What do I do, baby? I call out, looking over the new lady who is consuming my soul. What the fuck do I do?
She stirs and her eyes flicker open and close again. She repeats this a few times before she registers what and where she is, also who is sitting in the corner looking at her.
“Morning, little bird.” My voice is low and soft.
“Wow.” Is all she says pulling herself up into her knees, the blanket tight around her. “You stayed?” Shock laces her voice.
“All night,” I say back to her as her eyes roll over my body before her hands slip to the blanket pulling it from her body and looking under it. I can’t help it; I crack up laughing as her eyes burn into mine.
“What’s so funny?” she asks me.
“You would know if I fucked you, little bird.”
“How did you know I was even thinking that?”
“You were checking to see if you were still clothed, little bird. Doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that shit out.”
She just scoffs at me, pulling herself up from the couch and towards the bathroom door.
“You can see yourself out,” she says slipping into the bathroom.
“Ha, not likely, little bird.”
She sends me an unimpressed look over her shoulder and all I do is wink. Her cheeks redden before she kicks the door closed with the back of her foot.
I make my way to the kitchen and make her coffee and look for something to cook her for breakfast. This chick has nothing but the same green apples and jar of nuts as the other day.
Not even milk, butter, or bread. Absolutely nothing. Rolling my neck out I lean against the bench and watch the bathroom door.
“We’re going out,” I say as soon as she walks from the bathroom with only a towel around her body. She jumps at the sound of my voice.
“Fuck! You’re still here,” she says walking toward the stairs leading to her room.
“Yes, didn’t think I was going anywhere, did you?” I question her while following. “Um, well, I thought maybe you have people to kill or bike rides to go on.” I actually laugh at what comes from her mouth.
“Bike rides, babe? I’m not twelve.”
“Ha, could have fooled me,” she bites out and I place my hands to my heart and stare at her in mock hurt.
“I have to work, and you need to leave.” She storms up the steps stomping up all four of them and I laugh out loud.
I sit there watching her little angry shadow move around her room. She’s cute mad. She’s fire and ice. As I watch her, I scratch at my arms moving down my thighs as I roll over the thoughts of just how I ended up here last night, coz let’s face it, I really had no fucking clue how I found myself here, let alone with the coffee pot thing from the little lady at the Starbucks shop. This turning up was on a whim was a spur of the moment thing, nothing like my actual life before her. Not in the same way I used to find myself in strange places before. Those times I never knew how I got there, why I was there, or what I was doing. I was battling against the blackout brought on by booze and junk and the decisions I had made when I mixed the two. I had to though, to save myself from begging down on my knees for the devil to take me from this life. I couldn’t handle the life, I had without her in it. She made me into the thing I despised the most. The thing that killed her and took them both from me.
I was sober now though, I changed for them. For my loves. I had to; the Reapers made sure of it. Ghost pulled me from the pits of hell and up into the grey washed light of this empty life. Then I saw her. This lady. This little bird, who smelt like flowers in the rain. Sunshine on cherry blossoms. She made the world seem beautiful again.
My club needed me to be calm, sober. My job required me to have control and planning. Jobs that required my senses and my knowledge to keep my club safe and their bodies alive, unlike the ones we make lay at our feet with blood seeping from their pores. Unlike the ones that Ghost needs me to take from this world.
The job he has enlisted me to help run. The empire that he has built and grown into this wonderous dark lair of blood, sex and exotic, yet toxic, purpose. It requires me to be focused as I create beautiful bodies to feed the depths of hell and watch the girls dance for powerful men of this world. To pleasure them in ways their buttoned-up wives could never even imagine. This right here, this new job requires presence and sobriety. It requires me to fight against that itch in my skin that I woke up with. That I slept with. That I fucking breathed with. It was my penance. My fucking punishment. Today, like every day, I wondered what hell would be like when I finally ate a bullet. Because there was no more to be done to me. But as I watch her dry her hair, I wonder if maybe hell would be a little like heaven for a dark man like me. I shouldn’t be here watching this woman. She gives me the taste of a forgotten memory that sparks to life a whisper on the wind from a woman that once said to me when I was little,
“You will be loved more than the moon loves the sun, for I am the moon, and you are the sun. You will find your own galaxy, my darling boy, and when you do, it will feel nothing like you’ve ever felt before. It will be one hundred times stronger than the one feeling that you thought you couldn’t ever live without.”
And for me that feeling was Hannah, then when she took it from me. I replaced it with a junk and booze laced symphony. Now though, I feel that feeling itching back at the buried parts of my soul. Because when she opened it, hell felt a little bit like heaven. Everything about her face has flushed as she locks eyes with me. She fucking took parts of the itch away and filled me with the feeling the drugs brought after a lethal hit that would kill a normal junkie. She is broken, I know. Shit, she was hurt before and it made me feel more for her. Like I could piece her back together while trying to glue my own fractured and haunted soul back to the way it was before the explosives detonated inside at close range, blowing everything into tiny, fucked pieces.
She is soft with beautiful edges. Her stunning body that she tries to hide with oversized clothing, made no sense but screams so much at me that it has me thinking it was a man who had made her feel so un-beautiful. That she felt the need to hide behind the baggy, dull-colored shield so not to pull the gazes from men toward her.
She walks down into the large open area that was her simple white space, the sun had risen fully, bathing her whole place in a bright, orange hue. Lighting up her skin while sending a halo-like shine over her as she walked.
“Still here I see.” Her face held her annoyance at the fact that I am still there. “You know, I’m sure there is a law about you just hovering like this.”
