I crawl across the room to the window where the butterflies dance around the rosebush. I watch them twirl and spin and flutter their routine as they bask in the beauty they were created for. When I press the fingertips of my good hand to the glass, one of the butterflies moves closer, as if keeping me company from the emptiness that has become my life in just a week.
“I’ll fly,” I murmur, my gaze following the delicate dance. “I’ll fly.”
“Ready?” Cooper asks, stepping into the room and snapping me out of my trance.
“Absolutely,” I reply, void of emotion. “I like to go to the hospital naked.”
Material hits me in the face and after the shock, I realise Cooper has thrown me new clothes—another new outfit.
“Pants and a tank top.”
“Or trousers and a vest,” I return with a sneer, picking up the clothes.
I pull them on, and allow Cooper to fasten the bra. I have no choice but to let him, although I feel nothing when his fingers ghost over my skin. I refuse to let Cooper help me with the vest, struggling to put it on instead of letting him think I’m weak. When I’m dressed, Cooper grabs the tops of my arms and turns me to face away from him before his fingers comb through my knotted hair.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“Practising my braiding skills.”
My heart sinks, my stomach goes with it, and my knees want to go, too. Cooper braids the little girl’s hair. He parts mine at the scalp, taking a layer from the top and twisting it into a braid as he adds more hair to it. After quickly securing a band at the bottom, Cooper turns me to face him and smiles in pride.
“French braids are becoming my specialty.”
“Along with abduction and abuse?”
He frowns, and then smiles. Is there nothing I can say that will hurt him? I want to wound him, get through to him and make him understand just how crazy he is, but he’s wearing an armour I can’t penetrate. I suspect it has something to do with him knowing I know he has a child locked up in the next house, and I’ll behave for her sake.
“Now you’re ready.” He kisses my cheek and tucks a piece of my fringe behind my hair. “No one else gets to see you naked.”
“Except my fiancé.”
He growls. That’s how I’ll get him, by taunting his jealousy of a relationship he has no right to envy.
“He’s not here, is he?”
His hold on me as he leads me from the tower back to the house is a little more aggressive, a little more brutal, like I’m becoming used to with him. I hate that even now, with a broken wrist and a fractured soul, I love the pang of arousal that hits me when he touches me. We leave the house and Cooper ushers me into his car, hooking the hem of his t-shirt over the handle of his gun, reminding me to think again if I’m contemplating running, as he rounds the car and gets in behind the wheel.
“Red lights don’t last forever and I will shoot to kill if you attempt to run,” his says, starting the engine and hitting the button on the remote for the gates.
“I won’t run,” I promise, with not a hint of deception.
I won’t run. I won’t leave the girl behind. Cooper pulls off his drive and for the first time in a week, I taste freedom. He locks the doors as he speeds up and swerves around country lanes without thought. His driving is smooth, confident and assertive, everything Cooper stands for culminating in his ability to drive me to hospital with as much finesse as he possesses when he fucks me to oblivion. I watch the trees whizz by, look at the birds flying overhead, and allow the hum of the engine to sate the arousal burning intensely in the depths of my soul. Oh, Cooper Jennings, what have you done to me? I close my eyes, lay my head on the headrest and, despite how much I hate him, I rest my hand on Cooper’s and smile when he hooks his thumb over mine.
“Caterpillar.”
Cooper shakes me gently and I wake up with a jolt, the searing pain throbbing in my wrist reminding me why we’re here. I grimace and hug my hand close to my chest, keeping it hooked and shielded and protected like I failed to do for my soul. Cooper took more than my freedom. He has taken everything from me.
“Where are we?” I ask sitting up and looking around the small carpark.
“His name is Dr Reese, and he’ll fix your wrist.”
He gets out of the car and I watch as his body moves fluidly round to my side, before he opens the door and gestures for me to get out. When I do, he takes my hand in his and strokes the back of it with his thumb, locking the car with a flick of his wrist and leading me towards where the doctor is waiting.
“Ah, Cooper Jennings.”
I look up from where I'm staring at the floor, wondering if anyone will notice me, to see a short, round, white-haired man in a white coat standing in front of us. He approaches Cooper with his arms held out for an embrace, but my kidnapper takes a step back and shakes his head.
“Reese,” Cooper replies, offering his hand for a shake instead, which the doctor accepts.
“And this must be the famous ex-wife,” Dr Reese says, turning to me and assessing me from head to toe. “Did you have a fall, sweetie?”
Ex-wife? I look at Cooper, who is smirking and looking anywhere but at me. I’m supposed to play along. The gun in the back of Cooper’s jeans reminds me of that.
“I did,” I answer with a forced smile. “Wet feet and wooden stairs don’t make for a good mix.”
“Neither does gin and walking in general.”
I narrow my eyes but he laughs, Cooper chuckles, and like the good little pet I am, I laugh too.
“Let’s get you looked at.”
Cooper and I follow him to the back and into an open area that looks like an operating theatre. Dr Reese sits at his office and gestures for me to take the seat next to his desk. Cooper stands by the door with his hands behind his back, on guard. From who?
“Coop, you can’t give us some privacy?” Reese asks, gesturing for me to give him my hand.
“No.”
“And that is why you’re my favourite patient.”
Cooper just rolls his eyes as Dr Reese looks down at my arm, placing it flat on his desk, palm-up. I grimace; my hand is swollen and blue, my fingers plump and engorged. The skin had reddened, little prickles of pigment sparking against the angry inflammation.
“You didn’t put your hands out to break your fall?”
I shake my head. “My hands were…full.”
“Interesting.”
He places two fingertips over several spots around my wrist and checks the blood in my fingers, dragging his nail up each digit and monitoring the return from white to red.
“She needs an x-ray,” Dr Reese says to Cooper, glaring past me at him. “If you don’t get out, she’s going home without a diagnosis. Out you go, Cooper. Ask Bella for a coffee or a date or something.”
I shoot a glare over my shoulder at Cooper, who has the audacity to smirk and raise his eyebrows in silent acceptance of a challenge.
“Yeah, I heard she likes Spanish.” He opens the door and pauses. “You’ve got five minutes, Reese.”
When he’s left and closed the door behind him, Dr Reese hurries me to stand and cross the room to sit on a stool beside the bed.
“I’m not stupid,” he says, gathering whatever he needs to perform the x-ray, while I look down at the tiled floor. “I know you’re not his ex-wife.”
“Does he have one?”
Dr Reese grins. I just confirmed a suspicion, not knowledge of a fact.
“Yes…and I don’t believe her name was Erin.”
I shrug. “Doesn’t change anything. He’ll be back soon.”
I try to flex my fingers to draw his attention back to my broken bone, but hiss through clenched teeth instead when it hurts. Worse than the whipping. Worse than the cuts from the glass. Almost as much as how much my heart hurts when I remind myself I’m not going home.
“He’s a good man,” he says softly, positioning my hand on the tissue paper under a bright white light with a small cross i
n the centre of the window. “He just does things a little backwards.”
“You haven’t asked for my NHS number, or the name and address of my doctor’s surgery.”
“I owe Cooper a few favours.”
“Well, at least I can take some relief knowing I’m worth enough to be cashed in.”
I frown, angry at my own bitterness, and smile in apology. Reese crosses the room, turns the lights off, and hides behind a screen before a low beep sounds out.
“How do you know him?” I ask, when he returns to re-position my hand.
“He was brought to me as a twenty-two-year-old man with a shattered dream.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was nine am on a Monday morning when I received the call to prep for surgery. Cooper Jennings had been rushed to hospital in the early hours with a spontaneous pneumothorax.”
“What’s that?”
I lick my lips and lean closer, my injury forgotten as I imagine Cooper in the back of an ambulance, his life in danger.
“It’s caused by the formation of small sacs in the lung tissue that rupture. Air leaks in and causes the lung to collapse.”
I turn my head to look for him as a lump lodges in my chest, but he tuts at me and grunts, telling me to turn around. Another beep sounds out as another picture is taken, and then he returns to sit in front of me.
“His lung collapsed? How?”
My fingers are trembling, no longer from trying to flex my fat fingers, but from pain for my captor. He would have been choking, drowning in his own body and convinced he was going to die. Despite Cooper’s cool exterior, I knew he was sensitive. I knew there was something that plagues him, and I know how it feels to drown.
“Primary spontaneous pneumothorax isn’t always due to injury. Sometimes…” He sighs, hesitantly moving my arm again. “Sometimes things just happen. We can’t explain why and we can’t repair the damage.”
“So his lung just collapsed? Just like that?”
Dr Reese nods, bows his head and disappears again. I know the conversation is over, but I have so much more to ask.
“Please,” I say, talking over the beep. “Please, tell me more.”
The lights flicker on and Dr Reese switches a number of things off before he returns to me and guides me to stand. He glances at the door; he’s breaking patient confidentiality here, but he doesn’t seem to be preparing to regret it.
“The lung was drained and he was stabilised before he was brought to me, but his medical team wanted to give him the best chance and, well…” He grins, extending his arm in exaggerated cockiness. “I’m the best.”
“And you’ve been his doctor ever since?”
“I wasn’t able to get Coop back into Team USA, but I got him back in the pool and after the shock, that was all he wanted.”
Team USA. Cooper was an Olympic swimmer. He was a swimmer, just like me, and his dream was torn from him, while I walked away from mine.
“His lung suffered permanent damage, and it will always be his weakness. But I promise you, Mrs Jennings, he’s a good man.”
“I know,” I say, nodding as the handle turns and the door opens. I look over my shoulder to see Cooper standing in the doorway. “I know.”
“What’s the damage?”
“A closed fracture to the ulna.” Dr Reese pushes off, propelling his chair across the room to land in front of his computer where he begins clicking and tapping at his keys. Cooper stands over him looking at the x-ray images, and I cock my head, wondering if it’s possible to tell which lung almost killed him. “It seems Mrs Jennings took quite a fall, Coop. Maybe you should have taken a share of the load.”
Bastard. He knows I was tied up. I saw him looking at the tracks on my wrists, the burn marks and welts left by Cooper’s brutal treatment, and assumed he thought I just lived on the kinky side of life. I’ve never been outside the box…the one Griffin forced me to live in.
Shaking my head, I force myself to return to the room as Cooper and Dr Reese continue to talk about my wrist. Turns out, I have a closed fracture, which is a break resulting in minimal damage to surrounding tissue. I'm lucky the bone didn’t break through the skin, apparently. I’m even luckier it didn’t shatter and leave me without a hand. All because Cooper tied me up and showed me the child he keeps in house number 2. How many does he have? How many prisoners does he have and how many of them have their own house like the child and me? Dr Reese said he’s a good man and while that may have been true ten years ago when he was a young man with a dream who was dealt a shitty hand he couldn’t trade…good men don’t steal people. They don’t abduct children. They don’t whip with belts, gag with balls, and tie women up with no way to break their fall when he shoves them.
“Caterpillar?” Cooper says, waving his hand in front of my face.
I blink away blurred vision, and swipe at my tears with my good hand, the bad one still flat on the bed. Cooper strokes my hair away from my face and cups my cheek. I want to believe he’s a good man, but I know he has a gun in his waistband, and I know he won't hesitate to use a bullet on me. That doesn’t make him a good man. It makes him a monster. The worst kind, because he controls his own redemption, and he chooses not to use it.
“I’m fine,” I lie, before he can even ask me.
“You’ve got a break. It’s not severe—we can repair it with a cast, but…you won't be able to swim for a while.”
I shrug. “I’m used to being restricted. Just fix me…please.”
He smiles and leans forward, pressing a kiss just below my ear. “I’m trying.”
I shove him away and search for Dr Reese. I’m not broken. There’s nothing wrong with me. He can’t mould me into someone else because who I am isn’t good enough for him.
Dr Reese returns from a side room wheeling a trolley with a pile of bandages and a pot of plaster on top. He stops in front of me, shoving a conflicted Cooper out of the way.
“For Christ’s sake,” he quips, refusing to be intimidated by Cooper’s brooding like I am. He’s used to it. “Will you make yourself useful and open the bandages.”
Cooper scratches his head, but reaches out and picks up the first plastic packet.
The cast is heavy, and I’m only enraged more with having it up the length of my forearm when Cooper’s chuckle sounds out every time I bang it on something, and when I get it caught in the sleeve of the hoodie he puts on me before dinner.
“So we just go back to…what?” I ask, sitting at the table. “What happens now? I need to know what I’m supposed to do every day.”
He places the food in front of me, a quick rice meal he threw together when we got home from the clinic.
“What’s the issue with just relaxing around the house?”
“That’s not me,” I snap, straightening my back and squaring my shoulders. “Your wife may be happy doing that, but I’m not.”
“Ex-wife,” he corrects, as if that’s the only important part of this conversation. “And I’m not talking about forever, but Jesus. You don’t think you’ve taken enough over the past few days? How much more do you want?”
“I…”
I stop. I wasn’t expecting the answer from him. He promised to fill me up with deviance, and he has, yet I still find myself wanting…more.
“Just eat, Erin.”
I stare down into the bowl, grateful he cooked something I could eat one-handed and with my subordinate hand, since I’m right-handed and it’ll be trapped in plaster for the next six weeks.
“I’m not an ordinary man,” he says, happy to talk while we’re eating.
It’s his comfort. I imagine him sitting around a big table with his family, using dinner time to have conversations and debates and make decisions. But right now, Cooper is talking about something that wouldn’t be welcome at the family table. He’s no ordinary man. I know that.
“Go on.” I continue eating, as if his admission hasn’t thrown me and nudged my appetite into dormancy.
“I�
��I don’t want to explain it.” He takes a sip of water, swallowing his food and still refusing to look at me as he gathers more rice on his spoon. “I don’t want to have to. You know the deal and, honestly, I’m not telling you I won't let you in. I’m just asking you to feel it and not expect to be satisfied with a verbal explanation just because you want to soothe your curiosity.”
“Okay, I understand that.” I take a deep breath and continue. “What were you doing when your lung collapsed?”
“Why is that of any relevance? Reese shouldn’t have told you.”
“It’s relevant because I want to understand you, and I think I do.”
“So you know the answer to your question.”
“Not because I was told.”
I know the answer because I’ve been thinking about it. I know the answer because despite what Cooper thinks, I do want to understand him. I want to know him, and I want to know what makes him tick. It’s how I’ll find my way out.
“I was swimming. I liked to swim at night without my coach shouting at me, other swimmers sizing me up, and a stopwatch timing every stroke.”
“You were in the pool.”
“No, I was swimming in thin fucking air.”
“You can tell you were married to a Brit. You’ve got our sarcasm down to a T.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve been here for a while. Didn’t see the point in going home when I couldn’t compete for the flag.”
“Who is she? Your wife?”
“Ex-wife,” he says again. “Just like you’ve got an ex-fiancé.”
“Except I don’t. Tell me about her.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to know.”
He sighs, and I know he doesn’t want to tell me. But I also know he does. Cooper wants to be understood. He wants someone who knows him for who he is and loves him for it. I’ve decided, after seeing the concern in his eyes, the guilt etched on his face, and the remorse in his embrace, that Cooper Jennings wants to be loved. It’s his Achilles heel, because he feels unworthy of it, after everything he’s ever wanted was ripped from him by his own body. It’s why he drowned me. His collapsed lung, knowing his chest was filling with air and taking away his chance of returning to the pool with every breath he took, terrified him. It was the end. Whoever Cooper was when he swam for the Stars and Stripes, he stayed in that pool long after Cooper had been dragged out. He drowned me so I would feel the same, so I would feel his helplessness and suffer the same sinking feeling of disappointment when I realised my life will never be the same again. Now, the wife. Did she love him like he deserved, at a time when he needed it the most? Or was she the reason for this…alternative?
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