Growing and Kissing (30 page)

“Sign it,” he told me, pushing it and a pen across the desk.

With shaking hands, I started to flip through the pages.

“Fucking sign it,” he said victoriously. “Or get out.”

He knew I had no choice, no matter what it said. A few phrases leapt out at me from the densely-printed text.

...provision of modeling services...

...understand that recordings will be adult in nature…

...including open leg, toys, male/female, gang—

I stopped reading.

She was my sister. What else could I do?

I neatly signed my name, just below where it said that the contract would run for two years.

Murray whipped it out of my hand and threw it into a drawer, then opened up his safe and took out ten thousand: in hundred-dollar bills, it looked like a pathetically small stack, given what I’d just signed away. He seemed to delight in handing it to me, wrapping my fingers around the bills. “Come back here tomorrow,” he told me. “I’ll take you to meet some people. I think we can set you up with your first performance right away.”

I stumbled towards the door on legs that felt waxy. I could feel a tug in my guts—it was as if I was leaving a part of me there in Murray’s office, locked away in his desk drawer, and I’d never be whole again.

“Get your hair done,” Murray told me as I opened the door. “Nails, too, and make-up.”

I paused on the threshold. “What should I wear?” I croaked.

The two heavies in the lobby heard that and laughed. Behind me, Murray laughed too. “Whatever the fuck you want,” he told me. “Thirty seconds in, those guys will have you naked anyway.”

I tried to stalk through the lobby, to not let their leers and laughter bother me, but whatever pride and confidence I’d built up over the last five months had just been stripped away. I’d gone from
civilian
to
criminal
and now I’d changed again. Now I was
meat.

Back in my car, I took some deep breaths and forced down the tears that threatened to spill out. Then I drove straight to Mrs. Baker’s place and handed over the ten thousand dollars

There. Now it was done, and it couldn’t be undone. But I still didn’t want Sean to know. We had too much to do and no time to argue. I forced my face into a mask and drove to meet him.

One thing was for sure: after the things Murray would make me do, Sean wouldn’t want me anymore. No one would want me. Just as things were beginning to work out between us, I’d wrecked them for good.

Sean

We had less than ten hours before the realtor came around to inspect the house. But it’s amazing how fast you can move, given the right motivation.

I hired a truck, backed it up to the garage and we started loading plants. There were two hundred to move and it had to be done carefully, without damaging them. I provided the brute force, lifting and carrying the pots, while Louise knelt in the back of the truck arranging them and packing them in tightly so they didn’t move around. I could tell something was bothering her—she’d been almost silent, ever since she’d called me to tell me she’d found a place. But she kept telling me she was fine and I knew better than to push...for now. As soon as we got this done, I needed to find out what the hell was going on.

The tables had to be disassembled and packed, too, and the lights. All of the wiring that controlled them and the maze of pipes Louise had set up to drip-feed water to the plants. The monitoring sensors. The mattress. The horizon started to lighten and we tried to go faster, with me carrying bigger and bigger loads and Louise frantically trying to cram stuff into the truck. By the time we reached the bags of fertilizer in the garage, I was literally throwing them up to her and she was stuffing them into any available space.

We drove to the new place...but, as we arrived, I slowed to a stop in the street outside. “
Here?”
I asked, looking at the broken windows and holes in the roof. “Are you serious?”

“We’re growing in it,” she told me, repeating what I’d told her five months ago. “Not living in it.”

We parked the truck but didn’t unload it, yet. There was one more thing we had to do.

Back at the grow house, dawn was creeping quickly across the sky. Inside, I started carefully pouring gasoline in trails from room to room.

“You sure we have to do this?” Louise asked nervously, curling her hair around her finger. “There’s no other way?”

“However much we try to clean it up, we’ll leave a trace,” I told her. “Bits of leaf between the floorboards. Soil ground into the carpets. They’ll know we were growing here. Hell, they’ll know from the smell. This way, we get rid of everything.” I pulled out a box of matches. “Get ready to move,” I told her.

“Wait!”

I stopped.

She walked up beside me and held out her hand for the matches. “You’ve destroyed enough,” she said quietly. “It’s time for me to take some of this on.”

Just when I thought she was done surprising me, she found a new way.

I handed over the matches. She lit one and tossed it. There was a soft little
wumph
as the gasoline caught and then a wall of heat hit us as the flames rushed outward.

We backed outside and hid across the street. We waited until we were sure the house was unsaveable, then called the fire department. Then we started banging on doors, making sure all the neighbors were out. The houses were spaced far enough apart that I was sure the fire wouldn’t spread, but we weren’t taking any chances.

When the fire service arrived, I told them a story about knocking over a can of gasoline in the garage and a lit cigarette. As I’d expected, once they’d triple-checked that there was no one inside, they didn’t risk sending in guys just to save a house that was clearly finished anyway. They damped down the flames from the outside as best they could but, by the time the realtor rolled up to inspect the place, it was a smoking pile of blackened wood.

“I can’t believe I just burned down a house,” Louise whispered.

“Don’t feel too bad. They were going to knock it down and sell the land anyway,” I told her.

As soon as we’d answered everyone’s questions, we headed over to the mansion. When I saw the interior for the first time, I dropped the fertilizer I was carrying.

“What do you think?” she asked nervously.

“It’s very...you,” I said slowly. “Especially the tree.”

She bit her lip. “Did I screw up?”

I grabbed her, picked her up and pulled her to my chest. After all the stress of the night, I even let myself laugh. “No! It’s great.” I shook my head, looking around. “Incredible.”

She nodded, relieved...but she still seemed too tightly wound, considering what we’d just pulled off. “Louise…”

She immediately hurried out to the truck. “Come on! We’ve got to get the plants back under the lights.”

I sighed and followed her. It took us most of the morning to get all the tables set up in the undamaged rooms and rig up the lights and watering systems. I carried the mattress upstairs—I figured we might as well use it, now we
had
an upstairs—while Louise set up the monitoring sensors. When we were all done, I stood with her in the kitchen and looked at our relocated jungle.

“We did it,” she said, letting out a long sigh. But her face didn’t show any relief.

And that’s when, finally, I figured it out.

“Louise,” I said, barely wanting to form the words, “how did you pay for this place?”

She raised huge, scared eyes towards me.

“Oh Jesus,” I breathed.

“I didn’t have a choice!” she snapped, her fear coming out as anger. But her eyes were filling with tears. “We didn’t have any time left and I thought—I thought that if I told you, you’d talk me out of it and then we wouldn’t be able to afford a place and then...we’d have to abandon the whole thing and you’d walk away!”

I let out a long, slow breath, trying to control my rage. I took her by the shoulders and pushed her up against the nearest wall. “Haven’t you fuckin’ worked it out yet? I’m not going to walk away! Not from you!”

She sniffed and nodded and then I was covering her lips with mine, letting her know that I was there for keeps. I tasted salty tears but I kissed them away and went on kissing, wrapping my arms around her waist and holding her tight until she finally relaxed against me.

I pulled her in tighter and kissed her neck, then the top of her head. “No more keeping shit from me,” I growled. She nodded...but I knew that it was going to swing both ways: if I wanted her to be honest with me, I was going to be honest with her about my past.

One problem at a time.

I gave her one last squeeze and then pulled her towards my car. “Come on,” I told her. “We’re going to see Murray.”

Louise

When we arrived, Sean took his hammer and told me to wait in the car. But I crept up the stairs behind him and waited outside Murray’s office, ears straining. I had to know what was going on. What if Murray’s heavies had guns? This wasn’t like smashing up a dealer’s operation or a grow house: sleazy as it was, Murray’s business was at least partially within the law. He could opt to call the cops.

I heard the heavies get to their feet. “Unless you’re here with the redhead, O’Harra, fuck off.”

I didn’t have to see their leering grins—I could hear it in their voices. “Murray said we could hang around on set. I’m looking forward to seeing her get stuffed. Maybe they’ll even need us to help, if they run out of cocks.”

Sean’s heavy footsteps. Then a choking noise and the sound of something heavy hitting the wall. I peeked around the door frame.

Sean had pinned the two men against the wall, the handle of his sledgehammer across both their throats. Their toes just barely touched the ground. “You ever talk about her like that again,” he said, “and I’ll knock your fuckin’ heads off.”

The men gurgled and choked, their faces turning blue. One of them tried to reach under his jacket. Sean kneed him in the groin.

When he finally released them, both of them fell to their knees, holding their throats. Sean snaked his hands under their jackets and my stomach tightened when he pulled out two guns. He tossed them on the floor and then swung the hammer down on both of them, reducing them to twisted lumps of metal and leaving a dent in the floor.

I pulled back behind the door frame so that he didn’t see me. The next thing I heard was the crash as he opened Murray’s door—with his foot or the hammer, I couldn’t see.

“That contract is legal,” I heard Murray say. “It’s fucking legal, O’Harra. You can smash all you like but she’d better come here, today, ready to meet her new boyfriends, or she owes me ten thousand.”

There was a cracking, splintering sound and I guessed that Sean had just brought the hammer down on Murray’s desk. “It’s not about the fucking contract!” he yelled. There was rage in his voice like I’d never heard. A metallic bang echoed through the building—he must have slammed the hammer into Murray’s safe. “It’s about her! She’s not one of your girls!” A hard thump and the crunch of plaster—I imagined him burying the hammer in the wall, right next to Murray’s head. “She’s better than that! Better than all of us!”