I can feel the wrongness of what we did more efficiently than a vicious punch to the solar plexus. I’d almost prefer one. Violence is easy compared to this.
The wetness between my legs causes my underwear to cling, sparking an uncomfortable awareness of just how much I fucked up as Gracin backs away enough for my feet to drop back to the ground. Heat burns my cheeks and then drains away, leaving me cold and shaken and all too lucid.
I shift from foot to foot, trying to figure out what my next move should be and wince at the remaining ache from how wide he spread my hips to accommodate him. There aren’t words. The indecision is paralyzing.
What the hell do you do after such a monumental fuck up?
The steady throbbing ache inside me still craves to be filled, even as shame threatens to drop me to my knees. I didn’t feel this bad the first time Vic beat me. The trembling in my fingers intensifies as shock fades and horror follows in its wake.
He tips my face up with a finger, and my neck throbs in response, blood rushing to the place where his hand had been only seconds earlier. Vic has done that so many times before, but I’d never told anyone what I let him do to me. Baring my shame this way hurts deep inside, and I want to run. My eyes want to fill with tears, which I desperately try to lock up until I make it out of this room. I repeat that in a constant refrain. I’ll be okay as long as I can make it out of this room.
I open my mouth to speak, but what can I say? I literally asked for it. Whatever repercussions come from what just happened, the only one I can fault is myself. When no words come, I skirt around him, subtly adjusting my clothes, the uncomfortable warmth of mortification covering me like a blanket, even though the center of me feels so very cold.
“Tessa,” he begins, and I wince.
“Don’t.” My voice doesn’t shake as I settle into the familiar numbness. There wasn’t much mess from his bandages, so I pack up what little remains while keeping my back to him. Somehow, I know he won’t push me now. Somehow, I know he wants more than my pain, which is almost worse.
Pain, I know how to deal with. This . . . whatever it is that he makes me feel is way more dangerous.
When I turn, he’s waiting for me by the hall to the infirmary, his stance deceptively casual. Those arms, which were just around my body, are crossed over the chest I still can’t wait to explore at my leisure, despite the regret coursing through me like venom. I know full well he’s deception layered in an enigma, but my body still hungers for him.
“This can’t happen again,” I say without meeting his eyes. I hold on to his promise like a drowning woman. It is my only lifeline. My only way to make sense of the mistake I made. “You won’t try to kiss me again or come see me,” I say firmly. “I did what you wanted. Now it’s over.”
He nods, but I note he doesn’t confirm or deny that he won’t seek me out again. “Think what you want,” he says instead, “but we’re far from over.”
I don’t want to argue with him for fear of a repeat, so I bundle my things back into my kit and scurry to the storage cabinet like the little mouse he thinks I am. I feel his stare on my back the entire way, and then I spend way more time than necessary organizing and reorganizing the supplies. They’re already perfectly aligned, all the medicines and bandages in neat little rows. I envy their order when I’m in so much disarray.
I have no idea what the hell I’m doing or where the hell I belong.
I know I should be sorting through my next move and preparing to handle what comes next. But my brain is too busy racing, trying to make sense of what just happened. It’s useless anyway. There is no way to impart logic onto chaos. And that’s exactly what Gracin is.
Chaos.
Hours later, I finally have a few minutes to myself. Without thinking about it, I pull up Gracin’s name in the patient directory. The file I’d received for his patient records lists only his inmate number for security purposes, which is most definitely not the case with his official file.
His intake photo should have been utterly repulsive. I mean, who looks good in the watery blue jumpsuits they make the prisoners wear? He does, of course. His hair is longer in the picture, so they must have shaved it after he got to the prison. He faces the camera with an insolent upturn to his chin and a flinty, hard look in his eye that I’ve come to know intimately. The stark lighting makes the shadows beneath his striking cheekbones even more pronounced. Turns his face into all angles and hard edges. Just like the man, I think.
I take a deep, cleansing breath as I try to talk myself out of what I’m about to do, but it’s useless. Instead, I tear my eyes away from his picture and begin to read the notes in his file. As I do, my heart starts to thud thickly in my chest, and I bite down on one nail as my other hand taps down the report.
Gracin Kingsley.
Gracin Kingsley.
Just repeating his name now has my blood pumping.
The basic, animalistic parts of me that had enjoyed our dirty liaison react with an uncharacteristic viciousness and beg to know more.
After a quick glance at the office door, I hunch over the keyboard and continue to read. According to the birthdate on the form, Gracin is thirty-five, born and bred in Macon, Georgia, as he told me when we first met. He lived a not-so-charmed life of abuse and poverty before his parents died and he was remanded into state custody. I flip to his medical history, and my stomach plummets. He hadn’t been lying about suffering abuse at the hands of his father. Included in his file is an extensive list of reports from various officials and healthcare professionals containing dozens of injuries, including but not limited to concussions, burns, and broken bones. My heart breaks as I picture him as a little boy at the hands of a man like Vic. The laundry list of crimes on his rap sheet is both terrifying and . . . impressive. His records don't explain why he’s in prison, but it has to be something terrible for him to have wound up at Blackthorne.
I don’t know if I even want to know.
Within the confines of the prison gates, our relationship, for lack of a better word, is in a little bubble. I know I’m safe to an extent because he can’t get out. Aside from our brief contact during the workday, I don’t have to see him if I don’t want to, and I know that if I ever needed help, it would be one small call away. Learning more about his past makes it all real, final, definite.
I close out of the file and log out of the computer for my shift, erasing my steps along the way the best I know how. It’s a risk looking up the restricted file, but I had to find out more. Now, I’m afraid I know too much and not enough.
The house is quiet when I arrive home an hour late, but already, I feel the tension crackling in the air. I don’t see Vic anywhere, but I can sense him. Like prey who knows a predator is near. Watching. Waiting to strike.
For the first time since he hit me, I’m not terrified. I’m angry. And I know Gracin is the reason why. He makes me want things I can’t have. A different life. Him. To fight back.
It’s dangerous, this seed of hope.
Probably a little crazy.
How can a man like him make me want to be a stronger person?
The irony is laughable.
In fact, as I stand frozen in the front door, I laugh. No doubt Vic must wonder what the hell is wrong with his silly little wife that she’s laughing like a loon, but for once, I don’t care. I don’t care that he’s going to take his fists to me in the very near future.
I don’t care that I kissed a man who isn’t my husband.
I think crossing the professional line, realizing I’m capable of terrible things, has done something to my brain.
Maybe the years spent suffering at Vic’s hands have finally made me crack. The girl I used to be would have never let a man like Gracin get past her defenses. She would never have even considered breaking the rules, let alone the law. Then again, she probably never would have thought she’d let her husband use her as a punching bag, either.
A voice that sounds a lot like Gracin himself whispers in my
head.
What else can you do?
How far would you go?
How is it possible that one man, someone who is supposed to uphold the law, can tear me down, and another, who is supposed to be the scum of the earth, can build me up?
I take a tentative step inside the house I’ve spent the last few years hiding in. A house that has only managed to spawn terror and nightmares, and for the first time, I’m not afraid. In fact, it’s my lack of fear that terrifies me.
It’s a state of being that makes me feel like I can do anything.
Which is no doubt what Gracin had intended.
I glance around the living room on my way to the kitchen, noting the briefcase by the recliner and the snifter of brandy on the side table. Vic is home. Anticipation fills me, dark and potent. A twin of the desire that inspired me to draw Gracin’s head down and extend the kiss that was my downfall.
He must be in the bedroom, and the thought of him and a bed fills my mouth with bile. And I know without a shred of doubt that I’ll never share a bed with him again. I’ll never let him touch me. Never let him hurt me.
I’d rather die.
I open the fridge, more from habit than anything else, and retrieve the pork chops I’d set out this morning for dinner. The mundane task of preparing dinner will soothe the wildness that’s brewing inside me. It’ll keep me from making any rash decisions. Well, provided that Vic doesn’t do anything stupid.
I pull out carrots and potatoes and set them on the kitchen island. I get the ingredients to bread the pork chops and set grease to heat in a fryer on the stove. The bed creaks in the bedroom and an overwhelming sense of expectation unfurls in my stomach. His footsteps cause the wood in the hall to groan and my breath to catch.
“Where have you been?” he asks with deceptive nonchalance.
Which is how all of his “discussions” begin. He finds an excuse, any excuse, to nitpick. Then he rants and raves. Then he gets physical.
It’s a cycle. One I’ve read about in books and seen in movies too many times to count. I just didn’t realize I was in one until it happened. Again and again.
I’ve had enough.
Afraid of the uncharacteristic rage I feel coursing through me, I rinse the vegetables with extra care. A white fog begins encroaching on my vision, and after I set the carrots and potatoes on the counter, I rub my eyes, thinking maybe I’m overtired.
Vic makes a frustrated sound. “I’m talking to you,” he says in a voice that used to make me shiver and cower in fear. Now it just makes me weary.
Why have I let him hurt me for so long?
Why did it take me so long to see it?
I don’t answer Vic as I select a knife from the butcher block and begin dicing the carrots into thin slivers. As I do, I imagine that I’m cutting into the restraints he has around me. The ones that have been suffocating me for so fucking long, their weight is like a second skin. It doesn’t take long for those restraints to morph into a vision of the man himself, and I squeeze my eyes shut to dispel the image.
I chop the carrots more violently. Vic must sense my mood and, in a smart move on his part, doesn’t say anything until I set the knife down on the counter and exchange it for a peeler. I skin the potatoes without ever looking up from the task.
I think I’m afraid to.
I’m afraid that when I do, everything will change. That the fundamental parts of me have been irrevocably altered.
“Are you going to answer me?” he asks, and his voice tilts up at the end, as if he can’t quite believe I have the nerve to defy him. His dutiful little wife from this morning is gone, and he doesn’t know how to handle it.
It must be seriously disconcerting to him. Yet, the power that floods me is immeasurable.
“No,” I say as I put a pot of water on to boil for the potatoes.
“No?” he asks, his voice unnaturally high.
I prepare another pot with a small bath of water for the carrots and spare him a quick look before preheating the oven. “No, I’m not going to answer your question. You know good and well where I was.”
“What did you say to me?” He rounds the island and stands threateningly close to my back.
My fingers still over the cookie sheet where I am spreading out biscuits for the oven. I look up and nearly laugh at the expression on Vic’s face. His complexion is mottled red. Sweat beads at his temples, and his lower lip quivers. If I had to guess, I’d say he’s almost enjoying the possibility of a confrontation. The very thought makes me sick to my stomach. Fear has been a constant, if unwelcome, companion.
Until now.
Vic’s hand convulses where he grips the counter, and his knuckles are petal-white where they’ve split and healed several times over. Those hands are frequent stars of my nightmares. All he used to have to do was raise them, even only infinitesimally, and I’d immediately submit to him. I’d shrink back in panic like the timid little mouse Gracin accuses me of being.
Today, however, even seeing his hands flex threateningly, I’m not afraid. It’s as though my emotions are wrapped in cotton and experienced through a glass case.
If I were honest with myself, I would admit this snap has been a long time coming. The abuse, both emotional and physical, was too much. The sense of isolation and desolation too stark.
There’s only so much one person can take, and this morning tipped the scale.
It isn’t even because of Gracin. He’s a symptom of a much larger problem. Maybe I went to his arms to force this confrontation. To put an end to it all.
He is my ruin.
I had to reach rock bottom to see a way out.
The knife glints in the yellow halo of light from the kitchen fixture overhead. When I look up, Vic is watching me with his beady, snake-like eyes. We both know what’s coming.
The next day begins like any other. I wake and shower, taking extra care with my appearance. I even use the sugar scrub one of the other nurses had re-gifted me last Christmas. I wrap myself in one of Vic’s big luxurious towels and slather on lavender scented lotion and apply makeup with a heavier hand to cover the shadows under my eyes and the gauntness in my cheeks.
After hopping into the requisite pair of scrubs, I skirt around the mess left over from dinner in the kitchen and throw together a quick smoothie for breakfast. Out of habit, I retrieve the newspaper from the front stoop and place it on the kitchen table. I don’t think about why I do it as I grab my keys and purse and hop into my car.
Not thinking has apparently become my default setting to deal with all my problems. But everything is so phenomenally fucked, to deal with them would mean facing all the horrible decisions I’ve made lately, which I’m just not ready to do.
Nope.
So, I drive to work and pretend it’s like any other day.
I pretend as if my marriage isn’t a sham. That I didn’t fuck up my life the day I married the first man who’d ever made me feel special. That I didn’t stay in the marriage because I had nowhere else to go. My thoughts stutter to a stop there because I very nearly thought the name of the person who has probably screwed me up even worse than my sucktastic husband.
Ernie doesn’t even faze me as he tries looking down my shirt when I hand him my badge. He’s a small fish on my list of shit to worry about. I even flash him a slightly deranged smile that has his leer freezing on his face as I retake my badge and speed away.
My car skids on the gray slush in the parking lot as I come to a haphazard stop, the nose of my car kissing a snowdrift. But I don’t think about that, either. My back end is six inches into the neighboring parking space, but I don’t haul my butt back to fix it.
I make it to the infirmary without incident and plan to spend the next eight hours focused one hundred percent on paperwork and patients, minus one, who has the day off after his scuffle to recuperate and relax.
One of the nameless, faceless men sits on the hospital bed trying not to grimace as I search, fruitlessly, for a vein to tap for a bloo
d sample. It’s something I’ve done a thousand times, but for the life of me, my stubborn fingers won’t cooperate.
“I’m sorry,” I say, again. “Let’s try your other arm.”
He grumbles underneath his breath as I round the bed to his other side. I doubt he wants me to prick him five more times and still end up without the goods, but I’m determined to keep the cheerful smile on my face and pretend like I’m focused. Two more stabs and I hit pay dirt. Relief floods the inmate’s expression, and I take his blood sample, record his information, and send him on his way. He shoots daggers at me and grumbles about suing the prison as he shuffles away and I slide into my desk chair.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see a blurry outline of an inmate’s blue jumpsuit, and even though I’d been telling myself all day not to think about him, not to remember the horrible thing I’d done, I can’t help it.
The more I try not to think about him, the more my brain focuses on him. Like an itch that I can’t reach but am dying to scratch.
I squirm in my seat as I try to refocus on paperwork, but it’s useless. For two hours, the words swim and dance in front of my eyes. I’ve read the same line at least ten times and still don’t understand it. When the other nurse on duty sends me a dirty look because I keep letting out deep sighs, I give up.
I would say sorry. Normally, I’m a very solicitous co-worker. I come in, do my job with very little fanfare, and go home. Perfect little girl, that’s me. Vic has trained me well.
Frustration and rage bubble underneath my skin and I roll my shoulders as I stride to my locker to retrieve my lunch. Even thinking Vic's name makes me want to tear into something with my bare hands. I have to lean my forehead against my locker to cool my heated flesh.
“Nurse Emerson,” says a voice from behind me, causing me to knock my head against the metal locker.
I turn, holding a hand to the offending spot, and glower at the officer who’s smiling apologetically.
“Sorry about that,” he says. “I thought you heard me calling.”
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