“Want me to run it for you?”
“Always.”
“We need to work on anatomy,” he said as he filled the tub. I could have pushed him in, shown him what I’d learned thus far, but I knew it would freak him out. Water was his enemy. He didn’t even trust puddles.
“I like anatomy.”
“Do you remember where you stabbed your man?”
“In the kitchen,” I said, hopping in the tub. Frank could run a hell of a bath. It was about one degree and some chopped veggies short of Vincent stew. All this fighting was really giving me an appetite.
He smiled. “That is very true.”
“I remember where he stabbed me,” I said, playing with my scar. I used to see scars as flaws. Not anymore. Mine weren’t sexy like Frank’s, but I was fond of them nonetheless. Especially the one from being stabbed. The skin was raised and smooth, and whiter than the rest of me, a reminder of how I’d nearly died, only to be given a new life. But even though my knife scar was one of my favorite features, I didn’t like anyone except for Frank to see it. It felt sacred because he’d been the one to patch me up.
Frank knelt by the tub, placing the heel of his hand below my ribs, like I’d seen them do on TV when someone wasn’t breathing. I debated holding my head under the water to see if he’d complete the exercise and give me mouth to mouth.
“Was that good?”
“Apparently,” he said dryly. “That’s your diaphragm. If you hit someone hard enough in the diaphragm, you could kill them.”
“How close did he come to killing me?”
He moved his hand across my stomach, drawing a little line to the right of my scar with his middle finger. “That would’ve killed you.” Then he did the same just above it. “And that.”
“I really was lucky,” I said, flicking water on his hand. Frank had such beautiful hands. You wouldn’t think by looking at them that he used them as weapons.
“The French word for luck is the same as the English word chance. Did you pull the knife out, or did he?”
“Me,” I admitted. I could already hear him scolding me.
He ran his finger over the length of my scar. I could feel it in my heart. “If you had left it in, and you’d slipped or fallen in all that snow, if that knife had been nudged out of place even a little bit, you would never have made it to Charlie’s hotel.”
“You see?” I said excitedly. “The TV said to leave it in. That’s why I never do as I’m told.”
“If I tell you to leave the knife in, you had better do as you’re told.”
That took the smile off my face. “You’re not gonna stab me, are you?”
“Not tonight.”
I splashed him, and I swear to God my life flashed before my eyes. It was a wonder that Frank’s victims didn’t jump off buildings or swallow bullets at the sheer sight of him. I was ready to drown myself to save him the trouble. And save me the pain. I had to sit up and bring my knees to my chest to hide my erection.
He stood and wiped off his face, then shook his wet hand at me. “Finish your bath.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, watching him leave the room and knowing that maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but some day when I least expected it, Frank would hurt me very, very badly for what I’d done. And under that threat, I had the best orgasm I’d had in years.
For nearly a month, we did the same thing day in and day out. We started off with a morning run, had a couple of hours of driving lessons, and spent the rest of the day beating the shit out of each other. Frank was right about it not being fun; I was sleep deprived, in a constant state of pain and discomfort, and I felt like I was living with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
If I stepped out of line for a second, let my attention wander away from what he was saying or even blinked at the wrong moment, he’d go off on me. I was only allowed to speak when spoken to, which was the hardest part of my training so far, and if I so much as looked like I was enjoying myself during my anatomy lesson, locating bullet and knife-worthy organs over his clothes, he’d shove me away and threaten to call the whole thing off.
I’d never been more exhausted, but I was content. We were together twenty-four hours a day, and even though he was deliberately cruel to me at times, he still showed me affection. He’d carry me to bed if I was too sore to walk after we finished fighting, and he’d hold me while I slept, his hand protectively over my scar, a reminder of how fragile I once was.
During the day when we were at the hotel, the results of our hours of aggression were evident; I looked like a child being abused, and he looked like an opponent had somehow gotten a hit or two on him before he’d massacred them. This was fairly accurate when I thought about it. But whenever we went out, we’d get dolled up, covering all the scrapes and bruises with over-expensive designer foundation.
I no longer slipped off for quickies with strangers. I would still look their way when I felt their eyes on me, and I’d smile out of habit, leading them on, but I’d never leave Frank’s side. Having ten extra minutes that I could spend napping was worth foregoing a blowjob. I couldn’t even stop myself from dozing off while he took his second shower of the morning, missing that blessed opportunity in lieu of a few precious moments to rest before my driving lessons. How he was able to operate on less sleep than I was getting was beyond me. Frank was constantly plagued by insomnia, and he functioned just fine. I forgot my name when I dropped below the five hour mark.
Luckily for me, he knew my limits better than I did. If I looked like I needed it, he’d forget to wake me when I conked out, or he’d purposefully incapacitate me during our hand to hand combat, so I’d have no choice but to take the night off. We didn’t have a safety word. I trusted him to know my breaking point, and never pass it.
We were on our third car since my birthday, the others banished to unsightly retirement, regardless of their perfect working condition thanks to yours truly. Charlie had stopped taking Frank’s calls. Working expenses, cars and guns and even the Dior foundation, came out of Charlie’s cut of the profits, not Frank’s. And to make matters worse for the old man, it was almost tax time.
This was something he had to do every year; pay a visit to his supervisors in Eastern Europe and fork out their percentage of what Frank made. They were the highest earners in the company, because Frank was the only one who didn’t stay put and wait for the jobs to come to him; living a normal life with utility bills and grocery shopping until the call came to kill somebody. Charlie proactively sought jobs, meaning that not only did Frank work when Charlie wanted him to, but also when the boss was contacted by American clients directly.
This led to the occasional double booking, which his handler wasn’t supposed to allow. But Charlie’s scheduling skills were lacking when there was money to be had, so Frank had been known to work two hits simultaneously, tailing mark X Monday through Wednesday and mark Z Thursday through Sunday, sometimes even killing them both on the same night.
It was nearly impossible for his supervisors to keep track of how many people Frank killed in a year, so they billed Charlie half a million dollars every fall, and unbeknownst to him, funneled most of it back into real estate for Frank, because his boss knew that Charlie didn’t pay him as large a take as he deserved.
There were jobs that Charlie charged the client several hundred thousand dollars for, only to give Frank his normal seventy grand, one hundred minus Charlie’s standard thirty percent. My cut was to be half of Frank’s earnings, not to mention that I was still getting an allowance. I didn’t even count it anymore. I didn’t have the time.
“This one’s dead,” I said, letting the hood of Frank’s car fall down. It nearly fell off.
Frank sneered and took out his phone. “I need a new car,” he declared to someone I assumed wasn’t Charlie. “Yes, I am aware that Charlie warned you not to give me one. What does growing on trees have to do with anything? No. Fine.” He hung up, and promptly threw his phone. I caught it, the first time I’d ever caught a fly
ing object in my life. Then I handed it back, proud of my manliness. “Stop grinning. This is your fault.”
“You told me to crash it!” I scoffed. It was okay to argue with him when we were outside. There wasn’t anyone around, but he wouldn’t hit me if there was even a possibility of witnesses. “Who’d you call?”
He glanced at his phone, sizing it up like it was an opponent. “My boss doesn’t like leaving his people stranded. Normally I only work with Charlie, but the U.S. is large so he keeps a few associates on retainer.”
“Associates,” I repeated. I wondered if they were really kept on retainer because of the size of the U.S. and not because Frank could be so high maintenance. “What are they like?”
“This one used to do what I do.”
“What we do,” I corrected.
“I do.”
I bit my tongue before announcing that he could now kiss the bride. He was grumpy, and it wouldn’t have gone over well. “Why doesn’t he do it anymore?”
Frank nodded toward the hotel room. There was only so much we could talk about in public. I led the way, ready to try and protect myself if he attacked me from behind. “He got hurt,” he said, and tripped me to the ground as if to demonstrate.
“Like Bella?” I asked, taking the opportunity of distraction to kick his knee out, but he was too quick, and my foot didn’t connect.
“Worse.”
“Is she gonna be an associate?”
He laughed incredulously. Frank’s bad side was definitely not a good place to be. “Bella can’t even take care of herself, much less someone else.”
“But he can?”
“He’s capable of delivering a car. That’s about the extent of it.”
“You don’t like him.”
“I don’t trust him.”
It shouldn’t have bothered me, being that Frank’s trust wasn’t exactly the easiest thing to earn, but this associate person made me nervous. “Maybe I should try again with the car. We could keep it until Charlie gets back.”
“I’ve already called him, V. I’m not calling him again.”
I got up off the floor, feeling like I had quite possibly condemned the love of my life to death because I couldn’t fix his car. And I knew this wouldn’t be like when Charlie came to visit, where I could hide under the bed or in the bathroom, listening to him treat Frank like an idiot. No, when Frank’s new car was delivered, I’d be banished, and Frank would be at the mercy of a former killer who he didn’t trust.
His cell phone rang. My heart stopped. “Yes, that’s right. Thank you.” Frank glanced at me suspiciously as he hung up. He always knew when something was bothering me. “Yes, dear?”
“Is he bringing you a new car?”
“Yes.”
“That was quick.”
“Yes.”
“I want to stay.”
“Absolutely not,” he said. “Go play. Come back in two hours.”
“Two hours?” I whined. Two hours of freedom would’ve been worth singing about this morning. Now it was a seventy-two hundred second delay in avenging Frank’s murder. Or kidnapping. How the fuck would I find him if he got kidnapped? “Frank, this is a bad idea. Please let me stay.”
“Out,” he said sternly. “Do not come near this hotel again until noon.”
“It’s a figure of speech, by the way,” I said. “When a person says something doesn’t grow on trees, they mean it isn’t free.”
“Well, that’s a fucking stupid figure of speech,” he said. “Out.”
I stomped out the door in full pout, already debating the definition of the word near and whether there was some wiggle room with noon, being that we were such a short drive away from a different time zone.
Near was a bus stop across from a K-Mart on the other side of a four lane divided highway, the hotel, and our room, within sight between passing SUV’s. Noon was pretty much set. And Frank’s associate was a brunet man about Frank’s height who had great difficulty getting out of our new car. I watched the back of him, memorizing the color of his shirt, and the way he limped to our door, and then he turned around and honed in on me like I was sitting under a neon sign flashing This kid is staring at you.
I quickly lowered my gaze to my sneakers, as if that didn’t make it even more obvious that I’d been looking at him. When I dared to look up, he was gone. I got on the next bus. The driver scolded me loudly for not having anything smaller than a fifty, until a little old lady paid my fare in dimes. There was only one BMW in the hotel parking lot as we pulled away from the curb. Not even Frank could kill someone that quickly, so I took my seat, stopped fretting over Frank’s life, and started fretting over mine.
Two hours wasn’t long enough to rehearse what I was going to say to him. It wasn’t even long enough to think of a script. I decided my best chance of survival would be not to mention it, and hope Frank hadn’t seen me himself.
“Perhaps I should have been more specific,” he said as he opened the door. Then he grabbed me by the collar and yanked me inside. There was no point in trying to fight him off. I hadn’t even mastered normal Frank, much less pissed-at-me Frank. “Did he see you?”
Answering that question truthfully while his hand was so close to my throat would’ve been suicide. And really, see was less specific of a word than near. I hadn’t gotten a good enough look at his associate to pick him out of a lineup, and my vision was perfect. He couldn’t have gotten any better look at me. He was old. “No.”
“That’s interesting, because he specifically said there was a blond kid hanging out at the bus stop, watching my hotel room. Would you like to answer the question again?”
“Maybe he saw me?”
“I was bluffing,” he said through gritted teeth.
“We can dye my hair,” I offered.
Frank released my collar. With all the running he’d been making me do, and with him being big and scary, I would’ve thought it would be my first response. But I stood my ground, albeit submissively, and waited for his worst. “You’re not getting it. You are a liability. If someone sees you with me, if they find out I care anything about you, it puts us both in danger. What part of me not trusting him did you fail to understand?”
“I did understand,” I said quietly. “I…I got scared.”
“I told you I would protect you,” he said. “If you trusted me, you’d have no reason to get scared.”
“I wasn’t scared for me,” I said, finally raising my eyes to him. He looked the way he had when I’d woken in Charlie’s hotel room, the kind of rage that only comes from betrayal. “You follow your instincts and you don’t trust him and I’m supposed to listen to you so I don’t trust him either and I just got really scared for you because you seem sort of defenseless sometimes and you get this look—”
His expression changed, and his ears went red, like I’d just told him he’d been pronouncing something wrong for the past six months. He looked humiliated. “What look?”
“Nevermind,” I said, wishing yet again that I’d kept my mouth shut. Of course I wasn’t the only person to have noticed that Frank went crazy now and then. And Charlie wouldn’t have hesitated to call him on it.
“What fucking look, Vincent?”
I lowered my head. Tact was not one of my strong points. “I dunno, like you’re sort of not there?”
“Not there?”
“Forget it, Frank.”
“No. Say it.”
“No.”
“Say it!” he said, and he shoved me like the first time he’d slapped me, not really hard but hard enough to spike my adrenaline, and I shoved him back and screamed “You look sick in the fucking head, okay?”
Frank smiled, having gotten exactly what he was going for. Ammunition. “You know what’s sick? Letting every man you see treat you like a whore and pretending that you enjoy it.”
I took a step back, reeling like he’d hit me. Like he’d ripped out my heart. I couldn’t look at him. Not since Charlie tried selling me had I f
elt so hollow. Because Frank was right. Even when I no longer needed the money, I hadn’t been able to stop. I kept going to stranger after stranger, waiting for someone, anyone, to make it feel good, the way it used to feel to come before I’d come for Mark.
At seventeen years old, masturbation was unfamiliar to me, but I knew the feel of a wedding ring against my cock. I couldn’t count how many dicks I’d sucked, but the number of mouths to touch mine wouldn’t fill one hand. And those men would go home to their wives, their families, and their big screen televisions, and I’d be forgotten, just like Mark forgot me. Just like my parents forgot me.
“I see the way you look at them. It’s not desire. It’s disgust. You hate them for wanting you.”
“Well no one else fucking wants me!” I sobbed.
“I want you,” he said. Neither of us expected my reaction. I punched him as hard as I could, right in the nose. There was blood immediately, something I’d never been able to accomplish in all our weeks of warfare. It was definitely broken.
“Oh, my God! I’m so sorry!”
What came next was equally unexpected. Frank grabbed me, kissing me hard on the lips and pressing me against the wall. I kissed him back, gripping his closely cropped hair the best I could and forcing his mouth into mine, until I was sure I could taste as much of my blood as his. He lifted me onto the dresser, yanking my pants down so hard I’d have bruises, leaving them dangling precariously from one ankle, snagged on my left shoe. My other shoe was missing.
I scooted back to make room for him, knocking the TV to the floor with a hollow crash. I didn’t even reach for it as Frank hopped up with me, on top of me, kissing me again until he ran out of breath and tried to pull away. I wouldn’t let him go long enough for more than a quick inhale. Finally he turned his head away and gasped for air, grasping my face and forcing it away from him, his fingers sliding across the blood on my lips. I opened my mouth, sucking on them until he caught his breath. “I have wanted you from the moment I set eyes on you,” he said, and he pulled his fingers out before I could bite them off.
“You said you were straight.”
Chance Assassin: A Story of Love, Luck, and Murder Page 16
