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I don’t know which would have been worse: him being rough, yanking the brush through till it caught on a tangle and yanked my head back, or him being sweetly tender, him being slow? It wasn’t long before I knew. The brush moved like molasses and Nick’s eyes never left my face the whole time.
When his fingers reached forward to skim searchingly over the top of my dresser, over the things I kept trying to feel like a normal teenager—cheap makeup pallets, teen fashion magazines and bejewelled pictures frames with the stock photos still inside—it was like a spider crawling out from one of the many cracks in the wall. I wanted to scream.But I couldn’t.
When he plucked up a sparkly pink hair band (a stupid thing I stole because I saw another girl pick it out with her mother and liked the way they went back and forth about it like it wasn’t just a cheap piece of fabric wrapped around an even cheaper piece of rubber), I could see the grime beneath his too long nails, I could see the way the ink of his tattoos bled, spread. I would need a shower after he was done.
Nick parted my hair, torturing me by making it more precise than I’d ever bothered doing for myself, and then drew half my hair into the band. He was giving me fucking pigtails. And there was no one I could shout to for help. No one who could hear me. No one who would do anything if they could. The strangers out on the couch, down in the basement, crouched in the attic were either passed out or working for Nick, under the guise of working for my father, who himself was probably passed out. I was on my own. I was helpless.
“Ready?” Nick asked when he’d finished the second pigtail.
I met his eyes in the mirror.
“Ready?”
“For the job,” he said, hands on my narrow shoulders.
I stared at him in confusion.
“You’re the distraction,” he said. “You’re the innocent little girl, the pretty little thing, the poor little lost soul who will need assistance from the big, strong security guard with the gun.”
His grin curled up at the edges when I continued to just stare at him mutely. He spun me around to face him. I twisted round like those dummies seamstresses use. Nick’s finger lifted my chin.
“Why else do you think I did all of this?” he asked, twisting a finger round one strand of hair, following it with his eyes till it fell just above the top of my black tank top across my chest.
His eyes flashed when they darted back to mine.
“You don’t think I did it just for the fun of it, do you, baby Aurnia?” he asked in a low whisper. “You don’t think I did it just because I could?”
I managed to force a smile well enough. I laughed and twisted the other pigtail the way he had done and said, as casually as I could, “Of course not.”
I slipped past him to grab a shoe. I looked at him over my shoulder. “I mean, you’re not psychotic,” I said, laughing.
He laughed, too. It was the start of the game, after all.I dragged on my boot at the bottom of my bed, eyed Nick as I yanked at the damp laces until I thought they might snap.
“Little problem, though,” I said. “I can’t do a job today.”
“No?” Nick asked with an amused arch of his eyebrow.
“Probation stuff,” I said, tightening one hair band.
Nick nodded slowly. “From the jewellery store?”
“If I don’t show up, the police will be knocking on that door just down the hallway there within the hour.”
Nick was silent, watching. I hopped up with a grin and shrugged my shoulders.
“I mean, we can’t be having that, can we,” I said, patting Nick’s chest. “What with all the drugs and stuff just lying around.”
I flicked the little bag of cocaine I knew was in the front pocket of his army-style jacket. I winked. I went to leave.
Nick blocked my passage. He filled the door frame as if he had been poured in like concrete. There was only one man I knew who was bigger, stronger. And I was determined to get to him, whether he wanted me with him or not.
He had told me that he was setting me free, but exchanging one prison for another was not setting someone free. I would show him that I could help him, help Dublin Ink. I would make myself useful. I would make it so that he couldn’t get rid of me, couldn’t send me back here.
With Nick and his black eyes and dirty fingers there before me, I wanted nothing more than to step back and collide with his chest. I wanted his big arm to come around me, to guide me behind him. I wanted to hide in his shadow like an enveloping blanket. I wanted to close my eyes till he told me to open them, till he put his hand on my cheek. I wanted to open my eyes and have his hand on my cheek and it not be a dream.
“Should I have my JLO call you or…?” I asked Nick.
His long fingernails dug into the peeling paint of the door frame, but then he grinned and stepped aside, sweeping his hand for me to pass.
“Next time then,” he called after me as I tried to keep my footsteps even down the hallway. “Baby, Aurnia.”
I stepped over druggies slumped against the wall in the living room and with a shudder realised that amongst the blank, nameless faces was my father. He’d always had a problem, but he hadn’t always had a megalomaniac to exploit it. Things were worsening at home faster than I thought possible.
Because I was certain that Nick was watching through bent and broken blinds, I waited till I was around the block, dogs snarling at chain-link fences, to yank my hair free of the pigtails. I winced in pain, but I just tugged harder. Because it was my pain.
If I was going to remember pain from my childhood, it was going to be my own.
