by Alice Bello
The room brightened as if on a dimmer switch, everything bathed in a retina burning glare. I felt my insides tremble, and my heart started beating like it wanted to pop right out of my chest.
The room dimmed back to normal, but I was still shaking like a leaf.
And my scar was burning. I had my hand clutched protectively around my wrist.
“Hi Hope.” His smile was as devastating and charming as ever. But all I could think was how could I get away? I could just start running. But that would raise too many eyebrows.
My scar burned even hotter, and I wanted to start scratching at it to get it to stop.
I swallowed and licked my suddenly parched lips. “Derrick… w-what are you doing here?”
He stepped forward and I stepped back, banging against the buffet table hard enough to make some of the plates and glasses clink.
Derrick stopped and held up his hands, as if he were trying to get a wild animal to come to him.
Suddenly a broad, tall wall of designer suit stood between us. I shuddered and fell forward against the man wearing said suit.
“I don’t think Hope wants to talk to you anymore,” Raphael practically growled.
“Man, I don’t have any beef with you, so why don’t you—”
I felt the muscles in Raphael’s back tighten as Derrick’s voice cut out.
“I said she doesn’t want to talk to you,” Raphael repeated. “Do I really have to explain it to you?”
I heard the scuffing of dress shoes on the floor, and then Raphael turned and looked down at me, his face grim and deadly looking. “You ready to go home?”
I nodded and he threw his arm over my shoulder, guiding me through the ballroom like a bodyguard extricating his charge from a melee.
I heard Janine call out my name, but I wouldn’t look back to save my own life. I wanted out of that room more than anything. I needed out of there. I wanted to go home and lock the doors and windows, and hole up in my bedroom with a baseball bat and a meat cleaver.
Most of all, I just wanted to dig a deep hole and crawl into it, and stay there, hidden for the next decade or two.
Before I knew it we were outside and a valet had Raphael’s car pulled up to the curb. Raphael deposited me in the passenger seat and then jogged over and slid behind the wheel. Seconds later we were gliding through the streets of Houston, and then roaring down the interstate back to San Antonio.
Thankfully, he didn’t ask what had just happened, or who that man had been. He just kept driving away from where we’d been, every once in a while looking over to take a look at me.
I was trying to keep the memories at bay. If I let one surface I’d fall apart, or I’d die… maybe I’d just start screaming.
“That was my boyfriend… my ex-boyfriend.” The words tasted like blood on my tongue. “When I was going to college in California.”
Raphael didn’t say anything; he just nodded.
I told him about Derrick. How we’d started off as friends at school, and then became more, moving in together—he’d been my first.
Everything was great… until he started coming home in the middle of the night, high on drugs.
“He said he could handle it, and I was too young to know better. I was going to leave him, but before I could…” Oh god, that night was so dark, so sticky with my fear and blood. That damned song by The Black Keys, Everlasting Light, playing so loud I hadn’t heard him.
“One night, when I came home after working at the diner where I waited tables, he dragged me into the bedroom and held me down. He was crazy… his eyes were.” I shook my head and gulped down some air. “He kept on screaming that I was cheating on him, and I wasn’t going to get away with it.”
He’d pulled out a chisel I used to open paint cans and to contour my brush strokes. It was clean and shining as he held it up to my face. I couldn’t breathe, his weight constricting my chest as he laid on me. He let go of my one wrist, using his free hand to hold my right hand pinned to the floor.
I struggled, tried to push his face away…
And then I felt the steel of the scraper dig into my wrist. It hurt. And it went in deeper and deeper.
I remember hearing my screams echoing in my ears. Like they were the screams of someone else…
He was going to kill me…
“How did you get away?”
I turned and looked at Raphael. The car was stopped and we were in the parking lot of an Olive Garden. When had we stopped?
How much had I really told him?
All of it; I’d told him all of it.
How had I gotten away?
“I head butted him.”
Raphael stared, stone faced, but a lazy smile started to pull at the side of his mouth. He started to laugh: slow, strangled laughter.
I smiled and felt tears stream down my face, hot and dripping.
“I have a really hard head,” I said.
“That I already know.” He leaned back, holding his six pack abs as he snorted.
“I once head butted my brother so hard he landed in the ER and needed stitches.” I laughed again. It felt good to laugh.
“So you head butted him. What did you do next?”
I shrugged. “That knocked him out, so I had to push him off me, and then I…” I still had my hand clutched around my wrist.
“You pulled the chisel out?”
“I didn’t know better.”
“You could have bled to death.”
And if I’d gone to the hospital maybe I wouldn’t have had the nerve damage I ended up with. I’ve never been able to paint since. The closest thing to art I had now was my photography.
“Fucking bastard…”
I looked over at Raphael, his eyes were like coal and his face looked carved out of stone.
“It was a long time ago,” I said dismissively. “I don’t know why I reacted like that.”
He looked at me incredulously. “Because he hurt you, Hope. You reacted that way because he freaking abused you and you were all alone and had to defend yourself against him. That’s why you started shaking.”
I had started shaking, hadn’t I?
I looked at the neon lights of the Olive Garden, and the happy families and couples going in and coming out of it.
“Can we just go home?”
His stone hard features softened, and he nodded. “Of course.”
Chapter 18
My hands still shook by the time we made it back home, and Raphael gently took the keys from my grasp and opened the door for us. He went in first, turning on the lights and walking through the house.
I know it was stupid, but having him here really did make me feel better.
I followed him into the kitchen and watched as he filled my coffee pot and started a fresh pot.
“You hungry?”
“No, not really.” It was hard just to take a deep breath. I didn’t want to think about eating food.
“You haven’t eaten in five hours,” he said. “I know you have some frozen waffles in here somewhere.” He pulled my freezer section open and rifled through the half eaten tubs of ice cream, and boxes of Toaster Strudel.
“In the back behind the orange crème pops,” I said, sitting down on one of the stools around my floating island.
Five minutes later I had coffee and perfectly toasted Eggo waffles, smothered in melted butter and real maple syrup.
Raphael ate with me. I couldn’t imagine he could eat like this and keep his rock hard physique.
Maybe he exercised?
He rinsed the dishes and stacked them in the dishwasher, and then turned it on.
I went up stairs and changed into a pair of pajamas—these were a dark blue, and had Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh on them. I didn’t think Hello Kitty would understand how I felt, but the pessimistic donkey would. I just knew he would.
When I came downstairs again Raphael had his suit jacket off, hanging from the bottom banister of the stairs. He was sprawled on my couch, the sleeves o
f his shirt rolled up, his long, muscular arms stretched out over the back of the couch.
The TV had a rerun of Buffy the Vampire Slayer flickering on it. It was the episode where Faith rolls into town, being chased by an ancient, gargantuan vampire that wanted to rip her to shreds.
“How did you know I love Buffy?” I slid onto the couch and tried not to lean into him, but he was there, and I was still shaking… and it was my couch!
“I didn’t. I’m just a big Joss Whedon fan.”
I snorted. “Got a big boy crush, huh?”
He laughed silently, grimacing. “You’ve got this fantasy of me being gay, don’t you?”
“Well,” I finally gave in and leaned into him. He was warm and strong, and strangely soft in all the right places. I didn’t know muscle could be soft. “You did do a pretty good impression of one at the party.”
“I was taking one for the team.” His arm wrapped around me and he pulled me closer. His scent enfolded me, and I sighed as I rested my head on his chest. His heart beat slow and steady.
“Sure looked like you were.” Okay, that was a cheap shot.
“So you liked my sexy dance?”
I pulled my head up and shot him a hard glare. “Whatever dance you were doing, it certainly wasn’t sexy.”
“Really?”
I batted my eyelashes at him. “You couldn’t even hold his attention for three minutes, remember?”
He growled. “He was a double agent. Didn’t matter how sexy my mad dance skills were, he was on a covert mission.”
I had to laugh. Covert mission. Where did he come up with this stuff?
“You did look really good tonight,” I said, breathing in his deliciousness.
“Didn’t look too bad yourself.”
I looked up at him, and his face was bathed in the ambient light coming from the television. He was so handsome, so damned sexy.
Oh, what the hell.
I reached up and placed my hand on his cheek, and pulled his face until he was looking down at me. Slowly I raised up, closer, closer, until I could feel his warm, sweet breath on my lips.
I leaned in and kissed him. His lips were soft, so soft, and his mouth tasted cool and spicy and otherworldly good. I moved closer and deepened the kiss, entangling my arms around his neck, pulling him into me.
I laid back and pulled him on top of me. He was hard, I could feel the long, thick shaft of his sex against my thigh.
And then he sat up, pulling his lips from mine, leaving me gasping for him.
What the hell?
He looked down on me and brushed a wayward lock of my hair from my forehead.
“I don’t think we should go any further right now.”
Why the hell not?
“Don’t look at me like that.”
I grunted as he pulled his body away from mine. “Touchy.”
He was up on his feet, covertly trying to adjust himself so I wouldn’t see his hard-on.
“You know that if we went any further tonight we’d both regret it.”
I just scowled at him.
“Think about it,” he said patiently. “You’re fresh out of a relationship,”—if you could call what Jake and I had a relationship—“and you just had a run in with a psycho ex-boyfriend.”
Okay, it did sound pretty bad. “But in the plus column I stopped shaking.”
He looked down at me with those dark, heated eyes, his thick, soft lips spreading into the naughtiest smile ever. “Believe me… you’d be shaking by the time I was done with you.”
Oh my…
Oh my, my…
Someone knocked on my front door.
I closed my eyes and swore. I should have turned the volume up on the TV. Bette surely could hear every word we’d said. I was going to strangle her if she was on my porch with a video camera.
I got up and trudged to the front door, opening it heedlessly.
My world just fell away.
Jake stood on my porch, a shy grin on his face, smelling of soap and an undertone of grease. Suddenly there was only him and me, standing all by ourselves at the end of the world.
Was it possible that the man had gotten even better looking in the last two weeks?
“Jake,” I breathed, and then realized I was standing on my front porch in my pajamas. I crossed my arms self-consciously over my chest. “Why are you here?”
Could he ever forgive me? Would he?
I stepped back and shivered from the cool breeze that whipped in through the door.
“Christ, Hope…” he scrubbed his hand over the back of his neck and studied the wooden beams of my porch floor for a moment. When he looked up his green eyes sparkled in the glow of my porch light. “I just had to—”
He stopped talking and looked behind me. Raphael cleared his throat. “Hi, I’m Hope’s new neighbor. Who are you?”
Jake’s face turned hard, and he stood up tall and straight. “I’m Jake… I’m…”
I tried to back up into the house again. I just wanted to go to bed, not go through another show of testosterone. “Maybe we could all have lunch sometime next week.” I backed up into Raphael and he wrapped his arms around my waist.
Jake’s eyes hardened and his jaw clenched. “That’s a nice shade of lipstick you’ve got on there. Been cross dressing?”
Oh crap.
“It rubbed off. You know, when we were, well, you know.”
Jake’s head went back as if he’d been slapped. He turned and took a step towards the stairs leading off the porch, but then turned back around, pointing a finger at Raphael.
“Not him!” he groused. “You can’t be serious about him!”
I glared at him, my back straightening with ire. “And why not him?”
Jake’s eyes blazed, wide and erratic. “Because he’s an asshole, and he tried to cut down your goddamn tree!”
“How did you know about that?”
Raphael stalked out around me onto the porch, looking every inch the six foot menace he was. “I think Bette isn’t the only one who has you under surveillance.”
Jake and Raphael slowly circled each other, their steps whisper quiet on the boards of my porch.
“I was just passing by,” Jake barked. “And I saw you with a chainsaw. Was I just supposed to ignore it and go on my way?”
Raphael stepped closer, his face turning stony with anger again. “Well, isn’t that what you did?”
“You sonovabitch!”
“Stalker asshat!”
Okay, points for creativity.
Jake took a step closer and pushed against Raphael’s shoulder.
That did it. I wasn’t going to watch two grown men fight like a couple of barbarians on my own front porch.
I turned and walked back into the house, slammed the door closed and shot the locks home.
“Hope?” Jake’s voice drifted through the locked door.
“Are you okay in there?” came Raphael’s.
I switched off the front porch light, plunging the two men into darkness, and started straight up the stairs to my bedroom.
I was too damn tired for this shit.
“Hope?” they called in unison.
I marched into my bedroom and pulled two things out of my bedside table: the rainbow Twizzlers and my iPod. I tore off a couple strips and chomped into them like a ravenous hyena, and then plugged the earbuds of the iPod into my ears, effectively cutting off the unwanted voices of the two men on my front porch.
I tapped the screen and Hazy Shade of Winter by The Bangles roared and pulsed into my head, blasting all thought from my frazzled brain.
They really were at their best in this song. It was hard core and still elegant and beautiful.
I clicked off my bedside lamp and snuggled into my Hello Kitty sheets… and then clicked the lamp back on.
Maybe tonight I’d just sleep with the lights on.
I looked to the front window that overlooked my front lawn.
Goodnight boys. It’s been fun…
*The End*
To be concluded in Hope Rises, coming soon!
Thank you for reading my novella. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, then help others find it. Review it and lend it to others.
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