by Theresa Weir
“Don’t play these games, Claire.” He grabbed her by both arms. He pulled her close. “You’ve been waiting for me. I know you. I know how hot you always were for me. That kind of thing doesn’t change. You want me. You’ll always want me. I’ll bet you’ve been lying in bed at night, all hot and horny, thinking about me.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “I know what you like. I know everything you like. I know when to go fast, and when to go slow. I know just where to touch you to make you crazy.”
“Get out! Now!” She was outraged at him, at herself for allowing him to intrude upon her life to such a point.
In the months they’d been together, he’d never displayed violence. Now anger flared in his eyes. His fingers dug into her arms. “I didn’t think you had any surprises left in you.” He began shoving her, forcing her backward. “But I had no idea you liked it rough. No idea at all.” He turned her rejection into an open assault, one that demanded his retaliation. Claire knew she should try to placate him, knew she should back off and say the things he wanted to hear, but she had too much self-respect for that. And absolutely no respect left for him.
“Get your hands off me,” she said through gritted teeth. “You son of a bitch.” There was no fear in her, only anger.
What remained of his mask crumbled completely. There wasn’t a remnant of the person Claire had once known.
He took her by surprise, shoving her down to the floor, falling on top of her, holding her with his weight while he struggled with one hand to undo her jeans.
He never could chew gum and walk at the same time. The distraction allowed Claire to bring a hand to his face. She tried to scratch him, but she had no nails. Her pathetic attack only made him madder. He grabbed her hand. Without thought, she bit his arm. He screamed and let go, but before she could put any distance between them, he grabbed her again.
Together, they fell backward, the French easel that had been a gift from her father, slid across the floor, shattering when it hit the wall. Claire reached behind her, her hand coming in contact with the other easel. She pulled it down on top of Anton. He tossed it aside, her pictures flying, tearing. She saw his moving toward her, saw his hand. She ducked, blocking his blow with her forearm.
For a moment, she felt a sense of power. In the middle of the battle, it occurred to her that they were fairly evenly matched. She'd chopped a lot of wood in her day, and he'd spent a lot of time putting his wood to people.
She was actually thinking she had the upper hand when he tackled her, knocking the air from her lungs. With his added weight as momentum, they slid across the floor. She slammed into the wall, banging her head against the windowsill.
“No,” he said, gasping for breath. “I never knew you liked it so wild.”
She opened her eyes to see him kneeling over her, fiddling with his pants. Next to her was the dresser where she'd hidden the gun. She rolled to the side, tugged open the bottom drawer and grabbed the gun, shaking it free of the T-shirt. Without hesitation, she pointed the weapon directly at Anton's shocked face.
“You have no idea how wild,” she said calmly. It took supreme effort to keep her voice smooth. Her side hurt, her head hurt, her whole body hurt, but she didn't want Anton to know it.
He scrambled backward, both hands in the air. “Whoa. Where'd you get that?”
“Out of a box of cereal. Now get the hell out of here. I never want to see your face again.”
“Is that thing loaded?”
“Wanna find out?”
“I don't know why you're so pissed off. It's not like we’ve never done it before. What difference would one more time make?”
“The difference is that this time I don’t want to do it. Now go back to your Sugar Mama.”
He got to his feet and began backing toward the ladder. “You were never anything special, anyway,” he said. “Look at you. You look like a damn bag lady.”
That was uncalled for.
He glanced around the room. “Living here in this place like some nutty hermit. Thinking you could paint. Let me clue you in. You can’t paint, Claire. Nobody wants to buy your crappy little paintings of crappy little grasshoppers and frogs.” He pointed to himself. “I’ve been there. I’ve seen what people like. I’ve seen what they want.” He pointed around the room, from one picture to another. “And nobody wants shit like this hanging on their walls.” He swung around on his black shiny boots. He took a step toward the ladder. On the way, he swept up one of her pictures that had been knocked down in the fracas. He grabbed the ladder, swinging himself onto the rungs, her picture mashed between his palm and the side rail. He climbed down partway, then stopped.
“You wanna know something else?” he said, his head sticking out of the opening. “ You were never anything special, either. Just another lay. You thought we had good sex, but we didn’t. I’ve had a lot better.” He nodded, his mouth curled in contempt. “A lot better.”
He was almost to the front door when she grabbed his jacket and tossed it down the hole after him. “Take your fucking gigolo jacket!”
She heard his angry footfall, heard the soles of his sissy shoes as he made his way back to get his jacket. As a finale, he pulled down the ladder, dropping it on the living room floor.
She listened, finally hearing the sound of a car pulling away, finally hearing it fade into the distance.
That's when she began to shake. The gun slipped from her fingers, clattering to the floor. She put a trembling hand to her mouth.
He hadn't raped her, yet she'd been violated. Emotionally, physically. And worse, he’d attacked her art.
Darkness fell.
He'd left the front door open. She could tell because the cold found its way upstairs, and she could hear Hallie’s nails. Kind of tap-dancing across the floor, the chunks of snow and ice that always clung to the pads of her feet making the sound even more distinct.
Claire knew she should climb through the opening in the floor. The drop wouldn't be bad if she lowered herself as far as she could before letting go. But she felt sick to her stomach. Instead of getting up, she crawled into the space between the couch and the wall. Once there, she cried.
Chapter 17
It was stupid, going back. And dangerous. She'd probably called the cops. They probably had her place staked out. That was it. The thing on the news about his being presumed dead was a trick to flush him out. And he'd fallen for it. He'd been sucked right into their trap.
A novice would have known better.
But Claire. He couldn't get her out of his head.
Dylan had been waiting years for the opportunity to vanish, and here he was, risking everything to see Claire one last time before he rode off into the sunset. It was nuts. So he'd told himself he'd just swing by her place on the way to wherever the hell he was going, pay for the repairs on her Jeep, plus return the money and backpack.
He bought a car from a guy for a grand. Front-wheel drive. Two-hundred-thousand miles on it. What more could he ask for? He'd also picked up some necessities, like basic clothing and a new jacket.
It was dark when he turned down the snow-packed lane that led to her house. He'd planned it that way. Darkness seemed the way to go in case somebody was watching her house. He pulled up next to her Jeep, deliberately avoiding the motion light's target area. The front door was standing wide open. There were no lights on inside.
A trick? A trap?
He shut off the engine, grabbed the backpack, and slowly got out of the car, his heart pounding a warning. He moved toward the door. The motion light came on, almost blinding him. A second later, Hallie nailed him, hitting him hard in the stomach with both front paws. He rubbed her good behind the ears, all the while keeping his eyes on his surroundings. Hallie dropped back to the ground and circled him, making a whining sound Dylan didn't like at all.
Remaining outside, he reached around the corner and turned on the living room light. He waited a moment, then slowly looked inside. Hallie had been going in and out as she pleased. There
were wet spots where she'd tracked in snow.
He told himself to run, to get the hell out of there. Any moment, he was going to be surrounded by a bunch of weekend warriors in jackets, pointing sniper rifles between his eyes.
He spotted something on the floor. A piece of paper. Dirty. Familiar. He stepped inside and picked it up. Even though it was torn and smudged and wet, he still recognized it. Claire's picture. The one of the grasshopper, the one he'd liked so much.
The backpack slipped from his numb fingers. “Claire!”
He ran to the bedroom and turned on the light. Nobody. Nothing disturbed. The bathroom was the same way. In his haste, he'd missed the ladder the first time through. Now he spotted it lying near the wall, as if someone had angrily tossed it there.
He grabbed the ladder and positioned it through the hole in the ceiling. Not wasting time to test its stability, he shimmied up, climbing so fast the top lifted away every time he grasped a new rung.
He jumped from the ladder and quickly found the light switch.
Everything hit him at once. The broken easels, the pictures—Claire's pictures—torn, rumpled, stepped on. This was no random act of violence. It was deliberate, calculated, executed out of hatred or spite.
His gaze fell to the gun.
Holy mother.
It was lying in the middle of the room, half covered by a notebook. He picked it up. He stared at it for a moment, holding it in both hands. He lifted his head, no longer seeing the room but looking into tomorrow, into infinity.
“Claire!”
~0~
Dylan.
Claire pressed a hand to her mouth. In the process, paper rustled. She'd forgotten that she was holding one of her torn pictures.
Her breath caught in her chest, tight as a spring, painful.
Footsteps moved slowly in her direction … until she saw a pair of workboots directly in front of her. Not black shiny boots with pointy toes. These were real boots. Dylan's boots.
She wanted to wrap her arms around those boots and kiss them.
“Claire?”
She'd daydreamed about his coming back. She'd thought of him daily, but she hadn't wanted him to see her like this.
“I . . . I, uh, was just back here looking for something. Just looking for something. Trying to find a pencil. I have this favorite pencil, you know. It's really good for shading in large areas. It has just the right tone to it. Not too dark, not too light. It's soft, too. So it doesn't press into the paper. I don't like it when a pencil actually makes a physical mark on the paper. When you draw, you aren't sculpting, you know. You're drawing. You don't want to carve up the paper. That's not what it's al about. Carving up the paper—”
“Claire, are you hurt?”
She lifted the picture closer to her face. With trembling fingers, she touched what she could see of the frog. “It’s torn.”
He crouched down in front of her. “Who did this?”
The barely controlled rage in his voice scared her. He sounded as if he wanted to kill somebody. “It doesn’t matter.”
She was embarrassed to tell him that the person who’d trashed her studio, who had trashed her life, had been none other than her ex-boyfriend.
“It does matter.”
She sniffled. “Don’t be nice to me.”
“Why shouldn’t I be nice to you?”
“What makes you any different from him? You took my rent money. You wrecked my Jeep.”
“I stopped by Jim’s Garage and settled your bill there.” He pulled something from his pocket. Money. “I'm here to pay back the money I owe you, not destroy your work.”
“Where’d you get that?” God, he’s robbed a bank, she thought.
He tucked the bills in the pocket of her shirt. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It does matter!”
“Don’t worry. I didn’t rob a bank, if that’s what you’re thinking. You don’t have that low an opinion of me, do you, Claire?”
She sidestepped that question. Instead, she brought up a couple of other reasons she had for distrusting him. “You tied me up and left me that way all night. You handcuffed me to my own bed. Now that I think about it, you're worse than he is.” She wiped at her nose with the back of her hand. “I should hate you. I want to hate you."
He slipped the ruined picture from her and put it somewhere behind him. “Come out of there.” Her grasped her by the forearms, exactly where Anton's hands had held her so cruelly. She let out a gasp and Dylan’s hands sprang away.
“I’ll do it myself.” Actually, she wanted to stay right where she was, only with her arms wrapped around his booted feet.
He stepped back while she crawled out from behind the couch. She shoved herself to her feet, dusted herself off, pushed back her hair from her face. “There,” she said breathlessly. “Good as new.”
Apparently Dylan didn’t so, because he let out a strange, choking, sobbing sound. “Jesus, Claire.”
She looked down at herself. Her flannel shirt was torn. The top two buttons of her jeans were undone. He reached for her. When his fingers made contact with the side of her face, she winced away.
“Who the hell did this?”
She shook her head, unable to speak. .
“Why are you protecting the bastard?”
“I’m not.”
He was doing something with her blouse. It took her a moment to realize he was unbuttoning it. He slid it from her shoulders, down her arms. "I’ll kill him,” he said under his breath.
That’s what she was afraid of. It was bad enough that Dylan was wanted for fraud. He didn’t need to add murder to his accomplishments. She looked down at herself, at the blue handprints Anton had left on her arms.
"It was that scurve Anton, wasn’t it?”
"How did you know?”
"It had to be somebody who knew you. It had to be somebody who wanted to hurt you for a personal reason.”
She tried to wrap her arms around herself, half to cover what her semi-transparent bra was revealing, half because she was cold. "H-He didn’t rape me.” Dylan slipped her shirt back over her shoulders, and buttoned what buttons were still there. Then he grabbed a blanket from the couch and wrapped it around her, pulling it tight in front. "Tell me the truth, Claire.”
"He didn’t rape me.” Not physically, were the words she added to herself.
She found herself staring at him. Staring at was better than crying about what had just happened. Much, much better. She looked at him closely, to make sure he hadn’t morphed into someone else the way Anton had.
He was still Dylan. But how had she forgotten that his hair was the color of Burnt Umber? And that his eyes were a cross between Davy’s Gray and Emerald Green. If she were to paint his skin tone, she would have to use Golden Ochre lightened with Titanium White.
“What are you doing?” he asked. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
She brought up her hand and touched his face. “Painting you in my mind.” She laughed at his puzzled expression. “I do that sometimes. Would you do something for me?” she asked, looking up at him and reaching for his hand.
“Anything.”
He didn’t ask what she wanted of him first. It was just, Anything.
“Would you hold me?”
He caught her fingers, then brought them to his mouth. His lips were incredibly soft and warm. He kissed her fingertips, then kept her fingers there. And she found herself wishing that her lips were where her fingers were.
“I heard that they aren’t looking for you anymore,” she said quietly.
He lifted a strand of her hair. He brought it to his lips, kissing it. “They think I'm dead,” he said in the same way someone else might say, They think I’m living in Peoria.
“You’ve probably served enough time for your crime, anyway.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“And you’ve learned your lesson.”
“Of course.”
“You’ll never take anything
that isn’t yours ever again.”
“Oh, no."
Five minutes later, they were sitting on the couch with Claire’s legs draped across Dylan’s lap, his arms around her, her head resting on his shoulder.
She wished he would kiss her. But then he’d made it clear that he didn’t think of her that way. “Can I ask you something?"
“Ask away."
“Do I really smell like mothballs?"
He laughed, pulling her closer. He pressed his face to her hair in what she took to be a brotherly gesture. He sniffed. “I don’t know what you smell like. I can’t place it."
She hoped it wasn’t body odor. There were times when she was working on something and she’d completely lose track of time, when she would forget to take a shower and forget to eat. But she’d just showered and washed her hair that morning. Hadn’t she?
“It’s not mothballs. It’s like ... cedar or some other kind of wood. Now I have it. You smell like a blanket that’s been stored in a chest."
How lovely. She smelled like something old that had been kept in the dark too long.
Chapter 18
Claire couldn't get warm.
She'd tried adding more wood to the fire. She'd tried a hot bath. But fifteen minutes later she was shaking all over again. With Dylan in the kitchen banging pans around, she sneaked out the back door to the sauna. Teeth chattering, she turned on the thermostat, rotating it to 200 degrees, thankful that the sauna was electric and would heat up fast.
She sat down and waited, bundled up, her cap pulled down over her ears, her mittened hands tucked under her armpits. And while she waited, she thought about her artwork and the proposal Anton destroyed.
Could she start over?
Did she want to?
The deep chill that had settled all the way to her heart began to dissipate, the heat of the sauna began to seep into her bones. The thermometer on the wall was moving up rapidly. It was already over a hundred.
She took off her coat and mittens, then stripped down to nothing, wrapped a bath towel around her, and. sat back down, her head against the wooden wall, and closed her eyes.
