Chapter 27
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Wyn
I’m not even sure where I’m going. I just know I need air. Oxygen. Symbol is ‘O’ number eight on the periodic table. I need to breathe.
In through my nose, out through— Not so fast. In through my nose— Oh god, I feel dizzy. Do not pass out. Sixteen steps down the side of the house. Keep counting.
I recognized that man.
There are seventy-eight steps from here to the front of the bar. Someone’s shoulder knocks mine. Oh, fuck.
“Hey!”
Too many people are in line out front of the bar. Thirty-one to the edge of the parking lot.
“Isn’t that Professor Crowne? Dr. Crowne!”
Breathe. Someone shouts from behind me, but I tune it out. I know him. I knew him. Fifty-six to the other side of the footbridge. Breathe. You’re almost there.
I shove past Gail and Gina, and one of them calls after me. One foot in front of the other—the sound of water rushing, muffled voices. When I cross the threshold, I expect relief, but when I try sucking in a deeper breath, my chest won’t let me.
“Isn’t our new friend absolutely the most clever one yet, Professor? Aside from you, of course.”
No.
“Wyn,” Julian’s voice calls from behind me. It sounds different, like his voice. I knew him. Please don’t let all of this have been a dream. My palms scrape along splintered wood.
I know why Julian seemed familiar. I know because he reminded me of his father. I can still hear his voice: Wyn, run!
“Look at me,” Julian says as he approaches, nearly out of breath from running after me. He doesn’t sound angry, if anything, the softness and concern in his tone makes me feel even more horrible.
“Julian,” I rush out. How am I supposed to tell him any of this?
His hands frame my face, moving me so I’ll look at him. “Look at me, baby. Come on, breathe for me.” He blows out a breath for me to mimic. I look at him for a second, but I close my eyes. This is too much.
I can’t slow it down. I can only take in small puffs. My lungs won’t allow it. It’s too much. I knew him.
“You gotta slow it down for me, c’mon,” he coaxes.
Leaning into me, up against my ear, he says, “You’re going to need to slow down.
I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere. If you pass out, I’ll be right here.
Take your time. Breathe for me.” His arms wrap around me, and I let him. “Jesus, you’re shaking.”
He runs his hands up and down my back. Up and down the tattoos I’ve gotten, the pretty to offset the ugliness. “I’ve got you. Just breathe for me,” he says softly just as he lifts me in his arms.
Breathe.
“I haven’t told you about my favorite piece of jewelry, have I? Well, maybe my second favorite now,” he says, his voice measured and calm as we move.
I suck in another breath and can hear the familiar sound of moving water from the river across from my house.
This time, it feels like I can get more in.
I blow out, pursing my lips and trying to close them to inhale through my nose.
My hair is stuck to my neck from sweat, but my whole body trembles from the inside out.
The tighter he holds me, the better it feels.
“It was this pendant necklace I had designed for a client, a dainty gold chain and a pendant that had the most beautiful emerald. It had an eight-prong setting. The piece was very art deco. Think Gatsby, roaring twenties, distinct,” he says, out of breath.
My face is wet, my chest hurts, but I know he’s carried me across the footbridge and to my house.
Without asking for keys or the code to my front door, he brings us around to the side and through the back.
“I ended up finding it at an auction almost ten years after I designed and sold it. It was from an art installation I’d done in Los Angeles.
Anyway, I knew I’d figure out a way to get my hands on that stone again.
Maybe for another piece, or keep it. I don’t know.
I didn’t have a plan for it, just that I wanted it back.
I couldn’t forget that thing, and for a long time I thought, that’s just what art is—a piece of yourself you leave for someone else.
I always looked at it that way, but this was different.
I’d made so many pieces after that one, and I couldn’t tell you a single special thing about them. ”
I smile, letting out a small cough when I ask, “So did you find it? Keep it?”
“There you are.” Smiling, he kisses my forehead and wipes the streaks of tears from beneath my eyes. “Keep what?”
“The emerald. The necklace,” I say as I sit on his lap on the stairs of my patio.
He shakes his head. “Auctioned it off. I couldn’t keep it. The emerald had been payment for one of our cleaning jobs. I’d probably buy it back if it ever was put up for sale. I didn’t have a reason to keep it indefinitely, but I like the idea of being able to see something so beautiful again.”
He looks at me with so much emotion that I almost choke out another sob.
I don’t know if anyone has ever looked at me the way he is right now—softly, reverently.
The way he’s holding me, not like I’m fragile or broken, but intensely cared for.
Like he knows what I’m thinking, he holds me tighter as he tucks a damp piece of hair behind my ear.
I take a deep breath, and on the exhale, my breath stutters, but my chest feels less heavy.
I do it over and over. In his arms, I finally breathe.
Looking around my face and pushing away the pieces of hair that have fallen, he kisses my forehead like I’m something precious to him, like I’m something more to him than to anyone else. And he is something more to me.
“Tell me,” he says, his eyes searching. “Whatever it is, baby, I’m right here.” He tucks a piece of my hair behind my ear, and his thumb brushes away the wetness on my cheek.
I take one more deep breath and know that there’s no other way, that what happened has happened, and he deserves to hear it.
“I woke up in a train car. At first, I wasn’t sure what it was, but the sounds of it moving along the tracks clicked, as did the way it moved.” I swallow, my mouth flooding, trying to keep the nauseous feeling down as I play back my living nightmare.
“Professor.” He claps his long fingers together, like he’s so pleased I’m finally awake. My head feels heavy, and so do my limbs, like I’m moving in slow motion, but hearing everything in real time.
“Professor,” he says as I suck in a breath and cough. My heart thumps so quickly, I know I must have been given something to jolt awake like this.
“I screamed when I realized I couldn’t move my hands.
I kept screaming when I realized nobody was close enough to hear me.
When I begged him to let me go, I watched his pants tent and his head tilt to one side, like he didn’t expect it.
He wanted me to be impressed by him. He had two other women in that train car, and he would .
. .” My stomach churns at the memory of what he did to them.
“You don’t have to,” Julian says, holding my hand.
“The person who took me is dead now,” I say abruptly. “I wasn’t the only person, but the only one who survived it.” A shaky breath leaves me. “The only reason it was safe for me to come back to Rumor is because he is gone.” More tears track down my cheeks.
You’re safe.
“I had a student who started as an undergrad and was a person with selective mutism. I remember seeing her with her parents at graduation, and she was speaking with them. I was aware of her diagnosis, but to witness it . . .” I shake my head.
“She was an entirely different person than I remembered. That’s always been something that stuck with me, how the mind works and copes in various ways when we feel varying levels of anxiety or even threatened.
” I take a grounding breath. “I didn’t speak for one hundred and twenty-two days.
” My nose scrunches, and I shut my eyes, thinking about all the ways he tried to get me to speak after that.
An unpleasant shiver ripples through me, remembering what it felt like to watch him slice my side and the willpower it took not to scream when his two fingers moved skin and muscle and dug around.
I bat away another tear and sit up in Julian’s lap, shifting next to him to sit on the step.
“That was a choice, unlike my student. But it was the only sense of control I had left. It was intentional, and he hated it. The only thing I had in my favor was that I was a professor of organic chemistry—he told me how he had watched me deliver a keynote speech in front of a packed auditorium of brilliant minds. A monster that wanted to impress the smartest person in the room. When he realized that was me, he took what he wanted, thought we’d become colleagues or something. ”
With his hand open and pressed to my back, it’s the only connection I can handle as I try to work through the rest. The piece that I didn’t see coming.
“He would take souvenirs of people, ingest parts of others?—”
Julian covers his mouth, rubbing his palm across it. “Jesus Christ,” he whispers on an exhale. I knew there would be a chance he wouldn’t be able to handle this, or the details that I still haven’t shared. Please let him be strong enough to hear this, to survive it with me, to stay.
“After the train, I had been drugged. I woke up inside of a small room that was soundproofed. I didn't scream or make much noise, but the others he brought inside did. And he was prepared. I expected to die inside that room. It was a storage facility. I didn’t know that at first, but eventually, I saw the outside of it.” I clear my throat.
“It was in a quieter section of Queens. Just off of I-95 in New York.”
“There’s something so pretty about decolletage, don’t you think, Professor?”