Falling Down

by Selena Kitt

  “Oh baby, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” he murmured, sounding pained, and Lindsey took a deep, hitching breath, trying to speak, but she couldn’t form words. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. Damnit…”

  Instead, she cupped his face in her hands and kissed him through her tears, her mouth slanting across his as if she could devour him. He searched her face when they parted and she laughed, she couldn’t help it, laughed and cried at the same time.

  “I’m fine,” she gasped, wrapping her arms around his neck, settling deep into his lap as he pulled the covers over them. “You didn’t hurt me. You didn’t… I’m just… I’m…”

  He kissed the top of her head as she was overcome with a deep sob again, and then she laughed through her tears, looking up at him with more bewilderment and love than she’d ever felt for anyone or anything, sounding incredulous as the words spilled out: “I’m happy.”

  He smiled softly, folding her against him completely. “That makes two of us.”

  —

  Lindsey’s head was spinning, and she might not have even seen them if hadn’t been for the cell phone Zach had insisted buying for her sounding its “Coldplay” ringtone from her purse. She was practically skipping, planning a big, special dinner, and how she was going to tell him about the job interview at the recruiting office—she’d gotten it, all thanks to him, she was sure, and his bragging about her computer skills—and her subsequent registration at ITT Tech, where she would learn, at least more officially, how to do what she longed to on computers.

  Although she felt a little guilty about all the money Zach had spent on her since she moved in, at least now she had both the possibility and opportunity to start paying her own way. The thought was both so exhilarating and scary she could barely contain it, and when the phone rang, she was sure it was Zach—who else had the number, after all?—and she was going to spill it all before she could make any more dreamy little plans.

  She stopped on the street corner—the bus stop was just around it, anyway—and began to dig for the phone, letting people pass her as she searched. It stopped before she found it, and she swore, sifting through lipgloss and gum, hearing the sound indicating someone had left a message. She had her hand on the phone, finally, and that’s when she looked up and saw him.

  They were building a book store across the street, a big steel two-story deal, lots of girders and mortar, and the construction was in full swing. There, standing half-behind an expanse of bright orange netting meant to keep the public out, she was sure, was one of the men who had raped her—not the one she’d labeled Smooth, the one with the easy, fluid voice, but the other one, Gritty, the one who had, she remembered and actually gagged standing there on the street corner, come in her mouth that night.

  He was wearing a hard hat and writing something on a clipboard, his face slightly in shadow, but she knew him, would have known him anywhere. Then Smooth appeared behind him, and they faced each other, talking, and Lindsey thought she might faint as she pressed herself back against the brick of the store behind her, looking for something solid to hold her up.

  When the phone rang again in her hand, which was still half-buried in her purse, she startled and yanked it out, looking at the display. It was Zach. Oh thank God. She flipped it open, pressed the phone to her ear, and whispered, “They’re right across the street.”

  “Lindsey? Hello?”

  Her voice was choked as she shrank against the building, praying they wouldn’t look over, wouldn’t see her, but she seemed unable to move. “Zach, I saw them. Both of them. The men who…who…”

  “Where are you?” He understood, she could tell.

  “The corner of…” She glanced up to be sure. “Woodward and Ten. They’re right across the street at the construction site. Right now. They’re just standing there talking—”

  “I’m going to hang up and call the police. There’s a hardware store there on the corner, right?”

  She looked behind her, seeing red brick, but she knew the area well enough—her back was against the outside wall of the hardware store. “Yeah.”

  “Go inside. Tell them someone was bothering you, and the police are on their way. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. The police will probably be there before me.” He swore under his breath. “Do you hear me?”

  “Yes,” she agreed, inching her way around the corner toward the hardware store door, feeling her way for the entrance. She couldn’t take her eyes off the two of them, both laughing at some joke now.

  “Do exactly as I say,” he insisted. “I’ll call you back in two minutes.”

  The line went dead. She slipped into the store, heart beating hard, breathing too fast, and she took a cart just to steady herself as she walked. It was more like five minutes before he called her back—she’d already told the first cashier she came to, a young girl with spiky black hair and a coiled tattoo on her neck, whose mascara-rimmed eyes grew wider and wider as Lindsey talked until she finally ran to get her manager.

  The older man was more helpful, leading Lindsey to the back office, offering her a seat, bottled water. She accepted both, and was just taking a long drink when the phone rang again.

  “Are you okay?” “I’m in the store,” she said, smiling at the concerned-looking manager, who kept taking his wireless glasses off and wiping them on his shirt. “They’re nice. They let me wait in the office.”

  “Good.” He sounded a little less tense. “I’m on my way. The police should be there in a few minutes. They’re sending an unmarked car. It was in the area.”

  “Okay.” The thought of talking to the police made her stomach lurch and she closed her eyes, swallowing hard. “What…what are we going to do?” “You’re going to tell them.”

  She whimpered. “I want to go home.”

  “I’ll be there to get you. Just a few more minutes, baby. I promise.”

  “I feel like I’m falling.” She did. The world was spinning.

  “You’ll want to put your head between your knees…” The man with the glasses looked concerned.

  “It’s okay,” Zach said, his voice choked. “I’ll catch you, remember?”

  She looked up at the sound of someone in the doorway. “They’re here.”

  “Tell them everything,” he insisted. “Okay.” She looked at the man in uniform standing in the doorway and wondered if she could.

  “I love you, Lindsey.”

  “I love you, too.”

  She looked up at the cop, opened her mouth, and told him everything.

  It was from the back of the unmarked cruiser parked on the street that she identified them both. And a few moments later, Zach’s car pulled up behind them. The cop was suspicious when Zach knocked on the driver’s side window, but Lindsey’s relieved, “Zach! Oh thank God!” was enough to convince him that it was safe to roll it down.

  “Let me out!” Lindsey pulled on the door handle, locked from the inside.

  The cop got out to talk to Zach, but left her inside, and the longer they stood there, the more panicked she felt. When the door finally opened, she flew into Zach’s arms and he held her tight as she trembled against him.

  “Can we go home?” she whispered. “Can we go home now?”

  “Yeah, he said we can go. Come on.” He put her in the car and slid into the driver’s side. Lindsey didn’t talk on the way, letting him hold her hand while he drove with the other.

  But there was a message on the machine when they got home that made Lindsey curl into a fetal ball on the couch.

  “I can’t,” she wailed as Zach knelt beside her, brushing the hair out of her face. “I can’t!”

  “Yes you can.”

  She tried to imagine it—like every bad Law and Order, standing behind two-way glass, facing them, knowing they couldn’t see you, but still…

  “And you will. Come on.”

  She thought of Brian and the games she had played leading up to that night. He hadn’t meant for it to happen that way, she knew it, but if she sto
od up and started pointing fingers, he would be in just as much trouble. That weighed on her, but the thought of the things she’d done, the way she’d dressed, acted, instigated, the men she’d let feel her up, fuck her, use her—she pulled the sofa pillow out from under her head and pressed it over her flushed face to hide it.

  “You don’t understand,” she whispered, when Zach pulled the pillow away and made her face him. “It went all wrong that night, I know. It wasn’t supposed to…be like that. But I…I…” She closed her eyes, unable to look into his. “I went there to meet them. I knew…I knew what could happen.”

  “Did you say no?” Zach asked quietly, and she felt his hand in her hair again, stroking gently.

  She remembered, and knew she had, clearly and unequivocally. She’d told them no over and over, and it just made things worse instead of better.

  “Yeah.” She opened her eyes, looking at him through prisms. “But that doesn’t mean I didn’t deserve it. How many times had I said yes before that?” “Don’t.” He shook his head. “I don’t care if you said yes until the very last minute, and then decided you didn’t want to. No means no. Period.”

  She laughed, a short, strangled cry. “But ‘no’ never meant ‘no’ before…”

  “And why was that? Because no one ever listened to you when you said ‘no,’ did they?” He touched her cheek, his eyes pained. “Your stepfather didn’t listen. All the men who took advantage of you didn’t listen. Lindsey, baby, you’ve been saying ‘no’ all along. It’s just that no one was willing to stop and listen to what you actually meant.”

  Everything in her went silent as she stared at him, the slow realization creeping like cold fingers up her spine. She wanted to deny it, but she couldn’t. All that time, she’d been saying “No”—egging them on, sure, teasing them, trying her best to get herself or someone else hurt, she realized with a flush of shame—but she never once stopped saying, “No.”

  “Okay.” She sat up on the couch, wiping her eyes, blinking back any more tears, and managed to give him a small, hard smile. “Let’s go.”

  She was going and, not just this one time, but now and forever, “No” was going to really mean “No.”

  —

  “Ugh, did you have to make me eat waffles?” Lindsey held her stomach as they approached the pavilion. It was crowded with a sea of kids in black robes, but there were far many more parents and siblings, grandmothers and uncles. All she had was Zach—not that she was complaining.

  “You wanted waffles!” Zach laughed, tugging at the tassel on her mortarboard—

  a blue and white thing with a gold “2008”—making it go askew.

  “Yeah, well…now I feel sick.” She straightened her cap with a frown.

  “You’re going to be fine.” He kissed her cheek, pointing to a sign that read, ‘Graduates’ with an arrow pointing down a flight of stairs. “I guess that’s for you.”

  “How will I find you after?” She clung to his hand, hesitating at the top of the stairs.

  “I’ll wait right by this sign.” He kissed her again, properly this time, a slow, lingering heat filling her middle to replace the nausea. “Now go, before they start without you.”

  She went down the stairs and packed herself into the crowd, hoping to be invisible in the sea of black. There were nearly a thousand graduates—it shouldn’t be that difficult, she reasoned. And after today, she would be free, one rite of passage into adulthood officially taken, and more to follow—including the job she’d started two days ago, and school, which wouldn’t start for another two weeks for the summer session.

  Finding a spot by the wall, she sat down and waited for the organization machine to take over. It would, eventually, and then this whole thing would be over. Until then, she was going to concentrate on not being sick. The waffles Zach had brought to her in bed had been thick and rich and beyond delicious, and the sex they’d had afterward had been even better, but now it weighed heavily in her middle.

  The truth was, she didn’t want Zach to leave, and it was only a few weeks away now, looming large. She couldn’t picture being on her own, couldn’t imagine life without him anymore. He thought she was afraid of Smooth and Gritty—Robert Barnes And Donald McMillan according to the police report the prosecutor had showed her during their meeting with him. And she was, a little—they were out on bail, after all, and the trial had been so far in the future, nearly a month after Zach was due home, in fact—but no one knew where she was now.

  She was more afraid of herself, of what she might do while Zach was gone. And she didn’t even want to think about that.

  “Hey, Lindsey.”

  Startled out of her thoughts, she looked up to see Brian standing there in his graduation cap and gown. Speak of the devil, she thought, quickly standing.

  “Hi.” She returned his greeting, and they stood there, lost in the awkwardness.

  He finally cleared his throat. “I just wanted to say I was sorry.”

  “Okay.” She nodded, wondering what he knew, how much he’d found out.

  “I talked to Ralph. Those guys…I heard they were arrested.”

  So he knew. “They raped me.”

  “So did I.” His voice was barely a whisper, his eyes on the floor. “I didn’t mean for it to be like that. I didn’t know…”

  She put her hand on his arm. “It was bad. I’m sorry, too.”

  “They’re making me testify.” He swallowed, still not looking at her. “They say they’re not going to charge me with anything, but they want me to go to court anyway.”

  She’d done her best to protect him and was relieved to hear it. “It got out of hand. For both of us.”

  He breathed a sigh. “I’ll say.”

  “Hey, they’re making us line up.” She pointed to the front of the breezeway, where their old chem teacher was directed them into two lines—boys on one side, girls on the other. A thousand students, and she ended up next to Brian, filing two-by-two into the pavilion where family and friends were waiting to cheer as they walked across the stage to accept their respective diplomas.

  He reached for and squeezed her hand just before they went out. “Happy graduation.”

  “You too.”

  She stepped out into the sunlight, already looking for Zach, and hoped, more than anything, that they’d both get some sort of happy ending after all.

  —

  “I just want you to think about it.” Zach dug into his pocket for his keys as Lindsey unzipped her black graduation gown—it was incredibly hot and itchy, and she’d barely made it home without stripping it off in the car.

  “I don’t need to think about it.” She slipped the gown off over the jeans and t-shirt she was wearing underneath.

  “I get that you’re not ready to talk to her…”

  Lindsey picked up the puddle of black material as Zach slid the key into the apartment lock, remembering the look on her mother’s face in the pavilion. She’d found them just as Lindsey met Zach under the ‘Graduates’ sign, coming forward with congratulations and apologies and explanations. Excuses, more like it, Lindsey thought bitterly.

  “She said she didn’t know,” Zach said, pushing the door open.

  Lindsey snorted. “Bullshit. If I had a daughter who was doing what I was, I’d have suspected something was wrong.”

  “I guess I can’t argue with you there.” He sighed.

  So she said she didn’t know, Lindsey thought, tossing her cap and gown on the sofa. Her mother had found her journals, she’d said, and she had kicked her stepfather to the curb almost immediately. A little too late, Lindsey snorted to herself, not believing it was going to last for a minute. He’d be back, she was sure. Her mother couldn’t possibly live on her own for too long.

  It was the thing she’d always hoped for, desperately wished for, and yet now that it had happened, it didn’t matter at all. She swallowed past the bitter irony of that thought as Zach put his arms around her from behind.

  “When you’re re
ady.” He nuzzled her hair out of the way to kiss her neck. “Maybe you could just talk to her?”

  She shrugged and, for his benefit, said, “I guess. Maybe.”

  “So are you ready for your gift?”

  She could feel him grinning already.

  “What do you have up your sleeve now?”

  But he didn’t have to tell her. Their voices had carried into the kitchen, and now a succession of short, plaintive yelps gave away his secret. Her eyes widened as she turned in his arms, her jaw dropping.

  “You didn’t!”

  He was definitely grinning. “I did.”

  She squealed and took off running, stopping short at the baby gate now slung across the kitchen door where a black Labrador puppy scrabbled on the linoleum, jumping up as they approached, a little black nose nudging Lindsey’s hand as she reached down to pet him.

  “How did you do this?” She leaned down to pick up the puppy, who lapped happily at her face as she lifted him—yep, it was definitely a “he”, she noted. There’d been no sign of a puppy when they left that morning.

  “I had Nate drop him off.” Zach scratched the wiggly black bundle of fur behind the ears, still grinning. Lindsey laughed, remembering how Nate had looked at her the first time she’d met him at the office just a few days ago, like he was keeping some sort of secret.

  “What’s his name?” she asked, giggling as the puppy squirmed in her arms, his pink tongue making the rounds of her face some more.

  “Argyle.”

  She looked up at him and smiled, shaking her head. “Will I ever find a man who pays more attention to me than you do?”

  “I doubt it, baby.” He wrapped them both up in his arms, dipping his head down to hers to share in an exuberant puppy tongue bath. “I seriously doubt it.”

  Chapter Ten

  If Lindsey had known how good puppies were at licking up tears and giving much-needed comfort, she would have found a way to get one years ago, she decided, nuzzling Argyle’s little belly with her cheek, and pulling the comforter up over both of them. The bed was too big now. She considered, for a moment, sleeping on the couch, but couldn’t bear to be away from Zach’s pillow—it still smelled like him.