by L V Chase
I wrench open my laptop. While it starts up, whirring and clinking like it’s about to transform into a humanoid robot, I pick out a t-shirt, bra, and pair of sweatpants. I get dressed and comb out my hair. On my laptop, I search Klay Harrington’s name.
Dr. Harrington’s eldest son, Klay…
Klay, one of Dr. Charles Harrington’s sons…
The cardiothoracic surgeon has three children--Klay, Leon, and Vince…
In therapy, Dr. Murray warned me about fixating on issues. She told me that I focused on external issues instead of facing my internal issues.
I had denied that during our session, but I could see some validity in it now. But there’s also validity in the truth. There’s validity in the way my burning body needs relief, but the relief isn’t ice or cold water.
It’s body heat. It’s Klay.
I shake my head. I add the word ‘address’ to my search.
Charles Harrington’s Surgical Residency.
The link leads to a website for an architecture magazine, and from the description shown on the search engine, the article is about Dr. Harrington’s house. When I click on the link, a large photo spans across the page.
In the picture, a man’s standing front of a modern house. He’s slim, his dark hair contrasting with his white button-up shirt and his chinos, and his intense expression is a match for Klay’s, but what’s far more interesting is the building behind him.
It’s the second house on Viceroy Street. The one that’s half made out of glass and half out of steel. After the first time I’d seen it, it became a normal part of the school bus drive, but I remember now that the first time I saw it, it had a black Maserati and a black Jeep in front of it. The black Jeep hadn’t been there after that, but I realize now it must have been Klay’s.
I know exactly where that house is.
If I cut through several backyards and across some streets, it wouldn’t take me long to get to his house. I don’t have any memories of learning to drive, so I don’t trust myself to take my grandmother’s car. My bike is here, though.
I’m on autopilot as I creep out of the house and get my bike out of the garage. I feel wide awake, but time starts to feel irrelevant as I find myself cycling down a road I don’t recall turning on, or surprised that I’m abruptly riding over a rocky yard.
Regardless, the ride takes longer than I thought. I pump my legs as hard as I can, trying to not look like a thief as I pass by houses before 5 a.m., but my mind won’t concentrate on logic and discretion.
Instead, my mind fixates on memories and fantasies of Klay, his face slipping so close to mine that I feel like I could take my hand off of the handlebar and touch it.
All these memories of him are like tiny gold nuggets. They’re invaluable, but I need to keep digging to find more of them. I need to become so wealthy with memories of him that all of the other lost memories will become inconsequential.
I nearly pass by the house, but as I see the Jeep in the corner of my eye, I turn around and ride up to the house. I let the bike drop to the asphalt. My body is sticky with sweat, and my thighs are aching all over.
I stop in front of the entrance door. I turn to the doorbell. It’s attached to a small screen. Of course. A wireless system with the latest technology.
What the hell am I doing here?
Being a sleep-deprived fool. When I’m not tired, I’m too much of a coward to confront Klay, much less on his own turf. Now, I’m here when he’s likely half-asleep and not in any mood to see a girl he likes to hurt.
I turn back to my bike. What time is it? 5:30? 5:50? Even if it were six o’clock, Klay would have no reason to be awake. He can drive to school, and it can’t take him more than fifteen minutes.
I take a step down off the porch. I retreat to my bike. As I crouch down to pick it up, I hear the door open.
I turn around, my heart beating frantically, but instead of seeing Klay, it’s the man in the photo of the architecture article, Dr. Charles Harrington.
“Hello,” he says. “May I help you?”
I open my mouth, struggling to find an answer. He takes a step out, his eyes trained on me like a cat watching a bird with a broken wing.
“You look tired. Why don’t you come inside? We have coffee in the pot, and orange juice.”
He gestures into his house. While the exterior is a fortress of steel and glass, I can see some of the interior through the door, where it’s furnished with reddish-brown wood. It either hints at a warmer atmosphere or tells me I’d be heading straight into the belly of the beast—warm, red-tinted, and, as soon as the door closes, swallowing me whole.
Dr. Harrington’s tilts his head. “Miss? You could be suffering from dehydration. I’d be violating my Hippocratic Oath if I didn’t insist that you come in. I understand your hesitation considering I’m a stranger, but I promise you that I didn’t wake up to hurt you. I have to leave for work in ten minutes.”
His concern appears genuine, but something about the way he’s gazing at me reminds me of a cat toying with its food.
Paranoia. Another one of my traits that Dr. Murray warned me about.
“Thank you so much,” I say, stepping up to the door.
He leads me inside the mansion. It’s colder than it looks, but the furniture and decor are cozy enough. We pass by a den with a fireplace, floor-to-ceiling shelves showcasing books with leather bindings, two leather armchairs, and a leather loveseat. I try to recall if I ever remember sitting in it, but my memory doesn’t bring anything to my attention.
I walk a little faster to keep up with Dr. Harrington.
“Dr. Harrington,” I say. “Have we met before?”
He turns his head but continues walking. “No, we haven’t. But it’s a pleasure to meet you now.”
He doesn’t ask me why I want to know if we’ve met before, or why I would think that we have. He doesn’t ask me how I know his name. He doesn’t ask me anything. The only sound is his formal shoes clicking against the wooden floor.
The clicking is duller as he steps onto the kitchen’s stone floor. The kitchen is nearly as large as my grandmother’s whole first floor of her house. The space between the kitchen island and the parallel kitchen counter reminds me of how wide the hospital halls are. The stainless-steel refrigerator could fit at least three dead bodies, which I half expect as Dr. Harrington opens one of the doors.
He pulls out a pitcher filled with orange juice. He grabs a glass from one of the cabinets and fills it to the brim. I step up to the kitchen island, and he slides it over to me.
I take a sip. The cold drink is so good, it could almost make me cry. I finish it quickly, barely holding off a brain freeze. The sugar recharges my thoughts, which only serves to bring Klay back to the front of my mind, demanding my full attention. I try to ignore him, focusing on the blurry image of my reflection in the refrigerator.
“You’re not curious how I knew your name?” I ask. “I could be a criminal.”
He smiles. “Oh, you could be, but I doubt it. I know who you are. I still remember the night your parents were brought into the hospital. I’ll never forget it. I still think of them often and their daughter—you—who was left behind because some human didn’t know how to conduct himself better.”
My stomach twists. This is why I instinctively don’t trust him. He was at the hospital the night my parents died. He knows more about what happened than I ever will. He may have seen them die.
“Take a breath, Sadie,” he says, taking the glass from me.
He fills it up again and slides it back in front of me. It hits against the fist I hadn’t realized I’d clenched.
“It’s important that you control your behavior,” he says. “The greatest flaw in humanity is that we let our short-term emotions negate our long-term goals.”
“You sound more like a therapist than a surgeon,” I say.
He smiles at me. “When you’ve spent enough time fixing people who destroyed their own bodies because of poor impul
se control, you conclude that the human brain is the beginning and the ending of everything. If you can learn how the brain responds to various stimuli, and how to condition the brain to respond in productive, healthy ways, we could all bring society to a better place.”
“I just want to finish high school,” I say.
He chuckles. “Fair enough. I’m going to jump to the conclusion that you came here to see my son. I’ll take you to him.”
Before I can respond, he starts walking down the hallway heading north. I follow. It’s more out of a fear of being caught in the kitchen by someone and having to explain myself than because I want to see Klay.
My bravado started to fade when Dr. Harrington caught me off-guard, and it faded even farther as he brought up how people’s impulses destroy them. I let my emotions take the lead, and that’s how I ended up in the house of my tormenter.
And he had compared me to that man, the drunkard who had straddled the center line and slammed into my parent’s car.
The collision’s aftermath had been brutal. Most articles had skipped over my parent’s injuries to avoid too much sensationalist gore. But the tabloids had dug their teeth into it, describing how the first responder had vomited on the side of the road, how my father had repeatedly called my mother’s name, and how, when the police managed to pry my mother out of the car, a river of blood had followed behind.
I shouldn’t hold it against Dr. Harrington for being too callous to understand the comparison he had made, but I do. The acid of the orange juice churns in my stomach as I bite back all of the retorts I need to make. I’m furious enough to want violence, a level of anger that I hadn’t realized I had in me.
It’s not fair to him, but it would make me feel a lot better.
We pass by a dining room, a living room, and a bathroom. Dr. Harrington stops in front of a closed door. He knocks on it before swinging the door open. I flinch at the sound of metal clashing against metal.
“Sadie is here,” he says into the room.
I can’t hear the response.
“Take ten minutes to entertain our guest,” Dr. Harrington says. “You can stop your regimen. If you give yourself acute exertional rhabdomyolysis, you’ll have no one to blame but yourself.”
He turns back to me. “Why don’t you go in?” he suggests. “I have to go, but you’re welcome to any food or drink in the kitchen. If you need a ride to school, I’m certain my son will gladly help.”
He doesn’t notice the rage boiling inside me. He moves around me, walking back down the hall. His shoes continue to click against the floor. I stare at the edge of the door frame, weighing the pros and cons of running outside and never looking at Klay again.
Somehow, the thought of Klay pacifies some of my anger. It’s still there, threatening to come bursting back out, but it’s not quite as prepared to trigger me to violence.
“Come in, Sadie,” Klay calls out, his tone reminding me of a principal summoning a rebellious child.
I take a small step forward, then a bigger one. I’m not a coward. I try to grasp onto my earlier courage, but maybe that was driven by the stupor of my insomnia.
The truth. I’m here for the truth.
Or I’m here for whatever I can get. I step into the room.
I’m not certain what I expected. The home gym is as large, expensive, and as extravagant as the rest of the house, but I barely notice all of the equipment when I see Klay sitting on a mat on the floor, a notebook on his lap and a pen in his hand.
He’s shirtless and his chest is just as perfect as I remember it being in the pool. But instead of a sleek layer of water, tiny beads of sweat line his chiseled chest and torso. I don’t know what the disease is that his father mentioned, but if it created Klay’s physique, I know dozens of men who would die for it.
Klay finishes jotting a note down before looking up. His eyes flicker over my body. This type of assessment would usually make me self-conscious, especially coming from someone with a body like that, but his appraisal feels like a shot of liquor, spreading heat and moxie under my skin.
“Are you working on the biology project?” I ask. “Do you want me to start an exercise routine and measure my muscle growth?”
“No, that would be counterproductive,” he says, leaning backward.
I avoid looking at his abs and the lines of his body, which all seem to point to his groin.
“As a woman,” he says, “your body wouldn’t gain muscle as quickly. It would be too slow for the experiment, and people wouldn’t trust a crazy bitch’s word.”
“I am not crazy and you—”
“You’re the one who’s stalking me, Bell Jar,” he says. He sets down the notebook and stands up.
I swallow, abruptly reminded of how much bigger he is than me.
“Sounds criminally insane to me,” he adds.
I want to put my hands on him—to strangle him or caress the sculpted curves of his chest and abs.
“I could think of some worse things.” I cross my arms over my chest. “Like convincing a woman who’d just been in inpatient treatment that you didn’t know her at all when you’d been in a relationship with her and cared about her.”
His eyes flicker over my face. “You know that’s not true.”
“It’s true.”
“That’s a lie and you know it,” he says.
He turns away from me, heading over to one of the pieces of fitness equipment. He sits down on it. His legs are opened wide and inviting.
“You know it’s not true,” he says. “I wouldn’t have fucked around with—I wouldn’t have shoved you into that locker and pissed inside if I cared about you. You have a warped sense of what caring for a person means. You’re fucking insane.”
I nod once, my lower lip pressing out like a pouting a child, but I’m more annoyed than upset. “So, you were the one who pushed me into the locker.”
“That isn’t the part I would have focused on, but, yes, that was me.”
“Which means that you were the one who told me to get out of town,” I say. “Why? Why do you want me to leave?”
He glances behind me. I look backward at the door. It’s cracked open slightly.
“Because I don’t like crazy people in my town,” he says.
I turn back to him as he stands up again. I would consider his constant movement strange considering that the rest of his behavior doesn’t match that nervous energy. But maybe he’s restless after his workout. And maybe he’s hot and bothered.
Like I am.
He frowns at me, but the lines creasing his face only serve to bring out his sharp, rugged features. “The last thing Marshall needs is some insane woman running around. Stalking people, bothering them in their own houses, and making outrageous claims. If we were in this relationship that you think we were, tell me about something we did.”
His tone is commanding, scornful. “What did we do for your last birthday? What about my birthday? What about the last day of school last year? Did we ride on some unicorns and visit a magical forest? Am I secretly a vampire that can’t keep his hands off you because I’m an ancient sex addict?”
He’s taken several steps forward, closing the gap between us again, and the vitriol in his voice is enough to make my heart and lungs race harder than when I was bicycling over. His father might be a cat playing with its food, but Klay is a lion who doesn’t have time to play around or act domesticated.
I let my arms drop away from my chest. I look directly at him. My intention isn’t to tame him.
“I trust you,” I say. “You asked me during class if I’d trust you with my life and I do. I’d give you my life. I’d—”
“You’re confused,” he says. “You don’t trust me. You wouldn’t give me anything.”
“I would.”
“You’re an idiot then,” he says, looking away from me. “You’re acting like an overdramatic little girl.”
“It’s true and nothing you can say or do will change that. I don’t know how I
could prove it to you.”
“Turn your back to me,” he says.
“What?”
“You said you trust me with your life. Prove it. Turning your back to me should be easy. Turn around and keep your eyes forward.”
I take a deep breath. I turn my back to him. I stare at the door. It’s thick wood. A faint breeze comes in through the cracked opening.
I feel his body heat a second before his hand comes up around my neck. I instinctively take a step backward, bumping up against his body. His thumb strokes against my throat. He applies some pressure—not enough to hurt or restrict my breathing, but enough to remind me that he could.
“You still trust me?” he asks.
“Yes,” I breathe.
He feels so good against me, like the radiance of a setting sun. Or an explosion.
I feel his breath against the side of my neck. I close my eyes, leaning back against him. His hand tightens around my neck, squeezing hard enough to make me a little breathless. His hand drops away. He takes several steps back, leaving me cold.
I turn around. “I told you. I trust you.”
His lip curls up in disgust. “You’re mistaken. Take off your clothes. If you want to be part of the experiment, let’s make it interesting.”
I look down at myself. I’ve stopped sweating, but sweat still covers my skin. My hair must be a mess. There’s no way he’s getting me naked because he wants to see more of me. He intends to humiliate me.
I pull off my shirt anyway. If he’s going to humiliate me, I might as well rip off the bandage. I might as well admit that I’d take any kind of attention from him. Either I’m right or I’m crazy, and it’s time to find out.
He glances at me, and I follow his gaze. The whiteness of my bra seeming brighter than usual, which helps to make my breasts appear more impressive. He looks away again, focusing on the right corner of the gym, where resistance bands are hanging.
“Take it all off,” he says.
I pull down my sweatpants. While my bra seems brighter, my black underwear seems duller. I fidget with my bra strap, preparing to take it off. He’s not looking at me at all.
Maybe I was mistaken about our past relationship.
