Reeling

by Ev Bishop

  “Since you’re so fond of old tunes, you’re no doubt familiar with the Stones’ ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’?”

  Mia nodded. “Of course.” She smiled—a bit tensely, true, but still a smile. “I’m especially kick ass at the part about how if you try, sometimes you find what you need.”

  Gray crossed his arms over his now fully covered chest, but the tightness in his eyes eased a tad. “Point taken.”

  “So you’ll help?”

  “I guess I can teach you a few things, but you’d better tell me what you hope to achieve. I’m no magic worker.”

  That was fair, so Mia filled him in with the barest details. “I’ve been out of the music business, well, the performing side of it anyway, for years—like we’re talking almost two decades—but every once in a while I still get fan mail, or someone tracks down my personal details through social media and makes contact. Mostly it’s nice stuff, sort of like what Jo expresses, how I inspired them when they were young, blah, blah, blah.” Mia was horrified to feel tears at the back of her throat, so she barked a laugh. “It’s hard on the ego, you know? Nothing makes you feel your age more than middle-aged folks talking about your teeny bopper career.”

  Gray shook his head and didn’t appear fooled by her attempt at casual levity. “You said you left the performing side of the industry years back. What part are you still involved with?”

  Mia blushed. All these years later and she still felt a bit like a spoiled twit. “Truth is, I haven’t had to work, though I’ve chosen to. My mom was my manager—but not a shifty, shady one like you sometimes hear kid stars get stuck with. She arranged, with my permission, for me to live off a fairly modest allowance and she invested the rest—wisely. I didn’t get to spend like a Hollywood diva and the result is that my six-year career is still yielding returns that take care of me.”

  “Wow,” said Gray.

  He sounded sincere not critical, and Mia nodded. “So anyway, like I said, despite not strictly needing to, I do work—or I did. I have a music studio and before the total shit storm that almost destroyed everything, I taught guitar, voice, and song writing. And I still have an agent who sells songs I write to other people who produce them—not that I’ve put out very many the past few years.”

  Gray nodded, but his furrowed brow suggested she was talking about an alien world. “You said you mostly get nice fan mail and contact. What’s the not so nice stuff?”

  “Ah, you know.” Mia refilled her mug from the teapot—then Gray’s too. She couldn’t believe she was openly talking about this. Her stupid journal would get a page full tonight.

  “I can imagine, maybe, but no, I don’t really know.” Gray added a generous portion of the canned milk to both their cups.

  “The odd creep making pervy comments, the occasional marriage proposal—”

  Gray choked on his mouthful of fresh tea. “Seriously?”

  Mia couldn’t bring herself to laugh. Some people found it funny and maybe on one level it was, but there was also something awful and skin-crawlingly sickening beneath the idea that her whole life—even when she’d been a young, young teenager—there’d been older men lusting after her, and that even now, people looked up her old videos and felt they knew her or had some connection to her.

  Gray wasn’t amused either. “Disgusting,” he muttered, then gestured for her to continue. The harsh word didn’t seem targeted at her though. It sounded sympathetic, like he got why it bothered her.

  “My mom hadn’t been prepared for all that. I guess if you’re not a sicko yourself, you don’t always see what the dangers will be—but she took every case seriously. I feel badly for public figures today. They have it way worse. The Internet was in its infancy at the height of my career. That protected me a lot, but I still had bodyguards whenever I made appearances in public into my early twenties. After I ‘officially’ retired, it didn’t seem necessary . . . and while the odd letter, again, mostly good, still came, I got laxer. I admit it.”

  Mia sipped her tea again. “I just wanted to be a normal woman, work at what I loved . . . maybe meet someone and fall in love. My dating life was . . . stunted, to say the least.”

  If there was something her mother hadn’t done right, it was how she’d handled Mia’s social life—or rather, her absolute lack of one. She hadn’t trusted the “Hollywood types” in Mia’s performing circle and had always put off her desire to date and have friends as something she could do later. Mia didn’t blame her—anymore—but she did wonder if she’d have done a better job at spotting Ryland’s true nature if she’d had more experience with men.

  “Have you always had anxiety issues, or are they part of the PTSD caused by the ‘shit storm’ you referred to?”

  Mia almost asked how he knew she had anxiety, but bit the question back. It was pretty obvious how he’d figured it out. If Jo hadn’t told him when arranging the self-defense lessons on Mia’s behalf, her blind-with-panic, screaming at inanimate objects, completely oblivious to his presence freak out on the porch the other day would’ve cued him.

  “The shit storm . . . yeah.” She swallowed hard, then relayed how she’d received a nasty letter one day, close to five years ago, but hadn’t thought much about it—until she’d gotten three or four in unusually close succession and realized that they sounded like they came from the same person. Around the same time, she also started getting harassing phone calls, always from untraceable numbers or public phones in other cities, nowhere near where she lived.

  “Other things in my life were going well, though. My teaching was very satisfying. I was playing with a band for fun . . . I’d started dating a bit—guys who were interested in me, not in Mia Clark. I figured if I ignored the new haters, sticks and stones and all that, eventually the person or persons responsible would get bored or find a new obsession and move on.”

  Gray made an angry huffing sound and got up and strode to a cupboard. “I’m having bread and jam. Want some?”

  “Uh, sure . . .”

  He returned a second later with a loaf of uncut homemade bread, a foil wrapped block of butter, and a canning jar with a white sticker labelled “Rasp.” in black marker.

  “You make your own bread and jam?”

  Gray shrugged and sliced two fat wedges of the fragrant loaf. “I do a lot of things. I have a lot of time on my hands.”

  Despite her tension, Mia laughed. She so related. When she was having her inside-only days back at home, she got tons done and had never had such an immaculate house. She buttered her bread and added a generous scoop of jam. “Mmm,” she said, a little surprised when she took her first bite. “This is amazing.”

  “Thanks.” Gray ate his piece in three gulps, like he was doing it for sustenance, not enjoyment. Mia took one more bite, then put the rest down for later.

  “And then I met someone different. Someone potentially serious.” The words sounded so innocuous, so normal . . . so the opposite of absolutely everything that followed.

  Gray nodded.

  “And he, it, our relationship, was wonderful. Until it wasn’t. Until it turned out he was behind the increasingly hideous and threatening letters and calls—and was feeling more and more frustrated by how they didn’t seem to be getting to me. Until he had moved into my home, had access to my computer and finances, was part of my business and family life—” Mia spoke in rush, racing to get the details she needed to share with Gray out before they caught up with her emotions, desperate to not relive them in any way in front of him. Her hope was in vain.

  It was like she could feel Ryland’s hand close on her shoulder. She shoved at it—but, of course, nothing was there. Except . . . was that his breath prickling the hairs on her neck? His cologne clogging her senses? Could she smell him? And when she’d smelled him then, had her heart pulsed a little at the scent, had a bit of happiness tingled through her at his touch before she realized—

  She gagged lightly, set her mug down. “He . . .” She flapped her hands. Wher
e were the damn words? Where?

  “Mia,” Gray said softly, then again, more insistently, “Mia.”

  “What?”

  “You can tell me anything you need to, but don’t feel you have to unless you want to. I know what it’s like to be gutted. I understand. He hurt you. He was someone you trusted, were intimate with and he hurt you.”

  “Yes.” It was enough. She had never found words to capture the physical terror—of how it was like feeling each of her body’s systems shutting down. She couldn’t articulate the grief and shock and hatred that coursed through her when her own body betrayed her, priming for pleasure while her mind struggled against the knowledge she was about to be raped. Could still barely reconcile this new version of herself with the person who endured things no one should have to—all while fighting just to live, just not to die—at the hands of a man she had thought loved her.

  That had been the most terrifying, mind sickening, soul destroying part of all: that she was trying to survive Ryland. Someone she knew, that she’d let into her heart, that she loved, was a monster. Was trying to kill her. Had wanted to do her harm for a long time.

  Mia’s pulse jumped at her throat and her heart thudded painfully in her chest. “I should’ve seen him for what he was, right?”

  Gray shook his head. “How? It’s like you said about your mom. If you’re not a sicko—I’d call it evil—you don’t always see what the dangers are. Can’t even.”

  “But I dismissed all those letters, all those increasingly threatening warnings. I invited him in. I gave him every opportunity . . . It wasn’t entirely, but maybe it was partially my—”

  “No, it wasn’t. Not in any way. Period.” Gray’s tone allowed for no argument and for a moment, even the most insidious voices ever present in her psyche were temporarily silenced.

  She picked up her snack again but couldn’t take a bite. Her mouth was dry, her throat too tight to swallow. She managed to take a breath, then another. Then a sip of her cooled tea.

  Gray sat quietly, at ease, like their conversation and now their silence was exactly right and normal. Finally, she could speak again. “So that’s why I’m here. I have come a huge way since . . . all that. For a long time, I literally couldn’t leave my condo. Then I couldn’t leave without my mom or my sister. I am . . . better. But I still have really intensely bad moments where the fear that someone I trust or a danger I don’t pick up on right away will hurt me. I . . . I can’t bear even the lightest, most casual touches—though I don’t scream, now at least, if someone touches me accidentally. I thought that having even a rudimentary knowledge of how to defend myself physically, might help me handle social or public gatherings more confidently.”

  Gray picked up his tea and drank it down, studying her. “We can meet three times a week, if that works for you, and I’ll give you a workout schedule to follow.”

  Mia nodded.

  “You won’t like my top two pieces of advice for self-protection though.”

  She waited.

  “One, don’t let yourself get in a dangerous spot in the first place.”

  A choked sound escaped Mia, and Gray held up his hand, “If you can help it, and that’s a big if. Like we discussed earlier, sometimes there’s no way to predict trouble or to avoid it. We still have to live.” As those last words fell from his mouth, an expression Mia couldn’t interpret twisted Gray’s features. She nodded hesitantly.

  “Two,” he continued more ferociously than before, “if you do find yourself in an unsafe situation, or even just an unknown one, get out of there. Leave. Run—as fast and as far as you can. Putting distance between yourself and whatever is threatening you is always your best chance of protection.”

  She nodded again, unable to avoid a sense of throbbing shame even though she knew intellectually she wasn’t to blame for what happened or for not stopping it—and that Gray wasn’t saying she was.

  “One more thing,” Gray said softly. “I don’t know if it will help you, but it helps me . . . some things that happen are so terrible that no matter how shitty, random, and cruel life sometimes is, the chance of them reoccurring is minuscule.”

  “Gee, thanks, that’s super comforting.” Strangely, though, she did feel better.

  Gray shrugged. “You’re the one who came to me. I’m sure people recommended against it.”

  “They did, actually,” Mia admitted. Then she laughed—and it was a sincere, mirth-fueled laugh. How had she gone from what she had been feeling to this light-hearted, comfortable . . . mirth? Gray shook his head.

  “We’re a great pair, hey?” she said.

  “No,” Gray said. “We’re not. Now are you going to eat the rest of your bread or what?”

  Chapter 12

  The leaves crunching under Gray’s feet were plentiful and noisy. For once, Wolf stayed close by, nosing through every clump of withered grass and dying plant, no doubt hoping to find something disgusting to roll in. The cold sky was clear and slate colored, softened only by a plume of smoke in the distance that must be coming from Jo and Callum’s. Gray had been wrong about snow arriving overnight, but correct in his belief that when summer finally ended, the fall would be abrupt.

  It was nearing the end of October, but felt more like November or even mid-December, temperature wise. And while Gray was used to the region’s extreme weather fluctuations, Mia was not. He smiled, knowing full well she’d greet him with a rundown of the temperature—how cold it was, how the speed of the transition was “bizarre,” and how she still couldn’t believe she’d been swimming outside just three weeks ago. She religiously avoided referring to the aquatic adventure where they’d first met as skinny dipping, and he didn’t harass her about it because he was constantly doing his best to keep the memory of her, wet and naked in the sunlit water, from the forefront of his mind. He didn’t need to be fighting wood every time he worked with her. But it was hard. Pun intended.

  “Well, don’t you look happy about something,” Mia said, popping out of the forest and joining him on the trail. She’d taken to doing this lately, hiking to meet him on their scheduled days, instead of waiting for him to show up.

  “Do I?”

  “Yes. You’re . . . smirking. I’ve never seen you do that before. What were you thinking about?”

  Nope, not going there. He’d go to his grave first. “I’ll never tell.”

  She rolled her eyes and turned her attention to Wolf. Gray really liked that now that she knew the dog better, she talked to Wolf the same way he did. “And how are you today, big fella? What’s that? Oh yeah? You’re tired of Gray pretending he has some deep, mysterious thought life the rest of us shouldn’t be privy to?”

  Okay, so maybe he only sort of liked how she talked to his dog.

  Wolf stopped sniffing for a moment and raised his head, twisting it slightly so his left ear was angled up at Mia. She laughed. “Oh, I see how it is. You’ll stop snuffling and snurfling long enough to let me scratch your ears?”

  The mutt sighed with what seemed like intentionally comic exaggeration.

  Laughter rumbled through Gray and he felt self-conscious. But come on, ‘snuffling and snurfling’—how cute was that?

  Mia stopped rubbing Wolf’s head and stared. “Seriously, what is with you today?”

  Gray shrugged. “Nothing.” Then he took advantage of her being off guard and conversational. He dropped his pack and charged. Mia didn’t waste a breath shrieking or giving any verbal show of surprise or acknowledgement of the attack. Her body veered slightly left and Gray followed the movement, reaching for her. With invisible speed, she switched gears and lunged right. Gray shifted direction too, but a fast, clever foot kicked out. He tripped and went sprawling—and hadn’t even come close to getting a chance to grab the leg that took him down. All the years Mia had spent in dance lessons seriously showed in her light, feinting movements and ability to redirect her body instantly. He scrambled up and bolted after her, but she’d gotten a good fifteen or twenty paces lead.
He stopped moving, brushed leaves and bits of tree debris from his cargo pants, and started to clap. She paused at the sound, then made her way back to him, jogging slowly.

  “Not bad,” he said.

  She rubbed her forearms briskly. “And it helped me warm up. I can’t believe how cold it’s gotten—and practically overnight.”

  Gray laughed out loud again, and she gave him another odd look. “You’d better be careful, Gray. The way you’re acting, I’m going to start thinking you enjoy spending time with me.”

  If only she knew. He feigned a casual vibe he didn’t feel and grunted, “Just keep telling yourself whatever you need to get through the day.”

  She jabbed a light punch at his chest, then bobbed and weaved ahead of him, shadow boxing. He shook his head. “You’re not going to become one of those people who take a few classes and develop a falsely inflated view of their abilities, are you?”

  “No.” She stopped bopping around, immediately. “Not at all. I like your fight till you’re free then run philosophy.”

  Gray nodded and retrieved his backpack, both relieved and a bit sad that his sternness had made her serious again.

  “So are you pleased with what you’ve learned so far?” he asked as they neared Sockeye cabin.

  She sat down in one of the Adirondack chairs by the immaculate, unused fire pit. “This is lesson six, right?”

  “Yep.” They’d been meeting up regularly for two weeks, not counting their encounter in the Dining Hall, his visit to her cabin, or hers to his. It seemed impossible that they’d spent so much time together already, but the reverse was also true. In some ways it felt like they’d always known each other, no matter how carefully he tried to keep his guard up. Mia was a spontaneous, heart on her sleeve kind of person, or was the more he got glimpses of the real her anyway. Day by day, as she grew more and more relaxed in his company, the brittle, falsely chipper, overwhelmingly fearful person he’d first met showed up less and less. He knew it was a bad sign that he dwelled on the times they’d met in person—and a worse sign that he was already counting on more visits ahead.