by MV Ellis
Kota: Sorry I didn’t wait. I came out and you were still in there, but an officer offered Jorja and me a lift home, and all I could think of was soaking in a long hot bath, then going to bed while the sun is still up.
She was silly to apologize. I wouldn’t have wanted her to wait around in the station for any longer than was necessary, and I was glad to know she’d gotten home safely.
Me: Nothing to be sorry for. You were a superhero today. Thank you. I owe you one.
Kota: No need for thanks. You don’t owe me shit.
Me: I totally do. Need anything? I can bring you food, or just keep you company. Whatever.
Kota: That’s sweet. Zed already offered, also. He was here for a little bit, but I kicked him out. I just need sleep, and maybe ice cream. Not necessarily in that order, but I have a quart of cookie dough chocolate fudge, so I’m set.
Me: Ok, sweets. Be safe. Rest up. Let me know if you change your mind. If not, we’ll talk in the morning.
Her response came moments later.
Kota: Thanks. LY.
Me: LYT. S
It was true. We were a family at SK:eTCH, and I loved Kota like a sister. Loved them all like siblings, in fact. The thought of her and Jorja scared for their lives left me raging. Tommy had hurt at least three women I knew of, and God knew how many more.
There were messages from Jorja and Kian too, so I responded to those. Both were at home and also declined my offer of help or company, preferring to rest up alone.
I called Zed back. He answered on the first ring.
“Hey. How’re you holding up?”
“I’m done at the station, so I’m gonna head home. I’m all right, I guess. I need a beer and to jerk off.” I always found it to be a good stress relief. I thought most guys felt the same.
“Huh. Well, I was going to offer to join you for the first one, but you’re on your own for the second. Seriously though, you okay, man?”
“Yeah. Or as good as you can be when you’ve seen a woman battered and bruised and fearing for her life at the hands of a card-carrying psycho, seen said psycho threaten your friends, then watched another woman risk her life to disarm him. Not an experience I ever want to repeat.”
I gave him a blow-by-blow account of what had happened, describing the day’s events in the same level of forensic detail as I had to the police—both times skipping the part about the chemistry I’d felt leap between Emi and me. I’d been insanely attracted to her from the moment she walked in the door, and I couldn’t be sure, but my gut was telling me that what I’d felt wasn’t a one-way thing—that under different circumstances, she would have allowed herself to feel the same way.
When I was done, Zed whistled, exhaling what felt like an entire lungful of breath.
“Man, that’s rough. I was joking before about not coming over. You promise to keep your dick in your pants while I’m around, and I’m there if you want me to be.”
“Nah, man, it’s okay. I think I just need some time to decompress.”
“Yeah, I get it.”
“How’s Kota?” She played her cards close to her chest, but she and Zed were close, so I wondered if she’d revealed more to him than she had to me.
“She seemed pretty shaken up on the phone, so I went to her place to check on her. She basically threw me out, saying she wanted to have a bath, get into her PJs, and catch an early night. I called Ellie”—Ellie was Kota’s roommate—“and she’s going to finish work early to make sure K’s okay. You know what Kota’s like. She’d be bleeding out from her carotid artery and still claim she was fine. I just want to be sure.”
I agreed with Zed’s thinking. He was good people, and despite it not always coming in the most people-friendly of packages, he had a heart of gold. The two of us were like day and night, but that was why our shit worked. With the other as our wingman, we each played to our strengths and each stayed in our lane. We never had to worry about treading on each other’s toes, because there was very little overlap.
“Thanks, man. Yeah, I tried too and got the same patter from her. But you know her better than me, and like you said, she’d deny she needed help until she was blue in the face, even if she really needed it. She was incredible today. I mean, I knew she had mad skills from her army days, but it was easy to forget when I looked at the tiny woman with her crazy colored hair and pixie face. Watch the surveillance footage. It’s insane.” The police had already taken the drive from our security system into evidence, but everything was also backed up with the security company. I didn’t doubt that Zed would request a copy to review for himself.
“Well, from what the others have said, you were pretty fucking badass yourself, man. Well done.”
“It was literally nothing. I’m kind of embarrassed that while I was thinking about the best way to take him down, Kota just got up and did it.”
“Dude, do I need to remind you that you shielded that woman—”
“Emi.”
“—with your own body? If that psycho had tried shooting her when Kota jumped him, you’d have taken a bullet for her.”
He was right, but it still felt lame compared to the actions of a woman who was literally half my size.
“But he didn’t. And I didn’t. So we’ll never know, because that tiny ninja handled it right outta the ballpark. I just can’t help but think what if he’d gotten that Herculean strength that psychos in the movies always have and overpowered her? I mean, I’m a good six inches taller than him and way bigger built. If I’d have done what Kota did, no chance in hell he would’ve been able to get up.”
“Maybe, man, but it’s a moot point. What happened happened, and it worked out for the best. If you can call a shit fight like that for the best. Don’t beat yourself up. You have nothing to be ashamed of. You did more than many people could or would have in this situation.”
I humphed but left it at that, then asked, “You speak to Jorja and Kian?”
“Yeah, man.”
“And? How are they?”
“Much the same. Shaken. Shocked. Angry. Not surprising. You all need to rest up. And it goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway. You need me, or need anything from me, at all, and you got it.”
“Yeah, I know it. Thanks, man. Listen, I gotta go. My folks are freaking the fuck out, and I haven’t spoken to them yet.”
Now that I was feeling calmer, having spoken to Zed, I knew it should have been the first call I made. My poor parents sounded worried half out of their minds, which was out of character for my dad. His usual MO was cool, calm, and collected under pressure. Not that I could blame them—it wasn’t every day that their son’s place of work was under armed siege.
8
Emi
The police interview process was every bit as bad as I had imagined, and then some. Going over and over the details, not only of that day and the days leading up to it but also my life with Tommy, was a special form of torture. The officers had a few questions they asked over and over, varying them only a little—or so it seemed to me—making me reiterate and rephrase the same information again and again.
It got to where, exhausted and still in shock, I began to wonder if they had an agenda other than prosecuting Tommy. Although they were kind and friendly, bringing coffee, food, and copious amounts of Kleenex, the whole thing started to feel a little like a cross-examination, with me on the witness stand.
I figured being asked the same thing repeatedly—however subtly different each question may have been—was bound to feel like a witch hunt, no matter how nice they were. I worked hard to keep my eyes on the prize: telling them everything they needed to know so I could be sure that Tommy would go to jail for a long time for what he’d done to me.
They’d offered me a rape kit, but I declined. I didn’t need to go through the ordeal of having my sex life dragged into the public domain and scrutinized from every angle, knowing Tommy had taken what he considered to be his more times than I ever wanted to admit to myself, let alone to a courtr
oom full of strangers. I mean, he’d been rough, but I’d technically consented. At least I hadn’t declined, which in the eyes of the law amounted to the same thing. The law, as the saying went, was an ass, but I had to pick my battles.
I gave them every sordid detail, big, small, and everything in between, while in the back of my mind, I hoped there wasn’t an ulterior motive behind their intense and in-depth questioning. They told me over and over that they were on my side, that them being thorough at that stage would benefit me in the long run, as it would give Tommy’s defense team less room to question the events that had unfolded and the procedures the police had followed to gather witness statements.
Even with footage available from the security cameras fitted at the studio, they said they wanted to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s so the case against him was damning and watertight. That was the best chance of him serving the maximum sentences for each of the charges he would face.
Difficult though it was, I tried my best to take them at their word and trust them, all the while pushing down the niggling doubts as they arose. Though, as I revealed more details of our domestic arrangements, as well as Tommy’s violent and erratic behavior, I worried that I was leading myself into territory that could have repercussions for Noah and me.
Although never a direct victim of Tommy’s explosive temper and violent rages, Noah wasn’t oblivious to them. The fact was, everyone living in our building—and halfway down the block—was bound to be aware. He never conducted his rampages at a whisper.
At the first sign of a storm brewing—and I got pretty good at predicting it—I would send Noah to his room and instruct him to put on his headphones and listen to music or play his loudest computer game, but I knew he was wise to the reason. He was a smart kid, and it didn’t take a genius to equate those times I sent him to his room and my black eyes, broken bones, bruises, sprains, cuts, limps, and doctor or ER visits, and his father’s extra-foul moods.
Deep down, I knew my feeble excuses were fooling nobody—not Noah, nor the doctors who tended to my many injuries when they were severe enough to need medical attention, nor my colleagues who’d heard every variation on the “I fell” or “I walked into a door” excuse under the sun.
Every day the thought plagued me that a good mother, a real mother, didn’t allow her child to be repeatedly exposed to that kind of negative influence. Rightly or wrongly, I’d never forgiven my own mother for her part in the steaming pile of dung that was my childhood, yet here I was doing the same thing to my kid. I’d had no more strength or backbone than she’d had, and the situation with Tommy had only come to a head because it had gotten so out of control that the decision had been taken out of my hands. The overwhelming hypocrisy of that fact wasn’t lost on me. I’d added it to my growing list of failings and personality defects years earlier.
I told the police how this time around, Tommy had come home pissed because he’d lost his job as a casual agency laborer—the most recent in a long list of employment breakdowns. And rather than look at or, God forbid, own the reasons he was incapable of holding down steady employment for more than a few months, a year at most—lateness, rudeness, general unreliability, poor workmanship, picking fights, turning up drunk or high, or all of the above—he chose to take his frustration out on me.
On this occasion, the excuse he’d drummed up was the fact that I must have been having an affair. This wasn’t a new idea. According to his delusions, I’d slept with every man between the ages of eighteen and eighty in the tristate area—but his particular focus this time around was that I was screwing someone at work.
This accusation was even more wacko than the norm, as my colleagues at the travel marketing firm where I worked as a content writer were predominately women. The handful of men who worked there were either gay, married, or both.
He’d worked himself into such a frenzy about my supposed affair that he’d decided that putting me on lockdown was the only way to curtail my whoring ways. Without a job to go to, he had all the time in the world to keep watch over me, and I’d had to call in sick to work with yet another mysterious stomach flu to explain my sudden absence. I knew Stacey, my work wifey, didn’t believe my feeble excuse, any more than she’d believed the tens of others I’d given in the past. I also worried that I’d soon be joining him in unemployment—I was sure that management wouldn’t put up with my higher-than-average illness record forever.
Still, I wasn’t about to tell Stacey the truth—that I was being held captive in my own home apart from going to and from Noah’s school, accompanied, of course, by Tommy and Buddy, and that I feared for my life. Nor was I about to admit that a nonexistent affair that I was supposedly having with an imaginary colleague had sparked the whole thing.
Not only did I not want to worry her, or have her do something drastic like send the cops to investigate, but I was also too ashamed to tell her the truth. Although I knew she had a hunch that something was wrong at home, I wasn’t ready to confirm her suspicions. Even if I was, the fact that I was under house arrest seemed like the worst way to start, particularly when Tommy was listening to me make the call.
I talked myself hoarse and satisfied the cops with my responses for the time being, though they told me that they would probably be in touch to follow up on certain details and ask further questions. I made my way through the station accompanied by a female officer—a member of the domestic violence team. I looked around the busy foyer and waiting area, hoping to see Spider, but he wasn’t there.
“Don’t worry, he’s not here.”
“Hmm?” I answered absentmindedly, hoping that if I looked again, he might somehow appear.
“The perp—Tommy. He’s still in interrogation, but even if he wasn’t, there’s no way he’d be leaving this way. He’ll be going to the holding cells, then on to jail. If for some reason he may have been out here, we would’ve ensured you left through a different exit.”
I didn’t correct her misunderstanding. It was minor in the grand scheme of the web of lies and half-truths I’d woven together to create the delicate mesh that was my life.
“So have all the other… witnesses left already?”
“Yes, ma’am. Everyone has given statements and gone home. As with you, there may be some follow-up required, but that’ll pretty much be it for them until the trial.”
“Oh, right. So if I wanted to say thank you… for saving my life, I mean. How would I…?” I let the rest of the sentence hang heavy in the air, too tired to even finish it.
“Get in contact with them? Uh, well, there’s no formal process for that, as we can’t give out personal details. Of course, this is a little different, as you know their place of business. You could drop by, or if you didn’t feel comfortable seeing them again at the crime scene, maybe you could call the studio and speak to them, or send them something in the mail. Something like that.”
I nodded, running through the options in my mind. Flowers, while accepted as a neutral and safe gift, just didn’t feel right under the circumstances. It wasn’t a usual occurrence, so it was hard to know what gift said “Thank you for risking your life to save mine, and “I’m sorry I brought the drama to you and endangered your lives.”
“Oh! I’m so sorry, I almost forgot.” She looked embarrassed about whatever it was she had just remembered. “The gentleman. Mr. Williamson—” She looked at the black square in her hand. “—Spider asked if I wouldn’t mind giving you this.” She nodded down at the small piece of cardboard. “He said no pressure or obligation to reach out or anything like that. He just wanted you to have his number in case you needed anything.”
She stretched her arm toward me, balancing the card on her palm. I stared at it long and hard, one beat, two, three before finally reaching out and taking it. It was thick and sturdy to the touch. The embossed card stock wasn’t cheap. I slipped it into my pocket, sure I would never use it.
It was another kind gesture to add to the miraculous gift of helping save my life
, and while I was grateful beyond words, there was no way I could deal with the level of awkwardness that would ensue. “Hi there, remember that woman you risked life and limb for? Well, surprise! Here I am, and I have a blocked drain. Would you mind helping me out with a little home improvement, by any chance, given my boyfriend is rotting in jail after threatening to kill you?” Nope.
Out in the parking lot, I slid into the back seat of the patrol car, closed my heavily lidded eyes, and rested my head back against the seat behind me. It had been an epic day, and it wasn’t even close to being over. I breathed in and out methodically, hoping that if I got the basics right—like breathing—everything else would fall into place. I didn’t believe that would be the case, but I had to try to be even the tiniest bit positive so I could carry on putting one foot in front of the other.
9
Emi
As the same female officer—Jade Roberts—helped me into my apartment, I couldn’t stop shaking and crying. I’d held my shit together throughout the grueling interview, even in the back of the cop car on the way home, but as my key went into the lock, I lost my tenuous grip on my composure. Partly it was because I knew I didn’t have to deal with anyone else apart from the officer, and partly because when I swung the door to the apartment open, the smell overwhelmed me. The stench of Tommy.
Whether it was because I was in shock and therefore highly sensitized to it or I’d just never noticed before, I didn’t know, but I was struck by how much the house reeked of him. I realized almost too late that I was going to vomit, reaching the bathroom just in time.
When I returned from decorating the porcelain with the contents of my guts, the officer was still there, looking concerned.
“Are you okay? Is there someone I can call for you? Or I can stay a while, maybe get you some tea or something?”
I cast her a sidelong glance. She was young and wholesome-looking—like a grown-up and very beautiful version of Peppermint Patty. She even had the spattering of freckles across her nose. She was trying, and failing, not to look freaked out. I could tell she was out of her depth, that she wasn’t sure what she should be saying or doing in a situation like this. I decided to put her out of her misery—there was no escaping mine, but that was no reason for me to continue to drag others down with me.