Every night after work, I managed to take some of it home with me. Most of the time it was just grease or dirt under my nails or streaking my clothes and skin. Other times, it was all over my mind, ideas or problems Ace and I were stuck on, and I'd find my mind wandering back to them, even after we'd both knocked off for the day.
The dirt and the grease I could wash off, but the ideas stayed long after I'd gotten out of the shower to meet Bonnie at the door.
I was home before her tonight, which only ever happened when she was rostered on for the Friday and Saturday shifts. The bar she worked never stayed open late through the week, and since it was only Tuesday, I'd expected that she'd have been home, by now.
The place was rough, full of truckers and bikers and sleazy types, and they'd go there after knock off to drink and shamelessly stare at anything pretty that came along, like Bonnie. They'd drink in her beauty, like everyone else, and they'd underestimate her, like everyone else. They'd see that she was small, beautiful, and assume that made her vulnerable, or at least easy.
They were the types that there was no shortage of around Emerald, but Bonnie wasn't the same girl I'd stolen away under the cover of dark that very first night.
It was her eyes that gave away the first hint of the girl she'd become, their low burning ferocity simmering like a golden hued inferno. The uncertain dance of her timid glances had gone and been replaced with a direct and unwavering intensity that most people couldn't hold for more than a few seconds. Bonnie could handle herself just fine, without me.
I hated that she had to work there, like they'd put her on for display, only. She was something lovely that was there to be leered at, the fulfilment of every man's wish, a beacon to lure them in more closely, daring them, tempting them.
She hadn't laughed when I'd pointed it out to her, Ace and Jaquie, one night, feeling bitter, half drunk, and more than a little bit jealous.
Jaquie had suggested that it was just my fragile male ego making me see any guy who even looked at Bonnie as a threat, and I'd groped for the words to deny it.
Bonnie had pursed her lips knowingly, sympathetically, but shrugged, nonchalant.
"The extra money doesn't hurt," she'd pointed out with a self assured defiance that sang in her brighter than ever, "and I have you to come home to, so..."
It was a gentle reminder for us both, that in the end, we still had each other to go back to, that I was the only one she wanted to have. At the very end, if there was nothing, if we'd destroyed everything we'd come across since, there would still be us. She could burn the entire world to ash, and I'd be there at her back, the two of us glowing golden with the fire.
The only thing I'd hated more than Bonnie working that bar were the weeks after we'd settled in, when she wasn't working, or doing anything, for that matter.
Her grief had been like a storm, electric and unpredictable, rolling in from far away to black out the sky and turn day into the longest night. She'd fought so hard to keep it down, to outrun it, but it's breaking was inevitable, and it moved through her, full and intense.
It hit her, hard and devastating. It left a heaviness over her, drained all her energy and stole her smiles so it was all she could do to even get out of bed and get dressed. She isolated herself with her sketchbook, and would only come out if I nagged at her to.
Even in sleep it didn't spare her, and her mind would circle back to what was there at her centre; the hollow in her heart that was so heavy and obliterating that staring into her eyes was like staring into an empty abyss.
YOU ARE READING
Bonnie and Clyde
Teen Fiction'Monsters are real, as much as we want to deny their existence, and sometimes, when you close your eyes and wait for them to go away, they're still there when you open them again.' What would you do if you came home and found that your whole family...
