. She should be.
“What?” The word releases from my chest though I hadn’t meant to say anything.
She flinches. Clifton hisses my name. Sara orders me to stay still. Then Alina licks her lips and they manage to look hotter and redder from where I sit. I remember the last time I’d touched them. I shouldn’t have, but my fingers never forgot their softness.
“Can you…light for me? Bajalsta,” she whispers. I close my eyes for a moment, leg kicking mechanically as Sara stabs my calf with her thin, curved needle over and over again. I could listen to her speak Russian endlessly. These few words here and there are a sacred torment because they are so rare.
“I can do it,” Clifton says. “He doesn’t smoke…”
I’ve got the joint in my mouth before he’s finished and pull once, twice, a third time deeply into my lungs before passing it to her. Her fingers brush mine and I flinch back, putting more of the couch between us. Space has been shrinking between us as if the couch is getting smaller. I’m not sure how. She sips on the joint slowly, struggling to inhale. Eventually, the processes becomes easier. I can see the tension in her shoulders loosen. Her eyelids begin to droop. But she doesn’t stop shivering.
The joint passes from my hand to Clifton’s to hers three times and she’s still shaking visibly. It starts to grate on me like a high-pitched whistle with no source. Sara finishes patching up my leg, then my shoulder, and applies large white strips of gauze to both before moving on to Clifton. I use the opportunity to get up and go to the linen closet in the hall. I return with a full comforter and coil it around her body, working diligently and carefully to make sure not an inch of her except for her face and fingers are exposed.
“Ogromnoe spasiba,” she says, watching me as I sit back down. There are tears glossing her eyes again and I don’t understand what I’ve done to warrant that. She takes a few puffs from the end of her joint before passing it to Clifton.
There’s a rattling in my stomach and a pounding in my chest. It sounds like a train crushing itself against a wall over and over again. The sincerity in her tone makes me want to kill her because there’s a sudden violent emotion clogging my throat that I can’t speak through. Or breathe through. I’m suffocating slowly.
“Can I sit closer to you?” she says. She’s looking at me but I can’t imagine she’s speaking to me. Evidently neither can Clifton or Sara. They’ve both frozen and stare in my direction and I am embarrassed and ashamed and overwhelmed.
“No,” I choke.
She doesn’t look surprised or disappointed. Across the table, Clifton clears his throat. “You can come here.” He holds out his arm and beneath him, Sara’s mouth gapes.
The breath jerks into and out of my lungs. I look to Alina. She blinks several times, managing to look halfway dazed. Then, “Oh…okay. Da, spasiba.”
Pure ice blasts through me that succeeds in momentarily dousing the fire in my arms. I don’t kill Clifton, but watch as Alina ambles awkwardly off of the couch. I don’t help her though I want to. And I do want to. Watching her walk in short, pained steps, likely burning her feet on the floor that’s fire to her but warm to the rest of us is the most painful thing I’ve ever done. I don’t feel the bullet holes or the blue stitching zigzagging across my shoulder and leg, but I feel each twitching of her expression as if it were my own.
“Here, take my hand,” Clifton says.
She looks up, trips and falls as she reaches for him. Bundled in so many blankets that her shape is impossible to define, she crashes onto Clifton’s couch. No, onto his lap. His cheeks glow as she apologizes.
“Nothing to be sorry for, little lady.” He makes space for her but not enough of it so when she settles between his body and the edge of the couch, she’s fully tucked against his side, beneath the curve of his arm.
“You can relax,” he says, “don’t be afraid to lean on me.”
“Spasiba,” she whispers. She shoots a furtive glance in my direction, frightened at first, and after a moment of holding my gaze, which must be pure hate because that’s the only thing I feel at all anymore, the fear seems to fade away as if watching me relaxes her. I understand nothing but the rage I feel towards my brother as she relaxes her head onto his shoulder.
Jealousy. I have heard of the emotion but have not experienced it before this. Perhaps a shadow of it when the doctor drooled over her in the hospital, but this is magnified and concentrated and dangerous for everyone in the room. Because Clifton looks like the better version of me. He acts like the better version of me. He is better than me in every way and is, undoubtedly, better for her.
Alina’s eyelids begin to droop. With eyes closed she buries her face further into Clifton’s chest. Clifton inhales deeply and as he exhales, reaches over and gently rubs her shoulders. She releases a small satisfied moan and I look away.
“She asleep?” Sara whispers. Done with Clifton, she packs up her bag.
Clifton leans around the girl’s now still form and smiles. “I think so.” He takes the tea from her hands, which are limp and resting in between folds in the blankets, and sets it on the table. “I think I’ll take her to bed.”
“Wait.” For a moment I think Sara will tell me I should be the one to do it. I shouldn’t be. Clifton is softer, safer, more handsome, gentler. I’m disgusting. A monster. “I know it sounds rude, but wake her up first. With how anxious she is about all of us, we shouldn’t move her without warning. She won’t recognize her environment and it could be enough to set her off, or make her run.”
I look down at the wound travelling across my leg. The blue stitches against my white skin form a series of Xs, like a map of the New York underground. Red flakes and pink smears cover everything. Most of me. I’m a blood-soaked nightmare and she’s an angel wrapped in a white sheet. I hear but don’t watch as Clifton wakes her and she responds in tentative whispers. I don’t move as he lifts her from
the couch. At least not at first.
Sara follows him out of the room and I’m in a trance as I wade down the hall after him. After her. Sara turns as we reach the basement steps and the urge to go to the gym and run a hundred miles grips me. I can’t run though with my leg all fucked. I can’t lift with my shoulder fucked either.
Maybe I’ll load all the weights onto the bar anyways without warming up and see if it’ll crush me. Maybe it’ll cut off the wind to my throat, or sit on my chest until I can’t breathe anymore. They’ll find me tomorrow covered in Russian blood and bruising and at my funeral no one will show up besides Clifton who will tell the congregation of ghosts that I had a hard life but was a decent man. A decent man. Decent men don’t look like me. Decent men don’t kill and enjoy it.
I stand outside of the open guest bedroom door, looking in as Clifton unwraps Alina from the comforter I gave her and helps her into the bed. He draws the blankets up to her chin and tells her that he’s just next door, out and to the right, if she needs anything anytime, day or night.
She says, “Spasiba,” and nods understanding.
But as Clifton turns to leave, her gaze flicks past him. She sees me and her eyes are demanding, but I don’t understand what she wants. Probably for me to leave. So I turn from her and head to the basement and as I hit the steps, I am the ghost of my better brother.
Goodbye, Alina Popov.
Dixon
Sara’s apartment was empty. No bodies to be found. Sherry was a wreck when we reached her, nervous for her friend, but after a cup of tea and reassurance from me, she calmed down. Brant seemed pleased to see me and I hold him in my arms as I walk through the front door of the house. Knox carries two huge garbage bags filled with Sara’s stuff – clothes, schoolbooks, and medical supplies. Under my arm, I have her laptop.
The Hunting Town (Brothers Book 1) Page 35
