Even though Dicksnot had it coming and there will never be a point in my life where murdering him is off the table completely, I made it worse for her. I let him provoke me. None of this is working anymore, my coping mechanism of indifference, the playboy persona I don’t bother to argue with. I’m letting her down, my family down, my fans down.
Digging around a stack of papers and half-unpacked bags on the dining room table, I finally find it, one thing I can do to protect Mallory from the insidious corruption of Celeritas and her father. I make the call and then prepare to grovel.
Lennox: I’m sorry.
Mallory: I’m furious with you.
Lennox: I know. Can we please get out of here?
Mallory: And go where?!
Lennox: Anywhere but here. Please.
Finally, my door opens my door and Mallory walks inside my flat in silence. Her shoulders are slumped and her arms are wrapped around herself. She’s small and vulnerable and I wrap my arms around her, dragging her against me. “I’m sorry,” I whisper into her hair as I kiss her head.
She nods into my chest and wraps her arms around my waist, “I know. I understand.”
She doesn’t understand the half to it, but she’s here and she’s got her arms around me. I can fix anything else.
“Where are we going?” She asks.
“I just want to get out of here, just get in the car and drive.”
“That sounds perfect.”
A few minutes later I throw our jackets into the car and help Mallory get in since the gullwing doors pointing straight up into the air and harness seat belts aren’t the most self-explanatory.
“What the hell is this?” She sinks in and looks at the car suspiciously.
“LaFerrari. Supposed to be a chick magnet, let me know if it’s working.” She smiles as I get in and fire the engine to life. “You want to drive?”
“I will kill us both. I like when you drive, anyway.”
Along the way, Mallory and I return to our normal, whatever that is. I don’t have a definition for it yet. She had me stop to feed her, demanding cheeseburgers and milkshakes, but the extra workout I’ll need to make up for that is probably a better outlet for my frustrations, anyway.
Dusk will be falling soon as I pull up to our destination. I hope she likes this and doesn’t think I’m some kind of creep in addition to knowing what an asshole I am.
“What is this?”
“Highgate Cemetery.” I kill the engine and watch Mallor
y peer around taking in the huge Gothic limestone archways outside covered in moss and ferns and a couple of hundred years of plant overgrowth. “As the legend goes, vampires roam at night. Taste the Blood of Dracula was filmed here.”
“The movie I watched on the plane?”
I nod at her. Her eyes are wide and I think she’s excited, not afraid that I’m an ax murderer or grave robber. “Let me out of this spaceship,” she says as she starts trying to get out of her seat harness and open the car door.
Excited turns out to be an understatement. Mallory’s holding my hand and strolling the ancient resting grounds calling out famous gravesites for Karl Marx and Douglas Adams. The Victorian grandeur, angels resting atop catacombs, concrete lion heads from the 1800s, every section of the cemetery is more exciting than the next for her. When we get to the Tom Sayres gravesite with a life-sized resting dog statue, it’s the first time she takes out her phone to take a photo and she’s contemplative spending more time here than others.
“The dog?” I ask her wondering what it is about this one.
She shakes her head. “Tom Sayres was a bare-knuckle fighter, you don’t know him?”
I shake my head. I wonder how she does know more about this than I do, but I’m more taken with how beautiful she is, how much I just want to spend time with her, just the two of us. Cemetery, flat, hotel, airplane, I don’t even care where we go.
“He was born in a slum, only five foot eight inches tall, only one hundred fifty pounds. He fought men twice his size. In his whole career, he only lost once.”
She runs fingers over the stone mastiff on the grave and her eyes grow glassy. “He was a little insignificant fish, too, Lennox.”