Page 49 of Looking Grimm

Isha leaned forward and set the rag on the low coffee table. Then she drew closer, pressing her body fully against mine. She was warm and smelled like cloves and something else that tickled my nose. I started to shift away, but she draped her arm around my shoulders and tethered me to her.

I met her eyes at last, swallowing past the lump that had formed in my throat. She felt good. She looked good, too. Of course, I’d noticed, but I didn’t think too much about it. She was a grown woman, after all, as old as some schoolteachers I’d had.

“You know what I do, don’t you dear?” she asked. “What we do here?”

The angle of her gaze indicated the floor above us, an area I had yet to visit. I’d heard the men bragging, saying crude things and words I’d been told I should never use to describe a woman. I understood why they came here week after week, and I also understood they left happier than when they arrived, like when they got drunk but different.

I nodded mutely.

She touched my face again. Her fingers were soft and smooth as they caressed my cheek. “Would you like to dothose things?”

I blanched as something tingled low in my belly. Breaths crowded in, making me feel a little dizzy as I stammered through a reply. “I haven’t ever… you know.”

Her burgundy lips formed a smile. “Of course, you haven’t. You weren’t a man, then. But you are now. You should enjoy the things men do.” She spoke like it was a secret, the dirty kind.

Leaving my face, she slipped her hand between my thighs and curled her fingers around the bulge in my jeans.

I didn’t feel like a man; I felt too much the opposite. More like a small, helpless child, overpowered and overruled at every turn by people meaner and more domineering than I could ever be. A man wouldn’t have bruises on his face from Grimm’s angry fist. He wouldn’t spend his days hungry and his nights in bed while his little brother sobbed against him, crying for Mom and Dad.

Donovan needed me to be a man. I needed to be, so I didn’t have to worry about the other, real men hurting us anymore.

Sweat prickled at my temples. I glanced upward as though I could see through the ceiling to the area above. Then I remembered Donovan, a few feet away and possibly watching this whole scene. He’d been joined by another woman who worked here, a redhead in a black bra and panties. She had tugged my brother onto her lap and listened while he explained his drawings.

Isha must have caught my attention drifting because she leaned into my line of sight. “Don’t worry about Donnie. My girls will take care of him while I take care of you.” She stood, then turned and held out a hand for me to take. “Comealong, little love. Let me teach you some things.”

Half an hour dragged by in tense quiet. Every second was haunted by memories of this place and of time spent with Isha. I needed to focus on Grimm, but there was a more immediate enemy right in front of me.

“Did you ever care at all, or did you just fuck me because Grimm told you to?” The thought slipped out of me, full of spite.

Isha stared back blankly. “What brought that on?”

It started that night when she led me to this very room and gave me an education in meaningless connection, in exploitation. She taught me things, certainly. She showed me how to give all of myself to someone without giving anything at all. Or maybe I’d given so much over the years that I had nothing left, even for myself.

I laughed bitterly, thinking of Nash confessing his feelings for me, and how the idea of something as genuine as a relationship felt foreign. I should have been desperate for it, lonely as I was, but love was a language I didn’t speak.

“You really messed me up,” I told Isha, almost laughing at how pathetic it all was. “You trained me like I was one of your whores. Now I don’t know how to be anything else.”

She stared at me, unmoved. If anything, she looked a bit perturbed. “I didn’t train you or teach you anything you didn’t want to know.”

When I opened my mouth to argue, she clucked her tongue in a call for silence. Our cigarettes were both spent,and now she busied her hands fidgeting with a tassel on the corner of an embroidered throw pillow.

“You’re a powerful man, Fitch,” she mused. “You were powerful then.”

The way I came into the gang was no mystery. I was sure Grimm spread the word to Isha of exactly how dangerous I was. An accidental killer at only fourteen. But that accomplishment—and I hesitated to call it that—never earned me respect. Only fear.

My head shook long before I spoke. “I was a kid who lost everything. Then you took all that I had left.”

I consented to all of it. Grew to ask for and expect it. I even learned to enjoy it. Looking back, though, I realized Isha was no better than Avery, leveraging her age and authority over me. I didn’t really have a choice, only the illusion of it.

“Igaveyou experience,” Isha argued, visibly bristling. “I gave you pleasure without unnecessary entanglements.” She pulled the pillow to her chest like a shield. “Love makes people weak, and you needed to be strong.”

I pushed off the bed and stood, trying to settle the angry energy humming inside me.

“Grimmwanted me to be strong,” I said. “I just wanted to survive.”

Isha caught my gaze while maintaining a self-righteous smirk. “You did better than that.”

That only showed how little she knew because I was objectively worse. Worse for having to grow up too soon and being defined by what other people wanted to make of me. And I wasn’t strong, either. Not lately.

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