Changing Affection

Chapter Ten🌶

Ezra finished cutting the deer up and salting the meat. He carried the meat into the cabin and placed it in the freezer. He stared at his hands which were covered in blood. As a kid, his stomach used to turn and threatened to let go of the food inside, but now, he didn't feel a thing about blood. There was no sadness, no remorse, nothing. There wasn't even happiness whenever he looked at the thick red blood. 

He walked over to the sink and washed away the blood, hoping to bring back some kind of emotion into him. The only thing right now that can bring any kind of emotion to him was Aubrey. He thought that maybe that's what the gang had done to him. Ezra had done so many different jobs in the past that required him to deal with blood. The gang had made him cold-hearted towards these problems. He eventually had no problem torturing someone. He never felt guilty. He didn't feel anything whenever he had to torture or kill anyone. 

Ezra shook his head and sighed. He felt like a horrible person. He felt dirty and disgusting, he was unable to even look at himself in the mirror. Being almost two weeks away from the gang has shown him what life should be like for him. What it's like to feel something. What it's like to be next to someone who knows what you are but isn't afraid like they should be. 

He turned his head to look at Aubrey. She was sitting on the bed watching the news channel. He smiled as he remembered her chastising him about getting his hunting knife too close to his hand. Eventually, he had to tell her to go inside, or he would cut his hand. 

Aubrey looked up and connected her eyes with Ezra's. "What?"

Ezra turned his head back to the sink and shrugged his shoulders. "Nothing."

He heard Aubrey sigh. "You can't always keep in your feelings, Ezra. I don't know what they taught you when you were with the Stranglers, but sometimes you have to show feelings. That means you have to talk to me." 

"Aubrey, sometimes that's hard for someone like me." He turned off the faucet and grabbed a towel to dry his hands. "Sometimes, being where I grew up, you have to turn yourself into a cold person."

"Why?"

"So, you don't feel what you're doing to others." Ezra looked up at her. "So, you don't feel the guilt after beating someone to death. You have to turn all emotions off. You can't have any." He sighed. "Aubrey, I've done some horrible things-"

"I know," she interrupted. "You're Jearon's, right-hand man. You do the dirty work that he doesn't want to do. I know what goes on in a gang more than you realize."

Ezra grimaced. "You do?"

Aubrey nodded.

"It's not any knowledge from what those movies you say you watch told you?" Ezra smirked as he walked over to her, trying to bring the tension in the room down. 

Aubrey chuckled as she shook her head. "No. My father, before he started his business, was a police officer when I was little. I remember my mother telling me to go upstairs when my father came home and for a while, I never understood why." She looked up at Ezra and gave him a small smile when he sat next to her. "One day, I hid on the staircase and listened to my parent's conversation. That day, I saw my dad bleeding. As mom was cleaning his wound, he told her about what happened. He had been working undercover with gangs for a while I suppose. That's why he couldn't go to the hospital. He wasn't going to risk it. It was from him that I secretly learned what it was like to be inside a gang. What they do, how they talk, almost everything. Except for one thing."

"And what would that one thing be?" Ezra asked.

Aubrey looked him over. "If they are so cold, and have no emotions, how is it that they become overprotective of the one person they care about?"