Recovering Read Free

constantly
control, and the energy sucking thing…I hate thinking about that. Thank the
Lord that she’s not a full angel. Otherwise I’m not sure if we would be able to
help her keep the hunger under control.
     I realize
that no one’s said anything for a full minute. The cold digs through all the
layers of my clothes and injects ice into my bones. And Maya won’t get that
look off her face.
     “You’re
doing it again,” I tell her and hit the safety on my gun automatically, even
though the clip is empty.
     “Doing what?”
    “Looking at
me like that.”
    “No I’m not,”
she huffs. “Like what?”
    I almost
laugh. She looks so much like Tarren when she frowns, the way her eyes crinkle
and her mouth gets tight.
     I shrug. “I
don’t know, like you want to put me in a bubble and feed me chicken soup all
day long.”
     That frown
sets a little deeper, and she reaches up to tuck some strands of reddish brown
hair behind her ear. It’s getting long, the ends touching her shoulders.
     “How have
you been eating?” she asks.
     Yep, here we
go with the nanny routine. I walk past her into the house to get out of the
cold. I need to play nice. I know that. Maya cares. That’s a good thing.
     “So, how
were the strip clubs?” I ask as I drop carefully onto the couch. My ribs don’t
take too kindly to the movement, but I manage not to wince like a sissy.
     “Dirty,
depressing,” Maya says. I don’t know if she’s talking about the strip clubs or
the house as her eyes take a tour of the room and her nose wrinkles up in
displeasure.
     Right, I
haven’t exactly been Mr. Clean these past few weeks they’ve been gone.
Actually, I think I’ve been Mr. Clean’s evil duplicate from an alternate
universe. Just need the goatee.
     “Damn,” I
tell her, “God hates me. You have any idea how long I’ve been waiting for a mission
that involves strip clubs?” I think longingly of all the gyrating female flesh
that I missed.
    “It was
gross,” Maya replies. “Most of them were total sinkholes.”
     Ah, my
favorite kind. The shittier the club, the more amenable the women. You’d be
amazed at how attentive an over-the-hill stripper can be when you treat her
nice. She’ll teach you things the Kama Sutra wouldn’t dare publish.
     “Now you’re
just rubbing it in,” I groan.
     Maya is
quiet. I follow her gaze to the small, brown pine tree that she dragged out of
the forest last month. She’d even strung up some lines of popcorn to try and
turn it into a Christmas tree.
     It was a
nice thought, but we haven’t done the Christmas thing ever since Mom got sick.
Tarren is against celebrating of any kind, and me, I don’t know. Mom died in
December. So did Tammy. After that all the fake cheer of Christmas carols
always seemed mocking. Plus, it’s not like we had anyone but each other to
share the holiday with, and Tarren has so little Christmas cheer that Ebenezer
Scrooge would consider him a buzzkill.
    The tree is
sad as piss. All its needles are brown from the water I never gave it. Some
cling on, but most have found their way onto the carpet. I need to throw it
out. I’ve had this thought probably a hundred times. I can’t stand looking at
it, but here it still is. Alone. Abandoned. Shriveling.
     Which
reminds me… I stamp out my blunt on the coffee table mostly just to be an ass. “So,
I see that Tarren’s found another excuse not to be here,” I mention casually.
     Maya turns
to me the moment I open my mouth. The speed and grace of her movements sometime
remind me of a cat. It’s in these tiny ways, almost too fast for the eye to
see, that I realize again and again that she’s different. Something beyond
human.
     “He left.
He…just left,” she says and then launches into a bizarre story of a phone call,
a mysterious voice on the other end asking for Tarren by name, and Tarren’s
response, which was pretty much to take our medical kit and walk off into the
sunset on a secretive