by Lili Valente
I was a girl. Just a stupid little girl, playing at being a woman, thinking I understood what it meant to promise someone forever.
But I understood nothing.
Forever is impossible. Forever in a vacuum, maybe, but not forever in the real world.
The real world has too many ugly variables. It chews you up and spits you out and then goes back for seconds, gnashing you between its teeth until you barely recognize your own face in the mirror, let alone the face of the person you love. The person you loved when you were someone else, someone with a functioning heart, who hadn’t been forced to choose between two masters.
I could never have hated the men who hurt me the way I needed to hate them if I was trying to love Danny at the same time.
Love lies. Love whispers that living well and loving well are the best revenge. It convinces you to let go, step back, and leave justice in the hands of God or karma or some other imaginary thing that will never get the job done.
If there is a God, then he let four men brutalize me and continues to allow unimaginable horror to befall innocent people every day. If that God is real, I want no part of him and nothing in my personal karma earned me a gang rape or a not guilty verdict for the men who violated me.
God and karma are lies and maybe…
Maybe love is a lie, too.
If love were real, then I wouldn’t be able to look at Danny without bursting into tears and running into his arms. I wouldn’t be able to cross the room and stand facing him through the glass without saying a word. Not a word, after so long. If love were real, I wouldn’t be able to reach out and draw the curtain between us, shutting myself in even deeper darkness and leaving Danny on the other side.
But I do it.
I draw the curtain and then I wait, breath held, ears straining for some sign of what he’s doing on the other side.
I don’t know what I’ll do if he forces his way in. I was prepared for someone to hurt me—I’ve been preparing for that for months. I’m not prepared for someone to care or to go hunting for the girl they knew hidden inside the woman I’ve become. That girl is dead. I wouldn’t know how to be her if I tried and I’m not going to try. I can’t, not until I’ve finished what I’ve started.
And maybe not even then.
Hope, faith, and a soft heart made that girl weak. I refuse to be weak again. If I have to choose between happiness and strength, I choose strength. I choose to be hard and cold and ready to fight my own battles without anyone else to protect or disappoint.
Danny wouldn’t love the person I am anyway, I think, the thought sending a sharp feeling spreading through my chest. He should go and spare both of us an exercise in pain and futility.
Finally, after five endless minutes that seem to stretch on for an eternity, I hear the fire escape creak as Danny climbs down to the street below. I hear the soft thud of boots on concrete as he lands and the softer tread as he walks away. Only when I’m certain he’s gone do I let myself crawl back onto the bed and curl up in a ball so tight my abdomen cramps and my spine starts to ache.
I press my fist to my closed mouth and fight to steady my breath, but I don’t think about Danny and I don’t cry.
I haven’t cried in a year and I’m not going to start now.
I am going to breathe, sleep, and then get up in the morning and try to forget I ever saw the man I used to think would be my forever.
Chapter Four
Danny
“If I love you,
what business is it of yours?”
-Goethe
* * *
If this had ever been about me, I might have kept walking.
If I’d come to Costa Rica looking for Sam, instead of the monsters who hurt her, her dismissal would have cut me apart. The only thing worse than not knowing where she is or how she is or if she needs me is looking into the big blue eyes of the woman I love and seeing…nothing.
No love. No hate. No sadness or regret.
No emotion at all aside from the clear desire for me to leave and never come back.
I had thought I was frozen on the inside, too cold to feel much of anything anymore, but the past two days have proven otherwise. From the moment I spotted Sam at the airport, my pulse has been unsteady.
My heart races every time I spot her newly blond head bobbing through a crowd. My throat locks up with fear every time I watch her make another dangerous decision. And last night, meeting her eyes through the glass and realizing I mean nothing to her, I felt like I was going to die.
Maybe I did die, a little.
I feel like it.
Every muscle in my body aches, my eyes are blood-shot and throbbing, and my stomach churns and spits, protesting every drink of coffee I force down my throat. But I don’t go back to my hotel room on the other side of town to sleep it off. I stay on the sour-smelling couch in The Allegro Hotel lobby, watching the stairs, waiting for Sam.
There’s no other way out of her room except the fire escape and I doubt she’ll go that route. She won’t expect me to be here.
I almost wasn’t.
I don’t know how long I walked before I finally stopped and turned around, only that it was near morning and I had to take a cab back to the hotel because I was so lost. But as soon as I sat my ass down on this couch, I knew it was the right choice. My hurt and pain don’t matter. There will be time to mourn the death of what Sam and I had later after I make sure she doesn’t spend the rest of her life in prison.
I finish my coffee and sit staring at the peeling paint on the wall behind the lobby desk. The clerk lost interest in me an hour ago and is busy shuffling papers and typing numbers into a calculator with a printer attachment, the kind that makes a chugging sound every time he hits enter. The sound is oddly meditative, and by the time I hear familiar footsteps on the stairs, I’m as close to a Zen state as I’m ever going to achieve while I’m in the same room as Sam.
Leaning back against the mildewing cushions, I watch her descend the cracked marble stairs, by far the nicest feature of this run-down hotel. In a pair of khaki shorts and a white tank top, with her hair pulled back in a braid, she shouldn’t take my breath away, but she does.
She’s as beautiful as ever, more beautiful in some ways. She’s always been strong, but now she’s ripped, with toned arms and chiseled legs that leave no doubt she’s a force to be reckoned with. And the way she holds herself, with her muscled shoulders rolled back and her chin up, is the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen.
My girl is beautiful and strong and determined not to take any more shit from the world.
She will always be my girl.
I will always love her, even if her love for me is one of the things she’s had to burn away in order to rise from the ashes of what those animals did to her.
She shifts her gaze as she descends the stairs, not looking surprised when she spots me on the couch. She hesitates on the last step for a moment before stepping down and starting my way, but she doesn’t flinch or frown.
When she stops in front of me her face is smooth and expressionless and her eyes as empty as they were last night, bulbs with burned out filaments incapable of flickering to life.
“You shouldn’t be here,” she said. “You should go.”
“I’m here for the same reason you are.” I keep my voice soft and even, despite the way my heart is racing. “We’ll be better off if we work together.”
Sam shakes her head. “I don’t need or want your help.”
“You may not want it, but you need it.” I stand, looking down into her tanned face, gut churning harder as I fight the urge to reach out and touch her. It feels so wrong to be so close but still held at a distance. “I’ve been following you since you got here. I can guess what your plan is and it’s not going to work.”
“It’s going to work just fine,” she says with calm assurance. “I know what I’m doing. I’m not the person I was before. I know how to handle myself.”
“I don’t doubt it, but we can f
ind a better way. You don’t have to put yourself at risk. We can get the job done and still be free to walk away.”
She tilts her chin to one side as her eyebrows pinch closer together. “What do you want?”
“The same thing you want,” I say, then add in a whisper, “And I want to make sure you don’t get killed or sent to prison for the rest of your life doing it. I swear I’m not here to make any demands. I just want to help.”
Her frown deepens as she casts a glance over her shoulder at the clerk, whose calculator is still clicking and whirring, before turning back to me. “We can’t talk about this here. I was heading out of town for the day. You can come if you want.”
I nod and my shoulders relax a little for the first time since she pulled the curtain last night. “All right.”
“But I’m not making any promises,” she warns, hitching her backpack higher on her shoulder. “And after we’ve talked, if I ask you to leave again, I need you to listen and do as I ask.”
I hesitate, but finally nod again.
I’m not leaving until I know she’s safe, no matter what she says, but there’s no sense in having that fight right now. I learned to choose my battles when we were a couple and I sense that’s an even more important skill now that we’re…whatever we are now.
Nothing. You’re nothing to her. She doesn’t care if you live or die.
Ignoring the ugly voice in my head, I follow Sam outside into the bright morning light, where the air is already beginning to steam and the sidewalk to sizzle. Sam may not be capable of caring about me anymore, but that’s not her fault. It’s their fault, and maybe once they’re gone, things will be different.
Or not. It really doesn’t matter.
All that matters is making sure justice is served.
Chapter Five
Sam
“Know thyself?
If I knew myself, I’d run away.”
-Goethe
* * *
We don’t speak much on the drive out to the abandoned airstrip.
Danny stares out the window as city buildings give way to scrubby grassland on the way to the lush jungle not far from town. I concentrate on following the directions I wrote down last night and ignoring the Danny smell that fills the car, making every breath an exercise in forgetting.
Forgetting how that smell was once the best, the safest, the sexiest smell.
Forgetting what it felt like to wake up and have his spice and sea-salt scent be the first thing to fill my nose. Forgetting how I loved to burrow closer to his bare skin, press my cheek to his lightly furred chest, and relish the first few sleepy moments of the day with the man I loved.
For the first time in months, I feel the ghost of the old me shift beneath my skin, whisper through my blood.
By the time we reach the turn off to where I’ve planned to start my target practice, my body feels like a limb that’s been asleep too long, fighting its way back to life. The humming of long-dormant sensations prickling across my skin is as unwanted as it is painful and makes me resent Danny’s presence more than I did when we got in the car an hour ago.
I don’t want to wake up. I don’t want to come back to life.
I need to stay dead, cold, numb. I need to stay focused and having Danny around is going to make that impossible.
It doesn’t matter if he approves of my plan or how much he wants to help. I need him to go. I should never have invited him to come with me today. I should have shown him the door and said whatever it took to make him leave me alone.
At the end of the dusty road leading to the old airstrip, I pull in behind a few low trees near the chain link fence and shove the car into park with a rough jerk of my arm. My jaw is clenched so tight my teeth are grinding together and I suddenly want to punch something, the way I did in the early days, right after the trial ended.
Back then, I was so full of anger I would spend hours at my punching bag, beating the shit out of the foam filled leather until I was covered with sweat and trembling with exhaustion. Some nights I wouldn’t even make it to my pallet in the corner. I’d fall asleep on the floor in a puddle of my own sweat and wake up in the morning stiff, sticky, and so sore I could barely breathe.
But that was okay. There was no one there to judge or expect anything of me. It was just me, my pain, my mission, and whatever it took to keep going.
I learned to be grateful for that, to be content with the simple, spare existence left behind after everything but hate was cut away.
And now Danny is here, looking beautiful and sad, smelling the way he smells, shitting all over my focus with his gentle voice and his determined words and the way he looks at me like all he wants in the world is to hold me.
“Are you going to talk?” I snap as I reach between the seats and grab my backpack off of the floor. “I thought that was the reason you were here.”
“I’m not in any big hurry,” he says smoothly, unruffled by my flash of temper. “I’d like to see you shoot first. That’s why we’re here, right? So you can try out the gun you bought last night.”
I stiffen. “If Carlos had seen you, you could have gotten us both killed. I was told to come alone and he isn’t the kind of man who tolerates people disobeying orders.”
“Obviously, but he didn’t see me. Neither did you and I’d been following you for the better part of two days,” he says. “I’m better at sneaking around than you are. Which is one of the reasons you need me.”
“I don’t need to be good at sneaking around. I just need to be in the right place at the right time and have enough ammunition.” I lift my chin and meet his gaze, trying not to think about how familiar his green eyes are. As familiar as my old face in the mirror, back before Todd and his friends put my metamorphosis into motion. “You might as well save your breath. I’m not going to change my mind.”
Danny shrugs, one of those shrugs that could mean anything or nothing, and reaches for the door handle. “Let’s go shoot something. Maybe you’ll feel like listening after.”
Barely suppressing a growl of frustration, I swing out of the car and slam the door behind me, leading the way down the trail twisting into the jungle without looking back to see if Danny is following. I know he is, just as I know it will be hell to get rid of him if he doesn’t want to go. He’s the only person I’ve ever met more stubborn than I am.
Or more stubborn than I used to be, anyway.
He might be surprised how far I’ll go to get my point across now. I don’t want to have to frighten him away, but if he leaves me no choice…
I take a deep breath and quicken my pace, not wanting to go there just yet.
According to my research, there’s a shallow canyon at the end of the trail, tucked behind the old airstrip. In the forties, before the Costa Rican military was disbanded, the army used to test weapons out there.
Local gossip holds that the ground is poisoned with old biological warfare agents. The canyon is supposedly still beautiful, but the locals avoid it, and since it’s on the flight path of commercial planes, the drug lords do the same.
There are no monkeys hanging from the trees pressing in on the trail, but as we get closer to the canyon, the call of toucans and the other tropical birds makes it feel like we’re a thousand miles from civilization. Just around a turn, a scarlet flash flutters across the trail as a parrot lands on a low limb and fans its wings wide, stretching in the morning sun.
Danny pauses behind me, grunting softly as the bird squawks down at us from above.
Even I—as focused on the destination, not the journey, as I am—can’t keep from stopping to admire the creature for a moment. I’ve never seen anything like it outside of a zoo or a pet store. It’s so beautiful, so over the top gorgeous with its brilliant feathers that it’s almost magical.
“Remember when we used to talk about surfing our way through South America?” Danny says from over my shoulder. “I brought my board. If you want to go out later, we could swap out. I hear there’s a good break no
t far from town.”
I glance at him, too stunned by the suggestion to form a response.
“Just because you’re here to kill people doesn’t mean you can’t have a good time, too,” he says, mouth curving in a lopsided smile.
I shake my head. “This isn’t a game.”
“I know it’s not,” he says, smile fading. “It’s not a game, and if you get caught with that gun, you could spend eight years in jail.”
My lips part, but he pushes on before I can get a word in.
“You don’t even have to shoot anyone with it. Just having it in your possession would be enough.” He steps closer, sending his Danny smell swirling around me all over again. “They don’t fuck around with gun laws here. Even citizens have to jump through hoops to own a gun and get put in jail if they’re caught with an illegal weapon.”
“I’m not going to get caught.”
“The Seasons has its own security team,” he says. “Did you know that? And from what I’ve seen so far, they’re better organized than the local police. If you shoot four men on their property, the chances of you getting off the property before they catch you are slim to none.”
“I don’t care,” I say, angry that he knows something I don’t when all I’ve done for the past year is prepare for this. “As long as I take care of them first.”
“So you want to end up in jail?” His eyes narrow. “How does that even the scales? If you end up going to prison for the rest of your life for murder?”
“I told you, as long as they’re dead, I don’t care.”
“Well you should,” Danny says, heat in his tone for the first time since he showed up at the worst possible moment. “Because you deserve to have a life after this. A real life. Not dying isn’t the same as living, Sam. You know that. You have to know it.”
