by Artemis Hunt
She takes his hand again. The waitress is staring at them, admiring them for the attractive couple they are. The waitress may notice that his lips are pursed and he looks none too happy, but she may assume they are having a lovers’ spat.
Delilah says, “Is what we are doing so terrible for you? You seem to be able to get it up every time without problems.”
He sighs. “I get it up every time, Delilah, with anyone. It has nothing to do with you.”
“A truly sexual being,” she purrs, stroking his knuckles in an intimate way. Under the table, she has eased her foot out of her shoe. She nudges his shin with her stockinged toes.
He squirms uncomfortably. She is getting too coupley for his taste. Even Sam doesn’t presume to get coupley, and Sam has a lot more claim than this woman.
“I like this,” she confesses. “I like being with you. I have forgotten what it’s like to truly be with you.”
“You haven’t truly been with me. What we did in college was – ” he waves a diffident hand “ – not me.”
“I know. But I still like it anyway.” She pauses. “I like it a whole lot more than I thought I would.”
He frowns. “What are you saying?”
She runs the tip of her finger down the back of his hand. “I’m saying that . . . ” she seems to choke a little “ . . . that I may want this to continue. So here’s a new deal. I’ll drop all charges against you. But on one condition.”
She raises her grey eyes to appraise him. There’s a sudden vulnerability in them that he hasn’t seen for a long time. Not since she was Adele Jankovic and bared her soul to him.
She says, “I want this. I want this to continue. I want us to be together. A couple.” He flinches at the word, and she notices this. “I want you, Brian. You owe me.”
Her face hardens.
He knows she is referring to her suicide attempt. The feeling of guilt overwhelms him again, but he tries to stave it off. No matter how guilty he was in the past, she’s using her emotional strings to blackmail him now. For this is blackmail – clear as daylight.
He swallows the lump that has bolted to his throat. “For how long will this new deal continue?”
“For as long as it takes.” Her eyes hold a gleam of something indefinable. It isn’t madness. It isn’t calculation. He realizes that she desperately wants to keep him with her.
He finds his blood running cold.
“I can’t do that,” he says. “I’m not in love with you.”
Far from it. I’m in love with Sam!
There, he said it to himself And he didn’t turn into stone.
“You were never the sort of man to ‘do’ love. So don’t begin that sort of talk now.”
“You want me to live with you. To be your lover. For keeps. There’s no timeline definition.” He is finding it hard even to live a lie for two weeks. And he’s forcing himself to do it for Sam. He shakes his head. “I can’t do that, Delilah. I can’t live like that.”
“You want to go to prison?” Her voice takes on an edge.
He shutters his eyes, and then opens them again.
“No, I don’t want to go to prison. But in prison, at least I won’t have to live a lie. So I’ll take my chances on the stand.”
Her complexion is mottled. Her voice is very cold.
“They are going to rape you in there. Someone with your face and body. You wouldn’t last a week.” She practically spits this at him.
“Maybe. But I can’t live a lie, Delilah. Surely you’d understand that.” She would be forcing him into a prison of her own devices. And even if he was out there – free in the sunshine – his mind and body would be confined in a prison every bit as claustrophobic as one with four walls and iron bars.
He can already envision it. He would be forced to come home to her every day. It wouldn’t be a home. He would be a man of his word. He wouldn’t take the ‘deal’, get her to drop the charges before the court case, and then renege on his promise. He doesn’t make promises he knows he won’t keep. He would force every fiber of his body to go through with it.
She is trembling with anger.
“You’re rejecting me,” she accuses him. “Again.”
“I can’t live a lie,” he repeats. He sees no other recourse.
“If you say ‘no’ to me right now, our deal concerning your little girlfriend is off too. I won’t drop my charges against her.”
The threat hangs between them, electrifying the air. Now his veins are like ice.
“No,” he says desperately, “we had a deal. I did everything you wanted of me.”
“The deal was for right up to the court case. You’ve only done a week of it.”
The slow boil of his indignation begins to simmer. “Come on, Delilah, leave Sam out of this. I agreed, you agreed. You’re the one who changed the goalposts. It isn’t fair.”
“What you did to me back in college wasn’t fair either,” she says in a low, angry voice. “As well as what you made me do.”
He winces again. This is his sore point where she is concerned.
“You owe me,” she repeats.
“What I did to you was rotten, I agree. I’m sorry you couldn’t deal with it. But what you did to me was totally unwarranted and illegal. You took almost everything I had. And it’s only because I’m strong enough that I’m not putting a noose around my neck.”
And it’s also because he knows he has to live for Sam.
He continues in a controlled tone, “I would pretty much consider us even. There’s no need to make me . . . and Sam . . . go on paying.”
She shakes her head.
“I love you,” she says, and her face and voice are so full of complex, painful emotions that he shudders. He has no doubt she means it too. It is obsession bordering on love, but it is love nonetheless.
He says gently, “You think you love me, but you don’t. You’ve never known me. You’ve only known a caricature of me. You can’t love an ‘idea’ of a person. I’m not who you think I am. You’re trying to mold me into someone you want me to be, but I’m not that person.”
“It’s that woman, isn’t it?”
He doesn’t reply.
“It’s her,” she insists. “And I’ll be damned if I let both of you have each other. You think about it, Brian. I’ll give you two days. You and your little lovebird can go to separate prisons, or you can do the right thing and repay what you owe me.”
8
Sam can see that Brian is extremely troubled.
He is home tonight, and she guesses that Delilah has released him from his duties. But why? It could be as mundane as her having to attend an office function tonight. It could also be as sinister as him having done something to displease her.
Whatever it is, she’s frightened for him. She senses that a woman as psychologically disturbed as Delilah would never let him go easy.
She makes both of them a simple meal of salad and butternut soup. They talk about the gym. About Thor running the gym while she’s away and annoying all the other trainers. Brian laughs. She smiles at him. It’s good to see him laugh. She hasn’t seen him laugh in a very long time.
After dinner, he says gravely, “I have something to tell you.”
She tenses, but tries to appear outwardly calm.
He takes in a deep breath. “I did something really stupid.”
He tells her, in fits and starts, about Delilah and the ‘deal’ he made with her. She listens, not interrupting, until he finishes.
He looks up at her expectantly. “Well, are you going to ream me out?”
Tears come into her eyes, and she blinks them away.
She says, “So you did this because she promised you she would withdraw the charges against me?”
She is trembling.
He did this . . . for me.
The stupid, stupid lunk head. How could he have done this? Sacrificed himself like that at the altar of the woman who ruined him . . . for her? Of all the moronic, imbecilic, unbelieva
ble things to do! She envisions him being used like a sex slave for days on end and shudders.
He didn’t technically tell her what went on in bed between him and Delilah, of course, but she can well imagine it. All those positions that woman probably made him contort himself into. All those surfaces she made him fuck her against. All those things with his hands and mouth and cock that she made him do to her. One can get moist just thinking about it . . . and outraged.
He flinches, as if he’s expecting her to go mental on him too.
But she doesn’t. She doesn’t straighten the crooked smile that appears on her face, and she knows it’s there because the corners of her mouth are starting to ache from it.
“Why’re you grinning?” he demands.
“Because of you. You dopey, loony dumbbell. Whatever possessed you to do such a thing? You might as well throw yourself into the fire and make a deal with the Devil himself.”
He flushes. He says in a low voice, “It isn’t only because of you, although you are the main reason I did it. I feel as if I owe her something for what I did to her. You know . . . back in college.”
“Brian, you can’t keep on blaming yourself. What happened to Adele was rotten, yes, but she made her own choices. And she has punished you well for that. She has no right to demand this . . . this travesty from you and go on punishing you. No one has the right to do that to another human being.”
For all his bravado, he can be so emotionally irrational at times. But perhaps there lies the root of his problems. He has the emotional maturity of a teenager, even though physically and professionally, he’s all grown up. It had a lot to do with him being an abused kid, Sam thinks sadly.
Brian sighs. “Then why do I feel so fucking guilty?”
She moves closer to him and puts her arm around his shoulders. He’s gone thinner. Much thinner. Too much stress and worry.
Now it’s her turn to take some of that away. Or maybe add to it, depending on how he would react.
She says, “Brian, I haven’t been totally honest with you either.”
He raises his eyebrows. “Is this about Thor?”
She hisses exasperatedly. “Are you kidding? Snap out of it already about Thor. He’s nothing to me, OK? Nothing! No, this is much more important. You see, I followed you that night. And . . . ”
She tells him what she has done. His eyes go round.
“No shit!” he yells when her story is finally over. “Damn it, Sammie, what you’re doing is fucking dangerous!”
“I’ve done it anyway,” she says. Her shoulders steel themselves determinedly. “What’s done is done. Now what the hell are we going to do with it?”
9
In the Court of General Sessions, Brian and Karen Sandler, his attorney, stand as the Honorable Rufus B. Cowan takes his seat at the bench. The courtroom is full today. Brian grimaces. A good portion of the general public as well as a sprinkling of the city’s press have turned out in full force to watch him get hammered.
His mother, a beautiful dark-haired woman with startling green eyes – his eyes – sits silently on one of the pews behind him. He’s extremely aware of her presence and that of Sam’s. He’s glad his father and uncle decided to stay away. His father would probably be glad to see him in the slammer.
“That’s where you belong, you little fucker,” his father had told him once when he was hauled out of school again for smoking dope.
Delilah Faulkner and the ball-busting Assistant District Attorney, Norma Hennessey, occupy the prosecutor’s table, right next to the jury box. Brian steals a look at the jurors. Six men, six women – their ages running the gamut of twenty-something to sixty-something. He supposes that’s how the lawyers chose them – to eliminate favoritism.
Not that he’s going to be a favorite of anyone here.
Unless . . .
He met up with his mother before the proceedings.
“Brian,” she says coolly. “You look well.”
As well as he can under the circumstances. His mother is dressed in a well-cut Chanel suit. Her hair is impeccable, as always, but her hands betray a slight tremor and her eyes are slightly glazed. Brian knows what that means – his mother has indulged in her morning libations, as usual. The two sharp shots of alcohol would have rendered her into a pleasant stupor till mid-morning, so that she would be oblivious to whatever was happening around her, even if her eyes were fully open.
Some things never changed. He supposes he should be glad for her actually turning up at all.
“So do you, Mother,” he says, kissing her cheek. She smells of dry twigs and pressed powder.
Sam is waiting behind him, and so he steps aside.
“Mother, this is my friend, Samantha. Samantha, this is my mother, Angelique.”
Sam offers his mother a hand. Angelique shakes it with a weak grasp. Brian notices the liver spots on his mother’s skin.
“I’m so glad to have finally met you,” Sam gushes.
Brian knows Sam is trying to be nice because this is the first time she has ever met any member of his family. Well, don’t hope for too much, Sammie.
Angelique does not return the sentiment. He knows he should have warned Sam about his mother. Don’t expect any semblance of normalcy.
“I suppose I’d better check out the restroom before your trial, Brian,” his mother says. “Good luck, just in case I don’t manage to speak to you before it starts.”
“Thank you, Mother.” He allows her to kiss his cheek.
Then she turns tail and vanishes in the direction of the restrooms. Sam stares after her, the disappointment obvious on her face.
“Don’t mind her,” Brian says.
Sam gives him a smile. “At least she showed up.”
Which echoes his sentiments perfectly.
“Caleb wanted to come too,” he says, “but he couldn’t get off work. Anyway, I don’t want this trial to turn into circus freak show with all my friends showing up. It’s not exactly as if I’m the good guy here.”
“I know. But both Caleb and Cassie are behind you one hundred percent. You know that.”
“Caleb maybe.” He grimaces. “I’m sure Cassie won’t mind seeing me tucked away behind bars for a millennium or two.”
Sam’s lack of response to this validates his observation. She straightens his tie in a loving gesture.
“You look like a million bucks,” she says, changing the topic.
At Karen’s behest, he had suited up nicely. He is wearing his dove grey Armani, and his hair has been combed and styled immaculately.
“It’s important to let the jury see what a fine, upstanding member of the community you are, and it’s important you do not look like a common rapist,” Karen had said.
Brian clasps Sam’s hand at his tie. His eyes arrest her shining ones.
His voice is hoarse as he says, “Thank you.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“Yes, you did. Whatever happens . . . thank you.”
He kisses her on the lips, long and hard, before she can protest. She falls into the kiss, her arms going around his neck.
Someone clears her throat behind them.
“Brian,” Karen says, “it’s time.”
He releases Sam from the kiss. Her eyes are moist as she gazes at him.
“I care for you . . . very, very much,” she whispers.
“I care for you too,” he replies.
A strange feeling permeates his insides, turning his organs into mush. He turns away from Sam before he can betray himself.
The courtroom hushes as Judge Cowan takes his seat amid a clatter of chair against floor. Then everyone takes their seats as well with scrapes and much adjusting. Brian’s eyes stray to the jury again. He can feel them appraising him, taking in his careful appearance. The women in particular seem admiring of his looks. He hopes they are thinking that someone who wears Armani can’t possibly be a rapist.
Fat chance.
He’s not sure about the men though.
From the way they are giving him the once over, they don’t seem to have an opinion.
Yet.
The proceedings begin.
Norma Hennessey stands up. “The prosecution calls Delilah Faulkner to the stand.”
Delilah Faulkner is not looking her best today. She is dressed in a simple black skirt suit – neat but not expensive looking. Her usually glorious red hair has been pulled back into a bun, and several strands stick out from it, giving her a slightly disheveled appearance. Her eyes are ringed and her face is very pale. Her usually lacquered fingernails have been pared down and bitten.
God, Brian thinks. She’s really giving the jury a show. A prickle of discomfort creeps around his neck, and he has to loosen his tie.
A marshal swears Delilah in.
Brian tenses as Norma Hennessey goes through the preliminary identification questions. Then Delilah is ready to begin her story.
“Ms Faulkner, do you know the defendant, Brian Morton?”
Delilah stares hard at him. He meets her eyes. Her lower lip starts to tremble, and she clutches at the witness stand as if she is going to fall.
Delilah whimpers, “Y-yes, I do. I met him . . . in the lobby of his apartment building.”
“When?”
“Around nine p.m., on the night of ______” Delilah gives the date.
“Tell us what happened on that night, Ms Faulkner,” Norma coaxes her gently.
Delilah takes a deep breath. She trembles again. Brian clenches his fist under the table.
“Do you need some water?” Norma says in a solicitous tone.
“N-no. I can continue.”
Delilah seemingly takes a moment to compose herself, all the while looking like a frail waif who has been victimized. She stares at the jury. Brian seizes them up. Their expressions range from the non-committal to the concerned.
Delilah says, “I was visiting a friend. I brought some pasta. I was walking through the lobby of Mr. Morton’s apartment block, when the elevator doors opened beside me. This man, Mr. Morton, steps out and collides into me. The pasta sauce spilled all over the front of my dress. Mr. Morton said he was sorry. I was extremely uncomfortable because he was looking down my dress at that time. He had this . . . this look on his face.”