Maya’s brain wasn’t working right. That was the only thing she could think as she bent over to clean up the scraps of the mug she’d broken. That and the details about the new missing girl revolved around in her mind. This latest victim was older than the other ones, 18 years old. She was an athletic track star and a good student at the nearby high school, a rival public school to Roxie’s private institution. Maybe they even knew each other.
But even though her whole body had started shaking as she thought of the new girl tied up in a basement somewhere, being tortured alongside Roxie, her brain kept going back to the sex from the night before. What the hell had she done—to Chuck, to her new relationship? What was she going to do?
The sex had been wild, totally and completely uninhibited. She felt like she cast off every last useless layer of her flesh and got to the beast beneath, the animal inside of her that didn’t care about anything other than satisfying the most basic, base desire of her heart. It was nothing like what she had with Chuck. When they had sex, it was simple, safe. It was…a little bit boring, honestly. It was always the same, but even after years of having regular sex with Arsen, she never knew what to expect.
But Chuck….Chuck was a good man. A boring man, maybe, but stable. Predictable. Trustworthy. She knew where she stood with him. He was like a rock, a solid foundation on which she could erect her new, shiny, deceptive life, a life where she didn’t have to be the little girl in the basement who’d been so scared for so long. In contrast, Arsen was a flame, hard to touch, hard to contain. But he thrilled her. He filled her with light and warmth and power. Maya didn’t know how she could be simultaneously attracted to two entirely opposite men.
Maya shook her head, trying to dislodge all thoughts of her romantic quandary and focus instead on the missing girls. Nobody else was going to find them. It was on their shoulders and theirs alone. They couldn’t afford to waste time with their own stupid relationship drama when lives were at stake. We’ve already wasted time, Maya thought, thinking back on the beautiful, amazing, terrifying night she had with Arsen merely hours before. What if The Blade killed Roxie while I was fucking Arsen? I’ll never forgive myself. I’m dirty. I’m wrong. I’m dirty. I’m so bad.
“We’ve failed her; we’ve failed her already,” Maya said out loud, dropping the broken pieces of the mug into the trash.
“Don’t say that,” Arsen said, but his tone wasn’t particularly convincing. It was like they were thinking the same thing, feeling the same disappointment and failure and despair.
“Well, what should I say?” Maya asked, her irritation seeping into her voice. “Huh? What’s the situation here, Arsen? We’re fucked. Let’s just be honest. We’ve got no fucking leads, and there are two girls out there, trapped with a psychopath. What the hell are we going to do?”
“We’re going to keep our shit together,” Arsen said, closing the distance between their two bodies. “We’re not going to fall apart. We’re going to keep fighting until we find them.”
Maya wanted to argue with him, wanted to scream and break things and push him away, but instead, she found herself folding into his body, hugging him as close to her as she could.
“We’ll be okay,” Arsen whispered, rubbing the back of her head. “We’ll be alright.”
“I don’t know that I will ever be okay again,” Maya whispered into his chest, clutching hard at his back to make sure that he didn’t move away from her. “Is that okay? Could that be okay if I just…never heal?”
Arsen was silent for a long moment, and Maya guessed that he didn’t really know what to say. She didn’t know the answer either, so it wasn’t exactly like she could blame him. He finally trailed his head down from her head to her back, sticking a hand up her shirt to trace her spinal column with his fingertips. “You’re perfect…just the way you are,” he whispered.
Maya looked up then to stare into his eyes and see if she could detect any bit of deception. But she couldn’t find a single trace of a lie within his eyes. Only truth. Only love.
Before she knew what she was doing, she reached up and pulled his head towards hers, crashing their mouths together while their hands scratched at each other’s bodies.
Blindly, they moved into the living room, stumbling into various pieces of furniture on the way, their mouths attached the entire time. They fell back onto the couch, kissing deeply and furiously, but somehow, Maya knew that this wasn’t going to turn back into sex. Her body wasn’t ready for another round, for one thing. But more importantly, it was her heart that was hungry for him this time. She needed his softness, his sweetness, his comfort, not his animalistic side. She needed to know if the soft parts of Arsen still existed or if he’d cut them out of himself after she’d left.
Even as she continued to kiss him, the thoughts from before returned. Maybe she was only getting this stuff out of her system. Maybe she’d come here, back to the city, not to save the girls’ lives but to cleanse herself of her past. Maybe she’d just needed to come here to exorcise her demons, get all of that pent-up energy, all the “what-ifs,” all the unanswered questions out of her body. Maybe this was exactly what she needed to do in order to fully commit herself to Chuck and to the safer, simpler life out in the country.
Or maybe…maybe not. Maybe this was what she really needed, what she really wanted. Maybe this was who she really was, and any other life was just a lie.
She pulled back from his mouth, panting for air, grabbing at the muscles of his upper arm to anchor herself down into this moment. Maya licked her lips and cleared her throat, preparing herself for the first time in a year to tell the truth, the whole truth. It was terrifying, like dangling her feet on the edge of a precipice, but she knew it was what she had to do. Otherwise, she’d never be free. But what do I want to be free of? Maya wondered to herself as she stared up into Arsen’s wide, vulnerable eyes. Arsen? My past? Or the hope of ever having a future, the idea of healing from my past and letting it go, the expectation that I’ll ever get better? What was this ache in her heart, exactly, and would it ever go away?
# # #
“I would have taken you with me, you know,” Maya said suddenly, without warning.
Arsen didn’t know what to make of that at first, it was so out of nowhere. But then it hit him, all at once. She would have taken him to her little rural town in the middle of nowhere. She would have taken him to her new life.
“No, you wouldn’t have,” Arsen said reflexively, shaking his head back and forth. “You wouldn’t.”
“I would,” Maya said, and her tone sounded defensive now, like she was arguing for her own virtue. “You weren’t the problem. It was the city.”
Arsen just shook his head again, feeling a sad smile stretch across his face. “No, no, see, that’s wrong.”
“Why?” Maya demanded to know, her jaw set and her mouth flattening into a sharp, thin line.
“Because…because me and the city…I couldn’t leave it. You know that. It doesn’t…it doesn’t mean anything for you to offer because you already know what the answer would be.”
Maya was silent for a long moment after he finished talking, and Arsen felt the back of his neck go hot, his skin prickling with discomfort as she just looked at him. “I guess I always knew that,” she finally said. “I just…maybe I hoped that it wasn’t true.”
Arsen’s heart fell inside of him, hard, like a heavy stone sinking under the surface of a lake. The truth was so much more unbearable than a lie because the truth of the matter was that Arsen and the city couldn’t be separated, ever. He was born here. He was going to die here. Because that’s what happened to Lizzie. She never got out. She never got a chance. It wasn’t fair if Arsen got to leave it, got to forget about the horrors that hid within its alleyways. He wasn’t going to abandon his sister, not for anything. Not even for love.
Arsen straightened up on the couch, shifting away from Maya’s warm, wonderful body. “We should get to work,” he mumbled, rubbing his eyes as he got to his feet. “We can set up a surveillance shift on the Greenwoods. If the dad is involved at all, we might be able to see where he’s going, and if not, it’s possible the kidnapper is still monitoring the families of the victims. He probably watched them for a long time before sneaking in and leaving his insignia in Roxie’s bedroom.”
Maya was silent, not saying anything in response, but after a few seconds, she got to her feet, nodding to herself as she crossed the living room to head back into the bedroom. A minute later, she reappeared, fully dressed in black clothes, prepared for a stake-out. “Let’s go,” she said, tying her red hair back into a tight ponytail before heading towards the front door. Right before her hand hit the doorknob, however, her phone rang. “Just a second,” Maya muttered apologetically to Arsen before reaching into her pocket to grab her phone.
Arsen waited, watching as Maya stared down at her phone screen for several long seconds without moving to answer the call. “Who is it?” he asked.
Maya continued to stare down at the phone, chewing on her bottom lip. “It’s...Chuck, my fiancé,” she murmured.
Arsen felt his blood turn cold inside his veins. “Oh,” he replied, at a loss for what else to say. He’d almost forgotten that Chuck even existed at all, but now this reminder made him feel like he’d been punched in the gut. It was so easy to fall back into old patterns with Maya, to pretend that she was here to stay in the city with him forever, but that wasn’t true, was it? She was here on borrowed time, and sooner or later, she was going to go back to her shiny new life, far away from all the dust and grime and dirt, far away from everything that Arsen represented, everything that he was.
But for now, at least, Maya silenced her phone and put it back in her pocket. “Don’t have time for him now,” she muttered by way of explanation. “Come on, let’s go.”
This time, they didn’t use the subway. Instead, they retrieved Arsen’s car out of the parking garage where he kept it most of the time. It was a quick ride over to Roxie’s neighborhood, an upscale residential area full of young professionals and retirees as well as families with kids. It was like a chunk of the suburbs had been cut and pasted right in the middle of the city, hidden just out of sight.
“We should park on the side of the road, across the street from Roxie’s house,” Maya said, pointing out the right address. Arsen followed her instructions, pulling into a spot on the same block as the Greenwoods’ home.
“And now we wait,” Arsen said, getting his notepad out of his pocket to keep notes in case Mr. Greenwood appeared anytime soon.
Silence fell in the car, only broken by the sound of Maya’s anxious foot-tapping in the other seat, getting louder and louder as minutes passed by with no action. Maya was never really good at the “sit and wait” part of the job. It seemed to drive her crazy, just sitting still and letting things happen, although Arsen figured he could probably understand the reasons why. After all those weeks tied up as a teenager…she’d probably had enough immobility and inaction to last her a lifetime. “Hey, do you want to go get a snack or something? Stretch your legs?” Arsen suggested a half-hour into their as-yet unsuccessful stake-out.
“No, I’m fine,” Maya said, clearly lying through her teeth.
“Hey, you can take a break. I’ll keep watch. It’s okay,” Arsen said, trying to sound as reassuring as possible, but Maya just glared at him, her eyes virtually shooting daggers his way.
Arsen sighed deeply and settled back in his seat, staring blankly ahead at the empty stretch of street in front of the car. He resigned himself to sitting in silence for however many hours it took to spot Mr. Greenwood so they could follow him, but something was gnawing at the back of his mind, scratching like a cat attempting to break into a window. He opened his mouth and the words just spilled out like water falling from a faucet.
“What do you get out of your relationship with that guy? Chuck?” he asked, still facing forward towards the quiet street.
“What?” Maya asked, as if she needed the question to be repeated, but the edge of annoyance in her voice told Arsen that she’d heard him perfectly well.
“I mean, I haven’t met the guy, but I’m just wondering. What is it that you get out of being out there, in the middle of nowhere? I want to know,” Arsen said softly.
Maya shifted in her seat to face him. “If you must know, he’s…good to me.”
The words stung, but Arsen nodded, pretending like they hadn’t hurt him at all. “How so?”
Maya sighed and pushed some random strands of hair out of her face. “I don’t know. Like, if I start being stupid or something, he yells at me to stop it, and I snap out of it.”
“What do you mean, being stupid?” Arsen asked, his heart picking up the pace in his chest. He was afraid of the answer, but at the same time, he had to know. For some reason, he burned with curiosity about Maya’s new relationship, even if the line of question would inevitably hurt him.
“Like, if I start panicking about something or freaking out about nothing,” Maya said with a shrug. “You know, like I always do.”
Arsen’s heart was now pounding in his ears, the blood rushing painfully to the blood vessels nearest the surface of his skin. “So, let me get this straight. You get upset sometimes and he yells at you to knock it off? And you think that’s the right thing to do?”
“You’re making it sound bad. It’s not…he’s nice, really, I’m just explaining it wrong,” Maya said, her tone sounding more and more frustrated with each word.
“Okay,” Arsen said. “I mean, he really doesn’t sound nice, just judging from what you’ve said, but I’ll take your word for it.”
“How would you know? Seriously, how would you have any idea what he’s like? He’s…he’s too good for me, really, far too good for me,” Maya muttered.
“It doesn’t sound like it,” Arsen said sadly.
“Let’s just not talk about it, okay?” Maya snapped at him, turning to stare out of the window rather than look at him. Arsen felt a fire bubble up in his belly, a desire to say a thousand more things to her before shutting up, but he fought the urge to speak, instead nodding to himself and setting into his seat. It was going to be a long night, staring at nothing.
But then, out of nowhere, something caught his attention, some movement that he could barely perceive out of the corner of his eye. Arsen turned in his seat to find the source of the motion.
A small, thin figure stumbled down the street. At first glance, Arsen thought it was a homeless person, probably coming into this neighborhood to beg the rich residents for money or food or a place to stay. But something was off about this figure. She was dressed in a short white nightgown, but it was stained with blood and dirt, like she’d just been in a fight. “Hey, Maya, look at this, look at this girl,” he said, pointing at the bloodied young woman, who started moving faster but more unsteadily, looking like she was about to keel over at any moment.
Maya sighed deeply, apparently resentful at Arsen for saying anything to her after insulting her relationship, but she turned in her seat to see what he was talking about. A second later, her jaw dropped open, and she smacked Arsen’s shoulder hard with her fist before taking the fabric of his shirt in her hand and shaking him back and forth.
“Arsen!” she yelled, right in his ear. “It’s her! It’s Roxie!”