52. He Can’t Survive This Twice
he can’t survive this twice
alyssa
I woke up to the sound of Julian in the bathroom and his side of the bed empty with the covers thrown back. He came in a few minutes later in his running clothes, saw I was awake, and sat on the side of the bed with his hand on my hip.
“Go back to sleep, Lyss.”
“What time is it?”
“Five fifty-five. I’m only gonna run six miles, since I got a late start.”
“Mm.” I stretched.
He leaned down and tried to give me a kiss, but I turned my head to the side. “Nooo, my breath stinks, Julian.”
“I love your morning breath.” He leaned down again to give me a quick kiss, but I put my hand on the back of his head and held him there longer as he laughed into my mouth.
“I’d run with you, but I’m worn out.”
“Then I did my job.” He planted another kiss and stood, looking down at me. “Love you.” He smiled.
“Love you too.” I smiled back.
He walked out, and I heard the front door chime. I lay there a few minutes thinking about the night before, and felt butterflies and gratitude wash over me.
I got up, washed my face and brushed my teeth, pulled on one of his T-shirts and decided I’d make him breakfast for when he got back.
I padded to the kitchen and pulled the fruit out of the fridge, cantaloupe, strawberries, and a baby watermelon we’d bought at the farmer’s market the day before. I pulled out the board, and took the chef’s knife out of the drawer.
As I began cutting up the fruit, somewhere down the hall, I heard a door open. I didn’t turn around right away. I thought Julian had come back when I was in the bathroom, and I started to smile.
“Changed your mind, huh? I’m not the only one worn o—” I turned my head and there she was standing at the threshold of the kitchen. Sabrina West.
It took me a moment to process what I was looking at, because none of it belonged in there at six-forty in the morning.
She wore an ivory robe, loosely belted, exposing black lace underwear.
She was barefoot, carrying a pair of heels by the straps in one hand, and a coat draped over the other.
Her hair was flat against one side of her head and sticking out in places on the other.
Her makeup had slid down under her eyes in two gray smudges.
She looked ruined, standing in Julian’s home like she’d sprouted up from the floor.
“Sabrina?”
Her eyes drifted to me. They tried to focus, but slid past my shoulder, then came back and settled. “Hello, Alyssa.”
Her voice turned my stomach as my brain caught up. She greeted me the way you would someone you ran into at the store, and sounded far away at the same time. Something told me I would need to be cautious in how I engaged with her.
“What are you doing here?”
“I thought you two went running. I heard the door.”
“How did you get in here?”
“Where’s Julian?” she looked around the room, eyes wide and unblinking.
“Sabrina, how did you get in here?” I tried to keep my voice even. I set the knife down on the cutting board, and turned to fully face her, keeping my hands loose at my sides.
“He uses a code.” She lifted her heels, gesturing vaguely with them. “I’ve watched him put it in. You stand close enough to a man, enough times, you see things.” She said it like she was giving me dating advice.
“How… how long?”
“Since last night.” She tilted her head, and a rueful expression moved across her face. “You weren’t supposed to be here, you know. You broke up. I came to surprise him.”
She glanced down at the robe like she was remembering an outfit she’d been proud of. “He was not supposed to have somebody here.” She looked at me when she said somebody.
Her mouth worked. “I… I had to find somewhere to go.”
Every instinct I had was firing at once, and the loudest one wasn’t fear yet. It was the one that had spent years in rooms with people who’d been pushed past the place where reason still reached them. I knew the flatness underneath what she was showing me. I knew it was the dangerous part.
“Okay,” I said gently. “Okay, Sabrina. I hear you. I’m going to call you a car, alright? You don’t want to be here when Julian gets back. Let’s get you home.” I reached for my phone hoping that was enough of a cover to get my phone and call for help instead.
“Don’t!” Sabrina shouted, jumping forward as I reached for my phone. I stopped and raised my palms up. “Okay, Sabrina… okay.”
“He was getting there with me.” For the first time her eyes were all the way present, and all the way cold. “Then here you come.”
My heart was racing and I worked to keep it out of me. “Sabrina. I understand you’re upset. But… Julian’s going to be back any minute. You don’t want him to see you like this, do you? Let me help you get home.”
She shook her head. Then, her eyes went to the cutting board and the knife lying next to the half-cut melon, and I saw the thought arrive behind them.
We both lunged for it at the same time. I got my hand on the handle first. Her hand came down over mine, both of us gripping, the blade standing up between us.
Her weight pushed against me, shoving me into the counter edge.
My phone skated away across the granite.
I had about three inches and years of running on her, and it almost wasn’t enough.
She was strong. We pushed and strained as I used my free hand to clamp on her wrist, trying to bend her arm away.
Her free hand tried to grab at my throat, grunting, saying something that had my name in it and his name in it, he loves you, you took it, he was mine, you took it.
We struggled back and forth with the knife shaking in the air between our four hands.
I was not going to die in this kitchen.
All I could think about was Micah, who had already lost one parent. I could not let him lose me too. I could not leave him parentless. And then it hit me. I also had Julian. Julian was on his way home.
He was forty-some minutes into his run, and he was going to come through that door, to a scene in his kitchen, the way he had walked into a kitchen before, at nineteen years old, to find his mother on the floor.
He could not survive that twice.
The thought went all the way through me, as I drove forward off the counter into her with everything I had. We lost our feet, both of us, tangled together over the knife, and we went down.
We went down hard.
I hit the ground first, on my back, the back of my head cracking against the hardwood hard enough that I felt it in my teeth.
Sabrina’s full weight came down on top of me and drove the rest of the air out of me.
The kitchen tilted. The light smeared. And somewhere very close by, the knife had come loose from our hands and skittered out on the floor, stopping a foot or two away.
I lay there with her on top of me, feeling dizzy with the whole room ringing like a struck glass.
Get up, Alyssa. Get UP. Move!
I was so disoriented, I couldn’t make it happen fast enough.
My arms were slow. My head was full of a high thin sound and a pressure that wanted to pull me down through the floor.
I blinked and the ceiling swam and I fought to keep it in focus, and through the ringing I felt her lift up off me on her hands.
She turned to the knife on the floor and lunged for it.
I summoned everything left in me, grabbed a fistful of her hair and hauled her back.
We rolled, and I realized she’d managed to grab the knife by the handle.
With her hair still in my grasp, she twisted herself around on her knees, to face me, blade in both her hands, and her expression was wide open and gone.
Micah’s face and Julian’s face were the only things in my mind in that moment.
I have to fight. I was taller than her, so I bent my knees into her chest, and made the decision to let go of her hair, so that I could use my long legs to kick-push her as far back as I could.
She went back, then pushed forward on my legs, and I held her off with my feet, with her leaning forward with the point of the knife trembling in the air over my chest, eight inches back, then six, then five, both of us shaking with the strain of the struggle.
The knife dipped and caught the back of my hand, opening a line of cold that went hot a second later. It came down again and clipped my right calf. I yelped, then gathered everything I had left in my legs and kicked her back again.
She fell back onto the floor, with the knife still in her hands, and I rolled and came after it before she could reset herself. Both my hands back on the knife with hers, the two of us down on the floor, breathing into each other’s faces.
The ringing in my head was rising, my eyes feeling heavy, like I needed to sleep. I tried to blink the feeling away, and maybe she felt me weakening, so she leaned her whole body forward, our hands on the knife, its blade aimed at me, and her over me, bearing down.
I used the last strength I could muster, then twisted everything I could, my wrist, my arm, my shoulder, the last of my core, desperate to turn the blade away from me, in the small space between our chests, as she came forward onto me with her own weight.
Then there was a scream.
It filled the room and kept filling it, and I could not tell whether it came out of Sabrina, or if it came out of me. It was the sound a body makes when it has been opened.
I couldn’t fight the heaviness of my eyes any longer.
My head throbbed, as the room got darker.
I could feel myself going under, the ringing in my ears going to a flat hum.
And in the last bit of light, with her weight heavy on top of me, and blood warm and fast spreading out beneath us, I thought about Julian coming home any minute, calling my name into the quiet.
My heart broke in two for him. For what he was about to walk into. A second kitchen, and a second floor covered in blood. The last clear thought I had before it all went was the only one that mattered.
He can’t survive this twice.