Page 85 of False Idols

No one can stop The Reaper.

32

BEAU

Nevaeh leans close and looks into the pan that I’ve got pancake batter in. There’s another pan going with bacon. I have just beat the shit out of a half a dozen eggs in a bowl that I’ll cook once the bacon is done. The lake house is stocked just the way I thought it would be. There’s fresh fruit and meat in the fridge along with a case of beer. When I went into the walk-in pantry, I didn’t miss the two handles of Jack Daniels sitting right next to the bottled water.

Looks like my dad has been making more use out of the lake house than I realized. I bet if I went downstairs to the wine cellar that would be fully stocked too.

“I never pegged you for a cook,” she says.

“I wasn’t. Not before prison,” I tell her and flip the pancake.

“What?” she asks and blinks at me in surprise, but I get it. Prison isn’t exactly where someone thinks you’ll learn to cook.

“They have culinary courses in prison,” I tell her and her mouth drops open.

“They let you take cooking classes?!”

“Like I said, it was a culinary course,” I stress those two words and then nod, “and yes, they did. I was the best fucking student in that class.” I slide the last pancake onto the stack I’ve already made and start taking out the bacon.

“Sorry, sorry,” Nevaeh says and holds her hands out at her sides in a mock curtsey with a grin on her face, “culinary classes.”

“That’s better.”

“Do I need to call you “'Chef” or something?” she asks.

I roll my eyes as I pour the eggs into the pan and point at the cabinet to the right of the sink. “Get the plates out and set the table.”

Nevaeh gives me a mock salute and bounds off towards the cabinet. “Yes, Chef!”

I laugh and work on the eggs. “Shut it.”

Nevaeh laughs on her way into the dining room with her hands full of plates, but I hear her say, “Yes, Chef!” once she’s in the next room.

* * *

Breakfast is good. It’s not the food that makes it good though, it’s Nevaeh. I could be eating glass and a morning with Nevaeh would make me say it was the best breakfast of my life. I’m surprised by how normal she makes me feel. I haven’t felt this way in a long time. Years. Whatever light Nevaeh carries around inside of her has pushed the darkness back enough that the noise in my head is quiet.

I feel like the kid that went to prison thinking he would be out in a month. The one that was sure the cops would find who really killed his girlfriend. The one that didn’t know what it felt like to stab someone to death, using a piece of a chain link fence I spent every day for a week working on sharpening when I was outside in the yard.

I can be the dumb kid that doesn’t have blood on his hands. I can be the one that didn’t hurt Nevaeh or take from her what she would have given me if I’d just asked. I can be the man that might have noticed her with enough time and fallen in love with her like a normal fucking person.

I’m not normal though. Neither is Nevaeh. I fell in love with her with anger and revenge turning the thought of her into a weapon. But all of that calmed the second she said she loved me. All the anger, all the spite, every last bit of my drive for revenge crumbled to fucking dust. As twisted as my obsession and love for her is, as much as I know that I can’t rely on myself to give her the happily-ever-after she deserves, it doesn’t matter.

She’s mine and she’ll take what I give her. Right now, that’s the side of me that’s decent and kind, the one that lives to hear her laugh and notices how she takes her coffee. That’s the side she gets right now. Nevaeh welcomes it as easily as she has the darkness rooted deep in me.

“Can we go for a walk?” Nevaeh asks.

We’ve been out by the pool. I’ve been walking the perimeter and checking my phone for time since that’s all it’s good for out here with the shitty reception that keeps going in and out. I spread a towel down for Nevaeh so she could read by the pool. We’ve been out here for an hour or so and I bitched at her to put sunscreen on, but the storm clouds that started rolling in half an hour ago blocked out the sun enough that I let it slide when she pushed back. There’s a rumble and I look up.

“Looks like rain,” I say. “I dunno. Maybe we'll stick around here.”

Nevaeh sighs and throws herself back onto the towel she’s laying on. “I need to move. Please? I’m so bored and I can’t even text Sunny because of the reception.”

I hesitate. The cops that are assigned to us should be coming by in forty or so minutes. They’ve been making sure to make their route every hour to hour and a half. I just saw Marcus, he’s the younger of the two and more easy going than his partner. If I time Nevaeh’s walk right, we can get back before it rains and meet Marcus at the front of the house.

“All right, but just for a while. They’ll be by to check in and they’ll lose their shit if they don’t know where we are.”

---