BRODIE
IWANTED TO KILL SOMEONE.And not with a gun. No, a gun wasn’t personal enough. Reading Emery’s torment in black and white made me want to put my hands around his throat and squeeze, squeeze until the life left his eyes and he hung limp in my grasp.
But I wanted to intimately acquaint that mother fucker with pain, first.
I couldn’t let Em see my rage. Heading outside, I picked up the shovel that had been left on the porch and began shoveling the driveway with quick, angry strokes. A movie scene teased me while I worked, a James Bond one in which 007 is stripped naked and bound to a chair without a seat. The villain tortured him with a rope whip, exposing his vulnerability and leaving him bare. Somehow, I didn’t think Emery’s attacker would come through the punishment quite as heroically as Bond did.
Seemed appropriate.
I would come up with something appropriately heinous for both father and son, before I clapped eyes on them.
The day was shockingly domestic. I learned Emery had been viciously raped and in reaction had shoveled snow like a man possessed. We ate lunch, a truly shitty spaghetti. I started my young cousin on investigating a five star general in our country’s military like a fantastic mentor.
And after, we binged some dumbass girly show about a chick named Buffy on Netflix.
The show didn’t matter, though. Em was here, within my arm’s length. We sat together on the sofa, her curled into one corner and me at the other. She’d been skittish after giving me her journal, uncomfortable, maybe, with what she might see if she looked too hard at me. I wanted her to look at me, though, needed her to see that nothing and everything had changed all at once.
I was stunned at the depth of feeling I had for the girl. I’d never been neutral towards her—knew that from the moment I stole her away and fecked myself over with the family. But now, after just a few short days in her company, I was contemplating murder on her behalf and wondering how she’d like the Caymans. I had money put away; I could possibly hide us both away somewhere down there.
I was whipped, and didn’t mind admitting as much.
“Come here,macushla,” I murmured, watching her from across the couch.
She looked at me without moving her head from where it rested on her folded hand, eyes wary. She was right to be wary. She had no idea of how much I wanted her, how intensely I hoped she’d let me explore and play and please us both this night.
“I’m busy,” she said.
I stretched my legs out along the couch and tucked a foot in behind her back, nudging her bottom a bit with my toes. “Busy doing what?”
“Watching this; what’s it look like?” She shifted back against my foot. “Would you stop kicking me?”
“I want to dance with you.”
She looked at me fully this time. “There’s no music and you’re lying down. Am I missing something or is this code for getting in my pants?”
I shot a lazy grin her way. “There’s all types of dancing,macushla.”
She snorted. “And let me guess: tonight’s lesson is the horizontal tango.”
“We can dance however you wish.”
I watched her grapple with herself for a moment, then turn the television off and rise. “I require music, Kidnapper.”
Rising wordlessly, I moved to the old-fashioned record player beneath the window and pulled Van Morrison from its sleeve. Static popped against the needle and I crossed the room with three slow strides to draw her to me. As I tucked her hand in mine against my chest and settled my other firm on her lower back, “Into the Mystic” started to play.
As I did every time I heard this song, I sang along, my voice low and raspy but not terrible sounding.
Em stared up at me, her expression solemn and marked by a kind of gravity that I knew could unman me if I wasn’t careful. I gazed back down at her, my eyes catching and lingering on the fullness of her bottom lip before lifting to meet hers. Bottomless, they pulled me in and tugged me down. I drowned, a willing martyr, in the deep end of her gray-green oceans.
Em rested her cheek against my chest, rubbing it there once, twice, the way a cat nuzzles for affection. My voice trailed away when she spoke. “I don’t know what this is,” she whispered. “But I want you.”
We swayed back and forth, barely moving. The shift-slide of our bare feet was an intoxicant and I an addict. “Does it matter? I want you, as well.”
“It matters,” she answered after a beat. “I’m in a weird space. I don’t want to hurt anyone. And I don’t want to be hurt. You can put me back together or you can break me into pieces, depending on your purpose.”
“My purpose…”
I wasn’t certain how to interpret her statement. She was asking me for something, but I wasn’t certain what, or how to answer. Was she asking for some sort of commitment? I was committed. I was throwing everything away, putting my life on the line. What commitment was greater than that?
