10. Jesus Christ
1037 Words
Harley gave him a weird look. She started to walk away to her room before he looked back at him, laying on her couch like it was his apartment. She shook her head, waving her hand as if that was enough to get of the problems coming through the door behind Silas. She made her way to her bedroom. The second she stepped in, closing the door firmly behind her, she let out the breath she’d been holding.
Her stomach ached from clenching it so tightly. The nervousness she’d been ignoring rose to the surface. Her fingers trembled. She tilted her head down. Her wavy hair created a curtain around her face. She wished she could hide from the entire world. She pressed her cold shaking palms to her flushed cheeks, shivering though she was burning from the inside out.
So many things had happened tonight that she didn’t even know where to begin. Kenzy, her cousin and closest friend, was somehow involved with a mob boss. The same mob boss that thought Harley had stolen from him and tried to kill her. She’d been f*****g kidnapped.
It didn’t feel real at all. She wished it was just a f****d up dream. But it wasn’t.
Her throat closed up as a sob wracked through her. Her shoulders shook as the sob came from her mouth. She clamped her hand over her mouth, muffling the sound, but it wasn’t enough to drown it completely out. Too distraught to stand any longer, she threw herself on her shabby twin bed. It creaked under weight, sounding like it was going to collapse at any second.
She’d been a bad person growing up. That wasn’t her fault. The family she’d been born into was dirty poor, horrible criminals, and hateful people that didn’t want anyone else to have a better life than themselves. Her mother had been adamant to make Harley’s life a living Hell. If she hadn’t gotten out there when she had, running away at fifteen, taking odd jobs, and scamming people, she would have ended up dead in a ditch, a drugged up w***e, or married to a man that beat her and her children.
That was the life she’d been running from. Kenzy knew just what Harley had gone through because she’d gone through it as well. They’d been best friends. There wasn’t anything Harley wouldn’t do for Kenzy. It was a giant shock to see Kenzy part of the same people that were going to kill Harley. It was unfathomable.
Harley curled into a ball under the covers. She cried her eyes out, wishing that her sweet cousin wasn’t doing this at her own volition, until she fell asleep.
***
Her eyes were swollen and almost glued shut by crust. She let out a groan as she rolled over, almost off the bed, and hit her arm on the small side table that looked like it was about to crumble into dust.
“Ow!” She hissed at the pain, covering her elbow with her hand as she clenched her teeth.
A few seconds went by and the pain turned into a small ache. She stared up at the ceiling. She studied the water stains and many holes that littered the small space. It hadn’t hit her until now that she was living in a s**t hole. Honestly, she still viewed this was a hundred times better than the place she’d grown up in. At least she had her own things, her own bed, and nothing smelled like piss or vomit.
It was really sad that that was the bottom line.
She got out of bed, rubbing the back of her head as she stumbled into the hall. The morning like filtered in. She would have been worried about being late for work, but she’d missed yesterday and the day before. Her boss was an asshole so she probably lost her job. With how things were going in her life, she wasn’t really that worried about it. Thankfully, she was frugal with her money and had a month of expenses saved up. She attributed it to growing up poor and being paranoid.
She made it to the bathroom where she splashed her face with cold water. She shivered as the ice droplets ran down her neck and under her shirt. She looked at herself in the mirror. There were dark circles under her eyes, so dark that it looked like she’d drawn them on with a permanent marker.
“Are you done mourning yet?”
Harley jumped, slamming her arm into the sink. “Jesus Christ!”
She whirled around. Silas was leaning against the doorframe. His hair was neatly groomed and his clothes looked like he’d just put them on. He didn’t look like he’d slept at all which Harley figured that meant he didn’t sleep at all. He stared back at her with a small smirk on his lips and arms crossed over his broad chest.
“Not him, thankfully,” he said. He raised his brows and pushed off of the frame. “I’m quite offended too. Jesus is too cheery and boring of a person to be mistaken for me.”
Harley glowered. “I’d hoped you weren’t real.”
She had hoped that the entire night before had been a f****d up dream. Maybe her cousin sold her out to a mob boss for something she didn’t do. That was plausible, but for her to make a deal with a—was Silas a demon or a fallen angel? Harley wasn’t sure about that but she was sure that it could have been her mind being fried by trauma to think she was being saved by a man with black wings.
“Sorry.” He disappeared and then reappeared on the other side of Harley. She jolted out of the way, heart racing. “But I’m as real as they come.”
Harley shook her head. “No. I’m not f*****g crazy. Fuck.”
She ran out of the bathroom.
“Hey! Where are you going?”
She heard Silas coming after her, his loud footsteps echoing in the barely furnished apartment. She ran to her bedroom and slammed the door.
- Writer
