by Kitty Thomas
The way he rubbed the cream into my wrists and wrapped them, it was obvious he’d never done this for someone else before. It must be so baffling trying to heal when what you most craved was to do harm. Like a lion nurturing an injured gazelle back to health.
Finally, he finished. He put the supplies up along with the rope and paddle. Everything in its place. Then he got back into the bed with me and pulled the covers up around us.
“Shannon?”
“Yeah?”
I wasn’t sure if my next question was wise. It might be sensitive. It might make him angry. But I had this burning desire to try to understand him, to find some kernel of something human and sympathetic that I could use to justify my growing attraction to someone who did terrible things to others, and would be doing another brand of terrible things to me. Admittedly things I’d probably like, but I still didn’t want to think too hard about that.
“Were you abused as a kid?” I asked, all the while wondering if maybe I had been abused as a kid. Never mind what was wrong with Shannon. What was wrong with me?
“Why would you ask such a thing? I have zero appropriate social skills, and even I know that’s out of line.”
“I’m s-sorry, I’m just trying to understand what made you like this.” If I could understand what made him like this, maybe I could figure out what made me like this. Because I thought I probably wasn’t a sociopath, but Shannon and I seemed like two sides of the same coin. He was the perfect predator; I was the perfect prey. I was the fucked-up prey that wanted to be ensnared.
He seemed to be trying to decide how much he was prepared to tell me. At least he didn’t appear angry.
“No,” he said after another moment’s thought. “I wasn’t abused. That’s not why I kill people. I didn’t kill small animals when I was young or burn the wings off of flies. My parents are good people. They raised me in a good environment and taught me good morals. They loved me. I’m sure they still do. I know whatever it is that they feel toward me, it’s something real, even if I couldn’t understand it or feel it myself. I knew even when I was young that there was something very wrong with me—at least by the general population’s standards. I don’t know how I knew, but I knew I had to keep it a secret, so I pretended the best I could and did what the others around me did. But I never felt the things they claimed to feel. And I wasn’t even sure if they were lying or not. I just wanted so much to fit in and be like the other kids.”
“But how could you become this way if something bad didn’t happen to you?” I’d wanted to uncover something in his history that would make me understand so I could say, Ah, that must be it. So much pain almost had to turn him into a monster. Then I could feel pity for him. I could be this light of salvation. Maybe I could heal him. And even if I couldn’t, I could claim that my motives were virtuous. I could pretend I didn’t just like to stand a little too close to the fire.
“It’s not all nurture, Elodie. There are predators in this world, and I’m one of them. There’s nothing I can do to change that.”
“Would you if you could?”
“I don’t know.”
I wasn’t sure how long he was going to put up with this probing, but I wanted to find out as much as I could while he tolerated my questioning. I had no way to know that anything he told me was true, but given everything else I’d experienced, I knew that sometimes a story was all you needed—something that made sense. And I desperately wanted to find a way to make sense of who Shannon was and how he got to be that way.
“W-when did you kill for the first time?” I asked.
“Not until the military. I couldn’t afford college, and my parents couldn’t afford it either. Instead of taking on debt I might never get out of, I decided to join the armed forces. I wasn’t scared of anything, so I thought I might be useful. Turned out I was right. They test you in all sorts of ways, and they’re always watching, trying to figure you out. I fit a certain profile. I was a tool they could use. A weapon. I could be put to use doing the less savory jobs that most other soldiers can’t handle or can’t justify, the things most private citizens would be horrified by but which still must be done to keep us free and safe.”
I waited, wondering if he would say more. He seemed to be weighing whether he should or not. Finally, he did.
“The first time I killed someone, I felt... something. It was this rush and this sense of joy. Before that moment everything had felt dull and dead, but in the kill, I came alive. When I got out of the service, college was forgotten. I started taking lucrative contracts in the private sector and never looked back.”
The way Shannon described taking a human life was not unlike how a normal person might describe the experience of eating a really good hamburger or going on an amazing trip to Europe.
“If I hadn’t begged you not to make me face the police and you hadn’t had to dispose of Trevor’s body, would you have let me go?”
“I don’t know.”
“Because I made you feel something?”
“Yes. You made me feel pity. I’ve never felt pity for another living soul, not ever. It’s a fucking awful feeling, but it’s a part of the set of experiences I don’t have and which make it impossible for me to relate to people in any real way. But the idea of killing you... I didn’t get a rush from it.”
Lucky for me.
“What about the cat?”
“I feel a sort of detached affection for her. But before you came along, it was the strongest emotion toward another living being I’d ever felt that didn’t involve that being’s death.”
“Why are you telling me all this now?” Just because I asked, didn’t mean he had any obligation to answer, and I was kind of surprised he was going along with my questioning in the first place.
“I no longer have anything left to lose because I’ve decided I’m never letting you go.”
I’d suspected as much, and he’d said something close to this before, but the word never hadn’t entered into it. There was a finality and stubborn resolve to that never that caused the tightness inside me to finally relax. Because I believed him. He wasn’t letting me go. And he wasn’t going to kill me—at least not tonight. And whatever else he was planning to do... he was probably right that I’d like it because apparently I was a freak like that. Like him in my own twisted way. Yet another reason to not want to remember my past.
I closed my eyes and against all reasonable common sense, fell asleep in the only arms that felt safe to me.
***
When I woke, I was back in my room down the hall. Shannon must have carried me back once I’d fallen asleep. The clock on the nightstand read ten o’clock, and sun was streaming in through the windows. How had I slept so late? I must have been out eleven hours at least. I rolled over, stretching, startled to find Shannon leaning against the door frame watching me.
“You’ll want your own room for sleep. You’ll need a space that is yours to process your experiences.”
Even though he’d been decent to me up to this point, somehow everything he said managed to sound terrifying with about thirty layers of meaning tucked inside them, half of which I was sure I would never fully unravel until it was far too late.
There was an abrupt buzzing sound, and he retrieved a shiny red phone from his pocket. It wasn’t a burner like the one I normally saw him talk on. It seemed quite nice and expensive, definitely not the kind of phone you ditched in a nondescript undisclosed location every two weeks.
“Mom, hi.”
I could hear an animated female voice on the other end of the call.
“I know. I’ve been working,” Shannon said. “I know. I know. I’m free tonight.”
The woman on the other end squealed. An obvious sign of approval. But then something that sounded like nagging started.
“I found someone,” Shannon said, interrupting her tirade.
Utter pin drop silence on the other end for nearly a full minute. Then there were more animated questions I couldn’t decipher
from across the room.
“We’ll see,” Shannon said, noncommittally. “I’ll see you tonight.”
He put his phone back in his pocket and regarded me with something like amusement. “How would you like to meet my parents? You’ll be playing the role of my girlfriend.”
“What am I really?” Words like girlfriend seemed way outside the scope of anything that had or would go on between us. Still, I wanted to know how he defined this.
“You’re mine,” he said, as if that clarified everything.
“Your what?”
“Just mine.”
Since Shannon was perfectly comfortable killing a person, he must be equally untroubled by owning one.
“And when you get tired of playing house?” These questions and concerns had been in the background since we’d first arrived. But now that things had escalated between us to a mockery of coupledom, I was even more concerned about how these things ended with a contract killer. Surely it couldn’t be a nice ending. And this couldn’t last forever.
“I haven’t gotten tired of the cat.”
This statement was absolutely insane to me but seemed reasonable to him. How could he compare me to a fucking house pet? Oh, right, because I was just another type of pet to him.
“How long have you had the cat?” I asked.
“Seven or eight years.”
He’d managed to care for a cat for that long? Sure, they didn’t require a lot of maintenance, but he had to make sure she was fed and got her shots. And she seemed healthy and well taken care of—spoiled even. He fed her a super fancy brand of cat food that was probably better quality than most kids got at school. You could put it on a plate and feed it to a kid, and they’d probably think they were eating food meant for people.
So maybe there was some credence to his view on this. From your average person, such an unusual assurance wouldn’t mean much to me, but maybe he really wouldn’t get bored. If I could make him feel something without having to die at his hands first, then maybe he wanted to keep that feeling going. If it had only been me and the white cat who’d been able to elicit anything close to a human emotion from him, we were both far too rare to be casually discarded.
I hoped.
“How did you get the cat?” Somehow I couldn’t imagine him sauntering up to a pet shop or searching the classifieds. What situation could have possibly moved him to acquire an animal companion?
He smiled, remembering back. “I was on a job. I had a contract for her owner. She was skin and bones, barely being fed or properly cared for and little more than a kitten. She was so dirty that I thought she was gray at first. When I killed him, I think she actually smiled at me. She kept following me around, meowing at me as I cleaned up. For some reason, I couldn’t bring myself to leave her behind, so I brought her home with me.”
I wasn’t sure what kind of story I’d been expecting. I guess something a little more pedestrian. I shuddered, thinking it was like she was some kind of trophy from a kill. Like me after Trevor in the castle.
An awkward silence descended between us, then he said, “So dinner with my parents?”
I couldn’t believe he was taking me out of the house. And I was very curious. I was convinced his parents must somehow be evil, and maybe Shannon was in denial about it or was simply lying. It wasn’t as if lying would give him an attack of guilt. Though his lack of shame also made honesty much easier for him than the average person. If he could control certain parameters, he could tell me anything without caring what I thought about it.
“There will be ground rules, of course,” he said. “You will not at any point give them any indication that you are the girl who went missing or anything about how you truly came to be with me. Let me handle the details of how we met when they ask. Nor will you seek their help to escape me. Don’t put me in a position to do something I’d rather not do. I’m sure you don’t want blood on your hands.”
I stared at him, not even sure how to process that statement. “You’d kill your parents if I tried to get help?”
“I’m sure it wouldn’t give me pleasure.”
Oh that made it better. How could he speak so casually about killing the supposedly wonderful people who raised him?
“I’m not like you. You know this. Don’t assume I’ll be held back by the things that repulse normal people, and plan your own actions accordingly. It’s likely you’d be far more traumatized by the event than I would. Just know I will go to any lengths to protect my secrets.”
“And what would theoretically happen to me if I was this stupid?” I wanted to know the worst case scenario with Shannon as he saw it currently.
“Let’s just say it would be a very long time before I took you out of the house again. You’d be an indoor kitty.”
In truth, I had no intention of saying a single thing. Where the hell would I go? In the time I’d been in Shannon’s house, I had not once developed some burning desire to have my photo plastered all over the news and have strangers in my face trying to convince me of our history together, or having everyone I met from this moment on look at me with condescending pity.
I was sure that if I were to be able to go through all that, I would additionally be able to access my money at least and put together a reasonably non-horrible life. But I had no anchor. I would always be “that girl who doesn’t remember anything, poor thing.”
Aside from the initial moment in the castle where Shannon had felt the spark of pity that no doubt saved my life, he hadn’t acted like what had happened to me was any big deal. That might sound cold and horrible, but he hadn’t handled me with kid gloves. There were some bizarre benefits to spending time with a man who lacked empathy. I was sure that if I’d been with any other person, I would have spiraled down further and further into post-traumatic stress as all the well-meaning concern made life more and more impossible to cope with. I would have no doubt mirrored and aped the reactions those around me expected.
Sometimes all a person needed was to be treated like they were normal. At a certain point sympathy and empathy become another version of aggression.
“Elodie? Are you going to dinner?”
“I have a choice?”
“About this? Yes.”
“I’ll go, but what will I tell them about who I am?”
“Make something up, but keep it as close to the truth about what you know about yourself as possible. It’ll be easier to remember. You should make up a different last name if it comes up, and I wouldn’t tell them the university you attended. Pick another one, on the other end of the country, preferably.”
“Do I have to wear the brown contacts? Don’t I look different enough without them?”
My hair was much shorter and darker. And while I didn’t wear makeup with just us in the house, Shannon had bought me some. The colors I would wear would be far different than what would have worked with long blonde hair.
“What is your objection to the contacts?”
“Discomfort. Not wanting to touch my eye. And what if we forget them sometime? Or I might forget to take them out. I have to clean them. A lot of things.”
“What about a pair of non-prescription glasses?”
“Okay.”
“Good. I’ll handle it while I’m out running errands today. Finish up your leftovers for lunch so I can get it out of my fridge. I don’t want the kitchen smelling like lo mein for the rest of the week.”
I had thought we might discuss the previous night, or that he might give me some indication of how he saw our relationship progressing. I don’t mean that I thought we’d pick out rings or discuss babies, just that I thought surely he might give me some indication of his plans for me. In reality, it seemed he only planned to let me see a few feet of the road ahead of me at any given time. Whether he’d privately planned any farther than that remained a mystery.
***
At six-thirty, we sat in Shannon’s car in front of his parents’ house. They lived in a really nice—almost posh—upper mi
ddle class neighborhood in a generously sized red brick two-story with large white columns in the front.
“I thought you said your parents couldn’t afford to send you to college,” I said, sure I’d caught him in a lie. Not that it would matter in the grand scheme, but somehow I was disappointed he’d lie to me about something so trivial. I’d thought that because it would be easier to be honest for someone with little to no guilt, that he would be. Bad assumption on my part.
“They couldn’t. This isn’t the house I grew up in. We were firmly middle class. I had everything I needed and a lot of things I wanted, but college was still outside of our budget, and I didn’t have the kind of grades for a scholarship. But that was twenty years ago. In that time, my father’s small business has grown and his investments have paid off.”
“Oh,” was all I could manage, ashamed for thinking he’d lied about his family. Though I was sure he couldn’t care less whether I thought he’d been lying or not. He might be a demanding control freak, but it didn’t seem as though anything had the power to make him defensive.
Shannon got out of the car and came around to my side, opening the door for me with a smooth and polished flourish. If we’d been on a real date and I didn’t know the truth about him, I would have believed his act. In one hand, he held an expensive bouquet of pink roses he’d picked up for his mother from the florist on the way. The perfect gentleman.
On the front porch, he rang the bell while I straightened my skirt and my hair and pushed the glasses up the bridge of my nose. I wasn’t sure I would ever get used to these things and thought maybe I should have opted for the contacts after all.
“Stop fidgeting,” Shannon said as the door opened.
“Shannon!” His mom swept him up in a hug and pulled him into the house. I stepped in behind them and closed the door, shutting out the frigid air outside. She seemed to be about early sixties and was slim and polished in a smart red pantsuit. She had chestnut colored hair swept back into a bun and bright green eyes. “Frank! Frank! They’re here!” She called out behind her, a rich, southern twang wrapping around her words like velvet.
