Skin (44 Chapters #1)

by B. B. Easton

Black eyes.

  Zombie eyes.

  The fence.

  I shoved myself underneath feet first, pushing with my hands and scraping my back in my haste. Before I could get all the way through Knight cleared the top and pulled me the rest of the way out by my legs. We ran through the woods, the unlit streets, hand in hand. My lungs burned, my legs burned, but they kept pumping, desperate to keep up.

  As soon as we made it into the alleyway I collapsed in a heaving, gasping heap onto the fire escape. Knight growled and smashed the bat into the wall at the bottom of the stairs, breaking it in half, then threw the handle at the dumpster at the end of the alley causing an avalanche of crashes and clanks to echo between the two buildings.

  Cut the yellow wire, BB. Quick! Knight’s gonna blow!

  I sat up, trying to act cool while still trying to catch my breath, and said, “Jesus. You sure know how to show a girl a good time.”

  Knight didn’t laugh though. Instead he gripped his head with both hands and shouted, “Shut up! Shut the fuck up!”

  His scream hit me like a fist, knocking me backwards.

  Knight turned his head and looked at me with pure venom in his eyes. Hatred.

  “I killed him.”

  “What?” I asked, not processing his words.

  “Are you fucking deaf? I killed him! I smashed his fucking head in! Look at me!” Knight spread his arms and turned to face me.

  I looked. Really looked. Knight’s eyes were crazed. His chest heaved under the place where it used to say Lonsdale on his hoodie. The place that was now smeared with something shiny and dark. And new veins bulged in his face, under skin that had been splattered with the same dark substance.

  Knight looked exactly like a man who’d just beaten another man to death with a baseball bat. He looked like a monster, ready to feast on human hearts and howl at the moon. I wanted to tell him he was wrong. Tell him he hadn’t just killed someone, but one look into his eyes told me to shut the fuck up. The blackness of his soul had overtaken his irises, and he looked more undead than ever.

  “He pointed a gun at you.” Knight jammed a blood covered finger in my direction. “He pointed a fucking gun at you!”

  Knight was breathing heavy with rage and shaking from the adrenaline. He looked like he wanted to kill him all over again. Or me.

  “Hey. It’s over. Ok? Shhhhhh. It’s over.” I reached out slowly, like he did to that mangy dog, gauging his reaction before I pushed any further.

  “Shhhhhh...” I touched my fingertip to the one he was still pointing at me, and watched as his face crumpled and his eyes squeezed shut.

  “Shhhhhh…” I laced my fingers between his, and watched his breathing become shallow, as if he were fighting back tears. As if I were hurting him. Then suddenly he crushed my boney fingers between his and I became the one who was breathing through the pain.

  Knight spoke just barely above a whisper, grimacing as he struggled to control his emotions. “Eighteen years. I’ve been fighting what I am for eighteen years, and tonight I fucking lost it.” His grip on my fingers tightened even more to the point that I had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from whimpering in pain.

  “I’m a fucking killer. I’ve always known it. I’ve thought about it since I was a kid. Dreamed about it. Drew about it. But I learned to control myself. I kept people away. I never let anybody get too close. Until you.”

  Knight’s eyes snapped open, and although they were glistening with unshed tears, they were positively murderous.

  “You make me fucking weak.” Knight jerked me up by my crushed fingers and grabbed me by my biceps, squeezing them tighter than he probably realized.

  “The thought of him pointing that fucking shotgun at you…” Knight shook me. “I want to kill him again for that!”

  “Shhhhhh...” I whispered again, lifting my crushed fingers in an attempt to touch him. With my biceps pinned to my sides, the best I could do was touch his forearms. Knight rejected my comfort, shoving me backward the moment I made contact.

  I grabbed the stair railing to stay upright, then instinctively began rubbing my arms with my hands, trying to coax the blood back into them.

  “Why the fuck are you still here, Punk? I told you, I destroy everything! Fucking look at you!” Knight shoved a bloody finger in my direction again as his rabid eyes darted up and down the length of my body. “You were a kid! A freckle-faced fucking kid! And I took your innocence, burned it to the ground, and pissed on the fucking ashes. I shoved needles through your body. I fucked you. I cut you. I branded you with my name. And now I made you a fucking accomplice to murder!”

  “Manslaughter,” I blurted out, still rubbing my arms. “If it wasn’t premeditated I think they just call it manslaughter.”

  “Why the fuck are you so calm?!” Knight screamed. “What is wrong with you?! You should be running for the fucking hills right now!” Knight pointed in the direction of the street behind us for emphasis.

  “What do you want me to do?! Call the cops? Turn you in? That’s not gonna bring him back, Knight. That’s not gonna fix what happened. It’s only gonna ruin more lives—yours and mine.” Now I was the one pointing fingers.

  “I know you think the worst of yourself,” I continued, “but you’re not some mindless killer. You saved my life back there, because you love me. So, no, I’m not running from you. I love y—”

  Before I could continue my monologue about how we were in this shit together, the blood-soaked skinhead before me took two giant steps up the stairs, gripped the railing on either side of my body, and screamed into my face, “I WAS THE REASON YOUR LIFE NEEDED SAVING IN THE FIRST PLACE, YOU STUPID BITCH!”

  I recoiled, and Knight brought his fists to either side of his head, wincing at his outburst. I wanted to slap him. Shove him. Scream at him. Not for yelling at me, but for beating up the man I loved from the inside out.

  “Get the fuck away from me,” Knight said more quietly, his eyes screwed shut, fists boring into his head.

  “I’m not going anywhere without you.” My words came out with more attitude than I intended.

  Knight’s eyes flew open and he grabbed me by my biceps again. Turning me to face the bottom of the stairs, Knight gave me a shove, causing me to stumble down the first few steps until I caught the railing and steadied myself at the bottom.

  “GO!”

  I turned and looked up at the seething, broken, bloody monster looming over me at the top of the stairs. I should have been afraid of him. He’d bruised the shit out of my arms—even through my puffy jacket—and may have fractured a finger or two, but I didn’t care. The man I loved was coming unglued before my eyes and all I wanted to do was put him back together.

  “Knight,” I said quietly. “Don’t do this. Please. You’re beating yourself up. I get it, but don’t push me away. I can help you.” I could feel him shutting me out. Walling me off. “You…you need me.”

  With my words the old Knight came crashing back. Not the Knight I’d grown to love. Not the fuzzy-headed boy who wrote me love letters and drew me pictures and whose heartbeat always synchronized with mine whenever we were close. No, this was the version I met on the first day of school. Cold. Calculating. Staring down at his victim and considering his next strike.

  Devoid of emotion, Knight announced, “You’re right. I need you to get the fuck away from me.”

  “Knight, stop it.”

  “I wish I’d never met you.”

  “Knight.”

  “All of this shit happened because of you. You make me fucking weak…” Knight’s eyes roamed over my body, scowling at my appearance, pausing at my arms, which were undoubtedly smeared with blood from where he’d grabbed me. When he finally locked eyes with me again I grimaced, bracing myself for his final blow. “…And I make you way too fucking hard.”

  With that, Knight turned and headed inside. The sound of the heavy metal fire escape door slamming shut rattled in my ears for minutes before I actually registered that he was go
ne, and that I was all alone, in an alleyway, at God only knows what time, in downtown Atlanta.

  I should have been upset about almost being killed twice in one night, or remorseful about the man who’d lost his life because of me, but what made me crumple and clutch myself and weep like a wet rag being wrung out was the fact that my first boyfriend, my first love, had just broken up with me.

  When my sobs eventually subsided, I realized that my purse and all my stuff was still locked inside Knight’s truck. I probably could have walked to the gas station and borrowed the phone—called Juliet or August or even my fucking mom—but I physically couldn’t leave. I was tethered to the man on the other side of that door, and the invisible cord that linked us was stretched as far as it would go. I had no choice but to sit on the stairs, pull my arms and legs inside of Knight’s jacket for warmth, and wait for him to come out.

  When I woke up I was disoriented. Where ever I was, it was not where I’d fallen asleep. I was warmer. My cheek was stuck to vinyl. And there were illuminated digital numbers above my head.

  The break room.

  I leapt up in a panic and tore through the shop looking for Knight, hoping I’d find him asleep in his tattoo chair or smoking out on the fire escape, but he was gone. The only sign that he’d been there at all was a pile of stuff on the floor by the back door. I flipped on the light in the hallway and I saw my backpack, my overnight bag, a stack of cash sitting on top of my purse, and a note scrawled on the back of a blank Terminus City Tattoo receipt that read:

  GET THE FUCK OUT

  That invisible cord that wouldn’t let me leave earlier? Evidently Knight had chopped that fucker in half while I was sleeping.

  Knight ripped himself out of my life just as forcefully as he had pushed his way in. He stopped returning my calls. He stopped coming by his locker. He stopped smoking at the church between classes. And we didn’t even have the same lunch period that semester.

  He disappeared so entirely that for the first few days I thought he must have been arrested for manslaughter. I scoured the internet, my parents’ newspapers, and the evening news shows but the only information I found said that a local junkyard owner had been killed in a “senseless act of violence” and that there were no leads. The police had set up an anonymous tip line in case anyone would like to come forward with information, but I knew they wouldn’t be getting any calls. The only people who had any information about what happened were me, a dog, and a ghost. And none of us was talking.

  Once I realized that Knight hadn’t been arrested, I figured out that the only way to see him was to bolt out the door the second the dismissal bell rang and sprint to the back of the parking lot where his truck was parked. But seeing him was literally about all that I accomplished. Knight would walk right past me, climb into his truck, and drive away. Leaving me a shattered mess in his rearview mirror.

  I refused to give up though. I knew Knight loved me. I knew whatever he was doing he was doing to protect me. And I knew he was destroying himself from the inside out. I just had to show him that I was capable of loving him through it. That I was strong enough to handle him at his worst. He may have been able to push everyone else on the fucking planet away, but I wasn’t everyone else. I was motherfucking Brooke Bradley. I was the bitch who jumped on her parents’ bed until it broke because they wouldn’t buy her a trampoline. I got what I fucking wanted. And I wanted Knight to let me love him again.

  After a few weeks of crying myself to sleep every night, leaving notes in Knight’s locker, calling Terminus City when I knew he’d be at work, and trying to beat him to his truck just so he could breeze past me like I wasn’t there, I decided to up the ante. I was going to Peg’s motherfucking house.

  I felt like an asshole for doing it, but I asked August if I could ride the bus home with him. He and I wound up with the same lunch period again that semester, and we were the two saddest sacks of shit you’d ever seen. Although having me all to himself seemed to cheer August up a little bit, his black flop of hair and chipped black nail polish were still the perfect complement to my mood.

  I swore I’d never hang out at his trailer ever again, but he did live pretty close to Peg…and a certain skinhead I was stalking. August agreed to let me ride home with him, but I could tell it hurt his feelings. I didn’t mean to use him, but I know that’s how it probably felt.

  Goddamn it.

  I hugged August hard once we got off the bus and thanked him profusely before stomping off in the direction of Peg’s house. I cut through the woods between August’s trailer park and Peg’s neighborhood to shorten the trip, the tall pines casting a chilly, ominous blanket over an otherwise beautiful early-April afternoon.

  I emerged from the woods in the cul-de-sac at the end of Peg’s street. My backpack weighed me down, but in a good way. It felt like armor. And as I cast my eyes up the street at Knight’s monolithic white monster truck, I knew I was going to need it.

  I made my way up Peg’s rickety front stairs and felt the blood drain from my extremities with every step. When I reached the top I could no longer feel my feet, nor my finger as it pressed the shiny new doorbell that Knight must have installed since the last time I’d been there. My empty stomach churned out a batch of fresh acid as I waited for the door to open.

  When it did, the blood drained out of my face as well. The person who answered was not Knight. And it was not Peg.

  It was Angel fucking Alvarez.

  She didn’t smile. She didn’t invite me in. She raised her eyebrows, cocked her head to one side and said, “What the fuck do you want, bitch?”

  What the fuck do I want?

  “Um…I just want to talk to Knight,” I replied, not masking my confusion in the slightest.

  “Well, he don’t wanna talk to you.” Angel looked me up and down, her nose wrinkled in disgust.

  “I just…we just need to talk about some stuff. Angel, please.” I felt so ridiculous asking this person who didn’t even know Knight, who had no idea what we’d been through, if I could come in and talk to my own fucking boyfriend. I wanted to shove her out of the way and find him myself. Honestly, I wanted to claw her eyes out and rip her two-tone hair out by the roots, but Angel was built like a brick shithouse and would have torn my ass limb from limb.

  “I don’t give a fuck what you need. Knight don’t fucking love you no more, and he don’t want yo ass here.” Angel puffed up her ample bosom, draped in a low-cut L.A. Lakers jersey, and put her hands on her enviously full hips. “Now either you gon’ leave, or I’ma make yo skinny ass leave.”

  I blinked at her in disbelief. Was he fucking Angel now? It had only been a few weeks. What the fuck had I missed?

  “Angel, I don’t know what you think—”

  “Bye, bitch,” Angel said, just before she slammed the door in my face.

  While I might not have had much luck interacting with Knight—at school or anywhere else—Angel was suddenly more than happy to engage me. As were her hood rat friends. She and a handful of other baggy-jeans-and-big-hoop-earrings-wearing scrappers started waiting for me at my locker in the morning and between classes. They heckled me in the hallway and postured like they wanted to fight. Angel would say adorable things like, “Knight told me you can’t suck cock for shit,” and her friends would chime in with, “Angel might be pregnant.”

  I felt betrayed. I felt attacked. I felt unsafe and alone and heartbroken and borderline suicidal, but above all, I felt so fucking confused. This was the girl who said her brother and her friends would beat Knight’s ass for bothering me. This was the girl whose brother’s friend got the shit beat out of him against the side of her apartment by Knight. This was the girl whose brother might kill him if I quit paying Tony every month to keep his mouth shut. What the fuck had I missed? Suddenly they were in love? Knight went from trying to protect me from these people to serving me up on a fucking platter?

  It didn’t make any fucking sense, but my brain was also not really functioning properly consideri
ng that it had been fueled exclusively by fear and grief for weeks. Not food. Or sleep. Or education. Those were luxuries of the past.

  All I had left was August, the occasional hallway or phone conversation with Juliet, fading memories of a relationship that may have only existed in my head, and a fading tattoo on the inside of my ring finger.

  With Knight being out of the picture, Juliet’s boyfriend extorting me for money, and August’s house being off-limits, I was fresh out of options for after school transportation. Which was actually totally fucking fine with me. I didn’t want to talk to anyone anyway. I didn’t want to laugh and drink cheap beer and watch daytime talk shows. All of that shit seemed so trivial now. Sitting on a curb for two hours every day studying and writing poems that no one would ever read actually sounded fanfuckingtastic.

  Of course, it was April, which meant that I actually spent most of my after school wait time huddled in the B hall doorway trying to stay out of the rain. I could have waited in the front office, but fuck if I was about to hang out in the same space as all of the school administrators smelling like cigarette smoke. I’d rather get drenched.

  On one particularly monsoonish day, I was leaning up against the wall just inside the B hall doorway, reading A Clockwork Orange—which I’d convinced my Language Arts teacher was a perfectly appropriate piece of British literature for my book report—when one of the double doors burst open and almost squished me against the brick wall I was leaned up against. Luckily, my steel-covered toes took the brunt of the force rather than my face, but I still screamed and dropped my book like a little bitch.

  The person who’d opened the door spun around, and immediately took what was left of my breath away. It was a boy. A cute boy. A really fucking cute boy with short black hair that was a little bit spiky on top. He was wearing a Nine Inch Nails T-shirt, black Dickies with a chain wallet, and black Converse. His eyes were open wide, in shock over almost crushing someone, and I could see that they were green, like mine. They also looked like they might be rimmed in eyeliner, like mine.