Chapter 12
VEX
Someone needs to chop off my cock before I sleep with Carmen. Again.
It’s not even been ten minutes, and already it’s dying to plunge back inside of her.
This is dangerous.
Time to fix myself up with a beer to feel more like myself again.
“There were some strange noises coming from one of the back rooms a few minutes ago,” laughs Lucia as she serves me. “I don’t suppose that has anything to do with you, Skipper, and Carter? You seem to be sneaking away a lot recently with an outsider.”
An outsider. I’m glad she’s reminding me of that fact.
Lucia watches my face. “You’re afraid. I was an outsider too, once upon a time. Now look at me.”
Lucia is one of the lucky exceptions who happened to find the loves of her lives amidst a crisis that involved a stalker ex.
Things might be smooth sailing for the time being with Ash, Ryder, and Saint, but the future is never promised.
Also, how can they be so sure that their “love” is going to last forever? Forever is a fantasy. It’s impossible for something to last forever when death is the only constant in this world.
I thank Lucia and take my drink, heading over to the table to find Carter and Skipper questioning their lives in silence.
It looks like I’m gonna have to be the one to break the silence.
“Ours?” Even repeating the word slices me open. “Why the fuck did you have to go and say that?”
Skipper brings his attention to me in his own time. “Don’t blame a man for saying something in the heat of the moment.”
“I am going to blame him, especially when Carmen is anything but ours.”
Carter quietly listens in on the conversation, netting his hands together.
“We need to find out who was driving the black car,” I continue. “So we can say goodbye to Carmen and continue on with our lives.”
Skipper studies me like my face is a complicated textbook. “What’s the hurry?”
“The hurry is that Carmen was supposed to be a one-time thing.”
The staring continues. “So?”
“So, we need to get rid of her.”
That finally gets Carter’s attention. The pained look across his face is more prominent than before.
I don’t get the time to question why he looks like he wants to off himself. Carmen is already on her way toward us, maneuvering through dense crowds like it’s an emergency.
“Please. Get me home. Now.”
“That’s no way to ask someone for a lift,” I say.
She throws me her best pissed off look. “Okay. Pretty please give me a lift, please.”
“You know that’s not possible until we’ve taken care of the black car.”
“The black car is probably upside down in a ditch miles away from here, the driver bleeding out as we speak, in critical condition. That’s what normally happens when you off-road at two hundred miles an hour.”
“We’ll take a fleet out tomorrow.”
“No, you’ll get over yourselves and take me back home right this instant.” Carmen stares hopefully at Carter. “Cut the bullshit. You don’t care about protecting me. You just want me to yourselves.”
“That’s not true, Carmen. There are dangerous people out here.”
“And you suddenly decide to give a fuck about me, because?” She rakes a hand through her messed up hair, attempting to tame it. “Let’s face it—none of us know one another. I have a life, and I can’t afford to be all the way out here when I’m needed in the real world.”
“This is the real world,” Carter says.
Carmen takes a deep inhale, getting ready to prepare her counterargument when a burner phone rings.
Carter grabs his phone and stares at the screen with confusion.
“Who is it?” I ask. “Anyone we know?”
“Unknown number,” he mumbles, too busy trying to work out the order of the digits. “I don’t recognize it.” He accepts the call and presses the phone to his ear with a curt “Hello?”
In the year that I’ve known Carter, I’ve come to realize that he’s good at keeping a straight face. He doesn’t show happiness, the same way he doesn’t show sadness.
I always thought that was because he was one of the lucky ones, immune to feeling any human emotion.
Tonight, I’m proved wrong.
His face goes green. And then gray.
He ends the call without even saying goodbye, and launches the burner out into the room. It crashes into the wall, the plastic covering splitting open.
Looks like it’s gonna be great news.
Carmen stares, not at the broken phone on the floor, but at Carter’s bicep.
Skipper wafts his hand over his face. “Earth to Carter?”
“We’re fucked,” he says plain and simple. “That was Conrad.”
“I take it he was the driver of the black car?” I say.
“No, Conrad wouldn’t be caught dead out in the middle of the desert. The driver was an associate of his.”
Brilliant.
Carmen takes a seat, hand on chin as she anxiously waits for Carter to cut to the chase.
“He wants you,” he tells her.
I scoff. “He made that pretty damn obvious from the night of the auction.”
“No.” Carter dismisses my comment, still looking at Carmen. “He wants you. If we don’t bring you to the O’Neills in the next few days, there’s going to be war.”
I expect Carmen to explode, but instead she remains still.
Eerily still.
Her eyes are frozen on Carter’s face, like she’s trying to wrap her head around this. In a matter of seconds, she’s gone from being a human being to an ice sculpture.
One that looks like it’s about to crack.
“Carmen?”
“No.” Her head comes alive, shaking this way and that.
She’s gonna make herself dizzy.
“Carmen?” Carter presses again. “We’ll figure something out.”
Her eyeballs look like two fragile balls of glass that could shatter at any given moment.
Isn’t Carmen supposed to be the kind of woman that fights, not flights? Isn’t she supposed to use the fear as ammunition, not let it consume her?
I watch all of the blood drain from her face, the life disappear from her eyes.
And now I feel cold too.
“Carmen?” Carter tries again, this time with a hand on her arm. “Don’t panic, we’re going to figure something out. Conrad’s not going to hurt—”
“Don’t touch me.” She swats Carter away and shoots to her feet. “I have to get home. This was all such a terrible idea.”
I lock my hand around her wrist before she can take off.
I stare into her terrified eyes until my mind finally catches up to me. What am I doing? It’d be easier to let her go. To let Conrad take her.
With her gone, we’d be able to get back to the way things were before.
Normality is much easier to cope with.
“Believe it or not, humans use their mouths to communicate. Crazy, right? That you can use it to talk, as well as to drink whiskey?”
My father looks up at me with woozy eyes from the bottle of booze he’s just necked. “Stop being a sarcastic smart-ass,” he slurs. “You get that from your mother.”
“You were never gonna tell me about the divorce, were you?” I grab the papers that were kindly left out for me on the counter this afternoon, and shove them in his face.
“Thanks for planting these in the kitchen for me to discover. Nothing beats coming home from a hard day at school to find out that your own parents have decided to file for a divorce.”
The worst part is that I never saw it coming. There were no obvious signs. We always ate as a family every evening. Mom always used to cook; Dad always used to return from work and plant a chaste kiss to my mom’s temple.
I thought I was the lucky one, living the American dream with parents that were always going to be in love.
I chew on my lip trying to contain my anger. It was my eighteenth birthday two days ago. I found the divorce papers placed next to my birthday cards.
Nothing screams happy birthday quite like a surprise divorce.
“So, what? You had a big argument and decided to end your marriage? What the fuck is wrong with you?” I take the empty bottle of whiskey from my dad’s hands, the warm glass an indicator of how long he’s been holding onto it.
“What’s the plan moving forward? You become an alcoholic, and Mom has to spend the rest of her life picking up the pieces because as an ex, you’re no longer inclined to pick them up for her anymore?”
My dad takes one big sigh and turns around to face me. “A bottle of whiskey is the least I deserve to celebrate the eighteen-year-long act I’ve been keeping up.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“It’s time to take off the rose-tinted glasses, son. None of this is real.”
“Thanks for lying to me my whole life.”
My father looks at me like I’m a man, not the son he raised. “Marriage is duty. It has nothing to do with love.”
Is he taking the piss?
“What about Mom? Did the two of you set up an eighteen-year contract before I was born? You’re telling me this was all fake? I don’t believe you.”
“You don’t have to believe me now, but one day you’ll understand. We’re animals. It’s in our biology to reproduce. I wanted to settle down and have a child. Now that I’ve succeeded in doing that, my job here is done.”
“So, you’re just gonna abandon me and Mom?”
“Love doesn’t exist, son. Only duty.”
When your father tells you one random Wednesday afternoon that he never loved your mom, your immediate reaction is to think that he’s lying.
Until he walks out with two suitcases the following morning, not even bothering to comfort your sobbing mom.
It’s hard to fall asleep at night when you realize that your whole life has been a lie.
The hugs before and after work.
The I love yous.
My dad always used to make Mom a coffee in the morning, one sugar, just how she liked it. They’d kiss before leaving for work, and I always used to shrivel up with disgust, thinking it was gross how they shared saliva.
But it was a lie.
Everything was one-sided.
My dad was using my mom.
But, why lie to me for eighteen years? Why bother putting on a performance if the performance was eventually going to end?
It feels like I’ve been robbed of a childhood.
It feels like a crime.
Suddenly you’re in the middle of it all. One parent is warning you how dangerous it is to trust. Another parent is telling you why sometimes, it’s good to lie to get what you want.
“Good people always finish last,” says my dad. “Always remember that.”
That quote is why I decided to intern in the Las Vegas police department.
The law is a fragile thing. If you break it, you face consequences, but sometimes it can be worth it to get what you want.
Sometimes.
When you work in law enforcement, you move through the world neutrally. You get to see things for what they are. You strip down the lies and see everything objectively.
Because you’re in the middle.
And when you’re in the middle, you’re in the safe zone. No loyalties, no attachments.
Life doesn’t happen to you, because you’re the one who gets to decide who wins and who loses.