Nina Blake learned to fake it a long time ago.
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Nina, The Violinist
Nina Blake learned to fake it a long time ago.
Along with her affection and her orgasms, she learned to fake her conditioning into the perfect housewife. She learned to fake that her hands didn’t still yearn for the strings and the bow of her violin, that she wasn’t looking for any window of opportunity to flush out the clump of cells that’d been fucked into her, that she didn’t want to slide the blade of the cake knife across her captor’s throat and watch him bleed out on the floor…
She remembers a scene from a crime show she saw a long time ago, where a guy’s throat was cut open to expose his vocal cords and the neck of a cello was lodged in his open mouth. She recalls the criminal profiler on that show re-enacting the scene in his head, sliding a bow across the strings in the dead guy’s throat, drawing out the same deep, sonorous tones of a real cello. It was grotesque and beautiful all at once.
Nina isn’t sure if she’d be capable of that. Not even as she grips the blade of the knife in one hand.
Someone rings the doorbell outside and her shoulders tense.
Cautiously, Nina rises to her feet, one hand still holding the knife in a death grip behind her back, the other supporting her swollen belly, and tiptoes toward the front door. She runs through all the possibilities in her head as she grasps the doorknob – if it’s a cop, she’ll invite him inside, offer him snacks, lull him into a false sense of security, then attack from behind; if it’s the man who abducted her, she’ll stab him in the heart right there on the doorstep. The one outcome she’s not prepared for, however, is the girl in borrowed clothes standing there, glancing in either direction anxiously, and Nina breathes a sigh of relief.
“Oh! Hey,” the girl chuckles, sweeping her hair out of her eyes, the colour bright red and artificial in comparison to Nina’s natural amber waves. She’s a Brooklyn girl, Nina notices from her accent. “Sorry, I know it’s late, I just—”
“No, no, not at all!” Nina smiles, not quite sure herself if she’s faking it. “Come on inside, it’s freezing out there!”
The distinction faded away a long time ago.
As the girl gratefully steps into the house, Nina leads her into the kitchen and replaces the knife on the counter, letting her guard down ever so slightly. “I feel like I know you from somewhere, but I’m not quite sure,” she begins as she heads over to the fridge.
“I dunno, maybe Goodwives? Y’know, the supermarket?” says the girl. “I’m Rachel. Rachel Martinez.”
As Nina turns to look at Rachel over her shoulder she realises she does recognise her after all. She’d been forced into the same bullshit disguise as some of the other women in this town, but somehow she’s made it out, she’s broken free, and hopefully she won’t be the last. Nina opens the fridge, takes out a can of Peach La Croix and hands it to Rachel, who accepts gratefully. “Nina Blake, from Upstate New York,” Nina replies, finally shaking off her facade. “Good to finally meet you, at least without that creep hovering around you all the time.”
“Really?” Rachel says, before she continues with a cheeky smirk, “Well, I’m from Utica, and I never heard anyone use the phrase ‘steamed hams’.”
“Oh, not in Utica, no, it’s an Albany expression,” Nina giggles, recalling that familiar phrase that would always get brought up whenever she spoke about her hometown. She never thought she’d ever hear it again. She doesn’t remember the last time she ever laughed this loud with anybody else.
Wiping away tears of mirth from her eyes, Rachel finally cracks open the can of La Croix and takes a sip. “Fuck, I’m so glad I found you normal,” she continues. “Like, it’s literally so scary being dragged back into your own body, and I hate having to force it on everyone else.”
“I know what you mean,” Nina sighs, reaching into the fridge for a La Croix of her own and pulling the tab. “But, y’know, given the choice, would you rather live happily in a prison, or be dragged out to freedom kicking and screaming? I made my decision a long time ago.”
She punctuates her statement with a long sip of her drink, savouring the sensation of the cool fizzy liquid pouring down her throat.
“Uh, hey, what’s that tattoo on your arm?” Rachel pipes up, pointing toward the design in question on Nina’s left forearm. Nina blinks, glances over at it to remind herself it’s still there, then smiles to herself before turning back to face Rachel. “It’s from the Air Suite by Bach!” she beams proudly. “It’s the song that made me wanna start playing the violin.”
Rachel rests her chin on the heel of her hand, eyebrows raised in recognition. “Isn’t that the song from Evangelion?” she grins. “My girlfriend really likes that show. I watched it with her a few times, but I still didn’t get it.”
“You mean that weird Freudian anime show from the 90s?” Nina chuckles, taking another sip of her drink. “A lot of people tell me they know Bach from that, but I—”
The door pounds violently. Nina jolts out of her skin.
“SUSAN!!” a man’s voice – his voice – bellows from outside. “LET ME IN!!!”
He’s drunk again. Nina tiptoes carefully back toward the knife resting on the counter and picks it up slowly as the man outside continues to roar.
“Fucking BITCH, I said LET ME IN— don’t make me ask again, god DAMN IT!!” A few more pounds at the door. “Let me the FUCK IN! CUNT!!”
For a moment Nina glances back at Rachel, who nods at her in understanding, and draws a deep breath as she goes to open the door.
“Sus—”
Jeremy Claybrook’s eyes are wide and his jaw is slack. He glances down slowly, and Nina’s gaze follows – she jumps back in shock at the sight of the deep stab wound in her captor’s chest, the blade of the knife somehow having bypassed his ribcage and punctured his lung. He stumbles into the hallway, trying to speak but only managing faint wheezes of breath, coughing up blood onto the carpeted floor, before he collapses to his knees as the life fades from his eyes, then finally slumps to the ground, stone dead.
Rachel rushes out of the kitchen and into the hallway, her gaze following Nina’s toward the body at her feet, a pool of Cabernet Sauvignon slowly spreading outwards from the centre and staining the carpet fibres beneath. “I… I—” Nina begins, the knife falling from her grasp, before Rachel grasps at her shoulders urgently.
“I’ll take care of this,” Rachel says breathlessly. “You pack a bag and head for the train station! Hurry!”
Nina nods in understanding, then hurries up the stairs as much as her pregnant body will allow, ducks into the master bedroom, and grabs a suitcase from underneath the bed, carelessly stuffing clothes and toiletries inside before snapping it shut. She suddenly recalls a secret compartment somewhere in one of the bedside tables – remembers glancing over at it while Jeremy held her down and fucked her so roughly she thought he might tear her pussy in two – and fumbles around blindly until she finds a handgun and several thousand dollars in cash.
She hides them both in the suitcase.
When she descends the stairs again Nina doesn’t expect to see Rachel still there, but mercifully enough, she is, tossing aside the knife and rolling up the body in a rug. She pulls Rachel up to her feet, takes her face in her hands and kisses her on the forehead, then stutters out a quick “thank you” before bolting down the street with the suitcase grasped tightly in her hand.
Nina realises she didn’t think to ask what Rachel was going to do with the body. She also realises she doesn’t care.
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