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Aurnia
“You want me to go in there?” I asked. “You want me to go in there alone?”
“Alone?” Nick said. “Little baby Aurnia, do you call a kite alone just because the tail trails behind a little?”
Nick, as it so happened, was himself, high as a fucking kite.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
The lantern on the dirty warehouse floor cast ominous shadows of our hunched shoulders onto the high walls of mostly broken windows. Nick’s hand came like a ghost out of the dark. He grabbed my chin. I could smell the reek of his breath.
“It means,” he said, black eyes flashing in the lantern light. “That I’ll be right behind you.”
I tugged my chin away and said, “But I’ll be alone until you do. You’re sending me in there knowing what they could do to me.”
Nick had finally revealed his plan to me about his next big robbery the night before it was to take place. Nick wanted to expand his territory and to do that he needed to take over a rival drug den. I knew the place he was talking about. Everyone did. It made my father’s house look like a church basement during a sobriety meeting. On the outside it looked much the same as the trashy dump my father and I called home. But it was the inside that scared me…and it was the inside which was exactly where Nick intended to send me.
“I mean, how long can it take to wag your tail a little?” Nick was saying. “To bat your eyelashes a little? To show a little something, something? Get them distracted and I’ll be right in there.”
I glared at him over the lantern.
“And if they get a little too distracted?” I asked.
Nick shrugged and in the distorted shadows he looked like a vulture.
“You’re clever enough, little baby Aurnia,” he said. “You got away from me easily enough if I remember correctly.”
His fingertips began to trail up the inner seam of my black jeans. I pushed myself away from the lantern.
“Where are you going?” Nick called after me.
It wasn’t like there was far to go. Not a lot of nice places in an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of town. I went to the cot Nick had stolen from a shitty hostel while I acted as the getaway driver. I’d almost laughed when the owner came out onto the sidewalk shaking his arm at us as I sped away. I’d almost convinced myself that Nick wasn’t all that bad as he hooted and hollered and thumped his palms against the dashboard.
“Atta girl, Aurnia!” he shouted. “Atta girl!”
This was the life I was intended for, right? Life on the other side of the tracks. Life on the run. Life going job to job. Life that was rough, hard, real. Whatever I’d been doing at Dublin Ink wasn’t me. Wasn’t my life. It was just play pretend. It was just fantasy.
Nick was real. Nick was there. Or at least, that’s what I was halfway to convincing myself was true.
I shoved aside the clothes Nick had bought me. I’d been stupid enough to think just for a second that he did it as a kindness to me. That the dresses were a gift. I should have known better, of course. His comments were always, “maybe a little shorter” or “that does nothing for your tits, love” or “you’ve got the hips of a little boy in that one”. I knew what he had intended the dresses for. They weren’t for me. They were for the men that inhabited the rival drug den. For their filthy eyes. For their dirty minds. For their grubby fingers—but only for a second, he’d said. Just a second or two, he’d promised.
I sat with a sigh on the edge of the cot. How pathetic was I? So eager to find some sort of family anywhere that I’d allow myself to think that Nick could care about me.
Nick, who made me fear barring my bedroom door because I knew it would be worse if he had to force his way in, because I knew he liked to force his way in. Nick, who stared at me over my father’s shoulder with those black, possessive eyes like my father didn’t exist. Nick, who I always knew saw me as a toy and who forced me to go limp because it was less fun for him that way.
Nick, who I feared. Nick, who my father feared. Nick, who frightened everyone but himself.
When I left Conor at Dublin Ink, I swore I’d not need anyone. I’d give up these delusions of family, of safety, of someone to protect me.
There was Mia and Lee and Jack. For a moment I believed. I relearned my lesson quickly enough after that. They were just using me. So I used them. Took them to a different tattoo parlour. Pulled the alarm while they weren’t looking. I told myself again: I do not need anyone. I do not need a family.
Then there was Nick. Again those stupid hopes. I’d look for family anywhere. I’d fall for family with anyone.
In that moment, I hated myself.
I pulled the notebook from beneath my cot and began drawing in the faint light that came from Nick’s lantern across the dirty warehouse floor. There was something therapeutic about the scratch of my pencil on the cheap paper. There always had been. It was perhaps the sole place on earth where I could escape: my art. And yet as I drew, another place slipped into my head.
I found myself drawing the ugly floral print couch. Its torn armrests. It’s sweeping back. Its row of dingy tassels between the scratched-up legs. I lost myself in the petals of the dated fabric, drew each one with care. I sketched out Rian’s tattoo chair. Added the little stool he often spent hours just idly spinning round and round upon. Then there was the big window overlooking the street. The heavy drapes. I could practically see Mason’s worn fingertips on them where he’d pull them back again and again to check out a passing girl. I added one of several old oriental rugs, each more dusty and falling apart than the last. The broken neon sign above the stairs was easy enough to draw, the letters of ‘Dublin Ink’ fluid and sweeping.
