by Ian Hiatt
“Try to take it easy, though, eh?”
I roll my eyes. Thomas settles up with Bran as the man walks away, leaving me with my mark.
With a grin, I look at the boy and a giggle escapes me. I hope it’s from the booze I’ve already got in me. “You did good for someone so green.”
Thomas nods. “I’m seeing two of you right now. Is that normal?”
“Nope. It’s not normal.” I grip my bottle and pull off the rubber cap to fill my glass. “Here,” I say with a gesture to Thomas’s stein. He fishes out the shot glass, still soaked in remnants of his drink, and passes it to me. “We’re gonna drink until you can see four of me at minimum. And I’m gonna drink until I see two of you. If there’s two, I can cap one and collect the bounty!”
Thomas laughs, and now I know he has come to terms with the enormity of the pile we’re trapped in. Only the truly sane and accepting can laugh at their own imminent death.
“That sounds like a plan.” He raises the shot glass like it’s a toast and downs it. “You know, I’ve never actually been drunk.”
I raise my glass and drink about half of mine. “Great. Let’s pop that cherry, Tommy.”
He pushes his shot glass back to me and clinks it on the bottle. “Who’ll be the designated driver?”
I laugh. “What are we going to drive, and where could we even go?”
Thomas shrugs, arms limp as the alcohol starts to make more of the decisions than his brain. “No idea. We’re pretty fucked, aren’t we?”
“Very.” I fill his glass. “So let’s get plastered until we don’t care.” I fill mine and raise it to him. He mirrors and we both down our shots.
Hours later, the bottle is an empty husk of its former self. Thomas, for all his insistence of purity, is holding his liquor pretty well. Even my heightened system is having trouble keeping itself together under the weight of it.
Thomas is leaning on the bar, counting the pickled eggs in the nearby jar while Bran is telling a pudgy broker that it’s closing time and he needs to finish his beer. The man, only slightly less inebriated than me and my boy, tries to get one more drink for the road. A stern look from Bran shoots that pleading dead, and the man drops a handful of crumpled bills on the bar before shambling to the door and going out to meet the setting moon.
Bran grumbles, unfolding the bills before opening up the cash register to put them in. The ding of the machine makes Thomas and me jump and sober up for half a moment before we descend into chuckles and giggles respectively.
“Layla, sweetie, this boy has done what I never thought possible. You’re out of your wits, ain’t ya?”
I cradle my glass in my hand even though it’s been dry for quite a while, the world looking a bit more like a watercolor than reality. I’m grateful for that. “You know, I think I just might be.”
Bran grumbles again. “Ya didn’t drive here, didja?”
Thomas shakes his head. “Nope. No car to take. They could find us then.”
I set down my ghost drink. “Thas the safe way to travel. On foot. Can’t track ya on foot here in the city.”
“Aye,” Bran says, “that’s how my forefathers got across the isles back home. But they used a horse. You make good time with those. And you’re not likely to be mugged while riding a horse. Why don’t the two of you stay in my back office for the night? Sleep it off?”
Sleep. The idea is more than appealing. Lying down. Drifting off into true unconsciousness. At least that way when someone slits my throat, I’ll go peaceful.
“No,” Thomas says, going right back to softly muttering the egg count. Seven. Eight. Nine.
“It’s no trouble,” Bran insists.
Thomas shakes his head vigorously like a little kid might. “We kin find ‘nother place to sleep,” Thomas says, his drunk talk falling well below the standard of usual discourse between me and my favorite Scot.
Bran shakes his head and slams the cash register shut while Thomas and I stumble back from our stools to our feet and compose ourselves.
“Do appreciate the hospitality, Bran,” Thomas says, a hint of an apology.
I grab Thomas by the arm. “It’s not a bad idea…”
Thomas leans over and whispers just loudly enough that I’m almost certain Bran will hear it. “And he’ll end up just like your other friend.”
For the first time, Thomas sets my heart racing. Bran dead? Malcolm was somewhat of a friend, sure. He was also a bit of a dick. But Bran is a teddy bear. My teddy bear.
I gather up my hoodie and toss it on, and Thomas does the same with his coat. “Bran, don’t tell anyone I was here tonight, kay?”
Bran waves his burly hand. “Yeah, yeah. I know the drill, girl.” He goes back to wiping down the bar as we walk toward the door. I sigh and walk around, then put my arms around the big man and give him a squeeze. The movement doesn’t do anything for me, but I don’t want Bran feeling put out.
“Thank you.”
Bran pats me on the back, a little startled by my show of affection. Even more so than I am. “All right, girl. You be safe, y’hear? You want me to call you a cab?”
I shake my head. The need to get away from the man before someone realizes his connection to me is all I can think about now. “We’ll be fine.”
Thomas already has the door open as I walk away from the bushy red man and give him a final wave as we leave the Old Haunt.
Stumbling around the city in the depths of night is how I spend many evenings. But most of those end with a dead body. And so far, one hundred percent of the time, it hasn’t been mine. Those are good odds, but tonight, I’m pretty sure I won’t be winning.
Thomas shuffles beside me, more disheveled than he’s ever been in his charmed life, I’m sure. His exhaustion is showing as we round a corner, leaving the bar behind. His foot absently kicks at the sidewalk as we walk in silence. The sounds of faraway bangs crack the night, either from a gun or a car backfiring. Neither of us flinch at the noise or question the other as to where we think it came from.
“Ideas?” Thomas asks.
I shrug, because I really can’t think of a single place we’d be safe now that wouldn’t endanger someone. He watches me and shrugs back before stopping and sitting down on the curb to stare across the street.
“Good a place as any,” he mumbles.
Lacking the energy to get him on his feet, and the reason for why he should keep walking to nowhere, I study the graffitied brickwork of the building behind us, admiring the work of whoever thought to draw a pair of genitals over the mayor’s latest campaign sign.
“We had kittens once,” Thomas says, fumbling in the crumbling seams of the sidewalk to pick up a small piece of the concrete. He cocks back his wrist and tosses it across the road like he’s trying to skip it over water. “Well, we had them. We weren’t ‘sposed to.”
I lean back against the building, hearing the echoing nothingness beyond the broken window over my shoulder.
“I still remember her voice,” he says, turning back to me with the dull grin of a man reminiscing, his memories far more than the alcohol making him happy now. “Angie. She came into my room. Our room,” he corrects himself. “We had separate rooms, but we always snuck into each other’s at night. Mom hated it.”
I slump down to the ground, sick of standing. My sweatpants dampen from the fine layer of rain collected where the building met the sidewalk. “I never had any siblings.”
Thomas turns back to the street after a vague nod. “She came in and said in this whispered squeal, ‘Tommy, Tommy, you gotta come see!’“ His imitation of her voice has his own going soft. He reaches out for another rock and throws it across the street again, not even crossing the double yellow of the center.
“It was Christmas break,” he continues. “I don’t know why, but she went out to the pool house that morning before I woke up. Found the litter of kittens in there. Three of them. I guess the mother cat went in there to get out of the cold or something. We never found her.”
<
br /> He turns around, dragging his feet like they’re beyond his control. I watch him, my eyes taking a few extra seconds to focus in the dull streetlight flickering overhead.
He shakes his head. “You have any idea how to take care of newborn kittens?”
I shrug. I know how to take care of older cats, thanks to my mother.
He laughs. “Neither did we. But Angie insisted. She had this way about her, y’know? She could convince me to do the dumbest things.” He rolls up his pant leg to show a scar running up his ankle. “Rollerblading in our pool earlier that year when they drained it. Ya’d think that woulda taught me to rethink following her.”
I try to smile and chuckle at it, but it’s forced, because yes, I did think he would’ve learned.
“We got them into the house and hid them in her closet. Went on the Internet and found out how to feed them, take care of them, all of that. We were ten back then, I think, so it’s not like we could go to the store for what we needed.” He picks up another chunk of sidewalk and passes it back and forth between his hands.
I take the silence as a cue to try and get him to finish up his nostalgia. “How long did it last?”
He grins, morose. “Two days. If their constant noise overnight didn’t let our parents in on it, the fleas they brought into the house definitely did. We had to stay in a hotel in the city while they fumigated. Dad was furious. Mom was annoyed, but… sympathetic, I guess?”
The streetlight overhead flickers off and takes its time coming back on. “And the cats?”
He cocks his wrist back and throws his latest rock across the street where it cracks through one of the few unbroken windows of the warehouse. “Angie cried the whole time we were at the hotel. I guess I did, too. We had named the three of them after some TV show we used to watch. One of those cartoons with the talking dinosaurs or dragons or whatever. Mom said she brought cats to the shelter in the city to be cared for and adopted to families who had the time to take care of them.”
I have to appreciate the caring mother figure I’ve only ever viewed at a distance, and I smirk at the parent who would so obviously lie to her kids to spare them the pain the rest of the world was so eager to dish out. My mother may have been a homicidal psychopath, but at least she was a realist.
“Dad didn’t talk to Angie about it again. At least I don’t think he did.”
“He talked to you, I take it?” I say, hoping the story is over.
And it is. Thomas stands up, brushing off his pants, releasing a few skittering pieces of cement. He looks at me until I stand up as well.
“So where we going?” he asks, face sobering but still drawn.
I can’t hold in the glare. “You’re the one who turned down a roof and a curly Scotsman who knows how to use an axe.”
Thomas laughs and deadpans in the same breath. “An axe?”
“Just be glad no one tried to hit on me tonight.”
He laughs again, louder than I’m comfortable with. “Yeah. A bar full of sleazy dudes and you couldn’t get one of them to want you.”
I whirl and shove him. Hard. His smile pops like a bubble. “I’m sorry,” he mutters in a vaguely sober tone. “I didn’t…” He stumbles back, tripping on the curb as he backs up. It’s more out of momentum, but the predator deep inside me hungers for fear.
“If I had wanted to, Tommy, I could have had every one of those men shatter bottles on the bar and slit your throat. At a word. A hint. An eye movement.”
Thomas glares at me. Point made.
Not nearly.
“I could have you dead right now. I could. And maybe this would be over.” I shake my head, the broiling heat in my chest subsiding.
Beneath a flickering streetlamp and unsteady beside the brick wall of a long since abandoned warehouse, Thomas watches me as I put a hand to my eyes, hoping to wipe away a bad dream.
“So why don’t you?”
“Why don’t I what?”
“Kill me. Do it.” He holds his hands out wide, presenting an apparent target. “I mean, I’m screwed either way, right? Someone wanted me dead before. They must still want me dead. Enough to kill my whole family to get to me.”
I groan. “This is not the time…”
“No, I’m serious,” he says, words only partially slurred with intoxication. “The only chance either of us has is for me to die, right?”
“You’re drunk. Let’s just find a place to sleep it off. Regroup tomorrow and figure out what to do then.” My thoughts, blurry under the drowning of whiskey I’ve put myself through, flit to Cassie and her proposal. I slip my hands into the pockets of my hoodie and shuffle down the street toward some promising abandoned buildings off on their own.
Ashamed though I am to admit it, I sprawl on the ground when Thomas pushes me from behind, and I land with a sharp pain to my shoulder as I twist to try to break my own fall. “What the hell?” I screech.
“Come on, do it. Show me this great, amazing power of yours.” Thomas taunts me, his words coming out clearer now. With each throb of the streetlight, I see his face growing more intense. Whether in pain, anger, or desperation, I can’t be sure.
“Yeah, that’s real attractive. Lying in the gutter. I’m ready to shoot myself now,” Thomas shouts at me, putting his fingers to his temple like they might do anything near what I had planned for him the first night we met.
My arm tingles a bit at the memories of the snowflakes.
“No wonder you screwed up. Can’t even kill someone like me. You’ve got to be the worst assassin in the friggin’ city.” He chokes on his words as he rears back and gives me a kick to the ankle.
The pain rips up my leg and the wave of red flashes over me as my hands clench on the grime of the Saint Roch pavement and the shards of glass from a long since discarded bottle. Blood pours from the wounds as I leap to my feet, bringing my hand across his face. The streaks of red over his cheek drifting down over his lips are entirely my own blood. Even in my anger, I fail to break his skin.
He winces and the loud crack of my assault echoes from building to building, making the once quiet night seem less so. Abandoned mausoleums of a forgotten manufacturing piece of the city bear witness to our poor excuse for a dance of death.
“Well, that’s a bit better, isn’t it?” Thomas laughs. He moves to bring his hand up and slap me. Or punch me. I can’t be sure which.
But it doesn’t really matter. My hand whips out and wraps around his wrist with the strength of a pair of cuffs. I squeeze, and he bites his lip at the pain of it, locking eyes with me.
“Come on. Bitch.” He snarls at me. He thinks he’s still dealing with Layla. Not the animal that only gets to come out to play when the rent is due.
I push him back, stepping bodily over the curb as I slam him to the eroded bricks of a factory, shattered windows flanking either side of us. And as I move, my body shifts. Only subtly. Only just so. It doesn’t take much to leap from undesirable to any man with a pulse to the fix of a junkie.
Ratty, matted hair blends to a soft hazel color, falling down the sides of my face to my shoulders as I pull back my hood. Skin, once pale and blemished, clears but not entirely. I can feel freckles bloom over my cheeks, dotting my nose. Eyes, once a color that evoked feelings of sickness, burn as they fade to blue, near gray. I shrug out of the hoodie to pin Thomas to the wall as the rest of my body shifts, unnecessarily so, beneath sweatpants and a dirty T-shirt. Thomas is a simple boy, and apart from my body managing to rid itself of the filthy smell of fetid laundry, all it has to do is become totally focused on its prey. Vicious and longing. I scrape Thomas’s arm over the brick as his eyes peer into mine and his faint resistance, only playing a part to begin with, grows even less so.
His eyes wander over me. The imperfections and the absolutes that I’ve grown for him. Specially catered to his tastes. How my body knows that Thomas longs for a dirty blond girl with somewhat average looks is far beyond my conscious mind. But it does. And he’s nothing more than a fish dangli
ng from my hook.
I release his hands and move closer, pinning him to the wall in a very different way now. His arm stays up, his mind focused on anything but his own body. He stammers, words lost on him, his mind blank. Just the way I like it.
“Are we happy now?” I whisper to him as I lean in, so close my voice rippling goose bumps down his neck and along his shoulder.
His head bobs like a spasm. Oh yes. He’s mine now.
The predator in me smiles, and I slide a hand along his stomach up to his chest, surprisingly toned for a rich boy with perfectly clean fingernails. I let him dangle on my line as I breathe to his ear. Slipping my hand along to his back, I press my body to him, letting him feel every curve of his specially crafted killer. The only bullet that would ever be needed to put him into the ground.
My cheek strokes along his skin, and he shudders as I bring my face to his, our eyes meeting again. The streetlight gives a particularly sharp throb, and I look into the darkest brown eyes I’ve ever had the pleasure of devouring. I move my free hand up and bring cropped fingernails along the skin of his neck, eliciting further shivers from him. His sheepish grin fades as I feel his body move against me, wanting even more than he’s getting.
His eyes flit to my lips. Soft. Inviting. The faintest tinge of red to them that my body knows he’ll love.
He lifts off the wall in spite of my pressure on him as his face moves toward mine. My hand slips around to the back of his head; my fingers grasp his hair. I pull at his shirt with my other hand, digging nails into his lower back and lifting him to me. His husky breath dances over my skin. His own hands reach to my hips, and he brings me to him. I let him think he’s in control. That he’s steering the ship. That he means to set upon the rocky shore.
And drown.
His lips brush over mine, and I taste him. I entwine my fingers in his hair and let him in as my lips part and he kisses me deeply. The heat growing within me at this is unexpected, but delicious. My heart speeds, threatening to burst from my rib cage at the ecstasy of ripping the life from someone so deliberately. The entanglement between our two beings is thunderous, and I find my hands digging into him, wanting him even more. His own grip tightens, pulling at me, guzzling the poison that he so willingly drank.
