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I scamper to my feet.
“You fucking bitch,” he snarls when he gets his breath back, cupping his groin with one hand. His other beats against my floor, eyes blazing with hate as he watches me try to desperately put some distance between us. “I’ll make you pay for that!”
He can’t kill me. Right? He’s supposed to bring me to his boss, and that means alive. He can’t kill me—
He climbs up to one knee, hand slapping the ground, searching for his gun. It didn’t get too far, only about three feet across my living room, and he sees it once he takes his eyes off of me.
He’s quick. Terrified for my life, I’mquicker.
Next to my couch, there’s an end table with a side drawer. Racing for it, I have it open, my pistol in hand before he’s halfway to his gone.
“Hey, asshole.”
His head shoots up. A low chuckle escapes him when he sees the gun.
“Please, Ava,” Joey scoffs, his voice raw from his howl. “You can’t honestly think I believe you know how to handle one of those.”
He’s right. I have no idea what I’m doing past what I looked up on Google when the gun first showed up at my house.
It was five years ago, when I finally traded my last apartment for a house of my own. About a week after I finished unpacking, an unmarked brown box showed up in my mailbox. The gun was inside. With it, a white card that had a single minimalist drawing of a devil on it: red horns and a pointed tail curved beneath it.
Link sent it to me. I hadn’t spoken to him since I was twenty-two and saw him staring at me from across the midway at the Springfield mall. All the same hurt, rejection, pain, and love hit me then, and I called him, begging him for closure, even though he walked out on me two years before. He hadn’t been able to explain himself anymore then than he had when he first left—just telling me that he’d come back for me when he was “worthy”—and I’d… I’d given up.
I’d moved on.
And then, eight years later, the Devil of Springfield sent me a handgun when I lived on my own for the very first time.
Protection? I’d decided it was, and after researching the make and model of the gun he sent, I shoved it in my side drawer and tried my best to forget about it.
It’s loaded. With a determined flick of my fingernail, I disengage the safety. My Colt Mustang is a pocket pistol, barely a pound, and I lift it up so that Joey can’t miss it.
“Leave.” My voice is as shaky as my hands. “Get the fuck out of my house.”
“You want me to go, baby? You’ll have to shoot me first.”
I will. If that’s what I have to do, I will. “Just go.”
He doesn’t.
Instead, pushing off of the ground, he launches himself at me. The last glimpse I get of Joey Maglione is his handsome face twisted in a vicious sneer, and I know that, if I let him get his hands on me again, he won’t be satisfied with just fucking me because I never let him before. If he reaches me, I’m dead.
I’m fuckingdead.
So I can’t let him get his hands on me, can I?
Closing my eyes, praying to whoever will listen that I don’t miss, I squeeze the trigger.
Shooting a gun in real life is nothing like what you see on television and in the movies. I have my Colt positioned between both of my hands, and the reason I don’t slice my palms open when the barrel slide recoils is because I’m terrified of the thing so my grip isn’t as tight as it could’ve been. My arms jerk with the recoil, though, and the explosion of the actual shot has my ears ringing.
I’m not expecting the smoke that floods my face. It stinks like rotten eggs, making me choke and cough on it. My arms don’t just ache, either; they tingle from the vibrations. I can feel myself gagging, though it takes a few seconds before I can hear it, too.
And that’s when I realize that that’sallI can hear.
“Joey?” I drop my arms. “Joey?”
No answer. Not a curse, not a sneer, not even his yowl of pain.
It’s quiet, and for a few seconds more, I stay in the darkness before I finally open my eyes.
