Lightning Strikes

by Cass Sellars

  Becky laughed. “That little man with all the files. He’s in and out every day like clockwork. I held the door for him and stuck my breasts in his face.”

  “Becky, get out,” Parker yelled as her nerves finally allowed her voice to slip through. “You cannot be here.”

  “Well, of course I can, girl, I’m waiting for my honey. And I think we should spend some time getting to know each other.” Her deliberate, acrimonious tone disturbed Parker.

  Parker searched her grimacing face. Becky’s pale green eyes seemed blank as she pushed Parker in the chest with her fingertips, farther into her own living room. Clicking across the floor in her heeled pink boots, she stood towering over a bewildered Parker and shoved her down onto the couch.

  Becky growled. “When are you going to accept the fact that we are meant to be, Sydney and me?”

  Parker jerked out of her seat and tried to slide past Becky and toward the door.

  “No, no!” Becky warned, as she grabbed Parker’s arm and produced a six-inch blade anchored in a pink sequined handle from her oversized purse. She seemed to glow with her assumed power.

  Parker idly wondered if she had spent her day at BeDazzle class before embarking on a home invasion. She folded back down on the couch leaning away from the menacing blonde and her pink poking device.

  “So.” Becky perched on the coffee table directly in front of Parker and propped her chin dramatically on her hands. “What are we going to do to get you to leave my sweetheart alone, hmm?” She moved over to a side chair when she failed to receive an immediate reply and commenced checking her manicure.

  “Well,” Parker replied warily, “shouldn’t we let Sydney be here, you know, since it concerns her?” She hoped she could break through the crazy for just a moment with some logic or that by some miracle Sydney would show up.

  “Sydney doesn’t know how to get you to go away. She’s too polite for that,” Becky said.

  Parker thought quietly about distracting the unhinged woman who seemed to possess the IQ of a trout. In short order, she concluded that reason and logic were going to be lost on her. She was stunned at what was now happening in her own home.

  “I don’t think Syd’s coming back until late, Becky,” she offered. “She said something about going to the gym and maybe some stops after that.” Parker watched as Becky’s muddled eyes glazed over.

  “No way. She wouldn’t miss being with me tonight. How would you know, anyway? What did you tell her?”

  Parker searched for an answer to the nonsensical questions. “I’m just saying you have probably missed her tonight.”

  “You are an ugly liar!” She screamed as she drew the back of her hand across Parker’s cheek. The garish pink crystal ring she wore on her middle finger caught Parker’s skin, drawing blood from a deep gash just under her right eye.

  “See what you’ve done? Sydney will know you made me do that.” Becky seemed mildly shocked by her own actions. Parker dabbed her fingers to her cheek looking in vain for a way to blot the blood. Parker eventually gave up trying to bring Becky into the real world and simply watched quietly as she tapped around on her phone.

  The minutes ticked by. Parker searched her memory for where she had left her own phone. Perhaps she could warn Syd somehow and get her to stay away while sending her a message. She had watched for nearly an hour as Becky waffled between despondent, disconnected, and desperate.

  “Becky,” Parker began cautiously, “maybe I could get you some water or something.” Or arsenic, she thought. She prayed Becky wouldn’t ask for anything alcoholic potentially making the situation even worse.

  “Sure, hun. Thanks!” she replied as if they had just embarked on a friendly girls’ night in together.

  Parker walked slowly, not taking her eyes off the menace perched in her living room smoothing her clothes around her. She filled a glass with ice and jumped when Syd’s custom text tone signaled. Her phone was on the counter.

  Becky launched from the chair and raced to the kitchen, snatching the phone from Parker’s hand, but not before Parker caught Syd’s message: On my way baby, can’t wait to see you.

  Parker watched Becky’s face as fury, confusion, and contemplation seemed to cycle through her eyes like the news crawl at the bottom of the screen on CNN. Of course, in Becky’s case, the crawl might well have been over an episode of Sesame Street.

  “She’s trying to make me jealous.” Becky laughed maniacally as she arrived at an explanation she could accept. “My silly girl.” Her voice trailed off. “Write back!” she demanded and wheeled on Parker, thrusting the phone toward her. “Tell her you don’t want to see her anymore.”

  Parker stared at her.

  “Now,” Becky screamed wildly, barely two inches from Parker’s bleeding face.

  Parker’s hand shook as she lifted the phone. She could smell the sickly sweet perfume mixed with strong detergent wafting from her clearly delusional captor. Her stomach turned as she wondered why keeping Sydney away was suddenly what Becky Weaver wanted. Don’t come. Can’t see you anymore. Parker tilted the screen to Becky as she waited for her to read her draft text.

  Becky offered a satisfied nod and Parker hit send. Becky lifted the glass of water to her sparkly lips and Parker watched desperately as the message sent confirmation appeared.

  Sydney replied immediately: LOL, yeah, right. Just this morning you threatened to keep me as your love slave.

  Becky snatched the phone and hammered out the words, Leave me alone, dyke bitch!

  Becky clicked a satisfied pink nail across the send button and dropped the phone dramatically onto the counter.

  Grabbing Parker’s hair, she dragged her back to the couch and roughly threw her onto the cushions with unexpected strength. Parker started to shake uncontrollably as the gravity of the situation descended on her.

  Becky looked around the room with a puzzled expression. “Where is the TV?”

  “No TV in here,” Parker mumbled in reply, trying to control the trembling in her hands.

  “Huh?” She looked her way as if the terrified Parker had just asked her to solve a complicated math problem.

  Parker furiously considered that she was perhaps missing a fashion show for all of her personalities. Angry sarcasm would not help the situation but Parker couldn’t help it.

  As Becky sauntered back toward the kitchen, Parker caught the black Porsche through the window as it slowed at the street. Don’t turn in. Keep going, Parker implored her lover silently hoping Becky would not notice the car before Sydney noticed hers.

  “What are you looking at, bitch?” a derisive Becky commanded of Parker as she leaned over her from the back of the couch and turned the knife menacingly in her fingers. Parker noticed that she seemed to have less and less of a grasp on her sanity as the minutes progressed.

  “Nothing. Don’t you want to tell me the plan?” Parker hoped that keeping her talking would help.

  “No,” she snapped, standing quickly and resuming her post at the coffee table. She placed the knife beside her. Parker knew she couldn’t reach for it in time to get it away.

  “But if you and Syd are now together…”

  “We were never apart!” she screamed again.

  “I just mean we will be seeing more of each other so I thought we could try to be friends.” Parker felt like she had descended into a pit of madness manned by a hungry savage planning to eat her for supper.

  “Why, so you can make a play for my Sydney, again?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “I hardly think so. You will need to move.” She delivered the edict with finality.

  Parker was sweating, beginning to feel absolutely helpless while Becky looked increasingly fractured and vacant.

  Becky snatched the knife from the coffee table and gestured wildly at Parker.

  “I saw her at the bar, my Sydney. At the Pride. You know, with that redheaded slut?”

  Parker looked at her, confused.

  “She was trying to make me jealous then, to
o.” She gazed at Parker with a look of satisfied vengeance. “You know, she fucked her right in the bathroom. Everyone knew what they were doing in there. I mean after the way they were acting on the dance floor.”

  Parker’s stomach lurched at the thought of Sydney’s hands tracing lines on another body, her lips on another woman’s mouth. For the first time she felt harpooning physical pain, not on her cheek but roiling in her gut.

  “I don’t believe you,” Parker said, knowing she should just stay quiet. Knowing she was being taunted.

  “It’s true.” She roughly slashed the knife past an increasingly desperate Parker. Becky laughed when Parker recoiled farther into the sofa. “I saw it—she just picked her up, they started kissing and grinding on each other. And then Syd took her into the bathroom. We all know what happened next, don’t we?” Becky leaned in, clearly energized by Parker’s weakness and surprise.

  More aggressive now, an invigorated Becky leaned closer, almost touching Parker’s ear as she hissed, “You’re a stupid bitch. Did you really think she would be with someone like you? Sydney can have any woman she wants, and has. You’re not enough for her, not even close.”

  Parker felt tears pool and burn in her eyes, but she resolutely refused to let them fall. Every doubt, suspicion, and jealous thought rushed at her, pushing for purchase on her only recently healed psyche. She wouldn’t succumb to another destructive relationship.

  Becky mocked her captive as she watched her strength wane and her resolve crumble. “You had no idea, did you, plain girl? You really thought she just wanted you?”

  Parker stared at the floor as Becky continued the verbal assault, reminding Parker of a high school bully.

  Just past seven, her phone chimed on the table as Allen’s text chided her, Where are you? Has sex addled your brain? You’re never late. What gives?

  Becky read the message, too, and threw the phone to the floor, slamming her heel into it with a sickening crack and kicking it away. It spun in a now silent pirouette across the polished concrete surface.

  “How dare you,” she growled. “Did you sleep with her? Sydney is mine. You tried to take mine. Mine!”

  “I’m sorry, Becky. It won’t happen again,” Parker offered quietly, intent only on her self-preservation now. Involuntarily, she continued seeing a film reel showing a faceless redhead being pleasured by her Sydney. Logically, she knew it wasn’t true, it couldn’t be true.

  “You should be.” Becky let loose a frightening guttural scream as she grabbed the statue from the floor, rearing back to swing it at Parker’s ribs, hitting her leg instead with its base. Becky still gripped the heads of the stone women as they separated from the art piece. Parker curled against herself in shock, ripped back from the unpleasant visions invading her mind and propelled into an even more appalling reality.

  The statue that signaled a new life so long ago could now symbolize the end.

  *

  Sydney reread the text and called Parker’s phone for the third time only to hear it go directly to voice mail. She pulled quickly onto the street. Adrenaline coursed thickly through her tensing body, though she refused to let it consume and direct her mind. Her heart pounded with a sense of looming dread, and her intuition was rarely wrong. Trying to stem her panic, Sydney slowed the car past the warehouse lot, her copy of the restraining order sitting impotently in a side door pocket. Becky’s Jeep was parked in front of the warehouse.

  “Fuck,” Sydney exclaimed, as she snatched her cell phone from the console and found Mack Foster’s number. Syd delivered a hurried explanation of the circumstances and she launched the powerful car down the alley.

  Mack begged her to stand by for local patrol to respond. “Wait, Syd, I’m on my way. You could make this worse.”

  “I’m not going to just sit out here, Mack. I don’t know how long she has been there or how she got in. Parker could be…I can’t leave her alone in there.” She disconnected, throwing the phone onto the floorboard, forcing her mind to not complete the sentence or even the thought.

  She whipped the Porsche into a wide part of the alley and jerked the gearshift into park. Pushing herself out of the car and around the back of the building, she sprinted in a wide circle on the blind side of Parker’s unit, nearer to her own.

  She squinted through the glass as she pounded in her code and saw no one. She wedged an abandoned roll of newspaper into the hinge, preventing it from relocking. She knew Mack would send the cavalry and she didn’t want it to take any longer than necessary for them to reach Parker. Sliding past the front of Parker’s closed door and into her own unit, she briefly scanned her loft for signs of a disturbance and found nothing. She checked the gun in her waistband. A sudden scream jolted Sydney as muffled angry words escaped across the common hallway. Sydney ripped her sweatshirt from her arms and slid into a dress jacket from the coat hook near the door.

  Sydney took a deep breath in an attempt to quell the surging desire to break through the door and attack Becky Weaver. The adrenaline threatened again to eclipse her logical mind, consumed by the idea that her lover was in danger. She knew then that she would do anything for Parker. She would not allow her past poor decisions to hurt the woman who now owned her heart.

  Sydney charged into the hall before stopping herself, livid and helpless, at Parker’s door.

  “Becky? Honey?” She knocked lightly and tried to control her breathing. She grazed a palm over her forehead, clearing the sweat beading there.

  She knocked again. “Becky? It’s Sydney. I’m here to…take you to dinner if you want to go.”

  The latch disengaged as the door inched away from the frame. A green eye surrounded by heavy smeared black makeup peered through at her.

  “It is you! I told the plain girl you would come.” A satisfied Becky pushed the door farther, revealing an injured Parker straining against Becky’s knife-wielding arm looped around her neck.

  Sydney momentarily lost her breath at the sight that battered her soul. She strained against the urge to draw her gun and put a bullet straight through the psychopath’s head.

  Suddenly puzzled, Becky said, “But how did you know I was here, honey?”

  Apparently one out of every ten lucid thoughts was making it through, Sydney thought.

  “I saw your car, and I could smell your intoxicating perfume as soon as I came in, sugar.” Sydney tried not to let the insincere words betray the hatred she now felt for Becky.

  “Of course!” She danced in place, tapping her patent leather boots on the concrete, oblivious to Parker’s distress, possibly even to her presence in that instant.

  “I told you,” she taunted Parker, suddenly refocusing on her. Turning to Sydney, Becky pointed at Parker, ashen and bleeding. “First, tell her that you don’t want her. She doesn’t get it, honey.”

  Sydney wanted desperately to protect Parker from this insanity. It took everything she had to not meet Parker’s eyes and telegraph her feelings.

  “Why does it matter, Becky? Let’s just leave now.” She slid a glance quickly to Parker, hoping she knew that she was there only for her.

  Parker grimaced and watched the exchanges carefully. Sydney longed to touch her and ground them together again.

  “Sweetheart?” Becky offered a taut smile pulled over her clenched teeth. “You will tell her,” she demanded and pointed the blade closer to Parker’s flesh, “that you hate her and want her the hell out of our life.”

  Sydney took a cautious step toward Becky, intensely uncomfortable with the blade’s proximity to Parker. She watched the hand with the knife in her peripheral vision while she drew Becky’s focus toward her.

  “Oh, and I told her about how you were at the Pride fucking that redheaded whore. You know that this dumb bitch actually cried?” Becky pointed manically as she spat the words at a recoiling Parker.

  Sydney’s gut churned and a blinding anger consumed her. Cold terror washed down her spine as she saw Becky begin to stroke the knife over Parker’s bleeding cheek
. She watched Parker’s face, resigned and desperate. Sydney’s body pulsed with fury.

  Becky spun at Sydney, sliding the knife down to rest again at Parker’s neck. She said slowly, “Do it now. Say it or I will gladly cut her throat and get her out of our life for good. Tell her you don’t want her.” Becky now yelled frantically. “Tell her you love me! That you will be with me!”

  Sydney succumbed to the shadows of a protective fury. She would never utter those words about this unstable maniac and would not risk Parker being hurt anymore. Sydney narrowed her eyes and felt her body become rigid. Her glare, laser thin, drilled into Becky. Sydney’s speech was deliberate and dangerous, her jaw set. She put her hand out to Becky, willing it not to close around her throat. Instead she made it look like an impending caress.

  “Becky, you have to stop. We can’t be together if you hurt her.” Sydney stepped slowly toward Becky and Parker, intent on separating them, even if it meant using her body to do it.

  The room became energized with palpable desperation as Syd approached Becky, aware that Parker was watching her every move. Becky shifted her focus from Parker to Syd, her forearm muscles relaxing slightly as she anticipated an embrace from the woman she stubbornly desired. Parker abruptly raised her hands to Becky’s arm, pulling it up and away from her. Becky lunged the knife toward her withdrawing prisoner, catching the sharp tip angrily across Parker’s upper arm.

  Sydney’s vision tunneled as she watched a stain of blood spread over her lover’s skin. She swung a violent kick toward Becky’s solar plexus, hearing a rush of air escape Becky’s lungs when Syd’s heel made contact. That, and the shock that Sydney had become a traitor, drove Becky back across the room and into the wall. She dropped the knife as it skidded in a circular dance toward Parker. Parker instinctively swept an arm in order to send it careening into an opposite corner, far from Becky’s reach.

  A renewed wave of anger consumed Sydney; tears streamed down Parker’s face as she sat crouched and bleeding on the floor. Sydney pushed a kneeling Becky to the ground and drove a powerful fist into her face. Becky groaned as she fell hard into the concrete behind her, nearly unconscious. Sydney reached behind her and in one fluid motion, jerked her gun free, a bullet already waiting in the chamber. She pushed the stout muzzle against Becky’s forehead, her other hand encircling her neck, pinning her to the floor.