Page 2 of Our Blood, Our Pain

An hour later after being processed at the local station, they allow me my phone call, which I tentatively take as the buzz from the booze earlier has officially left my system, replaced by nausea and apprehension of putting this shit at my mom’s door. Again. You’d never have guessed I’m a twenty-two year old adult.

Biting the bullet, I make the call, hoping that she is awake and not too pissed.

“Hello?” Mom answers, voice slightly groggy from sleep.

“Hey, Mom.”

“You’re fucking kidding me. You’ve been arrested again, haven’t you?”

“How’d you know that?”

“Call it intuition or call it a habit.” She sighs into the phone. Tears fill my eyes, which I put down to exhaustion. I’m a fuck up. Who would be proud to call me their son? I want help. I need help, but I’m too afraid to ask for it.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper, fighting the urge to regress into a child and cry hysterically.

“I know, but I can’t do this anymore. I’m calling your Uncle Jules. See if he can help get you out of this mess.”

My body goes rigid at that name that hasn’t been uttered for months, maybe even years. Jules. I don’t even want to entertain his name being spoken, but the excitement that’s swirling in my stomach, similar to a washing machine, needs to get the message. We don’t think of Uncle Jules anymore. He isn’t my real Uncle. Jules and my mom are step siblings through marriage. I barely know him as he didn’t spend a lot of time around us, especially after we moved, only visiting a handful of times a year. But I do remember when my hormones started regarding him differently and he became an obsession. I’d just turned sixteen and he’d visited for my birthday. He then visited for Thanksgiving the same year and after that he left, he just disappeared from our lives. I was equally devastated as I was relieved. Does Mom still talk to him? She must, or why would she call him to help out? Why has she never said anything and why has he never wanted to talk to me?

“Jules? Why call him? We don’t know him and how could he ever help me?”

“I don’t know, but I’m out of options. Try and rest tonight and I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

“Okay. I love you, Mom.”

“I love you, too.”

It takes a few seconds to notice the dead dial tone on the other end of the line, signaling that she ended the call.

As I get placed back in my cell, I spend the whole night staring at the ceiling. I let the tears fall freely, wishing this would just all end, and accepting that I’m not worth shit to anyone or anything. I’m worthless—a piece of trash. My grandparents didn’t want me even before I was born so they kicked my mom out, Jules high tailed out of our lives, and now my mom is not far behind washing her hands of me. Maybe I’m the problem. I don’t add anything to society, I just aimlessly drift through life, only thinking of the consequences after I’ve done something inevitably to fuck up. It’s exhausting. I’ve never felt more alone than I do right now. Lost in the dense fog with no way out, nobody who can hear me silently beg for help.

Then the saddest thought passes through my mind, plummeting me into the dark depths of sleep that a small part of me hopes I won’t wake from. The thought that…would anyone actually miss me?

2

JULES

What a night. I love this side of the job, the interrogation, the violence, but I fucking hate clean up. I’m covered in sweat and blood, with the tangy aftertaste of the dead body left lingering on my tongue. So fucking gross. I want my shower and my bed, but Dima will flip his shit if we don’t get this done before morning.

I’ve worked with the Kozlov brothers, Dima and Lev, for years, since we were teenagers. They had a pretty chill set up going on with their drug business that has kept us all in good living. Then as time has gone on and the more notorious our names have become, that chill life has turned to multiple problems and fucking clean ups, leaving the runt jobs to fall to me and another guard, Simon. I have to be honest, I’m not loving it. Thirty years old and cleaning up this shit is not what I had planned for myself, but we’re a family in this house. I owe my life to Dima and Lev. They gave me a job and home when I had nothing. A teenager scrambling to make something of myself, because I sure as shit wasn’t going to go to college. My mom and step-dad tried their best, but we were dirt poor, living in a town where there were zero opportunities. I have an older step-sister, but my parents kicked her out when she got pregnant at eighteen. She’s ten years older than me and always looked out for me since she and her dad came into our lives when I was four years old. But as she grew older, the age gap became more noticeable when she started hanging out with boys, and not the best kind of boys my parents would have wanted for her. I didn’t see her again until I was sixteen, when I found her contact details in my mom’s old shoebox that she had hidden in her closet. I was snooping one day, looking for cash, and found the old tattered thing, shocked to see my step-sister’s name and cell number. I’d missed Jenny so much and decided to reach out. We may not be blood, but I’d always considered her my big sister. I called her and arranged to meet her in secret, along with her son, my step-nephew, Kai. It was odd having a nephew who was only eight years younger than me, but it was great having my sister back in my life, especially as life at home got harder.

The distance between myself and my parents grew after they kicked Jenny out in such a cold manner, I couldn’t get past it. Seems like they didn’t either as their indifference to my existence just pushed me further away. So predictably, I started hanging around with the wrong crowd, getting into trouble along with my friends. It’s not like I had anything else to do, plus they were a welcome distraction to keep me out of the house. After I turned eighteen, I met the Kozlovs when I got tangled up in a drug deal gone wrong. I won’t say they pitied me, as they don’t give a shit about anyone, but I think they saw themselves in me. Dima and Lev were looking for help dealing and offered me money and a home. I took that shit up without even thinking.

My mom and step-dad both died not long after I moved out, my mom first from an aneurysm, my step-dad a year later from a heart attack. It was such an odd and confusing point in my life as I felt nothing. In the years leading up to that I grieved the loss of them, their steady neglect after Jenny severed that tie. I didn’t blink an eye when they passed. The damage was done long ago, and I wasn’t the same boy, a fortress built so tightly around me that not even an atomic bomb could destroy it. People are shit. Love is bullshit. Have no expectations and nothing can disappoint you.

I’d stayed in sporadic contact with Jenny over the years, lessening when they moved away. While on the surface we appear to care for each other as siblings do, we never acknowledge that underlying tension that exists. The older I got, resentment set in on my side as the teenage me had decided that if Jenny hadn’t gotten pregnant, our family would never have blown apart. And I know she resents me to a certain extent, this perception that because I remained at home I had the perfect parents that she was so desperate to be a part of, which couldn’t be farther from the truth. Just like I know that I can’t blame her for our parents’ response to her pregnancy. Now, it’s only the occasional text around the holidays or birthdays, not like the one I received this afternoon from Jenny, asking me to call her.

“You going to Desire tonight?” Simon asks me, pulling me back from thinking about Jenny and why she’s contacted me. Desire is a strip club run by the Kozlovs, in addition to their burlesque/cabaret bar called Starlight. While Lev oversees Desire, I spend most of my time there making sure things run smoothly for the brothers. I must admit, it has its perks, with most of the dancers having sampled my dick at some point, but like anything else in life, the monotony gets old. Sex is just a release for me, and I’m selfish when it comes down to the act. I know it makes me sound like a dick, but I’ve never gotten pleasure in someone else’s enjoyment when fucking. I actually find it annoying, especially loud girls. Half the time it's fake as fuck, but that part doesn’t bother me. Sex has always felt like something was missing.

“Yeah, I need to stop by to check things over. Why? You tagging along?”

“I’m tempted. Just hope that fucker Carlos isn’t there,” Simon grumbles. Carlos took over the supply of Dima and Lev’s imports earlier this year. He spends a lot of his free time at Desire, and I’ve noticed he takes great pleasure in winding up Simon at every opportunity. Simon, for the most part, is the quietest one out of our group, but Carlos stokes a fire in Simon of such epic proportions that it’s hard not to notice.

“Come on, man. Just ignore him. The more you rise to his bait, the more he’ll do it to get a reaction from you.”

“I suppose. Let me get cleaned up, and I’ll head out with you,” he says as he puts away the hose he’s been using to clean the flooring in the holding pen. The room is now spotless, the black shiny floor sparkles, and there is no sign that anything bad happened in here. I remove my gloves and disposable overalls that we wear when doing the clean-ups and follow Simon out the door.

We don’t live in the mansion with the brothers, but we all share a single-story building that Dima built on the property grounds for us guards. It’s a decent size, and we all have our own rooms. Lev and Dima frequently discuss expanding and building individual properties for each of us on the land. There’s so much space, but it's just something they’ve never gotten around to.

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