by Kendall Duke
And I wasn’t terrible at it. I had something my parents didn’t, which was discipline. They were feel good, old-timey studio musicians, my mom and dad, but I’m a millennial. I practiced a lot. I understood technology, and the internet, and how to use them to find people that would enjoy what I made. I didn’t have my father’s brilliance, or the sweetness of my mother’s voice, but I was good enough. And I was a very hard worker.
That’s what I really brought to the table. But being such a hard worker had a serious downside; I’d never dated.
Nothing, no one, not once. Not really. I’d been out on a couple of dates, but all of them ended up being a one time thing orchestrated by the guy to be seen with me, usually with paparazzi involved. Not exactly romantic. So I didn’t count any of those. And I had fans who were absolutely lovely, and I really liked, but those relationships were too fraught right from the first—they already had expectations and demands, because they’d supported my music. I wanted someone who looked over at this giant dork with ice cream slopped over her sequined costume and smelled like a high school gym and thought, that girl is awesome.
No one ever had.
But Jacob… Jacob had just smiled at me in a way that made me feel like he might.
Was I imagining things? Probably. I was really lonesome, even more so tonight than usual, and Jacob was handsomer than the male models I’d ‘dated.’ And strong, and hilarious, and very, very smart. So who wouldn’t want to imagine his arms around them, and that voice losing it’s cool for once as it whispered wild desires into a waiting ear?
I sighed and swallowed another glob of ice cream.
He was scanning the rooms again, his eyes searching the windows, back and forth, over and over. It was almost two o’clock in the morning; I would usually have been asleep for hours by now, but with the concert and the letter and, well, Jacob, I guess I wasn’t sleepy. But he wasn’t in my kitchen because he wanted to hang out. I needed to get real with myself about that, before I got hurt.
And then I realized this probably wasn’t standard procedure at all. And Chase left with Mark after appearing out of nowhere for a reason. And that meant they’d figured out who they were looking for, and were trying to catch him in the act of doing something… Wrong.
My stomach sank.
I put the ice cream down. “Jacob.”
“Miss?” He didn’t look at me; we’d gotten too comfortable with each other a minute ago, and he was trying to rein it back in.
“It’s him, isn’t it?” I stared at him, my stomach sinking to my toes. “It’s Todd.”
Jacob blinked, genuinely taken aback; his face registered shock and something else, too, something it took me a minute to recognize… Sadness. That’s what that was.
And then we heard something coming from the bathroom, a slow, creaking sound, like the window being pried open, the drag of a knife blade on the sill.
Jacob glanced at me, and I will never forget the look in his eyes. Absolute rage. Frigid, furious, vengeful. And then he went coolly blank and held his hand out to me, palm down, while his other one went to his lips and placed a finger over them, asking me to be silent.
I nodded.
My tears didn’t make a sound.
~~~
Jacob
It was him. He had a knife—god knows why, since he dropped it the second he saw me—and started babbling a lot of crazy stuff, genuinely crazy, things I’d heard once or twice before in a very different context, said by people with real reasons to believe what they were saying. He was just an entitled piece of shit that thought he owned another person outright, and when she started trying to become more independent, in even the smallest ways, he started to go off the deep end. It didn’t help that he was a creep. Everything veered off the cliff, including his libido, when she turned eighteen.
Happy birthday, Kayla.
I would have happily killed him—might even have found an excuse to do it, if I’m being honest about my flaws—because she’d touched me, just a few minutes before; because she’d been in my arms, her beautiful, ridiculously perfect face just inches away from mine as she smiled and acted like the most adorable girl in the world, just minutes before. Years of training under the worst conditions imaginable, and I almost lost my cool on a helpless fucktard because a pretty girl smiled at me just minutes before. Pathetic.
I managed to rough him up only a little bit, which took a lot of fucking effort on my part, and then I radioed Rocket and he had the police and the FBI on top of us within twenty minutes. It was a circus, the whole thing. I kept the team encircled around Kayla, even during the interviews, so that she could see familiar faces at all times; granted, we’d barely started working for her but considering what just went down she seemed to feel safer with us than anyone else. Her mother had no clue what was going on with her husband; the manager said he suspected, but what could he say? He worked for the guy. The assistant, or whatever she was, barely knew what was happening in her own head. She was on something, I was sure. Nothing too serious—probably a bad painkiller addiction coupled with too much ADD meds or something. Something that would require medical attention to fix and would make her worthless to Kayla right now, which was what I cared about. I made sure Kayla knew where I was, even when I had to go give the deposition in the mobile unit, and when that was done I wouldn’t leave her.
I felt terrible.
I’d done the job she paid me to do. And I’d done it very well, considering I didn’t even kill the guy—and that would bother me for the rest of my life, even if it was absolutely the wrong thing to do. But… She was so sad.
Kayla didn’t cry a lot. She started when I moved towards the bathroom, because we both knew it was him, and that broke her heart. I couldn’t believe she put it together, just like that—but I suppose I should have given her a lot more credit. She probably knew the whole time and just didn’t want it to be true. Maybe if she’d given him enough space and time he would’ve figured out how to get help, and things would’ve gone back to normal; not that normal was so fucking great, if you asked me. But no one did. So I shut my face, and did my job.
Which was the problem.
Would she look at me forever and think of me as the culprit, somehow, instead of Todd? People did that, when they couldn’t handle the disintegration of a relationship, a betrayal so painful they needed to blame the person that helped them instead of the person that hurt them. I felt my worry about that gnawing at my gut the entire night.
I hoped it was because I liked the job—because there was a lot riding on it.
I hoped I was mature enough to want Kayla to be mentally healthy and that was it, no other concerns above this.
But I knew that wasn’t the case.
I just didn’t want Kayla to be mad at me.
I didn’t want her to refuse to make jokes with me, even when I made it hard on her. I didn’t want her to find someone else to take my place as her personal security. I didn’t want someone else teasing her, late at night, in the dark, their arms snatching her out of thin air as she grinned like the Cheshire cat.
I had it bad for this girl, and I’d barely known her for twenty four hours. I’d give my right arm for her to never have known how scummy her family member was. I’d give the other one if it meant she would keep talking to me.
It was a very long night. By the time everything had settled, Todd was headed to a locked down mental health facility in northern Virginia, her mother was surrounded by nursing staff, the assistant had vanished and Kayla’s manager was trying to order us around like we worked for him. It didn’t go so well; he wasn’t a member of the immediate family, and I’d been hired by Kayla, who was technically an adult, so now I worked for her. And her mom, but her mom was checked out. I got the team together and escorted her uncle off of the premises, and told him she’d be in touch tomorrow. Maybe. He made a stink, but there are a lot of us, and we’re big. Good-bye.
When Kayla finally finished all of the interviews with the various
departments and bureaucrats surrounding the house, one of them had tipped off the press and the paparazzi was arriving on the edges of the property. I suggested we relocate.
“Where?” She looked utterly helpless, and so exhausted I wanted… I just wanted to carry her out of there and take her to…
“I have an idea,” I told her, and she nodded at me hopefully, the only positive expression I’d seen on her face in hours.
I talked to the guys and we hammered out the details. I wasn’t going to let go of her smile that easily.
We got the caravan up and mobilized with most of the team—several stayed back to monitor the situation and keep them from harassing Emily—and headed towards a large hotel in downtown Charlestown. When we got there, we pulled a classic switch in the underground parking lot; about fifteen miles outside of town Kayla sat up in the backseat of my SUV and peered through the tinted windows. “Okay,” she said. “I am too tired to guess, but I’ll try: Disneyland.”
“Disneyworld,” I corrected, and just barely managed to wipe the smile off of my face when she lit up like a Christmas tree. “Is on this side of the country. Miss.”
“Boooooo,” she said softly, staring out at the window again.
I waited as long as I could for another playful response from her, but when none came I couldn’t contain myself. “My place,” I said, and I heard the sharp inhale before my eyes could make it back to catch her expression.
“Why?” I didn’t have to wait long; she immediately began climbing into the front seat. We were alone; the rest of the team was at the hotel, spread out as if she were in the pent-house at the top floor. Worked like a charm, too; Riley reported in my wireless that the reporters were camped out everywhere, trying to get a shot of her while she was still reeling from the evening’s events. Vultures.
“We did an assessment,” I said carefully, “and decided it would be safest to transport you somewhere that would be difficult to locate, let alone approach, without explicit warning.”
“Uh-huh,” she said, raising an eyebrow. “So you’re taking me back to the compound to meet my new sister-wives, huh?”
I admit it—I did laugh at that one. It had just enough truth to be a little uncomfortable, but that’s what made it funny. She didn’t know the half of it.
It was technically not a compound.
But yes, the guys all called it that.
And no, there was definitely no sister-wife situation going on… But when she made me laugh like that I wondered if she could be persuaded to marry me. Eventually. In my dreams.
“We did an assessment,” I said again, failing to come up with a better explanation.
“Who?”
“The team.”
“And you are the leader of this team, correct?” She had that mischievous look in her eyes that went straight from my gut to my balls. A reaction that seriously had to be tabled right now, considering she’d just lived through a nightmare most of us couldn’t imagine; some guy’s balls were the last thing she needed—and all attendant parts, which, while we’re being honest, were the real trouble.
She made me hard as a fucking rock. Just the idea of… All kinds of caveman bullshit was going through my mind, but I needed to put every bit of that aside. “Yes, miss.”
“And you decided to ditch the rest of the guys and take me to your mountain dungeon or something?” Her voice faltered at the end of the question, and I realized, given the circumstances, she probably was pretty scared. When I glanced at her, she was giving me that fake smile I’d seen too much of. It was so jarring, so out of place, now that I knew what the real one looked like.
“Kayla,” I said, unable to stop myself, “I just wanted to take you somewhere safe.” When her face didn’t change, I found myself reaching over and taking her hand, as if I didn’t control the body that claimed it. “I promise. We all talked it over, and because you’re half-right—it is in the middle of nowhere, and anyone that I don’t invite there won’t make it to the cabin alive, to be blunt—it’s definitely the safest and closest place we had access to.”
She looked down at my hand for a long time, not saying anything, and when I felt a tear drop land on my skin I almost pulled over. But then she laced her fingers through mine and whispered, “thanks, Jacob.”
And that was it. I closed my fingers around hers, and we headed into the mountains.
I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to let her go.
~~~
Kayla
So, let’s just do a quick re-cap, shall we?
Step-father: locked away, basically a drooling mess bent on doing literally unspeakable things to the girl he has called his daughter for the past four years, no longer capable of taking care of my mom.
Speaking of: mom. Inconsolable. Barely coherent with humiliation, fear, gratitude that nothing worse happened, baffled that she hadn’t been able to tell, and just the general vague suffering she feels constantly anyway, day to day, due to advanced rheumatoid arthritis.
Manager: power-grabbing, not embarrassed at all because he apparently just didn’t understand the seriousness of the whole thing and doesn’t really care about my emotional well-being, and thankfully not at the house now.
Best friend: none. Not applicable.
I guess it was great that I was able to afford to give them both the best care? I sat back in the seat of the giant SUV and stared at the landscape around us, the mountains getting taller and taller as we drove deeper and deeper into the Blue Mountain Range. I was honestly unsure which state we were in now, and I didn’t even care. I’d had a moment of panic when Jacob told me he was taking me to his house; I’m not an idiot, and I’ve been stalked a couple of times, actually, and this latest thing was very painful. But it subsided as soon as he held my hand. I believed him. I mean, I’d paid a lot of money to vet him beforehand anyway, but also, I believed him.
More than I believed most things, these days.
The letters started about a week after my birthday. I told myself it was a coincidence, but knew better, and when they became violent and explicit I knew that someone probably was paying very close attention to the intimate details of my life. But isn’t that what stalkers do? My birthday was public knowledge; it certainly wasn’t a state secret. But I guess I brushed it off. And Todd had always been a little strange. Not many people would jump at the chance to marry a broke studio musician with a debilitating chronic illness whose daughter was a pimply internet dork still deeply grieving her own father. I’d written Todd off, I guess; I wanted mom to be happy. I understood how angry she was, too, and why she needed to move on from dad’s memory. I didn’t think that hard about Todd.
If I had, could I have prevented this?
Probably not.
“Miss, if I may speak frankly?”
“We’re back to this, huh?” I gave him a quick eyeroll and refused to relinquish his hand.
“Stop.”
I swallowed. I really, really did not want to let go of his hand. He glanced over at me and must have understood what I was thinking immediately. “Stop thinking about it. If you can.”
“How the heck could I pull that off?” It was more of a rhetorical question, but he seemed to take it seriously, his mouth firming into a drawn line.
“You put it away, the way you would move something lower on your list of things to do—you don’t have time to do laundry right now, so you move it down the list. You’ll call that friend later. You’ll finish the dishes after you make that call. So this is just another thing on your list, Miss. It’s the lowest possible thing on your list right now—you don’t have to pretend it didn’t happen, or that it doesn’t matter. It does. But you also don’t have to make it the focal point of your thoughts. Pick something else to think about.”
“That is… Disgustingly rational,” I said, and his smile flickered again. I’d made him laugh out loud earlier, and the sound was forever emblazoned on my mind. It sparked through everything, through the fog of my exhaustion and my sadness—
it was so beautiful. And like most beautiful things, it was there and then gone.
“That’s the method that works best,” he said in his blank, matter-of-fact way.
“Says who?”
“Says just about every vet I know,” he said, giving me a brief glimpse of his more sardonic self. “Miss.”
“Tell me a little more about this please,” I said, snuggling into the seat and pulling his hand against my chest, under my jaw. It couldn’t have been terribly comfortable for him, but he let me. “If I tell you my curiosity about this has moved to the top of my mental list, will you speak for longer than fifteen seconds?”
“I make no promises, Miss,” he said, but he did; he talked to me for a long time, about managing trauma and making the best of horrible situations and recovery and life. All of it was very vague, but I could hear in his voice that it was all part of his own experience. He’d practiced this himself. A lot. And he’d definitely said the same words to lots of other people too, trying to bring them out of the dark.
I respected him, suddenly, in a way I hadn’t before. If my experience had been upsetting… How in the world did the rest of the people who helped others do this every day? How had all the FBI agents and detectives and the rest of the Marines that made up his team live through the things they must have seen, and keep going, day after day? Not to mention what they might have lived through themselves—no one escapes these things, grief and trauma and sadness. How did they do it?
It made my problems seem very small. Very small indeed.
“Miss?” I realized I’d been quiet for a long time; I was squeezing his hand, pressing it against my chest. “Are you alright?”
“No.” I said, nodding. “I mean… No, but yes, I’m fine.”
“Miss…” He gave me a searching look, his icy eyes narrowing on mine. “Don’t. Don’t… Whatever you’re doing right now, I advise against it.”
