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I ignored that fact. I focused on Maya’s smiling face instead. She wriggled in my arms, causing my muscles to tense. I placed her back on her feet and watched her as she ran the water between her fingers. I was lucky to find something big and deep enough to use as a pool. Being close to industrial places and some money always helped achieve what you wanted to be done.
“It’s time you learn how to swim,” I told her.
It was still the best weekend I’d ever had. I’d never laughed as much as I did that weekend. We both were young, carefree, and enjoying life in each other’s company. Our life caused us to be on the same wavelength, even with the eight-year age difference. With a fucked up life like ours, it was hard to be young. For me, it worked to my advantage since girls liked the troubled, brooding, mysterious type. They were ready to spread their legs for me, but no one was interested in really getting to know me. And after Maya, I used their weakness to make money. I wasn’t proud to admit that I madmoney for funding the club by fucking women for money, but it helped me to get money for my club and focus on something else instead of obsessing over someone I couldn’t have. When money wasn’t a concern anymore, the club was everything to me. After Maya, I had never spent a weekend off. My weekends were booked with the club, I was either working or fucking. And every day I was obsessing over Maya, my baby girl, creating my own hell of suffering.
I was the Dante in my own Inferno and Maya was my sweetest hell. We’d both been burning alone in the same fire, but now I was determined to turn to ashes with her in my arms.
CHAPTER 21
ZEKE
With determination in my steps, I opened Maya’s door. She didn’t notice me. She was sitting on the floor, facing the window. By the way, she leaned over something, I knew she was sketching. I saw the earbuds on her ear, attached to the iPhone I bought her. Her laptop was still sitting where I left it on her nightstand last night, unpacked. The note I left on it was creased. But at least she liked the phone, and she kept the sketchbook.
Walking toward her, I looked at her sketch from above.
I didn’t know if she saw my silhouette or if she sensed the fight between the right and wrong in my heart, but she looked up.
I couldn’t take my eyes away from her sketch. In her drawing, I was standing, tall and big like I was a god. The lines of my figure were black and bold. And at my feet, there was Maya. Kneeling. Weak. Desperate as she tried to reach out to me, like a beggar with her head bowed, shoulders slouched. The lines of her body were almost invisible, just a ghostly caress of pencil on the paper. She was see-through, invisible.
“Maya,” I breathed out.
Like my voice broke the spell, she rushed to close the sketchbook but kneeling next to her. I pulled her into my arms. The only reaction from her was the gasp that escaped her lips.
“Talk to me, Maya. Please. Talk to me. I’m going mad, baby girl. Just tell me how to make this better. Guide me to make us okay again,” I begged her desperately, hugging her tighter and tighter like I could bring her soul back from where I pushed it away when I left her.
She didn’t try to push me away, she didn’t touch me. She was in my arms, but she was far away from me. Leaning back, I looked at her face. Her eyes were closed tightly, her teeth were worrying her bottom lip. She was trying to hold her pain and probably anger inside.
“Do you hate me this much?” I whispered. “Do you hate me that much you won’t even let me see your pain or anger?”
Seconds passed as I waited for a reaction from her. I was going to accept whatever she would be willing to give me. But she gave nothing. I looked at her as she kept hiding away from me. Just when I was about to give up, she opened her eyes.
Those big dark eyes were shining with tears. Her chin trembled when she released her bottom lip from her teeth’s grasp, and she finally whispered,
“I hate that I can’t hate you.”
CHAPTER 22
MAYA
I didn’t know why, but after dinner, I didn’t go to my room. Instead, grabbing my sketchbook, I sat on the floor in front of the window where city lights played before my eyes.
Zeke was in the kitchen, putting away the dinner mess probably. With the clinking noises coming from there, I let my pencil move on the paper freely. At this moment, it was only the blank page and pencil dancing on it. It was like a hypnotic process for me. Most of the time I didn’t even realize what I was drawing until it was done. Sketching was the spell I had never fought against. As my hand moved over the blank page, it was my heart that did the talking, not my fingers. I was lost in it, I didn’t even notice Zeke coming closer to me until he sat on the floor next to me. He leaned against the window, stretching his long legs in front of him. I could feel his eyes on me, but I refused to look at his face.
“I own a special club,” he said out of the blue. It caught me off guard, I stopped drawing for a moment before I could catch myself.
“It’s where I spent most of my time, it’s where I could find some kind of peace. I created that place from scratch,” he added.
I knew he was looking at me. His stare was like an X-ray, going through my skull. But I kept my head down and went over the same pencil line I did since I couldn’t focus on anything else but his words.
“I earned so much money after… the last two years,” he corrected himself. I knew what he was going to say. After he left me.
“I’m not proud of the way I earned money, but it worked in the end.”
He sipped from the amber colored liquid before continuing, “I don’t really like this place. It’s not warm, and I know you feel the same. It feels soulless, but that’s why I bought it. Soulless, just like me.”
He stopped talking then. My heart was doing something I couldn’t explain. It was beating fast one moment and stopping the next. I wanted to shake him both to make him continue and to shout at him that he wasn’t soulless, but instead, I kept pretending to be nonchalant, and the silence grew between us again.
“I shouldn’t have left you,” he finally said. His voice wasn’t above a whisper as he added, “I thought I was doing the right thing. Not for me, but for you. I died when I left you, Maya. It was the last thing I wanted to do. But I didn’t want to shred your life apart.”
