“Let’s do it,” said Jeremy to Charles.
The two men moved toward the exit. Patrons stumbled out of their path, recognizing the intensity in their eyes. Ellen followed, falling behind. Her heart raced madly. She felt a choking in her throat, as if she was about to erupt in a sob.
“Charles, don’t!” she cried out. Her voice was lost in the rising buzz surrounding the impending brawl.
When Ellen made it outside, she had to push past a layer of people who had already started gathering to watch the confrontation. She heard Jeremy shouting in a drunken voice that resembled that of a bratty child, “You don’t fucking touch me. You don’t touch me!”
Then she saw the two of them on the sidewalk. Jeremy had already started to adopt some clumsy kung fu posturing that looked more fake than genuine. Charles was undeterred and struck the first blow, delivering a punch to Jeremy’s cheek. Jeremy responded with a punch aimed for Charles’s face, but caught him in the neck instead, which was probably worse. From there, the swinging and punching erupted from both sides, a combination of hits and misses, and the whole scene became so primitive and ugly that Ellen wanted to turn away, but she couldn’t remove her gaze from the crashing bodies.
In less than a minute, Jeremy was doubled up from a sequence of hammering blows that caused some of the bystanders to gasp just from the sound of the impact. Jeremy attempted to charge back at Charles, arms outstretched to grab him. Charles turned the momentum back on his attacker, slamming him into the brick wall adjacent to a window, where a growing number of faces had collected to watch from inside the bar.
As Jeremy crumpled, Charles grew fiercer, transforming into someone else, raging and animalistic. He continued punching Jeremy until Jeremy had fallen too low to reach, and then he began kicking him savagely in the stomach and head, and somewhere a cut must have opened, because Jeremy’s face became striped with blood. It pooled in his ear and when he cried out, Ellen could see his reddened teeth and blood-smeared mouth, a sight so awful that she screamed, “Stop it, STOP IT!” louder than anything she had ever screamed before in her life.
The crowd, equally stunned by Charles’s ferocious outburst, stumbled back to give him extra space, as if he was just wild enough to turn on a random onlooker next. Jeremy spit blood on the sidewalk and muttered unconvincingly through swollen lips, “Asshole, I’ll fucking kill you.” One bystander was brave enough—or drunk enough—to snap a few pictures with his cell phone.
A police siren tore into the night.
Charles gave Jeremy one more kick to the head, causing him to expel a large grunt. Then Charles turned to Ellen, eyes wide as if surprised by his own actions, and said, “Let’s get out of here.”
Ellen found herself running to keep up with Charles as he hurried away from Dartz in long, swift strides. The police siren grew louder and Charles turned the first corner he reached.
“C’mon, c’mon,” he said to Ellen. “I don’t want to get arrested because of that idiot.”
They continued for about half a block, and then Ellen saw another police car, lit up, heading in their direction.
“In here,” said Charles, ducking into an alley.
She followed him. He flattened against the wall of a building. As she got close, he reached out and grabbed her wrist, pulling her into him.
They watched the alley turn colors from the pulsing lights of the police car. It roared past them. They remained still. She could feel Charles’s heavy breathing. “We’re okay,” he said.
She looked up at him in the dark and at that moment felt safe and protected against anything and everything that could ever hurt her. He looked down at her face, and she slid up against him and kissed his lips. He grasped her around the waist and kissed back, forcefully.
“I’m sorry…” he said, muffled.
“No,” she said. “Thank you.” As horrible as it had been to witness the fight, she now felt strangely exhilarated by it. She realized how deeply she resented Jeremy, how he reminded her of the worst in herself, how he brought out her bad qualities and insecurities, and beating him back—really beating him back—felt like breaking free, out of some shell. She was experiencing life now, tasting it, smelling it, feeling it, like never before, in new dimensions and colors.
Old Ellen had been knocked out of play tonight. Now there was only new Ellen and her future.
“The police won’t find us…at my place,” she offered.
She could feel his response—the smile that grew across his lips as he continued to kiss her in the shadows, against the brick.
They stumbled into her apartment together, entangled like a single entity. It took several tries to close the door behind them without interfering with their passion. He clutched both of her hands in his, slapping them against a wall, bodies rough, lips tender, kisses rolling like small waves. She felt his broad chest press against her. She rippled with excitement, turned on beyond anything she had ever known. Sounds of pleasure erupted from deep within her, foreign to her ears. Her entire body unwound, weightless and drifting on a new plane.
He controlled the choreography, but she was an eager participant. She answered his cues. She followed his moves. He expressed his pleasure.
In the bedroom, she turned out the lights. He turned them back on. He unbuttoned her blouse. She blushed.
She still felt self-conscious about her body, an insecurity she had carried since puberty.
“You’re beautiful,” he told her definitively. He removed all her feelings of doubt with the delicious and loving way he traced her skin with his fingertips, leaving kisses along the way.
On the bed, he told her to relax. “I’m trying to,” she said, opening up to him. “It’s just been…a long time.”
She realized he probably didn’t understand her comment. She didn’t mean it had been a long time since she last had sex…although the number of months was in double digits.
No, what she meant was that it had been a long time, so very long…since she had relaxed.
She felt layers of her past, ugly tensions, lift off and float to the heavens, and the sensation made her want to cry, a happy, relieved crying.
He stripped down and his body was shaped with perfectly placed angles and curves, something out of a classic figure drawing, scientific and pure, rendered offbeat by a skull tattoo on his round, muscular shoulder.
He kissed her nipples. He touched her down below, gently gaining acceptance, something she could feel but not imagine. She sucked on his thumb, and then on his fingers. She saw the scrapes and stains of blood on his knuckles. Jeremy’s blood. She realized she was licking Jeremy’s spilled blood and it made her tingle with sensation.
Fuck you, Jeremy. Fuck you, George. Fuck every man who ever fucked with me.
She recalled the fists pounding Jeremy to the pavement. She closed her eyes tight, tighter, and imagined an enormous letting go, a release, like a rolling flood.
Ellen felt tremors she had never felt before, passion and excitement pouring forth that she had never known lived inside her. The realization took over that she was nearly thirty and had never truly made love. She had been molested, she had been fucked—but those things were far away, they were nothing events, because this was the real thing, a warm touch from another unlike anything else, something that she had read about in a million books and written off as fiction, but never experienced or believed in, until right now, living deep inside the moment.
Chapter Eighteen
She slept deeply, physically exhausted, emotionally cleansed, naked and freed under the sheets. He held on to her with both arms pressed warm around her. When she awoke, the morning brought fresh stimulation, taking her back to early childhood, when each day felt epic with wonder and uncharted territory. Surely this wasn’t the same apartment where she had awoken thousands of mornings before. These weren’t the same walls that had suffocated her with narrow possibilities, lockstep routine and a low, omnipresent layer of dread. Charles gave her a new lease on life. Everything c
ame into focus now in ways that displayed previously hidden richness.
For twenty minutes, she didn’t move. She didn’t want to wake him. She wanted to lie in bed and feel him against her, the softness of his breathing on her neck, the strength of his arms and legs. She wanted to absorb it all, recharging herself through his energy.
When he did awake, she pretended to wake with him. He looked at her and smiled.
“You probably need to get to work,” he said.
“So do you,” she said.
“That’s right.”
But neither one of them moved. Finally, he pulled her closer and kissed her.
Just when it appeared that they were headed for another session of lovemaking, he pulled back. “If we get started, we’ll never get to where we need to go. Let’s leave something for tonight. Tonight is good?”
“Tonight is very good,” she said.
He stepped out of bed, feet hitting the floor firmly. He reached down for some clothes and started to get dressed.
He pulled on his pants, then looked around and laughed.
“What?” she said, sitting up.
“My clothes are in a trail.”
She grinned. “Yes, I remember.”
He left the bedroom, calling out his locations as he followed his clothing. “Hallway…living room…couch…behind the TV set?”
“You made that one up,” she called after him.
His voice continued from the other room. “This bookcase is massive! Do you think you have enough books?”
“Never!” she said, sitting up cross-legged under the sheets.
“How did you even get this in here?”
“Piece by piece. I paid a guy to assemble it.”
“This bookcase is taller than I am.”
“Jealous?” she said.
“Possibly.” Then he said, “Hey, if I wanted to call you at work, do you have a cell phone?”
“No.”
“No?”
“I’m in the dark ages, I know.”
“Can I call you at the bookstore? Will they get mad if you receive personal calls?”
“Not from you. You’re a customer.”
“That’s right. I’ve spent a lot of dough in that place. What’s the number? I’ll write it down.”
She started reciting the Book Shelf’s phone number but he called out for her to wait a second so he could find paper and a pen.
Then there was a long silence.
She figured he wasn’t finding what he needed, so she threw back the sheets, stepping out of bed. “I’ll get it.” As she was putting on her robe, Charles entered the bedroom.
He held the red notebook.
“This was in your drawer,” he said.
She froze in shock, one arm halfway into a sleeve of her robe.
His eyes studied her. His face had lost its warmth and was becoming stoic and hard.
“I…” she said. She didn’t know what to tell him.
“I opened your desk drawer to look for a pen, and I find my notebook. Why do you have this?”
“I found it,” she said. It came out feeble. Her words struggled past the tightness in her throat.
He stepped closer, shirtless, chest heaving. “How long have you had this?”
“A couple of weeks, I guess.”
“A couple of weeks?”
She finished pulling on her robe, looking at it so she wouldn’t have to look at him. She tied the sash, hands trembling. “Please don’t yell…”
“I’m not yelling. I’m asking—I’m pissed off—you knew this belonged to me?”
She nodded.
“This is my personal property, Ellen. It doesn’t belong to you.”
“I found it on a chair at the coffeehouse.”
“God, that’s where I thought I lost it. It must have been weeks ago, right?”
She nodded again.
“I’ve been freaking out,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for this to turn up. I’ve been going crazy.”
“I was going to give it back to you.”
“When?”
“I don’t know.”
“Never?”
“No.”
“You knew it belonged to me and you had no intention of telling me?”
“No, that’s not true.”
“Do you know how this makes me feel?” His voice simmered. “I thought we had a real relationship. What’s a relationship without trust? You’ve had my notebook this entire time and you never said a word.” His tone sharpened, turning louder. “This is so messed up. What’s wrong with you? Why the hell wouldn’t you tell me you had this?”
“Because I was scared!” she shouted back at him.
He became speechless. He stared into her eyes. He stepped closer.
“Scared?” he said.
“I read it.”
“You read it. And…”
“Well, you know…”
“No. I don’t know. You tell me.”
“I don’t want to…” Ellen felt dizzy. Everything was falling apart around her. She wanted to shrink to the floor. She had woken up ecstatically happy…now this. She wanted to curl up and shield herself from the pounding waves of anxiety.
Standing before her, Charles appeared like a different person. His face had toughened, his mouth twisted in an angry scowl. All warmth and closeness had drained out of him.
“Tell me, Ellen,” he spoke plainly. “What’s bothering you about the notebook?’
“It says…maybe you hurt or killed someone.”
His head jerked back and he let out a loud, harsh laugh.
She watched his reaction, confused.
“Ellen, sweetie…” he said. “You think…everything in that notebook is real?”
“I don’t know,” she said, swallowing back tears, feeling weakness in her knees. “It starts out one way…and then it becomes Darren and talks about a murder…”
“Do you think I’m Darren?”
“Sometimes, maybe. I don’t know.”
“I see. I’m Darren sometimes? Do you see a split personality?”
“It’s in the notebook.”
Charles said, “If I have a split personality, then where is my other half? Where’s Darren?” He called out, “Darren, where are you? Hello? Darren, are you hiding in the closet?”
“Stop making fun of me.”
“Listen, Ellen. These are characters. It’s fiction. You work in a bookstore, for Christ’s sake. Surely you know about the land of make-believe.”
“It didn’t read that way…”
“Sometimes you’re so naïve.” He sighed. “It’s endearing, but it’s also frustrating.”
“Why would you make all that up?”
“Ellen, you know I read a lot of crime books. Mysteries and thrillers. You know I write. This notebook…I’m getting into the mind of a schizophrenic killer. The psychology, the back history. That’s what authors do. They invent characters to see where they go. This is just…it’s not even intended for an audience. It’s stream-of-consciousness. It’s an exercise. I’m exploring the dark side—like going to the Cave. The people in that notebook interest me. What makes a man reach that turning point where he becomes a murderer? What goes on in his brain? What happened to him as a child? It’s like method acting, getting into character.”
“Why would you want to be that character?”
“Why is any of this stuff so popular? Look at your bestseller rack. It’s escapism.”
“So all those stories about your childhood…”
“It’s not my childhood.”
“…you made it all up?”
“Of course.”
“But the feelings you wrote about…” she said and stopped.
Charles seemed to fragment in front of her. If he wasn’t the voice in the journal…then had she fallen in love with someone who didn’t exist? Was she really in love with this strange man who had taken her to that weird Cave bar and been so distant and uncommunicative on their dates? Or w
as she drawn to the sensitive, brooding character who lived only on notebook paper…with no flesh and blood behind it?
“So you think I’m a killer?” he said.
“You nearly killed someone last night.”
“That jerk in the bar? No. I could have killed him. But I don’t go around killing people. There are laws.”
“There have been murders in Lakeview.”
“Now I’m responsible for every dead body in Chicago?”
“What about your parents?”
“I told you before, my parents live in Arizona.”
“You didn’t walk in on…”
He laughed again. “My father stabbing my mother to death? No. It’s melodrama. It’s the turning point for the character I invented.”
“But you said your dad worked in insurance, and then you said he was a salesman for a drug company…”
He frowned. “Oh. So I’m a liar, and I’m just covering up for the fact that everything in the notebook is true, and I’m a maniac. Thanks, Ellen. I really appreciate your high opinion of me.”
“That’s not what I meant…”
“Let me ask you this, Ellen,” he said. “If you think I’m the character in this notebook, then what the hell are you doing dating me, letting me sleep in your bed? I mean, I could cut your throat in the middle of the night. Doesn’t that scare you?”
She couldn’t respond.
He continued, “Or…I don’t know, maybe it turns you on. Maybe your life is so boring that the only way you can get excited is if you imagine yourself rubbing up against a psychopathic killer.”
His tone stung—it was Jeremy, it was George Ravenwood—it was the harsh condescension all over again.
She wouldn’t allow it.
“You have to go,” she said. She looked at the floor. She had nothing else to say. She didn’t want to see his eyes anymore or hear his voice distorted by meanness.
“Okay,” he said. He clutched the red notebook so tightly that it bent in his large hand. “I’ll go, if that’s what you want. That’s what you want?”
She nodded.
He gathered his things, finished getting dressed, and left.
As soon as the door shut, leaving her in isolation, dropped back at square one, she knew she had made a mistake.
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