Keeping Never (15 page)

Ty moves us forward, eyes still locked on his first client in a way that disturbs the shit out of me, and as we pass, Hannah reaches out and takes his hand. I nearly slit her throat right then and there.

“
Hands off,” I snap as she scribbles some lines on the back of Ty's beautiful, butterfly hand. When she sees the tattoos, she smiles, and I'm forced to shove her back and draw the attention of the entire coffee shop. Silence descends.

“
My number,” she says as I resist the urge for violence and push my way out the door and onto the street with Ty stumbling behind me. As soon as we hit pavement, I slap him. Hard.

“
Wipe it off,” I snap.

“
Never,” he begins as he tries to reach out for me. I move away.

“
Wipe it of.”

“
I didn't expect to see her here, honestly. It was a one in a million chance. I just wanted to show you where it happened.”

I step forward, get into Ty's personal space and steal a cigarette. When he tries to stop me, I move back and grab a lighter out of my purse.

“
Never, don't,” Ty pleads, and his voice is so soft and broken that I know I should comfort him. This is hard for me; it must be agony to him. Unless he wants to talk to Hannah, to see her. Maybe he has Stockholm syndrome or some shit? I turn away and light up. “Please.” That one word stops me in my tracks and turns my head around. Ty doesn't wipe off the number whether because he's frozen, stuck in rotten memories and beleaguering agony, or because he doesn't want to, I don't know. I drop the cigarette where it joins a whole host of others on the ground. I feel bad for doing it, but right now, I just don't care.

“
I want to kill her,” I tell him honestly. Nobody stops and stares or even seems to hear my violent words. This is the big city after all; they've heard worse.

“
Me, too,” Ty says, and then he smiles, dimples and all. “But she's just the tip of the iceberg, Never. There is so much worse I could tell you.” I look at Ty, and I want to put my hands over my ears, lock him out, forget this ever happened, but I can't because he needs to tell me. He needs to spill his secrets, so that I can carry half of them. I love him enough to know that he needs me and take a big breath.
Is this what a mother does for her child? Loves unconditionally and without judgment? My mom didn't make it look so easy, but if your heart is there, then it is. It really, truly is.

“
Tell me then,” I say to Ty. “Take me somewhere and tell me everything.”

26

Hannah introduces me to a man named Dick Prick, fakest fucking pseudonym ever. Sounds kind of funny at first, but then you meet the guy and learn that he deals in underage teens. Essentially, he's a fucking pimp. Hannah tells Dick Prick about me and buys me a nice dress shirt. She has me fuck her from behind in a dressing room at the place and then leaves, passing Dick two hundred bucks as she goes. I get twenty of it. Dick says he has the customers, and I've got the goods, and so he's going to take a percentage and if I'm good and check in with him when I'm supposed to, I'll get bonuses. What Dick doesn't tell me is that during these check-ins, I have to suck his dick.

The first time it happens, I'm pretty shocked, but then Dick tells me that it's all a part of survival of the fittest or some shit. If that fucker wasn't already dead, baby, I'd kill him, too. He OD'd right after I left for California. Anyway, Nev, that was just the beginning of a three year stint where I ran tricks for Dick Prick and blew my money on pot, cigarettes, and alcohol. I didn't touch the harder stuff though I had plenty of opportunities to. Something told me that there was an invisible line between Hell and oblivion and as long as I stayed on the infernal side, I was fixable. I could end it someday. If I crossed over, I was going to end up dead in a gutter, a useless, broken, doll, a shell of a fucking person.

I did men mostly at first, but soon, I had transitioned over to female clients exclusively. The perverts had finally come out of the woodwork and showed me that the opposite sex can be just as cruel. I did whatever they told me to, no matter what it was, no matter how depraved or sick or fucked up. I did it until it changed from hurting myself to hurting others.

There was this couple, okay? And they had a third person with them, a woman. She was bound and gagged, spread open on a bed. I'd seen plenty of bondage before, so that was nothing new, but then … I saw her face, her eyes. I'd seen her on the news a few weeks prior. She'd gone missing on her way home from the gym. I looked her right in the face, and I left. I ran, and I took all the money I had and booked a one way ticket to San Fran.

I left her there, Never. I left her there and I didn't tell anybody because I was afraid. Afraid of Dick Prick and the couple and even the cops when they found out that I was a runaway, a whore, an alcoholic. Two weeks later, they found her body. I'm responsible, baby. Me. I am. I could've saved her, and I didn't. I have her blood on my hands. Do you still love me? Do you still want me? How the fuck could you? And even if you do, you have to know that one day, I will go to Hell for all the things I have done. I will burn forever, and there is nobody that can save me.

27

Ty and I are sitting on the front porch of the house that is now ours according to his mother's lawyer. He tells me that he got a phone call while I was sleeping in the car, and that's how he knows. I don't give a shit about that right now. I don't care about the smell from the house or the fact that my phone is beeping nonstop, filled with texts from my sisters and Lacey, from Noah. I don't care about the little, orange tabby cat that's rubbing on my ankles or the small flakes of snow that are beginning to drift from the sky.

Ty stares blankly ahead of himself, eyes wide, hands shaking, and he lights up a cigarette. He smokes it quick and starts in on another. I don't blame him. How could I? The worst part about all of this is that he isn't even done. There's
more
to Ty's story. More pain, more heartache, more blood splattered across the walls of his heart. How did he ever live to tell the tale? That's what I need to know. I touch my SOG chip for reassurance, slide my fingers down my arm and pause when I reach my opposite hand, find the rings that Ty gave me and find strength in the undiscriminating metal.

“
You were a kid, Ty,” I tell him which he already knows. He turns to me like a zombie, neck stiff, muscles taught and I see that his lip ring is bloody from where he's chewed his lip to bits. I reach out and cover his mouth with my hand, trying stop him from hurting himself. Thus far, he's bounced back quick, but then, none of his revelations have been quite like this. I think of that poor girl, and I hope she didn't suffer long, that somehow, she knows that Ty didn't mean to abandon her there. They're both victims, Ty and that poor girl. I wish she were here, so she could forgive him, and maybe then he could move past this. For now, I'm afraid we've hit a dead end, that Ty is going to revert back. I pray that I'm wrong.

“
Tyson Monroe McCabe,” I say, but he isn't looking at me. His eyes are facing me, and they're open, yes, but he isn't seeing me. He's seeing that girl and he's wondering how much she suffered, and he's blaming himself for everything. But he's not a bad person, not my Ty McCabe. It's not just because I love him or because I feel sorry for him, not because he's my twisted, melted, bloodied, bandaged, fucked, mangled, burnt, screwed, slaughtered other half. It's because I can see it in his face. If he could go back in time, he would change everything, even if it damned him, even if he suffered for it, he would. “Regrets are the most important tools in the world, Ty McCabe. If we didn't regret then mistakes would be nothing but a series of unstoppable accidents. We can regret something, and we can learn from it. Once we do though, once we understand why we regret something, we have to let it go. If you keep it, it will burn you. If you let it fly, it will become something else, something not quite as ugly or as perverted, but rather something new. That energy can rejoin the rest of the universe and be reborn. That's the whole point, isn't it? Change, rebirth, life.” I grab Ty's hand and put it on my belly. “You can't check out on us now, McCabe. You started something new, and I'll be damned if I'm going to let you leave it unfinished.”

My lover turns to me, eyes cloudy and he blinks, once, twice, three times, and then he's pulling me onto my lap and kissing me. He kisses me mouth and my cheeks and my forehead and my nose. He lays me flat on the wooden floor of the porch and pushes aside the fabric that separates us, drives into me, and fucks me right there in front of the neighborhood, hidden only by a bit of hedge. He takes me hard and fast, and I know that he isn't all there, that he's trying to dump his pain and sorrow, but that's okay. He took mine before, more than once, and now, I'm ready to take his. I said that recycling was a good thing, and I meant it. I will recycle Ty's memories into new things, better things, and he will do the same for me because that's what soul mates do.

When he's done, when he rolls off and slams into the wood, puts his hands to his face and screams, I let him. In fact, after a moment, I scream, too, and we come full circle. We come from being crazy college kids screaming in the middle of campus to lovers with a kid on the way, a house full of memories, and a dog who shares a name with my mother but who will forever “wear it best” so to speak because she loves unconditionally. We come full circle and I know that after the storm, there will be a rainbow.

28

Days pass before Ty is comfortable enough to continue on with his story. I don't push him. What I said before still stands. If he breaks himself into pieces for me, I will never forgive myself and he may never recover, so much as I need to hear the end of this, to finally lay it to rest and give it closure, I wait.

Noah gives us permission to stay as long as we need, ponying up money for the hotel, for the car, for the dumpster that Ty and I have to rent to clean up this damned house. I know he doesn't like to accept money from my ex, but he does it because that's the smart thing to do. We can save what little money he does have for the baby's things, for the nursery that lies hidden somewhere in the garbage up the stairs. Ty promises Noah that he'll pay him back when he strikes it rich. I don't know when that will be or how he'll do that, but I believe him. I believe him enough that I drag out bottles filled with yellow liquid. There's a whole mountain of them next to the bathroom that doesn't work, that has no running water, hasn't in years from the looks of it. Inside these plastic containers are piss. Urine. Pee. Wee. Whatever. Ty's mom really lost it there in the end. The sight of them sent him spiraling into a fit of rage wherein he took out a whole box of china to the yard and smashed it against the fence. I let him. I let him, and I took over, wearing nothing but a shirt tied around my face to block the smell. I only do it when he's not looking because he asked me not to. He's worried about the baby which I understand, but I'm more worried about his sanity, so I do it.

“
I knew the bitch was nuts, but fuck me,” Ty says as I surreptitiously hide the jug of piss I'm holding behind my back and crane my neck to see what he's uncovered in the downstairs bathroom. In the toilet bowl, which, of course, is long dry, there's a mountain of brand new toothbrushes. They're all still boxed up, wrapped in shiny plastic. Ty digs them out, cringing even though he's wearing some heavy duty gloves and throws them in the black trash bag to his left. “When I was a kid, she always bought toothbrushes when we went to the store. I mean, like lots of them. She used a new one every Goddamn day. But the amount I've found thus far defies logic. And to store them in the toilet bowl?”

“
Hoarding,” I say, thinking about what I've read on my phone in the few, quiet moments Ty and I spend together at the hotel. For the most part, we get up, we fuck, we eat, we clean, we eat again, we fuck, we sleep. Five days now we've done this same routine. “It sort of defies logic. It's a mental disorder.”

“
No shit,” Ty says as he shoves a questionable bucket into his bag. It's stained with …
matter
that I'd rather not discuss. “Psychotic bitch. Pedophile fucker. Useless whore.” Ty rants like this pretty often when we're here, and to be honest, I get it. I mean, this place is fucking
sick.
I try to think up something to distract him.

“
At least you had toothbrushes. My mom made us use miswaks.” Ty is in a pissy mood, shoveling old clothing into his bag, but for this, at least, he pauses. “You'd think a Midwestern girl would be chill with Colgate or Crest or some shit, but not my mom.” I sigh.
I really do hate that bitch.

“
'Kay,” Ty says, standing up, brushing hair away from his sweaty head with the back of his hand. “What the fuck is a
miswak
?” I laugh and turn away so that I can get the piss jug into my garbage bag before Ty sees.

“
It's a stick with fibers on the end. You chew it, and it's supposed to clean your teeth better than a toothbrush.” Ty laughs which is a nice sound to hear. When we're in this house, he rarely laughs. I think the garbage sucks the joy right of him. I don't blame him for that, but if I find out that it's more than just the trash, if it's the house itself and the memories attached to it, I will drag his ass out of here faster than you can say
sex addict.