by Aubrey Dark
“Now you know how I feel,” Gav said, watching my expression. “Careful, or you might fall in love with her.”
“Ha! No, I’m keeping her locked up in the library. I only took her out this morning to let her go to the bathroom. I gave her a bagel. I don’t know,” I said, feeling like I was rambling. “It’s a sticky spot to be in.”
“Are you keeping her sedated?”
“No.” I thought back to when I had paralyzed her, and a rush of blood ran down to my dick. I’d loved watching her eyes as I pleasured her. And last night…“I don’t know. What would you do?”
“You know what I would do.”
“No I don’t.”
“Hypothetically,” Gav said, tracing the scalpel around Mr. Steadhill’s big toe, “hypothetically I’m you. And I have this girl, an innocent girl, locked up in my library.”
“Yes.”
“And I’m falling for her.”
“I’m not falling for her.”
“And I’m kind of falling for her.” Gav smiled. “Do I kill her, or do I let her go?”
“There’s no other option?” I asked.
“She knows you’re a killer.”
“I haven’t killed anybody yet,” I said. “What if I let this guy loose?”
Mr. Steadhill looked up hopefully at me, growing silent for the first time in hours. Gav poked his foot again with the scalpel and he yelped.
“Of course not. Kill him. But you can’t keep her here forever. You’ll have to decide whether it’s worth it to you to let her go.”
“I can’t let her go. If the feds see her leave my place, they’ll just track her down and kill her themselves. Or send her to someone else like me, to make her disappear. She’s got her foot in some messy business, here, Gav.”
“You’re telling me.”
“You don’t think I could just keep her here?” I asked, hating the pleading note in my voice.
“It’s tough, keeping a girl locked up. I only lasted what, a week with my hostage? I couldn’t handle it.” He frowned. Blood began to stream down Mr. Steadhill’s foot and onto the floor.
“Damn, I nicked a big blood vessel here.”
I rolled my lab stool over to the medical cabinet and fished around in the drawer.
“I keep thinking that something will come to me. Some idea that will make everything okay.” I pulled out a bottle of superglue and tossed it over to Gav. He caught it and opened it up.
“You wish. If you don’t love her, kill her. Put her out of her misery.”
I frowned. The girl was interesting. It was interesting to touch her. Interesting to talk with her. She’d surprised me with her boldness. I didn’t want to swat her down. It didn’t seem right.
“And if I do love her?”
“Do you?”
“God, no,” I said. “But as a hypothetical.”
“Rien.”
“What?”
“You’ve never lied to me before.” Gav grinned, applying superglue to the cut on Mr. Steadhill’s foot. The blood stopped flowing.
“Who knows, maybe she’ll decide that she can stand to kill this asshole. Then we’re both murderers. Or rather, she’s a murderer.”
“That’s a weak plan.”
“It’s all I’ve got.”
“Pretty weak.”
“You think so?” I scratched my chin. “Why?”
Gav raised his eyebrows at me.
“Seriously, Rien? Here, let me show you what’ll happen.” He mimed picking up a phone. “Hello, police? Hi, some crazy man kidnapped me and tortured me and forced me to kill a guy. Your high up guy at the CIA won’t think twice about cutting you loose if that shit goes public. And like you said, if the feds get to her right away, she’ll be dead in two seconds.”
“Fine. I’ll come up with another plan.”
“Better hurry up before the feds realize this guy’s wife isn’t dead.” Gav was back to cutting, this time around the pinky toe.
“I don’t care about that. They have it all on camera. Two people come in here, no people come out. That’s all I got paid for.”
“You got paid to kill two people. A husband and a wife.”
“So?”
“So the wife isn’t the wife,” Gav said, pointing the scalpel meaningfully at me. “And neither one of them is dead.”
“And?”
“I’m just saying,” he said, going back to the pinky toe, “you didn’t really do the job you got paid for.”
“You want my job? You think you can do my job?”
“No, I don’t want your job! I’m just saying.”
“God, Gavriel. Alright. Let me alone. I gotta think.” I rubbed my hands over my eyes. This wasn’t going at all the way I’d thought it would go. I wanted Gav to come up with an idea that didn’t involve killing innocent people or getting caught.
“Alright,” Gav said. He wiped up the mess under Mr. Steadhill’s feet, spraying the tile with bleach before tossing the washrags down into the incinerator. He stopped at the door and looked back. “Want to come up for a barbecue this weekend?”
“Maybe. If I can figure this thing out.”
“Hey, don’t do anything drastic, okay?”
“Don’t worry, I’m not some emotional pansy like you,” I said, not knowing if that was entirely true after all. After last night. “See you around, Gav.”
“See you.”
He left, and I was alone with Mr. Steadhill. I twirled the scalpel in my hand. Gav being more coldhearted than me? I wasn’t falling for this girl. If anything, I was making her fall for me.
“This isn’t like me,” I said aloud, more to myself than to the man tied down on the table next to me. “I swear it. It’s just a bit of fun, that’s all. I can kill her whenever I want to.”
Sara
Rien let me brush my teeth in the waiting room bathroom that morning. I washed up as best as I could without a shower. I wanted to ask him if I could take a bath in the other side of his house, but when I came out, he was rubbing at the dark circles under his eyes. He locked me up in the library and then went back to the operating room, leaving me to eat a bagel alone. I heard voices through the bookshelves, and occasionally Gary’s screams. I tried to ignore them.
After an hour, he came back into the library wearing a different shirt. I didn’t know how to act around him. He moved as confidently as he had before, treating me like nothing had happened. I was nervous, panicky. I tried to act as nonchalantly as he did.
“Thank you for breakfast,” I said, motioning with the bagel.
“Sure,” he said. “Did you sleep well?”
“Yeah.” I thought of what he’d said earlier. “Even the part where I lost my conscious identity.”
“Really? I didn’t think I was that good.”
I choked on my bagel with nervous laughter. Rien offered me the glass of water. I took a drink and wiped my tears away, coughing. All of the uncertainty that I’d carried with me through the night burst out of me.
“Oh,” I said, breathing deeply. “Okay. Alright.”
“Did you want anything else to eat?”
“I’m fine. Rien,” I said, catching him about to leave.
“Yes?”
“Why did you come in here last night?”
He raised his eyebrows slightly and leaned against the door.
“I wanted to know more about you.”
“Like what my nipples feel like in the dark?”
“Sure.” He smiled, and I felt a twist of unease work its way through me. Was that all it was?
Don’t be silly, Sara. Of course that’s all it was.
I looked at the bookshelves, my eyes unfocused.
“Did you want to talk?” Rien asked. He came back over to the end table and set the tray down. The plate clinked lightly against the silver.
“There’s not much to say, is there?”
He looked at me without speaking for a moment. His gold eyes ran down my body, resting on the curve of my hip where his
shirt stopped at my thigh.
“Why did I come to you last night?”
“You’re asking me?” I said. “I don’t know. Maybe it was your unconscious identity making the moves.”
He studied me carefully. Under his hard gaze, I felt my skin burn. I turned back to the bookshelves, resting my fingers lightly against the spines of the books.
“You’re different in the light,” he said finally.
“Yeah, lots more photons bouncing everywhere.”
“You’re different. More sarcastic. Colder.”
He stepped toward me, and I could feel his presence pressing the air back. The library felt different now. Hotter. Wetter.
“You just can’t see me scowling in the dark,” I said flatly.
“Is that what you call it?”
I flushed.
“I don’t know how not to be sarcastic,” I said. I pulled a book out of the bookshelves and flipped through it, not seeing the words.
“You weren’t sarcastic last night.”
“I don’t know what last night was.”
Rien leaned against the bookshelves and looked up into my face. I bit my lip and looked straight at him. He was never different, I thought. He was always cool, unflappable. He was the most confident person I’d ever met. I’d only ever seen under that calm confidence once. Last night.
“Why did you want to be an actress?” he asked.
“This again?”
“Is it the fame? Money?”
“Why are you asking me?”
“I want to know why you wear so many masks.”
“Everybody is fake,” I said, shoving the book back into the shelf. “Why shouldn’t I be good at being fake?”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Sure it is.”
“I want a real answer.”
I couldn’t tell him the truth to his face, not when he was looking at me like that. So I turned away and sat back down on the couch.
“I never wanted anything, okay? We were poor.”
“That doesn’t make sense. It sounds like you would want everything, then.”
“Why?” I frowned.
“You said it yourself: you had nothing.”
I shook my head. My chest tightened as I thought about it.
“You don’t understand. That was why. I couldn’t beg my mom for candy when we were all eating bread for dinner. I couldn’t want anything. One time on my birthday, I asked my mom if I could have a Barbie. A Barbie! That shit costs like twenty dollars new. And I saw the look on my mom’s face when I asked. It was so much hurt in that look.”
Rien was staring at me. I could tell. I could feel his gaze on me, like I felt his fingers all over me last night. It was a palpable stare, and I shifted in my seat.
“I didn’t realize it until later. What it would have cost her to buy me a Barbie. What it cost her just to buy the bread we ate. And when I realized it, I stuffed all that want so far back inside of me that I never wanted anything at all.”
Tears burned the backs of my eyes. Everything she had done for me and my sister! There was no way I could possibly repay her for all she had done for us.
“You did want things, though. You just didn’t tell her.”
“No!” I looked up. “That’s what I’m saying. I stopped wanting anything. Inside. I convinced myself that I didn’t want happy meals, or toys, or even a soda from the 7-11. I convinced her that my favorite lunch was mayo on toast, because that’s all we could afford. I saw the look on her face when my sister whined about what we ate.
But it wasn’t just her. I convinced myself. I buried every single want I ever had deep down, burned away all the desire. I covered it with concrete and cinder blocks and locked it away for good.”
A sob rose in my throat and I cut it off, biting down on my tongue. I didn’t want to cry in front of him. Not him. Not now. What happened to keeping myself locked behind a mask? I was failing, miserably. He had torn down all of my screens and now I was sitting in front of him as exposed as if I was naked.
Rien came over and sat on the couch. He put his hand on my knee. I wanted to shake him off. I wanted to pull him into an embrace. I wanted to kill him.
“You’d make a good serial killer if you decided to change careers.”
It was such a strange comment that I burst out with one short laugh. Rien pulled out a handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to me.
“Oh, yeah?” I asked. “Why?
“Concrete and cinder blocks? That’s basically how you get rid of a body.”
I bit my lip. He smiled at me and kissed the top of my head. I couldn’t help it; I leaned into his arm and savored the pressure of his lips. His warmth.
“So that’s why you want to be an actress.”
I nodded, wiping the tears from the corner of my eyes.
“Yes. Because every character has a motivation. Every character comes with a set of goals, desires, dreams. It’s wonderful to slip into a part and not have to think about anything except that one motivation that keeps you going. Pretending to want something is almost as good as wanting it.”
“You don’t have any motivations at all?”
“No. Never.” I twisted the handkerchief in my lap.
“I don’t believe that. It’s a mask, that’s all.”
His face flinched when he saw my expression.
“You think this is a mask I’m wearing on top of my real self?” I asked. I balled the handkerchief up, blotting the tears angrily from my cheeks. “It’s not. It’s all there is. It’s a bunch of masks, one on top of the other. There’s nothing underneath.”
“That’s not true.”
“I’m not lying.”
“I didn’t say you were lying. But it’s not true. There’s more to you than just that. You have passion in you. Dreams. It’s not empty inside. Trust me. I’ve met a lot of empty people.”
Suddenly, I was sad. I was pretending. Always pretending. Even now. Pretending to pretend. Was that really all my life was?
“Thanks for believing in me,” I said listlessly. “The one person to tell me to follow my dreams is a psycho serial killer.”
“Psycho? Excuse me?”
“You rip people’s faces off.”
“Rip is such a rough word. I cut their faces off. Surgery is a precision skill.”
“Whatever.” I blew my nose.
“You know, you remind me of a quote. ‘If I had a desire, it would be to be free from desire.’”
“Sounds like me. Who said that, the Dalai Lama?”
Rien smiled.
“Charles Manson.”
“No way.”
“Sounds like you, huh?”
“Okay. Okay. I walked right into that one.” I chuckled sadly.
Rien stood up, and I wanted to take his hand and pull him back down onto the couch. Oh, God! I wanted a serial killer to comfort me. I felt so goddamn empty.
“I’ve got to go to the grocery store, my dear little psycho,” he said. “I’ll be back.” He reached over to the shelf and pulled out a book. It landed on the couch cushion next to me.
“Manson: A Biography,” I read aloud.
“Maybe he’ll give you some good ideas,” Rien said, his eyes twinkling golden brown. “For what you want.”
“From the grocery store? I want a cupcake.”
“Sara, I mean it.” His expression softened. “Think on whatever it is you want. Or if you really do want… nothing. I’d like to know.”
“What do you want to know?”
“What you want. What makes you tick. What makes you you. Surely you’re not such a psychopath as Manson. Or maybe…”
“Maybe what?”
“Maybe he was the sane one.”
“Only you would think that,” I said. I held up the book in front of my eyes so that Rien could not see me cry. I did not want him to know how much it meant to me that someone cared about what I wanted, even a little. The words blurred behind my tears as the door closed behind hi
m.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Rien
How could I kill her? I’d only just begun to understand her. I walked down the sidewalk meditating on the strange fascination that had come over me.
She was my plaything, yes, but as I peeled back her defenses, I saw more to her than she saw in herself. I could not cut out that consciousness, no, not with what I saw there. I could understand her frustration, at least in part. There was no way I could tell her, though.
My life on the surface might have been the opposite of hers. My family was rich, ambassadors who traveled from one European country to another. On the surface, I’d gotten everything I wanted. My mother and father had kept me carefully clothed. They bought me cars, food. They gave me money and arranged dates with other embassy children. But there had been no love. Everything I began to love, they took away.
I only ever loved one girl, and they took her away, too.
I shook the thoughts from my head. The Los Angeles sun beat down on my head, and the whole world looked too bright to be real. Along the street, I passed by shops and bars full of fake people chattering about fake nonsense. All I wanted was to get back to her.
In the grocery store, I ran my hands along the aisles, picking out things I thought she might like. A ribeye that would pair nicely with the Cabernet vintage I’d been saving. Heirloom carrots to add to the mashed potatoes. Once I reached the end of the aisle, I realized I was whistling.
This girl, what was she doing to me?
I bought my groceries, exchanging polite smiles with the cashier. I would have to be more careful, I thought. Today I had the excuse of a date. If this turned into a longer arrangement, though, I would have to spread out my shopping. Buying food for two would be an easy way to get caught.
Turning the corner back onto the street, I thought of the cupcake store I’d be passing by. My mind was on flavors. Chocolate? Strawberry? I wasn’t looking out. I wasn’t thinking.
I’d forgotten that not thinking gets me in trouble. Stupid. Careless.
I didn’t see him waiting for me in the alley.
Sara
I picked up the Manson book that Rien had left for me on the couch. I turned through the pages, skimming it. The first part was all about his childhood, so I flipped through to the middle. There was a statement in his trial testimony that caught my eye. I leaned back on the couch and read through the page.
