“Look—”
I’m up the stairs before he finishes whatever he’s saying next.I leave the basement door open.Six inches.
I call Luke.
“Yeah?”
“Come over.”
He doesn’t ask why.
I stand in the kitchen and wait.I don’t fix my face.I don’t fix anything.I’m done fixing things for men who don’t deserve the effort.
Everything I’ve done—all of it—has been for nothing.The kidnapping.The trailer.The lying.The cover story I built so well it should be on my résumé.The potty chair I bought from a woman who thought it was for my grandmother.The ball gag I bought from a man who thought it was for my weekend.The four times I changed the sheets because a grown man weaponized his own bladder.The casseroles I accepted with a straight face.The prayer I sat through while Meg Ryan orgasmed beneath my feet.The movie nights.The Notebook.The concrete floor.All of it.Every unhinged, criminal, delusional minute of it.For a man who had one sentence in his pocket that would have ended this and chose to let me keep mopping up his piss instead.
Everyone was right about him.Luke.Mrs.Mather, probably.The cashier at the kink store, for all I know.
I am a woman with a graduate degree and a corner office résumé who committed a list of felonies a prosecutor would need a second page for—and the man I did it for couldn’t be bothered to tell me the truth.
That’s not love.That’s not even delusion.That’s just stupid.
51
Luke
The tattoo parlor hasn’t changed.Same brick front.Same neon sign buzzing in daylight.Same bell on the door.
I park out front this time.Not two blocks down.I’m not walking far.I want him to see the truck.The bullet hole.The window I had replaced.I want him to know who’s here and why before the bell stops ringing.
Inside, it smells the same.Disinfectant, ink, and something sweet trying to cover poor decisions.The purple-haired girl looks up from behind the counter.She sees me.She remembers.
She’s gone before I reach the back hallway.
Smart girl.
Last door on the left.Past EMPLOYEES ONLY.Past the bathroom that still hasn’t seen bleach.I open the door.
Javi is sitting at the same stainless-steel table.Not counting pills this time.The hand I broke is out of the splint but it’s not right—the fingers sit wrong, curled in a way that says they’ll never straighten all the way.He’s rolling a joint with his left hand.Slowly.The way you do everything when your dominant hand is a memory.
He looks up.Doesn’t smile this time.
“You’ve got balls,” he says.“I’ll give you that.”
“You sent seven people after me, Javi.Two at the bar.Two with a gun.Three on the road.”I close the door behind me.“That’s a lot of friends to waste on a broken hand.”
“You cost me six weeks of work.”
“You killed a girl on the cheer team.I think we’re uneven.”
The room is small.Cold.The same cold from last time.The same fluorescent buzz.The same feeling of a space that was built for things that don’t belong in daylight.
“Where are they?”I say.“Sal.The tall one.The other one.”
“Not here.”
“Good.”
I pull the hammer from my jacket.Short handle.Good weight.My grandfather’s.I set it on the stainless-steel table the way you’d set down a coffee mug—casual, familiar, a thing that belongs in my hand.
