“You’re still withhim?” she slurs. “He can go fuck himself. He washorriblein bed. He tried, but he was never much good. He was too needy. He was much better suited to be a fucktoy, not a boyfriend.” She tries to focus on me. “Unlikeyou. You were…amazing,boy. You were always my favorite, special boy.” She sadly sighs. “I always did regret letting you get away.”
I refuse to let myself think about the guy I was or what that guy felt for her back then.
The things that guy didn’t merely willingly do for her, or let her do to him, but whobeggedfor them at one time, simply to make her happy and earn her praise. To earn her smiles, her laughter.
Or how that guy once would havekilledto hear those words from her—that she regretted letting him go.
That guy no longer exists, and hasn’t for a long damn time.
That guy’s death birthed Sarge and the bastard extraordinaire, who are the same man, basically. One is enlisted, one’s a civvie, but they’re just different names for the same damn guy.
I hold up the gun and motion with it. “You need to take a few pills, Elsa.”
She’s trying to focus on me. “What?”
“Pills. Take three.”
“I took some.”
“No, you didn’t. You were going to, but you got distracted by what we were talking about.”
She giggles. “What were we talking about?”
“That you are in pain and need the drugs to help you. That’s why you stole the money, isn’t it?”
“Ja.” She sighs, opens the bottle, and shakes three more tablets into her palm. Then she swallows them and chases them with vodka. She doesn’t bother putting the cap back on the pill bottle.
I still wear my gloves. I pick up the bottle of vodka with my free hand and top off the glass for her. “You look thirsty, Elsa. You should have a drink.”
She doesn’t bother arguing with me. I don’t know if she’s compliant because of everything hitting her system, because she knows I mean business because of the gun, or because she’s simply ready to follow this path now that she understands her only decent chance to free herself from it has evaporated.
Because if she borrowed from the kind of people I’m reasonably sure she borrowed from, based upon the kind of people I know she used to know…
Well, this is afarkinder fate than they’d have in store for her.
She’s got great tolerance, I’ll give her every bit of that. I wait a few minutes and talk her into swallowing four more pills.
Then I lean against the wall and wait. “This is also for Eddie,” I tell her. “He deserved better than what you gave him.”
She stares at me, but I think we’ve hit the point of no return. Her eyes look glassy and she tries to speak, but it’s just slurred sounds, nothing intelligible.
I smirk. “Eddie would come tomeafter I left you, Elsa. He’d visit me at night for comfort. You didn’t drive a wedge between us, you only brought us closer.Iwas there for him. He came tome. His loyalty was tome. And I took care of him after you got rid of us. He wasmineafter we were deployed.”
I’m not sure how much she’s processing now, and I don’t care. “I have a life now you can onlydreamof. I’m powerful, I’m rich, and I have a family. I could have been yours if you’d just stayed loyal to me and Eddie. I was thinking about staying in Germany, you know. I would have worked myassoff to take care of you after I got out and went to school. We could’ve made it work. But you never gave a shit about us. Youusedus, until you couldn’t easily control us anymore. It took me a lot of years, but this is satisfying, seeing you used up and broken.”
I walk over and lean in. I want her to hear this. “I am loyal tomypets,” I softly say. “Ilovethem. Whenmypets are threatened? I will kill or die for them. Guess which option this is.”
It takes another ten minutes for her to pass out, slumped forward on the couch.
I set the gun down on the coffee table and ease her onto her side with her face pressed into the cushion, then grab a throw pillow. Her system’s so numbed by the narcotics and booze that there’s barely any reflexive response, just one of her legs kicking a little.
All the times toward the end, when I was bent over the colonel’s desk, when I’d fantasize about doing something just like this to her—only to feel horribly guilty about those thoughts because narcissists are master manipulators of their victims.
Here I am, getting to doexactlywhat I’d wanted to back then.
I take little satisfaction in this now. It was much preferable imagining her…
Well, likethis. At her lowest point, reduced to a nothing existence with no one in her life to love her, while I had nearly achieved the apex of my success and happiness both professionally and personally.
