The Hostage Bargain (11 page)

“We actually have two deals now, I believe,” I said.

“Two?”

“That’s right,” I said. Zeus was none too pleased to hear about the price I’d demanded for my messenger services. But the exchanges really did help put me on a peer level with the god pack, as least in a limited way.

At around two in the morning, we crashed in a roadside motel in Missouri, just outside Kansas City. Thor and I bunked in one room and Odin and Zeus in another, and sex was definitely not in the air—we were all dead on our feet. Thor didn’t even wash up. He just collapsed on our king-sized bed. I brushed my teeth using my finger and Thor’s toothpaste, and then I, too, collapsed, stretched out next to Thor under the cool, clean sheets.

I woke up in the early hours with Thor snuggled up to me, whispering something. Was he trying to wake me up?

“Thor?”

Thor whispered some more, a stream of nonsense. A bad dream, I realized. I couldn’t make out most of the words. I got a lot of
no’s
and
don’ts
, and out-of-context phrases like
don’t leave Venus
. His sleeping face was a mask of pain.

Don’t leave Venus
? Was he having a bad dream about interplanetary travel? Dreaming of a movie?

“It’s okay,” I whispered. “You’re okay.”

He squirmed and turned onto his back. I waited, but he said no more.

For all the guns and domination and violence, I had the sense, watching Thor sleep, that he had a little Peter Pan in him. All three of them did, really. They were running, these guys, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that they’d been abandoned, too. Lost, bereft.

More. A hole was in them—that was my sense.

My badass Peter Pans
.

I touched Thor’s hair. I liked the notion that maybe I’d calmed him in his nightmare. Like I’d helped.

These guys scared me a little, but they also galvanized me.

Here I was in a shitty motel with a headache and no toothbrush, lying next to a doctor turned bank robber who was also a sex maniac who carried a gun, and a fugitive on some scary wanted list. And I was feeling slightly sore from fucking him and another guy, emotionally exhausted from almost being killed. And I was opting to stay. It seemed like something only a twisted person would do, but there it was. I wanted to stay.

I felt like I was home. Like I could finally breathe.

My mind floated back to my sisters. Would they have slept? I'd brought up the topic of contacting them on the road last night.

Later,
Zeus had said.

Thor flopped back over onto this other side, but I still couldn’t sleep. I wandered into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. My hair—now there was something to freak out about. I looked like an insane, redheaded Dutch boy. Maybe I was turning sociopathic.

Some time later I must have fallen asleep, because I woke up to the scent of coffee and the sounds of Thor packing stuff up. He’d slicked down his curls and had donned a brown sports jacket and jeans and boots, a get-up that made him look more like a movie director than yesterday’s slick businessman. When I commented on his new look, he pulled out mirrored aviator glasses and put them on, which made him look downright dashing.

“You have as many looks as a Ken doll,” I teased.

He came to the bed and put his hands on either side of me, and leaned down close still wearing the sunglasses. No more smiling. “But I believe I have one look a Ken doll never has,” he said.

My belly tightened. “I do believe I saw that look yesterday.”

He stayed looming over me, all dressed up and spiffy compared to my scantily clad self. I liked lying under him like that.

Goosebumps rode my skin as he touched my throat, drew a finger down the center of my chest. “Do you know what Odin said about you?”

“What?” Energy stirred on my skin wherever his finger touched. He drew it down, down toward my belly.

“Odin says a frisson of vulnerability turns you on. I’m inclined to agree.”

“Oh, yeah? Is Odin a psychoanalyst from Vienna now?”

“Let’s just say Odin has your number. Odin has everybody’s number.” Thor stood. “Unfortunately, we have to go. We have a lot to do.”

So we were all business then. I got up and put on my shabby bank teller outfit.

We took a cab to downtown Kansas City. Luckily, our first stop was an upscale department store where I picked out a trio of lovely sundresses and some awesome tops and pants, the sorts of things Isis might wear. And then we went to a beauty salon on what Thor termed “the rock ‘n roll side of town” for new hair.

I took the chair in front of a purple-haired stylist who curled her heavily pierced lip in horror as she inspected my knife-chopped locks. “It was definitely a hasty job,” I said “But I want a big change anyway. Can we make it short and pink?”

“Hold on,” Thor said. “Pink?” He shook his head.

“She should have the style she chooses,” the stylist snapped. “You want pink? Pink would be gorgeous on you.”

“But if she looks too radical or out of the ordinary,” Thor said, “she could lose the very important position she currently has. She might cease to be effective in her profession. Which has a public interaction component.”

“He’s right,” I said. “How about jet black?”

Thor shook his head.

“Dark brown,” I said.

This, too, Thor vetoed.

“What?” I protested.

“Come here.”

“One minute,” I said to the stylist. I took off the plastic poncho she’d put on me and followed Thor out onto the sidewalk, glaring at his back the whole way to the corner of the building.

“You can’t have your hair short and dark.”

“Why? It’ll look totally natural.”

He took off his sunglasses and eyed me straight on. “No go.”

“Why not? It’s blonde or nothing? Is that the deal here?”

“You can’t have it dark. You have to trust me.” The gravity in his voice suggested a world of pain, of trouble.

Slowly things assembled themselves in the back of my mind…the hole, the rules. And the way I fit in, at least with Thor and Odin, almost like there was a place for me.

The sense of a ghost.

“Because that’s how she had it,” I whispered.

He cocked his head, as though confused, but I suspected he understood.

And then it came to me.
Don’t leave Venus…or rather, don’t leave, Venus
.

“Venus,” I added.

He set a hand on the wall to the side of my head, and then he set his other hand on the other side, caging me in. “None of us told you that,” he said accusingly.

“You told me! You said it in your sleep.
Don’t leave, Venus
, you said.” It hadn’t been about planets. Venus was the girl.

His gaze remained keen.

“Is it that hard to put together that a girl came down this road with you guys before? Your rules? The undercurrents? It’s pretty clear.”

He pondered this, then straightened up. “Congratulations. Now you know why you can’t make it brown.”

I had the strange feeling I’d betrayed him by analyzing his sleep talk. It made me feel a little bad. “Sorry,” I said.

He put his hand around the back of his neck and stared up at the sky. I waited, noticing he had freckles across his nose, so light they were almost translucent.

What in the world had happened to Venus?

“Tell me,” I said.

He took his hand from his neck and looked at me then, lashes pale in the morning sun, contrasting with the rich blue of his eyes. I said nothing more. Thor was the sensitive one, the communicative one, the one who got out of line most easily. I felt like if I gave him space, he’d fill it with information.

And then he did.

“She’s the reason you can’t stay,” he said.

“But I
want
to stay.” I couldn’t believe I’d said it, but I had. “I don’t want to go back.”

He squinted into the sunlight; I suspected the squint was more to cover up happiness than to protect his eyes. “You don’t know what you’re saying. You don’t know what this is.”

“I know enough of it to know I love it here. I love this whole thing.”

“You’ve been with us a day.”

“Sometimes, Thor, people just
know things
. Sometimes in life you make a big decision on an instant of information and you know you’re right. Haven’t you ever done that?”

The way he looked at me, I knew that he had. That he understood. “I want you to stay,” he said finally. “I want you to. I can tell that Odin does, too.”

It was a strange moment of honesty between us, and there I was, taking off from the top of the rickety ski jump, ready to plummet to the earth and be shot on up into the sky.

“Two against one,” I pointed out.

He smiled bitterly. “Aren’t you observant. But keeping you with us is not something for a quorum. It’s all or
not
at all. The thing is—” Here he paused. “I’m telling you this in confidence. I’m telling you because—I don’t know why I’m telling you.”

“Okay.”

Thor smoothed back his hair. “The thing with Venus is that it was only supposed to be a sex thing. We met her at a hotel bar and let her think we were traveling on business, and we made up those rules, you know, if she wanted to travel with us she’d obey these rules.” He paused as a couple passed. “They’re the rules we told you. She’d just been fired, we were flush, and so it was all fun and games. And then she helped us out in a pinch. Does that sound familiar to you?”

“Yes,” I said, recalling the rooftop glance between Odin and Thor.

“It was cool, it worked out. But then we relied on her to do another thing and she got some heat on her—just cops, but still, it tied her to a robbery, and suddenly she couldn’t go home again. And she had people. She said she was fine, but she hadn’t chosen it. She was stuck with us. Sure, it was good for a while.”

He paused, watched a man unload boxes from the back of a truck and stack them outside the Vietnamese grocery across the street.

“She even drove for us sometimes. Then she fucked up, made a careless mistake that brought down a lot of heat on us. There’s a line you cross in this game where you want to be caught a little bit, just for the intensity to ease. Consciously you don’t, but subconsciously, you get tired. And I think she crossed it. We quit bringing her along anywhere having to do with the jobs, just brought her along to hotels, or kept her in the hideouts. That was the beginning of the end. She wasn’t entirely stable, really. Zeus thinks we broke her mind, but I don’t agree. It was there at first, her self-destructiveness. We sure didn’t help, though.”

“Right,” I said.

“I’m not talking against her. She was beautiful.” He looked at me hard, wanting me to get that. “She was a beautiful person. She held us together—I don’t mean we would’ve broken apart without her but she…connected us. Changed us inside. Reconfigured us—even Zeus. Venus was a little wrong, but we loved her.”

“Sounds like,” I said, awed by how important it was to Thor that I understand that she had been beautiful and loved by them.

“So one day, after all the trouble, we find this lipstick message on the dash of the Camaro we’d been driving around—
You’re better off without me
. We looked for her. Especially Zeus. Some workers in a quarry pit found her body. She’d gone and jumped off a cliff, basically. Zeus felt responsible. He’d been hard on her, and things were getting fucked up at the end. Twisted. Zeus can get very intense.” He paused.

I thought about the blunt violence in Zeus’s kick. The surprise of it, like he knew every way to go at a man, including the unexpected ones.

“He’s had less go right, let’s just say. He asked her to do things he shouldn’t have asked.”

I waited, surprised Thor had divulged so much. A man in a white apron came out of the grocery across the street and talked to the one stacking boxes.

“You’re good at this,” Thor continued. “You stay silent. You want me to tell more. But I don’t feel connected to you when you do that. I feel like you oppose me when you do that. Like you’re not part.”

My stomach felt funny.
Like you’re not part
. He was right. I was pumping him for information with my silence. So many times over the past day I’d felt these flashes of togetherness among him and Odin and me—not about the sex, but more. Thor’s words now suggested to me that he was used to that deep level of connection all the time. I felt envious.

“I didn’t mean to,” I said. “It’s something I never had, that’s all. But I want it.” I sort of didn’t know what I was talking about. All I knew was that I wanted in.

“It’s not enough, that you want to stay part. Or that Odin and I might want you to. Here’s the thing—it’s been a year almost, and…you just throwing in with us, it’s hard on Zeus. He feels responsible for what happened with Venus, grieved her the most. It wasn’t his fault—none of us understood her state of mind, but he takes it on himself. He gets fierce about people, and the way we live right now, a year is like a decade. Everything’s bigger. The danger, the reward, the fear, the pleasure. And we pulled Venus in so fast and furious, and we got very symbiotic with her. When she died, it damaged us in a lot of ways, beyond the obvious ones of losing somebody cherished. Zeus especially.”

I thought about the flowers, of course. But I thought about what Thor wasn’t saying. Last night I’d heard the pain in his voice loud and clear.
Don’t. No. Don’t leave, Venus.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“That’s why we can’t keep you.”

“I’m not a stray puppy. I’m not Venus.”

A pause. “Then don’t get your hair brown.” His words were part command, part collaboration.

A sprig of hope. “I won’t,” I said.

I went in and told the stylist to cut my hair short, like a boy’s, and to color it platinum blonde. Thor went off to do some mysterious errands.

“You’re sure you don’t want dark? It’s your hair,” she said.

“Absolutely.”

She clearly didn’t approve. She thought I was being ruled by my man. Oppressed by my man. She couldn’t know that for the first time in my life I was quite dizzyingly free, and that I longed only to stay like this.

I mused on what Thor had said. The loss they couldn’t quite heal from. Had they found other women to fill in temporarily? Had they filled the void themselves? They seemed so hooked into each other, so in tune, even with each other’s bodies.