Hard Knox

by Nicole Williams

  I couldn’t stop him by calling out, and it didn’t sound like he was going to stop until he’d reduced Beck to a pulpy mess. With my eyes still closed, I envisioned exactly what I wanted to do, just how I needed to move, what muscles I’d need to utilize, and which body parts would have to move. I envisioned it until I felt parts of my body breaking through the haze, and before they could slip back behind it, I moved. It wasn’t much and I didn’t move far, but it was enough.

  Managing to roll onto my side, my body balanced on the ledge of the table until it toppled over the edge onto the hard, damp floor. I landed with a few cracks of my own as a sharp rush of air escaped my mouth . . . and now my head was ducking in and out of the haze too. But as soon as I crashed to the floor, the cracks and thuds from the corner of the room halted.

  “Charlie!” He didn’t stop repeating my name until he crashed to the ground beside me, rolling me carefully onto my back and cradling my head in his lap. “Shit, Charlie, no.”

  I was fighting a battle with my eyelids, but I managed to focus on his face for a few seconds before they closed. He looked as broken as my body felt, and then I felt something cover me. From its scent and feel, I guessed it was one of Knox’s shirts. I hadn’t realized I’d been naked.

  “Charlie?” Knox shook my shoulders gently, panic taking his voice a few notes higher. “Don’t close your eyes. Keep them open. Stay with me.”

  I heard his words. I wanted to do what he was asking, but I couldn’t. I wasn’t sure if the drugs were taking me under again or if the fall was responsible, but I couldn’t open my eyes even if it would have saved my life. I couldn’t even open them for him.

  “Not again. I can’t lose you like this, Charlie.” Holding my head in his arms, Knox rocked me back and forth. “Fuck! You can’t die this way. I won’t let you.” His screams filled the room as he held me so close. It was like he was fighting some invisible power that was trying to take me away. “Open your eyes, Charlie. Just open your eyes, and everything will be okay. Please, God, just open your eyes.” His screams ended in a whisper so ragged, I didn’t recognize his voice anymore.

  He wanted me to open my eyes. He wanted me to open my eyes while he held me.

  My eyes never opened again in that room.

  MY EYES DIDN’T open again in that ill-fated room. They opened what felt like days later, in a different place. I woke to a pounding head, an aching body, and little-to-no memory. I noticed the metal bed rails, the pastel curtain, the tray table with a pitcher of water . . . I was in the hospital. My heart sped up as panic crept into my veins. How did I get here? What had happened to put me here? Which hospital was I at? I scanned my mind for my last memory, but all that came were a few flashes of a park bench, a photo of a girl who looked like me, and a stick of gum. None of that made sense. Not a single bit of it.

  The pounding in my head increased until I felt like my brain was close to liquefying. Pinching the bridge of my nose, I fumbled around my bed. There had to be a buzzer somewhere close by that would send a nurse running. I was pretty sure what my hand had just curled around was what I was looking for, but then I noticed something else in my room—a someone draped across a chair, half of his body hanging over it, while he slept. Judging from the pinched expression on his face, it wasn’t a peaceful sleep.

  Just like that, all of the panic and fear I’d felt drained from my body. Wherever I was, whatever I was here for, I would be okay because he was here. Knox was with me—I was safe.

  Safe. Safe. For some reason, the word brought with it an image that didn’t seem safe—it didn’t feel safe either.

  “Knox.” My voice was so hoarse, I sounded like an eighty-year-old woman who’d been smoking seventy years of her life.

  Hoarse or not, his eyes flashed open. Before he’d blinked a few times to clear the sleep from his eyes, they flitted my direction. A smile broke across his face as he untangled himself from the chair. “Thank you.” That was all he said as he got up and came closer, inspecting me like he was trying to decide if I was really here.

  “For what?” I asked.

  His hand touched my temple, his finger brushing the corner of my eye. “For opening your eyes.”

  I swallowed, scared to ask my next question. “What happened?”

  “How much do you remember?” Knox asked, filling a cup with water and lifting it to my lips.

  It felt so cool and calming on my throat I sighed. “Nothing really.” I took another sip. “Flashes. Images. Nothing that makes any sense.”

  Knox’s sigh sounded relieved. I didn’t understand how he could feel relieved about me having no memory of a chunk of my life.

  “That’s not a bad thing, you know?” he said. “Not remembering anything. I was there, and I’m not sure I want to remember the things I saw. The things I did. The things I wanted to do.”

  My hand reached for his. When his fingers wove through mine, I couldn’t imagine anything I couldn’t deal with when he was holding my hand. “Please, Knox, just tell me. The highlights if nothing else.” I pinched my hospital gown. “I just woke up in a hospital, feeling like my entire body has been run over by a steamroller, with no memory as to what happened to put me here. Now you’re telling me I don’t want to remember what happened. I’m about to go insane, so please, just tell me.” The water had made my throat feel better, but my voice was still hoarse.

  His head fell back, and though I knew everything inside him didn’t want to tell me, I also knew he would because it was me asking. Knox had never been able to tell me no—at least not very often or for very long.

  “I don’t know how you got there, but when I found you, you were in the basement of the Sigma Nu house. That was two days ago.”

  I felt my forehead crease. “Sigma Nu? That’s Beck’s frat . . .”

  Knox’s face shadowed, and I had another flash. It made me realize he was right—I didn’t want to remember everything. “It was him. Beck. He was the one—” A small sound slipped past my lips when another flash almost flattened me. “Did he . . . you know . . . did he—” I couldn’t seem to say the word. It got stuck in my throat every time.

  “No, he didn’t.” Knox’s head whipped from side to side. “And you don’t have to worry about him ever again. You don’t have to worry that he’s going to try something like that again.”

  Beck. My ex-boyfriend. The guy everyone liked and had what people would describe as an infectious personality and smile. The same one Knox had warned me to be careful with was the one we’d been looking for all year.

  “Why? Is he in prison?” My hand curled into the blankets as the pieces fell into place.

  “Not yet.”

  “Why not?” Without knowing the rest, the flashes alone were enough to earn Beck some solid orange-jumpsuit time.

  “Because they can’t throw him in prison until he heals from his injuries first.”

  “What injuries?”

  Knox’s jaw set, his eyes darkening. “The ones I inflicted on him. The ones that ensured he’ll be walking with a limp and a crooked nose for the rest of his life.”

  It wasn’t an image that flashed through my mind then. It was a sound—a noise like flesh pounding flesh, knuckles cracking into bone. “How did you find me? Did I tell you I was going to be with Beck? Did you know I was going to the Sigma Nu’s house?” I couldn’t remember how I’d wound up in that basement with Beck, but I hoped Knox did.

  “No, you didn’t tell me. I didn’t know. When I came home that afternoon and walked into my room and found it . . . the way it was, I knew I had to find you to explain. I didn’t expect that when I found you, it would be the way I did.” His hand stiffened in mine.

  “Your room . . . What did you find in your room?” I’d no sooner asked than I remembered. That memory came flooding back, not just as images but as a continuous stream. His desk, the lock, the metal box, the contents inside it, the photo . . . For the second time, that small sound escaped my mouth. “I remember. I remember that part.”
<
br />   His eyes closed as he nodded. “Good. That will make the next part easier.”

  “What next part?”

  When Knox looked at me, he looked old. Ancient. Stubble covered half his face, dark crescents framed the bottom of his eyes, his eyes looked flat, and his shoulders sloped down. He was in the same outfit I remembered him in from the flash I had of him charging into the room that night. He was a twenty-one-year-old who looked sixty, and he’d aged another decade before he opened his mouth. “The part where I explain.”

  I didn’t let go of his hand, but I wasn’t sure if I’d still be holding it at the end of this. Knox had saved me from Beck, but Knox wasn’t innocent. Not with the contents of that box.

  “Explain what you were doing with photos of all of the girls who’d reported their rapes, along with baggies of white pills and a handbook that may keep me from ever looking at humanity in the same way?”

  Knox didn’t flinch away from my words or the accusation in them. “I’m going to try, yes.”

  With every moment that passed, another piece of my memory fell into place. Not so much memories of what happened during the “incident,” but what had taken place leading up to it. Those memories came back like dominoes falling over each other. “How about starting with—”

  “My juvenile record and the charges on it?”

  My head tilted. “How did you know I knew?” Had I left the folder behind? Had I confronted him about it? Left him a note? I didn’t remember approaching Knox about his record.

  “Neve gave me a heads-up,” he answered.

  My expression was probably as surprised as his. “She gave you a heads-up? As in she came up to you, looked you in the eye, and talked to you?”

  “I’m not sure if she really looked me in the eye, but she did come up to me and tell me about what she’d found out and shared with you earlier that day. I think she feels a little guilty . . . If she’s even capable of that emotion.”

  “When did you see her?”

  Knox’s eyes flickered to the door like she was standing right there. “Earlier today. She left a while ago, but Harlow’s here somewhere, and Jake’s been coming after work. Your parents are down in the cafeteria right now—”

  “My parents are here?” I shot up higher in bed. It was a two-hour flight, but it was ten-hour drive. As Dad had something of a plane phobia, I was pretty sure how they’d gotten here.

  “Of course they’re here. Their daughter’s in the hospital. What happened to put her here is . . .” His fingers curled around the bed rails so tightly his knuckles went white “It’s a parent’s worst nightmare. And a boyfriend’s too.”

  “What do they know?” Even I didn’t know everything, but what I did remember were things I wasn’t sure I wanted to share with any human being.

  “Not much. I told them enough so they’d know this was serious, but I left the rest up to you. You can decide how much you want to tell them.”

  “You called them?”

  He nodded. “Harlow gave me their number. I know how close you are to them, and I figured you’d want them here for support . . . just in case.”

  “Just in case of what?” I squeezed his hand.

  “Just in case you woke up, saw my face, and started screaming and throwing things. Pretty much everything you didn’t do when you woke up.”

  Seeing Knox’s face the way it was now reminded me of how it had been when I’d woken. “Is that what you were dreaming about? Me screaming and throwing things at you?” I smiled, though it wasn’t all that funny. I’d very much wanted to scream at him and throw whatever was in reach when I saw him after finding that metal box.

  But now . . . now everything was thick with confusion. Knox was in possession of a box of horrors, but he wasn’t the one who’d been preying on other girls and me. I wasn’t sure what that box meant anymore, or why he’d kept something like his juvenile record from me when he had to have known, given my personal experiences, that was a piece of information I should have heard from my boyfriend.

  “Why didn’t you tell me, Knox?” My hand wanted to slip away from his, so I made my fingers wrap around his tighter. Holding on wasn’t easy, but letting go would have been harder. “Why didn’t you tell me you’d been arrested for having and selling roofies?”

  He didn’t flinch or wince or groan like most people would have. He wrapped his foot around the chair he’d been asleep in earlier, slid it closer to the bed, and fell into it. His hand stayed wrapped with mine. “I wanted to tell you, and I was going to tell you.” He bowed his head and stared at the floor. “I know me confessing that to you after you found out on your own makes it hard, if not impossible, to believe me, but it is the truth. I tried that first night we were together, but when you said you weren’t sure you could handle all of my backstory at once, I started to worry if you could handle it in pieces. And that’s not a discredit to your strength of character, but a discredit to the shit I’d accrued in my past. No one would deal well with the stuff I wanted to tell you.”

  “I could have found some way, Knox. It wouldn’t have been easy, and I would have been shocked as all hell, but you telling me would have been about a hundred times better than one of my professors throwing your record down in front of me.” I finished my cup of water.

  Knox looked up long enough to refill it. Then his head bowed again. “I know. I knew if anyone could handle the positively fucked up pieces of my past, it would be you, but after that night when I almost told you, I couldn’t seem to work up the courage again. I couldn’t find a way to work it into our breakfast conversations or our late-night talks after we’d . . . you know.”

  “Yeah, I was there.” Half a smile touched my mouth.

  “It seemed impossible to drop into everyday conversation, so I told myself I’d tell you once we found the bastard. Once we found out who he was, I’d tell you, because I started to worry if I told you about my record, while we’d spent months getting nowhere closer to the truth, all of your suspicions would shift to me.”

  I cleared my throat.

  “Or at least some of your suspicions would shift to me.”

  I shook my head. “They wouldn’t have. I trusted you implicitly. If we’d been searching for this guy for years and you told me that you’d been arrested for the same crime we were trying to get to the bottom of, I wouldn’t have added you to the suspect list. But since you didn’t tell me and I found out from someone else, that did move you to the suspect list. With what I found in your bedroom, that pretty much moved you to the number-one spot . . . at least until . . .” My eyes narrowed as I tried to remember what I’d done and where I’d gone after I left Knox’s bedroom. I remembered dropping the truck keys beside his truck, but that was where my memories dropped off. How and when I’d linked up with Beck, I couldn’t recall.

  “So that was my first mistake—my first huge, awful mistake in the series of many I made.” He blew out a slow breath. “The next was keeping the box a secret from you.”

  Just thinking about the box and how I’d felt going through it chilled me. I pulled the hospital blanket up higher, draping it around my shoulders. “What the hell is that, Knox?”

  He finally looked at me. The rims of his eyes were red, though I didn’t see any evidence of tears. “My obsession.”

  My breath caught. “I’m going to need more than that.”

  “I know.” He nodded as he scooted his chair closer. “But to explain it the way it needs to be done, I need to start at the beginning.”

  I didn’t know where the beginning was, if it was the day he’d been born, the day he’d been arrested, or the day he’d dropped the first article into that metal box, but I encouraged him with a squeeze of my hand.

  “You don’t know much about my past,” he said. “I’ve sheltered you from those details because I didn’t want you to look at me and see a charity case or a little boy trapped inside a man who needed to be saved or someone who needed to be pitied. But the short story is that I had a rough childho
od and an even rougher adolescence. My mom would come and go, bringing some new asshole into our lives every few weeks. We moved from one roach-infested apartment to the next every few months, and she had CPS called on her so many times she came to recognize all of the caseworkers and would button the place up and tell us to shut up when one would come to the door.”

  “She sounds awful.”

  His head bobbed. “She was worse.”

  As he spoke, I understood why he hadn’t wanted to tell me too much about his past. Right now, all I saw when I looked at him was a small, helpless boy who needed help, instead of the independent, strong man he’d grown into.

  “But I had my sister, and we made each other’s lives less shitty. She was only my half-sister since Mom’s relationships never spanned more than a few months, but she was barely a year younger than me, so she felt more like a twin than a half-sister.”

  A pretty young girl smiling at me from a photo came back to haunt me. “The picture in the box.”

  A muscle in his neck twitched as he nodded. “That was her, my sister, Maggie.”

  The necklace around her neck, our physical similarities, the newspaper article attached to the back . . . “What happened to her?” I’d read the article a couple of times, but I didn’t remember much else other than that she’d—

  “She died.” His voice was so strained, I wouldn’t have recognized it if I hadn’t been looking at him.

  “From an overdose.” I said the words as gently as I could, but when they hit him, it seemed the opposite. “An overdose of Rohypnol.”

  He lifted our joined hands and clasped his other one over them as his forehead dropped to them. “It was a party. I was sixteen. She was only fifteen.” Each word seemed to be like a different knife driving into his stomach. From his expression, I would have thought he was having a limb amputated without anesthesia. “Maggie and I had been inseparable growing up. She looked up to and depended on me because I was filling the roles of both a father and a mother, and I protected her like she was my daughter.” He let out the breath he’d been holding before taking another. “I started getting into a lot of trouble in middle school. I got into so much trouble it became the theme of my life and felt normal. If I wasn’t getting into trouble, that felt abnormal. I was suspended and expelled from so many schools I’d been through almost all of them in our area. I got into fights. I stole. I messed around with drugs.”