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“You’re hurting me,” I said, keeping my eyes forward, forward, forward.
“You’ve disappointed me. I don’t like you away from me. I like when I can really grab ahold of you.”
“You’re hurting me,” I repeated.
Nick just laughed and slapped my thigh.He swerved, barely avoiding a lamp post littered with missing children’s posters.
“But all is forgiven, my sweet!” he shouted as he whipped the car roughly around a corner. “All is forgiven!”
His fingers at the back of my neck made my skin crawl as he squeezed me and shook me.
“You’ve found your way back to me and that’s all that matters,” he said, roughing up my hair. “And you won’t do what you did, leaving me, ever, ever again, now will you?”
I shifted slightly away from Nick’s possessive touch because I just couldn’t stand it any longer. He laughed.
“Why did you call me, little baby Aurnia?” he asked, shoving me against the window.
Maybe he thought it was playful. I knew I’d have a bruise on my arm for weeks. The crack of my head against the glass was loud enough to block out his laughter for that blissful millisecond.
“I had no one else,” I told him.
Nick clicked his tongue.
“No, no,” he said, lighting a cigarette as he drove haphazardly with his knees. “No, I don’t think that’s why you called me at all.”
I’d always hated my house. Always hated it. Always wanted to get away from it. As Nick and I drove past it, him without comment at all, I longed to pull into the drive. I longed for the dirty entryway with bodies littered across it like a war zone. I longed for my bed sheets that smelled like smoke and sweat. Because as least I knew it.
If we weren’t going to my father’s place, where were we going?
“Do you want me to tell you?” Nick asked.
“What?” I was distracted, resisting the urge to shift around in my seat and watch my dump of a house disappear in the rearview mirror.
Nick slapped my cheek, not softly. “Little dummy. Do you want me to tell you why you really called me?”
I shook my head to focus, because all I could think about was the infinite number of doors us passing by my house opened, all of them more terrible than the last.
I said, “I told you. I called you because I had no one else.”
“No!” Nick shouted so loud and so violently that I jumped in my seat.
He ran his hand soothingly up and down my thigh and repeated in a softer voice as he shook his head, “No, no, no.”
His hand moved to the side of my head and he petted my hair with clumsy hands that got caught painfully in my tangles. The speed with which he had a handful of my hair in his grip and used it to wrench my face toward his was frightening.
“You called me, because you know where you belong. You called me and had me pretend to be this ‘Conor’ of yours because you didn’t want to call this ‘Conor’ of yours. You called me because you wanted me to come.”
No one was watching where we were going. Why didn’t we hit something? Why couldn’t we just fucking hit something?
“Do you see?” Nick asked in a syrupy sweet voice that made me want to curl up into a little ball.
Before I could answer, Nick used the hair he held painfully in his fist to nod my head up and down. He smiled at me, revealing his yellowed teeth, his missing molar. He pushed me against the headrest and released me at last. I gasped like I’d been under water the whole time.
“Good,” Nick said, returning his hand to my thigh like we were just two lovers out for a Sunday drive in the neighbourhood. “Good, little baby Aurnia.”
I dared to look over at him in the driver’s seat as he drove on, as he whistled an out-of-tune little song, as he put out his cigarette on the dash of his car.
From his profile you could almost call Nick handsome. A strong jaw. A sharp nose. High cheekbones. From his profile you couldn’t see his eyes, black and sharklike. You couldn’t see the disrepair of his teeth. You couldn’t see how his lips were chapped and peeling in their perpetual grin.
