I pressed my hand to my bandage as the laughter died in my throat. I kept forgetting that my body wasn't working right. It wasn't convenient at all. I opened the fridge and grabbed a bottled water. I sipped at it as I walked into the living room. I couldn't call out for him, but I was surprised he hadn't come down from the bedroom to me yet. I told myself that maybe he still felt guilty and was avoiding me. But as I walked toward the stairs, I noticed something strange.
The apartment was impeccable.
There was nothing out of place. There wasn't a sheen of dust on any surface. The floor had been vacuumed and swept clean. I backtracked into the kitchen and realized the same was true in there as well. The counters were clear and wiped down, every dish was put away, the trash can was empty. I walked back to the living room, pressing my hand to my throat. My purse was on the dining room table, and next to it was my phone and my keys. I turned on my phone. I had several missed calls from my mother and my brother. I set it down, not able to be bothered at that moment.
I had a bad feeling.
I hurried up the stairs and threw open the bedroom door.
There was no sign of what had happened in there. The bed was made. Everything was in its place. The closet doors were closed. There were no loose shoes or clothes or water glasses or anything out in the open. It was like no one lived there. I crouched down and opened the bottom drawer, where he'd been keeping his clothes. My blood flowed cold in my veins when I saw that it was empty. I ran my hand over the bottom of the drawer, like the clothes would magically appear the more that I looked for them. I could hear a faint jagged broken sound and I realized it was me. I couldn't scream – I could only make that sound. I stood and opened all the other drawers, tossing out the perfectly folded clothes, looking for his. They had to be hidden under my stupid sweaters and mixed in with my underwear, I told myself. He couldn't have just disappeared, I told myself. It wasn't possible. It couldn't happen.
And yet, every sign of him was gone.
There was nothing of him in the bathroom, there was nothing of him in the bedroom, there was nothing of him anywhere else. Even the bag under the bed had been cleansed of his ropes, his chains, his assortment of other toys. I shook my head because I couldn't believe it. I swiped at my eyes, trying to clear them of the tears that were blurring them. I was making the broken sound and my throat was throbbing but I couldn't stop myself. Then I remembered something. I remembered the one thing he might've forgotten. I crawled across the bed and threw open my bedside table. I dug under the post-its and the unopened condoms, my fingers searching for the cool metal of the frame. There's no way he would remember it, I told myself. There was no way.
I searched the drawer over and over again, looking for the childhood photo of him. It was one of my most prized possessions. It took me a long time to finally admit to myself that it was gone. He'd taken everything. I had nothing left. It was like he'd never been there. It was like he'd never existed. I slammed the drawer shut so hard that the lamp shook then I pressed my face into the pillow. I wanted to scream but I couldn't. I couldn't do anything at all.
He'd left me.
It took two days to fully sink in.
I only dragged my ass out of bed to go to the bathroom or to drink an occasional glass of water. I slept the days away and stayed awake all night, crying until I had no more tears to give. I didn't give up on him. I told myself that he was just laying low for awhile until I wasn't mad at him anymore. Or he was making sure that the FBI wasn't coming for him anymore. I thought up countless scenarios that ended with him returning to me. It didn't happen, though. Two days passed, then two weeks, then two months. He never came back.
Later, much later, after I'd healed and I'd peeled myself off the proverbial floor and forced myself gradually to come back to life, I found the metal box that was usually hidden in the back corner of my closet was sitting on the middle of the bottom shelf. I set it on the dresser and typed in the code – 0923875, his prisoner number – and opened the lid when the lock clicked open. Most of the money I kept in there was intact. Seven hundred dollars was missing, though. I didn't care about the money; it was just another clue. More importantly, there was a small, folded square of brightly colored paper. It was one of my post-its that I kept in my bedside table and I knew immediately he'd left it for me.
I unfolded it slowly and carefully, not wanting to rip it. Inside was one word, written in his small concise handwriting.
Forever.
Chapter Eight
The knife was sharp and the meat was bloody, just like I liked it.
I watched the red liquid pool on the plate underneath the steak, then I dipped my small piece of steak in it and took a bite.
“It's how you like it?” he asked, leaning closer, the candlelight flickering in his eyes. “It's not too rare?”
“No, not too rare,” I said, after swallowing demurely. I slipped my hand around the bulb of my wine glass and followed the bite of steak with a sip of pinot noir. The wine was blissfully tart and full and I savored it on my tongue. It was expensive, of course. The whole dinner was expensive. The air in the restaurant around us was posh. I could practically see the old money and the crisp black Amex cards hidden in plain sight. He'd told me to dress up for our date that night, but I hadn't expected this. He was trying to impress me and I wasn't sure exactly why.
The food was very good. The company was good. But he didn't need to spend a mint to get a point across, whatever that point was. I flicked my eyes up to meet his over the rim of my wine glass and he blinked and smiled, his white teeth flashing. He was nervous, I realized. I hadn't noticed it before, when he'd picked me up for the date. I'd been preoccupied, though, truthfully. I didn't even notice the color of his suit jacket before we sat down. It was a rich blue. His silk pocket square was striped gray and white. His shirt was crisp white and opened at the throat. I took a quick inventory, telling myself it was important, for some reason. I needed to pay more attention to the man in front of me. The man in front of me was the one that was important, after all. Any men before him – one in particular – weren't in the picture anymore. They were long gone and didn't deserve more thought than that.
Mitch was my boyfriend after all. He deserved more attention than I was giving him.
That much was undeniable. The restaurant was beautiful too, but I was used to dining at places like this with him. I'd been to all the best restaurants in Seattle and the theater and the orchestra and the ballet. He also liked going to movies, but only horror movies. He loved cheap slasher films, where the blood always looked too red and there was always one lucky girl left alive at the end. I hated those kinds of movies, but I would watch them if he wanted to. I couldn't help wondering how fucked up the survivors would be after the credits rolled. True, they'd survived, but at what cost? Life would never be normal again. It wasn't much of a happy ending if lifetimes of therapy and sleepless nights would be the character's future. Not that I thought about it that much.
Mitch was good to me. Too good. Better than I deserved. Sometimes I caught him staring at me and I had to look away because it made me uncomfortable how happy he looked. Sometimes I felt sorry for him, but other times I told myself it was his choice. He'd made the choice to fall for me. I was the worst possible choice he could've made, but he was stubborn. If I'd said no, he would've wait patiently for a yes. Whether the yes took a few minutes or a few weeks, he would've waited. He had the patience of a saint. Either that or he was a complete idiot. But I'd been an idiot too once, so I couldn't blame him for that either.
I couldn't help but feel like I'd been here before.
Maybe I was tempting fate on purpose.
“You know I'm from Texas,” I said, breaking the silence. “I like it practically still mooing.”
“I know,” he said, nodding. I stared at him, longer than I probably should've. In that light, his skin looked creamy and white. His skin wasn't rough. His eyes were soft and caressing and trusting. He smelled like a J. Crew s
tore, not daylight and skin and sweat. He used his brain, not his hands. He used his words, not violence. Well, he was learning about the violence. I was teaching him, bit by bit. But it didn't come natural. It didn't come from deep within him. It didn't have any meaning to him. It was like going to church on Sunday and not having any faith. It was hollow. I told myself it didn't matter. In a perfect world, I would leave all that behind me anyway. There was no reason for me to cling to it. And yet I did.
“You're being weird tonight,” I said, taking another sip of wine. “Are you tired?”
“I'm always tired,” he said with a laugh.
“In that case,” I said, dropping my eyes back to my steak. “Tonight, we'll have to make sure you get to bed early.” I sliced into the meat again, ignoring his reaction to my words. He laughed again, but I could still hear the tension in his throat.
“We can go now,” he said. “Do you want to have them wrap that up? We'll get it to go.” I laughed along and I felt some more of the tension fade.
“A few more bites,” I said, taking a bite of haricot vert. I could've eaten the whole plate – the potatoes and the vegetables and the whole steak – but I made sure to keep my intake small. I didn't want the whole plate, I told myself. Only a taste. It took discipline but discipline was important. I was at the thinnest I'd been since high school. Less drinking, less eating, more exercise. Discipline gave me something to focus on in the quiet moments when my mind started to drift back to the past. I wanted to focus on the here and now. At that moment, I was sitting across from a good man. He had a good job and he was smart. He was a goddamned doctor, for heaven's sake. He loved me. I knew that. That was all that was important. I chewed slowly, savoring every bit of the buttery and salty vegetable, knowing that I could work it off the next morning in the pool. The glass of wine alone was worth several laps.
No dessert, I told myself.
“There's no rush,” he said, slicing into his sea bass.
“I know.” I set down my fork and leaned forward, watching him eat. He had slim, capable fingers. Surgeon's fingers. I liked watching him cutting meat. It made me think of him performing surgery. Cutting through flesh and muscle and tendons was his job. It was so strange to think about. Some people did that for no money. Some people cut into people to destroy and maim. Mitch cut into people to heal and to fix. It was admirable, really.
Dinner ended early with no dessert, just as I'd requested. He paid for it with his credit card, no fuss. Every time he did that, I felt like a Texas girl again, letting a big important man take care of little old me. But I didn't fight it. This was our routine. He paid and then we got in his white Audi and drove back to his high rise apartment and fucked. Then he made me breakfast the next morning and we said I loved you before I left in the afternoon. That night, he took a different route back to his apartment, which we never did. He also was oddly quiet, as well. Usually he was full of stories that I loved to hear, stories about surgeries and tumors and other disgusting things that didn't qualify as polite conversation. But that night, we rode in silence.
“Just say it,” I said, staring at his profile and willing him to look at me. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel but still didn't look at me. He seemed nervous. He seemed like he was bursting at the seams to say something. “Are you going to break up with me?” I asked, because I didn't want to assume the other thing. The other thing that would make my mother ascend to another plane of existence from utter happiness. The other thing that involved diamonds and white dresses and Catholic churches filled with family you only saw on special occasions. He sighed sharply and I cried out as he put on the brakes and pulled over to the side of the road. The car jerked to a stop on the shoulder and the engine purred, barely distressed by the unexpected detour.
“I'm not going to break up with you,” he announced, putting the car in park. “Are you going to break up with me?”
“Of course not!” I said, smacking his hand. “Why would I do that?”
“I don't know,” he said, running his hand over his thinning hair. “I just messed up, that's all.”
“Messed up?” I asked, confused. He dug in his suit jacket and held out a small box. I stared at it, not quite sure if it was safe to assume what I thought it was.
“I was supposed to give you this in the restaurant. It was supposed to be a grand gesture, a big deal. I was going to put it in a flute of champagne or something,” he said, his voice shaking. He laughed a little, trying to disguise his nervousness. I took the box and opened it. I wasn't nervous at all. I wasn't even all that surprised.
It was a very nice diamond, from what I could tell in the low light of the dark car.
“You want to marry me?” I asked, even though I knew the answer. It was fairly safe to assume at that point.
“Yes, Jo,” he said with a more genuine laugh. “Of course I want to marry you. But that's not the question.”
“What's the question?” Again, I already knew the answer.
“The question is, will you marry me?” he turned in his seat and looked at me. I stared down at the ring and a strange thought passed over me. A question that I had no use in asking myself.
What would Elliot say?
It had been over a year since I'd seen Elliot. He had no bearing on what I was doing with my life. At least, that's what I told myself as I slipped the ring on. That's what I told myself as I smiled up at Mitch and reached out to caress his cheek. “Yes. Yes, I'll marry you,” I whispered, ignoring the voice at the back of my mind telling that Elliot wouldn't like it.
He wouldn't like it one bit.
*****
I closed Mitch's bathroom door lightly behind me and turned on the light. I scowled as the light assaulted my eyes and I pressed my hand over them until they adjusted to the brightness. I crossed the room, the marble tile cold under my feet, and sat on the toilet. I peed, setting my hands on my bare thighs. I didn't look down at them until I was finished and it was then that I saw the ring again, in all its glory. I still couldn't really believe it. I had a man's ring on my finger again. I'd actually agreed to marry someone again. I wasn't quite sure how I felt about it because it hadn't had time to sink in yet. I finished and flushed the toilet and went to the sink. I washed my hands quickly. The ring didn't budge, even when I dried my hands on the towel hanging beside the sink.
It was a perfect fit.
I gave myself a hard look in the mirror. In the bright light, I scrutinized every inch of my naked body. Every scar, every mark, every bruise that was on display. Every one of them had a story. I'd never hid them from Mitch. I didn't tell him the whole truth, but I didn't hide the signs of my past. The bite-marks and the faint scars around my wrists and my neck were undeniable. He'd seen it all. Although he'd never gone far enough to give me new scars, some of the bruises belonged to him. The yellowing bruise on my hip from his thumb digging into me. The three red marks on my upper arm from where he grabbed me and threw me on the bed. And my ass was still pink from how he'd spanked me.
Child's play.
When Elliot finished with me, sometimes I couldn't move. Sometimes I'd be bleeding.
I ran my finger around the pale raised scar on my tit, above my nipple. His teeth had made that mark, all those years ago. I carried it still, like a badge of deviance. I didn't ask him to do that to me; he didn't care if I wanted it or not, at the time. But there were other marks I had asked for. There were times where I had begged for him to hurt me. There were times when I begged for him to make me feel as much as possible, even if the feeling was pain. And he'd given it to me, because pain was what he liked most.
It was crazy to miss that. I knew it was insane to crave it. I tried to forget him everyday. He could've been dead or back in prison for all I cared. He'd betrayed me, used me, left me. He'd almost killed me. Yet, here I was, in Mitch's bathroom in the middle of the night, thinking of him. Remembering all the things he used to do. It was the ring, I knew. The last time I'd worn a man's ring, I'd doomed us both. L
oving me was dangerous, in more ways than one. I couldn't deny that when Mitch slid the big beautiful and expensive ring on my finger, my first thought was Elliot. I thought about the look on his face when he found out. I thought about the rage he would feel when he found out that I'd agreed to be someone else's wife. He would be beside himself.
But maybe I was fooling myself. Maybe he didn't care about me at all anymore. As much as I tried to pretend I didn't care about him, that thought knocked the wind out of me. It had been a year since I'd seen or spoken to Elliot, but I still wanted him to think of me. I still wanted him to want me. Nothing could be right in the world if he had given up on me. I acted tough and tried to convince myself that I hated him and part of me did. But the other part longed for him just as much as I always had. The dark and disgusting part of me that I tried to hide and disguise it was still crying out for him every moment of every day. It didn't matter though. I was going to marry Mitch. I'd made my decision.
I was going to be happy.
I turned away from my own nudity and turned off the light again. I didn't bother hiding the marks on my body but I didn't want to see them anymore. I wanted to pretend that I was clean and unblemished, in brain, body and spirit. I wanted to pretend that I was the woman that someone like Mitch deserved. He deserved someone who was normal. He deserved to be enough for someone. I could play that role, I told myself, as I slipped back into the crisp cool sheets next to him. I could feel his warmth seeping toward me and I moved closer to him, putting my head against his shoulder. He didn't move. He slept so soundly, like he'd never had bad things happen to him at night. He slept like he'd never had to watch his back or be alert at all times. It was comforting. He felt safe, so I felt safe. I felt safe next to him.
Love Is Strange (I Know... #2) Page 10