Chapter 13 #3
She takes the bag and peers down into it without moving away from me, and then reaches in, naming the items as she pulls them out and tosses them on the bed.
"Toothbrushes, toothpaste, deodorant, gauze, tape, hand sanitizer, antiseptic spray…
" she pauses at the last item in the bag, looking up at me. "And condoms."
I swallow hard, shrug. "I, um. I hope I'm not…getting ahead of myself, there."
Her gaze is heavy-lidded with arousal. "We have a bed and we have privacy. You're a smart man, and it turns me on when you think ahead." She uses her fingerhold on my belt loops to yank me up against her. "You could say I'm a pretty sure thing, babe."
"I must have spent five minutes trying to decide if I should get them or not. I know what we'd talked about earlier, but that was in the heat of the moment. I wasn't sure if—" I shrug, trail off. "I dunno. I was hesitant to assume."
"But you went with the assumption."
"More with hope than an assumption."
She gives me the melty-sweet look again.
"You don't have to hope anymore, Killian. Nothing short of an all-out gunfight is going to stop me from making love with you in that bed right there—and soon.” She pats me on the chest with both flat palms and steps back.
"But first, the ride. Explain, if you please. "
I scrub a hand over my head. "Well?" I laugh. "I still can't believe it worked, honestly, and even now I'm gonna be wary until we're boots dry on the mainland."
Story peels my shirt up and tosses it aside. "Don't mind me. Carry on."
"Ahhh…okay." She rips open the velcro straps of the vest and slides it off me; I cover my face with both hands, breathe, and force myself to focus despite the distraction of Story Binyamin undressing me like I'm a present to herself.
"So, Cal and I used to play this game that we called Spot The Dealer. "
She pauses with the vest in her hands. "Oh. I think I see where this is going. Very clever." She tosses the vest on top of the backpack and reaches for my fly. "Continue."
"Um. Where was I? Oh. Right. So I sat in an outdoor cafe and watched people for a while. Which is how the game works—Cal and I both love people watching. The game was just Cal's way of turning it into a competition."
"Because as we've established, Cal Roth has to win at everything." She very, very slowly unbuttons my fly, and then even more slowly lowers my zipper. "So I take it you found a dealer."
"I did. His uncle owns a boat, and for four hundred euros, they'll take us to the mainland, no questions asked. He'll be here at midnight to take us to his uncle's boat."
She gnaws on her lower lip, gazing up at me. "So you seriously just wandered around Olbia until you saw someone you thought was a drug dealer and asked if he could get us a no-questions-asked ride to Rome?"
I grin. "Yep."
"And it worked?”
"Yep." I laugh. "I almost bought some pot off him, too. I would've, if I didn't think we'd need all of our wits about us."
"It's illegal here, isn't it?" Story asks.
I shrug. "I think so? I'd assume so. It's only federally legal in a handful of countries, as far as I know." My jeans hit the floor, and I step out of them, toe them aside.
Story slides her hands under the waist of my underwear to cup my bare ass. "I'm seriously impressed, Kills. For real. I wouldn't have thought of that."
"Because you're a law-abiding citizen. You're an essential worker who’s dedicated her life to helping others. I'm the unemployed nepo-baby hooligan who's only stayed out of jail because my daddy's got a lot of money."
"You're a hell of a lot more than that, Killian," she murmurs.
"Glad you think so."
"I know so." She nips the tip of my chin, withdraws her hand from my underwear. "Time to eat, Fred."
"Time to eat Fred, or time to eat…Fred?" I tease.
We sit side by side on the edge of the bed, eating in easy silence; the meal Enzo made for us seems like a different lifetime.
"You think Enzo's gonna be okay?" I ask.
She nods. "I do. We got him to the hospital pretty quickly, and we stopped, or at least drastically slowed the bleeding."
"We have to see to his daughter and mother-in-law."
She nods without looking at me. "Playing the other side here for a second, but if Pugli is after us, it seems stupid to lead him to her."
"He knows where she is already. And we promised Enzo."
"But as far as anyone except Enzo knows, we shot him while escaping. If we stay clear, it's very likely Pugli won't know he was ever compromised. Just that he wasn't that great of a guard."
I glance at her. "True, but how does Pugli deal with failure?"
Her eyes shift to mine, and she winces. "Damn. You've got me there."
"I don't like it either," I say. "All I want is to find some safe way of getting ahold of our parents.
It's one thing to train for stuff like this, but it's a whole other thing to go through it, y'know?
The stories our parents tell, the media versions…
none of that can adequately convey the fear and uncertainty. "
Her eyes lock onto mine. “You're scared?"
I nod. "God yes. Not all the time. I'm not scared right now, for example.
But that fuckin' boat launch was the scariest thing I've ever experienced, the ride to shore second.
Even the actual getting snatched was more shocking and disorienting than scary.
And the being trapped in the dark container, that wasn't fun.
But…" I shrug. “You can't really sustain abject terror for that long.
Once I realized that they weren't going to drag me out and start chopping off fingers to send to my parents, I was more just bored and disoriented.
It's not natural to be in the dark for that long.
" Finished with my food, I set the empty clamshell aside and lean my elbows onto my knees, face in my hands.
"I haven't really had time to process any of this, though. "
"It gets delayed," Story says. "Our subconscious knows we can’t afford to have the emotional reactions yet. Once you really know you're safe, it'll all come out, one way or another."
"Do you…do you remember everything from when you met Anselm?"
She slowly finishes the last few fries, dragging them through ketchup until the red sauce kisses her fingertips, and then tilting her head back to drop the whole thing into her mouth. “Yeah."
The restaurant where I got the food didn't have a soda fountain, only warm cans and bottles. Story cracks the can of Coke Zero and takes a noisy, slurping sip. "Good lord, that's nice. It'd be better if it was nice and cold and crispy out of a fountain, but even a warm soda is a fantastic thing."
Another long pause.
"I was supposed to be asleep. Mom worked late that day.
Whenever that happened, she'd have our neighbor check on me.
Usually, I'd go to her house for a few hours and watch old Disney tapes, and then when it was time for bed, she'd bring me over to our house and get me in bed and asleep, and then she'd keep watch from her place until Mom got home. Not a perfect setup, obviously, but she was an old lady not exactly equipped to handle a seven-year-old with extreme PTSD.” She sips again, then rotates the can in her hands, fingers gently dimpling the tin with a metallic crinkling noise, her gaze on the floor, unseeing.
"I couldn't sleep. I kept…" she clears her throat.
"I kept having nightmares every time I closed my eyes, so I was reading books under my bed. "
“Under the bed?"
She nods. "I had a flashlight. Baby blue with Cinderella on it.
I'd drape my blankets over the sides of the bed so it was like a cave under there, and I'd look at books until I could sleep.
It was the only way I could feel safe. Even now, when I'm afraid, my instinct is to hide in a small space.
I don't, obviously, but I still feel the urge, twenty-two-years later. "
"Does the sound of gunfire—" I cut off. "That's a shitty thing to ask. I'm sorry."
She leans against my side. "No, it's not shitty at all.
Yeah, honestly, there will always be some part of me, however small, that will be that five-year-old whenever I hear gunfire.
I do know that Dad intentionally exposed me to gunfire when he and Mom were both with me, as exposure therapy, of a sort, I suppose.
And it worked. I don't…I don't have the PTSD reaction anymore. But I…I feel it, yeah."
“God, Story."
She rolls a shoulder. "I was so, so lucky.
No one else on earth could have gotten through to me the way Mom did.
She understood my trauma. She knew exactly how to love me.
How to support me. She knew when I needed to be alone to figure it out and when I needed her.
If I'd gone into the foster system?" She shudders.
"God, I'd be a fucking disaster." Another silence.
"Eight people died in that shooting. Six men, two women.
There were another six injured, including a ten-year-old girl and a six-year-old boy.
" She swallows audibly. "There were hundreds of people in the mall that day.
And you wanna know the worst statistic of all, Killy?
In the twenty-two years since the shooting, four people who were there that day have committed suicide.
Four. One of them was the six-year-old boy.
His parents were both killed, just like me.
But unlike me, a round went through his mother's head and into his chest. He survived, but he never recovered.
He hung himself three years ago. Jimmy Trainor, his name was. "
"Fucking hell."