“I won't sit here and be talked down to. Or abused. Who are you, Lucas Carter? What are you?”
I stare down at my shoes and listen to the ire crackling and sparking in my chest. I came this fucking close to hitting a woman outside of a client relationship. That's never happened to me before. Hell, I've never even hit Mrs. Braxton or Pam Tribbard during their woefully ignorant rants. I am a violent man, but I contain my rage. That is what I do. Damn this fucking woman and her tricksy fingers, untangling all of my knots.
I take deep breaths and consider my response.
“Why did you come here, Miss Holiday?” I turn around and front her question with one of my own. It seems legitimate, considering the circumstances. I watch as her round eyes shimmer with unshed tears. She looks ridiculously worse for wear, like she's aged several years since this morning.
“I've never killed anyone before,” she says, a statement which softens the darkness around the edges. I don't know why, but her words knock me down a notch. I nod my chin and grab a mop from the utility closet, pushing the liquid and the glass together in the center of the floor. As I bend down to pick up the glass pieces, Audra starts to talk. Not surprising. This is how many of my clients start out – just talking to me. Believe it or not, monsters have an awful lot of gossip to chatter about; it isn't easy spending our days hiding under beds. “I didn't plan on it. I mean,” Audra pauses to sigh and slide to the floor, her knees locked to her chest, her pale legs long and beautiful. My cock springs back to life, promising great things with this nightmare called Audra Holiday. “I picked Mark up in a bar last night, brought him back to my place.” I refrain from mentioning that I was there, that I saw. If I interrupt, Audra might clam up again, and we need this, this … dialogue. It's important for all my clients, especially one as fucked up as Miss Holiday. I have to know where she's coming from, what she likes and doesn't like, if I'm going to help her through this. And I do. I help people. It might not seem like it at first, but most of my clients don't stay clients forever. They move on. I absorb their darkness, tease it into the light, and for most of them, it eventually burns away, incinerated into the vast nothingness that is our universe. “I knew he was … wrong inside.” Audra taps at the floor with her nails, and the sound arouses my instincts, makes me desperate to feel them clawing against the flesh on my back. “Today … I invited him back over because I … because I'm … ” Audra chokes on her words and slams the palm of her left hand into her forehead. “I'm a broken nothing. I deserve that wrongness. I do. I really do.”
“Nobody does,” I snarl at her, much more vehemently than I'd meant to. Something about this woman twists me into strange shapes, shapes that I have no fucking name for. “Nobody deserves evil in their lives.” I run my tongue over my lips as Audra's eyes take me in, again, absorbing, cataloguing, enjoying – if her hardened nipples have anything to say about it. “Not even souls shrouded in darkness. Darkness doesn't necessarily mean evil, Audra.” She sniffles, but she doesn't actually cry. I respect that.
“After you left, I was going to kick Mark out and forget the whole thing.” She shrugs, as if what she's about to say doesn't matter. I imagine that a lot of people have written this woman off as not mattering. Some darkness is born, other darkness is made. “But he woke up before I expected him to, shoved me over the counter.” Audra nibbles her full lips and closes her eyes. I watch her carefully, dumping the shattered glass and the wine soaked paper towels into the garbage can. Her chest rises and falls, her breasts heaving and stirring my blood into a frenzy. “I still had the knife in my hand … ” Audra trails off, pausing as I put the mop and broom away and turn to face her. She doesn't open her eyes, clutching her arms around her legs as she leans forward and sucks in a massive breath. “I blacked out and came to on my knees. Blood was everywhere, everywhere, just fucking everywhere.”
I walk over and kneel down next to this nightmare of a woman, reaching out and putting my fingers beneath her chin. My touch has a false gentleness to it, like I actually care about Mark's last few moments on earth. I don't.
“So you killed him and then, what, you panicked? Chased me to my client's house?” Audra's head snaps up and she slaps my hand. I have to really fight my inner demons to keep from hitting her back. My eyes follow the curve of her upper lip, trace along the sharp line of her jawbone, and pause on a tiny spot of blood near her temple.
“I followed you back to your house,” Audra explains, shrugging her shoulders again. “Then I went home, dealt with Mark, and drove over to your place. You were just pulling out of the driveway, so I followed you. I wasn't going to come in, but I panicked. Sitting alone with your thoughts can be pretty fucking brutal sometimes.” Audra's face turns up to mine, her pupils narrowing into slits as she glares hard at me. “What were you doing to that woman?”