CHAPTER FIVE

Sarai


I take the concrete stairs two at a time, my bloody hands gripping the painted metal railing, until I make it to the bottom floor. A red EXIT sign lies out ahead. I dash across the dimly-lit hallway where just above me a long, fluorescent light flickers making the stairway all the more ominous. Thrusting both hands on the elongated door handle, I give it one hard push and the door opens up fully into a back alley. A man in a suit is sitting on the hood of a car smoking a cigarette when I run out into the open.

I stop cold in my tracks.

He looks at me.

I look at him.

He notices the blood on my hands and then glances at the door and then back at me.

“Go,” he urges, nodding toward the dumpster to my right.

I know I don’t have time to be confused, time to ask him why he’s letting me go, but I do it anyway.

“Why are you—?”

“Just go!”

I hear footsteps echoing through the stairwell behind the door.

I thank the man with my eyes and run around the dumpster, down the alley and away from the restaurant. A gunshot sounds seconds after I round the corner and I hope it’s just that man pretending to shoot at me.

I stay out of the open, running behind buildings in the cover of darkness, as much as my high-heeled shoes allow me. When I feel far enough away for time to stop, I hide behind another dumpster and step out of the shoes. I take off my blonde wig, chucking it inside the dumpster.

I can’t breathe. I feel sick.

Oh God, I feel sick…

I fall against the brick wall behind me, arching my back and planting my hands against my knees. I vomit violently onto the pavement, my body rigid, my esophagus burning.

Snatching my shoes from the ground, I take off running again toward the hotel, trying to hide the fact that my hands and dress are stained with blood, but I realize that’s not so easy to do. I get a few suspicious stares as I walk briskly through the front lobby, but I try to ignore them and hope no one calls the police.

Instead of further risking being seen by someone else, I take the stairs up to the eighth floor. By the time I get there and after all of the running I’ve done, I feel like my legs are going to collapse beneath me. I lean against the wall and catch my breath, both legs trembling uncontrollably. My chest hurts, as if every breath I take I’m sucking in dust and smoke and microscopic pieces of glass deep into my lungs.

The room I share with Eric is locked and I don’t have my room key. In fact…

“Oh shit….”

I throw my head back, shut my eyes and sigh miserably.

I no longer have my purse. I lost it sometime during the struggle in Hamburg’s room. My room keys. My cell phone. My gun. My knife. It’s all gone.

I pound on the door but Eric’s not inside. I didn’t expect him to be really since it’s barely eleven o’clock. But just in case I’m wrong, I try Dahlia’s door next.

“Dahl! Are you in there?” I rap on the door quickly, trying not to disturb any of the nearby rooms.

No answer.

Ready to give up, I drop my shoes on the floor and brace both hands against the wall, my head falling forward between my shoulders. But then I hear a faint clicking noise and the door to Dahlia’s room opens slowly. I look up to see her standing there.

Not stopping long enough to question the strange look on her face, I push my way inside the room just to get out of the open. Eric is sitting in the chair by the window. I notice his hair is slightly disheveled. So is Dahlia’s.

My instincts are kicking me in the back of the head, but I don’t really care about what they’re trying to tell me. I just stabbed a man in the throat and tried to kill another. I was almost raped. I just ran for my life through the back streets of Los Angeles from men with guns chasing after me. Nothing they could ever do could top that.

“Oh my God, Sarai,” Dahlia says stepping up in front of me, “is that blood?”

The strange, quiet demeanor she was displaying when I first walked in disappears in an instant when she takes stock of me in the full light of the room. Her eyes are wide and filled with concern.

Eric gets up quickly from the chair.

“You’re bleeding.” He looks me over, too. “What the hell happened?”

Dahlia’s eyes scan my clothes and my oddly pinned hair and wig cap.

“Why—ummm, why are you dressed like that?”

I look down at myself. I don’t know what to tell them, so I say nothing. I feel like a deer in headlights, but my expression remains solid and unemotional, maybe a little confused.

“You saw Matt,” Dahlia accuses and her voice begins to rise. “Fucking A, Sarai, you did, didn’t you?”

I feel her fingers curl around my upper arm.

I pull away from her and go to take my hair down from the wig cap, making my way into the bathroom. As I’m taking the bobby pins out of my hair, I notice a condom floating in the toilet.

Eric steps into the bathroom behind me. He knows I saw it.

“Sarai, I-I…I’m so sorry,” I hear him say.

“Don’t worry about it,” I answer and take the last bobby pin out, setting it on the cream-colored countertop.

I push my way past Eric and walk back into the room. Dahlia is looking right at me, shame and regret consuming her features.

“I’m—”

I put up my hand and look back and forth between them both.

“No, I’m serious,” I say, “I’m not mad.”

“What do you mean?” Dahlia asks.

Eric looks flustered. He raises a hand to the back of his head and runs his fingers through his hair.

“Look, no offense,” I say to Eric, “but I’ve been faking it with you since we got together.”

His eyes widen, though he’s trying not to let the shock and sting of my admission show too obviously. A huge part of me feels good about the truth, not for vengeance sake, but because I needed to get it off my chest. But I admit, after finding out that the two of them have been fucking each other behind my back, a small part of me is happy to offend him just the same. I guess vengeance always finds a way, even if only in the smallest of gestures.

“Faking it?”

“I don’t have time for this.” I go toward the door. “You two can have each other. No objections here. I’m not mad. I just really don’t care. I have to go.”

“Wait…Sarai.”

I turn to look at Dahlia. She’s so shocked and can hardly pull her thoughts together. After a few seconds of silence I get impatient and give her that yeah-out-with-it look.

“You’re really OK with…this?”

Wow, I really am unfit for their lifestyle. The normal lifestyle. I don’t even understand it, all this dating and best friend stuff and the cheating and competition and the head-games. That look on their faces, so blank yet so full of disbelief and question, all over a situation that, to me, really isn’t all that important. I have more serious things to worry about than this.

I sigh heavily, annoyed with their confused half-questions.

“Yes, I’m fine with it,” I say and then I turn to Eric. “I need our room key.”

I hold out my hand.

Reluctantly, he reaches into his back pocket and pulls it out. I take it from his hand and walk right out the door and head to the room next door. Eric follows behind me and tries to talk to me while I’m shoving my belongings into my suitcase.

“Sarai, I never meant—”

I turn around quickly and look him dead in the eyes. “All right, I’m going to say this once, and after that, either change the subject or go back over there with Dahlia. I couldn’t care less what the two of you do, but please don’t pull that cliché television line about how you never meant for it to happen, because…it’s just stupid.” I laugh lightly. Because really it is stupid to me. “Next thing you’ll be saying is that it wasn’t me, it was you. Geez, do you have any idea how that sounds? Is it really so unbelievable that I say I don’t care and I actually mean it? No head-games. I’m dead serious.” I shake my head and put my hands out in front of me and say, “I. Don’t. Care.”

I turn back to my suitcase and zip it up, then reach deep inside the side zipper for the key to my secret room, glad I had one extra.

“I have to go,” I say making my way back through the room and past him again.

“Where are you going?”

“I can’t say, but please listen to me, Eric. If anyone comes here looking for me, act like you don’t know who I am. Tell Dahlia the same. Pretend you’ve never seen me before. In fact, I want you both to go out for the night. Go anywhere, just…don’t hang around here.”

“Are you going to tell me what happened, why you have blood all over you? Sarai, you’re scaring the shit out of me.”

“I’ll be fine,” I say and soften my features. “Just promise me that you and Dahlia will do exactly as I said.”

“Are you ever going to tell me?”

“I can’t.”

The silence thickens between us.

Finally, I open the door and step out into the hallway.

“I guess I should be the one apologizing,” I say.

“For what?”

Eric stands in the doorway, his arms hanging loosely at his sides.

“For being with someone else in my head the whole time I was with you.” I glance down at the floor momentarily.

We look at each other for a short moment and nothing else is said between us. We know we’re both at fault. And I think we’re both relieved that everything is out in the open.

There’s nothing more to say.

I walk away down the long stretch of hallway in the opposite direction of my private room and double around the back so he doesn’t know where I’m going. When I close myself off inside the room, the only thing I can manage to do is fall over onto the bed. The exhaustion and pain and shock of everything that has happened tonight catches up to me as soon as that door closes, rushing over and through me like a wave. I fall hard against the mattress on my back. My calves hurt so bad I doubt I’ll be able to walk in the morning without limping.

I stare up at the dark ceiling until it blinks out and I drift quickly off to sleep.

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