Keisha
What the hell had I expected, I wondered?
I lay staring up at the ceiling in my cramped little room, feeling like I would be a prisoner here forever, with no hope whatsoever of escaping.
Up until this evening, I wouldn't have minded that one bit.
I really think I would have stayed here with Marlon forever, living out a blissful life together in our little slice of paradise. Screwing nonstop.
Talking and laughing together into the small hours of the night, unable to get enough of one another.
Had I really been that deluded, though? Thinking it could be anything more than what it was? Thinking that he and I, that we-
Oh, God damn it...
I wanted to cry, but I didn't even think I could bring myself to do so. I was in a kind of emotional wasteland. I was too much of my father's daughter to bring myself to tears, to admit that I had feelings for him.
I wasn't supposed to fall for him.
Jay... He was just like my dad at the end of the day.
He was ruthless. Brutal. He'd killed people before. But no other man had touched me like he had. No other man had looked at me with such intense longing in his eyes. I longed for his pale flesh to be pressed up against mine again... To hear his voice.
I had to accept that it was over. My feelings for him were drowning me but I was too proud to tell him the truth. Too hopeless to believe that it could even be worth the bother.
And so I just lay there. I lay there and lay there, wishing for a miracle. Wishing, for example, that things might be different. That my father wasn't a crook. That the man I loved wasn't a killer, and that he wouldn't have to spend the rest of his life running- I didn't dare even think about just how long that actually might be at this point.
Those both seemed ridiculously tall orders, even for fantasies. I knew that neither of those things could ever change, and so I set my sights on a wish just a little bit lower, though still hardly more feasible.
I wished, more than anything, that it could be Jay who unlocked that bedroom and stepped through to take me into his arms, rather than my father.
Jay was the only thing, the only one I wanted in the whole wide world. The only thing, really, that I could ever want again.
But I knew I was only fooling myself if I thought I would ever even get to see him again.
If Daddy got his hands on him, he wouldn't give him the money. Daddy would kill him. I knew my father better than anybody and while he'd never been emotional, he'd always protected me.
Maybe it was for my mother. Maybe it was just because he saw me as his prized possession, his beautiful girl.
I closed my eyes.
I waited. And I waited.
And after hours, too many hours, I heard the click of the lock.
That, finally, brought me close to tears.
But then I heard the sound of a voice, and instantly I was jerked back hard from the brink.
“Keisha. I'm back.”
I sat bolt upright in bed, my heart racing. His words were pleasing, but his tone urgent and harried.
“Oh my God! Jay!” it took a moment for me to get past the unspeakable thrill of simply setting eyes on him again, for me to notice the look on his face, and the blood pouring from a hole in his arm.
I didn't let him get another word in.
“Jesus Christ! Jay, you're hurt!”
Instinctively I reached out to touch him, but he brushed my hand away, lacing my fingers up into his own.
“Look, that's not important right now. Listen to me, Keisha. I have something to tell you. Your father is dead.”
I blinked at him. I wasn't totally sure I'd understood this correctly.
“Wh-what? He- he is? Really?”
“He tried to have me killed. He brought a sniper and tried to take me out after I told him where you were. Then the shit hit the fan, and one of the sniper's bullets-”
“Oh my God,” I said, slapping a hand to my mouth.
Maybe I should have felt something resembling sadness. Or horror. Or anything else, really, than what I was suddenly experiencing.
He was really dead. Marlon Hillary... my father. I wanted to cry. I wanted to pretend like there were memories between us to look back on. My father and my relationship was non existant outside of the financial details.
He'd always treated me the way he'd treated his work: cold and detached.
Still. I didn't want him to die.
“I'm very sorry,” said Jay, and I shook my head.
“Don't be. He had it coming. Sooner or later, he had it coming...”
It felt horribly callous of me, and suddenly I felt more guilt than anything else. I looked down at my hands.
My heart was exploding with a mixture of emotions as I tried to process the news. Marlon, dead. Me, the heir to his fortune and to all the trouble that accompanied it.
I felt sick to my stomach.
My father had built wealth for himself but he'd hurt a lot of people doing it, including me, his daughter.
I stared for a long time until Jay interrupted my train of thought.
“They're coming for you, Keisha. Your father's men, his enemies, all of them. They know where you are and I could have taken the money and run but... I can't leave you behind in this life. I can't let you live surrounded by these people. By these killers, these criminals. You deserve so much more than that. So much better. And I know...” He stopped here, his voice choking up.
I stared at him with slightly teary eyes, longing at that moment to reach out, and put a hand on his shoulder to comfort him. I resisted the urge, however. I had to let him speak.
Finally, he resumed, a tear rolling down his face. “...I know that I'm really no better than anyone, in this life you'd be leaving behind. I know I've fucked up. I know that, maybe, you have absolutely no reason to trust me. I've killed, and I've hurt people, and I know that. And I can never change that Keisha. But I mean what I said about leaving that all behind me. I never, ever want to hurt anyone again if I can help it. I regret the day I ever even got my hands on a gun in the first place.
“To be completely honest with you... I didn't think I could ever outrun all that I've done. That I could ever really put it behind me, or be happy again. But this past week I've been with you, Keisha. This time we've spent together... It's the happiest, the most at peace I've been, in a very, very long time. I don't want to leave that behind. Even if I survive all of this, I don't think I can live without you. I love you, Keisha. And I don't know what I can promise you. I don't want to make promises, only to find out down the road that I can't really keep them, or that it isn't enough.
“But I need you in my life. That much I know. If it's what you want, I can take you to a place so far away from here. So far away from all of this. But only if that's what you want. All you have to do is say the word, and we'll leave this all behind forever. Or, you can say the word, and I'll be out of your life. I'll never bother you again if that's what you want. But please, Keisha. I need to know. I can't leave without knowing what you want from me. What I can do to make up for everything I put you through. Because I really do love you, Keisha. And I need you to know that, too.”
I was floored.
I stared at him for a very long time, straining just to process all of this. The pros and cons. The risks, the moral quagmires, the endless array of factors there were to consider, in far too little time to even begin to scratch the surface. But somehow, I knew that no matter how long I tried to think about all of these things, I could never really wrap my head around it.
It was one of those things where, no matter how much time you spent thinking it through, agonizing over it, you would only end up spinning around and around in the same old circles, totally unable to reach any sort of conclusion.
All you could ever really go on, in an instance like this, was your gut.
And right now, my gut felt twisted into knots by the three little words he'd buried in all of that. The only three words that really, truly mattered.
I love you.
That was all I needed. That was all I'd ever wanted. From my father, from anybody.
I took a very deep breath, feeling that whatever answer I gave him, it had to be my final one. I watched the suspense building on his face, his eyes occasionally shifting toward the door, paranoid that the time for talk might be over, at any given moment.
I exhaled and I fixed him with my gaze, letting him know my mind was made up.
“I love you too, Jay,” I said, gently flaring my nostrils as I said the words. “And wherever you go, I'm there.”
He blinked at me, looking like a deer in headlights. The dumbfounded expression on such a serious rugged face as his struck me as adorable beyond words. And I knew, from that look alone, that I'd made the right decision.
I knew, from that look, that he really, truly loved me.
And I knew, from that look, that he would keep me safe wherever we ended up together. That he would do everything in his power to be what I needed him to be.