6. Six
Six
Vic
S ix Years Old
As I sit in the dark, cold room, a shiver runs over my body. I grab my blankie and hold it to me as tightly as I can, my small fingers going through the holes in the corners of the fabric.
My tummy hurts. It keeps growling for food.
Mom said she would bring me some, but she never did, and it feels like I’ve been waiting forever.
Mom and Dad were yelling, and he told me to go to my room. I begged him for food, but he didn’t care.
He never does. I don’t like Dad. He’s mean to me and sometimes to Mom. He falls asleep a lot, and Mom does, too, but every once in a while, she’ll spend time with me. She rubs my hair and hums.
Those are the best times.
I wish she’d come back right now.
“Fuck,” I growl and slam my palm on my nightstand, trying to reach for my phone that’s blaring in my ears. It feels like someone’s hitting me in the head with a baseball bat, though I’m thankful for it waking me from the dream that plays on repeat most nights.
“Hey, boss, your nine o’clock just arrived. Just wanted to let you know.” My eyes go wide.
“Fuck, I’ll be right there. Can you set up my station?”
“Done,” Samuel says before hanging up.
I stayed up way later than my ass should have, drinking as my feet dangled in the pool while I looked up at the room shrouded in darkness where Rosie sleeps.
I rub my eyelids with the heels of my sweaty palms and emit a yawn.
Grabbing one of the many protein bars from my top drawer, I polish it off in three dry bites, not even tasting it. Knowing that the bottomless feeling in my stomach has nothing to do with hunger and more to do with the nightmare plaguing my mind.
You’d think after all these years I’d be able to get out of that cold-ass bedroom with a small holey mattress on the floor, but I still get stuck there.
Helpless and hungry.
The shittiest part wasn’t discovering my parents died on the way back from a run to score more speed. No, it was being stuck in that house with no food for almost a week. My school finally called the cops for them to do a welfare check after a week of absences. I was malnourished, only surviving off water in the nasty-ass bathroom sink.
I count to ten. Allowing myself to only spend ten seconds in memory land before banishing it to the pits of hell. As I get to one, I close my eyes and inhale deeply before exhaling.
I jump up and stretch, looking back at my very empty bed. It’s not often that I wake up alone, since most women try to stay the night. Sometimes I cave and let them. Rachel tried last night after I called her in my drunken stupor, only to literally not get it up for the second time that day.
No one comes close to piquing my interest or making me hard... besides Rosie, which is aggravating. Her comment in the pool was not too far off.
She’s both the poison and the antidote to my situation, and I don’t know what to do.
I throw on my clothes in a rush. She has her first shift with Jess. I have my client. We need to hurry.
I yell up to her room that we need to leave, like now, then wait in the living room on the overstuffed couch that never gets used. Weirdly, it’s called the living room when I do far more living in the guesthouse than I’ve ever done in here.
Just like every other time, there’s an eerie silence in here. One might even call it lonely.
Not long after I got out, I saw this house on the market and found myself in a bidding war with a couple expecting a child. While this house was better suited for a family, I felt an inexplicable longing when I stepped inside. It was the home I should have had as a child, and because of that, I paid well over the asking price to get it.
But here it sits, mostly vacant. Devoid of warmth and laughter.
I check my phone with a sigh. We need to get going. I hate being late.
I ascend the stairs and knock, only to be met with silence on the other side. I open the door to a very empty room.
What the fuck? My stomach drops as I run around the house, looking for her. I pull out my phone and dial Jess.
“Good morning, and thank you for calling Sweet E—”
“Is Rosie there?”
“Good morning to you, too, Vic, and yes, she is. Do you want to—”
I hang up on Jess the second I know Rosie’s safe.
As the panic subsides, annoyance takes its place. The second I get ahold of her phone, I’m placing a tracker on it.
I pull over to the side and park in front of Sweet Escape, too fucking pissed to park at my shop and walk over.
The bell above the door announces my arrival, and Samantha instantly greets me a little too enthusiastically. After the shit show the night of Rosie’s arrival, I’ve avoided her. Once Rosie left for the main house, she bitched about her staying with me and told me she should stay elsewhere. First, she and I fucked twice—that hardly warrants her opinion to count—and two, she did it because she felt threatened.
Samantha’s pretty, with blond hair and blue eyes, but there’s not a whole hell of a lot going on upstairs, and she wanted more. They always do.
“Morning, Samantha,” I say politely with a tight smile, not wanting to give her the wrong impression ever again .
“Hey Vic, how’ve you been?” she asks, leaning over the counter and into my space.
“Not too bad,” I say, looking around for the brunette I want to strangle.
“That’s great. Hey, I was thinking...”
My gaze halts as I spot Rosie walking toward me from the back with boxes in her hands. “Hey,” I say to get Rosie’s attention.
“Oh, hey there, Vic,” she says, a little surprised before averting her eyes anywhere but at me.
So I guess my little comment in the pool made her uncomfortable. Good. I move closer to her, behind the food display counter and away from her clingy coworker.
“Nothing else to say?”
“Like...?”
“You weren’t supposed to leave the house this morning alone. That’s not part of our agreement. I’m supposed to drive you.”
“Sorry,” Rosie says with a dismissive shrug.
“Sorry? That’s all?”
“I thought you’d be busy this morning with your company from last night,” she says with a bit of a bite to her words.
So she was watching me after she left the pool last night. Interesting.
“Little nosy, don’t you think... or maybe it’s jealousy?” I smirk.
Her head snaps up. “Not in a million fucking years. If anything, I pity the company you keep.”
“Is that so?”
“Four different girls in four days...it’s like they all pull numbers and wait their turn.”
“You want to pull a number? You seem awfully worried.”
“Absolutely not,” she says with a smirk. “Just wondering when it’s my turn to bring someone to the guesthouse. You know, try out the bed.”
My smile vanishes, and my mood sours further, if possible.
She’s playing with fire, and she knows it.
She’s trying to make me jealous, and it’s working.
“You don’t get turns.”
“We’ll see.”
“I’m fucking serious.”
“And so am I. It’s not fair you get to have all the fun,” she complains with that same fucking smile she had yesterday. She’s practically giddy with the way she’s pissing me off. I can’t help but feel like I need to get the last word in and win this little battle we seem to always have.
I lean on the counter and narrow my eyes at her before licking my lips, which I know she’ll look at. When I know I have her full attention, I give her a hard stare as if I’m looking under her clothes to make her uncomfortable. I gaze down her delectable body, at least from what I can see from behind the counter, then back up, stopping at her eyes that reveal her every emotion.
Irritation, anger, and a flicker of something else.
She squirms under the heat of my gaze as if I’m caressing her body with my hands.
And this is why I need to walk out right now. Why am I doing this to myself? I’m here to reprimand her, and all I can think about is bending her over my knee and spanking her.
“You bring anyone to my house, and I will kill them. Do you understand?”
“Sure thing, Dad,” she mutters as she bends down out of view .
I stomp back to my truck and slam the door closed. I’m too irritated to eat even though my stomach groans in protest.
She won’t be honest with me, but I know who she will be honest with.
I burst into my office, passing a perplexed Samuel and my most likely furious client, and slam the door. After grabbing a piece of paper from my printer tray and a pen from my desk, I plop down in my seat and stare at the blank piece of paper as I try to come up with something to say besides sorry for leaving you hanging like a piece of shit.
The pen tapping on my desk fills the silence as I wait for inspiration that will not come.
The difference between the letters from before and now is knowing she smells like a mix of flowers and fruit, the notch she gets between her eyebrows when she’s irritated, and the groan she makes when she eats like it’s the first time every time. She seems even more satisfied with food than I do, which is difficult. Now I know the way her body looks without pants and the way her skin feels. How she breathes in and out while stretching in the gym every morning.
All of this in such a short period is fucking with me, and the resolve I had when Gage asked me to watch over her is almost nonexistent.
One Month Ago
“Yo!” I raise my head from my sketch pad as Gage saunters into my shop.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” I can’t help but smile as I jump up and give him a hug.
It’s been a minute since I’ve seen the fucker. He crashed at my place for about a month after he got out and then bounced. He needed safety and anonymity until he got strong enough. It didn’t take him long, and I couldn’t be more proud.
“Just in the neighborhood,” he states while looking around my shop, nodding his head as if approving.
“Yeah, fucking right. It’s been too long, bro. What have you been up to?”
“Oh, you know, the usual. Burning down one building at a time.” He smirks.
As time went on and we were stuck in our cell, he got more vengeful, plotting moves to take down everyone who wronged him. I was behind him on that fully. Ask anyone how they’d feel after serving years behind bars for something they never did.
“I wouldn’t expect anything less,” I say with a big-ass smile plastered on my face.
“Listen, I need a favor.”
Raising an eyebrow, I ask, “Don’t you have your own people to bury the bodies now?”
“That I do.” He smirks. “However, I need you for something more important.”
“I’m listening.”
“My sister, Rosalinda.”
My heart beats faster, and a tightness forms in the back of my throat as I think about her .
The one girl I looked at every single day for years, the one girl I fantasized about, the one girl I can close my eyes and see with such absolute clarity. The one girl I promised myself I would stay away from after the night of that party. But she’s always been in the back of my mind. She’s taken up residence there for years, never to vacate. Her name is all it took for her claws to sink under my skin and poison me with no thoughts besides her.
It sounds insane, even to my own ears, but she gave me hope during one of the most hopeless times I’ve ever been in. It probably didn’t help that Gage told me stories about all of them with the endless time that we had on our hands. He spoke of her being an artist; we had that in common. He spoke of her compassionate nature and sweet personality. His stories reeled me in. Then, I stole her address and wrote to her for years. I’m a piece of shit for doing that behind Gage’s back, and if he ever found out, I’d gladly let him beat my ass.
Running guns and drugs cost me many years of my younger life, but I’d do it all again to see her face and write to her. I’m a crazy motherfucker with a screw loose, obviously.
“She’s trying to run away in a half-ass attempt to deter my fucker of a father from marrying her off, which he plans to do soon.”
My fists clench. The thought of her with someone else makes me see red. Blood red. It’s something she mentioned multiple times in letters. She was always adamantly against an arranged marriage, and over time, I was, too.
I didn’t want to share her with anyone else.
“Okay, I’m listening.”
“I need you to keep an eye on her here for a while. She’s sheltered. I don’t want her to be taken advantage of, but I want her to live the life she wants until I can figure something out to help her. ”
“Why don’t you want to keep her with you?”
“Someone tried to take me out last week.” He points at the graze on the tip of his ear.
“Fuck, it got close.”
“Exactly. I don’t want anything to happen to her.”
“Why me? Wouldn’t you want someone further away? Your dad’s still pretty close.”
“They won’t expect her to stay so close to Chicago, and I trust you with my life and hers. I know you’ll keep her safe.”
“I will.”
“You can befriend her, but keep your dick to yourself, as well as every other dick in town.”
And there it is. I’m totally fucked.
“When’s she coming?” I try not to sound too interested. Too eager. My pulse is in my ears, and my palms sweat in anticipation.
“A month, maybe less. I’ve been monitoring her text messages. Not sure if I’ll have to bring her myself or if she’ll come on her own, but take this just in case.” He hands me something from his pocket. A photo. I flip it over, and my heart rate picks up.
She’s just as beautiful as I remember. Still the same angelic face with that ever-present smile, and again, I’m flying too close to the sun. Feeling the warmth.
I flip the photo over and school my features. Gage doesn’t need to see how a mere picture of her affects me.
When I place it in my pocket, it feels like it’s burning a hole in my leg. I itch to take it back out and give it another glance. To rub the face in the picture.
“Got it. I’ll protect her. No worries.” I shrug.
But there are many worries. Big fucking worries. More worries than he will ever know .
“Thanks, bro. I owe you one.”
He can trust me with anything... besides his sister.
Fucking kill me.
“That’s what family’s for.” I clap him on the back. “Now, let’s give you some ink. I know your ass didn’t come all this way just to chitchat with me.”
“You know me well. How much time you got?”
“For you, my schedule’s wide open.”
“Fuck yeah. Let’s fix some of this shit you did when we were younger,” he says, referring to the not-so-great prison tats I gave him. He was my first canvas.
“Hey, what do you expect, motherfucker? I was limited on supplies.”
“Let’s start with the first one,” he says, looking down at the name of the girl who has been his everything since day one.
“You ever get your girl back?” I ask while I set up.
His face lights up with a huge-ass grin.
“Something like that,” he says cryptically. I wouldn’t expect anything else.
Fuck it. I’m already in too deep, with no way of making it out whole.
I tried to make her hate me, to make this easier on both of us, but it’s not working.
I put the pen to the paper.
Dear Rosie.