I got You

Chapter 4

Marinela

The one place he might come if I give him a reason to. The one place…the one…

I repeat the words to myself as I stare at the glass door I have been standing in front of for some time now. It is the door of the damn shop…his coffee shop.

“I’m going to end it here,” I tell the girl I see in the reflection. I know her, but I can’t recognize her. It’s a strange feeling, but I like it. I like the change I see; it reminds me of how much my life changed in less than two hours.

On the outside there is nothing different about the way she looks, but on the inside… Oh, forget it. I am too overwhelmed to talk about my feelings and feel them all at the same time.

My body takes over, and in seconds the deafening silence is removed with the sound of glass shattering. I hold the bat handle tight as I am bursting into the glass walls surrounding the shop. I feel the rage and the fire burning inside me and I feed on them as a pleasure is riffling through me. This feels so good, I think.

The glass beneath my feet cracks as I walk back through the shop and towards the door, that is now missing most of its glass.

I stop in front of it and squat down to get the bottle of gasoline I left there, when I arrived at the shop. I remove the lid, get up, then turn and start to spill it all over the place.

When the last drop of it is out of the bottle, I suddenly start to laugh so hard that my stomach begins to hurt.

I look around and give one last glance to the place I am soon going to burn to ashes. I feel no remorse, no regret for what I did, and for what I am about to do.

I only feel bad for the girl I will bury soon, because I can’t save her. I can’t be her again, not with all the pain.

I reach inside my hoodie pocket to get the lighter I put there earlier, but a loud and repetitive sound makes me freeze, and I can’t do it.

Crap! I forgot about the safety alarm.

I hurry to finish what I started before someone comes, and as I walk away from the shop, I flick on the brass lid of the Zippo lighter and toss it over my shoulder.

A loud crackling sound comes from behind me.

“Beautiful,” I say, as I let my head fall backwards.

Then I turn to see it all. To see it burn, to see how everything burns…to feel the heat all over again and remember how much I want this.

I can’t hold the scream fighting its way to the surface in anymore, so I let it out. I scream at the top of my lungs. I scream how much I hate him, how much I hate myself, how much it hurts, how much I want to die, how much…before I can continue I hear a sound of tires squealing, and I run.

I hide behind a car on the opposite side of the street and I try to peak from behind it. I still have my bat in my hands, and I am clinging to it as if my life depended on it, because it might.

I am not stupid, I knew someone would show up the moment that alarm went off, after I just set the freaking shop on fire in the middle of the night.

The fire intensifies, but all I can focus on now is the huge car, responsible for the disturbing noise of tires squealing, one that looks like it came out of a Bond movie. Windows black and tinted, large tires and an enormous trunk, it definitely looks like one of those cars that can be seen in crime movies.

From the little knowledge I know about parking a car, I can see the driver of this car doesn’t give a damn about parking correctly. One moment the car is driving in my direction, and the next it abruptly turns to the left and starts to spin, which is when I see the driver’s door open before the car ceases moving. The car’s spinning force throws the driver on the street, and he does a side roll before he starts running towards the shop. 

Before I get smooshed by what obviously follows, I throw myself onto the cement pavement and roll on my side a few times. I tilt my head up, and watch as the car with the black tinted windows hits the car I was hiding behind not long ago, and halts to a stop. Thank God I saw that coming, otherwise I would have been turned into a pancake now.

I wouldn’t mind that to be honest, but I still have a job to finish.

It is late and there are no people living near the shop to make a dramatic scene out of it being in flames, as it is located in a business-based area of the city.

The number one positive thing for tonight. I wouldn’t want to deal with any hysteria, nor authorities right now.

I get up, find my bat and head back to the shop…I mean, to what was once the shop. I would have chuckled at that thought any other time tonight, but I am too terrified to do it now.

That car’s driver could literally not wait to park his car to get into the shop. Jeez, his entrance was intense. I didn’t get a chance to see his face, but who else could it be. Who else could care more about that shop, enough to risk their life, but the owner of the shop?

He came.

And my terrified being won’t stop me from finishing him.

A few steps separate me from reaching the shop. I’m panting hard as I imagine his head flying off, right after I hit it with my bat. Yes, in the very Harley f*****g Quinn style of decapitation.

“Oh…yeah, that is definitely what I am going to do to that motherfucker”, I think as I take those last few tentative steps to get inside.

I have no time to rethink this twice, because the next thing I notice just before I pass under the metal frame of the door, stops me dead in my tracks. A human shadow coming from behind me is the thing I see. My breath stops and I don’t move, as I realize what is about to happen in less than five seconds.

“Oh - oh, I did not see that coming,” is all I can manage to think, before I turn and aim for that motherfucker’s head.

What I imagined would be a f*****g awesome decapitation, ends in a loud thud as I see my bat dropping on the ground. He easily missed being hit by it, by blocking the hit with his forearm, and giving it a push that made it fly away from my hands. I stare at my now split in half bat, as I’m trying to process what just happened.

I realize I am tired, and I am scared. I try not to hyperventilate as I warily move my gaze from it and ease it up to see his face, but I do more than hyperventilate when I see his face. I start to panic, and I open my mouth to scream before I get my legs to run, but he stops me.

He presses his right hand over my mouth, and rounds me, then pulls me against his body with his left hand. My back is pressed to his front with his left arm wrapped around my left shoulder and chest, and his right hand pressing over my mouth.

If I thought being in my house two hours ago surrounded by fire was the worse thing happening to me today, I was wrong. This is worse. No matter how much I press my nails into his skin and kick the s**t out of him, squirming, he won’t let go of me.

I can’t even scream.

And the worst of the worst is…is, these hands I am captured in are not his.

This is not him. The clothes he wears aren’t the type of clothes anyone involved in the line of work I suspect the Serbian motherfucker is in, would wear either. Black jeans and a black hoodie with its hood hanging on his head aren’t really the package deal of an elite gangster, such as the one I hope is going to burn in hell soon.

This stranger might be anyone, wanting all types of things from me. By trying to end the one who gave me my worst nightmare, I ran into someone who might just give me my next one.

The torture is too much. My life is practically in this stranger’s hands and there is nothing I can do to change that right now.

“Shh”, is all he keeps saying as I try to free myself from his grip, and I am sure I am going to find myself in a dark trunk any moment now. Tied and drugged.

Oh, my God!

No, there won’t be any need for it, because I am going to be way beyond conscious by then. I know I am going to collapse from the stress and panic my body is going through in this moment. I might as well be peeing my pants, for all I care.

More so, I feel I am going to black out now.

* * *

What feels like an eternity, but is in fact just a several hours after I passed out, I can feel some heavy light burning my face as I struggle to move my eyelids that feel like they have been sealed for a year. I keep trying, and after some time when my eyelids decide to cooperate and let some of the burning light touch my eyes, I realize I am waking up. I try to open my eyes all the way up, but they feel so heavy, all I can do is blink. My body doesn’t feel any better, and I get a feeling that it has survived a nice beating I can’t remember any of. The tension I feel in it makes me want to stretch my legs out, and to my surprise I manage to do it easily.

Hold on a second. How did that happen?

I blink a few more times and the images come to me. It all comes back to me. A flashback of the events that happened before I fainted is playing in front of my eyes, and at the moment I remember the very last of them, I sit up straight with a jerk.

I gasp as I notice my surroundings. I am in a room. A very nice luxurious room set up in warm tones that looks like a royal suite.  Beige and cream are its dominant colors, but some touches of white can be spotted as well, just like the sheets on the bed I am sitting on.

I’m sitting on a bed in a nicely decorated room, and the truck I’d imagined I would end up in with my hands tied up to my legs is nowhere to be seen.

What alternate reality am I in?