Mirage

by Alice Tribue

  Deep down, I think I know that he’s bluffing. I don’t believe he’s going to have my father arrested. He’d let me go if I persisted, but seeing him here, chasing me down, makes something inside of me stir. I need to know why; I need to know how he could do this to me after I gave myself so freely to him. I make up my mind, walk over to him, and take the helmet.

  “Victoria.” Dad sighs, shaking his head.

  Nathan gets on the bike and I hop on behind him, “Don’t worry, Dad. I’ll meet you back at my place; I just need to end this.”

  “Like hell you do,” Nathan comments under his breath. I put on the helmet and wrap my arms around his waist just before he pulls onto the highway, weaving through the traffic.

  I don’t know how to feel about any of this, about all that’s gone down since last night, about me wracking my brain with how to tell him about my life when he already knew. He knew all along, and not only did he allow me to get emotionally and physically involved with him, but he told me loved me and I actually believed him.

  By the time we pull up outside of his apartment, I’m fuming with anger. I’m off the bike in record time. I take off the helmet and throw it at him with full force; all he can do is dodge, and lucky for him, it misses and hits the concrete instead.

  “What the fuck.”

  “I hate you,” I yell. It feels good to get some of the rage out. “I really fucking hate you,” I tell him, shoving him in the chest when he attempts to get close to me.

  “I understand why you’re angry, but we’re not doing this here.” He grabs me by the arm and drags me all the way up to his apartment. When he shoves me in the door, I about lose my mind.

  “Let go of my arm.”

  “Relax.”

  “Fuck you,” I spit, pulling my arm back hard. He releases his hold on me and I can’t see straight because I’m so filled with rage. All of my cool, calm composure is obliterated, and I see red. Literally see red. It’s like an out of body experience when my hand connects with his cheek. The sound of the slap pushes me on; I need to make him feel the pain that I feel, just a little bit of what this feels like. I shove him again, hard enough for him to take a step back.

  “Stop it.”

  “Screw you,” I yell pummeling him in the chest, tugging at his shirt, trying to claw his fucking eyes out. I’ve become a wild animal, and I can’t stop myself from attacking him.

  “Baby, stop,” he says.

  “Don’t call me that! Don’t you ever fucking call me that again,” I screech as I scratch the hell out of his arm, and then Nathan is done with me. It doesn’t take long for him to immobilize me. Soon, he is holding me with both arms behind my back so that I can’t fight.

  “You need to stop. If we’re going to do this, then we’re going to do it calmly.”

  “Calm? Calm!? You set me up, you son of a bitch.”

  “I was doing my job, and if you would calm the fuck down, I could explain it to you.”

  “Explain what? Explain how I’m going to spend the rest of my life in jail because of you?”

  “You’re not going to jail,” he grunts in my ear. He rests his forehead on my head, his breath coming in short quick pants. “I’m letting you go now, and I swear to God, if you hit me again, I’m going to tackle you and tie you to the fucking bed.”

  I want to keep fighting him, but if I know anything about this man, it’s that he’ll do it. He’ll actually tie me to the bed and where would that leave me. I’m tired of being at his mercy; I’m tired of being weak.

  “Do you understand me?”

  “Yeah,” I say through gritted teeth. He lets me go and I step away from him quickly. I keep my back to him. I honestly don’t want to look at him because looking at the face that I loved… that I love, the same face that betrayed me, is too painful.

  “I need you to look at me, Tori.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t want to.”

  “Please,” he asks quietly, and I let out a sigh because even now he has power over me, even though I don’t want to comply with his request.

  I take one look at him and all of the anger is gone, replaced now with hurt. I don’t see the man who was placed in my life in an attempt to uncover my double life, I see the man who I fell in love with. I hate everything about this—I hate what he did, how this turned out, and I hate how when I look at him, all I want to do is break down and cry. So, I fight the urge, but it’s a useless battle. The tears that are threatening to break free spill over, and I let them go. I cry for everything that I’ve just lost and the life I’m about to lose—how I came so close to starting a new chapter, only to have it erased in the blink of an eye. I cry for how I fell in love with the perfectly imperfect man and how even now I love him more than I hate him.

  He takes a step toward me, and I take one back.

  He appears to be in as much pain as I’m in when he looks at me. “Please don’t cry.”

  How could I not cry? How could I not feel this, want to confront it, confront him? And so I do the only thing I can think to do. I throw out my accusations, hoping that his explanation is worth the time it took for him to break me.

  “How could you be so cruel? How could you do that to me? Your job was to uncover evidence about me, not seduce me, not fuck me and make me fall in love with you.”

  “Yeah,” he agrees with a nod. “And God only knows I tried. I tried to keep you at arms’ length, but that connection you felt… I felt that, too. It got to the point where I just couldn’t help it. I told myself just once, just one time, but once I had you, there was no way I could stop.”

  I run my hands up and down my face, suddenly feeling exhausted.

  “What does that even mean?”

  He disappears into his bathroom and appears again moments later having produced a tissue. He hands it to me and tells me to sit down. I do as he says because, at this point, the quicker I comply, the quicker I can get this over with.

  “Let me start from the beginning. Months ago, a known prostitute by the name of Kimberly Lewis was picked up for drug possession. During her questioning, she started talking, talking about a Madam, a woman who fired her, forced her into this life on the street. She implicated you, Victoria. She told the cops all about you.”

  “I fired her because she refused to get help; she refused to go to rehab.”

  “Well, after she made her statement… That’s when vice was brought in.”

  “You.”

  “Yes, me. I was just supposed to get close to you, offer you security services, infiltrate your life that way, but after meeting you… I don’t know, you intrigued the fuck out of me. You weren’t at all what I was expecting, not at all, so I thought I’d take you out one or two times, feel you out, but the more time we spent together, the more I wanted to spend with you.”

  “You put Rick in my office; you told me that he was a security guard.”

  “He’s a detective, too,” he says, confirming my suspicions. “When I wasn’t getting anywhere, it was decided that we needed someone else on the inside, and that’s the only way I knew how to make that happen.”

  “Of course.”

  “You are the smartest woman I know though because you never let him anywhere near your business, not even once. You kept him confined to front office duty; he was a glorified doorman. You made him absolutely miserable by the way; he was bored out of his mind.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, let me take a minute to feel bad for him.”

  His lips tip up in a half smile.

  “Anyway, when you and I… when we had sex, I crossed a line.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Intimate relationships with a citizen during the course of duty is prohibited, Victoria. I could lose my job.”

  “Am I supposed to feel sorry for you?”

  “I don’t want you to feel sorry for me. I want you to understand that when I crossed that line, I did it knowing what it could cost me. I did it willingly because I wanted you.”

  “You want
ed me?” I ask with more than a little disbelief in my voice.

  “I did. I wanted you, and once I crossed that line, babe, there was no going back for me. I knew that I had to protect you.”

  “You’re a liar. Your whole purpose in my life was to bring me down.”

  “Yes, it was, and still, I’m the man who risked his badge to keep your ass out of jail. I’m that guy.”

  I shoot up out of my chair, that familiar feeling of anger creeping up.

  “Bullshit, you risked your ass… if you had risked your ass, I wouldn’t have been hauled out of my bed and dragged down to a police station in the middle of the night.”

  “If that hadn’t happened, I’d still be investigating you today, and we could’ve been stuck in a bad situation for a long time. I needed this shit to end. I did what I did so that I could get you out of this mess.”

  “So you could get yourself out of this mess.”

  “I’m still in it. This isn’t done for me. I have to make sure none of this shit blows back on me.”

  “Nathan,” I call, realizing that’s wrong. “Nathan, that’s not your name, what’s your real name?”

  “Eric.”

  “Eric,” I whisper, trying it on for size.

  “Yeah, Eric Nathan Locke.”

  “And the Lennox?”

  “My mother’s maiden name.”

  “Okay, Eric.”

  “Nathan. You call me Nathan.”

  I roll my eyes at his crazy request. “Nathan, Eric, whatever. None of this changes the facts. None of this negates the fact that my apartment and business were raided and they were searching for evidence against me, evidence that could put me in jail for years.”

  “There was no evidence found,” he says walking over to his nightstand. He opens the drawer, grabs something, and closes it again. “There was no evidence found, baby, because I have it.” He opens his hand, revealing the flash drive that had been in my safe the last time I checked.

  My breath catches at the sight of it, at his admission, and I begin to fire questions at him.

  “How the hell did you get that? Why do you have it? How did you get access to my safe?”

  “You know what’s funny is that you keep the combination to your safe inside your desk. Not a smart thing for a smart woman to do.”

  He’s right; I do that. It’s the dumbest shit ever, but it’s in written on one of the pages of an old calendar and I never imagined anyone would put two and two together.

  “All those times I’d catch you up in the middle of the night and you said you couldn’t sleep or were getting a drink.”

  “I was searching for evidence. It became obvious pretty early on that you were good at keeping your business dealings hidden, but I knew that it had to exist. I knew that it had to be somewhere. I just got lucky with the combination to the safe, found the flash drive, and realized it held all the evidence I needed.”

  “Then why haven’t you used it?” I shrug, not understanding why he’s still holding onto it.

  “Everything changed for me after you told me about your mother, about what that was like for you, and I could see that this was much more for you than just money, wasn’t it?”

  “It was still a crime,” I say shaking my head. “So you found the flash drive and you put it back?”

  “I put it back because I wasn’t ready to have this thing between us be over. I had to figure out a way to finish this for you, for me, without either one of us going to jail because, at the end of the day, you are guilty, Victoria. You are what they say you are.”

  “I was getting out. I was done with that life,” I yell, defensively. I’m so frustrated with this conversation; I don’t know how much more I can take.

  “You were shutting it down?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “So that I could have a normal life. So that I could have you,” I reply honestly, before thinking that I wish I could take the admission back.

  “But you were never going to tell me, were you? You would have spent an entire lifetime with me leaving out this huge piece of your life.”

  I shake my head in disbelief. “What difference does it make? You already knew.”

  “It makes a big fucking difference. You didn’t trust me enough to let me in.”

  “Rightfully so!” I yell, too pissed off to tell him that I had been ready to come clean about all of it, that I had wanted to tell him the truth so badly, that the only reason I didn’t was because he had left last night.

  “I took you away to the shore because I wanted to spend one last weekend with you, one last time before it all blew up, but I had it all planned out.”

  “What was the plan?”

  “I went to the captain and told him I had found the evidence. I’d seen it, seen you put it in the safe, but I couldn’t find the combination. I explained that everything we needed to put you away for good was in that safe. He set up last night's raid.”

  “Then what?”

  “We got home from the beach and you were tired, I sent you to go take a shower and I used the opportunity to get into your safe and grab the drive.”

  “That’s why you were in my office?”

  “Yes, I needed to get the evidence out of there before anyone could find it.”

  “If you were trying to help me, why didn’t you just say so? Why didn’t you just tell me what was going on?”

  “I needed your reaction to be genuine. If you were anticipating it, you might have made people suspicious. It was better this way.”

  “So you left me there.”

  “I had to, babe. I had to leave but I came home, I came here, and hid the drive.”

  I furrow my brow, feeling more than a little confused again. “Isn’t that like obstruction of justice or something?”

  “Or something.”

  I look back and forth between him and the drive he holds in his hands. I don’t know what to think anymore, it’s all so much to take in. Is he telling the truth? Can I possibly trust that what he’s saying is true? Does it even matter anymore?

  “What are you going to do with it?”

  He holds out his hand, palm open, the flash drive in the center.

  “Take it.”

  “Why are you doing this?” I whisper, completely taken aback by what’s happening.

  “Because I love you, because I know that you’re a good person, and because I know that you’re intention was never to hurt anybody. You honestly believed you were protecting those girls. I get that, but you have to end it, Victoria.”

  I reach out and take the drive, feeling a little bit of relief for the first time since this all started.

  “I told you it’s done.”

  “What about the girls?”

  “There’s always going to be some who fall through the cracks and don’t want to change, but the others I’m helping to find jobs.”

  We stare at each other for a while. I take in his features, memorize them, thinking that this could be the last time I ever see them.

  “I should go.”

  He moves fast, wrapping his arm around my waist and pulling me to him. My hands instinctively go to his chest, bracing myself and barring him from pulling me any closer.

  “Don’t go.”

  “I have to,” I tell him with very little conviction.

  “No.”

  “This is all too much Na- Eric.” I sigh, getting tripped up on his name.

  “Nathan,” he corrects me.

  “You’re a cop, and I’m a criminal.”

  “Don’t say that. You’re a good person.”

  “Even if I wanted to be with you, which I don’t, it wouldn’t even be possible. You’d get your ass fired.”

  “We don’t know that yet. It’s a gray area.”

  He’s lying; I can tell it worries him. “Could you go to jail?”

  “Only if they can prove I withheld evidence, and I’m not going to tell them, and I don’t think you’re going to tell them because
you’d be incriminating yourself.”

  “And if they find out we’ve had a sexual relationship.”

  “I’d probably lose my job.”

  “Yet you want me to stay.”

  “Once you’re cleared, once the investigation is over, they can’t do shit to me. It’s frowned upon, yes, I’m not going to lie, but it’s not illegal. I know that you want to stay.”

  I shake my head, pushing out of his hold. “I don’t know you.”

  “You know everything that’s important about me. You know me. I’m the same man who you fell in love with. I can be that for you, and I want to be that for you.”

  “You are fucking unbelievable. I never want to see you again.” I don’t know why I say it. I’m not sure if I’m protecting myself or him.

  “You can tell yourself that all you want, but you know the truth as well as I do.”

  I look at him with defiance. “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “You’re mine.”

  “You’re crazy,” I toss back.

  “You need to open your eyes. This is not over.”

  I grab my purse in a hurry to get out of here.

  “I’m leaving.”

  “No.”

  “I heard you out. That’s what you wanted, and I gave you that.”

  “Tori.”

  “I need to think. I need to get out of here. I need to call Ivy and make sure my office and spa are okay. I have to make sure that everyone knows it’s over, Eric. I can’t just sit here.”

  “You’re running.”

  “Yes, I’m fucking running. Can you blame me?”

  “Don’t do it. You’re lying to yourself if you think you can just walk away from me.”

  “It’s what I do. I’m a fucking liar, right?” I don’t wait around to hear his response; I stayed longer than I should have. I stop and turn when I hear a loud crash come from Nathan, Eric’s apartment. I consider going back to make sure he’s okay, but I don’t, I keep moving down the stairs and outside of the building. I hail a cab, get in, and give him my address. Only then do I open my hand to look at the jump drive he gave back to me. Why? Why would he go through all that trouble and put himself in danger to help me? Could he really love me? It shouldn’t really matter because there are too many reasons why he and I would never work. I put the flash drive in my purse and think about all the ways that I can destroy it, make it so that it doesn’t exist, and I’m thankful that I took the time months ago to destroy every paper file that I owned and transfer it to this drive. I’m thankful that it was Nathan who took it and gave it back to me. He really did just save my ass, and I’m not sure what to think about that.