Sadie
Something in me flips.
It's the thing I pushed down ten minutes ago when he told me I didn't have friends. The thing that's older than fear. It comes up now like a fist through water.
"No."
The word comes out low and flat and final.
Jason blinks. I suppose it’s because for four years I have been the woman who folds.
Who hands him water in her only mug, who sleeps on the far side of the bed so he has more room.
The woman who forgives when he hits her, but still found the strength to walk out when his behaviour escalated to the point of risking my life.
"No, you're not staying here. Not tonight. Not ever. Get off my bed and get out of my apartment."
He stands slowly, not taking his eyes off me. He wants me to watch him unfold to his full height, wants me to remember the math. Six-one against my five-five. A hundred and ninety pounds against a diabetic woman in her underwear.
"Sadie." The voice. The one that used to make my blood run cold. "You're being dramatic."
"I'm being clear." My pulse is hammering, but my voice holds.
Something about tonight, about the way Nick told me stop means stop and meant it to his marrow, has rearranged a piece of me I thought was permanently broken.
"You messed with my insulin. You turned the dial on my pen and put it back in the fridge.
I watched you do it, Jason. I stood in the hallway and watched you do it, and then you walked out whistling. "
His face changes. The mask drops and what's underneath is ugly. His jaw goes tight, his eyes go flat, and he takes a step that closes half the distance between us.
"You're crazy. You've always been crazy. Your numbers were off because you don't take care of yourself properly. I was the one making sure you ate. I was the one reminding you to check. And you repay me by sneaking out while I'm at work and spreading your legs for some guy you met in a car wreck."
"Get out," I say.
"Make me."
I reach behind me. My fingers scrabble around to find anything, but only the kettle sits behind me.
"Get out of my apartment, Jason."
"Or what? You're gonna throw a kettle at me?" He laughs, high and sharp. "Put it down, Sadie. You look ridiculous."
I don't aim. My arm moves and the kettle leaves my hand. It bounces against the wall a foot left of his head, and the sound of the plastic cracking is the sound of every single thing I've swallowed for four years.
He moves fast. He was always fast when he was angry, and the kettle was the permission he needed. His hand catches my wrist before I can pull it back. He yanks me forward and I stumble forward, my hip catching the corner of the island as he drags me into him.
"You stupid bitch."
His other hand goes into my hair. He grabs a fistful at the back of my head and jerks my face up, and the pain is bright and immediate, a hot sting across my scalp that makes my eyes water.
"You think you can just disappear? I found you in three days, Sadie. Then watched you for three more. You can't hide from me."
I claw at his hand. My nails catch skin and he hisses, letting go of my hair. He shoves me backward. My lower back hits the counter hard enough to knock the air out of me, and I double over, gasping.
He's breathing hard. His hand goes to the scratches on his forearm. His face does the thing I've seen twice before. Once in November before my wrist, then in June before my eye.
The decision face.
He grabs me by both shoulders and spins me. My hip clips the island again. His hand is back in my hair and he raps my head hard against the wall before he pushes me towards the bed. Pain screams out from the point of contact, my vision blurs and spots. But I’m still not going down without a fight.
My bare feet can’t find purchase on the smooth laminate as I try and push back against him, struggling wildly to get out of his grip, ignoring the trickle of blood that must be coming from where he banged my head.
Then I’m on the bed.
He stands over me. His hands are opening and closing at his sides the way they do when he's deciding whether he's done.
"Jason." My voice sounds far away. "You need to leave."
"I'm not going anywhere." He crouches, face level with mine, eyes flat and patient the way they always get after the wave passes. "In the morning, we're going to talk about how this is going to work. You and me. The way it was."
My head is pounding, and underneath the pain, something else is happening.
The tremor in my fingers. The numbness in my lips.
Adrenaline burns through glucose like gasoline.
I've been running on fight-or-flight for twenty minutes, and my body has dumped everything it has, and now the bill is coming due.
"I need my glucose tabs. They're in my coat pocket by the door. Jason, I'm going low."
"You're fine." His voice is dismissive. Bored. The way it was every time I told him something was wrong. "You just need to calm down."
The edges of the room go soft. I feel myself list sideways from the bed.
My shoulder hits the floor. I hear his voice from somewhere above me saying something I can't make out anymore, and the last thing I think before the dark pulls me under is that I can't pass out because if I do, he'll be here when I wake up and I'll be weaker.
Then I'm gone.
I come back in pieces.
The floor is cold under my cheek. Jason is at the sink with his back to me, running water over his arm where I scratched him.
I don't know how long I was out. A minute. Maybe two. My head is pounding and my hands are shaking badly, my body is screaming at me in a language I've spoken since I was nine. Sugar. Now.
Under the edge of the counter, on the floor, a single glucose tab. It must have fallen from my coat pocket when I hung it on the hook earlier. I fumble it twice before I get it between my fingers, put it in my mouth, bite down. The chalky sweetness is the most important thing I have ever tasted.
One tab is four grams. If I'm as low as I think I am, I need twenty. But it's a foothold.
Jason turns off the faucet.
I push myself up. My head screams when I lift it, but I get my back against the bed and slide my knees under me. I'm upright when he turns around.
"See?" He dries his hands on my kitchen towel. "Told you you'd be fine."
He walks toward me. The anger has passed through him and now he's in the part after, the part where he thinks we're going to talk and I'm going to listen and everything is going to settle into what he wants. He crouches in front of me and puts his hand on my knee.
"Come on. Let me help you up."
His hand tightens. His other hand reaches for my arm, gripping my bicep, hauling me upward.
My body is barely keeping up, barely conscious, and his fingers are pressing into the same spot where Nick held me gently an hour ago, and the difference between those two pressures makes something in my chest rupture.
I grab the counter to steady myself. My hand finds the edge of the drying rack.
My fingers close around the handle of the small knife without any decision, without any thought.
It's the cheap serrated one I bought to cut apples and spread peanut butter.
It's in my hand because my hand needed something to hold.
"Let go of me."
"Put that down." His eyes drop to the blade. He looks almost amused. "You're not going to stab me with a butter knife."
He reaches for my wrist. The wrist he fractured in November. It’s the same way he's always reached for things that belong to me, with a casual certainty that everything I have is his to take.
His hand closes over my bones and squeezes, and the pain makes my fingers spasm. He's trying to make me drop it. His grip grinds my wrist together and the sound I make is a wounded animal sound I have never made in my life.
I twist.
My wrist turns in his grip and my arm comes forward and the knife goes with it.
I feel it catch. That's the only word I have for it. It catches on something that gives resistance and then doesn't. His grip vanishes. He steps backward, one step, and looks down at his stomach.
The handle is against his shirt. The blade isn’t visible.
Jason looks up at me. His mouth is open. He puts both hands around the handle and sways.
"Sadie," he says. My name sounds different in his mouth now. Smaller.
His knees fold as he drops onto the floor, his back against the island. He looks at the knife with total incomprehension.
I get my wits about me enough to say, “Don’t pull it out.” But it’s too late, he’s already pulled it with a wet sound I wasn’t expecting, an arc of dark red blood following the tip of the knife.
I should help him. The thought arrives clinical, automatic. Apply pressure. Call 911. I know these steps the way I know my own readings, written into the muscle memory of five years of other people's emergencies.
But my legs won't move.
Blood is coming through his fingers, dark and steady. His face has gone the color of old paper and his breathing has changed to the short, shallow pattern I've heard before. In the SUV with Christina. In the sedan with Nick.
The blood is almost black, mixing with bile. My thoughts are fractures pieces of information I’m pulling from parts of my brain I haven’t used for a long time.
Liver.
Ten minutes.
"Call someone," he says. His voice is thin. "Sadie. Call someone." His fingers are slipping over each other as he tries to stop the bleeding.
I slide down to the floor. My vision blurs with blood from where he banged my head against the wall, then begins to go black at the edges.
I need to call 911. I look at where my purse is, where my phone will be tucked away safely in the back pocket of the lining. I could crawl to it, I think, only every part of me feels too heavy.
My vision has tunneled to a narrow column of light that contains Jason's face and his hands and the blood spreading across his shirt. The glucose tab isn't holding. I can feel myself slipping again, the slow fade, and I know that if I pass out now and nobody knows I'm low, I could seize.
Jason's breathing changes. His hands slide down towards the blood that’s pooled around him. So much blood. His chin drops to his chest. One more breath, and then it stops.
The room is quiet except for the drip of the faucet.
I don’t feel anything as I slip into my own darkness.