The Dark Light of Day (36 page)

I groaned.

“How about we start now?” I asked, pressing my chest to his. He shook his head and sighed, placing his hands on my shoulders and distancing himself from me.

“The second I get back Bee... the very second. I promise.” Jake
leaned in and softly kissed my lips before deepening the kiss and
opening his mouth to mine. His tongue danced across my lips, and then inside my mouth and over my tongue. It had been so long. I didn’t know if I was going to be able to wait much longer without bursting apart. He pulled away again as if he were reading my mind. He closed his eyes. “I love you, Bee.”

“I love you, too, Jake,” I said. “So much.” I’d never meant it
more.

We spent the next hour inside, sitting on the living room floor. Jake sat silently while I told him the details of the night Owen raped
me. I didn’t leave any detail out, as he’d requested. I used the
pictures to explain each injury as it happened. As I spoke, his mood darkened into a much more sinister version of himself. My sapphire-eyed Jake shared his body with a monster. I could feel him moving aside as the beast within him firmly took control.

By the time I’d finished telling him, I was shaking like it had just happened yesterday. I remembered the feeling when I woke up in unending pain, wishing I was dead. And yet somehow, I had made it through, and my little miracle Georgia had survived as well.

Jake put his hands on my shoulders and pulled me to him. He kissed me with so much raw anger and passion I didn’t know if I was going to be able to survive the overwhelming feelings building inside of me.

Jake may have had a monster living inside him. But nothing about either of us had ever been just one way. Nothing was black or
white, light or dark.

Coral Pines was a place that looked like heaven on the outside and felt like hell on the inside. Owen, the golden boy of our town, turned out to be the biggest monster of them all. And Jake, who had become accustomed to living within the dark shadows of his tortured soul, turned out to be one of the brightest lights in my life.

I had lived my life in both the dark and the light. Having my
new
family meant I had to walk a blurry line between the two. I was
never going to be a normal person with regular thoughts and feelings.

I’d never known what “normal” meant, anyway.

Maybe what set Jake and I apart from other people was our acceptance of our feelings and emotions—the dark as well as the
light. All I knew is there was no darkness in the world that could compare with the love we had for our daughter. Jake love for Georgia was proof that even the blackest hearts were capable of love. He was the light and the darkness, all at the same time.

Jake the angel, who comforted me at the hospital.

Jake the killer, who stood to leave, tucking his gun into the back of his jeans and checking for the additional clip in his boot.

“Tell me again you’re okay with this, that you won’t look at me differently afterwards.” His tone carried worry.

“I knew Owen’s death would be coming from the very night he raped me, and I wanted it to be you who killed him.” I didn’t hesitate to tell him. “I still do.” I held up the last of the pictures to him. It was the photo I had taken last, kneeling in front of the mirror with my legs spread open for the camera. The lens caught the bruises and dried blood caked in every nook of my body, over every inch of my already marred skin.

Jake’s nostrils flared and his eyes lost their light. The killer in him was being fed. I turned over the picture. In my handwriting was a note I’d written years ago.

Send him to hell, Jake.

Jake took the picture from me and read and reread the note on the back before folding it and tucking it into his leather jacket. He picked me up off the floor and gave me one last furious kiss before putting me down and stalking to the front door in quick, determined strides. “Thank you,” he whispered.

“Make sure you come back to us,” I reminded him. I hoped I hadn’t needed to.

“Leaving you was the worst mistake of my life, Bee. I won’t
make it
again.” Then, he was gone, disappearing into the blackness of the
night.

The roar of his bike announced his leaving, but in minutes it was silent again, only the echoes remained.

“Make him suffer, baby,” I whispered to no one.

I once wondered if two broken souls could heal one another.

I hoped the answer was
yes
.

We may not have been perfect, or even acceptable by anyone else’s standards. But together, we were perfect.

Together, we were just us.

Battered and broken. Dark and difficult. Impulsive and scared.

I’d accepted Jake for being all of those things, yet for so long, I
couldn’t accept them within myself. I finally realized that it’s
possible to love within a space that sometimes holds nothing but emptiness... or nothing but darkness.

After all, we all have darkness within us.

Some of us more than others.

Jake

TWO NIGHTS PASSED BEFORE I WAS ABLE
to make it home to Georgia and Bee, to my family. My clothes and skin were soaked with blood, mud, filth, and the other remnants of the dark places I had been. Bee threw herself into my arms without hesitation the second she saw me, despite my disheveled condition.

I’d pulled Bee into her bedroom that night, and she didn’t even
let me shower before she asked me to describe to her what I had
done to Owen in detail. Then, we had ourselves a long overdue, blood-covered, lust-fueled fuck-fest that lasted all night. For a woman who had once been afraid of my touch, she now devoured every moment of twisted carnal bliss between us.

Making love wasn’t our thing. We already had
love
. We made that every day. It was in every look, every touch, every understanding word.

Our sex? That was about owning one another. Finally being able
to feel after years of pushing that shit aside in order to live and
survive was an amazing fucking feeling. I wanted to live inside Bee, and I
almost believe I do. That girl had gotten under my skin and inside
my black soul the very first night I’d ever laid eyes on her.

I would walk around wearing her on my dick if I could.

I never thought I would be calling the house that used to hold so
many ghosts, my parent’s old house, my home again.
Our home.
Truth is I could call a hollowed out tree home as long as Bee and Georgia were there with me.

My wife, my daughter, my entire life.

The reasons for my existence.

Yeah, we got married. We didn’t make too big a deal out of it. It was just something we felt we needed to do. Not to mention I really
wanted to. My girls were always meant to share my last name. It
became more important to me than I thought it would be. Our wedding was just the three of us, a witness, and a justice of the peace. We had the ceremony in the orange grove clearing during sunset, where more than my secrets were laid to rest.

It was perfect, our kind of perfect.

I became a better person because of them. The monster in me
had been tamed, tucked away for the time being. He was still there deep inside, in a sort of semi-permanent hibernation. It was a comfort to know I could call on him if I ever needed to. Because if my family
were ever to be threatened or harmed again, he
will
be fucking called
on.

Truth of it was, I needed them more than they needed me. I’ve
never fooled myself into believing that I was even remotely good
enough for either of them. Instead, I made a promise to myself that I would
give them the life they deserved, and be the man they needed me to
be, even if being that man took more work on my part than I imagined others needed.

I no longer traded lives for money. I put that behind me and
focused on helping Reggie run the shop. We got ourselves another
receptionist so Bee could focus on her photography.

I haven’t killed since the night I was given permission by my
woman to end the man who killed her grandmother, raped her, and shot my daughter.

If it had been possible, I would have killed that fucker three
times over.

A sense of elation washes over me mixed with pure heated rage when I think of that sick fuck laying his hands on Abby the very night she let me into her heart and into her bed. I can’t stand to think about my poor frail Georgia in the hospital clinging to life. Even
when I think of a defenseless and harmless old woman, walking to
her own death while thinking she was doing nothing more than helping people, I feel a rage I sometimes find hard to tame.

Abby and I stopped talking about Owen entirely after that. The people of Coral Pines assumed he was drunk one night, fell off the seawall and drowned, like so many of the town’s alcoholics before him. I’m sure they thought his body had been made a good meal of by an alligator or wild boar in the mangroves somewhere.

No doubt, some of the town folk had their suspicions about me. I’m sure they thought I could be responsible in some way. After all, Owen had always hated me, and we’d publicly brawled on occasion. They knew how little we cared for each other. But, the sad fact was
that not many people gave a shit about where Owen might have
gone.

I had his very own mother on my side.

Bethany knew I killed Owen. How? I told her. I was no fucking
coward. I told her while we were still in the hospital what I was
going
to do the second I knew my girl was okay. She knew she couldn’t
stop me and said she wasn’t even going to try. She knew as well as I did that Owen was like a rabid dog and had to be put down.

What I hadn’t expected was for her to ask me to kill her as well. She practically begged me.

It was sad, really.

She told me she couldn’t live with what she’d done to our
family, and she didn’t know if she could survive the death of her only son. She still loved him, no matter how broken he was.

Story of my life.

Bethany had called herself a ‘human wrecking ball’. Fitting,
maybe,
but not punishable by death. Honestly, I had considered it. But, I
wasn’t a fan of killing women, and Georgia and Abby seemed to actually like the bitch.

So, I made her a deal.

Instead of killing her, I promised her that even though I was
Georgia’s biological father and not Owen, she could still be part of
our lives and our family if that was what she wanted. She just
needed to heal.

We knew a thing or two about healing in our house.

It wasn’t easy in the first few weeks after Owen “disappeared”. Bethany came to see Georgia, but couldn’t look me in the eye. As time passed, she became more accepting of our new—and unusual—family dynamic and became a regular at our house.

As a consolation of sorts for killing her son and refusing to do her in, too, when she mentioned filing the divorce papers, I offered to take out her husband for her instead. Abby kicked me under the dinner table.

Bethany opted for the divorce.

I killed her son, and she comes over every Sunday for family
dinner.

My daughter calls her Grammy.

The world is a twisted place, for sure.

It may have appeared that I was a changed man on the outside,
but I couldn’t help but smile when I thought of the night I sank
Owen’s body into his deep dark grave at the bottom of the swamp. A laugh would sometimes involuntarily escape my lips when I glanced above the mantle and saw my knife collection on display, hanging from one the little hooks Bee bought for me at the flea market.

The knife in the center, the one with the red handle and serrated edge, was the one I used to slit Owen’s throat.

I’m not sure whether I viewed it as my prize possession or an inside joke.

Maybe it was both.

Slitting someone’s throat may have sounded like the pussy way
to kill, and I would have agreed with that... if it was done from
behind like most pussies would do it.

That’s why I looked that motherfucker dead in the eye as I told
him he was going to die. That’s why I pushed him up against the
wall of the boat-house and covered his mouth with my left hand and used
my forearm to hold him still while I slowly carved out his throat
with the knife in my right.

I stared right into the depths of that scared motherfucker’s non existent soul and ignored his pathetic gurgling pleas while I watched the life flow out of him with the blood that poured from his neck, sending him into the depths of hell where he belonged.

Someone might as well have wrapped up that day and given it to me on Christmas morning. A revenge kill is the best kind of kill.

But a revenge kill for your family,
with
your woman’s permission?

That’s borderline erotic.

Now, I’m just a simple family man, receiving love I know I don’t deserve, and sleeping like a baby after a fifth of Jack Daniels.

I’m not stupid. I have no doubt that when I meet my end, I will descend into the hell that’s been saving me a spot in its torturous embrace since the day I was born.

I also know that when I get there, I’m going to spend my time finding Owen and killing him over and over again.

The End

Memoirs Aren’t Fairytales
by Marni Mann
(Contemporary Fiction) Leaving her old life behind, Nicole finds herself falling deeper and deeper into heroin addiction. Can she ever find her way back to a life free of track marks? Does she even want to?