“So,” Cy had said to him that morning, standing in the doorway (taking up the doorway) of his bedroom. “Rent?”
Kaden woke up, bleariness smeared over a layer of gritty anxiety. He hadn’t been able to sleep peacefully in Cy’s room (always forbidden, since he learned how to walk forbidden) since he moved into it, constantly waiting for Cy to come in and violently kick him out. “What?” he asked, his ears quite far behind his brain, which was shouting out! Up! Go! Run! and getting confused that Cy was just standing there and not coming at him.
“I said your rent’s due today, bitch. I want it by tonight.”
“I – but – I gave you an iPhone, and all that money – that was enough for rent for weeks -”
“That was bond. Rent’s due tonight. Something shiny, yeah?” Cy grinned at him in a way that made Kaden nauseated, and shouted over his shoulder as he walked off down the hall. “And the bathroom’s filthy! Someone absolutely destroyed the toilet! Hah!”
It was still better than leaving, Kaden told himself. He’d probably have to scrub shit off a toilet in some foster home too, and he had told Cy he’d pull his own weight when it came to money. And Aphrodite had promised him another phone, opened up her house to him whenever he wanted, her house full of expensive, beautiful things…
Kaden got dressed, trying to think rationally even though fear and apprehension and guilt did their best to unravel any clarity he managed. He couldn’t just walk into Aphrodite’s house and steal something straight away, that just felt dumb. She had to be more of a long game, slide something into his pocket on the third or forth visit, or drop a few careful hints that he wanted something else she might buy him and not think twice about. Not another phone, but something…
He had to ignore his guilt about it all. Yeah, she was incredible, beautiful, and he thought maybe he was falling in love with her, but he had to do what he had to do or Cy would kick him out.
Aphrodite wasn’t an option for tonight, though. So Kaden took himself into Manhattan, hair clean, face scrubbed, dressed in the clothes Marcie had bought him the first time they’d met. Tidy, expensive, non-distinct. He walked into Bloomingdales and poked around for a bit, found a very cute younger shop assistant looking bored at one of the makeup counters and got her chatting, got her to hold his phone and film him doing a I can’t talk right now, I’m doing hot girl shit challenge and walked out of there with a stick of By Terry mascara that they were charging almost fifty bucks for. He figured there were a couple of girls at school he could sell it to, By Terry was good shit.
He didn’t post the video, obviously. Deleted it from his phone even though it was funny. Then moved on to see what else he could get. The mascara had just been practice, really, a test of himself to make sure he could still summon the charm and the confidence to get away with it.
He wandered up to a different floor, picked up some cheap earphones and a spare phone charger and a Michael Kors watch. The watch stayed in his left hand, hidden below the counter, the charger and earphones in his right as he passed them to the shop assistant and paid, sharing stories about the snowstorm and making her laugh. He waited till he’d stepped into a bathroom stall to take a proper look at it.
The mascara had been almost $50, but they were trying to sell the watch for almost $600. Well fuck! That’d do for Cy’s something shiny.
But then again… maybe it was too shiny. If he gave Cy a watch this expensive, Cy was gonna demand something equally pricey (or moreso) next time (next week? Next month? Whenever the hell Cy felt like it?) Kaden frowned to himself as he peeled any labels he could see, ripped the packaging up into little pieces and flushed them before stashing the watch in the innermost pocket of his bag. The slim mascara tube went into his sock. The plastic parts of the packaging he crumbled up and dumped in the bathroom bin under a pile of used paper towels.
Then he started scoping the store for something more appropriate. Something worth a hundred? A hundred seemed reasonable, and more-or-less maintainable. Plus the $30 odd in cash he could get from the mascara. Then later he could pawn the watch and that was five or six weeks of rent and that’d give him enough time to try his luck with Aphrodite.
Yeah, yeah, he could do this. Kaden grinned at himself as he passed a mirror. No one ever said the Murphys weren’t cocky bastards.
Still, all the humility in the world might not have helped him realise he was being watched. Several times over.
One pair of eyes had been on him from the start. Vincent followed him through the aisles (literally – he passed through the aisles) as he fulfilled his duties to the goddess who had promised him beer, and had made good on that promise several times over.
One pair had been watching him since he palmed the mascara.
One pair only noticed right at the last, experienced eyes who’d seen a shoplifter or three in his time, could recognise the body language for its antithesis of suspicious, and saw the last flick of a hand slipping into a pocket as Kaden walked past a stand of sunglasses craning his neck like he was looking for someone he’d lost.
The security guard stepped just as casually into the aisle in front of him. “Excuse me,” he said, as Kaden stopped dead in front of him. “Can you show me what you’ve got in your pockets?”