Vik (Shot Callers 2)

“Nas, wait.” He stood, calling out after me as I made a hasty retreat.

The smile I wore was nothing but a mechanical stretching of my face. No warmth. No emotion. “See you at work.”

But not if I could help it.

I wasn’t safe anywhere. No matter where I turned or where I tried to hide, there she was. I went into my closet, and she stared back at me in the mirror. If I fled down the stairs, she was there waiting for me, blocking the front door. I asked her to go away. Begged her to leave me alone. But nothing worked. And now, as I sat sobbing with my back inched into a bare corner of my room, knowing she couldn’t sneak up behind me, I kept my blurry vision on her as she sat smiling at me. But the decay had begun.

Her face was no longer as pretty as it once was. Her eyes had dulled, a white haze within them. The color of her flesh was now a blueish-gray. Bits of her hair had fallen out.

And still, she smiled.

The torn hole in her cheek revealed her rotting teeth.

Yet she smiled.

I sobbed and rocked and pleaded for mercy.

Her smile remained unchanged, the very face of evil.

“Why are you doing this to me?” My quavering whisper seemed loud in the dark. “I was your favorite.”

Mother’s voice had deepened some, taking on an ethereal echo behind it. “I’m here because you missed me, dearest.”

I shook my head rapidly, closing my eyes, repeating over and over again, “I don’t miss you. I don’t miss you. I don’t miss you. I don’t miss you anymore.”

Time seemed to work differently when she taunted me. I wasn’t sure what hour it was, only that it was dark when I heard my front door open, then close. My eyes flittered over to the open doorway of my bedroom, and Mother’s movement mirrored my own.

The shadow in the doorway loomed, and I sank in on myself, my breathing turning choppy.

What if there were more of them?

The shadow began to move, came closer, and my breathing hitched when it stood directly in front of me and crouched.

But then I heard him, and the gentleness in his clearly concerned tone was more than I could bear. “I called. You didn’t answer. I texted. You didn’t respond. I got worried.” I couldn’t see very well, but I knew Vik was taking in my pathetic form. “Jesus, baby.” Then his hand came out to cup my cheek. “What is she doing to you?”

She’s torturing me.

With one swift motion, I was hefted up into his arms, and when he walked me toward the bed, closer to the rotting corpse that sat there, my breathing hitched as I let out a frightened, “Not there!” I shifted in his hold, shaking harder than I ever had before, and clutched at him with fisted hands, refusing to let go of his shoulders. I pushed my face into the side of his neck and let out a whispered, “Not there. Not there. Not there.”

Vik’s arms were pillars of safety, and he would not let anything bad touch me. “All right. Not there. I got you. You’re coming with me.” He held me a moment, thinking of where to go from here, and when he began to move, I relaxed a little, knowing he had me. But when he removed one hand, a light turned on from somewhere around us, and he stopped moving.

He stopped moving for a long time, and when I lifted my watery gaze to find his rigid body taking in the destruction of my bathroom, all I could do was look at him and whisper a sorry sounding, “It was an accident.”

Vik’s jaw ticked, but when his eyes met mine, they held some form of understanding there. “It’s okay. It’s not that bad. I can fix this.”

He sighed with unease and set me down on the vanity, but my arms cinched around him. I was unable to let go, scared of what might happen if I did. Gently but firmly, he removed my arms from him, but I clutched at his forearms with rigid fingers, digging into his flesh.

“Hey,” he said, crouching down so his eyes lined up with my own. “I’m not going anywhere.” The certainty in his tone had me nodding, but more tears fell, and when he detached my fingers from his arms, he held my hands tightly within his own. “Let me clean this up, and then we’ll clean you up, okay?”

I nodded once more, but my vision hollowed out until all I saw was the light coming off the reflective surface of the chrome shower doorframe.

Vik worked at moving the glass around into one pile. He threw it all into the shower, and I shivered from my spot on the vanity. My mind was a mess. I wasn’t sure this was even happening until he crouched down to touch a spot on the floor, then another, and when he twisted back to look at me, he asked cautiously, “Baby, did you walk through this?”