Vanquish (27 page)

Had all those men she’d slept with been some kind of coping mechanism for her loneliness? That might’ve been part of it. Like a fourth of it. Yeah, and the other three-fourths of the reason was simply payment for her deliveries. It’d been a fair trade. She hadn’t been using them, right? Her ribs squeezed, and she shoved that thought away.

She passed a tall display cabinet with a glass door, the only one like it in the room. The two dolls inside... What the hell?

A plastic woman sat nude on a chair. She was similar to Amber's height and held a child-sized doll in a red-checkered dress. The woman's brown marbled eyes stared with a glassy, far-away look. Even more eerie was the red line hand-drawn from one glass eye to the pink painted mouth. A scar drawn exactly like the one on his face. She shuddered, gasping, and covered her mouth with her hand.

The dolls in the cabinet were the only two in the garage with hair, the strands intricately woven together in various shades of brown. Why weren't they damaged like the others? Why were they the only ones safely displayed behind glass? What did they mean to him?

They held answers. Shivering curiosity drew her hand to the knob on the glass door.

“Don't touch those.”

His harsh voice made her jump, and she yanked her hand back. Shit. She shook off her nerves and turned to face him. “You collect dolls.”
Hollow-eyed, creepy-ass plastic people.

Perching on a wheeled stool, he rolled toward the table and placed his palms on the surface, staring blankly at the clutter around his hands. “I make them, collect them, and...break them.”

An emotionless response, but layers hummed beneath the words. He leaned back, knees spread, hands folded between his strong thighs. He watched her from beneath dark eyebrows, his full lips relaxed and pouty. He was somewhat childlike, surrounded by dolls, sulking and rolling on the stool. Yet he commanded the room with the intensity of his sullen temperament, all that muscle, and...the stretch of his jeans cupping his cock so erotically.

She jerked her gaze up. The man was fucking sexy as hell, doll fetish notwithstanding. She swallowed and continued her exploration around the perimeter, attempting to make sense of it. As she wandered, she peeked back every now and then, finding him tracking her every movement with hooded eyes.

A weight bench sat at one end, surrounded by a mess of mismatched dumbbells. She hoped to learn a lot more about him than the location of his damned workouts. When she reached the farthest corner, she faced him again. “Why do you break them? You don't sell them?”

His huge hands cradled a small headless body, his thumb moving over a two-inch hole punched through the torso. “I'm more interested in quality control.” He tossed it behind him.

She flinched as the doll skidded across the cement floor. He broke dolls for fun. Her heart crashed into a roaring panic. Had he harmed a real child at some point? Was this his way of dealing with that? Or maybe he had been the child?

Her spine crawled with millions of icy pinpricks. Her feet stuck to the floor, the span of the garage separating her from the darkness surrounding the man she might've gravely misjudged. “Why do the dolls need quality control?” Fear quivered in her voice despite her best attempts to stifle it.

He rose from the stool and walked toward a box of undamaged bodies with a terrifying calmness. Paralyzed, she watched as he yanked out the plastic mold of a baby—its limbs attached—and dropped it on the floor. Then his bare foot came down, smashing the body with one stomp.

She stopped breathing. Was this some kind of reenactment? Horrified, she wanted to look away, but she couldn't. She had to know.

The torso cracked beneath his foot, and the head popped off. Dizziness swarmed her head, sending her ears ringing in a frenzied pulse.

With hands on his hips and his head tipped down, hard eyes rolled up and locked on her. “That's why.”

She wrapped her arms around her waist, her fingers sticky and trembling. Quality control meant he was looking for flaws, right? Was he looking for a doll that could survive a heavy foot? That didn't make any sense. Oh God, she didn't want it to make sense.

Breathing deeply from her diaphragm, she smothered her dread with a strong voice. “I don't understand. Why are you smashing them like that?”

He looked away, his lips in a flat line, seemingly refusing to answer. But he wanted to. She could see it in the rise and fall of his chest and in the shift of his eyes as they studied the collection, searching for the words.

Endless seconds passed, the stillness strangling, before his Adam's apple bobbed and his fingers twitched on his hips. “It was the first and last toy I owned. A goddamned doll.” He laughed nervously, his hand lifting to rub the back of his neck. “I don't even know how I got it. Probably from one of those missionaries who would pop in to deliver food and Jesus pamphlets.”

A clot of emotion gathered in her throat. Something had happened
to
him. She lowered her hands to her shorts, gripping them. “This was when you lived in the
colonia
?”

He nodded and crouched over the broken doll, glaring at it. “I was a nine-year-old boy. What the fuck was I doing with a doll?”

His tone was angry, at odds with the tender way his finger traced the jagged hole in the doll's torso at his feet. He seemed to be lost in memory, his silence hardening the lump she couldn't swallow. She stepped forward, aching to erase the distance, but the jerk of his shoulders halted her approach.

“He was a huge man. My mother was a whore, sold herself for the needle, and he was just some random john, but he was the first one I remember. He fucked her right there in front of me. She was so fucking high I don't think she was conscious.” A tremor shook his body, and he sat back, legs folded against his chest, his arms wrapped around his knees. “And there I was, curled up in the damned corner, hugging that doll, kissing her ratty hair like she was my only friend. Hell, she
was
my only friend.”

He put his hands over his face, and his shoulders hunched like a scared little boy. Her heart clenched painfully, and her eyes burned. She wanted to hold that little boy so damned badly.

Straightening the legs of her shorts, she moved with fast, quiet steps. Then she dropped before him and mirrored his pose with her arms around her knees.

His hands lowered and dangled between them. He didn't look up, didn't acknowledge her at all. “When he was done with my mother, he turned to me. I wouldn't let go of that doll. He was so goddamned strong I couldn't stop him from ripping Isadora out of my hands.”

“Isadora? Your mother?”

His head cocked, and his eyes narrowed in confusion on the broken doll between their feet. He squeezed his legs tighter against his chest, his body curling inward. He was shutting down.

In a bold gesture, she reached out and placed her hand on his cheek, stroking her fingers through the thick hair above his ear.

He shook his head, eyes on the floor, then leaned into her touch. “I'd named the doll after my mother.”

There was no embarrassment or resentment in his tone, just...sadness. He loved his mother, that much was clear, and evidently that love wasn't reciprocated.

A burn seared through her nose. She envied his devotion. She didn't know her mother well enough to love her. There'd been no connection, no relationship. Just illness. She rocked forward to her knees and wrapped her arms around his shoulders.

His legs dropped, and he pulled her against his chest, speaking softly into her hair. “When he stomped on the doll, her body split in half, and the arms and legs tore off. Just like that, she was dead.”

She rubbed his rigid back, her own muscles stiff with anguish. The attachment he must've felt for that doll amidst such a neglected, fucked-up upbringing... God, he must've mourned her. The doll. His mother. She glanced over his shoulder and took in the menagerie of brokenness with new eyes.

It was tragic and beautiful and inspiring. She didn't know the depth of his suffering, but the coping, the struggle to self-medicate? She knew all about that. The memory of his doll had stuck with him, and he'd recreated his appreciation for it, clinging to the notion that he could somehow repair what had happened, that he could fix the past with the present.

She didn't think that was possible, but what did she know? Just because she hadn't been successful at taking back her own life didn't mean he couldn't find some kind of peace in creating an indestructible doll.

He adjusted her legs so that she straddled his lap and squeezed her chest to his. His arms were strong and immovable around her, his body a powerhouse of muscle. But she felt the scared boy in the hunch of his shoulders and the restlessness of his fingers gripping at the shirt covering her back. That little boy felt like her insides, fractured and hurting, lonely and scared, but brimming with the desire to love something or someone and to be loved.

His cheek rubbed against hers, but his arms turned to stone and his chest expanded with a long, tense inhale. “After he smashed the doll, he pressed my face into the dirt and fucked me.” Her heart crushed instantly at the emptiness in his voice and the impact of his words. He released a slow breath and kissed her brow. “I came to grips with that a long time ago. He was the first but certainly not the last. For the next four years, many of her drug dealers turned to me when she was too stoned to put out. She OD'd when I was thirteen.”

Amber held him tightly, her hug expressing what she couldn't with her voice. When he leaned back, his eyes were clear and searching. His gentle expression filled her with heartache, but she also felt a strong surge of something else. “I'm proud of you.”

He cupped her face, his thumbs caressing her cheeks as his eyes followed the movement. “Mm. Not much to be proud of, Amber. By age thirteen, I was a whore just like her.”

Her jaw stiffened, her words rushed and heated. “You were young. It was all you knew. And you broke free from it. You didn't let it kill you.”

“Don't make excuses for it.” His eyes sparked. “I don't.”

She wanted to argue, but his hard, domineering glare was back. She bit her lip, her mind swimming through everything he'd told her. “So you're trying to make a doll that doesn't break?”

His gaze traveled through the garage, probing the broken body parts. “I've tried. They all break eventually.” He laughed. “I'm convinced their hollow bodies are filled with mysterious energy, just waiting to cave in. Like dark matter. Can't fuck with science.”

She stroked a finger over his jaw, savoring the connection. “Dark matter holds the universe together.”

His lips twitched. “It also threatens to destroy it.”

Were they talking about the dolls or him? She pointed at the plastic woman and child sitting in the cabinet. “What about those two? They're not broken.”

His eyes closed, opened, and he patted her leg, lifting her to her feet as he stood. “That's enough for one day. I've got shit to do.”

More secrets then. She stared at their shiny blank faces, and they stared back, trapping their story behind painted lips. “You'll tell me when you're ready?”

He nodded and led her to the door with light steps as if he'd shed the weight of the world. So why did she feel so heavy? It was admirable what he was doing, making and breaking dolls to redeem his childhood. To redeem his mother.

But she wouldn't dress it up. He was her mirror in a way. They both carried a million cracks beneath the skin. Even under the stark light of the fluorescents, it was hard to see which of them was more broken. But for the first time, she felt like she had to vanquish her mental illness not for herself but for someone else. Because she was broken
with him
, and if she fixed herself, maybe she could make him a little less broken, too.

The first twenty-four hours in Van’s cabin had been both terrifying and eye opening. Amber’s surroundings and the man she shared them with challenged the routine and order she desperately clung to. Her world had become a state of nonlinear catastrophic exasperation.

As the hours bled into days, the next three weeks were very much the same. Every day was just like the first, the punishments and the tenderness, the panic attacks and the sex. She made his life hell, and he whipped her for it. She adored him, when she didn’t hate him.

He followed through on his promise to be as messy as she was clean. When she scrubbed the shower walls, he coated them with motor oil. When she picked up his socks, he decorated the house with tampons, tying the strings in knots so complicated she couldn't undo them.

Three weeks with him made her fear a little less. She still couldn't face the outdoors, yet every day he forced her out. Sometimes, he required a single step on the porch. Most days, he hauled her kicking and screaming to the tree where he whipped her and fucked her into an adrenaline-induced state of elation.

But as the weeks passed, she could still feel that intangible thing in her head, scratching against her brain like it wanted out. Something else lived in there, too, making her anxious. Her dependency on routine and straight lines was shifting. She was becoming too centered on Van.