Chapter 5 #2
I jump as the door shuts behind me. I turn around to see the tall, broad-shouldered, balaclava-clad man who has been haunting me for days now. His eyes glint at me through the open slots.
“Hello, Laura,” he says, his voice deep and commanding. “Did you do a little commerce today?”
At first I can’t think what the hell he’s talking about, then it hits me. Of course, the money. The car. All that. My annoyance at Dave temporarily made me forget my own transgressions.
“I did,” I say, taking a step back and bumping into the kitchen table. “It was my car. I could do what I liked with it.”
I push my handbag onto the counter and look at him defiantly. I knew he wouldn’t like me selling the car, but there were so many very good reasons to do it, and money was only one of them.
“That thing would have been way too expensive to run,” I say.
“You could have asked me for money,” he replies. “It’s rude to return a gift, to the wrong place, for significantly less than it is worth.”
“I would never ask you for anything. I don’t even know who you are. I didn’t want the car.”
“Ungrateful little girl,” he murmurs, reaching for me. “I know one way to teach you a lesson.”
He draws out a chair at my kitchen table and pulls me close. I let him do what he’s going to do. My mind has gone sort of soft and floppy and helpless as he turns me over his knee like I’m some bad kid he needs to spank.
“Next time I give you a present, you’re going to say thank you,” he says, smoothing his hand over my skirt.
Smack!
“What do you say, Laura?”
“Huh?” I am confused. Another hard smack lands on my ass, pain prompting thought. “Sorry?”
“No,” he says, his tone patient. “What did I say I was going to teach you to do when someone gives you something?”
“Thank them?”
“That’s right,” he says, rubbing his hand over my ass smoothly one more time. Then he spanks me again, quite sharply and hard enough to make me yelp.
“Thank you?” I try that response to see if it’s the one he wants.
“Good girl,” he growls softly. “Thank me for spanking your naughty bottom.”
He talks with this deep, masculine, almost paternal tone that probably shouldn’t make my pussy tingle as much as it does. I also shouldn’t be feeling this comfortable with him. There’s something about the way my weight is distributed over his thighs that feels comforting.
But I’m not going to thank him for punishing me.
He spanks me again, sending another sharp jolt through my body.
“Say thank you, Laura.”
“No,” I grunt. “I’m not thanking you for anything. You’re a monster. Even if you left a car here in my name, there was some sick reason for it, I bet. Probably was full of trackers and explosives.”
“Explosives?” His voice lifts into a questioning tone at the end.
“Yes. Because that’s what crazy stalkers do.”
He starts spanking me really hard and fast then. I guess he doesn’t like being called a crazy stalker. Truth hurts. Both of us, in this case. Before long I am squealing and kicking my feet and telling him I’m sorry just so he fucking stops.
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! Thank you!”
He pauses and slows down, mollified by hearing what he wants, because that’s a stupid man thing. I don’t like being punished by an asshole who is completely in the wrong.
I’m glad I sold the car. I’m worried he’s going to take the money from the sale, but he doesn’t make any obvious moves toward my bag. Probably thinks I’m not stupid enough to keep thirty grand in there.
“Laura!”
Oh, fuck. Things are about to get…
The front door slams open as Dave comes running in with a baseball bat and takes a wild swing at my stalker. My stalker dips his head just in time to avoid his skull being crushed.
“Run, Laura!” Dave shouts.
This is the bravest Dave has ever been. I didn’t know he was actually capable of doing anything useful. He just found a masked man beating my ass and his instinct was to go to his shitty truck, pull out his trusty solid wood baseball bat, and go to town. Good for Dave.
My coffeemaker explodes with his next wild swing.
The stalker jumps up, grabs the chair, and takes a swing at Dave.
Chair beats bat, I think. The chair crashes into the wall, putting a hole in it.
I am not getting my security deposit back, that’s for sure.
Right now I’m not even sure I’m going to survive.
I could easily be hit by one or both of these animals trying to kill each other.
“Fucking asshole!” Dave curses, offended the man he’s trying to hit with a bat tried to hit him with a chair.
I don’t know who is going to win in this battle. The stalker is obviously strong, but Dave isn’t a small guy either and you never really know what’s going to happen in a fight.
I know one thing, though. I am going to get the hell out of here.
I grab my bag and run.
Adrenaline is coursing through my body as I rush down the stairs, trying not to fall down them. Seeing Dave has knocked me out of whatever weird headspace I was in, letting that man, whoever the hell he is, manhandle me and fuck me and punish me.
This shit has gotten way out of hand. I have to go to the police. My neighbors will probably call anyway, given two men are beating the shit out of each other in my apartment.
The department nearest me is kind of dilapidated and overworked. The officer behind the counter is occupied by another person when I walk in, so I’m forced to awkwardly wait a few seconds before I realize I should be interrupting.
“Um, excuse me? There’s sort of an emergency?”
“Call 911 if you’re having an emergency,” the officer says.
He’s a big man with a thick graying mustache and world-weary eyes.
He looks like he’s seen some shit and it’s stuck to his soul.
“Now here’s the thing, Mr. Smith. You don’t have a permit for a lemonade stand, and that’s why it was confiscated. ”
“You steal a kid’s lemonade stand?” Mr. Smith insists. “I thought this was a free country!”
“Common misconception,” the officer deadpans.
Mr. Smith is furious, and not prepared to give up on the matter. He argues for a further ten minutes about the lemonade stand his kid was running, demanding the return of the pitcher and cups, and compensation for the lost sales. He gets none of these things.
“There’s a fight happening!” I interject. “Someone could be dead!”
My concerns are not taken particularly seriously. Mr. Smith doesn’t care who dies. I can kind of respect that.
“You want to tell my wife that she’s not getting her grandmother’s lemonade pitcher back because it’s in evidence? When’s the trial going to be?”
“I’m going to need you to move along and fill out a complaint form, sir,” the officer finally says. “You can argue this in front of a judge.”
“When would that be?”
“Well, right now, murder is taking about three years to be heard, so I’d say your pitcher request should be handled some time before the heat death of the universe.”
Mr. Smith balls up the paper and throws it at the cop’s chest.
“I could book you for assault on an officer,” the officer says.
Mr. Smith says some very unkind and explicit things, then leaves.
It’s my turn to approach the counter. I do so with haste, spilling out all the events of the afternoon as fast as I can.
“A man broke into your house, and your ex-boyfriend is beating him with a baseball bat?” The officer repeats what I am saying in a bored tone.
“Yes. Exactly. It’s happening right now. They could be killing each other!”
The cop taps on his computer, and murmurs into the unit on his shoulder. Something comes back in a crackle of static.
“We don’t have any units for a fight right now, but they’ve been alerted.”
“A masked man is in my house and my ex and him are going to kill each other.”
“Sounds like a home invasion and/or domestic dispute,” he says. “We can fill out a report now, and…”
“It’s a murder about to happen. I’m not doing paperwork!”
“You’re going to need to file a report, ma’am. Now. What was your name?”
“Laura Brown.”
He starts writing my name down. “Is that Laura with a u, or an o…”
I barely restrain the urge to scream.
All in all, it’s almost a full hour before any kind of police presence arrives at my apartment. The cops give me a ride back, which is nice on some level. It means they’re not putting me right back in harm’s way.
“Stay down here, ma’am,” a young woman says. She seems nice, and is taking this seriously. Her partner is older, male, and stoic. The two of them go up while I wait in the downstairs lobby, wondering if I am going to have to identify Dave’s body. He came in like a fucking wrecking ball.
They come back down less than two minutes later, frowns on their faces directed at me.
“There’s no sign of anything being amiss,” the female officer says.
“There’s not? They smashed my kitchen up,” I frown. “They were fighting.”
The officers look at one another. “Ma’am, the apartment looks clean.”
“Did you go into the right apartment? The intruder picked up a chair and smashed it into the wall…”
They shake their heads. “No drywall damage, ma’am. Come up and let’s make sure we’re in the right place.”
There’s something in that tone I do not like. I’m about three sentences away from a trip to a place with grippy socks and padded walls, I can feel it. If anything, they’re more concerned than they were before, but about me.
We get all the way back up to the apartment. They must have gone into the wrong one. I know damn well the place is a mess.
But it’s not.
The kitchen counter is sparkling clean. There’s no sign of a broken coffeemaker. In fact my coffeemaker looks untouched. The hair on the back of my neck rises slowly as I try to understand what has happened. If anything, it looks better than it did when I left.
“Wow,” I say. “I guess I must have overestimated how bad the fight was. It seemed crazy at the time.”
If I tell them anything else, it’s going to seem like I’m crazy. This way it just seems like I am a bit dramatic.
“You said there was an intruder?”
“Yes. He had a mask on,” I say.