Chapter 9 #2
His hand was in my frame of vision—scarred knuckles, tanned, weathered skin, faded prison ink along his knuckles and the backs of his hands, illegible.
With a sudden shrill shriek of awful hate that came from the pit of my stomach, I slammed the fork down into his hand as hard as I could.
I'll never, ever forget the crunch of the metal tines scraping past bone, or the way it bit into the wood below his hand.
He yowled, jerking his hand away—or trying to.
I had, apparently, stuck the fork in him so hard it was fixed into the wood of the bar.
"FUCK YOU, YA CRAZY ASS BITCH!" he screamed, sagging down and away from the bar while trying to wiggle the fork free. "I'LL FUCKIN' KILL YOU!"
I pivoted slowly to show him my face. "Not if I kill you first, Daniel Cohen." I spat in his face, and when he reared away, howling in rage and wiping at his face, I closed my fist around the fork handle and used my hand like a hammer to drive it deeper, prompting renewed screams of agony from him.
"Remember me, Danny?" I was no longer frozen. Ohhhh no. Now I was caught up in a red haze of fury. "Surprised you're hitting on me, actually, Danny, now that I'm not a FUCKING CHILD, you rapist, pedophile FUCK!”
He looked stunned, trying to get away from me. "L-L-L-Lindsey?"
I wiggled the fork back and forth, felt the tines scraping against bone.
"Shut the fuck up." I grabbed a stack of bar napkins and stuffed them in his mouth when he went to speak, shoved them in so far he gagged on them.
"Did you get raped in prison, Danny? I gotta say, I really, really hope some big-ass motherfucker used your asshole like his own personal Fleshlight.
" I leaned over the bar, snagged the soda gun, clicked the first button my thumb hit—the lemonade button—and sprayed his eyes with it.
"I bet you could fit a Louisville Slugger up your asshole, now, Danny.
Kinda feel like we should try. My boss keeps one in the office.
" I stepped back while he was sobbing and clawing at his eyes and choking on the now-sodden napkins clogging his mouth…
and kicked him in the balls as hard as I could.
"Maybe I'll just use it to turn your pathetic little balls into fucking ketchup. "
He gargled something muffled.
"Sorry, I couldn't hear that," I said. "Let me help you out." I sprayed him with the gun again, directly in his mouth, effectively waterboarding him.
And then I kicked him the nuts again, complete with a step back, wind up, and follow-through like I was a punter making a Super Cup winning football goal in the fourth inning, or whatever the right analogy is—I don't know, I don't sportsball.
I wound up to kick him again, but hands wrapped around my arms and lifted me bodily off the floor, carried me away. I kicked and thrashed until I heard Saleh's voice in my ear. "Calm, calm. Calm. It is me. You must be calm now, Lindsey."
"I'll kill him!" I screeched, thrashing. "Let me go! I'll fucking kill him!"
"And then you will go to jail."
"I don't care! I'll kick him in the fucking balls until he dies! I don't care! Send me to jail, as long as he dies first!"
The red haze obscured my vision—I'd always thought seeing red was a figure of speech, but the edges of my eyesight were, quite literally, tinged red. I was thrashing, kicking, screaming, spitting. Saleh held me like he would a similarly-behaving feral cat, which wasn't far from the truth.
"Saleh, he's unconscious." Connor.
"Good. Leave him. I will deal with him." His voice was cold and hard and scary. To me, then, warmth and compassion in his voice. “Breathe, Lindsey. Breathe. You must try to breathe."
I wasn't breathing; my lungs burned.
I heard traffic. Fresh air hit my face—fresh air tainted with the sickly-sweet stench of old food trash from the dumpsters.
“He hurt you?"
I nodded.
"You were a child?"
I nodded again. "T-t-tw-tweh—twelve. Un-until I w-w-was s-s-s-sih—sixteen."
Saleh cursed floridly in Arabic. "Then what you have done was a kindness compared to what an animal like him deserves.”
"N-n-not an animal," I whispered. "A m-monster. I l-like animals."
"Sit, sit." He guided me to the wall and helped me slide down to my butt on the filthy ground. "Put your head between your knees and breathe slowly in and out. You know the square breathing?"
I nodded, doing as he suggested.
"You stay here," Saleh told me. "I will return soon."
I kept breathing, trying to square breathe: Four seconds in, hold for four, four seconds out, hold for four, repeat. I kept slipping back into panic and had to start over.
"That's it, baby. Keep breathing." I heard his voice—I swear to God I did.
"Dane?" I whispered, sniffling.
I lifted my head, looked around. The alley was empty.
"Dane," I whispered again. "Fuck."
I missed him.
God, I missed him so damn bad.
It'd been over two months since that night in my apartment.
I spoke to Rune almost every day, via text, calls, voice notes, and video calls, but I never mentioned him, and neither did she. Duncan occasionally popped across the screen to say hi, and I could see tightness in his expression when he looked at me.
Angry at me, probably, for being the bitch who broke his brother's heart.
Too bad for me, only Rune seemed to understand how broken I was—what I was really struggling with.
It wasn't Dane.
It wasn't trust.
It wasn't even men.
It was me. My self-worth. My fear. Fear of what?
Yes. Love. Sex. Intimacy. Vulnerability.
I’d been a vulnerable child, a twelve-year-old girl who had had the misfortune of developing early and significantly—by the time I was twelve, my breasts were already bigger than most high school girls’.
Yay—not. The jealous mockery from other girls, the looks and comments from the boys—my age, younger, older, even adults. So fun.
And then my figure caught the attention of my brother's best friend.
My brother was ten years older than me, so at the time, he'd been twenty-two and still living with Mom and me.
He was a troubled kid, unsurprisingly, but managed to avoid arrest, despite being involved in a lot of highly illegal shit, most of it drug-related.
Fuck. I have to get him out of my mind.
He hadn’t aged well. That was some consolation, at least.
"Focus on me, honey." I heard Dane's voice again, soothing, calming, comforting. "I gotcha."
Can you panic so hard that you have auditory hallucinations? Or have I just finally, actually lost my mind? Because the alley was still empty.
I don't know how long I was in the alley alone, trying to gather myself, to slow my breathing. At some point, Saleh came back.
"Where is he?" I asked him.
"Do not worry about this, Lindsey. It is my worry, not yours."
"Did…did I…?"
"No. He will recover, unfortunately. Perhaps he will not be making any children, but I do not think this is any great loss for the world."
"Where is he, Saleh?" I demanded. "Please, tell me."
"I left him in the street outside the hospital."
"With any luck, he'll get run over by an ambulance. That would be nice."
"Sadly, I do not think that is what occurred." Saleh knelt in front of me, took my hands in his. "Will you please allow me to drive you home, Lindsey?"
"My car." It was a 2012 Dodge Neon; it was white, which means it was always dirty; the A/C tended to conk out when it was hottest, which is the most fun and helpful during the scorching Angeleno summers; it was always leaking oil and the gauges on the dashboard only worked some of the time, so I could never be entirely sure how fast I was going, how much gas I had left, or how hot the engine was, which was an issue considering the oil leak.
"Connor said he would drive your car," Saleh said. "I will take him home."
I sniffled. "Okay. Thank you, Saleh."
"Of course, my dear. Of course."
I barely remember anything else past that—streetlights, stop lights, motion, Saleh having a quiet conversation in Arabic on his phone while driving; mostly, I had Danny's face, his voice, his hands, his everything vile flashing through my brain.
I remember Saleh escorting me upstairs to my apartment.
And then I was dreaming. I was fifteen. Danny and my older brother, Larry, had been gone all week on a bro trip to Baja.
It had been great having them gone. It meant Danny couldn't corner me.
In the dream-memory, I was in bed asleep.
Something woke me up—a sound of some sort.
My eyes had flicked open to see my door easing open.
A tall, lanky frame filled the doorway, backlit by the nightlight from the hallway.
I had scooted against the wall and curled up in a ball, already crying as Danny approached.
"No," I'd whimpered. "No. Please."
He'd shushed me, placed a hand stinking of cigarettes over my mouth.
His belt had jingled as he fumbled with his baggy, oversized jeans.
I'd worn a T-shirt and loose shorts to bed.
He'd yanked the leg of my shorts aside, hand over my mouth, muffling my whimpers as he took what he wanted from me; the only good thing about Danny was that he never lasted more than a minute or two, so at least it was over fast.
"Keep your whore mouth shut," he'd hissed in my ear, breath stinking of vodka and cigarettes and halitosis.
"If I can come in here and do this and no one knows, I could kill you in your sleep.
You say a word about this to anyone, and I fucking will.
You'll wake up with my hands around your whore throat. "