by April Lust
Charlie smirked. “Home,” he said. “Where you belong.” He glanced over at me. “I’m sure you’re pretty fuckin’ tired by now, aren’t you?”
I nodded, though I wasn’t sure what he meant. He sped up as we passed through the main part of town, gliding past the stores at an alarming and fast pace. My mouth was dry – I couldn’t wait to get home and drink the whole bottle of juice that I had waiting for me in the fridge. Ever since I’d found out about the baby, I hadn’t had many cravings. In fact, thinking about food called to mind that incident at Kabuki. But I’d been craving sugary juice, and that was all I’d bought last night when I’d gone to the store. I could practically see it in the fridge now: half-frozen, dripping condensation, a beautiful deep purple-red color.
“Yeah,” I said finally. “I’m exhausted.”
Charlie didn’t reply. He was staring straight ahead at the road, his lips twisted into an odd expression. I couldn’t see his eyes because of the sunglasses, and suddenly I began to wish he’d taken them off. There was always something unnerving about talking to Jack when he was wearing shades, and suddenly I felt the same feeling echoing back within me, like it had sprung up from nowhere.
“I bet you are,” Charlie repeated. He slammed on the brakes just in time to stop for a red light, then sighed as the cars in front of us began to cross back and forth.
My heart started to beat faster and faster in my chest. “So, um, what do you do?” I asked. “I work for a law firm,” I added. “I haven’t been there long – only a couple of weeks – but everyone’s really nice. I work for Stephens & Coolidge, Attorneys at Law. You’ve probably seen their office, it’s downtown. Small, but really nice—”
“Shut up, Nicolette,” Charlie said. The light turned green and we sped through the intersection. I felt the car bounce over a bump in the road and a faint feeling of nausea spread through my limbs as a result. I began to hope and pray I wouldn’t be sick in Charlie’s car.
“Okay,” I said meekly. “I’m sorry.” I shifted around on the leather seat. “And you know, I’m really sorry about last week,” I said. “I shouldn’t have thrown you out, but things came down to that and I’m just really sorry about it. I don’t have a lot of experience with guys, and I was hoping you’d understand even though I didn’t do a really good job of explaining my—”
“Shut up, Nicolette,” Charlie growled. He reached forward and pressed the radio button, then turned it up to an ear-shattering volume. I cringed and covered my ears as loud, abrasive classic rock filled the car.
When I looked at Charlie, I felt more confused than ever. What is going on with you? I thought as I shifted in the seat again and leaned against the window. What the hell is your problem? You seemed happy enough to pick me up in the first place!
That was when I noticed we were pulling on the highway. West. Towards California.
Reaching forward, I cut the radio off. “What the fuck is going on?” I asked in a shaky voice. “Where are you taking me?”
Charlie smiled grimly. “I told you,” he said. “I’m taking you home.” He turned towards me and looked at me over the tops of his sunglasses. “Don’t you want to go home, Nicolette? You’ve been gone for so long.” He shook his head and clucked his teeth. “Your boyfriend really misses you.”
Suddenly, it hit me. It hit me harder than a punch to the gut ever cold. I felt like someone had dumped a bucket of ice water over my head, like someone had pushed me over the edge of the Grand Canyon and I was falling down, down, down without a parachute.
“You…” I trailed off, my voice shaking. “You! You were working for him all along!” The fear in my voice was quickly replaced by anger as Charlie nodded his head in a quick affirmation of the terrible words I’d just spoken. “How could you do that to me?” I shrieked, reaching over and slapping Charlie’s face hard with my open palm. “How could you do that?”
Charlie shook his head. “It’s my fuckin’ job, lady,” he replied. “I don’t give a good god damn why you ran off, but you’re goin’ home now, or it’s my neck that’s on the line.” He pulled the car off onto the shoulder of the road and turned to face me. “And if you ever, ever hit me again...” he trailed off. “You’ll make the journey home tied up in the trunk, you got that?” He glanced down towards my belly. “And I don’t think little Jack Junior in there would like that too much.”
I felt a cold spike of fear slide down my throat. My life was officially over.
Chapter 12
Nicolette
As Charlie merged onto the highway back to Hell, I couldn’t stop the knot from expanding in my stomach. For a moment, it was almost too painful to breathe. The past came rushing back to me like a punch in the gut. No, actually, it wasn’t like a punch. It was like being pushed off the deck of the Titanic into icy, black water. It was like drowning and feeling like I was over my head. Everything hurt. Breathing hurt.
I knew I had to make Charlie see the truth.
“Charlie,” I whimpered. “Please. Please listen to me.” I glanced at him – he was driving with his lips pressed together in a tight line. “Please,” I begged. “Please!”
“Shut up, Nicolette,” Charlie growled. “I don’t want to hear it! I don’t care! Jack’s my boss, you gotta understand that. I do what he tells me to do. That’s how this shit goes!” He pounded the wheel with his fist and a shock of real fear went through my body. If I couldn’t make him understand, if I couldn’t make him see the truth…I had no idea how I was going to get out of this predicament.
My heart was beating as fast as a rabbit’s as we rounded a curve on the highway. The car let out an angry hiss and Charlie cursed, smacking the dashboard with his fist.
“Charlie, he’s going to hurt me. And he’s going to hurt the baby,” I said softly. “He’s a monster. You don’t know him at all.”
For a moment, Charlie was silent. Then he gazed at me for a long time before turning his attention back to the road. “I don’t care,” he said finally. “I can’t care, Nicolette. I had no one – no family, no one – for a long fuckin’ time. And Jack’s the only guy who’s ever taken me seriously. Jack gave me a chance when no one else would.”
“Charlie,” I begged. “I’ll give you a chance! Please! Just let me go, please! I won’t tell anyone!”
Charlie gripped the wheel so tightly that his knuckles turned white. “Shut up, Nicolette,” he muttered. “Shut up. Just shut the fuck up!”
Tears came to my eyes and I looked down at my hands in my lap. They were shaking like leaves. “No,” I said. My voice sounded calmer than I felt. “No,” I repeated. “I want to tell you a story, okay? And if you’re still hell-bent on dragging me back to Carlsbad after that, fine.” I was bluffing – I had absolutely no intention of letting Charlie bring me back there. But I knew I had to try something.
Charlie swallowed. I watched his Adam’s apple bob from the corner of my eye. “Fine,” he said. “You got ten minutes. You better make ‘em fuckin’ good ones.”
I licked my lips. “A few years ago, Jack got into blow for a while. You remember that?” I cringed at the mere thought of that time – waking up and finding Jack strung out in the living room, twitching, his nostrils coated in a white so bright it looked like flour.
“Yeah,” Charlie barked. “I remember. What’s the big fuckin’ deal?”
“He used to go on benders,” I said slowly. “He’d get enough blow for two, maybe three days, and hole up with a bunch of porn and weed and enough shit to get him through the weekend.” I swallowed. “And one of those times, I was supposed to go away, I can’t remember why.” I did remember why. I’d gotten a call from the hospital where I’d gone after my last check-up. I had some kind of benign cyst on my ovary, and I was supposed to have surgery.
“And?”
“And I didn’t go away,” I said simply. “I was…well, it doesn’t matter now.” I paused, wiping the tears that came to my eyes. The cyst had burst before I’d gotten to the hospital – there was nothi
ng they could have done. They advised me to stay home and “get my boyfriend to take care of me” for a few days. Oh, if only those idiots had known.
“Hurry the fuck up,” Charlie growled. “This ain’t a two-way conversation, Nicolette. You gotta know it’s nothin’ personal. I’m doing my job.”
“And I’m trying to talk you out of it,” I rambled. “Because Jack had made plans to party the whole time I was supposed to be gone. And when I got home, he was so mad at me that he told me he wasn’t going to let me ruin his fun.” I wrapped my arms around myself and leaned back into the car seat. “I went into the bedroom and closed the door and lay down. It was fine for a while. Jack was listening to music, real loudly, but at least he was leaving me alone.” As I talked, my stomach began to churn. I hadn’t thought about this incident for a long time – what felt like months. And thinking of it again was enough to make me start quivering with fear at the knowledge that within a day, I’d be this man’s possession again. Not this man, I thought. This monster.
“And what happened?” Charlie shifted in the seat. He reached forward and turned the radio down to a low volume. After punching the cigarette lighter into the dashboard, he pulled a smoke out of his pocket and let it dangle from his lower lip. I swallowed hard.
“He left me alone for about two hours,” I said. “I was curled up in bed, just starting to drift off to sleep. And then he burst through the door…” I trailed off. “He was so high that he looked manic. His hair was standing up on end, and his eyes were bloodshot and his nose was crusted with blow. And before I could stop him…” I trailed off, closing my eyes and letting my head rest against the window. “He dragged me out to the living room and raped me. More than once. It went on for hours. The second I tried fighting him, he punched me in the stomach until I passed out. When I woke up, I was tied to the couch.”
I thought I saw Charlie’s eyebrows shoot up from behind his mirrored sunglasses but I couldn’t be sure.
When he didn’t say anything, I continued, “That went on for three days. Three. Days. I couldn’t even tell how much time had gone past. The only way I knew was when it was over, I had a voicemail on my phone from work, demanding to know why I hadn’t showed in three days.”
Charlie cleared his throat. “But he doesn’t do blow anymore,” he said. His voice was shaking but the car was still pushing forward at seventy miles per hour. “Those days are over, and they have been for a long time. The Gods don’t deal with that shit anymore.”
“But it still happened,” I said softly. “And he never apologized. Not a single fucking time. I was so black and blue that I couldn’t go outside for weeks, Charlie. I had to quit my job.” I wiped another frantic tear away from my eye. “Do you know what that feels like? Do you know how desperate I felt?”
Charlie didn’t reply. He pressed the gas pedal even harder and the car shot forward. A rattling noise started from under the hood and a burst of excitement shot through me.
“That doesn’t sound good,” I commented. “You need to pull over and check it out?”
Charlie glared at me. “You’re done talking,” he snapped. “Shut up.”
For the next five minutes, we drove on in. Charlie kept cursing under his breath and smacking the dash with his fist. That didn’t do anything to stop the noise – it kept rumbling from under the hood like a demon wrapped around the engine.
Finally, he pulled over to the shoulder.
“Don’t try anything,” Charlie warned. He yanked the keys out of the ignition and my heart sank as he dropped the keys in his pocket. He climbed out of the car, locked it from the outside, and then busied himself under the hood. There was a foul odor and white smoke billowed out into the air.
I slid down in the seat and rested my hands over my belly. My baby bump was small, but noticeable, and suddenly I was filled with the most acute sense of panic and dread I’d ever felt. The landscape was already starting to change – we were past the Kip Mountains and I could tell that soon, we’d be seeing the flat, dry landscape of California.
I shuddered as I remembered how I’d first felt when we’d moved to Carlsbad. Sure, some of the abuse had already started. But deep down, I was proud that we’d have a chance to start our lives together. I thought it was going to be a good thing, I thought it was going to be a chance for us to build something perfect together. Well, not perfect. I wished I could go back in time and strangle myself, do anything to keep myself from making that fateful decision to go with Jack, to abandon my parents, to completely forget about any shred of self-respect I could have had.
Without Charlie’s stern presence beside me, I couldn’t keep from breaking down into sobs. I wrapped my arms around my body and clutched myself tightly. The tears were falling faster than my hopes of being able to wriggle out of this situation, and my mind was spinning.
It was my fault. I knew it was my fault. I glanced down at my stomach, where I knew in a few months’ time I’d be as round as a ball. I’m sorry, baby, I thought as a hot tear slipped down my cheek. I love you, and I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you from the monster.
It might have seemed odd, that I was already so in love with my baby when I hated the father more than anyone else on earth. But I didn’t think of it like that – I knew that deep down, my unborn child was going to have their own personality. And I thought that as long as I could keep them away from Jack, nothing too horrible would happen. I mean, sure, they might have a tendency for the bad behavior in life. But I’d come so close to that perfect, sweet little vision of single motherhood. And while most people wouldn’t have called that glamorous, it was exactly what I wanted.
I wondered, deep down, if the idea had appealed to me so much because it seemed like a way I could atone for my past mistakes. Sure, I’d fucked up my relationship with my parents beyond repair. And obviously few guys would want me after I’d given birth to someone else’s child. But that no longer mattered. I would miss having sex, but I wanted so desperately to devote myself to being the perfect mother, to raising a child who would love me unconditionally.
And now that was never going to happen. I wondered what Jack was going to say when he saw me for the first time in weeks. I wondered if he was going to hit me immediately, in front of Charlie, or wait until we were alone. In the early stages of our relationship, he’d always waited. But now, I wasn’t so sure he’d do me that courtesy. He was going to be so, so angry.
I shuddered with fear just as Charlie slammed the hood shut and unlocked the car. As he slid into the driver’s seat, he didn’t even look at me. The taste of metal seeped onto my tongue and I shivered.
He doesn’t care about me, I realized. I’m just cargo to him. I’m not even a real person. I could be a sack of fucking potatoes for all he cares.
“Overheated,” Charlie said. He wiped his hands on his jeans. “We’re gonna have to sit here for a little while.”
I swallowed hard.
“Well?” Charlie asked “You don’t have anything to say about that, Chatty Cathy?”
I shook my head, letting my hair fall down over my eyes. “No,” I muttered. “I don’t care. But you might as well call Jack and tell him we’re going to be late.”
Charlie snorted. “He’s already riding my ass,” he replied as he pulled a lighter out of his pocket and lit another cigarette.
“Can you roll down the window?” I asked quietly. “I don’t want…I don’t want my baby exposed to that.”
“Shit,” Charlie muttered. He tried to start the car but the engine wouldn’t turn. Eventually, he opened the door. “If you try anything,” he warned. “I’ll make sure we get back to California before nightfall.”
My stomach churned but the fresh air blowing through the car was a relief. I shifted in the seat, already tired of sitting in the car.
“So,” Charlie said. He turned towards me, one hand gripping the handle on the door. “You were really gonna get rid of that thing?” He gestured towards my stomach.
“I couldn’t,” I
replied. I swallowed hard. I didn’t want to make that distinction for him. Of course, I didn’t really believe in abortion. But the timing had taken the choice out of my hands completely. There was nothing left that I could have done.
“You gonna keep it?”
I glared at him. “I don’t feel like talking about this,” I said. I sighed. “I was pregnant once before, you know. Right after I moved to Carlsbad with Jack.”
“What happened?”
“I lost the baby.”
Charlie’s eyes widened but he didn’t say anything. “Right,” he said. “I’m gonna try the car again.” He threw his cigarette butt out of the window and pumped the key into the ignition. Miraculously, the car roared to life. I rolled down my window as we cruised away from the shoulder, merging with traffic.
The sun was starting to get low in the sky and I tried not to panic for the hundredth time as I did the math in my head. Durango was a twelve-hour drive from Carlsbad. I didn’t know how long we’d been in the car. Charlie had taken my bag and my phone, and the clock on the dashboard was permanently stuck at 5:45. There was no way of knowing just how much time I had left.
