The Blood That Bonds (3 page)

“
You’d do well not to
mention that, or I could see some severe problems developing in
your future,” he said, dropping the street dialect. This was a
warning; Darren never adopted this manner of speaking with a girl
unless she was perilously close to severe punishment. He’d cut a
finger off the last girl. Cut her finger off and turned her out in
the streets, bleeding and begging, in withdrawal, without a source
of the drug. All alone.

“
I’m sorry. Darren, I’m
sorry!” Weak voice, heart pounding, Two was amazed that she still
had this much capacity for fear in her.

Darren sneered at her and left. As soon as
she heard the door shut, Molly peeked out from the bathroom. Seeing
Darren gone, she moved back into the room.

“
Even if you don’t hurt
yourself, you’re going to make him hurt you sooner or later,” Molly
said, and to this, Two found, she had no reply at all.

* * *

“
You look wicked!” Molly
clapped her hands and grinned. Even Two, preening before the
mirror, had to admit that it was the truth. Her own predilection
for black clothing had made dressing simple. The gold chain had
been a bit harder, but it had been there, shoved into the back of a
drawer. It would probably be broken; Men liked to tear them off in
the heat of passion. But it had been requested, and Two knew Darren
would inspect her before she left.

She was pale, her wavy blonde hair tied back
with a simple piece of black rawhide. Big, green eyes now nearly
luminous against her white face. Her silk blouse was low cut, her
bra pushing her small breasts up and together. Her jeans were
tight, emphasizing her legs, which Two had always thought the best
part of her. She couldn’t claim they were long; she stood at just
over 5’4”, but they were smooth and supple, shapely, the muscles
not yet ravaged or wasted away by the drugs.

She had no black lipstick. Darren’s answer
to this made her grimace. “Borrow some from Lisa.”

Molly arched an eyebrow. “This should be
fun.”

Lisa had attacked Two in the kitchen a week
ago, screaming something about Two’s using ‘her shower.’ Two, who
had no idea that shower territoriality was even of any
significance, had been unprepared. She’d stood up, and Lisa had
shoved her backwards against the table. Two had reacted
instinctively, swinging back around and giving a shove of her
own.

Lisa had fallen backwards, and the
altercation might well have ended there. Two could see from the
other girl’s eyes that she was not accustomed to anyone putting up
an actual fight. Lisa was used to simply commanding and being
obeyed.

Two had thought then of an earlier incident:
Out of sheer spite, Lisa had forced Molly to turn over all of her
money, strip naked, and shove the clothes down one of the
building’s laundry chutes. She’d then stood at the top of the
stairs and watched as Molly climbed down into the dank,
spider-infested basement to retrieve them. The incident had given
Molly nightmares for two weeks.

A circle of girls had formed, though, and
before either Two or Lisa could walk away, they were shoved right
back into the center. Lisa, deriving confidence from the crowd,
began shrieking again.

Looking incredulous, Two drew back her fist
and punched Lisa in the mouth.

All of the fight went out of the other girl
in an instant, and she crumpled to her knees. The blow had cost Two
the skin on her knuckles, but it had cost Lisa two teeth.

Darren had arrived to prevent any further
damage from being done, though Two had no intention of pressing the
attack. He’d grabbed Two, dragged her to his office, and slapped
her twice across the face before grabbing her by the throat and
forcing her up against the wall.

“
Bitch had it coming,” He’d
conceded, “But now she can’t work and she looks like a damn
hillbilly. Who gonna pay for the dentist? Not me.”

“
I’ll work extra,” Two had
gasped, barely able to breathe, and Darren had seemed to find this
amenable. He had let her go, told her to get the fuck out, gone
back to whatever it was he did during the day. Gasping and choking,
Two had made her way out, and had taken multiple clients a night
for the next three weeks.

Two and Lisa had not spoken since, but now
Two had no choice. She took a deep breath, and knocked on the door.
No response. Two knocked again, waited, grew angry. She hammered on
the door. “Lisa! I know you’re in there. Open the fucking door or
the next time I see you, I swear to God I’m going to make a
necklace out of the rest of your teeth.”

Click of a lock being undone. The doorknob
twisted in Two’s hand and she let it go. Lisa’s puffy, petulant
face stared out at her.

“
I was sleeping,” she said,
not a trace of it in her voice. The dentist Darren had hired to fix
her teeth had been neither sober nor careful, and there was a
large, dark space between the girl’s two false front
teeth.

“
I don’t care. Darren says
you have to lend me your black lipstick.”

Two had taken half a step into the room. Now
she managed to move backward in time to keep the speeding door from
hitting her in the face. She looked over at Molly, who was standing
in their own doorway. Molly rolled her eyes. Two turned back,
preparing to kick the door in, when it opened. Lisa hurled the
lipstick at Two, who missed the catch. She heard it clatter against
the wall behind her.

“
Don’t ever fucking ask me
for anything again, cunt!” Lisa slammed the door closed
again.

“
You know, you really
should get that gap in your teeth fixed, hon. Your S’s whistle!”
Two called, her voice all sunshine and sugar. Behind her, Molly
burst into bright peals of laughter.

* * *

Her friends knew very little of Two’s new
life. Rhes, Sarah, Sid; light that she used sometimes to drive away
the dark. Darren, the epitome of kindness, gave each girl two days
of the month off. Two’s were the first and third Sunday, and she
typically spent them at Sid’s. She would take the drug early,
letting most of its effects wear off before arriving at the bar.
She didn’t want them to know. She didn’t want anyone to know.

They still suspected. Her visits were too
infrequent, yet too regular, for them to believe that she was “just
busy.” Yet whenever Rhes attempted to learn where she’d been, what
she was doing for money, where the bags under her eyes had come
from, the air went immediately cold. Two’s expression would forbid
further discussion, and Rhes, for all his kindness, could not stand
to hurt. He wouldn’t interrogate her.

Eventually, the questions stopped.

Two felt sure that they knew of her
occupation. She thought that Sarah would have guessed by now, even
if Rhes was busy trying to fool himself. What was the most logical
way for a young girl to survive on the street? Why would she give
no information about it?

She desperately hoped they didn’t yet
suspect the drugs, though she could feel her body beginning to
break down under their onslaught. Of this, far more than giving
strangers the use of her body, Two was ashamed. To be enslaved so
fully by something so darkly and desperately evil. Horror
masquerading as bliss, disease and decay and death hiding behind a
porcelain visage of joy. When the drug ran new through her veins,
Two felt as if all problems had ceased to exist. When it ebbed at
its lowest, Two spent her time staring out of her window at the
cemetery down the block, thinking of death.

Seeing Rhes and Sarah together depressed
her. Seeing Sid, Tina the waitress, Dan the other bouncer, free to
live their lives as they chose, slave only to their own whims and
desires; it was terribly beautiful to Two, and she was beginning to
abhor this beauty. She was beginning to hate those she so
desperately wanted to love. Lately Two had begun skipping even
these visits, choosing instead to spend the day in bliss and
forgetfulness and floating white.

Rhes and Sarah did not let on how much they
knew because they understood how badly it would hurt Two. They were
sure about the profession, had strong suspicions about the drug.
Were it within their means, they would gladly have lifted Two up
and stolen her away from the life she had fallen into, but they
could not. There was no money to support her withdrawal, or enter
her into a clinic, particularly given that such an act would likely
procure wrath from unknown sources.

So they observed, horrified, as Two began to
fall apart in front of them. Her naturally light skin took on a
sickly pallor, bags formed under her eyes, her voice fell to flat
monotone. Worst by far was the expression of complete apathy. Two’s
body moved, her mouth formed sentences, but her eyes were dead.

Sarah wanted to confront her, at least to
hear the truth. This was one of the few areas in which Rhes had
ever denied her. He’d known Two far longer, lived with her,
understood her. She was killing herself, but if they brought it up,
he knew that she would only turn away, descend even further, let
the drugs kill her that much faster. It was better to watch her die
slowly, as they searched and hoped for a solution, than make it
happen all at once. That was his line of thinking.

Two might have thought differently.

* * *

It took Darren a moment to remember to sneer
when Two entered the room, a sure sign that she had impressed him.
Two stood before him, letting him survey her appearance. This was
customary for Darren’s top-tier girls.

“
Not too fuckin’ bad. Lose
the purse.”

Two tilted her head, surprised. Darren was
fond of purses, liked his girls to carry them even if they had
nothing to carry. He said they were classy.

“
Client wants you to leave
it here. That shirt tight enough? It’s starting to get cold out,
and the client wants to
know
it’s getting cold out.”

Two rolled her eyes. “He’ll see. He’ll
know.”

“
Good. Get. Smoke on your
way to the corner, because he doesn’t want to see a cigarette for
the rest of the night.”

“
How does he know
I–”

“
Don’t know, don’t care.
Probably been stalking you. So what?” Darren looked her in the
eyes, a rare occurrence. “Look: You make this guy happy. Price he
paid up front for you don’t even make sense. He goes home
satisfied, I may throw in an extra ration for you.”

Two’s eyes lit up. An extra ration was
Christmas. Her birthday. The return of Jesus Christ himself. She
grinned, turned, and left, tossing her purse into her room as she
went by.

Outside it felt like Autumn: cool and dry.
Dark. It had been a hot September, but edges of winter were lurking
on the wind. The nights would be cold, before long.

Two lit a cigarette and glanced around. A
girl with bright purple hair was leaning into the window of a
police cruiser, smiling and snapping her gum. No trouble there.
Across the street, a man was pretending not to look at the girls
loitering around. Was this her guy? If it was, he was welcome to
stay where he was, looking nervous, for as long as he wanted.

Two was still comfortably held in the
afterglow of her heroin, but this had passed enough for her to feel
a twinge of annoyance. The nervous ones were always a big pain in
the ass. They needed constant reassurance. It was almost like
babysitting, except it paid more, and you skipped right to the part
where the father tries to cop a feel on the ride home.

But no, the guy across the street was
heading toward another girl whose name Two didn’t know, and who
looked nothing like Two. The guy who had contacted Darren had known
exactly who he was looking for. This couldn’t be her man. Her
client.

Darren insisted they call them “clients.”
Never “Johns” or, God forbid, “tricks.” Two supposed he thought
that girls who were forced to behave in a professional manner when
it came to the little things would do so instinctively for the big
things.

Two leaned against a lamp-post, looking down
the street at the glowing pink neon perched in the window of an
adult bookstore, waiting for the night to begin.

* * *

Two dragged at her cigarette, blew smoke out
into the October night. There was no hint of rain in the air, and
barely a cloud in the sky. The moon was a bright sliver, not the
bloody, bloated full October moon that would arrive later in the
month.

Normally Two used this time to prepare,
strengthening herself mentally and emotionally to deal with
whatever lay ahead. Tonight, though … tonight was different. It was
more than the simple promise of an extra ration. In truth, this was
already slipping her mind. Tonight her heart was beating a little
too fast. Her lungs pulled in air differently. The smoke from her
cigarette, which had not bothered her in years, made her cough. She
felt shaky, without shaking. Wound up tight in anticipation of
something, but unable to determine what that something was.

Tonight felt new.

The client, whoever he was, was late. Two
had been standing at her corner for nearly half an hour. Three
cigarettes consumed, she loaded up on nicotine. She guessed it
would do no good, that she’d be dying for one within a few hours,
but the instinct was always to try. It never struck Two as odd that
she was, and had been, as much a slave to these little white sticks
as ever she would be to heroin. Two had not gone for more than a
day without a cigarette since her eleventh birthday. They were as
much a part of her life now as breathing, but they could be easily
bought or stolen, and Two had never wanted for them like she had
for heroin.