by Deja Voss
Mani’s better than any superficial bandaid. Against my better judgement, I go to her, and the way she comes to me, no questions asked, makes me think I’m either making the biggest mistake of my life by fucking her up even more, or that maybe she gets it.
We go to my room and she starts peeling off my shirt. She takes off my pants, strips me all the way down to nothing but my socks. She disappears into the bathroom and I hear the bathwater running. She sits on the edge of the tub swirling her hand in the water.
“Come on,” she says.
I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror, and I even scare myself a little bit. Killing Doctor Fischer was something that had to be done, there’s not a doubt in my mind, but staring at his blood on my face brings the dark reality that I took a man’s life today. He was a piece of shit, but he was a human being. Trying to explain something like that to a girl like Mani isn’t something I should have to do.
She doesn’t ask any questions, though. “Get in there,” she says, beckoning to me. “It’s the perfect temperature.”
“Mani, I don’t know if you should be in here right now. I don’t want you to see me like this.”
“Get in the tub, Lean. The damage is done.”
I don’t know if she somehow caught news of what happened or if she’s reading my mind. Either way, she grabs my hand and helps me into the shitty bathtub I don’t think I’ve ever used for anything besides entertaining a bitch or two. I damn near overflow the thing as I sink down into the water.
She grabs a washcloth and takes my hand, scrubbing each and every finger with a kind of care I didn’t know was possible. It’s electric how intimate it is, how strangely erotic. This woman’s had her mouth around my cock, but something about this makes me feel so much more vulnerable, but I let her proceed.
She moves up my arms with circular motions, scrubbing my chest, my neck, my face. Every time she rings out the rag, the bath water gets murkier, but she doesn’t bat an eye.
“Relax, babe,” she says as she washes my back. “You’re super tense.”
She sits on the edge of the tub, straddling me, massaging my back, pressing into the knots in my neck with alarming precision and strength, digging hard enough to make my leg twitch. She has me in the palm of her hand.
“Does that feel okay?” she asks. “Do you want me to go softer or lighter?”
“It’s fucking perfect,” I say. “You know you don’t gotta do this. You don’t have to baby me.”
“You’ve taken care of me since the minute you met me, Lean. If I can’t do the same for you, what does that make me?” She smiles at me with what I can only describe as love in her eyes. She’s not the little rag doll I brought home and nursed back to health anymore. Maybe she never was. What I see staring back at me is a woman who finally found her voice, who is comfortable in her own skin, who knows exactly what she’s doing to me.
It’s the sexiest fucking thing I’ve ever seen in my life.
I reach down and pull the plug on the tub, letting the murky water run down the drain.
“Take off your clothes,” I say. “I want to feel you.”
I stand up and turn on the shower, letting the water run down over me as she steps out of her clothes. My fingerprints on her hips, on her ass, the spot where I bit her shoulder, it makes me rock hard in a second. I take her hands and pull her in the shower with me, feeling her soft body up against mine.
I kiss her, my hand moving between her legs, and I push a finger inside her. She’s wet and ready. I slide another in, and another, and she arches her back and groans as I fuck my fingers in and out of her. I bring them to her mouth, and she takes them in hungrily.
“I want to take care of you,” she says. “I want to make you better.”
I push her up against the wall of the shower, spreading her legs with my knee. I slide a finger into her tight asshole, and she squeezes down around it. “Take it,” I growl in her ear. “Show me how bad you want it.”
She looks at me from over her shoulder, her eyes flickering as she nods.
I pump my dick, coating it in the juices from her pussy and line it up with her ass.
“Fuck me, Lean,” she pleads.
I do my best to take it slow, but just the very idea of her letting me in there, trusting me with her body, I could cum right now. She’s so tight, and I keep my fingers on her clit, circling it as I inch my way inside, the wetness dripping between her thighs fiercer than the shower head above us.
“Who’s ass is this?” I whisper in her ear before nibbling on her earlobe. Her legs are trembling, and I have to hold her upright, my cock penetrating her so deep, I can nearly feel it through her stomach.
“It’s yours, Lean,” she says between choppy breaths.
“You gonna cum for me?” I circle her clit harder, quickly strumming my fingers over it, and she starts to scream. “Fuck yeah, baby, show me how much you love this dick.”
Her ass tightens around me as I begin to slowly thrust my way in and out. I shove my fingers in her pussy, bucking my hips hard against her as she begins to cum.
“Mine,” I growl, pulling at her hair. “You’re mine.”
I fill her ass with my jizz, claiming her, owning her, back to feeling like a God again. Grounded. Fulfilled. No drugs required. Just this fucking perfect creature who knows exactly what I need, without me even having to ask.
Washed clean from the sins of the day. Sins of my life. Sins of my father and my brothers. She is my atonement.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Mani:
We curl up under his covers, the TV on but the volume all the way down. The room is pitch black and he sips from a beer on the nightstand. He hasn’t said much at all since him and the guys got back, but neither have I. I guess it’s kind of a good thing I’m not much of a talker.
I know the man who came to me today was different than the one who rescued me, but I still love him. Hurt is temporary, as Margaret told me.
He throws his arm over me, and then his leg, squeezing me so tight I can barely move, like he’s scared I’m going to run off or something.
He tosses and turns, completely restless, never actually falling asleep.
“Lean,” I whisper.
“I’m sorry, babe. Put something on TV if you want. I’m sorry.”
I flick on the light on the nightstand. He hasn’t eaten anything since he got back. He hasn’t talked to anybody, or even left the room. I can tell he’s hurting, and there aren’t enough blowjobs in the world to fix whatever it is he’s going through.
“Stop apologizing. Can I tell you something?”
He rolls over to face me, and I really wish he wouldn’t because looking him in the eye and telling him this stuff is going to take a lot more strength than if I just whispered it into the night.
It’s time for him to hear exactly what he saved me from, no matter how hard it is for me. I know he feels bad about something he did, but in my eyes… in my heart… he will never be on the same level of the evil I experienced.
“You can tell me anything. You hungry or something?”
“Lean… Dave…” I say, trying to put my thoughts into words in a way that doesn’t make me sound like a pathetic human. “One time Catarina and Stefano locked me in the basement for I don’t know how long. I tried to count the days, but after awhile, they all blended together. All I had was a bucket to go to the bathroom in, and every once in awhile they would put some water or some sandwich crusts in there for me. I tried to just sleep, but every time I would start to doze off, the lights would flash on, or they’d play loud noises on the speakers. This went on for so long, by the time they were done, I lost my fucking mind. I couldn’t talk, I was hallucinating, I begged them to kill me.”
“That’s terrible,” he says as I start to wipe the tears from my face.
“They didn’t kill me, though. They started sending in men to do things to me. Some of them would just have sex with me. Some of them wanted to beat me up, or piss on me, or
choke me until I passed out. I didn’t know who any of these guys were, but Catarina always reminded me that if I fought them, they wouldn’t just kill me, they’d kill Ella, too. And nobody would ever know or care. I was completely helpless.”
I put my head on his chest and he hugs me tight to him.
“They used to have these parties, and I knew all the guys there were rich and powerful by the way they dressed. They’d make me crawl around and lick everyone’s shoes, use me as furniture, let anybody who wanted to put their fingers in me like I was the lowest piece of garbage on the planet. They’d tell me that, too. That I was just a piece of garbage. And I believed it. As long as I got to see Ella, I didn’t care.”
“You’re not garbage, Mani,” he says, running his fingers through my hair. “What they did to you was sick and wrong. There ain’t nobody in the world who deserves that.” His arms tighten around me, and I weep, mostly with guilt. He’s right, these things I lived through are not something anybody should have to experience, not even second hand.
But he needs to know.
“They would put me in a room full of cameras and put snakes in there, and I never knew which ones were poisonous unless they were rattlesnakes, and I would scream and beg while they laughed. They said I made them a lot of money, that there’s a lot of people in the world who like to watch women begging for their lives. I was so weak, Lean, I did everything they wanted. I played their little games. All I wanted was for Ella to have a chance to survive. For some reason, she was never a target of their sickness. At least, I thought she wasn’t.”
“It’s gonna be ok,” he says, kissing my head. “It’s over. It’s not going to happen anymore.”
“My only wish in life was that one day I would have enough money or enough power to get my sister out of there and we could start our life all over again. The only thing that ever stopped me was thinking I wasn’t going to be able to take care of her. I didn’t know the first thing about her condition, and she was always so sick. Now that I know they were making her sick, I’m angrier than I’ve ever been in my whole life. She’ll never get her childhood back. I’ll never be a hundred percent right again. Those two are downright evil, and anybody that associated themselves with them are evil, too.”
I pull away from his embrace, kneeling over him on the bed.
“I don’t know what you did today, and I don’t know what your plans are, Lean, but you need to know, that a person like me knows what darkness truly is. I know exactly what goes on in this world. Whatever you did, it could never make you anything like them.”
“It doesn’t matter if I’m anything like them, Mani. I’m still not good.”
“You’re not getting rid of us like that, Lean,” I crawl up onto his lap and wrap my arms around him. Reliving my terror for the first time out loud somehow makes me feel more empowered than I ever felt before, as if everything up to this point in my life was just a nightmare, and everything from this point forward is real, the truth, who I was meant to be, and where I was meant to be. “You’re the only reason why I made it this far. You’re the only man in this world who didn’t just play into their sickness. You are good.”
“I’m so fucked up.” I hug him, his heart racing and his body tensing.
“We’re not destined to be normal,” I say. “We can be fucked up together.”
“I’m gonna make it my life’s mission to show you normal, babe. I’m gonna give you the normal-est, most boring, safe, suburban life you could possibly imagine.”
I look at him and we both start laughing. I can’t help but notice the way his eyes are watering. I never imagined a man like him crying, but it doesn’t make him weak in my eyes. It makes him strong enough to be a part of this circus I’m dragging him into.
“I won’t tell anybody,” I say, wiping the tears from his face with my fingers and kissing his cheeks.
“Why are you so perfect?” he asks.
“I assure you, sir, I am not. I’m a lousy shot, I can’t hold my liquor, and I’m terrible at spelling. Also, I have this deranged fantasy about slitting Catarina’s throat and watching the blood run out slowly as she chokes on it and dies.”
“Well, the blood don’t run out slowly,” he says, pulling a blanket over the two of us. I settle on his chest, and he flicks out the lights. “I mean, at least not as slowly as you might think.”
He passes out in seconds, and I lay there on top of him, knowing there’s nothing in this world that would make me ever let this man go.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Lean:
“You look like a fucking dork, man.” Lazarus looks up from his phone and starts pointing at me and laughing. “Where’d you get that outfit? Middle Aged Divorced Men’s Warehouse?”
“Oh good one,” I say, grabbing my crotch. We need to take Ella to Doctor Hardin’s today to run some tests he couldn’t do at the house. We’re still trying to play it low key, because even though everything went off without any major hitches yesterday, Stefano and Catarina are still out there, and they’re probably hungry for blood. Once the dust settles a little, taking them out will be cake. But for now, I’m dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and a pair of khakis, and a fishing hat. Exactly like a fucking dork.
“We’re going to Kennywood afterwards if I’m good, Uncle Laz.” Ella’s munching on a pop tart right out of the wrapper.
“No, we’re not going to Kennywood today,” Mani says. She’s got on this long red sundress, and big wide black sunglasses, and I know the goal was to disguise ourselves, but the only thing she achieved was making herself even more hotter than I thought possible. “I don’t know where you got that idea.”
“Oh come on, I’ve never been on a rollercoaster before,” she whines.
“Tell you what, kid, before the season’s over, we’ll rent the whole damn place out. You can ride all the rollercoasters you want,” I say. “Today we gotta lay low.”
“The doctor said I’m supposed to get fresh air,” Ella says.
“Nothing about Kennywood is fresh air,” Lazarus says. “It’s puke and pee and armpit sweat.”
“Right up your alley,” I say, and he flicks me off. “This shouldn’t take long. I got Finch following us in the van. You need anything, just holler.”
We get into the dirty old Crown Vic my dad’s been tinkering with for years. It’s nothing fancy or spectacular, just a trusty indiscriminate beater car, perfect for times like these. Mani buckles Ella up in the backseat, and I give Finch the wave as we pull out of the parking lot and onto the straight away.
“Thanks for doing this.” Mani puts her hand on my knee, and I don’t care if I look like an idiot, I still feel like the luckiest guy in the city. Maybe we can be normal every once in awhile.
Maybe being some suburban dork isn’t the worst thing that could happen to me.
“We’re not going to Dr. Fischer’s office are we?” Ella asks. “He’s gonna make me take that medicine that makes me all sleepy and dizzy.”
“Doctor Fischer is out of the picture. Permanently.” I grip the steering wheel tighter and wonder who had the pleasure of finding that disaster we left in the parking garage.
“We’re going to see Doctor Hardin. You know that,” Mani says.
“Yeah, I guess I just got worried you might be sick of me already. I know I’m a lot. I know you guys don’t like kids hanging around the house.”
I look at her sad little face in the rearview mirror and my heart breaks. “You’re not going anywhere, kid. We won’t be living in the house forever, though. Your sister needs some space to herself. Can’t keep you guys cooped up in there for too long.”
“More space means more puppies, right?”
I was thinking more about babies, but at this point, I’d buy Ella unicorn if she asked me.
Ella starts listing off all the different kinds of dogs she knows and Mani fidgets with the radio. We head North on the expressway, and soon, we hit the exit where Doctor Hardin’s office is. I put on my turn signal, but before I
can turn onto the ramp, lights flash in my rearview mirror.
“Fuck,” I mutter. I don’t know the last time my dad had this thing inspected, and for all I know, the registration is probably from 2009. I pull up off the ramp and over to the divot on the side of the road when I realize it’s not just one cop car. There’s three more, and they’re already getting out of their cars, running right at us with their guns pointed.
“Get out of the car! Hands in the air!” The cop shouts. Mani looks at me nervously, and Ella starts to cry.
I’ve had my fair share of run ins with the police. Spent plenty of time in jail. Something about this doesn’t feel right, though.
“I love you Mani,” I say, giving her a quick kiss. “I need you to stay calm. Do what they say, and don’t tell them anything. You have Finch call my lawyer, alright? It’s gonna be alright.”
“Out of the car!” he shouts, and I slowly open the door, holding my hands in the air.
“We got the victim,” another officer shouts, pulling open the back door. “Ella, my name is Bob. I’m going to take you home now, alright?”
“What the fuck are you doing?” I shout. “She’s not a victim. Not anymore.”
“Lean!” she screams, punching and kicking the officer as he pulls her out of the car. Mani jumps out and runs to her.
“There’s a misunderstanding,” Mani says, trying to grab her sister from the cops arms. “This is my sister. Our parents are dead. I’m responsible for her.”
“Ma’am, that’s not what the paperwork says. Now please step back.”
They shove Ella in the back of a cruiser, and she kicks and screams the whole way.
Mani drops to the ground and starts bawling.
