by Ian Hiatt
But not where I am in general. I’m in the control room of a long-dead carousel. That part is easy. What is not easy is the sound of the ocean in my ear, and the light drumming there. The warmth coating my body as though I’m curled up by a fire like the many homeless that wander the city.
My head no longer rests on my sweatshirt, and I’ve lost the hoodie to the darkness of the room. Instead I’ve made a pillow of Thomas Donahue, my cheek resting on his slowly rising and falling chest. I feel shame for the movement I’ve made in my sleep. Shame for the arm I have draped over his torso, gripping his body with the fervency of a swimmer to a life raft. Shame for the leg entwined in his, somewhere between pulling him to me and pulling me on him. But mostly shame for the way my own body reacts to being so close to him. As close as I’ve been to many men before him, but never so deliberately. Never so… blissfully.
As I stir, a hand brushes my shoulder, and I realize he’s put an arm around me. My pulse bubbles at this, and before my mind can rise to full consciousness, my hand grips him harder.
What the hell has happened to you?
Thomas murmurs in his sleep, and his breath billows out to meet me. Despite having drunk enough whiskey to knock out a horse, I can still smell hints of Bran’s concoction, including the finest Irish cream in the bar. I sit up slowly as Thomas murmurs again quietly. His hand drops down my arm and strokes my back as it falls, and he stirs beneath me. I can’t see him very well in the darkness, but as he takes a deep inhale, I put my hand to his chest and consider waking him.
His entire scent reaches me now, and our twenty-four hours of running has done neither of us any favors. But it still manages to make me feel weak. Instead of waking him, my hand drifts up his shoulder. To his neck. His cheek. With only the barest hint of stubble there, I let my hand rest. It seems to soothe him, the murmuring stopping and his breath slowing.
Before I can think, I’m leaning down to him, bringing my lips to his. My hope is to chase away the nightmares for good, though I can’t understand why I should really care.
Please don’t die…
In his sleep-ridden state, he’s so slow to respond I think my silent fear has come true. But as I go to pull away, he returns the kiss, his hand lifting from the ground and slipping up my bare arm to the sleeve of the ratty, sweaty T-shirt I’m wearing. With each borrowed breath, I feel him waking more and more beside me, lips becoming more driven, hand moving up higher. Leaning down into the kiss, my heart racing and heat spilling over the dam, I feel his other hand come up my side as he takes a deep inhale between oral assaults.
“Layla?” he asks, drowsily.
I growl at his addled stupidity. “Who else would it be?” I press against him, kissing him again.
“What… what are you doing?” he asks a handful of seconds later when I come up for air.
I pick my body up from the floor as I lie on his chest and my lips trace from his chin to his collarbone. “Honestly?”
“That’d be nice.” He’s confused, not complaining.
“I have no idea,” I admit, pressing my hands to his hips and slipping them up under his shirt, feeling the skin there with my fingertips. He shivers at my touch, and I grin in the darkness as my lips cover skin radiating everything that is Thomas. Everything I felt the first time our lips touched and everything I feel when I kiss him now.
My hands move farther up, and in spite of the winter cold outside creeping into the carousel, I pull the shirt off him before he can object and toss it to find my sweatshirt in the dark. I press down again, one less barrier between my body and his. His heartbeat quickens as I straddle his hips, my hands wandering over his torso, completely unsure of what I want. Something I’ve never contemplated. This has always been a means to an end. Never what I want. What I need.
“Layla, I don’t know if this is the right…” He fidgets beneath me, and I rise up, slamming my hands to his shoulders. I peer down at him as my breath comes out in gasps, my chest a jackhammer. Thomas clicks on his flashlight and looks up at me.
“What the…?” His words are more fascination than horror, and he gestures to my hair that falls down on either side of my face in sweaty sheets.
Red strands, blond strands, hazel.
A shard of mirror beside us shows me what Thomas can’t bring himself to describe. My eyes look more like pools of color than eyes, in a constant shifting of browns, blues, and greens, unable to rest on one. Meanwhile my skin ripples beneath them, freckles fading and appearing like a Rorschach test, my lips shifting in between breaths to different shades. All the while I can feel the unrest of my body.
“Are you okay?” Thomas asks.
Instead of answering, I lean down harder, pressing him to the metal floor with a creak as I kiss his lips again, tasting him. Breathing him in. Devouring everything that is him.
Nineteen years without human affection is a long time. And poor Thomas has popped the cork on that flood. All I want is for him to make me feel as electric as I can. Make me drown in the warm fluttering filling my chest.
I lie down, watching his face in the bright but limited light from his keychain as he drops it beside us.
“It’s like I can see a new color,” I try to explain to Thomas as much as myself. “I’ve never been able to… feel this.”
For all his naivety, Thomas has a hopeless but understanding smile on his face. “I can’t imagine it’s many hitwomen who get to know their targets?”
I shake my head and loosen the grip on his shoulders, letting my hands run along his arms. The goose bumps that rise make me smile. But it’s his hands moving to my hips, chivalrous to the end as they avoid the hem of my sweatpants. When he holds my waist like a fragile thing, a sharp inhale brings my eyes closed.
He’s not charting new territory for me. I’ve let far too many men and a handful of women touch me. Have me. But they’re all dead, and their touching didn’t help save them.
I reach down and jerk his hand up farther. I have no idea what I look like to him now, but he obliges, moving his other hand to mirror the first. My legs relax as I dip down to kiss him.
“If we’re going to die,” I say, biting my lip as his hands, hesitant though they are, drift higher, pulling my shirt up with them. “I want to make sure we live a little first.” I reach over and click off his flashlight as he pulls my shirt off and drops it beside us.
With the groaning sheet metal beneath us, it’s a miracle that no one has found us. Clad in only sheens of sweat, Thomas tries to catch his breath while I try to steady a stampeding pulse, my ears hammering. Each old experience of living has been given a new flavor, and I can’t bring myself to resist a single one of them. Pressed in the crook of his arm, I move my fingers on his skin and my skin alike with different traces and drawings. Whenever his hands touch me, thousands of nerve endings fire with more than just the information they did before.
In the past, it was the joy and doom of my prey to touch my body. To believe they were bringing me to new heights of pleasure and feeling. But it was all just… data. Things my brain should be aware of to better bring about their death.
His heart falters when you move to the right.
She closes her eyes whenever her hand falls to your waist.
If you make that noise again, he won’t notice that open manhole cover.
This is far different, though. A piece of the equation has been removed and another added. It’s no longer information I crave, but sensation. And in defiance of my profession, I find myself fond of Thomas for indulging me. His hands, beyond gentle, make me feel deeper than skin. A race of adrenaline that I can’t imagine being elicited by any other.
“So much… for rest,” he says between inhalations.
I nod as I run a knuckle through the tufts of hair covering his bare chest, which seems to invite him to drop a hand to mine. The jungle cat in me purrs at this, and I nip at his shoulder. He chuckles.
“I have no idea what time it is,” I say, feeling exhausted and exhilarated s
imultaneously.
“Me neither.”
I sit up, one hand on the floor, another on his far arm. “Some Boy Scout,” I say, leaning down to taste him again.
His lips grin against mine.
“I’m… I’m not complaining, but you’re different,” Thomas says as I crawl on top of him again.
I shrug, too wrapped up in rebirth to care. It doesn’t occur to me that he couldn’t see my expression in the dark when he goes on.
“That kiss… that did more to you than me, didn’t it?”
The statement seems obvious, so much so that I want to make a snippy remark, until I realize it didn’t occur to me. Not fully.
“We have people hunting us,” I say.
The floor creaks as Thomas sits up enough to bring his face close to mine, and he kisses my lips. “Well, yeah.”
I push him off and stand up, then grope for his keys or my clothes, whichever I can find first. “Get up. Get dressed.”
Thomas doesn’t move. I can just picture his gawking in the inky black. “What’s wrong?”
“Get. Dressed.”
He clicks on his flashlight, and like two inexperienced teenagers, we shuffle about the small room half-naked while we sort out clothes, mixing up T-shirts but not caring enough to fix the mistake. I grab my pistol and hold it in my hand, ensuring a round is chambered before I move to the door. Thomas keeps his light trained on me as I move, and he fumbles to zip his pants.
“It’s gotta be day now. That’s a good thing, right? They can’t sneak up on us,” he reasons.
I roll my eyes. “Just try to be quiet,” I say, feeling deep regret that I hadn’t followed that advice over the last few hours. I lean against the door, grip the handle, and push the door open, shrouded daylight flooding in to drown us. We both squint as we make our way out of the control room and peer around, the early morning covered in a thick layer of fog. I hold my gun up, trained on any vague movement my eyes pick up.
“What do you see?” Thomas whispers behind me. While I move lightly, feet making no noise, he tries to creep with the grace of a toddler, metal floor creaking and groaning beneath his feet. I’m about to turn to shush him when the floor beneath us both begins to shift and the squelch of the speakers is so loud it deafens us. Thomas’s eyes go wide as we’re both thrown off our feet, the carousel lurching to life, and haunting music pipes out as the lights of the ride flicker on. The animals march up and down, parading what I know will be our death.
drop to the floor of the ride that moves smoothly one minute and grindingly crippled the next. Thomas takes a moment to pick up on my movements, and he drops, too, slamming hard into a nearby pony that smiles in red, making it look as though it’s feasted on a kid during the night.
“All we want is boy!” A voice rises from the mist beyond in the old park as the ride spins around at a speed that no parent would put their child through. I can only just make out figures standing out beyond the careening carousel, and every time I level my gun at one, the ride swings us around and they’re gone.
This is bullshit. Not a fair fight at all.
“You throw out weapons, and we let you go, little girl.” It’s a male. With an accent. So not Killing Spree Barbie from the Donahue Estate.
The predator in me considers the offer while the human in me spits at it.
Human? Well, aren’t we being generous…
I look back to Thomas, huddled behind the Death Pony. He’s waiting for me. That decides who’s wearing the pants in our relationship.
Their first mistake is assuming having us stuck and surrounded on a carnival ride is enough of a distraction to derail me. The second is that they don’t move.
The ride swings around again, as circles are wont to do. My pistol sits leveled where, only seconds before, it was trained on one figure in the fog. I pull the trigger. I never get to see if a body drops or not. The carousel keeps spinning, and before my finger releases the trigger, the night is full of snaps, crackles, and pops.
Bullets tear up the ride, animals exploding around us like poorly made piñatas without any candy to speak of. Death Pony loses his bloody smile, and the unicorn I’m perched behind loses its horn. Thomas puts his head to the floor and covers it with his arms.
Really? You’re going to fall for a guy who thinks his arms will shield him from bullets?
I groan and adjust my pistol and fire again with the next circuit of the ride.
“Cease fire! Cease fire! We need him alive!” the voice calls out. The crack of a rifle ends the final rattling of bullets, and the fun ride gives me just enough time to see one man lowering his rifle after having shot one of his own men.
The ride continues on its merry way, music crackling through the speakers in blissful ignorance of the gunfire. The sun, slowly rising higher in the sky, has been burning off the fog, revealing our enemies.
“You going to run out of ammunition eventually,” the leader calls out when we swing by him again. I line up my pistol to take him out if he’s dumb enough to stand still on the next pass.
Behind me, Thomas rises shakily to his feet, ready to play the hero. Or try to. I kick his ankle and he stumbles, sprawling on the spinning floor.
He looks to me, anger apparent.
“Like hell,” I yell at him over the music. In the distraction, we’ve swung by, leaving the leader slowly walking toward the ride, cocky but still holding a military-grade rifle on us.
“They’ll let you go,” Thomas yells.
Not bloody likely…
Thomas moves to dodge away from me, slipping between his faceless pony and the backside of a rather deranged-looking zebra. I leap to my feet, and though I swing my gun and fire wildly at the group advancing on us, it doesn’t matter.
Twang.
My jump to tackle Thomas loses all of its enthusiasm as a bullet ricochets off one animal or another and shatters one of the mirrored panels.
The cold, rusted metal floor flies up to bitch slap me as my fingers grasp the hem of Thomas’s shirt while he stumbles away from me. Sacrificing himself.
The ride grunts as they turn it off, and I roll over onto my back, looking up at the roof, vision spinning on panels covered in mold and rat shit. Thomas comes back and hunches over me, shakily.
“Layla? Layla! No, no, no. Come on.”
His arms reach under me and pull at my pits. He drags me a few inches across the floor before they reach him. He’s kicked in the shoulder and cries out in pain, hands coming back slick with blood.
Must have been some kick…
The leader squats down over me and looks over my body. I desperately want to reach up and slip my knife through his carotid, but my hand doesn’t want to respond. And I’m sleepy.
“Girl should have listened.” Han Tzu looks down at me with a venomous grin, his face no different than his father’s. One of the scum-sucking gangsters from the East Passage side of town.
“Long way… to come…” I manage, the wind not returning to me from my fall.
He nods, resting his rifle on his knee. “Lotta money. Dad say, ‘Han… two-million-dollar ticket gunna get punched in Westie territory. Get it for me.’ So here I am.”
Thomas is up and scrambling forward when Tzu’s thug buddies grapple with him, slapping a pair of cuffs on his hands behind his back. Tzu holds a hand out, and one of them passes a pistol that gleams nickel in the cracked lights of the ride.
My chest is warm. And heavy.
“You said you wouldn’t hurt her,” Thomas snarls.
Tzu drops the gun to my head. “I lied.” His finger slides over the trigger.
The mirrors behind us all burst as more gunfire tears the morning apart, Tzu’s men dropping in the field like puppets with their strings cut. Tzu throws the pistol aside and pulls his rifle up. He fires several deafeningly loud rounds, but I can’t see where they land.
“Go! Go!” he yells, pushing Thomas and his thugs along. He glances down at me, but before he can put a round through my skull, the
ride creaks with heavy footsteps. Tzu bolts, his footsteps considerably lighter.
The creaking gets louder. I can only imagine who’s looking to snatch up the lottery ticket now. If Tzu is right, my head is worth a pretty penny.
Pretty, pretty penny. So shiny, and bright…
“Oh shit,” he says as he kneels down over me, dropping his shotgun casually on the corrugated floor. “Lay? Talk to me.”
Bran brushes hair from my face, his big ratty beard and red hair all I can see.
“Hey Bran,” I say, unsure why my voice is soft. And then I taste the blood.
Blood on his hands, too. My blood.
Bran, crooked as a leather-clad dancer at the Fireman’s Hose, presses down on my chest. “You’re gunna be just fine. I’ve seen worse than this. Hell, I’ve had worse than this.”
I sit up just enough to see my shirt―well, Thomas’s after our hasty exit―is not the same gray it was the night before. It’s brown. Red and brown.
“Get your arses over here!” Bran’s yelling to someone, but I can’t tell who. “We’re going to get you all patched up, y’hear? Don’t you―”
y eyes are burning when they open, but nowhere near the inferno scorching my chest. And thanks to Thomas’s affections, it’s more than just information.
I gasp at the pain, and after blinking several times, my eyes water over, and I choke on the scream I can feel rising up.
“Take it easy, take it easy,” a girl says to me, a thick Scottish accent coating her voice. All at once she appears over me, hair as black as midnight with the eyes to match. Her face blocks out the light that, as my eyes adjust, is not all that blinding. I blink a few more times, and she reaches out with a white cloth to dab my eyes.
My mouth flaps like a beached fish’s, and she shakes her head. “Don’t speak. You’ve still got some healing to do.” She grins and reaches out to help me sit up as I struggle to do so.
I’m barely clothed, wearing what looks to be a dark nightgown of some kind, and beneath that I can feel the tight bindings of bandages, gauze, and a wound that burns fierce.
