5

Kaki

October 12

Sneak-out mission #2. As Kaki crept down the stairs that night, she waited to hear, “Hey! Where do you think you’re going, young lady?” But the house was silent. She guessed she was lucky her dad and stepmom were too wrapped up in their own problems to notice her. They hadn’t really acknowledged her existence since she was twelve anyway.

Damien had told her he’d wait for her out front at eleven that night. “I’m not gonna wait long. If I don’t see you out there right at eleven, I’m taking off.”

Kaki didn’t want to disappoint him, so she made sure to start her escape a half an hour earlier. It might take a while to get out without making a sound. It was easier than she thought it would be. She repeated her tactic from before, walking on the sides of the stairs, avoiding the middle section, trying to prevent each step from creaking.

One of the steps creaked anyway, so she just walked normally down the last few and right out the front door. It was that easy. As she looked back at the house, no lights popped on in the windows, and her cell phone didn’t ring. No one knew she was gone. But it was a cold night, and she had to stand on the curb shivering for fifteen minutes until Damien finally showed up.

This was the third time seeing Damien, but her nerves still got the better of her when climbing into his car, almost as if those black leather seats that smelled of smoke, car cleaner, and pine-scented air freshener, held some sort of danger. And she couldn’t make that feeling go away, no matter how crazy she was about the guy. She realized that was part of her attraction to Damien. The risk she took each time she was with him made him that much more appealing. Not everyone got to be with someone like him, and he had singled her out. In his eyes, she was special, and winning his attention made her somehow worthy of love.

“Anyone see you leave?” His dark eyes flashed in the glow of the dashboard.

“No. Everyone was asleep.”

He nodded his approval and drove slowly out of the cul-de-sac, leaving her breathless with the anticipation of what would happen between them that night. Moments before, she’d been safe inside the warmth of her dad’s house. With Damien, she was anything but safe. Even so, exhilaration filled her lungs and pumped blood through her heart, creating an electrically-charged friction inside her body.

“Where are we going?” she asked, as they turned onto Elden Street.

“You’ll see.” He looked over and raised his hand to touch her cheek. “It’s a surprise.”

Her heart hammered, and all the fluid in her mouth dried up as her teeth chattered together, partly from the cold and partly from his touch.

They drove down a road that took them through an industrial park and into a neighboring town—only a few miles from congested Herndon—where the lights and houses disappeared, and open, undeveloped land eclipsed the noise and neon. They passed a few tractor trailer stores, car shops, and warehouses and finally turned into a gravel parking lot marked by a motel sign, The Cove Motor Inn.

Damien parked the car and turned to her, his face shadowed from the overhead street lights. “Yeah, well, it’s not the Hyatt, but I know the guy who owns this place. He won’t give us any trouble.” His meaning was obvious. By trouble, he meant the guy wouldn’t care she was underage.

They kissed in the car for a long time before going inside, and when they finally did get out of the car, Damien wrapped his arm tightly around Kaki’s neck and shoulders, almost as if he was worried she might take off running into the woods. And there were a lot of woods around them. Dark, silent. She shivered.

The lobby was small and smelly, with wood-paneling like in old houses. There were two couches positioned in an L-shape, both of them beat-up and tattered. On the brownish leather one, discolored and worn with decades of use, sat an old man and a much younger Asian girl. He was fat and greasy looking, and he puffed away on a cigar. Kaki nearly choked on the smoke that filled the room. The woman laughed and flirted, pushing at him with her small, thin hands. Her nails were painted green.

The second couch was orange fabric set into a wood frame. It also looked a million years old. The fabric was worn around the edges, pulling away from the frame, which allowed the stuffing to poke through.

Damien pointed at it. “Go sit over there while I check us in.”

Kaki did as she was told, but she sat at the end farthest away from the man and the woman pawing at each other.

Damien and the man at the counter mumbled something, and the man looked over Damien’s shoulder at her. His dark eyes widened momentarily before constricting into a squinty smile. He dangled a key in front of Damien’s nose. When Damien reached for it, the man snatched it away from him, laughing hysterically. Damien laughed too, but with a final “Give me that!” he managed to pull it out of the man’s grasp.

“Come on,” he said, wrapping his arm around her shoulders as she rose hesitantly from the couch.

The room was dark and covered in the same wood paneling as the lobby. It was also freezing. Kaki’s breath materialized in the air like a puff of smoke as Damien flipped the wall switch and the fluorescent, overhead lights flickered and glowed.

She stood just to the side of the door, frozen, as Damien moved with expert ease around the room, turning on the television and the heat. He held a brown bag, and as he sat down on the creaky bed covered in an ugly, lime-green bedspread, he began pulling miniature bottles from it—a mixture of clear and brown ones—and lined them up on the dusty nightstand.

He looked at her briefly. “What are you doing just standing there?”

She shrugged, nearly paralyzed, and focused on a black-ink tattoo on his neck that said Devil-Dog. “I’m cold,” she croaked.

Damien grabbed some kind of container from the long chest of drawers that held the television. “It’ll warm up in here in a minute. Go ahead and take your coat off. I’m running down the hall for some ice.”

As soon as the door closed behind him, Kaki looked around the room. This was her chance. She could just run. She could run right out that door. Or she could climb out the window. She knew what she was there for, and with the way things were going it seemed pretty certain what she thought was going to happen would happen. But Damien hadn’t said he loved her, and she wasn’t even sure if she loved him. She liked him a lot. The idea of being with him had filled her mind for the last few weeks, and she’d fantasized about him some. But now that it came right down to actually doing it? This wasn’t how she’d pictured it happening at all. Not in an old, ugly, dusty motel room smelling of stale smoke and mildew.

Damien returned a few minutes later with the tan container full of ice, and remembering she was supposed to take off her coat, Kaki shrugged out of it, allowing it to fall onto a chair.

“What’s your pleasure?” He motioned to the bottles on the nightstand.

Her stomach rolled at the idea of drinking. She felt as if she might throw up. “I don’t know.” Her voice trembled.

“Whiskey or vodka?”

She shrugged. “Whatever you’re having.”

“Well, I’m a whiskey man. My dad drank whiskey, his dad drank whiskey, and his dad’s dad drank whiskey. I like tequila, too, but I didn’t get any of that.”

“I’ll have whiskey, I guess.”

The trembling moved into her legs as she watched him pour the brown liquid over the ice. He filled two glasses and handed her one of them. “Come on.” He patted the bed beside him. “Sit down here. I won’t bite.”

Kaki wanted to talk. She wanted to talk more about his father and his father’s father. “Did you grow up here?” She took a sip of the cold liquid that stung the back of her throat like the medicine she used to take for coughs.

“I’ve lived all over.”

“Where’d you go to high school?” She stalled for time, even as his hand rested on her thigh, and then slid her knee-length black skirt upward.

Damien downed his drink in three quick gulps and turned to look at her. His breath was sweet from the whiskey as he leaned toward her. “Too much talking.” He lifted the glass from her hands. She heard the ice clink against the sides of the glass as he shoved it onto the nightstand next to his.

He pushed her back onto the bed.

She didn’t protest. She did everything he wanted. And afterward, she wanted to forget all about it.