Part 30 - Goldi: Afterglow
Flames reached up to the sky. Everything burned.
I watched it through tears, my dress torn, knees grinding into the sidewalk as the SUV pulled away. When I reached up and wiped my face, I could feel the warm blood smeared on my palm. The sky poured tears, drowning out mine, leaving the world crying as I knelt there by my only friend, his blood pooling around us, washed away as quickly as it spilled, every heartbeat feeding the gutter. In the morning, he will never have existed.
“Steve.” More a groan than a word. A name. A past. The name of my family, the only person in the world I knew. The only person in the world I could call mine until I met Red.
His eyes fixed on me, but he saw nothing. His grip faltered, and his hand slipped out of mine and fell lifeless on the concrete.
The haunting call of sirens echoed in the distance.
I looked right and saw Ivan’s SUV run the light. A navy blue car skidded across the intersection, laying on its horn and plowing another car. And then he was gone, just like that. Just another mook heading back to Manhattan while the last ounce of blood spilled out on the sidewalks of Harlem.
“Steve, I told you to go back to my place and wait.” I stared down at the empty eyes, the great bastard’s pallid cheeks, his thin lips, a nose that had seen too many fists. “You fuck. You fucking fuck. I told you to let me do this.” The rage was gone. The roar. The threats against the Russian. The welling of my heart when he appeared there on the sidewalk to rip me from the grip of the old mook dragging me into his car. Washed away into the gutter.
The flash of a knife, and Steve was on his knees, gasping for breath, Ivan standing over him, a shadow of a man compared to the big burly bastard he’d just felled as if he’d spent his whole life taking down monsters. As if he’d spent his whole life becoming a monster, too. His eyes flashed. The knife clattered to the concrete, and he held out his hand to me. The world of a man who’d spent his entire existence becoming something beckoned. The warmth and dryness of the car. The opulence of his flat. The crisp fit of his suit. This was a man of means, a man of will, a man — I could easily see it in how he regarded everything around him — a man who had no need for anyone or anything, but would accept the world as it was.
And I knew the moment he took my hand, the moment he set me on that stage, the moment I stripped off my dress for him I was his property. Just as the giant was. Just as the two wild women with their flowing blonde hair and terrible spears were. Just as the thing in the cage was as it screamed for his delight. His belongings. His playthings. His toys. His pawns. He’d tossed them away like so much trash, the flotsam and jetsam of life, locking the door behind us, letting them burn. A cool, slow pace, a practiced cadence as we crossed the hall. I felt the chill radiating from him even as the inferno engulfed his flat, threatened to devour the building. The elevator dinged, and we stepped inside, my eyes locked on the flat’s double doors as they began to glow and smoke.
The old woman was gone when the front doors opened. He didn’t look for her, his eyes straight ahead. Had she ever been there?
Not a word from his lips as we strolled toward the street, his grip like a vice around my wrist. I was his now, and there was no going back. Until Steve stepped out from the bus stop, his tan coat slick with rain. A single brown curl wilted across his forehead, heavy with rain. My heart skipped a beat. He’d been there before for me, taken me in, saved my life and given me a family. He’d always been there, from the first days I could remember. A brother I’d never had. A caretaker when I felt low. A towering menace when I was bullied. A savior when I was at my wit’s end, clinging to anything. And now he was here again to pull me from a bed of my own making. A giant in his own right, he towered over the slender old Russian.
“She’s coming with me,” said Steve, his voice a low rumble, the kind of rolling thunder he used to establish dominance on the playground, in school and later at that party I couldn’t speak of ever again. I’d seen it before, how it worked with the other predators, how his growl brought entire rooms to a standstill. The giant was gone, leaving only one old man. Until Steve stepped in close and pulled Ivan’s hand from my wrist, saving me from my own cage. And in that moment, before I even knew what was happening, the knife plunged into Steve’s left side — one, two, three times. He stared at me, his mouth working, seeking some sound, some way to voice what I’d just witnessed, and then he dropped to his knees, a gush of black blood trickling out of the side of his mouth.
Ivan climbed into the truck, and for a moment he paused, waiting. An invitation. Leave the last person on Earth I knew and become his forever. I gazed into the abyss, my eyes tracing the cut of his pants, his shoes shiny and slick with rain — with my tears? — and I watched it all melt away. The door closed, and the SUV pulled out into traffic.
And with it, my dreams of the spotlight, the stage, rounds of applause, bouquets of blood red roses in my arms, filling my dressing room, strewn across the floor as I swept into a gala. Interviews and invitations, parties and previews. Prima donnas at my doorstep seeking a way into my inner circle. I’d sip champagne, pour the rest of the glass over my bare cunt. Let them lick it up, suckle on my toes as rivulets of Ruinart Blanc de Blancs cascaded down my open legs. I’d bathe in their tears, climb their broken dreams to mount a horse-drawn carriage around Central Park, watch them snap my picture as I took a glorious shit in an underground cabaret on West 35th, where I’d once fucked three guys in the last stall. Ivan promised mooks galore, an army of sycophants, a flurry of fans, an empty existence.
Steve promised a life. And now — I looked down at him once again, the steady pitter-patter of rain on his coat, the raindrops sliding off his face like tears — and now there was nothing.
“Goldi?”
I knew the voice before I looked up. It wasn’t possible, was it?