by Naomi West
“Get up,” the man grunts.
“Your mask is scaring me,” I say. “Take off your mask and I’ll get up.”
“You want to see my face? I saw your face last night with the big boy. The president. The big boy president. He’ll be angry, won’t he, when he finds out? Gerald’ll have no choice but to ramp up the war, ramp it all the way up. Turn it up to eleven as they say.”
“You’re using me to get at Rocco,” I say, my mouth filled with the taste of blood. It’s happening. My fears are coming true.
“Get up.”
“Take off your mask!” I snap. “If you’re doing this, be a man about it!”
I’m way more terrified than I sound, but I keep my voice firm and hold his gaze. I have to gain some sort of control.
“Oh, you want a real man, do you?” He waves his gun around. “You want a real big tough man like that Rocco fella, big wide shoulders but with a small little dick?” He cackles wildly. “You’re not worth shit. None of you whores are worth a damn. You twist and turn and get a man interested and then leave him in the dirt. Cunt.”
He lurches forward and drags me to my feet. I have no choice but to stand up unless I want him to pull my arm out of its socket. “Do you think you’re special?” he says, as he drags me deeper and deeper into the foliage. “Is that what you think? You smell like a rich girl. Just look at you, head held high. You too good for the forest?” He turns and squints at me. His eyes are the only points of humanity in his face, the only points not covered by the mask. They’re small and pale brown. “I ought to make you eat the dirt, but we’ve got plans. Come on, sweetheart.”
“You saw me with Rocco,” I say, as we skirt a wide tree. “So you know that if you do anything to me, you’re a dead man.”
He pauses for a moment. “How do you mean?”
“If you hurt me,” I say, “Rocco will hurt you.”
Is he simple? He seems genuinely perplexed by this.
“Ah, ah, ah!” He wiggles a forefinger at me. “But I’m wearing the mask, see? So your tricks aren’t going to work on me. No way, no way. You’re all the same. Tricky bitches, shifty sluts.”
If he really is that stupid . . . “Rocco has installed a tracker in my foot. For safety. Like a dog chip. They make those now.” I wish I said something other than foot. It sounds ridiculous. In reality Rocco is probably having dinner or sleeping or killing, completely oblivious of what’s happening to me.
“In your foot?” The man shakes his head. “No, you’re not getting me like that. But since you’re so dang eager to get this over and done with, we’ll get it over and done with. Bend over, then.”
“What?” I gasp, taking a step back.
He yanks me forward and grabs my throat, turns me around like I’m a ragdoll, and then pushes me firmly in the upper back. I remember last night in a flash, the way Rocco pushed me in the same way, but how I bent forward for him then. Now I try and stay standing upright. I won’t bend over for this sicko. But he’s stronger than me and he has a gun. He places the gun to the back of my head. “If you don’t bend over I’m going to decorate that there leaf red. You get me? You know what I mean by that? It’s a clever way of saying if you don’t bend over—”
“You’ll blow her brains out. Yeah, we get it, kid. Good for you.”
I crane my neck and see Rocco standing beside the man, his gun pressed against the man’s head. “It don’t take a rocket scientist to work it out. You really are a dumb fuck, aren’t you? Take that gun from her head or I’ll blow your fuckin’ brains out.”
“You really think—”
“I’m gonna count to two.”
“You’re a—”
“One.” He pulls back the hammer on the gun.
“Okay, okay!” the man whines, taking a step back and handing the gun to Rocco.
Rocco smacks him across the face so hard the man stumbles into a tree a few yards away, his face scraping down the bark. His mask rides up to his forehead in the process. I’m met with a normal-looking man, around nineteen or twenty, with freckles on his forehead and a scar on the left side if his lips. He scrambles to stand, but Rocco is there first with a kick to the gut. He coughs and rolls onto his front.
“What’d’you think, eh?” Rocco growls, kneeling down and yanking the man’s mask away. He grabs the man by his hair and stares into his eyes. I’ve never seen such rage in my life. It’s like Rocco is a gorilla claiming his territory. He pulls the man up, forcing him to climb to his knees or lose his hair, and then headbutts him in the nose. It explodes and blood showers everywhere. “You’re coming with me,” he says, dragging the man to his feet.
He glances in my direction, and then nods at a tree. “Stay there. Don’t move. I won’t be long.”
“Are you going to kill him?” I whisper, and for some reason the thought scares me. It shouldn’t. This man was going to rape me. But it’s outside of my world. If you get assaulted, you report it to the police. You don’t drag the man off into the woods.
Rocco reads my face. I can tell he knows what I’m thinking. He doesn’t reply, just drags the man further and further away until I can’t hear them anymore. I sink against the tree, elbows on my knees, hands on my face, trying not to weep. I fail. I cry violently. I cry so that my body shakes and my eyes start to sting. I cry until my face is hot with tears. I can’t stop. The idea of what was just going to happen . . .
Rocco saved me, but if it wasn’t for Rocco . . .
I kill the thought. I can’t think like this now, not when he just saved me. Not when I was so close to . . .
The tears hit me again.
I hunch over and cry for around ten minutes, unable to stop myself. When the tears have finally passed, I climb to my feet and lean against the tree, taking long, deep breaths to try and calm myself. The worst thing is the feeling of dread in my belly, like any moment I could slip through time and it’ll turn out I’m back with the masked man, his gun to my head, and really Rocco hasn’t saved me. It’ll happen and there’s nothing I can do.
“Did you kill him?” I ask when Rocco returns.
“No,” he says. “But he won’t be coming back. Now let’s get you home. Simone!”
“What?” I mutter, and then I realize.
I’m on my back, staring through leaves up at the sky.
Chapter Eighteen
Simone
“I’m leaving my bike here and driving you myself,” Rocco says. “There’s no way in hell I’m letting you drive in this state, and a stolen car to boot. No damn way. Anyway, I have the keys.”
“I can drive,” I say firmly, trying to snatch the keys from him.
He pulls them out of reach. “No, you can’t. I’m driving. No arguments.”
“What about your bike?” Everything feels fuzzy. Ever since Rocco pulled me to my feet, I’ve felt numb, tingly all over. I wonder if this is what adrenaline feels like. “You can’t just leave it here.”
He makes a scoffing sound as he leads me to the jeep. I remember the way the jeep pulled up behind me, its bumper almost hitting me in the back. “He was going to—Rocco—he was going to . . .”
“He didn’t,” he says, his hand on my shoulder. “Don’t think about it right now. Just get in the car. I’ll keep you safe. I promise.”
“You’re the one who got me in this situation to begin with!”
But I don’t say it because then maybe it’d create a split between us and I can’t be alone tonight. I just can’t. I need someone here with me and who better than Rocco, huge and strong and immovable in his leather jacket with his killer’s instinct?
“Okay,” I murmur instead, climbing into the car.
We drive without speaking. I look down at my bruised hand and try to make a fist again. I wince.
Rocco pulls over near a drugstore. “What’s wrong?” he asks.
“My hand. I think I’ve hurt it.”
Rocco leans down, and then lifts my arm slowly and softly. He lifts it so that my hand is above my head. “How does tha
t feel?”
“That doesn’t feel too bad. A little achy but nothing too bad.”
“And this?”
Very softly he prods the back of my hand. I wince again. “That hurts.”
“On a scale of one to ten, ten being the worst pain imaginable and one hardly hurting at all?”
“About a . . . I don’t know, a four?”
“All right.” He nods, looking at it. “You live my life long enough, you get familiar with all types of injuries. It looks like it’s bruised. You’re damn lucky that all you got from that crash is a bruise.”
“Lucky,” I repeat. “Hmm . . .”
“Well, maybe lucky ain’t the word.”
“No, maybe not.”
“I can bind it up for you so it heals quicker, and you could do with some meds to reduce the swelling, and for the pain. Wait here.”
“What else am I going to do?” I laugh pointlessly, feeling fuzzy.
A few minutes later Rocco binds up my hand. I’m shocked by how softly he can use his giant hands, how gently he turns my bruised hand here and there to wrap around the bindings. He wedges tiny cushions in between my fingers and wraps tape around them, securing them, and then gives me a bottle of water and two pills. I take them, drinking half the bottle of water.
He starts the car and we continue driving. “Simone, I’ve gotta say I’m sorry. I’m damn sorry for this. I spoke to that guy before I let him go, and he said he saw you with me, and that’s why—”
“Don’t,” I say. My voice is harsher than I intend. “If you start saying sorry, I might start thinking about it again. And if I start thinking about it, maybe I’ll agree with you that it was your fault, and then I’ll ask you to leave, and I don’t want you to leave tonight. I want you with me.” My words seem far away. I wonder if the meds have kicked in already.
Rocco nods shortly. “Fair enough.”
He stops outside my apartment building, just managing to wedge the jeep into the alleyway, and then walks around to my side and helps me out of the small gap. The door scrapes the wall, making a loud metallic noise. Holding my good hand, he leads me to the door.
“Are you coming up?” I ask.
“Do you want me to come up?”
“Yes,” I answer without hesitation. “Please.”
“Then I’m coming up.”
He takes my keys from me and unlocks the door, and then we ride the elevator up to my apartment. “I don’t know what I’ll do if I’m alone.” The tears return. I want to be strong, but I can’t shake the feeling of the cold metal against the back of my head. One pull of the trigger, and I’d had have been done forever.
Rocco wraps his arm around me and kisses me on the forehead. “You’re safe now,” he says. “You don’t have to be scared anymore. I swear on that.”
“I’m not scared.” I pull away from him, standing soldier-straight and staring straight ahead. I offer a mock stern expression. “Nothing scares me, private!” But the joke falls flat. Rocco laughs, but I can tell he’s in no laughing mood. To be honest, I’m not, either. I fall back into his embrace.
In my apartment, he sits me down and then goes into the kitchen. “Do you want anything?” he asks over the partition. “Food, wine, whatever.”
“Just water,” I say. “I . . . I don’t want to drink—drink wine, I mean.”
“Okay.”
He returns with a glass of water. Handing it to me, he sits down and watches me drink half of it down. Then he just watches me anxiously. “Maybe I should stay here tonight,” he says. “I’ll take the couch.” He holds his hands up. “And I’ll keep these to myself. But I just wanna make sure you’re okay.”
“Yes,” I say. “I’d like that.”
He hesitates, and then says, “I . . . I know you said I shouldn’t say sorry. So tell me what I can do.”
“Tell me something about yourself that you’ve never told anybody else.” This seems important, and yet I don’t know why. Nothing makes much sense this evening. I’m sitting here on the couch, but I could easily be back there in the forest. This man has seen me at my most vulnerable. Maybe that’s it. Maybe I need to expose him so I don’t feel so exposed.
“I was beaten in my foster homes, pretty damn routinely. But I guess a lot of people know about that.” He talks for a little while, telling me how he was chucked from home to home, being beaten until he got away at sixteen. I listen, rapt, contrasting his upbringing with my own. When I was growing up I never felt privileged, but as I listen to Rocco I realize I was incredibly privileged. Mom and Dad may have argued from time to time, but they never hurt Cecilia or me. “But that’s just how it goes sometimes,” he finishes, shrugging. “Some folks like to beat kids. I’ll never understand it, but there it is.”
I take his hand. “It must’ve been awful.”
“Yeah.” He nods. “I guess it was. But there was something more awful, something which really hurt me but not in the way it should have.”
“That sounds . . . mysterious.”
“It’s about another woman.” He flicks his eyes to me. “It was years ago, but—”
“Tell me,” I say.
He takes a deep breath, and then starts his story. “I was nineteen when I met Angela. She was a club girl, which basically means she was hanging around the club flirting with all the guys trying to get one of them to snatch her up. I thought she was the hottest thing I’d ever seen. She was, back then.” He looks at me again. When he sees I’m not getting jealous or weird, he continues. “I asked her out. We went to the movies. We went on quite a few dates. And all through this, I really thought I was falling in love with her. Or maybe I just told myself I was because that’s what normal people do, and when you’ve grown up in the system, you always wanna do what normal people do. After three months I asked her to marry me. I don’t even know why, exactly. That sounds sick to say aloud, but I still don’t understand. I was a confused teenager, I guess. All I knew was it was what people did, normal people. They proposed, so I proposed. I wasn’t the man I am today. Today I wouldn’t do shit just ’cause it’s what normal people do . . .
“Anyway, she said yes. I had a fiancée. She started talking about kids and a house, and deep down, I wasn’t interested in any of it. We had nothing in common. We never really spoke about anything. We weren’t even that attracted to each other. You ever been to the park and looked around and seen a couple just sitting there like they’d rather be anywhere else? That was us, but neither of us tried to stop it. We just marched ahead, planning and inviting and all that shit.
“And then one day Angela was driving from the club to our apartment and she skidded off the road. She died instantly, the authorities said. She didn’t suffer. I wanted to cry when it happened, but I felt too . . .” He pauses, looking for the word. “Disjointed, you know? I felt like somebody else’s fiancée had died. I was sad later, but not because she was dead, not just that, anyway. I was sad because I’d tricked her. I’d made her believe I was falling in love when really, I wasn’t. Really, I was just going through the motions.
“When I met you, I knew for sure I had never fallen in love with Angela.”
I watch him, stunned. I never dreamed Rocco had so much emotion within him, so much complexity. It’s like seeing him with new eyes. He won’t look at me. He must feel nervous.
“What do you mean, when you met me?” I ask.
He laughs awkwardly. “I’m not used to this talking about what’s going on in here shit.” He thumps his chest. “You must know what I mean by that.”
“I think I do,” I say. “But I’m not sure if tonight is the best time to talk about it.”
“You’re probably right,” Rocco says. He meets my eye. “But I’m falling for you, Simone. That’s what I mean by it.”
I swallow, the fuzzy feeling being replaced by lust, powerful lust, impossible-to-ignore lust. The forest keeps trying to resurface in my mind, but I batter it down. I lean forward, bringing my face close to Rocco’s. It’s like we’
re animals. A scent rises into the air as if it’s mating season. Both of us begin to breathe heavily just by staring at each other. Both of us begin to think about being with the other person. Rocco’s pitch-dark eyes are full of barely withheld animalistic desire.
“Are you sure?” he asks, his voice growling with the effort to stave off his animal side.
“I want to feel good,” I say, inching forward, our lips almost touching now. “Just for a little while.”
Rocco’s entire body is trembling now. Mine is, too, so badly that I can hardly think. All I want is to forget about the forest, and right now this man—this surprisingly sensitive man—is the only person in the world who can make me forget.
