Chance Assassin: A Story of Love, Luck, and Murder (21 page)

I bit my tongue before announcing that he could now kiss the bride.  He was grumpy, and it wouldn’t have gone over well.  “Why doesn’t he do it anymore?”

Frank nodded toward the hotel room.  There was only so much we could talk about in public.  I led the way, ready to
try
and protect myself if he attacked me from behind.  “He got hurt,” he said, and tripped me to the ground as if to demonstrate.

“Like Bella?” I asked, taking the opportunity of distraction to kick his knee out, but he was too quick, and my foot didn’t connect.

“Worse.”

“Is she gonna be an associate?”

He laughed incredulously.  Frank’s bad side was definitely not a good place to be.  “Bella can’t even take care of herself, much less someone else.”

“But he can?”

“He’s capable of delivering a car.  That’s about the extent of it.”

“You don’t like him.”

“I don’t trust him.”

It shouldn’t have bothered me, being that Frank’s trust wasn’t exactly the easiest thing to earn, but this associate person made me nervous.  “Maybe I should try again with the car.  We could keep it until Charlie gets back.”

“I’ve already called him, V.  I’m not calling him again.”

I got up off the floor, feeling like I had quite possibly condemned the love of my life to death because I couldn’t fix his car.  And I knew this wouldn’t be like when Charlie came to visit, where I could hide under the bed or in the bathroom, listening to him treat Frank like an idiot.  No, when Frank’s new car was delivered, I’d be banished, and Frank would be at the mercy of a former killer who he didn’t trust.

His cell phone rang.  My heart stopped.  “Yes, that’s right.  Thank you.” Frank glanced at me suspiciously as he hung up.  He always knew when something was bothering me.  “Yes, dear?”

“Is he bringing you a new car?”

“Yes.”

“That was quick.”

“Yes.”

“I want to stay.”

“Absolutely not,” he said.  “Go play.  Come back in two hours.”

“Two hours?” I whined.  Two hours of freedom would’ve been worth singing about this morning.  Now it was a seventy-two
hundred
second delay in avenging Frank’s murder.  Or kidnapping.  How the fuck would I find him if he got kidnapped?  “Frank, this is a bad idea.  Please let me stay.”

“Out,” he said sternly.  “Do not come near this hotel again until noon.”

“It’s a figure of speech, by the way,” I said.  “When a person says something doesn’t grow on trees, they mean it isn’t free.”

“Well, that’s a fucking stupid figure of speech,” he said.  “Out.”

I stomped out the door in full pout, already debating the definition of the word
near
and whether there was some wiggle room with noon, being that we were such a short drive away from a different time zone.

Near
was a bus stop across from a K-Mart on the other side of a four lane divided highway, the hotel, and our room, within sight between passing SUV’s. 
Noon
was pretty much set.  And Frank’s associate was a brunet man about Frank’s height who had great difficulty getting out of our new car.  I watched the back of him, memorizing the color of his shirt, and the way he limped to our door, and then he turned around and honed in on me like I was sitting under a neon sign flashing
This kid is staring at you
.

I quickly lowered my gaze to my sneakers, as if that didn’t make it even more obvious that I’d been looking at him.  When I dared to look up, he was gone.  I got on the next bus.  The driver scolded me loudly for not having anything smaller than a fifty, until a little old lady paid my fare in dimes.  There was only one BMW in the hotel parking lot as we pulled away from the curb.  Not even Frank could kill someone that quickly, so I took my seat, stopped fretting over Frank’s life, and started fretting over mine.

Two hours wasn’t long enough to rehearse what I was going to say to him.  It wasn’t even long enough to think of a script.  I decided my best chance of survival would be not to mention it, and hope Frank hadn’t seen me himself.

“Perhaps I should have been more specific,” he said as he opened the door.  Then he grabbed me by the collar and yanked me inside.  There was no point in trying to fight him off.  I hadn’t even mastered normal Frank, much less pissed-at-me Frank.  “Did he see you?”

Answering that question truthfully while his hand was so close to my throat would’ve been suicide.  And really,
see
was less specific of a word than near.  I hadn’t gotten a good enough look at his associate to pick him out of a lineup, and my vision was perfect.  He couldn’t have gotten any better look at me.  He was old.  “No.”

“That’s interesting, because he specifically said there was a blond kid hanging out at the bus stop, watching my hotel room.  Would you like to answer the question again?”

“
Maybe
he saw me?”

“I was bluffing,” he said through gritted teeth.

“We can dye my hair,” I offered.

Frank released my collar.  With all the running he’d been making me do, and with him being big and scary, I would’ve thought it would be my first response.  But I stood my ground, albeit submissively, and waited for his worst.  “You’re not getting it. 
You
are a liability.  If someone sees you with me, if they find out I care anything about you, it puts us both in danger.  What part of me not trusting him did you fail to understand?”

“I
did
understand,” I said quietly.  “I…I got scared.”

“I told you I would protect you,” he said.  “If you trusted me, you’d have no reason to get scared.”

“I wasn’t scared for
me
,” I said, finally raising my eyes to him.  He looked the way he had when I’d woken in Charlie’s hotel room, the kind of rage that only comes from betrayal.  “You follow your instincts and you don’t trust him and I’m supposed to listen to you so I don’t trust him either and I just got really scared for you because you seem sort of defenseless sometimes and you get this look—”

His expression changed, and his ears went red, like I’d just told him he’d been pronouncing something wrong for the past six months.  He looked humiliated.  “What look?”

“Nevermind,” I said, wishing yet again that I’d kept my mouth shut.  Of course I wasn’t the only person to have noticed that Frank went crazy now and then.  And Charlie wouldn’t have hesitated to call him on it.

“What fucking look, Vincent?”

I lowered my head.  Tact was not one of my strong points.  “I dunno, like you’re sort of not there?”

“Not there?”

“Forget it, Frank.”

“No.  Say it.”

“No.”

“Say it!” he said, and he shoved me like the first time he’d slapped me, not really hard but hard enough to spike my adrenaline, and I shoved him back and screamed “You look sick in the fucking head, okay?”

Frank smiled, having gotten exactly what he was going for.  Ammunition.  “You know what’s sick?  Letting every man you see treat you like a whore and pretending that you enjoy it.”

I took a step back, reeling like he’d hit me.  Like he’d ripped out my heart.  I couldn’t look at him.  Not since Charlie tried selling me had I felt so hollow.  Because Frank was right.  Even when I no longer needed the money, I hadn’t been able to stop.  I kept going to stranger after stranger, waiting for someone, anyone, to make it feel good, the way it used to feel to come before I’d come for Mark.

At seventeen years old, masturbation was unfamiliar to me, but I knew the feel of a wedding ring against my cock.  I couldn’t count how many dicks I’d sucked, but the number of mouths to touch mine wouldn’t fill one hand.  And those men would go home to their wives, their families, and their big screen televisions, and I’d be forgotten, just like Mark forgot me.  Just like my parents forgot me.

“I see the way you look at them.  It’s not desire.  It’s disgust.  You hate them for wanting you.”

“Well no one else fucking wants me!” I sobbed.

“
I
want you,” he said.
 
Neither of us expected my reaction.  I punched him as hard as I could, right in the nose.  There was blood immediately, something I’d never been able to accomplish in all our weeks of warfare.  It was definitely broken.

“Oh, my God!  I’m so sorry!”

What came next was equally unexpected.  Frank grabbed me, kissing me hard on the lips and pressing me against the wall.  I kissed him back, gripping his closely cropped hair the best I could and forcing his mouth into mine, until I was sure I could taste as much of my blood as his.  He lifted me onto the dresser, yanking my pants down so hard I’d have bruises, leaving them dangling precariously from one ankle, snagged on my left shoe.  My other shoe was missing.

I scooted back to make room for him, knocking the TV to the floor with a hollow crash.  I didn’t even reach for it as Frank hopped up with me, on top of me, kissing me again until he ran out of breath and tried to pull away.  I wouldn’t let him go long enough for more than a quick inhale.  Finally he turned his head away and gasped for air, grasping my face and forcing it away from him, his fingers sliding across the blood on my lips.  I opened my mouth, sucking on them until he caught his breath. “I have wanted you from the moment I set eyes on you,” he said, and he pulled his fingers out before I could bite them off.

“You said you were straight.”

“No,
you
said I was straight,” he said, and he roughly hitched my knees up around his waist, bringing his mouth back to mine, and reaching between us to slip his fingers inside of me.  Now it was my turn to gasp for air.  It felt good.  It actually felt good!

I dug my heels into his back, my vertebrae pressing painfully against the wood of the dresser, trying to get him to go deeper.  “We need lubrication,” he said.  He
needed
to keep doing what he was doing.  I was almost there.

“Gun oil,” I panted.

“It’s toxic.”

For some reason, the rest of the contents of Frank’s duffel bag escaped me, and my next suggestion came as a moan I didn’t think I was capable of.  And all over Frank’s shirt.

“You are brilliant,” he said, and before I could ask for clarification, before I could even register that I wasn’t hearing Mark in my head, calling me stupid for making a mess with bodily fluids, Frank was rubbing my cock, wiping my come off of me, and onto him.

I raised my mouth to his as he gently pushed his cock inside of me.  I trusted him so completely then that I wasn’t scared of it hurting.  And it didn’t hurt, except where my spine was rocking back and forth over the hard wood, or where my feet were forced so close to my face that my shoelace kept hitting Frank in the eye.  That empty place inside of me was gone.  I was whole.

If I hadn’t been in love with him before, I was now.  Each thrust was like waking up, everything beautiful and bright.

Frank came in me just as I was starting to get hard again.  I felt like a new man, seeing his face, the release of tension he’d been carrying for years.  And I didn’t feel vulnerable like I had with Mark, fragile and weak and broken.  I felt strong, my fingers in his hair while he panted, his cheek against mine, his weight on top of me, making me warm and safe.

He said something in French, and I could feel him smile, then he turned to me, and there it was, his adoration for me unimagined, that brief look I’d seen before losing consciousness.  Love at first sight.

“Was that all right?” he asked, and all the helplessness I’d ever seen in him, that distant expression when he was making us disappear, or when I’d called him sick in the head, none of it compared to how exposed he was to me now.  It wouldn’t have taken a month of assassin training to kill him.  I could’ve done it with one word.

I lightly touched his face.  It was rough under my hand, a five o’clock shadow at noon.  “That was perfect.”

Frank laughed nervously, tension on its way back.  And not the good kind of tension, either.  I gripped the back of his neck and forced him to kiss me again.  “What did you say?  In French?”

He caressed my hair, focusing on my eyes like I was all he saw.  It made me shudder, raising goosebumps across my entire body.  “Today I am truly alive.”

“You’re alive every day,” I said, and for just a second he was gone, far away from me where I could never follow.  “Frank, what I said, I didn’t mean it.  I swear.  You just, sometimes it’s like you’re in this dark place, and it scares me.  Because I care about you.”  Fuck it.  “Because I…
love
you.”

He smiled again, then winced.  “You broke my fucking nose.”

“Do you want me to get you some ice?”

“No,” he said, delicately wiping some blood off my mouth.  “Don’t go anywhere.”

“There was something between us from the very beginning, wasn’t there?”

Frank sighed contentedly.  “I didn’t think you remembered.”  Then he laughed.  “You were so adorable, holding your hand up like that.  I’ve never seen anyone strategically faint.”

“I did
not
strategically faint,” I scoffed, but I had to laugh too.  He’d been mine the whole time, and I didn’t even know it.  “You looked so fucking sexy when you opened that door, all pissed off and disheveled.  Did you drop me?”

“No, I didn’t drop you,” he said.  “I hadn’t even realized you were hurt.  I just…I saw your eyes and I was gone.  I thought you must be the angel of death, come to take me home.”

“Do you want to die?” I asked, terrified that he’d say yes.

“For you? 
With
you?  Willingly.  Otherwise, no.  Not anymore.”

“But you did once?”

“That dark place that scares you, it’s just a place, V.  But yes, there was a time.”

“After your mom died?”

“I’ll tell you a story,” he said, and he sat up, his shirt streaked with drying come, his pants unbuttoned but still basically on, revealing only a fraction of the size I’d felt inside of me, and beautiful dark pubic hair, glistening with sweat.

I kicked off my remaining shoe, bouncing it on our broken TV, and letting my pants fall over the top of it like a funeral shroud.  Frank put his arm around me, pulling me close to him.  It took everything I had not to fondle him while we were having a serious conversation.