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Her sexy voice intrudes. “Do you feel scared? Exhilarated?” Yeah, both of those. It’s been that way my whole life, a feeling of falling.
Her glasses are on perfectly straight, but a strand of hair has escaped from her bun, and she’s staring ahead with utter composure, a look that is so her, just so very her, it does something to me.
It’s a little bit like he’s holding my hands and a little bit like he’s controlling me, and it feels like a metaphor for everything between us now.
Obviously I’ll just catch her, but she has to know I won’t kill her now. I sure as hell know it. She’s mine to do what I want with, but that also means she’s mine to care for, to protect.
Lying on the ground with her, calming her, helping her breathe, that was one of the most powerful experiences of my life—powerful in a good way. The feeling is so huge inside me that it scares me.
The blood dripping down her cheek calls her a liar and twists me in a knot.
But I know she heard everything I told the cop. Save your energy, I told him, and she was listening. The same way she lectured about memoirs, I taught her how to escape. How to fight back. Wait for your chance, I said. And she soaked the knowledge right up.
I back up until the truck stops me. I’m sweating, but the hot metal is almost a relief. Warmer and more human than the flesh-and-blood beast that looms in front of me.
“Some people can never be fixed,” he says to me. “Some wounds can never be healed. Not ever.”
And I’d think about those goldfish, seeing nothing and feeling nothing with their huge dead eyes, and be all jealous. Like a fucking idiot, jealous of some dead goldfish.
“Sometimes, Abigail, you have to punch a fucking hole in your soul to survive.”
She’s watching me, but she doesn’t seem to hear, sitting there, dark hair tangled around her pale face, red-rimmed eyes shining. “You are so fucking beautiful,” I say. The light turns green. And then I kiss her.
The scariest part wasn’t when he pressed a gun to my rib cage while my heart beat a staccato rhythm. The scariest part is right now, wanting to fulfill his hope. Believing that I can. It’s that nightmare that follows me down.
She jerks her head around, and there go her eyes again. Boom boom boom. Suddenly they seem important, those fireworks. Like I have to keep them in her eyes. Can’t let them fade out.
Misery is wanting what you don’t have. Misery is wanting what a rat has, or really, anything different.
She makes a soft sound of pleasure and there’s the fucking Liberty Bell, clanging like crazy.
He’s soft grass and damp earth, and I want to lie flat on the ground of him and breathe in deep, but I can’t move.
He sighs like I’m overreacting. I want to kick him in the balls.
He won’t let her go. He’ll kill her for the same reason I should’ve. But the pain of him choking her out slowly is too much to bear. “Help me!” she gasps, and I’m powerless to resist.
Will you live that long? I can’t ask the question.
He goes limp. I think if he dies, I might just keep driving forever. North past their hotel. Past the Canadian border. I’ll drive right off into the Arctic Ocean because I can’t deal with another dead body beside me.
I feel it too—the link we have is as unforgiving as barbed wire.
