19. Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Nineteen
I expected to feel like a zombie the whole way back from the Feral Possum. Normally, the worse Eamon is on a particular day, the more my mind checks out. It’s easier that way. But for some reason, the part of my brain that lets me detach—that unhooks itself from the dock and allows my consciousness to drift away until I can passively observe from a safe distance instead of participate—seems to be broken.
Instead, I feel shivery and intense. My prey-senses are dialed up to their maximum level, and I’m hyper-aware of every flicker of movement or sound or scent that I can perceive.
Eamon is continuing to be extra as fuck. Tapping his fingers, snorting more of whatever meth or coke he’s been pounding, chain-smoking like it’s the eighties, rambling about his glorious victory over Gunnar, who he clearly perceives to be some kind of competition.
Which doesn’t make any sense. Even he should know that. Competition implies there’s a choice, and I have no choice here. Unless he thinks I also don’t have a choice with Gunnar, because that’s just how relationships work to him, so he’s competing with Gunnar for who can keep me chained in a tower the most tightly?
Fuck if I know. I want to go back to being exhausted and stressed out. This wired, alert, close-to-panic-but-not-quite version of myself is something I’m not used to and don’t fucking care for.
When he finally pulls the car in and throws it into park, I look around.
“We’re not going home?”
His home, obviously. Not mine. All of my homes have been razed to the ground by his existence.
We’re in the parking lot of a motel. The whole place is long and low and flat, including the building, and we’re within both eye and earshot of the freeway. It’s not a chain, and looks like it’s on its last legs before it gets bought out by one, which makes me think we’re here for the discretion rather than the decor.
“Fuck that,” Eamon says before sniffing loudly. A brief image of him having such a colossal nosebleed that he hemorrhages to death right here in the parking lot flashes in my mind, but it doesn’t happen. “I’m sick of people meddling. Everybody wants to meddle. Everybody has an opinion. You should thank me, too. If your boyfriend comes looking for us, I’ll fucking kill him. At least here, we’re off the grid until everyone comes to their senses. I just need a few days until Patrick cools down and accepts that I am the one who should be taking over the Banna. And you’re going to keep me company.”
Jesus, he really has gone full Wolf of Wall Street . I can taste the unhinged from here, and it’s difficult not to sigh. This issue is one of his greatest hits. Patrick is his shitty boss—my shitty boss too, I guess, although I’m sure he also wants me dead by now. Eamon has been rambling about becoming his ‘successor’ as long as I’ve known him. As if any hick-ass backwoods mafia is going to want their leader to be someone like him.
Maybe they could get over the fact that he fucks men. Maybe they all buy into his Spartan bullshit about real men exerting their dominance over others blah blah blah . But whoever he fucks, he’s still a mess. I’m sure he hasn’t impressed them by spending all this time chasing me around town because I bruised his ego by running away. He must be neglecting whatever it is he does for them when he’s not coked-out and paranoid.
Resigned, I follow him toward the very outer edge of the one-story building. I’m still wired, but I have it under control. The motel is split into several arms, all jutting out from the main entrance, with rooms on either side of the arm and each room directly accessible from the parking lot.
We’re at the very end of one of the arms. Private, just the way he likes it. I wouldn’t be surprised if he bought out the rooms around us and paid or threatened whatever passes for maid service in this place to stay away.
In all my time with him, I’ve experienced a lot. But there’s been at least a veneer of civility over it. No matter how much brutality he exerted, there was always the facsimile of some kind of relationship, and he bothered to make excuses or at least convince me that whatever he did was my fault.
He was teaching me. Correcting me. Punishing me. Whatever he thought sold his dominance and my subservience.
I feel like this time, all that’s about to go out the window. I’m graduating from constant, insidious terror combined with brief moments of violence to being chained to a radiator until someone eventually finds my corpse. I can see the whole thing playing out in my mind’s eye.
I don’t want to die chained to a radiator.
It’s a weird thought. “I don’t want to die,” should be a complete sentence. And it is. Sort of.
But in all the possible futures my subconscious has laid out for me, each with their own levels of humiliation and debasement, none have been quite so fucking dry as to starve to death after Eamon’s heart explodes from doing cheap blow that’s probably laced with fentanyl. Or he gets executed by his boss and doesn’t come back to unlock me. Or whatever else.
I don’t know why I latch on to the thought, but once I do, I can’t let go. I made my peace with the idea of dying young since before I even fully understood it. Since long before Eamon. It just seemed like the future for people like me.
But the dreary, depressing, slow-motion concept of wasting away in this godawful motel room makes me want to grab the world and fucking shake it until ridiculous shit like this stops happening to people.
It’s dumb. It’s all a waste. There’s no purpose to any of this, but still, here I am.
Maybe I am detaching myself from reality again, because this train of thought is weird, even for me. For whatever reason, this specific hypothetical has got its claws in me. I feel more motivated to escape my radiator-fate than anything else Eamon may or have in store for me.
Or maybe it’s the lingering shadow of Gunnar’s face at the periphery of my vision, telling me I deserve better than this. I don’t know that I deserve a lot. I constantly scramble back and forth between how many of Eamon’s punishments I really did earn by my own weaknesses and failings, and how much of it is just him vomiting his aggression on the world. Some days, I think it’s all him. Sometimes it feels like it’s all me. It depends.
Right now, I know with more certainty than I’ve ever known anything that I do not deserve this.
I want to go home. To whatever’s left of it.
Fuck it. I’d rather die trying than slowly rot here, anyway.
All these thoughts distract me while Eamon hustles us both inside. He’s looking around the desolate parking lot, as if anyone here gives a fuck what we’re doing. He could bend me over in the parking lot and the only response we might get is someone jacking off as they watch.
Inside, he keeps the lights off. The blinds are drawn, and the whole room is messy, like he’s been here for a while. There’s a half-drunk bottle of rye on the small Formica table next to the bed, although it doesn’t smell as bad as I would expect it to if he’s truly been on a bender. It’s possible he was holding it together until the past couple of days. If he’d been fucked up this whole time, there’s no way it would be this clean.
Eamon throws down his keys and phone. He kicks off his shoes and pants immediately, collapsing on the bed to settle in for the night, although his gun gets placed on the nightstand next to him like always.
He watches his gun, but not that closely. He knows I wouldn’t. And I really won’t. He can still overpower me, and it’s too easy for the fucking thing to go off in the middle of the struggle. If I’m escaping anything, it’s not by shooting him with his own gun, as satisfying as that sounds.
It’s also not by smothering him with a pillow, or anything else as dramatic. I hate to admit it to myself, but now that I finally feel the spark of actually wanting to leave, of wanting to live, I have to seize it. Before it flickers and is extinguished by more pain.
The only weapons I have to use against him are speed and seduction. And in a space this small, speed isn’t going to happen.
Pieces of a plan are fragmented in my mind, but I do my best to pull them into something useable. I look around, desperate to find anything to work to my advantage, but there’s nothing. Nothing except his own inherent weaknesses.
There’s a small mini fridge in the corner that looks like it’s about to cause an electrical fire. I walk over to it and pull out one of the beers I assumed would be inside, bringing it to him with a meek expression. Then I kick off my own shoes and crawl into bed. I lie next to him, like I’m waiting for permission.
When he looks at me with his eyebrows raised, I tap into every swirling piece of rage and sadness I can access, and I let the tears fall.
“I’m so sorry,” I say, babbling while I sob as cinematically as possible. “I didn’t mean to run. I’m sorry. I’ll make it up to you.”
He looks a little surprised, but that quickly smoothes out into a preening, self-satisfied smirk. When you truly believe you’re this deserving of something, it’s easy to be convinced that you’re finally getting it.
Eamon lets me cling to his side, although the stiffness and unyielding discomfort of his body against mine would be noticeable even if I didn’t fucking despise him.
Gunnar has never felt like that. Everywhere Eamon is sharp and hard, Gunnar is soft. He’s just as strong, but his body is thicker and more substantial. He has this way of not just feeling physically soft, but also melting into even the slightest touch from me. Like he’s a fucking Tempur-Pedic pillow that’s designed to conform to my shape.
Eamon is designed to disrupt every plane and surface he comes into contact with. He’s nothing but sharp angles and brittle, cold textures.
I pretend anyway, though. I don’t want to taint my memories of Gunnar, but it’s what I need in this moment. Letting myself remember how he felt under me allows me to throw myself at Eamon like the world’s most apologetic puppy, weeping and hiccupping and begging him to forgive me.
As soon as his hand finds the back of my head, I know he’s taken the bait.
For a second, I think about trying to bite his fucking dick off. I saw a movie once where a girl bit the dude’s dick and rubbed something painful in his eyes to escape. I’ve always held that scene in a special, tender place in my heart.
It would be satisfying, at least. Well, it would be until he shot me. With all the junk he’s shoved up his nose, I don’t know how much he’s feeling of anything and he would definitely be able to let rage and drugs fuel him through my brutal dismemberment before he bled to death.
No, thank you.
Once again, I remind myself that all I have is the long game. It feels pathetic and disgusting, but it’s safe.
It’s the only thing that might get me home. I want to go fucking home.
So, I force myself to cry even more, knowing how much he enjoys it, and I let him fucking push me. Enjoy it while you can, asshole. If this is what it takes to lull you into trusting me again, fine. It’s not like I have any dignity left to protect.
I just want to leave in one piece. I can take a little more punishment. If I have to.
I thought it would be enough. As soon as he fell asleep, I could go. But no, he doesn’t trust me that much, apparently. No matter how much I pretend and debase myself in the process.
He locks the door at night with an extra padlock and keeps the key around his neck. We don’t leave during the day. I don’t know where the Banna think he is, or if they finally want him dead as well. I don’t know what his endgame is, except I think he probably doesn’t have one. He’s getting fucked up enough to stay mean, but not enough to get stupid and vulnerable.
I’m hanging in the balance, and nothing seems to shift one way or the other.
The only plus is that he hasn’t literally chained me to the radiator yet, but I can feel it coming.
On the third day, we run out of beer and food.
“Go,” he says, pointing at the front door with the muzzle of his gun while I stand there, slack-jawed. “Go to the store. You can walk.”
I squint. Either he’s getting paranoid or he’s genuinely in danger now, if he’s not even willing to leave the room anymore. But that still doesn’t make sense that he would let me leave. He doesn’t really believe I’m coming back.
Slowly, not making any sudden movements or appearing too excited, I pull on my shoes. I stand up, trying not to wince as my body protests any kind of movement after the punishment it’s been taking. My jaw trembles at the sudden pain, but I think I hide it well enough.
Eamon doesn’t like signs of weakness unless they’re specifically for his entertainment, and I don’t want to risk pissing him off before I get the chance to leave. I head to the door, maintaining the same slow and careful pace.
I can almost feel the sunshine on my face. He tosses me the key to the extra lock, and I manage to catch it with shaking hands. When it clicks and releases the latch, every cell in my body seems to sigh in relief.
My hand is on the door handle when he finally speaks again, and the sound of his voice makes me freeze.
“If you’re not back in thirty minutes, your boyfriend dies.” Ah. That’s it. There’s the catch. “I don’t mean I’ll go get him and kill him. I mean there’s someone waiting, and all it will take is one phone call. The second that minute flips over, and he’s fucking dead. Do you hear me? Same thing goes if you think you can rat to the cops. Or if anything happens to me. If you step out of line one teeny tiny bit… He dies. Think about that while you’re walking.”
My stomach sinks. He must be bluffing. Or is he? Is that too much to risk?
He’s not some evil mastermind with a space laser pointed at Gunnar’s head. He doesn’t have any allies left. He assumes I’m too weak and scared to question it. He’s bluffing.
Right?
Either way, I slip out of the room without looking back. My stomach clenches, acid sloshing inside me with each step I take. The farther I get from the room, the faster I move, until I’m practically jogging.
I’m still headed toward the store. Is that my subconscious telling me I should believe Eamon and not risk Gunnar’s life? It’s one thing to cost my own life with this stupidity, but I can’t let him pay the price for any of it.
I can’t run fast enough to make it to Gunnar within half an hour. I don’t even really know where we are, although I’m sure I could figure it out after a while.
Both options are a gamble. Either I obey Eamon and nothing changes, except I get one more sunset closer to the end. Or I run, and Gunnar could be dead by the time I get to him.
If I had good judgment, I wouldn’t be in this fucking situation in the first place. Overthinking is the only form of thinking I have, and rationality doesn’t play a big role in that.
Fuck.
He must be bluffing.
He has to be.
Unless he’s not.