DIESEL DADDY

by Naomi West

  And then we’re rolling aside, onto the bed, lying there breathing heavily. After everything that’s happened this long, long day, the woods and the warehouse and the drinking, this is the only time I feel relaxed. I could lie here forever, I reckon.

  After a while, Yazmin crawls across the bed and into my arms. I never usually do this, lie down and hold a woman when we’re done. I usually get up and get a smoke or a whiskey. It’s too much. We’re too close. A man like me can’t get close, otherwise all his demons’ll come hissing out. But I don’t move. It feels too natural to have her in my arms.

  “Can we just stay here for a little bit?” She kisses me on the chin, our first kiss, our first tender moment. “Is that okay?”

  “Sure. Just a little bit.”

  We lie there until the sun comes up.

  Chapter Eleven

  Yazmin

  One and a half months have passed but I still think about the first night Spike and I shared together. I think about falling asleep in his arms and how close I felt to him. I think about the way we came together as though we’d been together before, knowing exactly what the other person wanted. One and a half months, and still Spike and the Smoking Vipers don’t trust me enough to give me free rein of the clubhouse. I’m kept in the basement and let out only in the evenings, where two guards stand watch—sometimes Knuckles, sometimes Red-Eyes, sometimes the VP, Justin, sometimes Danny —the bulge of their weapons outlined beneath their jackets. I don’t think they’d shoot me, but I also don’t think taking that risk is a good idea.

  “I’ve given you four tip-offs,” I told him one night, when we were both sitting up in bed. “Four tip-offs and all of them worked out, didn’t they?”

  He stared into the middle distance as if he was not hearing me. Sometimes, Spike gets such a sad look in his eyes. From the whispers around the club, I know he was in the army. But when he gets this look, a look which is at once tragic and hopeless, I sense something else is going on. It’s not the look of PTSD. It’s the look of profound heartache. He snapped his head to me, smiling and frowning at the same time, an expression wholly his own.

  “Yeah, they all worked out. Two shipments, a warehouse, and a laundry place hidden right in the center of Sunnyside. But you’ve gotta understand, Yazmin. I’ve been fighting with Snake for years. I know what sort of scumbag he is. He’d sacrifice all of this for a plan.”

  “What plan?” I rolled over so that I was lying atop him, staring into his eyes. We’d just had frantic sex twice in a row but I could feel his cock getting hard against my crotch. “Explain that to me, Spike. You keep going on and on about this plan. What are you even talking about?” I rolled over again, jumping to the floor and pacing away from the bed in my underwear. It’s strange how quickly I’ve grown comfortable with Spike seeing me in my underwear. “I think you’re talking out of your ass. That’s what I think!”

  Spike sighed and tried to approach me. I paced further across the room, stopping only when I hit the wall. Maybe staying in the basement was making me crazy, I thought.

  “I don’t know what plan,” Spike said. “But even this could be a part of it. The way you’re acting now. Snake could’ve told you, ‘When you get in there, gain his trust, and if he resists throw a tantrum about—'”

  I turned on him, ice-cold. “I’m not throwing a tantrum,” I said.

  He winced. A look came into his bright green eyes which told me he’d never gotten this far with a woman. He never usually engaged in arguments like this. He found them petty. “I’m not going back and forth with you on this,” he said.

  I leaped across the room and prodded him in the chest. “You can’t keep me down here like some kind of pet and then refuse to take what I have to say seriously. I’m not your fucking pet.” I prodded him harder, getting in his face. I wanted to stir some of that sadness out of his eyes. I wanted him to see that I was really here.

  But then he just left, leaving me for two whole days.

  Doing sit-ups today in the small homemade gym Spike has set up for me, my mind returns to dozens more memories. We’ve spent entire days and nights in each other’s arms, just lying there. But he never talks. I talk until I suspect he’s growing tired of it. I tell him about the time in second grade when me and Mom went to the seaside to search for shells and I got swept out on the current, how Mom waded in and swam after me in her underwear, dragging me back to shore. I tell him about the time Mom brought one of her boyfriends home—she had a few—and I mistook him for my father, how I clung onto the man’s leg and cried when they broke up. I tell him about sitting up with Mom, a giant tub of ice cream, and The Real Housewives of New Jersey DVD boxset on auto play. But when I try and get him to share something about his childhood, or the army, or anything, he just gives me that faraway smile and shrugs it off. He isn’t the sharing kind.

  That’s why this evening is important, I remind myself as I stand up and go to the running machine in the corner. I set it on the fast setting and sprint at the wall, head down, pumping my arms and working up a sweat. Today I’m going to try and draw Spike out of his shell.

  Once I’ve showered, changed, and made myself some dinner—they finally brought some real food—I sit at the table reading a paperback set in the Jane Austen era. Sometimes I wish Spike could be like Nicholas Appleyard, the soft-spoken gentleman in the novel who’ll do anything to win his lady’s heart. I think of Spike, dressed in his leathers, on his knee with a red rose in his hand. I can’t help but laugh.

  I put the book down when Spike walks into the room. He’s dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, his eyes tired. I know he’s been up all night and half the day guarding a shipment.

  “How did it go?” I ask, getting him a beer. As I go to the fridge, I feel for a second like we’re a regular domestic couple, doing regular domestic things. I hand him the beer and he cracks it on the edge of the table, the cap landing on the floor.

  “Fine,” he says shortly, and I can tell he’s in one of the moods where he doesn’t want to talk. He sits silently, sipping the beer.

  I sit next to him with a glass of wine. I promised myself that tonight I would try and break through to him. Part of me wants to back out, but I can’t back out of it just because it seems difficult. “Spike, I want you to tell me something about yourself.”

  He laughs at first. Maybe he thinks I’m joking. But when he sees my face, he mutters something and shakes his head. I think it’s, “Women.” I bristle, angry, but let it slide. Watching him, I wait for him to speak. After a long pause he says, “I’m dog tired and I just wanna relax, all right? I don’t know where this is coming from.”

  I sip my wine, telling myself to be calm, telling myself I knew this was going to be difficult. “Listen,” I say, “I know it’s hard for you to talk about yourself, but I’ve told you loads about me, and you just sit over there—”

  He stands up and walks to the bed, clicking his neck from side to side. “I’m tired, Yazmin.”

  “You might as well be a stranger to me!” I blurt, jumping to my feet. My heart is pounding, my head pounding. “I just want you to share one thing.”

  “You want me to trust you,” he says.

  I grit my teeth, struggling to maintain any kind of composure. “This is not about the Vipers or the Scorpions, if that’s what you’re trying to imply. This is about us.”

  “Us,” Spike murmurs.

  “Yes. Us. What’s wrong, you don’t like the sound of that?”

  “I didn’t say that. It’s just . . .” He takes another sip of his beer. When he sees he staring at him, he says, “What?”

  “You can’t just say, it’s just . . . and then not say anything! Talking to you is like talking to a brick wall.”

  “What do you want from me, Yazmin?” He’s on his feet now, suddenly angry. “Do you want me to spill out every little thing that’s ever happened in my life? Do you want me to tell you that some nights when I close my eyes I wish I was dead? Do you want me to tell you about all the hat
e and pain in my fucking heart?” He’s standing over me, chest heaving, eyes wild. “I don’t know what you want from me.”

  He goes to the fridge to get another beer.

  “What hate and pain?” I ask. “Let’s start there.”

  “Yazmin . . .” There’s a note of warning in his voice.

  “What?” I snap. “I’m here as a prisoner. You’ve restricted where I can go. Are you going to restrict what I say now, too?”

  “It’s been a long day,” Spike says. “A damn long day. Can’t we do this another time?”

  “There’s never another time with you.” I massage my head. My temples are pulsing. This wasn’t meant to go this way. “I’ve shared. I just want the same from you. What about hate and pain?”

  “I can’t,” Spike says. “I can’t know if—”

  “I’m not working for my dad!” I scream, throwing my glass at the wall. Blood-red wine spills over the floor, glass shatters, shards sparkle before cascading like rain.

  Spike steps back, watching me warily. “You’re gonna need to calm down, Yazmin. You can’t blame me for being suspicious, ’cause you’re still doling me out intel like I’m standing in a food line, a piece here and a piece there. I bet you’ve got a couple’a things you still haven’t told me about. I’m right, ain’t I?”

  I shrug, though he is right. “I haven’t been withholding because I’m working for Dad. I’ve been withholding as insurance. Maybe this is an act. The sex, the closeness, maybe you’re just waiting until I’m not useful anymore.”

  “That’s not true.” He doesn’t approach me, but his eyes are fixed on me.

  “There’s going to be a raid on your nightclub, The Phoenix, and there’s a bundle of guns buried in the woods, just south of the Scorpions’ clubhouse. I memorized the coordinates. There, are you happy?”

  We stare at each other for a long time. Usually we’d go to bed now, lose ourselves in each other, pant and writhe and moan. But as we stand here, I know we won’t be going to bed tonight.

  “Thank you,” Spike says. “And that’s everything, right? Nothing’s changed, Yazmin. You’ve always got a place here.”

  “But you still won’t let me leave,” I mutter.

  “Do you want to leave?” I can’t tell if he sounds hurt.

  “I’m not sure,” I answer honestly. Tonight was meant to be a turning point. Tonight was meant to bring us closer. He was supposed to see my point of view and open up for me. Not this.

  After he leaves, I try and return to the paperback, but Nicholas Appleyard and Nancy Smithson seem ludicrous now. Love, affection, closeness; it can never be that simple. There are always things that get in the way. Sitting up in bed at half past midnight, I wonder if it’s time for me to get out of here, get on my own two feet. I don’t want to stay here if there’s no future. What would that make me? This past month and a half, I’ve thought of myself as Spike’s girlfriend, or at least lover, but if I stay and Spike refuses to open up to me, I’m nothing but a concubine.

  I roll over, burying my face in the pillow, willing myself into my dreams.

  Chapter Twelve

  Yazmin

  “Idiot, idiot, idiot,” I mutter one month and three weeks after Spike took me. I’m standing in front of the bathroom mirror, staring at myself, wishing I could reach into my reflection and throttle the wide-eyed moron who stares back at me. I want to hit something. I want to scream. I want to cry. “Idiot, idiot, idiot.”

  I go into the main room and sit at the kitchen table. It’s ten in the morning, half an hour before the time when G usually comes to bring me some supplies and clean my room. She’ll often have time to sit down with me and have a chat, too, and I can only hope today is the same. I think about asking Spike, but for the past week he’s barely been here and when he has, things haven’t been the same. We haven’t had sex, we haven’t kissed, once we didn’t even speak. I refuse to go back to the way things were, with me sharing everything and him sharing nothing, and he refuses to open up, so we’re at a stalemate. Maybe if I went to him, he might understand. But then again, maybe he’d kick me out or something. I can’t risk it.

  I’m biting my nails, something I never do. I watch the clock. The hand seems to tic around in slow motion, as if trying to torture me. I’ve only wanted time to speed up this badly one other instance in my life, when I was nine years old and Mom told me that she was going to introduce me to my father. I’ve never known if she was really going to introduce me to Snake or if it was a bizarre lie, but I remember sitting in my bedroom staring at my digital clock, convinced that it was broken. I would lean forward to check the batteries before the numbers changed and I’d lean back. Almost a minute later, I’d be doing the exact same thing. When the door opened, it was only Mom, holding a takeout container of Chinese food to make up for being alone.

  Tic, tic, tic, and time crawls on. My forefinger is a stub, so I start on my middle finger. By the time half past ten arrives, all the nails on my right hand are short and jagged, and two of my left hand are as well. The knock comes at the door as it always does, quiet, timid. I go to the door. “G?” I ask.

  “Y.” I can always hear her smiling through the door. “Step back, I’m opening it.”

  “Okay.”

  I step back and she swings the door open. G steps in with a bucket of her cleaning gear and a paper bag with some vegetables sticking out the top. I take the paper bag from her and stow the vegetables away, my heart pounding in my ears.

  “G,” I say, turning as she goes into the bathroom to clean it. “You don’t need to do that. You cleaned it yesterday. I’m not that dirty.”

  “It’s my job.”

  “Then let me help.”

  She rolls her eyes. “You always do this.”

  “Let’s not break the habit, then.”

  I snatch a scrubber from her before she can argue and the two of us go to work on the bathroom. “So how’re things with the boyfriend?” I’m delaying, I know. I should just come out and say it, but the words won’t form on my lips. We’ll sit down afterward, I tell myself. We’ll have a cup of coffee and talk like friends.

  “Not so great,” G mutters. Her boyfriend is a gardener and G thinks he’s sleeping with a woman whose garden he works on. “He came in last night stinking of perfume. I mean, really stinking of the stuff, you know? So I ask him why he smells that way. I think that’s a fair question. He’s always getting on at me about working here, thinking I’m doing stuff with the men when I never have. Isn’t that a fair question?” We’re at my bed, stripping the sheets. She pauses in stripping a pillowcase to look to me for approval.

  “It’s a fair question,” I assure her.

  “Exactly!” she snaps. “But you wouldn’t think so by the way he reacted. Started stomping around the apartment and telling me I’m paranoid, telling me it must be my time of the month. I should break up with his ass.”

  “Why don’t you?” I ask.

  “I love him,” she says quietly, “that’s the problem.”

  Once the cleaning is done, I make to sit at the table, but G packs her stuff away and flees for the door. I chase her, standing near the door, half blocking it. “I thought we’d have a coffee!” I’m being way too intense. I can tell she’s shocked by it.

  “I have to go into town. I have some apartments today. Sorry. Tomorrow though, okay?” She makes to move around me.

  “Wait!” I wave my arms. “Wait,” I repeat, trying to make my voice calm.

  “What is it?” She squints at me like I’m mad. Maybe I am.

  “I need you to do something for me.”

  “What is it, Y?”

  I tell her. Her eyes go wide and she looks like there are half a dozen things she wants to say to me, but in the end she nods briefly and says, “Tomorrow morning. I’ll bring it tomorrow morning.”

  The rest of the day is a torture of creeping time. Ever since being here, I haven’t given much thought to escaping. I know I can’t stay here forever. And more a
nd more, with Spike, I’m starting to think that getting out of here might be necessary. I’m starting to think that sitting him down and explaining to him that I want to go into the world alone might soon be something I’ll have to do. But as for escaping—searching the walls for weak points, thinking about darting out the door when G comes to clean—I haven’t given it any thought. But now, as I try and work out to distract myself, as I stare at the clock, I miss my freedom desperately. I could just make a quick run to the store. Instead, I have to wait an entire day.

  Spike visits me in the late afternoon. We have dinner together but it’s awkward. I make us a curry and we both eat it all, but we hardly talk.