Caffeine and Magix

Great Challenge everyone! I can’t wait to read all of your stories :) You can find the prompt here (X) for anyone late to the challenge!

His heart is still beating when you decide you’ve spent enough time with his blood on your hands. Enough time trailing after him with broken apologies falling from your lips. Enough time presenting him with gifts like sacrifice so he’ll just smile one more time.

You stare out at the city, coffee hot in your cold hands and think, Enough. You put the mug down on the counter, shrug on your jacket and slide off the stool. You jostle your neighbor, but neither of you say anything to acknowledge the invasion of personal space. You’re both city dwellers and you know when to fight and when to just let it go.

You wish you’d remembered that a month ago.

You walk out onto Michigan Ave, tuck your hands into your pockets, and put your head down against the biting breeze coming off Lake Michigan. A bus comes by, stops, and rolls away without you.

You want to walk. You want to feel the rock salt crunch under your feet, the ice pull at your stability, the wind cut through your jeans. Then, maybe, you won’t have to think about how he’s been dead to you for months despite the fact that his heart is still beating.

—————————————-

“Babe?”

Your hand tightens around your phone and you bring it in tight to your chest. You’re sitting on the couch, knees tucked to the side and feet bare. You make your fingers loosen before the edges of your phone case, scraped and dinged from months of hard use, pierce them.

He walks into the room, hair tousled and cheeks red from the wind outside. He’s wearing the long coat you got him last christmas, the one that actually goes down far enough to keep him from freezing his ass off. His blue eyes are bright, but not with the joy of seeing you. Oh no.

“You didn’t text me back,” he says, dropping the duffel on his shoulder onto the ground. It’s mostly empty, too empty for him to have gone ahead with the plan without you. His jaw clenches. “Wanna tell me what that was about?”

You turn your phone over in your hands. “I told you. It was too dangerous.”

“Not for us,” he says and takes an aggressive step forward. That’s another thing that’s changed since you became partners in crime–the aggression. The fact that he thinks he can move towards you like that, like you’re a civilian ready to be taken hostage. “I told you it was today or never.”

“Too many people would have gotten hurt,” you say. You know it’s true. There’d been too many people at the bank, you’d seen them walking by from your vantage point in the coffee shop. You’d seen him too, his gait unmistakable even under the layers of winter clothes he’d used to hide his face. “Or killed.”

“Or,” he says, “we could have been too rich instead. Jesus, I thought you wanted that for us? For me?”

“I do,” you say, head jerking up at the hurt in his voice. It’s instinctive, the need to get up and comfort him. To take him into your arms and tell him about all the things you’ll do so he can live his life the way he wants–in luxury. You swing your feet down to the floor and grip the couch to stop yourself from going any further. “Or–I did.”

The air in the room is as crystalline as the snow that’s begun to fall outside the window. You can’t meet his eyes, staring at your  lap like a naughty child instead of the villain you are. You blink too long where he can’t see, willing the tears to stay away.

“You did,” he says, dropping the emphasis on the past tense. His face is dark, expression stormy, and he is ever so carefully still. “But now you want me to…what? Live in this hole with you forever? Never hope for something better for us? Never try to be better than this?” He throws his arms out to encompass your apartment, lip curling at the ratty sofa you’re sitting on.

You resist the urge to flinch though your heart stings at his words. This is your apartment, your home, and you’re happy with how far you’ve come in life. Proud even. Or, rather, you used to be proud until he came and took you out to caviar dinners and dressed you in silk and–

But there’s a price, you remind yourself and your lips thin. I won’t pay the price. “We’re alive, Darren. It’s–I don’t want more. Not with what we have to do to get it.”

There’s a face in your mind–a woman. She’s crying mascara tears into a split lip, mouth open wide with fearful gasps. A bank manager in some little neighborhood you don’t even know the name of.

“I want more,” he says. He steps forward and his hands stay clenched. “I do.”

You finally look up fully, let him see the moisture in your eyes and the determined set of your shoulders. “You can’t. Not anymore. It’s too much.”

The bank manager is dead. She’s been dead for a month and you helped him wash the blood from his hands. It may have left his but the blood never, never left yours.

He laughs and it’s an ugly sound. “I see what this is. You’re punishing me, right? For not listening to you when you nixed the location.” He takes another of those aggressive steps and it brings him into arms reach of you.  “You think you have the right to tell me what to do? I ask you for one thing and you can’t do it! Where the hell do you get off telling me to stop now?”

“People are dead,” you say. A tremor runs through your body when you say it. It’s real now, out there, and you can’t ignore it ever again. You soldier on. “No one else dies for us, Darren. No one else suffers.”

“People suffer!” he bellows. He jerks forward, falling over you like he’s going to headbutt you. You rear back into the couch, heart thundering in your chest, but he never touches you. He stares at you from inches away, face twisted into a furious mask. “I learned that on the streets. You learned that in a nice, comfy house so I don’t want to hear about who suffers and who doesn’t, okay? Because we do and we don’t have to.  I don’t have to, so who gives a fuck about anyone else?”

You can’t take his proximity. You kick him in the stomach, hard enough that he can’t even yell. His breath leaves him as he stumbles back, falling against the living room wall. You scramble up onto the couch and leap over the back, putting it between the two of you.

“I give a fuck,” you say. “And I said we stop. If you ever loved me, you’d listen to me.”

Even as you say it, you know it’s a thin plea. The type of love the two of you are capable doesn’t stop people. It just enrages them.

“Love,” he sneers. He uses the wall to pull himself up, free hand gently prodding his stomach. He meets your eyes. “Love ain’t got shit to do with money.”

He roars towards you like a tsunami, eyes bright with hatred. He doesn’t see you anymore–just an obstacle. That’s the problem with violence, you’ve found. It doesn’t have just one direction.

“You killed them!” you scream as you dodge away from him. He crashes into the cheap plaster, denting the hell out of it.  You run to the other side of the living room, a mouse in a circle with nowhere to go with him between you and the door. “You didn’t have to and you did!”

“They were in my way,” he snarls. His breath feels hot on your neck. “And if you think I’ll let you stop–”

There’s a horrible splintering sound from the door just as he grabs your arm. You hit the ground as black boots rush into the living room. There are people shouting, demands and curses.

“You bitch!” he screams and brings his foot down onto your ribs. You cry out as you feel bone break and curl around yourself as he’s dragged away. “Did you sell me out? Did you do this?”

“Get down!” a man in riot gear snarls.

You stay down as the police pull him from the room, gasping around the pain in your chest.  You called the police. You told them everything. You wore the wire. You got the confession.

Somehow, you’ve still got blood on your hands.