Her heart pounding with adrenaline as if she was the one who had been in a fight. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that she had been running after the thief before her mystery crush came into the picture. Or maybe it had something to do with the fact that she was finding herself to be sorely attracted to the man. This seemed to her to be past the sexuality that he exuded. This was even past his tormenting green eyes. It was something more complex. Less easy to describe in words or song for that matter. She knew she would be unable to detach herself from this man and everything he stood for in her life.
She started to rush through the rest of her journey home. She needed to see him. She wanted to be there when he took his nightly shower and got into bed. She wanted to watch him sleep. She wanted to just watch him. It didn’t matter anymore if it was wrong. All of her sense of warning and right and wrong had deserted her and she was left with only her passion. She let it wrap her up.
She took the stairs in twos and threes when she got into the hallway that led to her apartment. Someone else had moved into one of the apartments downstairs and she wondered who else was down on their luck enough to have rented an apartment as horrible as theirs. She rushed her way up the stairs and almost missed her steps once. She made it to the top of the stairs and then to her room relatively safe and sound and rushed into the room.
With her heart thumping loudly she went straight to the peep hole and put her eyes over it in the hopes that she would be able to catch him.
Behind the wall was a figure that she instantly knew was different. It was spotless and flawless and had the tattoo of the dragon on her back where he had his exactly. She had long hair black hair that she wore in a ponytail on top of her head. In spite of this, the hair descended well towards her waist. Her hips were broad and her waist was thin. She had the perfect hourglass figure, and a wave of jealousy washed over Aimee.
“I said it!!! He only likes the perfect figure girls!!!” she said as a wave of despair washed over her. In the far corner, he was still seated on his usual chair and looking at the lady with what seemed like a blazing green fire in his eyes. “What would I not give to have him look at me like that!” she thought inside her as she watched the lady walk over to him and sit astride him.
“Oh my baby... I’ve missed you!” she exclaimed. He didn’t seem to be responding at first.
She knew that she had no right to be jealous. The guy didn’t even know her. She knew that she had always known that he was bound to have women with beautiful bodies who gave him everything he could have ever wanted. She had always been aware that he would be finding ways to take care of his sexual life one way or another, so why was she mad?
When it was over, she peeped into the wall again and saw her sprawled out in his bed. Amie was angry, but there was nothing she could do about it. Then she heard his voice, it was deep, it was guttural and seemed to come deep within his chest cavity.
“You should leave now.” He was not asking. The lady in the bed looked at him with raised eyebrows as if to ask
“Are you kidding?”
“Did you hear me? I need you out of here now.” He repeated. She shook her head and turned around to face him.
“But it is already so late in the evening... I could sleep here and leave in the morning.”
He rose out of the bed and turned to her fully.
“I don’t care. You are a big girl... you can handle a little dark.”
“Viper...”
“Don’t call me that” She was silent for about three seconds and then turned her chin up defiantly.
“Viper...” She repeated as though she was daring him.
“You need to come to terms with reality. The Truth is that you are who you are... you will always be.”
“Get out!” His voice was hardening. She picked up her clothes and started to dress up. When she was done, she looked at him and blew him a small kiss.
“Ciaos... viper darling. See you soon” she said as she left the room. He looked at the door after her for a while and she watched him sit there and look into space. He seemed to be angry and tormented. His green eyes seemed to have turned to a really dark shade.
He stood from the bed and headed to the chair and table where his whiskey still sat. He poured himself a drink and gulped it down all at once. He looked at the wall for a while, then just when she thought he had calmed down from the anger that was in him, he flung the bottle of whiskey at the wall behind which she was standing. She retreated with bad feeling in her chest. She knew that she would not be getting a good night sleep that night. It was sealed.
Questions rolled around and chased each other in her head. Who was the woman? Why did she have exactly the same tattoo in the same place with him? Why did she call him “Viper”? And why did he seem to hate her? Was that the way he treated the women in his life? Who was he exactly and why was he hiding behind these shabby walls?
Sleep wore its trainers that night and fled. Leaving her restless.
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Chapter 4
“Mom you need to stop worrying... I’m not in Afghanistan. I’m in Britain!”
“I know... But I'm not sure what you’re going through over there...”
“I’m going through all the usual madness of moving halfway around d the world. What did you expect?”
“I don't know... I miss you”
“I miss you too... so much.”
There was silence and Amie knew instantly what was coming. Her mother was very emotional and was definitely the sort of woman to break down and cry on the phone with her daughter. Ever since her father died a few years before, they had been each other’s best friends and companion.
“Mom...” Amie called her name. Hoping that by some miracle she would be able to change the topic.
“Hm?” her mother answered
“There’s this guy... he...” She was going to launch into the story of how she had moved into the shitty apartment that Amanda rented out to her but realized that she didn’t really even know enough about him that would make him worthy of being the topic of a conversation with her mother. She swallowed hard and paused. Knowing that it was too late to back out and she definitely had to give her mother some sort of information no matter what.
“What guy? You met a boy? Oh my God! How cool is that! Something good is coming out of this trip of yours at least!” her mother said everything all in one breath. Amie knew that she had successfully taken her mind off of the loneliness that she was sure she was feeling. The problem, however, was that she had diverted her attention to a topic that was even less discussable than the initial one and she was soon finding herself at crossroads.
“Well... is he handsome?” Amie sighed. The way her mother always became so excited when the talk involved boys amused her. What was it about boys that were so special? She didn’t really like discussing the opposite sex with her but now she had no choice.
“Oh well... he’s not bad!”
“Well then say yes... Go on a date with him at least but don't kiss him on the first date. And always go with a condom!”
“Mom... stop it! We haven’t even talked yet. “
“Well that’s not cool. If he’s your friend and he wants to be more than that he ought to voice it.
Amie was starting to feel the onslaught of a headache that would prove to be relentless and mighty.
“Mom stop it!! Just stop it.”
“If you say so!”
“Thanks... have a good day...”
“Will you be...?” She dropped the call before her mother could complete the sentence.
“Damn! She is just too much!” She said to herself. But she knew that her mother was not doing anything that other mothers wouldn’t do. She was cranky for no reason...
okay maybe she did have a reason to be cranky but how was she to explain to her mother that in the whole town, she had ended up renting a place like the one she lived in and then discovered a hole in the wall through which she watched a strange man. Did that even make any sense? She understood that the woman was extraordinarily curvaceous and sexy but so were a whole lot of other women, and he could have picked any one of them. With a body like that, she knew that most women would oblige him without thinking.
Besides... why did they have matching tattoos? Did it have something to do with a friendship pact? Was it like one of those couple twinning things where they got matching tattoos to show their love? If that was the case, then what could have happened to drive them apart enough to make her torture him intentionally and he look at her with that much hate in his eyes?
Or worse still, was the Dragon tattoos a symbol of a cult that they both belonged to? Would it explain why she had said to him: “You cannot run away from me... from your past”? Did it have anything to do with the fact that he was holding that long Asian sword the other day?
Her mind was roaming as she went home. She wished silently that there was a way she could get answers to the questions that were on her mind. She was curious about him, attracted to him and repulsed by him all at the same time and now she knew that it was only a matter of time before they met again and she would introduce herself to him as his neighbour. She had played and replayed over a hundred scenes in her head about how they would interact if she ever got to meet him again. She drew the bag of bread that she had under her arm closer as she walked into her building and started to tame the stairs in this as she seemed to do every other day now. She was eager to eat something and then resume at her post near the wall. Looking into his apartment and spying on him.
“One would think that I would have some sense and leave the man alone now that I know that he has a woman in his life! But trust me to be as stubborn as a mule!” she said to herself as she turned the key in her apartment lock. She walked into her room and dumped everything in the kitchen at the far end of the room. Then she rushed over to the wall and placed her eyes over her peephole again.
Beyond the wall today was something different. Something she had never seen before. He was alone, on the floor of his room. Fully clothed but obviously bleeding badly. He seemed unconscious and didn’t look like he would be coming out of it anytime soon. Her heart started to pound in her chest again. What was she to do? Should she call the police? What if they charged him with something? The fact that he escaped before they came to the scene the other time showed that he either didn’t like them much or had a case pending at the station.
He seemed like he was not living particularly within the confines of the law and she might be doing him a disservice by calling the cops. She fingered her phone for a while and remembered the times that her father had come home battered and wounded. He was the only other man that she knew who came home bloody and beaten up. He was a fighter.
He never really had a good education and had dropped out of high school to be there for his small family when her mother had gotten pregnant. Then he had discovered fighting!
He had never been a good fighter... far from it. He didn’t even seem like he could fight to save his life. But he went back there, night after night, and got beaten up for money. He would be paired up with some fighter who was still upcoming and training vigorously and he would try to fight the person. Sometimes he would seem like he had a fighting chance but he never really did. Part of his contract was that he would never actually train to fight except his body building. He was there to give a specific set of people some morale and faith in themselves that they could win.
She remembered the nights he would come home battered and looking like steak. Blood shot eyes, broken lips, broken ribs, cuts, swellings and a host of other things that he came home with. He would be tired and bleeding and her mother would shed hot tears as she bandaged him up and stitched him back together. She hated it. And they often argued about it. They would scream at each other and yell their heads off. Then she would burst into tears and he would spend another thirty minutes to one hour consoling her and promising that he would find a less dangerous job. But he never did and they would have that fight again and again.
He liked the money. He liked that it gave him the opportunity to save for her college education and to give her all the basic things that she ever needed and then just a little bit more. He liked that he could take care of his family with the money he got from his fighting and that was good enough for him. He wasn’t ambitious as all of his ambition was vested in his only daughter. She was the only thing in which he had faith. She was all he ever wanted and he did everything he could to make sure that she knew that clearly.
So when one night he had come home again all bloodied up, and her mother had spent hours trying to care for him and crying, they had thought it was just another of those fights and that the sounds were just on the flesh. She had waited for the bleeding to stop after the stitches and it had stopped. Or so she thought. But when he started to lose consciousness, she knew that she had to get him to the hospital. She called in an ambulance and took him to the hospital as fast as they could be. The journey to their house and to the hospital took about thirty minutes and he was pronounced dead on arrival.
He had been bleeding internally.
Amie had been fourteen and had understood that her father was dead. But she had never come to quite get into terms with how he died.
He was her hero... Her super man who got knocked down a thousand times and still came back up. He couldn’t be dead! No... It wasn’t feasible that he would be dead. He was a strong man who could withstand a lot. So how could he be dead? She had watched people go on the podium and say nice things about her father and she had been momentarily proud. But when it had been her turn, she had stood there and stared into space for a long time. Eventually, she had burst into tears and had been unable to get a single coherent word out to say about her father.
Now as she peeped through the hole and watched the man in the floor, she could feel those emotions coming on so strongly all over again. She could feel herself feeling the pain and the anguish of seeing her father being lowered into the floor. She jerked out of her emotions and rushed out of the room and towards his door. It wasn’t until she got to the door before she wondered if it was locked. Deciding to try her luck first, she moved the door knob and the door swung open. She moved closer to him and looked him over.
She pulled his shirt up but realized that trying to take it off him would waste too much time and energy and could also make him even more wounded. She rushed through his kitchen and found a knife with which she tore the short open and the way down. He had multiple stab wounds but not all of them were new. There was a while whole lot of scars on his back, chest, abdomen, and even thighs.
Who was this guy. Why did he have so many stab scars and what kind of life was he living exactly?
She rushed to his mini bar and brought out a bottle of whiskey that she found there. She brought it over to him and smeared some on his wounds to disinfect them and then she rushed back to her own apartment and came back with her knitting kit. Gently and taking care not to injure him more, she started to stitch him up the way her mother had taught her.
It took her over one hour of gentle stitching and bandaging his wounds to get to a level where she would at least be sure that he would not bleed to death. All her fantasies about how she would feel if she got to touch him had flown away and in their place was worry that she might not be doing it right. She almost laughed at the way she had visualized their first physical contact and yet here she was, stitching him up and trying as much as she could not to make a mistake that could kill him. When she was done, the new dilemma became whether to try and move him to the bed or leave him where he was.
He was a big man. Over six feet with all that muscles and bones. She knew better than to try to move him away from the spot that he was otherwise he might break hi
s stitches open and be worse off than he was when she came in.
“Oh God! Don’t let him die please... don’t let him die!” she said to herself as she packed her personal belongings and started to leave. At the door, she looked back at him and figured that he might be scared when he woke up and noticed that someone had been in his apartment and had stitched him up. She did a double take into the room and found a pen and paper. The she wrote something out on it and then left. Closing the door behind her firmly and wishing there was a way to lock the door without locking him in. What if the person who had stabbed him so badly traced him home and came into his room to find the door unlocked? She decided to be vigilant and look out.
“At the slightest sign of trouble... I’ll call the cops. That’s it.” She said to herself as some sort of assurance of his safety. Once in the privacy of her room, she dragged the only seat in the room close to the wall and peeked in at him. He was still on the same spot but she knew that he would come around eventually and she wanted to see him do so.
“How long are you going to sit here, girl?” she asked herself with a little bit of scorn. But she knew that she dared not leave. If anything happened to him, she would never really forgive herself.
“As long as it takes...” She said as she leaned her head back into the chair and let her mind drift.
In the years after her father’s death, she had become overwhelmed with this feeling of lonesomeness that had her looking into space blankly for long stretches of time. Her school work had suffered badly and some of the complaints that her teacher gave was that she was sleeping in class too often. “It is either she is not getting enough sleep at home or she is trying to avoid a reality desperately” the school counsellor, who was a graduate of teen psychology had claimed. Amie had been indifferent as to the diagnosis and had made it to a point to ignore all that was said to her. She was still in awe of how she had made it out of high school. Maybe it had something to do with the time that she discovered that her father had taken out a large life insurance pay on himself to which he made her the sole beneficiary. The only clause being that she didn’t get paid except she had graduated college with the college funds that he had left her.
Hidden: A Dark Mafia Romance (Forbidden Kiss Book 1) Page 4
