Crave

by Margaret McHeyzer

  She immediately flinched, and took a huge gulp of air and squeezed her eyes shut, waiting for his fist to strike her already abused skin.

  “No,” she whispered again. “You don’t know who he is.”

  “I won’t hurt you. Let me help you.” He managed to glide his warm fingers across her cheek, and she didn’t flinch this time.

  What is it about her? Why do I want to protect her?

  As his hand made contact with her face, she let out a small mewl, so tiny that only she felt it as it ripped through her bruised chest.

  Her eyes closed again, not in fear, but in an appreciative, contented way. With this one simple touch, this one act of selflessness shown to her by a man she’d only briefly spoken with, she knew that there was another way.

  “I can help you,” Jake said again, as he ran a gentle hand down her clothed arm.

  “No one can help me. I’ve made a deal with the devil, and now he owns me.”

  Momentarily she had forgotten. She forgot the abuse, the caustic words, the fists and allowed herself a moment of respite.

  But she knew that she would never get away from him. Not alive anyway.

  “Please, I need to leave,” she said, trying to break off communication with the cop.

  “I can hide you,” he said in a moment of sheer desperation.

  He didn’t want her to walk away, and he certainly didn’t want her to go back to him.

  “Please,” she begged. “Just let it be.”

  Jake stayed in his seat, not wanting to move. He wanted her, but not for some cheap affair. He knew she was too fragile for any type of relationship. He wanted to protect her, hold her, and treat her exactly like she should be treated, like a precious treasure.

  “Promise me you’ll come back here tomorrow,” he blurted. He just wanted to see her, make sure she was safe.

  “I can’t, tomorrow I have…” She averted her eyes. She was clutching at thin air, trying to find an excuse.

  “Tomorrow, or I’ll come to your home.”

  “NO!” she shouted, her voice way too loud.

  “Tomorrow.” He pushed for a commitment from her.

  Just then her cell rang, and she jumped back in her seat, knowing what the ringing phone meant.

  She got it out of her bag, and slid her finger across the screen, not even checking to see who the caller is.

  “Hi, baby,” she said as she stared into Jake’s intensely angry eyes. “I’m sorry, I just thought I’d sit here and have a coffee. I’ll leave right now.” She went quiet, listening to whatever that prick was saying to her. “Yes, I understand. Chicken breast not thigh, and you want the potatoes mashed, not fried.” She let out a deep breath as she continued to listen. “Five-thirty exactly, not a moment after. I’ll go get your suits right now.”

  The rookie cop refused to move until she gave him her word that she’ll be in the café tomorrow.

  “I love you too,” she said and waited for the prick to disconnect before she sighed deeply.

  “Promise me,” the cop said again.

  “Please move. I have to leave.” She was eager to go, and the cop understood why. She wouldn’t welcome another beating from him.

  “Tomorrow, I start at two p.m. Please meet me here at noon, and I’ll treat you to lunch. Please.”

  “I can’t. He has a tracker on my phone.”

  “Let the battery run down tonight and leave it at home.”

  “You don’t understand. I just can’t.”

  “Coffee at one then.”

  “I can’t, it’s too hard.” She looked away, regretful that she wasn’t able to accept the help of this generous man offering her a life preserver. “I can’t,” she said again. Tears pooled in her blue eyes, ready to streak her face any second.

  “Please.” He was beyond bewildered by his own immense desire to shield her and ensure she was protected.

  She darted worried eyes around the café and leaned toward the man. She didn’t even know his name. “One quick coffee and you’ll have to leave immediately.” Her voice shook, but he knew she would be there, even if it only lasted for a few moments.

  He moved out of her way, and clasped her hand in his, and refused initially to let her go. But he understood that she had to leave.

  She hurried out of the café without looking back.

  He stood staring at the frail, incredible woman as she rushed away.

  He knew what he had to do.

  And the plan had already begun to form in his mind.

  He was going to take her, and kill the monster who used his fists to talk.

  But first, he needed to call in a favor from a person he knew from his his younger days back on the streets, someone that owed him.

  It was time for Tyler to pay up for that problem that Jake had taken care of for him, in the old neighborhood. The incident that Tyler wasn’t yet aware his friend had cleaned up.

  Mr. Brody

  He sat in the same comfortable chair he always sat in when he was meeting a date. And although the dates never repeated, the women were all the same.

  They’d take one look at him and judge.

  He was incredibly tall, though he had a taut, athletic body. His hair was buzz-cut short and he had a terrible scar running the length of his face. That wasn’t the only reason why his dates were never repeated. He also had three fingers missing on his left hand and a prosthetic leg.

  When a date walked in the restaurant and sat down with him, she immediately assessed his appearance and decided he wasn’t worth her time.

  Oh, they stayed and ate the excellent dinner he provided for them. They even pretended to find him interesting and laughed at all the right times, though afterwards they never returned his calls or messages once the “date” was over.

  Mr. Brody knew they didn’t like his looks, and became more and more disheartened every time he went on one of these dates. Not because they didn’t like his looks, he’d long ago accepted that reality. But what saddened him was that they were all the same.

  He wasn’t affected by their looks. He really didn’t care how they dressed or what hair style they favored. He simply wanted each woman to be something other than what they were.

  “Are you waiting on a date, Mr. Brody?” Jessie asked as she put a glass of water down for him, interrupting his thoughts about the dates he had lined up.

  “Yeah,” he said, though it came out on a sigh.

  “Maybe this one will be different,” Jessie said, gifting him with a soft smile.

  “Who knows? After all this time, they all seem the same.” He dragged his eyes to the glass of water and took in a deep breath.

  “Maybe you’re looking in the wrong places,” she retorted, a bit too snippy for his liking.

  Mr. Brody looked at Jessie and thought maybe she was having a bad day, so he excused her small outburst.

  “Sorry,” she mumbled, embarrassed. “I’ll be back when your lady friend joins you.”

  Mr. Brody nodded once, and went back to his glass of water.

  He’d been in this very restaurant for every blind date he’d had since…since…since she left him.

  Jessie walked away, leaving Mr. Brody to silently brood, waiting for his date to arrive. He already knew it would be like every other date he’d had.

  In a few moments, a beautiful, leggy blonde approached him and asked if he was her date.

  Like the gentleman that he was, Mr. Brody stood and held his hand out to introduce himself to her. The leggy blonde took it, but her eyes went directly to his missing fingers and sucked in a deep breath as she gingerly shook his hand.

  Yep – another one bites the dust, he thought as her face fell and she snatched her hand back out of his.

  “Would you care for some wine?” he asked as he rounded the table to pull out her chair so she could sit.

  As he returned to his side of the table, her calculating blue eyes went straight to his obvious limp, and her mouth twisted in disgust.

  “Why are
you limping? Have you been injured?” she asked.

  “It’s a prosthetic leg,” he answered candidly.

  “Oh,” she said as she tucked a piece of loose hair behind her ear.

  Suddenly, remembering she was on a date (a first date – obviously) she straightened her shoulders and delicately rested her little bottom in the chair and waited for Mr. Brody to sit again.

  But he was disgusting, nothing short of revolting – heavily scarred, limping, with missing fingers. Yuck!

  The rest of the date didn’t go too well, but Mr. Brody already expected that. He could feel how the blonde retreated in herself and only answered his questions with single-word answers.

  Jessie gave Mr. Brody and his companion enough time to inspect the menu before she came over, becoming the most professional waitress she could be.

  Jessie didn’t like that Mr. Brody always looked so sad. She knew he’d suffered great losses and was just trying to find someone to make his life less lonely. He was considerably older than her, maybe about fifteen years.

  Jessie had worked in this restaurant, owned by her family, ever since she could remember. Now, a rather ordinary twenty-four year old, she worked here every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night instead of going out with her friends.

  Really, she didn’t have many friends. She preferred to bury her nose in a good book, or watch an extremely violent action movie on DVD. She wasn’t a drinker or a party animal; she was simply… well…ordinary.

  She wasn’t leggy, and she wasn’t blonde. As a matter of fact, she wore glasses because she was unable to see without them. Her hair was mousy brown and she certainly had hips and boobs. Hourglass, that’s how her figure could be described.

  Mr. Brody was nearing forty and he had faced great losses over the years, physically, mentally and emotionally.

  But through it all, he picked himself up and kept on going through life. He knew that she wouldn’t have wanted him to stop just because…well, just because she was no longer with him.

  The blonde excused herself with a fake, plastic smile and walked quickly to the bathroom, clutch in hand. Maybe she was going to make the “escape call” to a friend, or maybe she’d try to squeeze out the window. Mr. Brody chuckled to himself at the image of that plastic woman trying to hoist herself out the restroom’s small window.

  “Why do you do this to yourself, Mr. Brody?” Jessie asked gently.

  He simply shrugged his shoulders and twisted his water glass, avoiding her intense brown eyes.

  “She’s clearly not the person you want.” Jessie paused, took a quick breath and added, “But maybe she’s exactly the type you expect.”

  “Maybe I’m not the person she wants either,” he replied, almost in a self-deprecating way. “And I doubt that I’m what she expected.”

  “You have nothing to be ashamed of,” Jessie said, her voice small, warm and caring.

  Mr. Brody’s eyes snapped up to look at Jessie. Her face was reddening and she looked so shy.

  Was she hitting on him? Introverted little Jessie?

  Mr. Brody’s gaze wandered over her body. She was wearing plain clothes, just a crisp white shirt and black pants, the same as all the other waitresses in the place.

  “Well, I’m not exactly a handsome man,” he said in his deep, velvety voice.

  “You may not be a male model, but you’re certainly not horrific either,” she retorted, now injecting some confidence into her voice.

  Mr. Brody sat back in his chair and smiled. She’s certainly a firecracker, he thought.

  “Is that so?” he teased, smiling at her.

  “Yeah. You’re alright.” Jessie smiled at him.

  Mr. Brody cheekily allowed his eyes to roam once again over Jessie’s body.

  Just then, the blonde returned to the table, looking a good deal more relaxed than she was just moments earlier.

  She sat in her seat, adjusted her short dress and picked up the menu, beginning to peruse it once again.

  “Would you like another moment?’ Jessie asked, though Mr. Brody could tell her tone was slightly hostile.

  As if on cue, the leggy blonde’s phone rang.

  Right on time. Both Mr. Brody and Jessie thought simultaneously.

  The blonde made a show of looking down at the display on the phone she’d retrieved from her clutch and frowning. “Oh, I’m sorry, I have to take this.”

  Mr. Brody looked at Jessie, and Jessie returned his gaze trying to refrain from smiling. Instead, they both burst into laughter, knowing exactly what was about to be said.

  The blonde looked at them both, knowing she’d been caught in her little ruse. Her embarrassment showed itself as annoyance.

  “I’m sorry, but you’re most certainly not at all the sort of person I want.” This was the first time she had been honest since she’d met Mr. Brody.

  “That’s fine,” he said.

  The leggy blonde got up and left, Mr. Brody and Jessie watching her fine ass walk out of the restaurant.

  “So Jessie, would you care to have dinner with me?”

  “Are you for real?” Jessie folded her arms across her chest and cocked one hip, frowning. “She shoots you down and I’m supposed to stand in as your ‘just in case’ girl? That’s not going to happen. If you want to ask me out on a date, then do so, but don’t you dare think I’ll be a last-minute substitute because of your poor choice for a date. I’m not one of them.” She emphasized the word ‘them’ with a sarcastic tone.

  Whoa – hello fireball! Jessie’s reaction made Mr. Brody seriously hard. She had ripped him a new one right there and then, and he loved it.

  Maybe, just maybe, she might be up for the other activities he loved to partake in.

  Hmmm, I wonder?! Mr. Brody thought to himself.

  “I’m sorry, Jessie.”

  “Good. You should be.” Jessie stood with her hand on her hip, towering over an amused Mr. Brody.

  “Tomorrow night, I’d like to take you to dinner.”

  Jessie looked hard at Mr. Brody. She bit on her bottom lip, thinking about his offer.

  “That all depends,” she said as he lifted his glass of water to take a sip.

  “On what?” he said, just before his lips met the tumbler.

  Jessie leaned right into Mr. Brody, her mouth ghosting past the shell of his ear, her warm breath caressing the sensitive skin of his neck.

  “Do we get to kill the blonde?” she whispered.

  Mr. Brody’s heart stopped. The blood in his veins turned icy as his movements ceased completely.

  “What did you say?” he asked breathlessly, stunned almost speechless.

  “I know what you do. I know who you are,” Jessie murmured into his ear.

  A long, intimate moment passed between the two. Jessie’s hand now toyed with back of Mr. Brody’s hairline, softly fondling the cool, yet clammy skin.

  How could Mr. Brody not have known that Jessie was a stalker? A woman who followed him and watched what he did.

  The women he invited to these dinners were all carefully chosen. They were all there for a reason.

  They were nothing more than monsters that abused their children, physically, mentally, or sexually. He watched them, learned their behaviors, befriended them online, and lured them out on a fake date to see if they were truly as horrible as his research had shown him.

  His wife, who had passed away in a dreadful accident (which left him disfigured), had come up with the idea when they couldn’t conceive children of their own. She told her husband, a Mafia hit man, that she was sick and tired of women who had children and abused them. She said those women scarred their children to the point that they grew up not fitting into society. She blamed their later crimes on the horrible abuse they’d suffered at the hands of their mothers and on growing up in destructive homes.

  Mr. Brody’s mind worked in mysterious and complicated ways. He took his years of training, and decided that it was time that someone stepped up and did something, seeing as the law did
n’t usually do much to punish the women that his wife was talking about.

  Together, they refined their goals to just the elite – the women that got away with it because they had an infinite amount of money, giving them access to the best attorneys and sometimes, making secret, under-the-table bribes possible.

  Yes, Mr. Brody was a killer. He made those women suffer, and now he was excited because he had found himself a new partner.

  A partner in killing…and a partner in life.

  He was sure his late wife would approve.

  The Good Doctor

  “You’re fucking useless.”

  Another night of drinking, but tonight it had started the moment the doctor came home. The moment the good doctor walked through the door, the verbal abuse started.

  “I’ve been gone for ten hours and you’ve done fucking nothing around here,” Alex snarled.

  Based on the early appearance of alcohol this evening, Rory knew what was going to happen, and could guess what was going to be said.

  And Rory knew full well what it meant for their evening.

  Shut up, Rory thought. Don’t say anything. Maybe a drink will improve the foul mood.

  But Rory knew better, and understood that when Alex came home like this, the insults would be followed quickly by a push, a shove, then (if it got really bad) a fist.

  But since little Ari was born, Rory did everything possible just to keep the peace. The abuse had started virtually the minute baby Ari arrived on this earth.

  Blessed with a beautiful little brown-eyed girl, the good doctor felt resentment toward Rory, and on some days it seemed Alex felt total, utter hate for the entire world.

  The target of that hate would vary, although Alex had never raised an angry hand toward little Ari. It was always Rory that suffered the abuse.

  In fact, Alex had become so spiteful, so arrogant, and so mean, that Rory was even required to use the professional address of “Doctor”, even in their home.

  The abuse first began as small, short, cruel remarks...“You look horrible. Do something to improve your appearance. I can’t be seen in public with you looking like that.” A hand would wave from head to toe and the look of sheer disgust would be just as clear as the words that had been spoken.