BABY WITH THE BEAST

by Naomi West

  “It’s fine,” I say. “What were you saying? You don’t need to be embarrassed. Like you said, you don’t know me, so what’re you losing by talking to me?”

  “That actually makes some kind of warped sense.” She nods. “But I think I’ll need another drink.”

  I drain my whisky, placing my matchstick on the table. “I’ll second you on that one.”

  I’m having way more fun than I thought I would. I thought I’d just toy with her a little, but this is turning into something else. I have to remember Grimace. He’s the president, after all. And when Grimace gives me orders, it’s my job to carry them out, especially since my time in the slammer means I’m not exactly fighting off other jobs. I push that to the back of my mind and get the drinks. As I walk across the bar back to the table, I look at this Willa, at her legs stretched out beneath the table, her blue-brown eyes full of life, and I wonder what she’d look like panting, what she’d sound like moaning.

  “Where were we?” she asks, sipping.

  “Kids,” I say. My heart is beating fast for some reason, faster than it did when three guys started something in the food line and I had to tool all three of them up.

  “Oh, yeah. I never had much of a family. I was raised by my grandmother after Mom and Dad, and then she died, and so, yeah … I don’t want to be a downer, but sometimes I wish I had a little boy or girl of my own so I could be there for them like my parents weren’t—not that it was their fault! It’s just … Please, stop me.”

  “A game of pool?” I say.

  My mind is on overdrive. What she just said is basically how I feel. What’re the chances that this stranger would feel the same as me, down to the root impulse? What are the chances that some random girl in a building Grimace wants burned to the ground would be so damn captivating?

  I let her win the game of pool. At least, that’s what I tell myself. But as she pots the black, I don’t know if that’s the truth, or if I’m just too busy watching her stalk around the table, bend over, smile, and sip to care.

  Chapter Three

  Willa

  Before we go to the pool table, I slip the matchstick into my pocket. I’m not sure what compels me to do this. I’m not sure if it’s just the vodka—which is doing some serious work on me; I need to slow down—or if some other hidden urge prompts me to do it. All I know is I’m having a good time, a far better time than I should be having considering my position. I should be mentally recording this man so that I can tell everyone at work about him tomorrow, but I’m past that point now. I’m no longer playing the journalist.

  We end up outside after the game, leaning against the wall. Diesel strikes a match and lights a cigarette. He’s nothing like the boys from college, I reflect as I watch him. He’s gruff and slightly mean-looking. He looks like the kind of man who’d do bad things to get what he wanted. I remember the way he picked that guy off his feet, just lifted him up like it was nothing, his eyes dead. But when he asked me about kids, his dark green eyes weren’t dead. They were alive. They were full of life. They were more full of life than they’ve been all evening.

  “Why’d you ask me about kids?” I say. I can hear the slur in my voice. The sun hasn’t even set yet. I don’t think we were in there for more than an hour. But an empty stomach and vodka will never mix well together.

  “Just making conversation.” He takes a drag on his cigarette.

  I’ve never been a fan of smoking. So it isn’t a huge leap in logic for me to reach up, pluck the cigarette from between his lips, and toss it to the curb. I just don’t know where I get the confidence to do it, or what makes me feel like this stranger and I are close enough for me to be able to get away with it. I’ll blame it on the vodka, I tell myself.

  “That’s a lie,” I say. “There’s more to it than that.”

  “Are you a mind reader now?” He reaches for his jacket pocket.

  “If you take out another cigarette, I’m going to hurt you.”

  He turns to fully face me, grinning. “You’re going to hurt me,” he says, and I can tell he’s struggling not to laugh. “You’re going to hurt me. As in … you’re going to cause me pain. As in … you’re going to take me down, Willa?”

  I stand on my tiptoes and look into his eyes. “I just said that, didn’t I? Now tell me, big, scary, Skull Rider man, why are you so interested in kids?”

  “Goddamn, are you always like this? I was just making conversation.”

  “I don’t believe you. I think there’s something else going on here.”

  He steps forward so that his chest is pressing right into me, his leather hard and cold through the fabric of my clothes. “You’re starting something with me. Is that it, little lady?”

  “Little lady?” I laugh right in his face. “This isn’t the fifties, asshole.”

  “You haven’t asked me the most important question of all yet, little lady.”

  “Yeah, and what’s that?”

  My heart is pounding heavily, my palms sweaty. I don’t know if I can blame it all on the vodka anymore. He leans down so that we’re staring eye to eye. His breath tickles my lips, my face. “You haven’t asked me what your prize is for winning at pool.” He takes another step forward so that now our bodies are pressed firmly together. The wall hits my back. I’m trapped. Who knew that being trapped could feel so good?

  “What’s my prize?” I whisper.

  He presses his lips against mine, hard, the way a man kisses when he wants to own you. He kisses me so hard that for a few seconds I don’t think, I can’t think. All I can do is press back, hoping to match the intensity, caught up in the madness of the moment. His lips taste like smoke and man, but it’s a beautiful taste, a taste that sends fingers of pleasure trailing all over my body, around my neck and down to my nipples, hardening them. I want to reach down and grab the front of his pants, see if he’s hard for me, feel the hardness. But then he’s stepping away, a strange look on his face.

  “I’ve got to go,” he says. “And I need you to do me a favor.”

  “What?” I ask, wondering why he’s not close to me anymore, wishing he would be. The aftertaste of the kiss is almost as sweet as the kiss itself.

  He looks at me sternly. His lips twitch. It’s like there are dozens of things he wants to say but only a few he can actually say. “Stay in the bar a while,” he says. “Have another drink. Give it half an hour.”

  “What?”

  He lurches close to me, interrupting my nervous laugh. “Stay in the bar, Willa. I’m safe but stay in the bar, all right? Promise me.”

  Stunned, confused, cogs turning in my mind—matchstick pressing through my pocket into my thigh—I nod. “I’ll stay in the bar,” I mutter.

  “Good.”

  He turns, pacing down the street, back toward his bike, back toward my apartment building.

  I know I should chase after him, or call the police … but what will I say to then? Gossip and suspicions don’t make a fire real. The real reason rears up as I go to the bar, get another vodka. I should call the police, but I don’t want to get Diesel in trouble. The absurdity of the idea doesn’t seem to make it any less real. I tell myself I’ve known him for an hour. I tell myself I owe him nothing. I tell myself the kiss was just a kiss. And yet, sitting here halfway through one too many vodkas, I can’t believe any of it.

  In the bathroom, staring in the mirror, I laugh at my reflection. This is so silly. This is like a dream. Everything that’s happened today since I got off the bus is like something I would invent when I was a teenager, when all my friends were talking about their moms and dads and I would tell made-up stories about all the fascinating things I did on the weekends so I didn’t feel left out. It was amazing. At the age of thirteen I was a catwalk model, a secret agent, a bestselling author, and an astronaut.

  I have to focus on my walking as I leave the bar, which is how I know I definitely shouldn’t have had that last vodka. I take it one step at a time, walking slowly on purpose. The rumors, the
man called Diesel … it fits together so easily. And yet I can’t believe it.

  I feel like an idiot when I see the first wisps of smoke kissing the sky. I try and tell myself they’re not coming from my apartment building, that this can’t be happening, no way, not to my apartment building, not to the building which has stood strong every day for the past year. Then I’m in the street and I see around one hundred people gathered outside, the flickering of emergency lights, firehoses spraying powerful jets of water at the building, trying to tame the flames. Firefighters move around like soldiers.

  I approach Mr. Corby, a neighbor I vaguely know. He’s an old man and once or twice I’ve carried his shopping up to the first floor to him. He’s a glasses-wearing, jacket-wearing, mustache-wearing Englishman. He looks odd standing there in a bathrobe with pictures of dogs all over it.

  “Is everybody out?” I bark. I have to know that. If not, I need to find a police officer. There are enough of them around.

  “Oh, Wilma.”

  “Willa …”

  “Wilma, it was the strangest thing I’ve witnessed in all my long and venerable years.”

  That’s right, I remember. Mr. Corby talks as if he’s reciting a sonnet.

  “I was sitting in my flat and there came a knock at the door. It was the building manager, you know, Mr. Terry, and I told him to go away. Five minutes later he is back, banging on my door with the fury of thunder, and so I open the door and ask him what has got into his nut head. He tells me, quite rudely, that we have ten minutes to evacuate the building, to get anything with sentimental value, and this is the strangest part … to keep a record of those who do not have renter’s insurance so that they may be reimbursed. Luckily, we all have renter’s insurance. So, confused, we all stand in the street, and then—whoosh, Wilma, whoosh—the place bursts into flames. Odd, isn’t it?”

  “Odd,” I repeat.

  I stand with Mr. Corby watching as the firefighters bring the blaze under control. I see some of my other neighbors talking to the police now, undoubtedly giving them Mr. Corby’s story. So a man wants to burn down a building—he is criminal enough to want to do something that severe—but he takes precautions to make sure he doesn’t harm anybody, waiting until they’re gathered in the street before setting the fire.

  All of us have to give statements to the police. As I lie, telling them I have no inkling about what happened, the matchstick burns into my pocket. Part of me is afraid it will spontaneously catch on fire as I’m shaking my head and explaining that I just got back from the bar. Was I drinking alone? Yes, I’d had a stressful day at work and I was drinking alone. I think about how busy the place was, and how dingy, how a place like that most likely won’t have CCTV.

  An hour and a half later, I’m using my meager savings to book into a cheap motel room. I sit on the thin mattress, listening to TV blaring through the adjacent walls, trying to sober up. I don’t know what’s gotten into me. A conversation, a kiss … it can’t be worth this much, can it? It can’t make me lie to the police. But I can’t get over how he went about it—and I’m almost certain it was him—how he warned everybody, how he cared about their safety. A moral arsonist. It sounds like a contradiction.

  I take out the matchstick and lie back on the bed, sober now, the rooms around me silent. Turning it over in my hand, I will myself to pick up my cell and call 911. I can explain that I was drunk and not thinking straight. They’ll understand. I’ll give them Diesel’s name and description. That would be the right thing to do.

  The absolute wrong thing to do, the sick thing to do, would be to grip the matchstick in one hand and slide my other hand down between my legs, pressing down on my clit as I remember the kiss over and over.

  Chapter Four

  Willa

  Walking into the station is usually exactly what walking into school was like. I wasn’t bullied or outcast. I was just unremarkable to my peers. I would walk through the halls getting nods here and there. College was worse. In college, I felt like a ghost. And usually, as I walk into the station clutching my handbag, the same emotions wash over me. I feel like an intruder. I want to scream out for everybody to hear, “I’m here! I exist!” And at the same time, I want to sink into the floor so that nobody can see me.

  Today, it’s like my hair has been dyed green.

  Even the security guard who I’ve never spoken to the whole time I’ve worked here openly stares at me. I walk down the hallway and feel people’s eyes on my back. When I turn, several heads dart away, hiding behind the corner. I stand in the elevator and can feel people watching me, even if it’s out of the corner of their eye. None of them are from my floor so they don’t speak to me, but their eyes burn into me. When I finally walk onto my floor, the place goes dead quiet and dozens of heads turn to me, staring.

  I go to my desk and get started on my copy, pretending like I don’t know that this place has turned into a zoo and I’m the only animal. In the morning light, with my head groggy from all the alcohol, I was able to tell myself that last night was all a crazy delusion. There are facts. My place burned down. I was on the phone with the insurance people on the bus. But meeting Diesel and the matchstick and the arson … all of that was a lie. But we have a TV in the office and right now it’s playing a news story with my apartment building in the background and the word “arson” in the foreground.

  I don’t want to talk to anybody about it. I don’t know what to say. I tell myself I don’t know for sure that Diesel had anything to do with it, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have my suspicions, suspicions I haven’t even attempted to tell the police about. I think about masturbating over Diesel last night, how wrong and yet right it felt. He made sure nobody was hurt, I tell myself. But then, isn’t that simply justifying?

  I’m in the breakroom making myself a much-needed coffee when Brittany enters. From the way she enters, trying to be way too casual, curling strands of hair around her forefinger and pretending not to look at me as she makes her own coffee, I know why she’s in here. She’s been sent to gather intel. She’s the scout.

  “So,” she says, stirring her coffee, “anything interesting happen with you last night?”

  “Come on,” I say. “Really? You’re really going to pretend like this whole place hasn’t got me on neighborhood watch right now.”

  She feigns a shocked look. “I have no clue what you’re talking about.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “So.” She darts to me, abandoning her coffee and almost spilling mine. I only save it by quickly placing it on the counter. “What happened? You must’ve freaked out when you saw it, right? Were you in your apartment? What happened?”

  I take a step back, but then I’m boxed in, Brittany on one side and the wall on the other. I remember last night, when I was boxed in with Diesel. I much preferred that.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “What do you mean? How can’t you know if you were in your apartment?” She gives me a condescending look. It seems everybody in this place is destined to give me condescending looks. “You can’t stand there and tell me you can’t remember if you were in your apartment or not!” Her voice rises, her cheeks flush, and all in all she looks far more frustrated than she has any right to be. Not for the first time, I reflect that Brittany has some emotional problems. “Can you?”

  “I guess not,” I mutter. Emotional problems or not, she’s my only work friend.

  “So, were you?”

  “No, I was at a bar.”

  “A bar?” She squints at me through her glasses. “With who?”

  “Alone.” I answer quickly, feeling like I’m on the witness stand.

  “You were at a bar, drinking alone,” she says, tutting. “That’s not any way to keep your looks, is it, dear?”

  I barge past her. “You’re thirty, Brittany,” I snap. “Stop talking to me like you’re my concerned grandmother.”

  She blocks the door with her arm. “Excuse me, miss! But you won’t speak to me like that
! I can tell you that right now!”

  “Let me past,” I say. “If I don’t want to talk about it, I don’t want to talk about it.”

  She leans close to me, her face warping into what I guess is supposed to be a concerned expression. It doesn’t really fit with her features. “I’m your best work friend,” she says. “You know that.”

  There’s that distinction again. She’s too eager to make that clear. It’s just like college, when I walked the halls alone only to have pals in class. “I know,” I say, more so she’ll move than anything else.

  “So why won’t you talk to me?”

  “Because I don’t feel like talking.” A thought hits me, a monetary thought. I can afford two nights in the motel, then I’m in serious trouble. “It’d be different if you were going to offer me a place to stay.” Her face drops. Her lips tremble. She opens her mouth, but all that comes out is a stutter. I fake a laugh. “I’m joking.”