31. Lance
Chapter thirty-one
Lance
“Of course he’s pressing charges!” I shout.
Detective Van Hoek doesn’t look like the kind of person who gets shouted into agreeing with people. Her eyes cut to Jonny, then back to me. “If he wants to press charges,” she says, “I need to hear it from him, sir.”
We’re in a classroom across the hall from the auditorium.
Through the wall I can still hear somebody talking into a microphone, the words sanded off to nothing.
I’ve already logged the room: one door, two windows, second-floor drop, the cop between us and the hall.
Nash three doors down in cuffs. Threat contained, but my body hasn’t gotten the message yet because I’m still running the perimeter.
“Yes, I would like to press charges.” He sounds completely calm. Why is he acting so calm? Does he even know what the fuck could have happened out there? How has he managed to sit down at all?
I go to the window again and start cataloging the lay of the land outside, drumming the adrenaline out of my fingers.
“Okay. That’s what I wanted to hear,” she says. I turn around and look at him. He’s seated in the front row of this empty classroom, at a metal desk, and Van Hoek has pulled up the only solo plastic chair to do her interview from.
I can carry this for him. That’s the thought going around in me on a loop while I walk the room.
Nash is going to jail. He killed Alice. I don’t know why, and I don’t much care.
He’s a mean sadist. It doesn’t matter. The mission is Jonny and Jonny is upright and breathing eight feet away from me. Nash is never going to touch him again.
The adrenaline starts to ebb fast, and suddenly I need to sit down.
I take the desk next to him. My ribs light up where the risers caught me; something in there is cracked or close to it.
My neck throbs where the taser kissed it.
My left arm has come back as far as pins and needles and no further.
Every muscle I own starts filing its complaint at once.
I look over at Jonny, still perfectly composed. If I feel like I got hit by a truck, what does he feel like? He’s a civilian. He has never in his life had a body come at him meaning to end him, and he had no way on earth to stop it. If I had gone to that conference an hour later—
I don’t finish it. I can’t. My hands have started to shake.
Van Hoek sighs and turns to Jonny. “And you’re certain you’ve had no contact with this man before today?”
“I met him a few days ago. He was two tables over while I was having lunch with my aunt. He was staring at us, so I went over and introduced myself. I thought he was somebody I ought to remember. He told me his name was Roger. He said we had met indirectly, so I thought it was because of the fires.” He looks at me.
“Why did everybody call him Nash when that’s his last name? ”
“It’s Marine Corps culture. I mean, you don’t want to make a mistake in public and get yelled at, so I just kept it up. Nash introduced himself to my parents as Nash so we went with it.”
“Anything else you remember about that meeting?” Van Hoek prompts.
“He knew who my aunt was,” Jonny says slowly. “I never once thought to ask him how he knew she was my aunt and not my mother or my friend.”
Something goes through me like a current. “He stalked you.” I turn to the officer. “I want a restraining order. On him, on his aunt Shelley, on my mother and father and sister, me. Everybody.”
“You do that at the courthouse, not through me, but, noted,” she says.
“And he came to the lecture hall on Thursday,” Jonny continues.
“When were you going to tell me this?”
“I thought he was a student! Maybe a little old but people go back to school all the time.”
I stand up. “How long has he been walking around this town looking at you?”
“Mr. Broussard, sit down.”
I put both hands on the back of a chair and hold onto it until the plastic bends under my fingers. Jonny puts his hand on my leg. “Lance, it’s okay. You can sit. It’s all over now.”
I look at him and decide to trust that he’s right.
“This is my fault. Nash found him through me,” I say. “He’s been furious since the divorce. He came here two weeks ago asking to be taken back and I threw him out.” I have to stop for a second. “If I had thought for one minute he would go near him, I would have dealt with it.”
Van Hoek sizes me up without even the flicker of emotion. “By dealt with it, you mean use the legal means available, is that correct, Marine?”
I grind my jaw once. “I am a law-abiding citizen, ma’am.”
She doesn’t break eye contact. “Make sure it stays that way. Well.” She closes the notebook and stands. “I’ve got a room full of witnesses to get through. If either of you thinks of anything, I’ll be right outside.”
The door clicks shut behind her.
Jonny doesn’t say anything for a moment.
Then he gets off the desk and crosses to the window, and instead of looking out he puts his back to the wall and slides down it onto the industrial carpet, legs out in front of him.
He shrugs out of the borrowed jacket I forced on him and lays it over his knees. He pats the floor beside him.
“Sit with me.”
I lower myself down next to him and it takes longer than I want it to. I take the side nearer the door, so I’m between him and it. He reaches over and takes my hand.
For about a minute neither of us says anything, and it’s the first minute in two hours that hasn’t had anything in it.
“If you need to cry, or whatever,” I say. “You weren’t ready for this. I was.”
He huffs. “Were you? Is your past that littered with psychotic exes?”
“No. But other things. People coming at you meaning it.” I look at his hand in mine. “If we were together together, I’d take care of you. That’s all I want. Keeping you safe is the only thing I have ever been any good at.”
He turns to me. “I thought we were together together.”
“If you were my—if we were, you know…” I trail off.
“Go on.”
But I can’t. “It’s not the time,” I growl. “You’re in shock. Let’s get you home, get you in the shower, and we’ll talk later.” I gather my legs to stand. He doesn’t move, and I let them slide back down.
“I think it is the time,” he says.
I wait a beat. Then I shift around until I’m facing him properly. My ribs protest.
“I didn’t want to do it like this. But I love you. I’ve always loved you. If you and I—if we—” This means too much and my nerve goes.
He stares at me incredulously. “Are you proposing to me?”
“It doesn’t have to be that. Not if you didn’t want it. But—yeah. I think I am. I need to know if it’s at least on the table.”
He doesn’t answer.
It goes on long enough that I hear the clock over the whiteboard, and a few syllables from the conference. Somewhere outside, a girl is laughing. In here, it’s quiet.
“You dislocated a man’s shoulder twenty minutes ago,” he says at last. “And now, you’re asking me to marry you.”
“That’s not—that’s a different thing.”
“Lance.” He pulls his hand away and lays it flat on the carpet between us. “I don’t think they are. You could have killed him.” His voice is soft and somehow fills the whole room. “Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
“That piece of shit put his hands on you,” I say. I don’t know why he hasn’t clocked how close he’s come. “He’s lucky he isn’t eating through a straw for the rest of his life.”
“You almost killed a man in cold blood.”
“I neutralized a threat.”
“You dislocated his shoulder.” He stops, and his voice comes back smaller.
“You did it slowly. I watched you find the angle and adjust your grip like—like you had all the time in the world. And then you put your bare hands around his throat and you kept going, and the only reason he’s breathing right now is that I said your name.
” He makes himself look at me. “You could do that again. To anyone.” He doesn’t have to say the next part, because it rings unsaid between us: you could do that to me.
“I will do whatever is necessary to secure your safety. That is not a thing I’m ashamed of.”
He drags his hands down over his face and looks at the ceiling.
“That man is pond scum,” I continue when the silence lasts a beat too long.
“I lived with him. I know exactly how far he was willing to go. I couldn’t let him near you.
” He isn’t stopping me, so I keep going, because surely somewhere in here is the sentence that fixes it.
“There has never been a single moment since the day I met you that I would not give my life for you.” I need him to hear it, to feel the size of it. “You know this.”
He laughs. “I do know. You would lie down in traffic for me. I’ve never doubted that.
Not for a second. But that’s not what I wanted.
I don’t want to spend the rest of my life terrified that the man I love is out there putting himself in harm’s way because he thinks I need protecting. That’s not love. It’s ownership.”
It feels like a slap. “How could you say that?”
“Because it’s true. I don’t doubt you love me.
I just think that the part of you that comes to the surface doesn’t see me as able to take care of myself, and I’ve had a long time of doing just that.
” He turns to me. “And what could he have really done to me? I was within shouting distance of a hundred people. All they would have had to do was open that curtain. What could he have seriously done that he didn’t know I would press charges for later?
Was his hatred so great that it outweighed his own sense of self-preservation? ”