Brutal Precious (Lovely Vicious #3) (13 page)

“I’m sorry!” I clutch my fork. “I’m so sorry - ”

Mom gets up, sweeping over to pet my head and hush me in soft whispers.

“No, honey. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for needing you so much. You should be free, I have to let you fly away from me sometime. Other kids your age, other parents my age have all learned how to leave and let go but…but it’s harder for me. And that makes it hard on you.”

I swallow hard. Mom looks into my eyes.

“Sometimes I think bad things – dark things. And I go to Dr. Torrand and try not to think them so much. But they keep me up at night. And I don’t sleep. And I start resenting everyone – your father, Leo, even you - and it’s horrible. I’m horrible.”

I hug her back, tight and unending.
 

“We’re not horrible,” I whisper. “We’re just people.”

***

I watch Charlie do his homework, hair greasy and his face eternally frowning. He’s not the most intelligent agent, and he doesn’t think before he speaks, but he gets objectives done with startling speed and force. Where my style is to write lightly with a ballpoint pen, his is to press hard with a soaked paintbrush. We both get the job done, just in different ways. It’s why Gregory assigned us to each other, probably – two radically differing methods double the chances of success. In theory.

In reality, we get along as well as two wet cats in a stewpot can.

“What’re you staring at?” Charlie grunts, never taking his eyes off his paper.

“I wanted to thank you,” I say finally.

“Fuckin’ doubt that.”

“For sending Isis away at the barbeque. I was reluctant to do it myself.”

“You don’t say,” Charlie rolls his eyes. “You and her got history or somethin’?”

“Something like that.”

“Well keep it out of the mission. I don’t need your fuckbuddies screwing this up for me. A job like this means a damn promotion.”

I glance over at his desk. He doesn’t keep a lot of personal items, but he brought a framed picture of his grandmother, an old Japanese woman with a wrinkled, smiling face, hugging Charlie in front of a tiny noodle shop in what looks like foggy San Francisco. He sends the money he makes back to her – I did some digging into his file and his bank accounts. Orphaned at the age of three due to a racial hate crime, his grandmother took him in and raised him. Now that she’s nearly eighty and unable to work the store, Charlie is the one who keeps it running with the money he makes. He used to be in a Chinatown gang, until Gregory scouted him.

He’s weaker than me, even if he doesn’t act like it.

The people he loves are still alive, after all. And that is a weakness in and of itself. It’s why I will always be a better agent than him. Or, I thought I would be. Until Isis stepped back into the picture.

“She wasn’t a fuckbuddy,” I clarify, tempering the soft fire of anger that flares in my lungs. He didn’t mean it personally - his name-calling is a defense mechanism to keep from getting to know people, and consequently caring about them. It’s similar to Isis’ rampant jokes.

“Whatever she was to you, she was sure as hell jealous of Brittany that night. Kept giving her stink eye. Don’t let her get in the way of pumping Brittany for info, you got me?”

Jealous?
Isis
? That can’t be right. I’ve hurt her so bad, for so long – how could she feel anything but contempt for me? She’s smart enough to know when she’s chasing after a worthless cause. She would never pursue me. Not after what I’ve done to her.

I grab my coat and walk out.

The campus is quiet, night stars glimmering like discarded diamonds. My confused feet take me around the library, through the parking lot, and to a haughty granite fountain in the shape of a centaur shooting an arrow into the sky. I read the plaque - dedicated to someone’s dead something. I sit on the edge. I’m not the only one there, I notice.

I could walk away. I could leave her, on this starry night, and walk away. I could choose not to form this memory, not to engage. But I long for it. I miss the fights, the blows, the wit. I miss her, even when my every perfect, lifeless, and calculated plan demands I never speak to her again, in the interest of not hurting her further. But I am human. I am selfish.

And I let myself be human and selfish, like she taught me.

“Boo,” I say. Isis jumps, withdrawing her lazily-circling hand from the water.

“Fuckstick Central! Are you
trying
to kill me before I attain my final form?”

“Do tell,” I settle beside her. She’s wearing a soft-looking sweater and jean shorts. “What’s your final form? No, wait, let me guess – insane witch.”

“Cyborg empress,” she corrects with a dignified sniff. “Of a small yet filthy rich country.”

I laugh. “And what will you do when you’ve regained your kingdom, your majesty?”

“Oh, you know; improve schools, build better roads, form a harem of beautiful European boys, the usual.”

I raise an eyebrow. “Really? I thought your type was more swarthy, more Eastern.”

“It was, until I learned it doesn’t actually matter what people look like on the outside, duh. Don’t you watch Dora the Explorer? Shit is straight informative. I’ve learned so much about treating people as equals. And like…backpacks.”

I smirk, and she hides her twisted smile in the crook of her arm.

“Alone in the middle of the night and hiding behind a studly centaur’s rump is no place for an empress,” I say.

“I wasn’t
hiding
,” she frowns. “Hiding is for babies. And ninjas.”

We graze our hands through the water, our ripples the only thing touching. Our fingers distort to albino snakes under the water, speckled by stars and moss.

“You wanna go somewhere with me?” She asks.

I look up. “Where?”

“Somewhere. Anywhere but here. Anywhere Sophia never got to go. Let’s go to the moon.”

I look up at the silver disc. “It’ll be cold.”

“We’ll bring jackets.”

There’s another quiet. Isis huffs.

“Where’d you get that thing on your eyebrow?”

“I ran into a doorframe,” I answer smoothly.

“Where, at Samwise Gamgee’s house?”

“Samwise lives in a gardener’s shack, not a house.”

“Oh my god who cares,” she throws up her hands. “The point is, that scratch looks nasty.”

“Yes. That’s what I’ve been doing all along. Nastying up my face so no woman will ever look twice at me again.”

“Impossible,” She scoffs. “All it’ll do is heal and make you look badass and then you’ll have girls and their moms running after you. More than you do now. Distant aunts, maybe. God, life is so unfair.”

She pushes her chestnut hair off her shoulder. It’s gotten so long – past her shoulder blades - the faded purple streaks now lavender with a touch of white where her hairline begins. Her bangs are messy, in dire need of a trim, shading the warmest of hazel eyes and gracing her flushed cheekbones. Her lips are still endearingly small and pouty. A year has changed her. She’s grown taller ever-so-slightly, a mature sort of beauty sending out its first roots into her face. Her lashes are long and dark as ever, and only when she blinks four times do I realize I’m staring and look away quickly.
 

 
I owe her the truth. I owe her at least that much.

“I left Northplains because I couldn’t stay,” I say. “Because I didn’t know what to do with myself. Because I was hurting, and I was afraid I would hurt people with my own hurt. People like you.”

Isis is quiet, hand slowing in its caress of the water.
  

“I took the car and drove for days. I don’t even remember most of it. When I snapped out of it, I was in Vegas. I spent weeks there, in a motel room.”

“Doing what?” She asks softly.

“Fighting. Fighting, and drinking. There was a club in the lower east end, and I’d go there every night, beating up tourists or seasoned veterans or whomever wanted a piece of me. I got beat up more than I did the beating, unfortunately. But I wanted to be hurt. I wanted to feel pain, to feel something, anything. Anything other than the horrible nothingness that closed in after the funeral.”

I see her swallow, her fists clenched in her lap.

“The guilt drove me like a demon. It still does, a little. But thanks to Gregory, it didn’t swallow me alive.”

“What do you mean?”

“He found me. God knows how. But he tracked me down, and just as I was running out of money, he offered me a job, and training. Something to devote my energy to, to strive for, to pour myself into. I’d been so afraid of losing control for so long. But it’s been that way since my father died, I think. That’s when it started. I lost control in the forest, and caused that man’s death. Terrified, I tried to control myself even harder, keeping people at arm’s length so they wouldn’t get hurt. But then you came along.”

She flinches, and I slide my hand into hers under the water and hold it, lightly.

“That’s not a bad thing. Leo was, objectively, a bad thing. And I lost control then. But you – I lost control in a more pleasant way around you. In a way that was healthy, and supportive. Losing control showed me the intricate web of emotions I’d been denying for so long. You teased them out, like the sun does to spring sprouts.”

The flush on her cheeks grows redder, and I smile. But then I realize I’m holding her hand, and disengage quickly. Motions like that are not helping her move on to a better man. None of this is. And yet I’m too selfish to stop talking, to walk away. I want the sun. I want to be warmed again on her heat, if only for a fleeting moment.

“Gregory taught me to control myself in a deeper way than I was doing alone. He took me to the desert, a ranch house he owns in the middle of nowhere, and he made me work. I hauled water and firewood and struggled with the stallions. Horses hate me, by the way. And they hate snakes. But primarily me.”

“The difference between you is marginal,” she muses, grinning. I flash her a smirk.

“Gregory made me fight – him, mostly, and sometimes his ranch hand; a giant of a Najavo man. Gregory showed me that control isn’t suppression – it’s expression, expressed when and where you choose and with deliberate purpose. After three months, he said I was ready to join his team. And I did.”

“Spying,” she says.

“Information gathering,” I correct. “Only people who watch too much TV call it spying.”

“So you’re spying on Nameless.”

I nod. “Trying to. He’s very secretive, and more clever than I gave him credit for. But with enough time, we’ll get solid evidence.”

“What’s he done? Other than ruin a fat girl’s life?” She asks, steely.

“Provided his hacking services to a number of internet black market kingpins involved with opium, meth, child slaves. The list isn’t pretty. He probably didn’t know exactly what he was doing, but he knew it was illegal, and that’s enough to put him away.”

Isis is quiet. She puts her hands between her legs and rocks on the edge of the fountain, a nervous gesture.

“I’m scared. Every corner I turn – I’m convinced he’ll be on the other side, waiting for me.”

“Then why come out here alone at night?”

“He doesn’t like the dark,” She says.

“Fascinating,” I say as I file the information away for later use. “Not that you’re scared,” I correct quickly. “But that someone so terrible could have a fear so mundane.”

She shrugs. “He was locked in the closet a lot by his dad when he was a kid. For hours.”

We’re quiet. Isis tries to break the tension.

“So, you and bikini going steady, then? Charlie said it was to get info out of her, but I mean, c’mon, look at her. No living thing with a portable piss tube could
not
feel something while dating someone that hot.”

“She’s boring,” I say, my voice acidic. “If you must know.”

“I do say I must know,” Isis takes on a faux-British accent.

“Why? Why would you care?”

“Because, idiot,” She snaps. “I like you. I told you that a long time ago. Not that you’d remember – you get confessions like that all the time, why would you remember one from an annoying, angry little girl –”

Even after all the hurt, she still likes me.

“I’ve hurt you.
 
You deserve someone better.”

She wrinkles her nose. “Oh my god, I forgot how arrogant you are. Who are you to decide what people deserve?”

It goes unsaid between us, but even she can tell what I’m thinking.

“And Sophia…Sophia loved you. She would’ve wanted you to be happy. That’s all any of us can do in this short-ass life. Try to be happy. And I know it’s killing you and I know you blame yourself but you’re not the only one blaming yourself -”

She stops, a choke ending her words.

I’m not the only one. How could I have forgotten that? What selfish prick had I become – running away and leaving her to bleed over my shadow, and the shadow of all she thinks she should’ve done? She waited alone in silence, and fear, bravely holding together the pieces of my life that I abandoned because I was too selfish to stay. Even after abandoning her, she held on to the memory of me, to her feelings for me, guarding them carefully so they wouldn’t start to rot. Any girl would have given up. Any other girl would have sowed hatred for me for the rest of her life. But not Isis. Not my stubborn, courageous, kind Isis.