Stranger

by Robin Lovett

  “You heard me. I want her.” I could say more. How I want revenge, how I want to use her to get to him. But my end goal, the money, stops me.

  He pokes me in the chest. “You hurt her and I’ll have the limbs ripped from your body.”

  “Maybe if you talked to her, you’d know I would never hurt her.” Though why I gave that away I don’t know.

  “Leave. Now.”

  “No.”

  “You’ve conned her somehow. I’m going to prove it.”

  “Believe what you want. I’m not leaving.” Until I get the money, until she believes me, until my need for revenge is satisfied. Though I wonder if it ever can be.

  “I’ll never give you the money.”

  “Legally, you have no choice.”

  “I’ll find a way. I’ll unearth every dirty skeleton in your closet, then she’ll throw you out.”

  Not likely. But I have no desire to give him more ammo. I want him gone.

  He waits for my comeback, but when I don’t give it, he gets in his car and drives away.

  I can’t sleep on the beach. If Blake comes back, I have to be sleeping under the same roof as my “wife.” I’ll spend the night in her extra bedroom again.

  And for some reason I don’t understand, I have no desire to leave her alone.

  * * *

  Home visits to patients are my least favorite thing. But diagnosing a problem that’s related to daily habits sometimes necessitates a visit, and anyway it’s safer for me to come to them than for a mother and a newborn to come back to the hospital and risk infection.

  Plus, I need a distraction from my flashbacks of being sprawled on my dining room table last night. I wonder what would’ve happened if he hadn’t stopped.

  The front door opens on a frazzled woman, the same one who had the bruises on her neck when I taught her to breast feed in the hospital. She looks like she hasn’t showered in days. “Thank God, you’re here.” Her eyes are dimmer than at the hospital, which is normal for a new mother, but what isn’t normal is the panicked movement of her hands. “Please come in.”

  “How are you, Mrs. Toolen?” I step past her inside and she closes the door.

  “Call me Nancy, please.” The baby in the carrier by the couch whimpers and begins to cry. “Oh dear. She was quiet for a couple of minutes.” She rushes to the child and picks her up to rest on her shoulder. “No more crying. Not while the nice nurse is here.”

  “She’s been really fussy?”

  She rolls her eyes. “Lord, yes. She’s driving my husband insane. I’m not sure how much longer he can take it.”

  “But how are you doing?” I urge her to sit on the couch.

  “I’m okay.” She sags against the seat like she can barely hold herself up.

  “I’m sure we can make the feeding troubles a little easier, at least.”

  She adjusts the baby and her shirt rides up on one shoulder. There’s a fist-sized bruise on her arm. It’s so purple, I gasp.

  She says, too quickly, “I bumped into a door jamb.”

  I remember the finger-sized bruises on her neck from the hospital. Those are gone. She’s gushing about her breastfeeding troubles.

  I go through the motions, the diagnostic list of things that make breastfeeding easier. I give her my card at the hospital to call if she needs more help.

  But as she re-buttons her shirt and covers her bruise, I pull out my other card. “This has my home number on it. If you need anything, help for whatever reason, please don’t hesitate to call.”

  She handles it delicately, like it’s precious. “Thank you.”

  “It’s lonely being a new mom.” Isolating, even scary. “Do you have other friends with babies?”

  Her lip quivers, and she stares at the child. “We moved here a few months ago. My mom and friends are all back in Ohio.”

  I pat her hand. “Call me if you need me. I’ll follow up with you in a few days.” To check on both you and the baby.

  She sighs. “Thank you.”

  Back in my car, my phone beeps. Three text messages, two from Amisha, one from Layla. I text them back about solidifying plans for this weekend.

  I’m not ready to go home, so I stop at the mall. Not knowing what to buy, I end up in the men’s department. If Logan is going to meet my friends this weekend, he needs to have some new clothes. The clerk helps me decide what size he most likely is. I buy jeans and button-downs. I pick up a couple pairs of shoes in different sizes.

  Why I feel the need to do something nice for the man who is remaking everything I know about myself, I don’t know.

  He won’t like that I bought him something.

  I drive home, blasting music that’s a mix of heartache and damn-I’m-fucked-up. I have no reason to be. I had a perfectly normal, reasonable childhood, even if most of it was spent at boarding school.

  I have a comfortable life. My father died, yes, but I have nothing else to complain about. Except for the whole extortion for my trust fund thing.

  I realize there’s a warning light flashing on my dashboard, and who knows how long it’s been going off. I ignore it until it starts dinging. My engine sputters. I’m on the highway, and it’s dark. The next exit is more than a mile away.

  My gas pedal quits working. I pull over, my car coasts to a halt, and I realize my gas tank is empty.

  I can’t remember the last time I filled it.

  It’s a hybrid. It doesn’t need it very often.

  Obviously, it needed it now.

  Embarrassing. Anyone I call for help is going to ridicule me for being a ditz. My brother will for sure.

  I sigh and grab my phone to call him but . . .

  I’m married. Logan should be my first call. If I call Blake, he’ll know my relationship with Logan is fake. Same thing with my friends. If I call them instead of Logan, they’ll know the marriage is a sham.

  I don’t know Logan’s cell number. Or if he even has a cell.

  The last two days I’ve come home to him in my living room. If he’s home now, maybe he’ll pick up the landline.

  Though I doubt it. Even if he answers, he’ll call me a spoiled rich girl and tell me I deserve it.

  I could call a tow truck. But a strange man I don’t know in the middle of the night . . .

  I’ll pick the dangerous man I know first.

  It rings and rings and rings. He doesn’t pick up. It goes to voicemail.

  “Logan? Are you there?” My voice sounds so pathetic, I can’t stand to hear more of it. I hang up.

  What a mess. I married a man I can’t call for help. I can’t call my friends because I married him. I can’t keep my head enough to remember to fill my gas tank because the man I married has stolen my brain.

  My phone rings.

  “Hello?”

  “Why’d you call?” Annoyance drips from his tone, but it’s threaded with something else, something that makes my heart surge. The impatience, the demand—it makes me afraid of him in the most blissful way.

  I stutter first. “I ran out of gas.”

  There’s silence. I wait for him to make fun of me, insult me, refuse to help me. But he surprises me. “Where are you?”

  I tell him the freeway and mile marker.

  He doesn’t reply. He hangs up.

  Leaving me stranded in the dark wondering if he’s coming. I want him to come. Not just to help me.

  There’s no reason why I should be desperate for a man who will destroy me if I let him. But I burn from my scalp to my toes. My fantasy and nightmare are one and the same: begging him to do what he did to me yesterday again, and more.

  No, my real worst nightmare: me begging, him refusing.

  It’s not good. I shouldn’t want him. His goal in life is to wreck mine. Though so far all he’s done is torture me physically. And marry me.

  I don’t want to be the things I’ve always been: dutiful, safe, perfect. Living the straight and narrow life with my friends, my job. My father is gone. I don’t have to do that an
ymore to please him.

  The perfect is suffocating me.

  But the danger is worse. This craving I have for him is unhealthy. It’s changing pieces of me in a bad way, making me want things, making me need things. Dear God, please let him come soon so I can suffer with him instead of alone.

  For an answer, a pair of headlights pull in behind me.

  I move to get out of the car, but he’s already at my passenger-side window. He cracks the door open. “Slide out this side, away from the traffic.”

  “That was fast.”

  “Get out.”

  “Can’t you just fill up my gas tank?”

  He glares. “I’m not leaving you stranded alone while I buy gas. Come on.”

  I do as he says, and he walks behind me to his truck. Inside the cab it’s dark, no interior lights except his dashboard. The glow around his sharp features casts his expression in a sinister light.

  He says nothing, starts his truck, pulls into traffic. It occurs to me that the last time I saw him, he was on top of me with his hands under my clothes. It also occurs to me that the last time we were in this truck, he was on top of me as well.

  He might do it again.

  I’m crazed.

  He exits the freeway, pulls into a gas station. It starts to rain, big fat drops on his windshield. I groan. “How can it be raining? It never rains.”

  He ignores me and gets out of the truck. I take my first deep breath since he picked me up. Breathing around him is not an easy thing.

  I jump out of the truck too.

  “What are you doing?” His brows are heavy over his eyes in the street light, rain spattering over his face and shirt.

  “Buying gas.” I dash for the interior and the cash register.

  “Do you know what you’re buying?” He rushes after me.

  The door dings inside the convenience store. I fling off the rain and roll my eyes at him. “A can of gas.”

  It turns out I don’t know what I’m buying. He tells them what size can and how much gas I want, but I’m the one who pulls out the wallet to pay for it.

  He fills the can with gas at the pump while I duck through the rain into his truck. The driver-side door opens and he gets behind the wheel. I shiver with cold, my skin goose-bumped from the rain.

  He starts the truck and turns the heat up. He noticed I’m cold.

  “Why are you being so nice to me?” I ask.

  “Am I?”

  “Why haven’t you made fun of me for running out of gas?”

  He gives me side-eye. “Making fun isn’t my thing.”

  “Why’d you come out?”

  He drives the truck onto the highway. “Why’d you call me?”

  “Because my brother would know for sure this was a scam if I called him and not you.”

  It’s raining harder. By the time he reaches my car, it’s coming down in buckets. “We’ll have to wait till it slows. Otherwise we’ll fill your gas tank with water.”

  “Right.” I have to shout, the rain pounding on the truck is so loud.

  The windows start to fog from our breathing, the outside world growing dimmer. Him and me trapped in this too-small space, the heat in the truck growing warmer. My goose bumps are gone. He gives off heat so well that if the lights were on, I’m certain I’d see steam.

  “Thanks.”

  “What?”

  I shout over the rain. “I said, thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Our silence is awkward, leaving my mind too much space to fill. It would be so easy for him to turn and kiss me, to put his hands all over me and . . . “It’s too bad we’re not at my condo.”

  “Why?”

  “Watching rain pour down on the ocean is pretty. It rarely rains. I’d like to see it.”

  “It’s too dark. We wouldn’t see it.”

  “I guess.” The silence stretches. I think for a moment the rain might let up, and he leans forward too. But then it comes down harder.

  He moves restlessly. “You like the ocean?”

  “Love it. It’s like the wide open endless space I’ve never had in my life. I come home from work and no matter what’s going on in my day, there it is, water as far as I can see. Unchanging. Vast and limitless.”

  He snorts. “Don’t get much of that in Nashville.”

  “You grew up there?”

  “So did you.”

  “I haven’t lived there really since I was ten. Have you been to the ocean before?”

  “Nope.”

  I’m forced back in my seat. He has to be almost twenty-five and he’s never seen the ocean till now. I can’t fathom it. “I saw the ocean—”

  “Every year going to South Carolina to visit your aunt.”

  My jaw drops. “That’s creepy.”

  “I thought I was worse than creepy. ‘Evil monster’ was what you said.”

  “Only when you’re . . .”

  “When I’m what?”

  Trying to put lies down my throat. Or worse, your tongue. “Nothing.”

  Chapter Twelve

  I don’t know why I’m sitting in this truck, listening to her, waiting to hear what she says. I don’t know why I drove out here in the first place. It was more a reflex—if a woman calls for help, it doesn’t matter who it is, you go help. That’s the rule.

  But with her, my reaction could have been different. I could’ve told her to call someone else.

  “Don’t get any ideas.”

  “About what?”

  “Me being nice.”

  “You’re not.”

  “Not what?”

  She slouches against her door. “You forced me to marry you so I’d give you money. You’re not nice.”

  “Good.” I take a deep breath. Or try to, but it comes out ragged. This car, her and me, closed in—the windows have fogged over, blocking the outside. The walls seem to close in, the world shrinking, like she is the only thing in it . . . and the only thing I want in it.

  I have to get out of this car. Or use it to my advantage, another step in my plan. “You’re not worth being nice to.”

  “Excuse me?”

  I lean toward her. “Your denial is a serious flaw.”

  “How serious?”

  I crowd her and her breathing quickens. I can’t see her face in the dark, but I can hear the air being sucked into her lungs. She doesn’t pull away. She could so easily refuse me, and yet she never does.

  I grip her thigh and whisper in her ear. “As in you’ll live to regret it. The longer you resist the truth, the longer you’ll suffer.” I inch my hand up her hip, gathering the material of her skirt, palming the cool flesh of her thigh.

  She gasps, “I won’t.” By the fight in her words, she should be running from the truck, but she turns toward my hand, her body begging for more.

  I press my other hand across her stomach, skimming the under curve of her breast. “You say that now.”

  She shivers, and her chest rises faster. Her lips part, her breath echoes in my ear. If it weren’t so dark, I’d see her pulse leaping in her neck.

  I brush my thumb across her nipple through her shirt. It puckers hard under my finger, and she whimpers. Her smallness, her softness, the way she gives herself over to me, as though my touch is a command for her to yield—it’s fucking heady.

  It makes me want to test her, goad her, see how far she’ll let me take her. Before I stop.

  I pinch her nipple. She sucks air through her teeth.

  “The horrible things you don’t know. The lies you convince yourself are true.”

  “They aren’t lies.”

  “Yes, they are.”

  I palm her breast and squeeze. She arches into my hand, pleading for me to press harder. Her lips graze my cheek, seeking my mouth, but I deny her.

  I pry her lips apart with my fingers. “Bite it.”

  “Mm?”

  “Bite your lip.” Her teeth graze my finger, and she sinks them into her lower lip. “Harder.” Her lip divo
ts, and air gusts from her nose onto my cheek.

  “It’s going to hurt,” I say. “Worse than that bite. The truth is going to rip you open.” I grasp her waist, and pull her across the bench seat toward me. “But it’s the only thing worth having.”

  She moans, her fingers clinging to me. “But it’s not true.”

  I stick my finger between her teeth. “Bite!”

  She does, her little teeth sinking into my skin. It’s so pathetic and satisfying. Her protests, followed by compliance, I feed on it. I want it. My blood runs hot and thick, making me hard and heavy to take all of her. Her little fights, her excuses, her stubbornness—it will make breaking her all the more enjoyable.

  I grasp her hip and rub her against me, massaging my groin with hers. Her head falls back and she bites my finger harder. “I’m going to make the truth scar you the way it’s scarred me.”

  She shakes her head but doesn’t let go with her teeth.

  I sneak my thumb farther in her mouth, pressing on her tongue. “I will shove it down your throat if I have to, but you will believe me before I’m done.”

  She writhes against me, under me, her whole body moving with a craving that matches mine too closely. Her lips wrap my finger and begin to suck.

  It’s my turn to moan, thinking of where else I’d like her mouth, where I’d like her on her knees.

  My control fast bleeding away, my thoughts fading from manipulation to lust, I have to stop. Her grinding beneath me, pressing into me, she’s not listening anymore. She’s only thinking about what she wants.

  I’ll give her none of it.

  I plan to pull back, except I take one more moment to smell her. I let her scent fill my lungs, with the nauseating sweetness that peels away my self-control.

  I push away and jump from the truck.

  The rain, less strong than before, drips on my face. I let it cool my heated skin and slow my heaving heart.

  That’s the second time I’ve lost it with her in my truck. My plan needs revising. Me playing her should not include me being played.

  * * *

  I lounge on his truck seat and catch my breath.

  The rain drips on the windshield. I hadn’t noticed it slowing.

  I am alive, awake, aroused. I can’t grow complacent around him, he won’t let me. He provokes me, challenges me—with his words, his hands.