Dark Corners - Twelve Tales of Terror (13 page)

“
Let
me take you away from all of this. Let me give you the life you
deserve.”

“
Away
from what?” she said, feeling the heaviness of her own voice.
The world felt distant—faraway. All she could think about were
his eyes, and how easy it was to lose herself in them.

“
I
can give you everything, Tina. More than you could ever imagine. All
you need to do is give yourself to me.”

She could barely breathe and her pulse pounded thickly
in her temples. The chatter of the restaurant seemed muted and
distant, and she knew then that she would do anything he asked her
without question. She recalled her dream of making love to him and
stirred in her seat.

I’m
yours
, she wanted
to say, but the words wouldn’t come, and she just looked at him
in breathless need.

He smiled at her, acknowledging the unspoken agreement.

“
Then
we should go.”

“
Where?”

“
To
my apartment. Come.”

Heart racing, she allowed him to lead her out and into
his car, which was waiting with the engine running, the driver
holding the door open for them. It was as if he knew the exact time
they were leaving. They climbed into the car, and immediately fell
upon each other.

When she awoke in the morning, she could barely move.
Being with Monde had been very different from her dreams, and instead
of the gentle lovemaking she had imagined, it had been a frenzied and
violent affair. She had been afraid at first as he ravaged her, his
hands clutched around her throat as he glared at her with a
terrifying intensity. Unable to breathe, she had feared for her life,
but it only served to intensify the pleasure, and six more times that
night they had engaged in their violent coupling. Scratching, biting,
and tearing at each other in an animalistic savagery she didn’t
even know she was capable of.

She stirred under the tangled mass of sheets on the huge
bed and looked around, her bruised and beaten body throbbing in
agony. She looked at her skinny reflection in the mirrored ceiling
and winced at the ugly, purple finger marks around her throat, the
bite marks on her breasts and stomach. Monde was nowhere to be seen.
She climbed gingerly from the bed, hissing in pain, but somehow
completely satisfied. This was her first real look at his apartment,
and she thought it suited him well. It was on the seventeenth floor
of a large, recently constructed apartment building deep within the
city. The building was modern—all steel and glass, with deep
red, gold-trimmed carpets in the hallways. Monde’s apartment
was the penthouse of the building, and was sparsely but tastefully
decorated with clean lines and plush furnishings. Apart from the
bathroom, which housed a huge and ornate marble bathtub, it was a
large open space with expensive white carpets and lavish gold
furnishings.

She walked to the window and looked out over the city,
which looked beautiful in the blue-purple hues of the early morning.
It was wonderfully picturesque, and for the first time in a while,
she felt at peace. She closed her eyes and leaned her forehead on the
cool glass of the window.

The harsh vibration of her mobile phone broke the
silence, demanding her attention. She couldn’t locate it at
first, eventually finding it in the pocket of her jeans, which were
still discarded on the floor. She retrieved the phone and answered
the call, expecting it to be Lexi.

“
Hello?”

“
Tina,
it’s me.”

Shit.

It was Paul. She cursed herself for not checking the
caller ID before she answered.

“
I
told you not to call me anymore,” she said irritably.

“
I
heard about the fire. I just wanted make sure you were ok,”
came the slightly hurt reply.

“
Look,
I already told you to leave me alone. Stop calling me.”

“
I
want us to be together again. We were good together.”

Monde walked into the room from the bathroom. He was
wearing a towel around his waist, and the sight of him standing there
dripping wet made Tina ache with desire, despite her ravaged body. He
looked at her as she spoke, but said nothing, sitting down on the bed
and watching the conversation unfold. She turned to the window, but
could still feel his dark eyes crawling over her.

“
No,
Paul, we weren’t... Jesus, just stop bothering me. I’m
trying to get on with my life.”

Tina felt awkward conducting this conversation with her
ex-boyfriend in front of Monde. Paul had that sarcastic, mocking tone
in his voice that she hated.

“
Look,
you can’t blame everything on me all the time, Tina. You had a
part to play too.”

“
Fuck
you. I’m not going through this again. Just stop calling me.”

“
You
don’t control me, you little bitch. I’ll call if I want
to, you got that?”

She
was upset now and old memories began to surface, bringing fear with
them. She had learned the hard way that Paul had a temper. At first
he blamed the drink for the times he had beaten her, but over time,
he stopped trying to make excuses all together, only grunting reasons
for his actions between gritted teeth. She remembered them all. She
looked at another man. She was flirting with his friends. She made
him do it—that was his favourite. He had introduced her to the
drugs, and because she was afraid to say no, she had started to use
with him—anything to keep his fists from connecting with her
body. The end came when he tried to force her into prostitution. He
had called it something else, accompaniment…no—
escorting
.
That’s what he had called it. He said he had good friends who
would look after her, and they would make a ton of money. She told
him she wouldn’t do it. His response was to punch her in the
face and throw her down the steps of his apartment, where she had
been living at the time.

All of this was conducted in secrecy of course. Lexi had
told Tina she was lucky to have found such a good-looking guy, and
wanted to know if he had a brother to introduce her to. That was the
problem: in public he treated her well. Hugging her close, holding
her hand, but she could always sense it. The anger simmering below
the surface. Fearing that the next beating might be the one she
wouldn’t wake up from, and desperate to avoid becoming a whore
to his circle of friends, she finally plucked up the courage to leave
him, doing it whilst he was out at work. She was terrified that he
would find her, so she left a letter warning that if he didn’t
leave her alone she would go to the police about some of his less
than savoury dealings. That kept him at bay for a while, but recently
he had started calling her, usually when he was drunk, which
frightened her even though he didn’t know where she lived. If
she had been alone when he called, she would have been terrified to
stand up to him, but she felt strong with Monde in the room with her.

“
Look,
Paul, I won’t let you do this to me again. Just leave me
alone.” Her voice was shaking, but she managed to blink back
the tears.

“
You
better watch yourself, Tina. You had better remember who you are
fuckin’ talking to, you little cunt. I might just drop by your
place one day and remind you,” he spat down the line before
hanging up.

“
Problem?”
Monde asked her, watching carefully.

Apart
from being absolutely fucking terrified of my psycho ex? Nope, not a
thing.

“
No,
no problem,” she said as she tried to still her heart, which
pounded in her chest.

Something in his expression changed. Maybe it was no
more than a trick of the light, but his eyes seemed to darken.

“
Tina,
I won’t let anyone hurt you ever again. You have my word.”

For
the next few weeks, the routine was the same. Tina and Monde’s
nights would consist of several bouts of frenzied and increasingly
violent sex, then in the mornings Monde would dress and leave to
conduct his
business
.
She had asked him what he did for a living, but he would always evade
the question, telling her simply that he owned an import-export
business and worked long hours in the city. Her obsession with Monde
grew, and the less he revealed about himself, the more she wanted to
know. He had given her a key to his apartment and a credit card, and
spoiled her with expensive gifts and clothes.

Also curious was her drug addiction. She no longer
craved the heroin that had been such a huge part of her life in
recent months, and as she spent more time in Monde’s world, she
found she no longer desired it at all. Unlike the last time she tried
to clean up, there was no painful drying out or sickness whilst the
drug flushed itself out of her system. This time, stopping was as
easy as breathing. Her need for the drug had been replaced by her
obsession with Monde. It was one addiction in place of another. He
had become her life, her existence. She forgot the Tina of old and
devoted everything to him.

It was a Friday afternoon when she received the
voicemail from Lexi. The usual bubbly exuberance in her voice was
absent, replaced by a tension Tina had never heard before. The
message asked Tina to call her back to arrange to meet up, as there
was something they needed to talk about. The thought of being away
from Monde filled her with dread. She begrudgingly called back and
arranged to meet her at the same bar as before.

It was the first time since their last meeting here that
Tina had seen Lexi. In what seemed to Tina as something of an irony,
there had been a role reversal; now it was Lexi who appeared
distracted and carrying a world of worry on her shoulders. In
contrast Tina felt good, ecstatic with happiness even despite the
painful bites and bruises, which she wore like trophies.

“
Hey
there, stranger.”

Tina detected a bitter tone to Lexi’s voice, which
she tried her best to ignore. She was already missing Monde and
wanted to get back to him.

“
Hey,
Lexi. How are you? You sounded strange on the phone. Is everything
alright?”

Lexi swallowed, as if trying to select the right words.
Tina noticed that her friend couldn’t look her in the eye.

“
Look,
Tina, I need to tell you something, and I don’t think you’re
going to like it.”

Her stomach vaulted, but she masked it by sipping her
drink.

“
What
is it?”

“
It’s
about that guy you’re seeing.”

Rage. Jealousy. Panic.

She smiled and sipped her drink. “What about him?”

“
He’s
not what you think, Tina. He’s bad. Really bad.”

“
How
would you know?”

Tina
had the impression there was some kind of bombshell coming—a
revelation, a plot twist.
Remain
in your seats, folks. Remain calm.

“
He…
He went to see Paul.”

“
Don’t
be ridiculous. He doesn’t even know Paul,” she argued,
but knew inside that it didn’t matter. He’d overheard
their argument on the phone and had gone to see Paul. She knew it as
well as she knew that the sky was blue and that she hated the taste
of mushrooms. Monde
had
said he wouldn’t let anyone hurt her again.

“
Tina,
you know me. You know I wouldn’t just say shit for the sake of
it. But this guy is bad.”

“
How
can you know? You haven’t even met him,” she said between
gritted teeth. She knew it was stupid, but she was angry and jealous.
Even though she was doing a fine job of burying her head in the sand,
somewhere deep down she knew there was more to Monde than perhaps she
would ever know.

“
I
know because I was there with Paul when your man knocked on the
door.”

There it was. She imagined it unfolding like a play:
plot twist enters stage left.

“
What
do you mean
you were
there
?” Tina
asked sharply.

But Lexi didn’t need to answer. The look on her
face said it for her.

“
You
were sleeping with him?”

“
I
know I shouldn’t have, especially after what he did to you, but
you know me—I’m attracted to men like him. You know…
I always go for the wrong kind of guy.”

“
Wrong
doesn’t begin to cover it. You don’t even know half of
the things that bastard did to me. You think you know everything,
Lexi, but you don’t. How could you do this? Why him?”