The Girl: Chapter Five
She stepped into the room with all the timidness of a doe but none of the animal's grace. Her eyes darted around and he knew that they were judging, judging everything, before she had crossed more than a foot over the threshold. Logan had held the door open for her, but only to make sure the kid wouldn't chicken out and run. He felt a tremor of shame over his poor lodgings, a pulse of confusion as to what protocol existed upon bringing a girl you had no intention of fucking inside your home. But the irritation he felt at feeling such emotions quickly overwhelmed the emotions themselves.This wasn't a fucking date, after all; he wasn't going to give her a tour of his place or gently guide her to a seat. She was here, and he was feeding her. He did not have to worry about anything beyond that.
There wasn't much to see, but Logan supposed the girl was placing a sick twist on everything, like all teenagers did. She'd assume that he entertained five year olds on the couch, that he kept the body parts of his victims in the little fridge. You could see into the bedroom from here, and those sheets hanging over the end of the mattress (clawed to shreds in the midst of a particularly bad nightmare) was probably rope, in her eyes.
Why had he let her in? Why hadn't he left the girl outside in the hall, let her handle the other residents herself? Better that than to lay his quarters on display for her to entertain herself with assumptions.
He shouldn't have left those sheets out, in plain sight. He should have hidden them. Thrown them out.
Shit.
This was a bad idea.
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The apartment was small (not that she had expected otherwise) and so sparsely furnished for it to be anything but intentional. Walls unbroken by photos or frames, wide stretches of empty carpet. Most of the apartments in this building (at least, the few she had been unable to avoid going into) held some trace of it's owner, fingerprints of the tenants preferences and personality. But not here. Except for a discarded undershirt and the smell of beer, this place might have been unoccupied. No personal touches, little mess. It was the reverse of those homes shown in magazines--the kind overflowing with vases and hand-knit pillows but impossible to envision a real person living there. This place was not ashamed of it's bareness, stared you in the face and dared you to challenge it's lack of pretense. Exactly like the man who inhabited it.
The girl knew even before she had given it any conscious thought that this was a temporary home for him, and a miserable one.
She wasn't sure how she felt about the former.
But it was clean, or at least more so than her (or any other) apartment. Nothing dripped from the tiny fridge; the lightbulbs did not flicker; all evidence of rodents had been swept away. She did not have to examine the carpet for broken glass or dirty needles, and place her feet accordingly. These were rare qualities that she had learned to appreciate.
It didn't seem too bad, this place.
The man--Logan, he had said--headed almost immediately to the bedroom and she could not stop the noise of alarm that travelled up her throat.
But he did not go inside the room and, more fortunately, did not force her to. He simply closed the door, cutting the other chamber and it's ominous mattress from view. He sent her a sharp look when he turned back around, his nostrils flaring and his jaw clenched as if dealing with some perpetual irritant, but did not share his thoughts.
"Well," Logan said, in the same manner she was learning to expect from him: as if each word was a precious commodity and she was making him waste them. "Sit down, Kid."
But there was something in his voice--or perhaps the way his eyes flicked away from hers, or how his hands kept changing their hold on the box of food--that suggested nervousness, despite the fact that he was not someone with any reason for anxiety.
A moment's worth of hesitation, and the girl came to perch on the couch. Just the edge of the cushion, better if she needed to stand quickly. She fidgeted, tucked and then untucked her hair, crossed her arms and then uncrossed them, folded her hands in her lap and picked at her nails. She could hear her own heartbeat, a watery pulse, and hoped that her fear was not so obvious.
Logan snorted, took a seat at the other end of the couch and set the box between them. His hands were very large, would have as little trouble crushing a skull as they would bubble-wrap. She did not take her eyes of of him, not for a second. They were three feet apart and she wasn't stupid.
He pulled off the plastic lids, ripped open the paper bags. Noodles and beef, chicken covered in glistening sauce, bread coated in sugar. She did not know the dishes' names, could not begin to identify the rest, but that did not matter. It was food.
It smelled good.
The girl's gruff companion sank his teeth into what she had thought was a mini-burrito before she saw it's contents. His teeth looked very sharp from this angle.
He nodded toward the food--indicating, she guessed, for her to begin eating or to take whatever she wanted, hopefully both. She complied without argument. The noodles were good, the beef wasn't. She took forkfuls of them all regardless. Who knew when she would have the opportunity to eat anything in such abundance?
The T.V. came to life, and the girl jumped a little; she had not seen him lift the remote. That was bad. She couldn't lose focus.
He sifted through channels until a hockey match could be made out beneath the static waves. Logan glanced sideways at her, raised his eyebrows and tightened his lips. Not questioning, but daring her to argue with his choice of programs. The girl lowered her gaze to his shirt collar.
Nothing was said when he dropped a few noodles, but when she spilt soy sauce on the couch he growled, "Damnit", and shoved handfuls of napkins her way. Their fingers touched. The girl said sorry, over and over.
The man always seemed to be waiting for a fight to start. Couldn't he see that she had no intention of giving him one? Did that disappoint him in some way?
He refused to look at her after that, and she chose to find comfort in this. Ignoring was considerably preferable to maiming.
Although she had found plastic silverware crammed into the side of the box, there were no plates and he did not offer her one. They were forced to eat leaning over the containers. It was awkward, and she felt vulnerable--too close to him, with the strong sense of one placing his head on the chopping block over and over. But she listened to the T.V., to the rattling of the fridge, to their muffled chewing, to the pleasant sounds of a place that just might be safe. And the rest bothered her less with every passing minute.
"Do you want me to help you clean up?", the girl asked quietly, when he hadn't reached for the box in some time and she had eaten her fill. Her fill did not amount to much; her stomach was as little accustomed to a large meal as she was, but still she felt guilty for what she had taken.
"No." His voice reminded her of a belt, snapping in the air.
"Oh--oh, okay then." She bit her lip. "I guess...I guess I'm going to go now, then. Th-thank you. Thank you very much."
He glowered at the T.V., on which the hockey game had not ended, but refused to acknowledge her otherwise as she stood, made her way to the front door. "Goodnight," she called back politely, not expecting a reply but pleasantly surprised when she received one.
"Goodnight, Kid."
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Entering her own home was a delicate operation, one that had to be undertaken with the greatest of care. She only opened the door few inches because anyone inebriated behind it might take the motion for a trick of the eye, while a door opened wide would alert her presence to everybody. The girl waited, listening without breathing (in much the same way, though she didn't know it, that Logan had stood weeks prior) for any indicator of Him. No sound came, or none that she could detect.
In a movement that would have shocked the man on the fourth floor with it's swift fluidity, the girl slipped inside.
Her eyes scanned the interior with all the thoroughness of a hunter but the motives of it's prey. He was no where in immediate view, but she allowed herself to neither relax or shut the door--there was still the bedroom and bathroom to check, and she might need to make a hurried escape. God help her if he was out and returned before she could hide, because certainly no one else would.
Condoms and cigarette buds and empty syringes were smashed into the grime that covered the floor--beneath which, she supposed, might be a carpet. She couldn't be sure; her memory did not reach that far. Heaps of trash and clothes (some mixed together) were strewn throughout the room, as if left in the wake of a particularly drug-addicted tornado. Rat droppings and a broken microwave, a forsaken bologna sandwich that was starting to turn a strange color. A smell that said her mother had lost control of her bowels again.
The woman in question lay in the center of the room, on a couch beaten and stained beyond shape or color. It was merely a leathery lump that took up space, sorta-brown and sorta-pale and sorta-grey. The same could be said of the woman who rested upon it, whose right arm hung off the side and seemed stuck within a bag of Frito's. She had tan-ish hair that had been washed at the same time she had changed her clothes--long ago, a face pockmarked and pasty and legs streaked with blue veins. The girl paid her absolutely no attention.
She crept forward, sticking to the left wall, except when she had to step around mess and trash bags, the latter of which had been half-filled and then abandoned in the face of a task too great.
The bedroom was on the right-hand side, rather than straight ahead as in Logan's apartment, so there was a corner, a moment when He could have been standing there, waiting for her in one of his rare, sneaky moods. And another moment when she had to check the bathroom. But He was not hiding behind the doors; His unconscious form was not sprawled across the mattress; His piss was not splashing into the toilet.
He wasn't here.
The girl took a breath of deep relief, but her brow crinkled up at a new decision. He could be back in any minute. Or He could be gone all night, and she might have time to curl up in that corner of the apartment (cleaner than the others) that was hers and sleep. Both had an equal chance of happening; the girl had no way of knowing which to prepare for. Worst of all possibilities was the scenario in which he came back before she awoke.
"Mmmmm....", mumbled a voice, fuzzy as if covered with a fine layer of lint instead of sleep. "Mmmm....Marrriee, sweett-ee? Thatchoo?"
The girl ignored her, and settled on the safest of her options.
She washed herself at the bathroom sink, changed her socks and underwear. She grabbed her pillow from its hiding place behind the trash can (the least touched item in the dwelling). It was blue, with a pattern of faded yellow stars and another set of clothes stuffed inside. She picked her way back through the living room, and left with as little noise as she had entering.
The night before last, He had caught her while she was using the bathroom, taken her to some men in a smoke-filled room behind a bar. They were in their thirties, but their beards and cold eyes made them appear older. She had cried while being made to strip, while they poked and pulled and discussed and examined. She cried while He stood in the corner, hands shoved into His pockets until the men said no. No, she was a bit too old to interest their clientele. He should have brought her earlier. But she was a good product; they might be able to refer him to some others who would pay less but....
And they went to another building, whose occupants repeated the procedure and told him the same thing. Anyone could find a hooker, but fourteen was too old for them to sell.
And again. And again. She did not grow numb to it, did not run out of tears or shivers or pleas. She did not want to listen to the bartering but could not shut the voices out or ignore their hands.
His fingers had dug into her arm as he dragged her, and then her into neck and then her hair and then into more painful places. He had fumed and stomped and cursed and turned red in the face. And when they arrived back at the tenement He had kicked and slapped and thrown, and then dug His packet of cigarettes out--while in the other room her mother called for somebody to bring her "some water or sumthin."
And afterwards--when she had only the strength to blink and run her tongue over the cut on her lip and wonder how much money He owed and who He owed it to--He forgot about her.
She had stayed on the floor for a long, long time.
The girl walked upstairs with her arms wrapped around the pillow. She thought, briefly and crazily, of going to that man, Logan's, room. But that was a stupid idea, and she discarded it almost immediately. She didn't even know him. Why would he take her in?
She went to the laundry room, at the back of which stood a thin door. Shoes with loose seams, holes in the soles covered up with cardboard, stepped over the concrete floor. The girl would have seemed much younger than fourteen, if anyone had been around then to judge. She hooked her fingers into the hole where a knob should have been, pulled the plywood towards her.
Technically, it was the boiler room. But a closet would have more apt term. The large, metal cylinder had been broken for two weeks, a fact that she was grateful for. When it was working the machine could burn you.
She squeezed her pillow inside, followed it with expertise. The space between the doorway and the boiler was slim, but behind it was about two feet of room that had seemed alot wider when she was younger.
The floor was hard and cold, but the girl did not mind so much. It wasn't too dusty, and she wiped out the dead roaches every other day. She pushed her pillow against the wall and curled around it, knees tucked to her chest in a parody of comfort. It was still early in the evening, and she could have fetched one of her books from behind the dryer. But her head hurt and her eyelids felt too warm and heavy. She was tired, always tired lately.
And the girl fell asleep pondering the week irony of being so close to her home and being homeless, of having a mother and a father but no parents.
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Author's Chapter Notes:
I'm always shocked when I manage to finish a chapter on time, and that is doubly true today. I was resigned to a guilty conscience and the apologies I would have to make when I eventually updated. I had got stuck on one paragraph when I was about two pages in, but it was Tuesday so I was not really worried....and then looked up at some point and realized that it was no longer Tuesday, and I had only two days to post! I almost had a stroke. But I drank two cups of coffee, ate an alarming amount of candy corn, and managed to complete this at eleven o'clock last night. (Okay, it was ten o'clock but I'm an absolute pansy when it comes to sleep).
The following is a wee bit darker, has a little more Marie (I will return to Logan's POV in the next chapter; I usually dislike straying from his) and still did not reach the scene that I've been itching to get to. But I'm reasonably happy with it, and I hope you are as well.
The following is a wee bit darker, has a little more Marie (I will return to Logan's POV in the next chapter; I usually dislike straying from his) and still did not reach the scene that I've been itching to get to. But I'm reasonably happy with it, and I hope you are as well.
Chapter End Notes:
I did not forget to thank the wonderful reviewers of the last chapter. I thought I'd shake things up a bit and place it down here. The feedback I recieved was overwhelmingly kind and has kept me walking in the clouds all week. Thank you for clicking on this story and, once again, please review!!