Page 69 of The Way We Rot
The need to remind myself what this was all for, to reconnect with Jake and what it was like before we grew up, overwhelmed me. Before we drifted and came back together, just a few short years before his death. The guilt ate at me, the way I’d pressured him to hang out, to spend time with my friends, my colleagues.He’d had a major crush on my partner and only came out through cajoling.
If I hadn’t pushed him…
Penelope grunted when I heaved her body up to the rope piled in the center of the stage. She was going back into the same setup; it was all I’d learned how to do and I itched with need to punish, to show the ghost of Jake that she was in pain, suffering, dying.
The Jake I knew when we were little kids here in the theater, the man I knew in those moments at the bar, before I slipped away for a piss and left him vulnerable. That was the person this was for. Not me, not my dick. Not my dirty desires.
This was for Jake.
I stared at myself in the dirty bathroom mirror, ignoring the chaos around me. This place was filthy, busy when men flitting in and out, using the urinals, not washing their hands or spending too long looking at themselves in the mirror before heading out to their dates.
Like me, I guess, but I wasn’t on a date. I was just fucking exhausted, admiring the new depth of color under my eyes. “Shit,” I grunted, stepping away. I’d left Jake out there for too long. After waiting at the bar for ten minutes for the whiskey I downed in seconds, then coming here, he had to be wondering where I was.
Things were getting better with us each time we hung out, and he was here tonight at my behest. I splashed a bit more water on my face and left the bathroom.
He was there in our booth, grinning as a woman leaned over the barrier and chatted. He looked at ease, comfortable, not like he’d been missing my wonderful company at all, so I turned back to the bar, another whiskey calling my name.
I’d get him one, too.
But after I ordered and weaved back to the booth, he was gone. So was that woman.
“You good?” my colleague asked, finding me standing there looking perturbed. I nodded, pulling out my cell, a bad feeling in my gut.
Jake’s phone rang out. I chugged my drink and went on the search forhim.
Something told me to; something told me he wasn’t off having a nice time somewhere. I didn’t realize that the image of him smiling in his booth would be the last time I saw him alive. That the next time I laid eyes on his face it would be mangled, twisted in anguish.
I didn’t realize that my colleagues trusted my gut and were already searching for him. Putting pieces together, trailing him and the woman on the CCTV the bar had.
“Adrian,” my partner said, her hand gentle on my arm as she directed me further away from the bar. We’d been looking for hours, had found Jake’s phone behind the bar in an alley, signs of struggle evident.
“He’s dead?” I asked, knowing her tone.
She nodded, her mouth turned down. From what we’d gathered, Jake had left with another woman, but that sounded wrong. He was so infatuated with Phoebe that he never even glanced at other women.
“You have to catch her. That woman. You have to,” Phoebe implored.
“We know where she went,” another officer said, not even in uniform. We’d all panicked, rushed into this, again, just trusting my gut and nothing else. “She’s leaving now.”
I was therewhen they caught up with Penelope Karner, when the excitement rippled through the uniformed cops as they realized who they had in their possession. I fought through the red tape and crime scene investigators to see Jake one more time. I needed it proven, what I was being told.
In quiet words and hands resting on my shoulder, with looks of pain on the messengers’ faces as they gave me the worst news I’d ever had, it wasn’t enough.
So I forced my way into that warehouse.
It wasn’t his wide smile at the bar that would stick with me from that night now; it was the sight of him laid out on the floor, the image of what Penny did to him.
That was why she needed to die.
Jake was good, the best of us. And she took that from me. From the world. All my goodness left with him.
Penny looked pathetic, strung up again, her limbs at my command, her body mine to bend. I had her positioned how I wanted her, her front facing down, her legs spread wide, almost above her head,and her arms at her knees. It was like she was flying, some fucked up version of a bird in flight, swooping down to catch its prey.
She said nothing apart from those dreamy mutterings, like she was somewhere else, falling back into that place where she could drift in and out. I could barely hear her from up here in the rafters, but the idea of her feeling any pleasure at all pissed me off.
Couldn’t have that. It made my movements jerkier, rougher as I moved her into position. I stretched her muscles further, her limbs tighter. Fuck her. Fuck her and everything she put out into the world. Fuck her for the sickness she injected me with when she killed my brother.
She needed to suffer here, like she promised she would.
