Sadie
The bell over the door jingles when I push through it, and the cold hits me like a slap.
I walk fast. I don't know where I'm going exactly, I just know I'm going, and my feet have picked a direction before my head has caught up. Left on Chandler. The sidewalk is wet from a shower of rain I don’t remember.
My flats make a small sticky sound on the concrete.
I shove my hands in my coat pockets and keep my chin down.
The bell jingles again behind me.
I don't turn around. I know it's him. I know the weight of his step without having ever heard it before, which is a stupid thing to know, but I know it. He falls into pace about six feet behind me. He doesn't call my name or speed up. He just walks.
I make it two blocks before I stop.
I turn around in front of a closed dry cleaner with a cat sleeping in the window. He's there. Hands in his jean pockets. No coat, just the black sweater, and he should be cold but he isn't acting like he is.
"What are you doing?" I ask.
"Walking you home."
I stare at him. My breath makes a pale cloud between us. A car passes on Chandler, tires hissing on the wet, and the light of its headlights slides across his face and doesn't change it at all.
“Why?” I ask, but it sounds stupid enough that I have to fight the urge to cringe at myself.
"Because it's dark, and your apartment is twelve blocks away. I'm not going to stand in a diner and watch you disappear when the least I can do is make sure you’re safe."
I look at him for a long time. His face is the same as it was in the booth. Patient. Steady. A little tired around the eyes in a way I didn't see under the fluorescents.
I turn back around and start walking. He keeps his six feet. I can feel him the way I felt him in the sedan, a pressure on my skin without any actual touch. I hate it. I don't hate it. I don't know which one I hate more.
We pass a bar with its door propped open. A man inside is laughing at something on a television. The sound is warm and ordinary and it pulls something loose in my chest that I didn't know was wound so tight to begin with.
"I had a boyfriend," I say.
I don't mean to say it. It comes out the way glucose tabs come out of my pocket. Automatically. A thing I reach for when my numbers are low.
Nick doesn't answer. He closes the distance between us and stands beside me.
"For almost four years," I continue, my eyes fixed on the sidewalk. "Jason."
"I know," Nick says with a tone that would almost sound like pity if it wasn’t for the clipped anger beneath it.
"Of course you do." I sigh, remembering the conversation in the diner as I keep walking. I watch my flats in the streetlight. Left, right, left, right. The air is sharp in my throat and I focus on that.
"He was charming at first. They always are, right? That's what the articles say. That's what my mother would have said if she'd been alive. He had a laugh that made you want to make him laugh again. He paid for dinner. He opened doors."
"Sadie," he says quietly.
"I'm talking,” I snap. “Just let me talk."
He goes quiet beside me.
A gust of wind pushes my hair into my eyes and I drag it back with one cold hand dragged from my pocket. I keep my pace steady. The pace is the only thing I can control right now.
"He hit me twice," I say. "Once in the November before last. Once in June.
The November one was my wrist, because I fell down the stairs, according to the ER.
The June one was my eye socket, because I walked into a door frame.
I don't need you to say anything about either of those.
I've said everything there is to say about them to myself already, and I don't need another round of it from a man I barely know on a sidewalk. "
His breath changes. It's small. It's almost nothing.
"I looked the other way," I say. "Both times.
I want you to know that. I'm not going to stand here and tell you I fought back, because I didn't. I told myself the stories women tell themselves.
He was stressed. He'd been drinking. It was an accident.
He was sorry. He cried after. He brought me flowers.
He slept on the couch for a week. All of it. I told myself all of it and I stayed."
"Okay."
I turn my head half an inch toward his voice. "Okay? That's what you have to say?"
"I'm not going to argue with your telling of your own life, Sadie."
I laugh. It's a thin brittle thing in the cold air. My eyes sting. I blink hard and keep walking.
"The thing that made me leave wasn't either of those. I want you to know that, because I think it matters. I looked the other way on both of those. But the thing I couldn't look the other way over was my insulin."
His footsteps stop.
I don't stop. I keep going, because if I stop I'm going to have to look at his face, and I can't bear the weight of his pity right now.
"I'm type one. I’m guessing you probably know that.
I need insulin the way you need air. I had a pump for a while but the supplies were expensive and my insurance kept fighting me, so I went back to pens.
Pens in the fridge. Pens in my bag. A routine.
A system. You build a system when you have this disease, or you die from it. "
I keep walking, but I’ve slowed my pace. I didn’t realize how saying all this out loud would be exhausting in its own way. He's moving again behind me now. I can hear him catching up.
"He started messing with them. Not all at once. Little things first. A pen wouldn’t be where I left it.
A dose would be off. I thought I was going crazy.
I thought I was miscounting. I started writing my doses down in a notebook I kept in my purse, which is a thing I never told anybody, and the numbers in the notebook didn't match the numbers in my meter, and I couldn't figure out why. "
"Sadie."
His voice is low. Rougher than it was. But I can’t stop talking, even though my teeth are chattering now and I don’t think it’s from the cold.
"Then one day I watched him, from the hallway. I came home early from a shift because I had a migraine. I saw him through the crack in the kitchen door. He had my insulin pen. He had the dial. He was turning it. Then he put it back in the fridge and he left the room whistling."
I stop walking when I reach the corner of my apartment building.
I don't turn around. I stand in the middle of the sidewalk under a streetlight that's buzzing and flickering a little, and I look at my own breath in the air in front of me. My hands are in my pockets. I make them into fists.
"I went to Dr. Mehta the next morning, she ran the clinic where I worked.
I told her what I saw. I told her my numbers had been all over the place for two months.
She listened. She didn't tell me I was crazy.
She told me she was taking over another clinic in another state, she was still looking for an MA.
She told me I could be out in two weeks if I was careful.
She told me not to tell him I was leaving. "
My voice catches on the last part. I push through it.
"I ordered a moving van and packed my car when he left for work. You know the rest."
Nick doesn't say anything.
"I don't want a man in my life." I say it directly to him.
"I've had a man in my life. I know what a man in my life does to me.
I'm not doing it again, Nick. I'm not. I came here for a quiet life and a job I'm good at and an apartment where nobody touches my medication, and I'm not trading my peace for a man who wants to control me…or worse. I can’t let a man do that to me again. I won’t. "
He takes a step into the light.
"That’s what you don’t understand about me, Sadie.” His hand comes up; his fingers touch my jaw again.
I go still. Every hair on my body goes still with me.
“I'm not a man," he says, almost apologetically. "I'm a monster."
His face is very calm, and something in the stillness of him feels deliberate, as if he's holding himself in place on purpose.
"I'm telling you that as a warning and as a promise," he says. "The difference between me and your piece of shit ex, is not that we’re not the same. The difference is that I'm honest about what I am and what I’m capable of. I also know I could never be capable of hurting you."
My pulse is in my ears. I can feel it in my fingertips, in the soft skin behind my knees, and at the hollow of my throat.
"You asked me tonight what I do for a living," he says.
"I gave you the short answer. The long answer is that men like Jason Harrow are the reason the word monster exists.
Men like me are the reason they're afraid of the dark.
I'm not a good man. I'm not going to be a good man for you.
But I will never, in this life or the next, touch you the way he touched you.
I will never make you check your numbers twice.
I will never make you question your own mind. "
I press my tongue to the roof of my mouth to keep it steady.
"I'm telling you this because you said you don't want a man in your life, and I heard you. I understand. But I'm not offering you a man." His eyes don't move from mine. "I'm offering you something else. Something more."
I can't speak. My throat has closed around every word I know.
"So tell me to leave, right now, on this sidewalk. And I'll go and stay gone. You have my word."
My mouth opens, but nothing comes out.
He watches me. Waiting. The streetlight buzzes above us. Somewhere down the block a car door slams, a dog barks. The whole world is noise, and he is the only quiet thing in it.
"I don't know what to say," I whisper.
"Say anything." His thumb strokes over the scar on my lip.
"I don't want you to leave."
The words are out before I can catch them. They hang in the air between us the way the sentence hung in the alley this morning, the one about being afraid of not being afraid of him. I feel my face heat even in the cold.
His other hand comes out of his pocket. He lifts it slowly until his knuckles brush my jaw. His fingers slide along the line of it, under my ear, into the hair at the back of my neck. His thumb rests in the hollow below my ear where my pulse is going so hard I can feel it.
He lowers his head and tips my face up at the same time.
I have a second. Maybe two. I can’t help but feel he gives me those seconds on purpose.
His mouth is warm.
That's the first thing I think. The cold of the night and the warmth of his mouth and the small catch of his lower lip against mine. My hands come up without my permission and grip the front of his sweater the way a drowning person grips a rope.
He doesn't rush me. He doesn't crowd me. He kisses me the way he said my name in the sedan, careful and deliberate. Some part of me that has been white-knuckled for four years unclenches finger by finger.
The unclenching is the part that surprises me.
Because I like it.
I like it more than I have liked anything in a very long time, and the liking is not a small quiet thing. It's loud. It's telling me clearly that the danger in this man's hand on the back of my neck and under my chin feels safer than the danger of trusting a man who I lived with for four years.
That piece of knowledge is going to keep me awake for the rest of my life.
He lifts his head.
His thumb is still under my ear. My pulse is still hammering against it. His eyes are the dark gray of slate beneath the streetlight, and they are looking at me the way no one has ever looked at me before.
He lets me go slowly and steps back. He puts his hand at the small of my back, just enough that I can feel it through my coat. We walk the last few steps to the main door of my building without speaking.