I hoped the answer was yes.
We may not have been perfect, or even acceptable by anyone else’s standards. But together, we were perfect.
Together, we were just us.
Battered and broken. Dark and difficult. Impulsive and scared.
I’d accepted Jake for being all of those things, yet for so long, I couldn’t accept them within myself. I finally realized that it’s possible to love within a space that sometimes holds nothing but emptiness... or nothing but darkness.
After all, we all have darkness within us.
Some of us more than others.
EPILOGUE
Jake
TWO NIGHTS PASSED BEFORE I WAS ABLE to make it home to Georgia and Bee, to my family. My clothes and skin were soaked with blood, mud, filth, and the other remnants of the dark places I had been. Bee threw herself into my arms without hesitation the second she saw me, despite my disheveled condition.
I’d pulled Bee into her bedroom that night, and she didn’t even let me shower before she asked me to describe to her what I had done to Owen in detail. Then, we had ourselves a long overdue, blood-covered, lust-fueled fuck-fest that lasted all night. For a woman who had once been afraid of my touch, she now devoured every moment of twisted carnal bliss between us.
Making love wasn’t our thing. We already had love. We made that every day. It was in every look, every touch, every understanding word.
Our sex? That was about owning one another. Finally being able to feel after years of pushing that shit aside in order to live and survive was an amazing fucking feeling. I wanted to live inside Bee, and I almost believe I do. That girl had gotten under my skin and inside my black soul the very first night I’d ever laid eyes on her.
I would walk around wearing her on my dick if I could.
I never thought I would be calling the house that used to hold so many ghosts, my parent’s old house, my home again. Our home. Truth is I could call a hollowed out tree home as long as Bee and Georgia were there with me.
My wife, my daughter, my entire life.
The reasons for my existence.
Yeah, we got married. We didn’t make too big a deal out of it. It was just something we felt we needed to do. Not to mention I really wanted to. My girls were always meant to share my last name. It became more important to me than I thought it would be. Our wedding was just the three of us, a witness, and a justice of the peace. We had the ceremony in the orange grove clearing during sunset, where more than my secrets were laid to rest.
It was perfect, our kind of perfect.
I became a better person because of them. The monster in me had been tamed, tucked away for the time being. He was still there deep inside, in a sort of semi-permanent hibernation. It was a comfort to know I could call on him if I ever needed to. Because if my family were ever to be threatened or harmed again, he will be fucking called on.
Truth of it was, I needed them more than they needed me. I’ve never fooled myself into believing that I was even remotely good enough for either of them. Instead, I made a promise to myself that I would give them the life they deserved, and be the man they needed me to be, even if being that man took more work on my part than I imagined others needed.
I no longer traded lives for money. I put that behind me and focused on helping Reggie run the shop. We got ourselves another receptionist so Bee could focus on her photography.
I haven’t killed since the night I was given permission by my woman to end the man who killed her grandmother, raped her, and shot my daughter.
If it had been possible, I would have killed that fucker three times over.
A sense of elation washes over me mixed with pure heated rage when I think of that sick fuck laying his hands on Abby the very night she let me into her heart and into her bed. I can’t stand to think about my poor frail Georgia in the hospital clinging to life. Even when I think of a defenseless and harmless old woman, walking to her own death while thinking she was doing nothing more than helping people, I feel a rage I sometimes find hard to tame.
Abby and I stopped talking about Owen entirely after that. The people of Coral Pines assumed he was drunk one night, fell off the seawall and drowned, like so many of the town’s alcoholics before him. I’m sure they thought his body had been made a good meal of by an alligator or wild boar in the mangroves somewhere.
No doubt, some of the town folk had their suspicions about me. I’m sure they thought I could be responsible in some way. After all, Owen had always hated me, and we’d publicly brawled on occasion. They knew how little we cared for each other. But, the sad fact was that not many people gave a shit about where Owen might have gone.
I had his very own mother on my side.
Bethany knew I killed Owen. How? I told her. I was no fucking coward. I told her while we were still in the hospital what I was going to do the second I knew my girl was okay. She knew she couldn’t stop me and said she wasn’t even going to try. She knew as well as I did that Owen was like a rabid dog and had to be put down.
What I hadn’t expected was for her to ask me to kill her as well. She practically begged me.
It was sad, really.
She told me she couldn’t live with what she’d done to our family, and she didn’t know if she could survive the death of her only son. She still loved him, no matter how broken he was.
Story of my life.
Bethany had called herself a ‘human wrecking ball’. Fitting, maybe, but not punishable by death. Honestly, I had considered it. But, I wasn’t a fan of killing women, and Georgia and Abby seemed to actually like the bitch.
So, I made her a deal.
Instead of killing her, I promised her that even though I was Georgia’s biological father and not Owen, she could still be part of our lives and our family if that was what she wanted. She just needed to heal.
We knew a thing or two about healing in our house.
It wasn’t easy in the first few weeks after Owen “disappeared”. Bethany came to see Georgia, but couldn’t look me in the eye. As time passed, she became more accepting of our new—and unusual—family dynamic and became a regular at our house.
As a consolation of sorts for killing her son and refusing to do her in, too, when she mentioned filing the divorce papers, I offered to take out her husband for her instead. Abby kicked me under the dinner table.
Bethany opted for the divorce.
I killed her son, and she comes over every Sunday for family dinner.
My daughter calls her Grammy.
The world is a twisted place, for sure.
It may have appeared that I was a changed man on the outside, but I couldn’t help but smile when I thought of the night I sank Owen’s body into his deep dark grave at the bottom of the swamp. A laugh would sometimes involuntarily escape my lips when I glanced above the mantle and saw my knife collection on display, hanging from one the little hooks Bee bought for me at the flea market.
The knife in the center, the one with the red handle and serrated edge, was the one I used to slit Owen’s throat.
I’m not sure whether I viewed it as my prize possession or an inside joke.
Maybe it was both.
Slitting someone’s throat may have sounded like the pussy way to kill, and I would have agreed with that... if it was done from behind like most pussies would do it.
That’s why I looked that motherfucker dead in the eye as I told him he was going to die. That’s why I pushed him up against the wall of the boat-house and covered his mouth with my left hand and used my forearm to hold him still while I slowly carved out his throat with the knife in my right.
I stared right into the depths of that scared motherfucker’s non existent soul and ignored his pathetic gurgling pleas while I watched the life flow out of him with the blood that poured from his neck, sending him into the depths of hell where he belonged.
Someone might as well have wrapped up that day and given it to me on Christmas morning. A revenge kill is the best kind of kill.
But a revenge kill for your family, with your woman’s permission?
That’s borderline erotic.
Now, I’m just a simple family man, receiving love I know I don’t deserve, and sleeping like a baby after a fifth of Jack Daniels.
I’m not stupid. I have no doubt that when I meet my end, I will descend into the hell that’s been saving me a spot in its torturous embrace since the day I was born.
I also know that when I get there, I’m going to spend my time finding Owen and killing him over and over again.
The End