by Nicole Thorn
I knew she meant it as a joke, but I still wanted to play. Slowly, I took another sip and set the mug down in a safe place. When I did, I swiftly picked up Lynnie and dropped her onto the counter. She yelped and took a second to recover.
I slipped my hand between her legs, lightly touching her through her panties. I spoke low in her ear. “Force, huh?”
She nodded. “A force to be reckoned with.” Her teeth closed around my earlobe. Ah, I guess two can play this game. Sadly for her, I almost always won.
Still touching her, I let my eyes bore into hers. “If I didn’t have somewhere to be…” I pressed my fingers against her and she arched to me with a hitch in her breath. “…I would show you what a force really is.”
Lynnie smiled, accepting the challenge with her eyes. “I could say the same to you, Deputy Barker.”
All right, so I guess that turns me on now. Should add some interesting feelings since I hear it from people a hundred times a day. I would think of her each time I heard it.
I kept the cracks out of my voice, the proof of the power she had over me. In the end, it didn’t matter. She knew anyway, and I wanted her to understand. “I need you,” I said, honest and weak.
She held my head up, hands under my chin. “I need you, too.”
“Why?”
She scoffed. “Don’t say that. Don’t make me think you think this is wrong.”
“It is,” I whispered. My hand had already stilled on her, and now I held her thigh. I needed to feel her skin on mine.
I saw the heartbreak in her eyes as she searched mine. Her fingers curled in and her voice no longer sounded steady. “What are you saying? Do you want me to go?”
“No.” I let the word rush out of my mouth. “I don’t ever want you to go.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
I stared at a button on her shirt, the necklace on her chest, anything but her eyes. She could see right through me. “I’m scared that I’m bringing you down. Or that I will. You’re perfect and you’re innocent. All I am is dirt.”
Her tone matched mine. “I don’t know why you think that, but you’re wrong. All this you see in me, it’s not real. One day you’re going to figure that out. You can’t bring me down. Not when you make me feel the way you do.”
I wanted to latch onto every word she said. She always had a way of saying what I wanted to hear, the things I dreamed of before the night she let me become human. I still felt like I lived in a dream, awakening threatening me every second. My bubble would pop, and I would be back to the demon I had been when the sun came out.
But I hadn’t been dreaming. My reality had simply changed. In all the evil I’d done, I had been rewarded. Maybe the atrocity of that had something to do with the trepidation. Maybe it had been all of it. Because I didn’t deserve this, I assumed it would go away. The world had never been fair like that. I knew first hand, since my role in this life had been judge, jury, and executioner. Good things happened to bad people all the time. Why shouldn’t this last?
“I feel,” I started. “I feel like I’m a monster. And you’re this perfect being.” My eyes found hers as I tried to make her understand. “I see you and I see everything I didn’t know was real. It feels like ecstasy when you look at me the way you do. I’m addicted to it, and it scares me. I don’t understand at all why this happened to me. I felt nothing before you. Nothing but malevolence.”
“Why?” she asked in a breath. “I don’t understand why you feel this way about yourself. Did something happen? Did something make you feel like this? Because I can’t fathom why you see a monster in the mirror. All I see is someone with compassion and love and more humanity than I’ve ever seen in anyone else.”
“Just for you,” I answered. “Those things only exist in me because you made them.”
“Don’t you see how it makes me feel when you say things like that? You think of me like I think of you. You think I’m something special, but I’m not. I have to live up to this image you created and I’m terrified of the day you figure out that it’s not real.”
I smiled and shook my head. “It won’t come.”
She ignored me. “You didn’t answer my question. Why do you believe all these things about yourself? How can you be a monster when you’ve saved my life and the life of every person The Ripper would have killed?”
I answered as best I could. “No. Nothing happened to me. It’s just something wrong in my head.”
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” she said like she knew. I almost believed her. Then I remembered that she didn’t have all of the facts. She didn’t know that I was a murderer. She examined me. “Does this have something to do with killing the sheriff? He was a bad man. He deserved to die. Is it because he was the first person you killed?”
I wanted to laugh at the question. I’d been a killer for more than half a decade. She thought that guilt over taking a life caused my self-hatred. It made sense to me that she believed it. Someone like her would believe in a concept like guilt.
I shook my head. “That’s not it. It’s not something I can explain, since I don’t even know.”
Lynnie put her arms around my middle. “I want you to feel like you can tell me anything. I won’t judge you for anything you say or do. What I feel for you is unconditional, Isaiah. My heart is yours. Forever.”
Oh, I wanted that to be true. I wanted her to love me. More than that… the thought popped into my head. I wanted her to know me. Know what I was and still love me. She wouldn’t, of course. If she knew, she would run. Rightfully so. The love in her eyes would go away forever. I would be alone, and she would be broken.
I pressed my lips to hers, soothing myself in the only way that I knew how. She responded the way I needed her to — trapping my lips between hers. She felt warm, and she smelled like my soap. She belonged to me. She didn’t have all the facts and we played an uneven game, but she still belonged to me. I played dirty, but I won.
“Are you going to be okay here?” I asked.
She nodded, mood darker than before. “I can take Blue for a walk. I’m still a little tired, so I might nap. Will you be back by dinner? I can make something for us.”
“Yeah, I’ll be back in time.”
I left her behind and went out to my car.
On the way to work, I thought about cashing in all my vacation days and staying home until school started back up again. It would only be a few more days. The sympathy had started waning. That way, I could at least know Lynnie wouldn’t be all by herself or with those stupid friends of hers. I really wished I could kill them.
Lynnie’s texts started coming in before I even made it to the station. I sat in my parked car, looking over them. She decided that she needed to take Blue out. Then she stopped by her house to get some fresh clothes. Good. I hoped she would bring enough to keep her with me for another year. I bet her parents wouldn’t have noticed her absence if she moved in. Maybe they would if they smelled the rotting food that no one ate. Even then… they’d have to be home to notice.
Then the thought came to me that it would be a crazy person thing to do if I asked her to move in with me. I hadn’t even told her I loved her yet. Because again, it would be crazy to do so. We hadn’t known each other all that long. Though I thought I’d been in love with her since the start, she shouldn’t love me yet. No. I would wait until the recommended amount of time. I could look it up online or ask a few of the people at work. When could I tell her I loved her? Ask her to move in? Ask her to marry me? I knew, I knew with all of my absent heart, that she would be the only one. In this life I thought I’d spend alone, I needed to share it with her. I could be good for her. I could give her what she needed. Keep her happy with a house, a pet, and children if she would have them with me. I could be good for them too. They would be good, because their mother would be. She could drown out the evil in my DNA.
The receptionist got married last year. I could ask her. I could make it sound like casual conversation. Asking
her about when her husband proposed, how he proposed. I really needed to know how to do that.
As I walked into the station, I smiled. The thought of a little gold ring on Lynnie’s finger made me happy. In my head, she was a little older. She danced around our kitchen, cooking something and playing with Blue. He got bigger than I thought he would.
The tension in the air brought me out of my fantasy. The operator didn’t occupy the front desk and the entire front room sat empty. I could still hear a great many voices, but they came from somewhere else.
A cluster of people gathered at Draper’s old office door. Not a single person remained in their seat. They stood uselessly and I couldn’t see what they stared at.
Draper’s office had been closed off since I killed him. The shades had been drawn and the door closed. Not today. The door hung wide open.
I walked up to the crowd, trying to see past everyone.
Barbie turned around and gagged, covering her mouth and hunching over. I moved out of the way, but she didn’t throw up. She just gagged some more.
“What’s going on?” I asked anybody that would answer.
Barbie looked up at me before taking off, probably to finally throw up.
Deputy Mills turned around. Moving made a gap appear in the crowd by the door. Before he spoke, I could see what everyone stared at. “We didn’t know it was in there. Beck had to get something from the desk. Some paper. I don’t know…”
A massive ice cooler sat on the desk, filled to the brim with rotten, smelling body parts. I saw a little piece of everything, skin of all different colors. Atop the stack, a heart. Bloody and fresh.
“One more thing,” Mills said, pulling me aside. “We went through his desk. I don’t know why, but I have an idea…” he trailed off.
“What?”
He looked over his shoulder before he looked back to me. “He had some pictures in there. Ones of that Blum girl that you were watching over. Maybe three dozen or so. Some of them were—” He took a breath. “Look…” His voice dropped. “…I’m the only one who saw them. They’re in the bottom drawer of my desk. Locked. I legally can’t destroy them. Thing is that I have this nasty habit of leaving the key in my pencil holder.”
I nodded, almost unable to breathe. I couldn’t think. Not past the thought of Lynnie. Alone.
“I-I,” I stammered. “I need to go. She’s alone and…”
Mills nodded back. “Yeah, you should stick with her for the day. Maybe tomorrow. Just till we figure this out. Crossing my fingers that this was set up in the event of his death. Somehow I don’t feel like I’ll be that lucky.”
I left before he finished talking. I had a million things to do. I rushed to Mills’ desk, calling Lynnie at the same time. It still rang as I sat down and fished the key from the holder. The crowd kept looking at the body parts, so they wouldn’t see my break in.
I ripped the drawer open and pulled out the familiar file. It held so many more pictures than before.
I cursed when I got Lynnie’s voice mail, and I tried calling again as I looked through the glossy pictures. I got through the old ones quickly and then I got to the new ones. A few of her that night in the woods set my teeth on edge. It only got worse from there. I found maybe six of her half naked and taken through a window. One through her bedroom window. One where she had hands on my ass and I had my tongue in her mouth. As I went through them, I found another ten of us together, holding hands or kissing. Mills saw this and decided to let me take care of it. I guess he didn’t see anything wrong with my actions.
A text came from Lynnie and my heart pounded against my chest.
Lynnie: Can’t talk, driving. At light. I’ll call when I get home.
Me: On my way.
I ran out to my car, file in hand. I tossed it to the floor of my car and flipped my lights and siren on. I needed to get to her. Now.
She said home, and I wished she’d told me which house that meant. I banked on the fact that she meant mine, and I went to my place. I couldn’t manage to drive fast enough, though I must have scared a lot of people on the road.
No car sat in my driveway, and I felt a jolt of fear. We got this all wrong and she would be in danger. He would come back and he would try to hurt me through her. I would die if something happened to her. I would be gone and I would take the world out with me.
I got through my front door, screaming for Lynnie. No one answered, but I checked all the doors anyway. I went to my bedroom last.
And there it sat. On my pillow. A long switchblade had been stuck through a piece of paper. It had one red blemish. A drop of blood that acted as an ‘o’.
I pulled the knife out and looked down at the note, stomach sinking through me. Four words. So simple and yet so world shattering. Everything tilted on its axis and I stopped breathing. I knew. I knew the truth before I even looked at those four words.
Close, but no cigar.
