The Comfort of Black (16 page)

Hannah grazed her thumb along the glass tumbler containing two fingers of Maker's Mark and two ice cubes. The glaze of the liquid was a smooth caramel, and she craved it like a child lured by a candied apple gleaming in a polished-glass display.

The bourbon slid down her throat in one gulp, leaving behind a pleasurable burn. She put the glass down and poured some more.

“You might want to slow down,” Black said. “You hardly had anything to eat today.”

“I might be small, but I can hold my liquor.”

“I don't doubt it.”

Black lifted his glass, emptied it, then also poured more.

Hannah straightened in her chair. The sunlight streaming through the kitchen window warmed her neck, while the bourbon warmed everything below it. “I'm going to get you drunk enough to tell me your real name,” she said.

“You'd have to get me
really
drunk. And then I'd have to kill you.”

Hannah sipped this time. “Well, that would save you the headache of what to do with me otherwise.”

Black stood and walked over to the plastic bags on the counter. He pulled out a box of hair coloring. “Hope you like black, because that provides the greatest contrast to what it is now. It would be helpful, but unless you can do it yourself there's only me to do it, and you definitely don't want that.”

Hannah had never dyed her hair in her life. The idea of changing it to black made her nervous but also excited. A chance to hide in the shadows.

“What else did you buy?”

“Clothes, mostly. Toiletries. Some food. Another cell phone. A cheap tablet, so you can at least go online if you need to. A few other things. Most of the things I need to help you are here in the house.”

“Things like what?”

Black spoke as he piled the contents of the bags on the granite countertop. “Tools for making new IDs for you. The more difficult work needs to be done on the phone and online. If you're going to disappear, it's not just a matter of changing your name and hoping for the best. We need to change your past. Erase old footprints. Create false trails.”

“Is that what you did for yourself? Create false trails?”

“I continue to do it.” Black walked over to her, and she swiveled her tall counter stool to face him. She had the sudden impulse to simply open her legs and let him walk into her, his body pressing against hers. She could reach around his waist and pull him harder against her stomach, her thighs. She hadn't felt that way about another man in a long time.

“Listen,” he said. He stopped short of where her knees would touch his legs. He placed a hand on the counter and leaned in close to her. “If you disappear, if you
really
disappear, it will be your full-time job. It's impossible to disappear completely, and there will always be traces of you out there, popping up from time to time. Pings of your existence. If someone is looking for you, and if they know what they're doing and have the patience
to keep at it, they
will
find you the moment you let your guard down. And it doesn't take much.” He looked around the kitchen. “This house? I've been here eight months. It's the longest I've ever stayed anywhere, and I won't be here much longer. So don't be fooled. If you want to erase your existence, you are going to have to work really hard at it.”

“But I don't want to disappear. Not…not like you have. I have a whole life that I've built. A
good
life. I mean, aside from the obvious situation.”

“Nobody wants to. Who would? It's a matter of the other options available. I don't know if you need to disappear forever, but if you go back now, the consequences would be severe.”

Disappear forever
. Hannah struggled to grasp the concept. She would never see her sister again, or her beautiful nephews, one of whom would never remember her and the other having perhaps a vague recollection of
Auntie Hannie
. And what about Zoo? Would she not even be able to take her dog with her? How would she even live, and where? And what about all the money, all the wealth she and Dallin had built together? Would she just be forfeiting that, leaving it all to him?

Then there were her friends, those daily points of human contact that gave every person's life a routine, a structure. Though she had many social connections, she had to admit most of her friends were little more than acquaintances. Many of them she knew more about from their Facebook posts rather than actual conversations with them.

A sudden realization struck her, one both enlightening and depressing.
If I disappeared, how much am I really leaving behind? How many people and things in my current life do I actually, truly care about?

It was too heavy a thought to ponder, so she dropped it. “The news,” she said.

“What?” asked Black.

“Can we turn on the news? I want to see what they're saying
about the shooting this morning. Shouldn't we see if my name is being mentioned at all?”

“If you want,” was his response, seemingly indifferent to the idea. To Hannah, it seemed like a natural thing to do. Scour the news, the Internet, see what's being reported. So much had happened. Something had to be on the news, hadn't it?

He handed her the remote control, and she aimed it at the flat screen mounted to the wall.

“I'm making lunch,” Black said. “Sandwiches okay?”

Hannah would have been happy just drinking her lunch, but she knew she had to eat something. “Perfect.” Hannah first found CNN Headline News and lingered there for a few minutes, expecting to see something about the shooting earlier this morning.
Black shot a cop—real or not—in downtown Seattle. That must be a big story
. But the headlines of the day were political ones, which meant it was a pretty slow news day.

Hannah turned to the local networks and found soap operas instead of local news. She checked the time on the TV receiver: just after one in the afternoon. There would be no local news airing at this time, unless the networks broke into the regular programming with a big story. But nothing interrupted the fake tears and the dramatic music of the soaps today.

Hannah turned the TV off and took another sip of her bourbon, which was now starting to taste more like an enemy than a friend. How quickly it turned, she thought. How difficult to maintain that perfect balance of pleasant numbness. She rinsed out her glass and replaced the liquor with tap water, gulped a full glass down, then filled it up again.

Black handed her a plate containing a very simple-looking sandwich and apple slices. “Believe or not, I'm a good cook. Don't let this jade your opinion, but it should do for now.”

“This looks great,” she said. “But if you need to prove yourself, you can cook me a nice dinner.” Hannah consumed her meal faster than he did, caring not at all if she appeared like a feral
cat greedily devouring its prey. He wasn't even halfway done when she looked up from her empty plate.

“Want more?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I want to get online. Check the news.”

“Not now,” he said.

“There's got to be something about me. About all of this.”

“What are you hoping to find?”

“Anything to give me a clue what to do next. I mean, Justine said Dallin was talking about missing money that I took. I want to know what that's about.”

“Later,” Black said.

Hannah felt the angry little girl in her well up. “Why?”

“Because you're not going anywhere for a few days. You're safe here, and feasting on a news cycle will overload your brain, which is close to that point anyway. I can see it. You need to sleep, even for just a few hours.”

“I don't
want
to sleep.”

“You've had one adrenaline spike after another. You need your brain to relax.”

“I slept in the car.”

“But not enough. There's a guest bedroom you can crash in. Don't worry, I won't let you sleep all day. We have work to do.”

Hannah didn't want to sleep but knew he was right. She spun around and started going through the bags from the store. She found the hair dye and pulled it out.

“Show me where the guest bedroom is,” she said. “I'll dye my hair and then rest a bit.”

Black walked her down the hallway and around a corner.

“Staying hidden must be exhausting,” she said.

“It is. But it's better than being dead or in prison. Besides, you learn to adapt. Your body adjusts. It becomes normal.”

Hannah never felt she knew a normal life, so she had a hard time thinking anything would become that way in the future. Her gaze followed him until he disappeared around the corner. Then
Hannah shut the bedroom door and turned the small lock that, she knew, wouldn't stop anyone who really wanted to get in.

She woke in a dark room; sunlight no longer spilled through the edges of cellular shades as it had when she'd first pulled the covers over her. After dying her hair she slept deeply, her wet hair still wrapped in a towel, and after awakening she opened her eyes, reached up and felt the thick, damp cotton. Moments passed before she remembered where she was, and then a few more seconds before recalling her hair was no longer blond but raven black. She walked to the bathroom where the light was on as she had left it, the sink splattered in streaks of black, watery dye. Hannah removed the towel, unwrapping it with hesitation, as if this was the first unveiling of a face after reconstructive surgery.

Her newly black hair fell around her face and shoulders in wet, clumped strands. It was such an unnatural color for her, as if someone had cut the mane off a bay horse and fashioned a wig from it. The color changed her. Such an easy thing, to dye one's hair. But she seemed truly another person in the mirror, and as she stared at herself she wondered if it was merely the hair that made her different.

Her eyes seemed lighter in contrast to her hair, her face more pale. She reached up, and in the mirror saw her fingers stroke an outline of her cheeks, one of which bore the fresh cut from what seemed like a lifetime ago. She leaned in and looked more closely in the mirror, but that didn't answer the question of what it was that suddenly seemed both so different and familiar to her. She stepped back a few feet and saw herself from a distance, and then it hit her.

I look just like him
.

The truth was, Hannah and Billy shared no physical traits. Justine was the one who had inherited her father's washed-blue eyes and pointed jawline. But in the mirror Hannah saw the beauty on the outside and the rage within, just like with Billy. Despite the ugliness of his character, Billy had been a strikingly handsome man, and as a young man probably could have been a model if he'd had the chance. Wiry and muscular, with smooth, tanned skin and casual facial stubble. He hadn't even had to work at it. He had just woken every morning, usually hungover or even still drunk, yet he was striking in his looks. Which is why his rage was all the more horrifying. Rage from something appealing is always jarring, like a fluffy housecat ripping apart a bird in the backyard, the cat's normally cottony white facial fur matted in drying blood and tufts of feather.

But she
wasn't
her father, and if she was going to deal with whatever was happening to her life, she couldn't keep hiding behind the blame and hatred so easily directed at Billy. Her life was hers alone, and it was time for Hannah to regain some control of it.

Hannah left the bathroom and unlocked her bedroom door. The house was lit against the night. She had no idea if it was seven at night or three in the morning. Then she saw Black.

He was sitting on a stool leaning over the angled top of a desk. An architect's desk, she thought. A light attached to the back of the desk arced up and over the top, bent to shine a focused beam directly on the part of the surface where he was working. In his left hand he held an X-Acto blade, working it delicately over something pressed against the top of the desk.

He heard her and turned.

“Wow,” he said.

“Wow?”

“Your hair.”

She reached up and touched it.

“It looks great,” he said.

She took another step forward. “I've never dyed it before.”

“It suits you. I don't think you even need to cut it. Add some glasses and you'll be a new person.”

She moved closer, feeling energy well up within her, spreading from her core, through her chest, pulsing outwards, making her fingertips flush with the heat of her blood.

“I'm working on some documents for you,” he continued. He nodded to the top of the desk. “Won't be done tonight, but tomorrow for sure. Then we need to go over several more things before finding you a place to start. When I say start, what I'm referring to is—”

He stopped talking when she walked close enough to be within a foot of him. He looked up at her, his eyes almost level with hers, as she reached and cupped the sides of his face with her hands.

Black said nothing.

Hannah didn't hesitate. She leaned in and kissed him, her eyes closing a second before feeling his lips on hers. Just like that. Over eight years since another man's lips had touched hers, and Hannah wore Black's taste as she did her black hair. New. Different.
Necessary
. He tasted almost oaky, perhaps the lingering bourbon on his lips, the taste of something aged just the right amount of time. She felt her nipples harden under her shirt as she held his face tighter in her hands. Then she pulled back and looked at him.

“I need this right now,” she said.

She expected him to say something. Agreement.
I want you, too
. Protest.
Hannah, I can't. I don't sleep with clients
. Reason.
Doing this won't get back at your husband. Your judgment is clouded
. She expected
something
. But Black said nothing, as if he was in perfect sync with her thoughts, as if he knew why she needed to be in control of something right now, even if it was just sex. Or maybe he simply wasn't going to argue with a beautiful woman pressing her mouth against his.