Dirty Laundry

by Rhys Ford

  “I can’t feel… inside of me anymore, Cole.” He sounded scared, more terrified than I’d ever heard him sound before. Even in the grip of the bloodshed and death we’d slogged through, Jae’d been stoic, practically phlegmatic in enduring his troubles. Suddenly the shell was cracked, and a little boy with a broken heart poured out in a slithering, yolky mess. “I can’t feel my heart anymore. It just… hurts too much to breathe.”

  “What did she tell you? Your mom?” I didn’t even know the woman’s name. He’d never told it to me. Right now, it didn’t seem as important as what she meant to him. “Maybe you didn’t hear her straight. Maybe she just needs time.”

  “No, she is done with me. She said that she’d always known I was… wrong, but she didn’t care because I wasn’t there living with her anymore so it didn’t matter. I didn’t matter anymore.” He was tiring, too much energy spent on too little, and the bitch seemed to have sucked everything out of him. Bruised circles puffed up the skin beneath Jae’s drooping eyes, and he sighed, unable to hold himself up anymore. “I was nothing to her. Nothing more than someone to feed off of. I thought… I wanted it to be different… I wanted her to love me. She is my mother—”

  “You have me. And Scarlet. Hell, Jae, you’ve got so many people around you.”

  “But they’re not family,” he insisted softly. “Not my family. She’s going to take Tiffany. I don’t know if I’ll ever see her… or Ree again. I can’t… I can’t let her take my sisters from me, Cole-ah. She doesn’t care for them… forgets them and does things with men. I can’t let my sisters live like that. Like I did when I was their age. It kills you inside. You’re so alone, Cole-ah. I don’t want them to be that alone.”

  “We’re your family, Jae. I’ll be your family.” I didn’t know what else to say. Trapped in the sticky threads of Jae’s pain, I could only hold him tighter and rock him as he cried. “And you’re not nothing. Babe, you are everything.”

  “Don’t leave me, Cole.” His arms tightened around my stomach, thrusting sharp tingles through the bandaged knife wound along my ribs. “You promised if I told you to never let me go, you’d be here.”

  “Hey, I’m here, aren’t I?” I reminded him. Sliding my hand under his chin, I tilted his head up until I could see his face. “I’m not going anywhere, Kim Jae-Min. Promise to God, whatever it takes, wherever you go—I’m there.”

  “Agi?” Jae didn’t cry pretty. His nose was red, but he was pretty. Beautiful in every way that mattered, especially when he bent his head down to kiss my fingertips.

  “Yeah, Jae?” I murmured, stroking his lower lip with my thumb.

  “Saranghae, jagiya.” He took a deep breath and whispered something I’d wanted to hear him say for a very long time. “I love you.”

  THE day was just beginning to kiss dusk when Jae began to shiver violently in my arms. I’d sat and held him close for nearly an hour and a half, letting him cry himself out at first before spending a long time kissing him better. I didn’t want anything more from him than his mouth and body against mine, stroking his heart back open after it’d been stabbed through by his mother’s rejection. We’d talked some, coming to the conclusion we were both freezing our asses off and the world would look a whole hell of a lot better if we had food and alcohol in us.

  I reluctantly let him go and picked up the produce box. The leeks tickled my nose, and I pushed them to the side. Jae moved stiffly, his legs probably frozen from squatting on the cold cement.

  “Let go. You’re injured, remember? Go unlock the door.” Jae sniffed with shuddering hiccups as he wrestled the box from me. “I want to talk about something besides… me. Is Terry and his mom okay? No one knew where they were, ne?”

  “Yeah, he’d gone to take her to the dentist. She broke a tooth on something. It’s why he lit out of Gyong-Si’s, so they missed the whole thing.” I snatched an escaped apple from the box as it rolled around near a bunch of celery. “Wong said Abby’s doing well too.”

  “Did you talk to Bobby? How is he feeling?”

  I didn’t have a chance to give Jae an answer. Instead, my attention was drawn to a woman who’d stepped out from the back of my building and onto the walkway, her arms draped loosely by her sides. I barely recognized her, and when I did, my brain stuttered to a standstill, refusing to accept the reality of the skeletal woman shuffling across the cement walk.

  Defibrillating my mind, I choked past the lump in my throat. I squeaked, “Sheila?”

  The last time I’d seen Ben’s wife, Sheila, had been the day of Rick’s memorial, a hastily thrown together affair attended by a few of his friends and my family. When I’d called her to tell her about the service, she’d responded with such a dull voice, I’d wondered if she’d even heard me. I would have preferred the brain-dead zombie who answered the phone to the harpy who’d arrived at the chapel. She’d cornered me in the vestibule, told me she never wanted to see me again and she’d be damned if I ever came near her kids. That was the last I’d seen of her, and even then, she’d taken an emotional beating she probably couldn’t recover from.

  It’d been the final blow for me, and I’d walked out of the memorial mourning not only the loss of my lover but the disintegration of a family I’d thought of as my own. To see Sheila standing in front of me was a shock, but not as bone-chilling scary as what she’d become.

  Sheila was nearly unrecognizable, more like one of those shrunken apple dolls shaped to look like her. Red lesions mottled her sunken cheeks, and the blonde mane she’d once been so proud of hung in brittle hanks around her too-thin shoulders. Even from a distance, she smelled rank, a sour, curdled odor with a hint of raw sewage. A soiled wifebeater hung on her skinny frame, but the thin fabric did nothing to hide the concave swoop of her chest or the slight bloat around her belly. The black of her teeth stank of meth use. Even without seeing their rotting, crumbling edges, the lesions were as good a sign of a meth addict as any.

  Her parched, cracked skin flaked off in a dusty storm when Sheila raised her arms and leveled a wicked-looking Glock at us. It was nearly too heavy for her, and I recognized it as Ben’s personal piece. I’d given it to him for Christmas once, and we’d spent time on the range testing it out, turning up very late for dinner that night.

  I moved forward to grab at Jae, but Sheila warned me off with a wave of her weapon. When she spoke, her lips cracked further, and I could see the black rot eating away at her teeth. Holding up my hands, I slid slowly closer to my lover, and Sheila let a shot bark out, shattering the living room window. The shot-up glass blew out everywhere, pelting Jae and I with tiny sharp pebbles. The gun jerked up in Sheila’s hand, nearly slapping her in the face, but she brought it back down quickly, its sight finding me again.

  “Hey, come on, Sheila. You’ve got friends here.” I was going to try talking. Hell, I’d try sucking the gun off if it would make her feel better, but Ben’s wife had other plans. “What’s going on, huh? Do you need some help?”

  “They took my kids, Cole.” Her tongue slithered around her mouth as she spoke, unfettered by her lack of front teeth. “You know that? Did your friends—the cops—tell you that?”

  “Cole-ah.” Jae began to speak, but I shushed him, wanting to keep Sheila’s attention on me. He was still caught up in the savagery his mother had inflicted on him, and I could hear him try to catch his breath behind me.

  “Sheila, honey… we can get someone to help you get them back, okay?” I nudged closer, trying to get closer to Jae. Seeing her strung out and wild-eyed, I didn’t have any doubt the kids had been taken from her. She barely looked stable enough to be outside of a loony bin. “Why don’t you tell me what happened?”

  “What happened?” she screamed. “They took my kids! My parents took my kids! I’ve got nothing now, you fucking faggot. Nothing! No one!”

  “Sheila—”

  “Don’t say another goddamned thing!” She was in full scream mode, and I took the chance to edge up against Jae’s side. “Is this who you
’re fucking now? Does he know what a damned slut you are? You weren’t happy with that faggot asshole you were living with? You had to go and fuck Ben too? You probably got him sick and that’s why he killed himself. Because you gave him some faggot disease he couldn’t live with.”

  “Honey, Ben never ever looked at me like that.” I patted at the air, hoping the motion would calm her. “He didn’t like men. Not like that. He loved you. Things were just too hard for him.”

  “You think he loved me? Then why the fuck did he leave me? What the hell was so damned hard that he killed himself? Huh?” More spittle flew from her mouth, and a speck hit my face.

  “I can help, honey,” I soothed. I was searching my brain for a way to get Jae out of there, but short of throwing him through the broken window, I was coming up empty. “Just tell me why you’re here. What can I do for you?”

  “You know what I’m doing here, Cole? I’m going to do to you what you fucking did to me. You took Ben. You took my kids. Rick was fucking nothing. You want to know how I feel? This is how I fucking feel.”

  That’s when she lifted the gun up again and blew a hole right through Jae’s chest.

  Epilogue

  WHEN I’d been under, consciousness slid up around me with an undulating lucidity. Once when I was floating on a river of painkillers, I listened to the whistles and beeps serenading me and wondered who was playing Pac-Man over my dead body. The machines wheezed and beeped and moaned, blipping out squeals in rhythms usually only found in video games or bad porno. Sitting with Jae-Min in the hospital room, I was again being sung to by the bells and whistles, and not for the first time I wondered who was in charge of the controller and when would he stop fucking with the man hooked up to the machines.

  A shadow passed behind me, one of the nurses or orderlies tending to Jae, but I didn’t really see them. The only thing I saw was the man lying too still under the bleach-scented white hospital sheets.

  Over the past few days, the hospital staff had tried to move me from the room. I wasn’t having any of their shit. I followed Jae from ICU to the private room they’d finally put him in, keeping an eye on him. Keeping my heart going with every beat of his.

  There’d been an argument about letting me stay with him. A lot of swearing on my part and then some negotiating done by Mike and Scarlett’s hyung convinced someone Jae and I were domestic partners. Either way, I wasn’t moving. While everyone, including Ichiro, took turns sitting beside me, Scarlet kept me company most of the time. She and Tiffany were my constant shadows, while Maddy and Claudia provided a backup chorus for their nagging, sometimes even ganging up on me to take a shower or eat.

  His mother never came. I called. God fucking knows I called. I fucking begged into her voice mail, promising her everything… anything… just so she’d come to her son’s side.

  Nothing. Scarlet told me to give up, that the woman wasn’t worth it, and plied me with so much coffee I was beginning to wonder if I was fucking Tantalus.

  Still, hot and bitter coffee was good. The hospital food, not so much.

  He woke up sporadically, at first fighting the tube they’d shoved down his throat, then battling the nurse when they took it out. I’d held his hand, trying to soothe his fears, but Jae was too far gone… too far in the black to hear me. I wasn’t even certain he knew who I was when he woke up the next time, his unfocused brown eyes trying to track my face when I leaned in to talk to him. He might have heard me say three words, and then he went under again.

  HIS face was wet with tears when I came in, and the deep brown eyes I loved to stare down into were caught someplace off in the distance, staring at something outside of the window. It wasn’t much of a view, mainly the ass end of the building next door, but something in the reflective windows called to him. I pulled the chair closer to his bed and picked up his hand before I sat down and held his cold fingers tightly.

  “Babe?” I got no response, so I tried again. “Jae?”

  “You’re too far away. I need… to feel you against me.”

  I was going to catch hell for what I did next, but fuck the rules. Working down the bed guard, I slid in behind Jae, tilting him slightly forward so he could rest against me. Other than a wince when his stitches were pinched, he said nothing, but the shuddering sigh of relief was all I needed. Cradled in my embrace, he snuggled back, his breath snagging on his pain until he was comfortable. I was mindful of the drainage tube they had placed on his right side, keeping it as tangle free as I could.

  “I am so stoned. No wonder you get shot a lot.” His tongue sounded like it was two sizes too big for his mouth and a silly grin played hide and seek with me. “How is Neko? Where’s Tiffany?”

  “Trust you to ask about the cat, then your sister.” I laughed, rubbing at his stomach. “Tiff’s staying at Mike’s house. I think Maddy likes having a full-sized doll to dress up. From what I hear, they’re buying up LA. Ichi’s at our house. He’s Neko’s favorite person right now. He cooks her an egg every morning.”

  “How bad was I hurt?”

  “Not too bad.” I grinned back at him when he gave me a sour look. “No really, on the scale of zero-to-Cole, you barely registered. She hit your lung, but other than that, you’re doing okay. They just wanted to keep you under for a few days.”

  “Fuckers.” It was odd to hear him swear. Most of the time he rolled with everything, but for that one second, it seemed like I was rubbing off on him. Which was a good thing, considering how much time I spent rubbing against him. “Did they catch her?”

  “No, hon. They didn’t. I didn’t.” I kissed the back of his head, grateful Scarlet had brought waterless shampoo for his hair. “They will. I’m not going to let this go.”

  I could have said more. I could have told him how I didn’t give a shit about where Sheila’d run off to after she’d shot him or how I didn’t chase after her, choosing instead to hold my hands over his wound to keep the blood in his body.

  After sitting in the ER with Jae’s blood all over my hands, I chewed through every cop’s ass I saw until Wong was hailing down a doctor to tank me with sedatives. My own wounds hurt, scarred-over reminders of the last Pinelli who fucked with me and my own. Ben took the coward’s way out. He took himself out before I could get a hold of his fucking life-destroying ass, and I’d feel cheated if I found out Sheila danced off to her karmic destiny without me helping her get there.

  “Let the cops find her, Cole-ah.” He tightened his arms around mine, and one of his elbows thrust sharp tingles through the bandaged knife wound along my ribs. “Remember when you promised you’d never let me go? Now is good. I need you here. Now.”

  “Hey, I’m here, aren’t I? I’ve even eaten the shitty Jell-O they put on your plate so you don’t have to,” I reminded him. “I’m not going anywhere, Kim Jae-Min.”

  “Agi?” The time spent drugged out of his mind had taken a toll on his face. His skin was drawn tight across his cheekbones, and he’d lost some weight, sharpening his features until they were nearly vulpine.

  “In case it was lost in all of this, I love you, jagiya.”

  It was fantastic to hear. Despite the R2-D2 orchestra playing the salsa behind us, those were words I needed to hear… wanted to hear. Even sweeter was the kiss he gave me, a slow brush of his mouth, the chap of skin rough on my chin.

  “I love you too,” I whispered into his mouth. “But no more getting shot. I don’t think I can take it.”

  About the Author

  RHYS FORD was born and raised in Hawai’i, then wandered off to see the world. After chewing through a pile of books, a lot of odd food, and a stray boyfriend or two, Rhys eventually landed in San Diego, which is a very nice place but seriously needs more rain.

  Rhys admits to sharing the house with three cats, a black Pomeranian puffball, a bonsai wolfhound, and a ginger cairn terrorist. Rhys is also enslaved to the upkeep of a 1979 Pontiac Firebird, a Qosmio laptop, and a red Hamilton Beach coffeemaker.

  Visit Rhys’s blog at h
ttp://rhysford.wordpress.com/ or e-mail Rhys at rhys_ford@vitaenoir.com.

  How the story started

  http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com

  Also from RHYS FORD

  http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com