by Elena Monroe
All of Grimm’s fucked up pieces that I saw last night fit right into my fucked up pieces, like some fucked up puzzle of a Mapplethorpe photo, where you aren’t sure what you are looking at. I wasn't sure how or why; maybe that made me just as equally crazy. Maybe he was right in how unfixable he is, or maybe he just knew better that I couldn’t fix him because I was just as troubled, all under the surface and well hidden.
My mom’s name popped up on my phone, and I pressed ignore before my steeled spine could wither with whatever update she had from back home—a home I missed and family I desperately needed to see soon. Her call was the only realization I needed that a trip home was long overdue.
Sipping my smoothie, I let my lips wrap around the straw seductively, even though I knew Grimm wasn’t here; it was too early. Just thinking about his fingers in my panties had my heart racing and my body almost feeling him all over again.
With a small smile, I set my stuff down and sat down at my desk with my ankles crossed, feeling like a porno version of a secretary. I was prepared to crawl my way to his desk and let him do whatever he wanted to me.
I would make myself be okay with this one-way street and dirty version of myself. I felt like imagining Grimm naked in my mind, while everyone buzzed around me busy if it meant feeling his touch again. I felt dirty when my cheeks heated up and my panties became damp as I looked at my login screen for longer than normal.
“There you are!” Khaos stood in front of my desk, tossing an unwrapped Starburst in the air and catching it with his mouth.
“He’s not in yet,” I said so automatically that I didn’t have to think about it. Grimm wasn’t here early ever, if at all. Only in my mind.
He laughed, chewing on the Starburst like it was too juicy for him—the way candy is. “Oh, I know that. He sent me a text… you're on my desk today. Come on. Don’t be scared. You’ll leave in one piece.”
I followed Khaos to his corner of the office, every step further into his danger zone that I could feel morals disintegrating, souls begging for forgiveness, and for a lack of a better word, chaos ensuing. No one ever dared to go into his corner of the too big office space. It was asking to leave destroyed or damaged in a way the health plans didn’t cover.
With his palm up, his hand glided in the air. “Your chariot.”
The desk was colorful, almost everything a rainbow, and then I saw the photo of two young men framed on the corner. The rainbows weren’t happy random rainbows, but pride for who he was. I respected that more. “You have an assistant, so why am I working at your desk?”
“I told you, he sent me a text. I don’t argue with Grimm. What he wants he gets.”
“And everyone just obeys him?” I snapped at Khaos, really hoping he was dumb enough to tell me. Vic was too close to the vest, and Bowen was just the kind of guy who gave you goosebumps that took too long to go away, even after he had left the room.
“Disobey him, and then ask me that. Pick a hand, quick.” Two fists appeared in front of me, closed, his knuckles bruised, and a grin across his face like he spoke only in games and riddles. Perfectly named, as far as I could see.
“Left. You’re right-hand dominant, so you’ll favor it.” My finger tapped his fist, only after which I realized his bruises looked fresh.
“Aha!” He disappeared behind the desk door only to appear with stacks of pencil boxes. Dropping them with a sharp sound on the desk, he announced, “I need you to sharpen all of these. Too bad, because in my right hand was just getting me lunch. Sucks, I know.”
He disappeared again, inside his office this time. The door was painted black. It wasn’t even frosted, but pitch black and matte from the paint not being coated with a glaze. It looked like a hurricane came through his side of the office and now it was in a state of construction—one not going too well by the looks of it. There was even caution tape over another closed door, a broken table, and paint on various surfaces only half done.
Following him only to the threshold, I stood in the open doorway admiring the paint job gone wrong from the other side. There was a skate ramp in the middle of the office, and nothing resembled someone who was responsible for a financial company like the Clave.
If this was a cult, how the hell did Khaos make the damn cut? He was a moving train wreck going too fast.
“Are you serious? Pencils? That’s gotta be like 500 pencils.”
I watched him grab his skateboard and jog my way. “I’m gonna get my lunch. I may walk, talk, and act like a joke, Abigail, but I’m far from it.”
Defeated, I slumped down in the comfortable chair, trying to find the electric pencil sharpener that was hiding from me. Khaos wasn’t someone that wrote anything down let alone need fucking 500 sharp pencils.
It was times like this I missed Vic’s desk. He was rigorous, controlling, and even scheduled bathroom breaks, but I knew what to expect. I always knew what to expect. I even knew how to react, granted he only had three different moods: pissed off, sullen, and spiteful.
I knew exactly how to handle each mood and had solutions for all of them. There were no solutions for Grimm or Khaos’s personality defects.
Sharpening each pencil manually, I had to be grateful for at least the busy work. Taking breaks to scroll through social media photos was only a guise to keep checking the time. Grimm still hadn’t arrived at the office. Every time I heard footsteps I looked up like it might be him, even though his office was at the other end of the building. Each office was in a corner, with the middle acting like a bullpen—a neutral zone safe from Vic’s war strategies, Bowen’s macabre, Grimm’s absence, and Khaos’s, well, chaos.
Time pushed along when I heard the elevators open amongst the quiet of everyone focusing on their own tasks. Looking up, I saw Khaos walking towards me with Grimm at his side. Both were holding onto coffee cups, while Khaos clearly dominated the conversation. I couldn’t see Grimm having much to add, since he wasn’t a talkative person to begin with.
Sitting up straighter in the chair, I flicked my hair over my shoulder and pretended to focus on the pencils I had to twist into the small sharpener. Khaos had me do this on purpose, and I wasn’t blind to the torture.
Grimm gave me a fleeting glance as Khaos tossed an unwrapped Starburst my direction and shouted, “Catch!” as it hit me in the chest. Fishing it out of my thin black top where it was threatening to fall down the center of my cleavage, I purposely made it obvious for Grimm, since he had no intention of even facing me today. “Finished your pencil job.”
Khaos set down his coffee on the desk, only to lean down to line up the trash can to the edge of the desk before pushing all my hard work into the trash can. “Great, now that is done. I need you to go start my car for me.”
Pulling his keys out of his back pocket, he tossed them to me, making me scramble to catch them in my hands. “Are you serious? Could you pretend to use them at least?”
“You’re prettier when you don’t talk, sweetheart. You should know your strengths, and as one of your bosses, I feel obligated to give you an early review. Now please go start my car for me.”
Standing up, looking right at the person avoiding eye contact, I got more and more angry. He avoided the office, then only showed up to rub in his choice to have me work for someone else in my face. I stood up, letting the keys swing off the long leather key chain with off-white written all over it.
Walking right up to Grimm, I felt my spine straighten and my feelings tuck under my surface so far that he could be confused for once.
I looked at him and growled, “Are you kidding me? You had me working that psycho’s desk because you didn’t feel like facing me after you fingered me?”
Grimm didn’t react at all. He was solid, cold, frozen with no feelings, just a muted expression. It made the anger already crawling up my spine feel like it was about to drag me to hell and back if I let it.
Without much consideration, I found my hand slap across his cheek with my mouth so tight my cheek muscles hurt as I w
alked away to the elevators. I wanted to turn back to see his face, but I didn’t dare.
Khaos couldn’t not add insult to injury when his fist pushed up to his lips, and he shouted, “Get ‘em, Rex!”
All my anger, emotions, all my best laid plans went up in flames, and I was biting back tears from this awful day.
When things feel out of control, I spiral. I spiral into a dark part of my mind that’s no longer bright and clean. I spiral so hard I damage things around me; that’s why taking people’s advice on modeling in California sounded like a great idea. It was supposed to be an escape hatch from my life back home that I had no control over, where spiraling was pretty much all I knew.
I had reinvented myself here. I changed my wardrobe, found control that I grasped onto so hard the spiraling felt like centuries ago. I also found happiness I didn’t know I could exist in.
I turned things around. My wild ways were tamed by strict routines and a firm grasp on controlling every part of my surroundings.
Now, control had been ripped out of my perfectly manicured nails, and I was being punished on top of it.
I walked by Jus at the welcome desk with her boots on the desk. Trying to hold all of it in, I heard her concerned voice, “Abi, you okay?” She was too aware of her surroundings, of me, all the time. It was how I truly perfected my mask being stuck in place.
Having trouble keeping it together? Get yourself some accountable friends.
Ignoring her, I headed into the elevator and down to the garage, where I assumed Khaos car was, but I didn’t know what he even drove. I could assume it was one of the expensive cars, and in the sea of standard cars people could afford, only four were out of place.
Walking around the parking garage, I kept pressing the find button on the key fob, but I couldn’t hear any cars chirping or lights flickering. Getting more frustrated by the second, I was caught off guard by Grimm’s dark presence stalking me like a shadow in the night. I kept my eyes high, on the cars, instead of taking inventory of my damage I slapped him with.
His car door sounded with a sleek pop as it flipped open, and he stood there smirking at me. “He skateboards to work.”
Nothing about me or what happened.
Did he have selective amnesia? Did he think if we ignore it, it’ll make me never want it to happen again? Was he saving me from himself?
As each question formed in my mind, a small amount of anger was planted in its place when there was no answer.
We were both adults, and somehow Grimm possessed the ability to make me feel like a teenager again. I felt naive and embarrassed that I hadn’t tried harder to stop shit from happening. None of this would have happened if I had just written back to Oscar and gotten my fix, or even if I had just made my vibrator a priority.
The stupidity of what I had said and done didn’t set in until after Grimm teased me with his torture by forcing me to work for fucking Khaos.
He is my boss. Maybe if I say it some golden amount of times, it’ll sink in.
Instead Grimm’s lips felt like the best kind of brainwash.
Watching Grimm speed away was all I needed to refocus on Khaos and his endless tricks. He didn’t even drive here; no wonder I couldn’t find his damn car.
Storming back into the office and past the black painted door, I slammed my hand down on his desk with the keys under my palm. “Heard you skateboarded to work.”
Kicking his feet up on the desk, looking at me like he had seen me naked, wasn’t stopping me from wanting to punch him in the face for the antics. “As I do every day. Guess you aren’t very perceptive, huh? How does that work? You were fine being Vic’s bitch, literally, not anti-feminist, and you take Grimm’s bullshit. Is it subject to guys you’re into?”
My fists balled up by my side, and with only a desk between us, I was shaking from the anger’s adrenaline. I wanted to explode and damage it all. He stood up, rounding his desk, and handed me a baseball bat. “You’re so stiff you could be considered a dead body. Break something. Break it all.”
“Wh… what?” My voice was shaky and raspy under the pressure cooker he put me in, mixed with the anger and desire to break it all.
Wedging the bat’s end in my hand, after he unwrinkled my fist from behind me, he whispered, “I’m Khaos, babe. Bad behavior is my specialty.”
Lifting the bat up above the glass desk, I gave into the spiraling I knew was poison in my veins. All it took was one drop, and I would be consumed in minutes. Punching the bat down, I watched his whole glass desk shatter without much real force. It had been fragile and ready to break, just like me right now.
Trying to regain my breath and slow my heaving chest, I dropped the bat so I couldn’t do more damage. Controlled damage… I think I was falling in love with the idea as Khaos handed it to me.
He was clapping behind me with a grin from ear to ear. “Thank god we got through that. Can you call everyone in my phone and see who’s DTC?”
With a toss, the phone landed between my hands meant to catch it and my chest, clamped between. Scrolling to the bottom of his contacts before I agreed, I needed to see how many names there were: 30 contacts.
I couldn’t decide if that seemed normal for a guy like him. Scrolling up, there was a name for every letter of the alphabet, plus the boys and his mom. It was peculiar.
“DTC?” I asked, unamused and still recovering, not sure I wanted to know as we stood amongst the rubble.
“Down to cook. I’m thinking of burritos.”
“There’s literally a girl’s name for every letter, no duplicates, 26 girls.”
He walked backwards until his calves hit the leather chair and crashed down onto it. “Don’t judge me, Abigail. I have ADHD. Find me someone to make burritos.”
As I moved toward the door, I felt better, certainly less stiff, and I knew he was to blame, or thank, depending on how you looked at it, when he spoke again. He spoke four times as much as Vic and Grimm put together, so I wasn’t going to voice a complaint. “Word of advice? Don’t take it personally. I’m sure it has nothing to do with his fingers. We don’t have a choice in who we are. Now scamper along, young maiden! I have some role playing to prep for.”
I couldn’t help the sneaky grin I never expected to crawl up to my mouth. Khaos was nothing but fun, and that shit was contagious.
Strutting over to Jus’s welcome desk, I hit call on the first girl’s contact and held it to my ear, waiting for an answer. Jus sat up, intrigued by the phone to my ear. I let it ring three times before hanging up, because I wasn’t a savage. Moving on to the next girl, I put it on speaker and set it down on the surface while I leaned in toward her.
“Do you wanna go out tonight? Drink? Don’t say no.”
Going out after work wasn’t something we did, let alone drinking. We were both home bodies with no issues with drinking at home to reruns of our favorite shows.
Her eyebrow shot up, “Like with people?”
No answer from girl number two. Hanging up, I moved on to the next girl.
“Yes, at a bar with people. Come on! It’ll be fun.”
I watched her tense up and play with the end of her pink braid, which was for breast cancer awareness month. “Can I think about it?”
“Nope. I’ll see you in an hour.”
I was no longer giving people choices or the ability to damper my control. With a pep in my step, I almost skipped down the row of open desks in the bullpen as I hit end and called another girl.
I was on H for Heidi right now when someone finally answered. Well, this is gonna be awkward.
After explaining to Heidi I wasn’t a side piece or random girl a few times, she relaxed. She even asked my name and put two and two together when she asked what happened to the other girl with an A name. I would say he’s in over his head, but I knew he wasn’t. This was him thriving.
Dropping his phone in his lap, I found him sleeping. He woke up abruptly, already throwing up defensive fists. I flinched and leaned away, just in case
he was going to follow through with some automatic defense. “All done. Heidi is gonna cook your burritos.”
I heard the word catch before I saw him toss the pink Starburst, and I successfully caught it this time. I leaned into his mess, and I didn’t combust.
“Not bad, kid…” He was scrolling through messages when he said it, making it seem less valid.
“Was that a compliment?” I stopped at the door’s threshold, waiting only for a second for him to agree, even though I knew better.
“It’s a ‘you didn’t suck’. Take that how you want.”
“Compliment in true elitist form. Didn’t you guys go to prep school?”
Khaos looked up from his phone at me in an odd way that cleared the small smile off my face instantaneously. “How did you know that?” He even pushed himself to the edge of his seat while his eyebrows dropped in a harsh look.
“Vic has photos and stupid awards in his office. Servants of something.”
“That’s enough. You’re released. Playing dumb is better for your health, Abigail. You don’t want to know us.”
The whole exchange pushed me out of the room in a haze of confusion. Was I not supposed to know they went to a prep school? They certainly didn’t go to public with those last names; that much was obvious.
Still reeling from his change in personality at the mention of the school they went to had me wondering if Jus was right. Not about them being Illuminati, but something bigger than us—something we weren’t privileged in knowing—and all the pieces we collected were turning the scales in our direction.
Mafia?
Criminals?
Secret societies?
Illuminati?
There weren't many options when I grabbed my bag and headed for Jus.
ABIGAIL
I couldn’t tell you which drink I swallowed down that had me hellbent on getting the truth to ease my aching mind.
My head pounded, trying to make sense of everything I blissfully ignored for so long. There was no reset button on this kind of stuff. Once the seed was planted, there was no stopping the growth.
