Becoming His

by Angel Marks

Will smiled down at her and said, “Thank you. How are you feeling? You should be home resting.”

  “This is pretty restful, isn’t it?”

  “Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad you came. I’m glad you’re here, but you shouldn’t be here with him.”

  “I know.” Noelle looked away, not wanting to meet his eyes regarding her stupid mistake.

  “If I was sober enough I’d drive you home. If you want to stay here with me, you can have my bed and I’ll drive you home in the morning, no problem …but I don’t think you should ride with that dildo.”

  “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine,” she replied, more for Will’s benefit than for what she really felt. She had thought about getting a cab, but riding by herself with a stranger unknown concerned her even more than riding with the known hazard of Joel.

  “Call me as soon as you get home,” Will said authoritatively while programming his roommate’s landline into her cell phone. Finally! They would have a connection!

  When they got back to the house Noelle reminded Joel, who had been rebuffed by the brunette but was seemingly making progress with the blonde, that she had to be home by 1:00 a.m. He seemed more than agitated that her curfew was getting in the way of his possible romantic endeavors, but Brandy promised him she wasn’t going anywhere for a while, so he said he would “return soon after taking the child home to her mommy and daddy.”

  Will opened the passenger door of Joel’s Trans AM, helped her in, handed her the seat belt, and closed her door all while watching Joel. “Thanks for driving her, man. I’ll see you when you get back.”

  Joel pulled out, gunning his engine in an effort to show off to Brandy, or maybe to say fuck you to Will. He had been responsible enough not to smoke and to drink very little, and Noelle was glad he had met someone, but as soon as they were on the street, she was greeted by the Joel she remembered.

  If only Will could have ridden with them, thought Noelle, but that idea had not been brought up and she knew Joel would not have agreed to it. It was certainly wise for the new girl not to ride with him, as he probably would have mauled her, but this unfortunately left Noelle alone with him for too long.

  “Thank you so much for the ride, Joel. I really appreciate your generosity. Here’s some gas money,” she said as she pulled a twenty out of her clutch.

  Joel looked over at her and dropped his right hand just above her left knee, grabbing it like a vise. She stiffened and panic shot into her heart. She knew she had to play cool as Joel could be very touchy.

  “Brandy seems really nice!” Noelle tried to sound as nonchalant as possible despite her heart residing in her throat. She reached over and placed the twenty dollar bill in a cup holder.

  “Yeah, Brandy seems pretty nice,” Joel responded. Eyes on the road, he let go of her to change his music. Eminem began pulsating through the car and Noelle crossed her arms and shivered in the night as they descended onto a long stretch of dark highway, T-tops still out, the breeze much cooler now.

  Joel’s hand found its way back to her body, this time her right thigh. She looked over at him, afraid to make eye contact.

  “What are you doing, Joel?” she asked while trying to keep her voice calm and steady, as she used both her hands to attempt to push his hand off her. He laughed and grabbed her tighter, pressing his fingers down on her skin, hurting her.

  “Please stop,” Noelle said quietly. “You’re hurting me.”

  Joel didn’t respond and didn’t let go. Fear raced through her heart and her eyes began to tear up as they sped down the highway, now going close to ninety miles an hour.

  “Joel, please slow down,” Noelle whispered as they flew around a curve and she felt for sure they were going to wreck. He let go of her thigh to grab the steering wheel and once he pulled them out of the curve, he looked over at her with a Cheshire grin. “Did I scare you?”

  Noelle focused on her breathing. Stay calm, try to make this normal, get him off this track. Without answering his question, she tried changing the subject. “I heard you and your brother are opening your own business. What’s it called?” Unfortunately, this wasn’t a good topic. He was fighting with his brother.

  “Have you seen any good movies lately?” was her next attempt at pleasant conversation and this one was a success. For the rest of her ride home she got to hear about horror films, and the gruesome details of unsuspecting girls being killed by men they mistakenly trusted to be alone with. Noelle thought she would pass out with fear and considered dialing 911. Joel was such a fucking asshole, but she was the dummy who had put herself in this spot. He was getting off on terrorizing her.

  Finally, he pulled into her driveway, and she got out and walked inside, never looking at him after a curt “Thanks for the ride.”

  She called the landline from her bedroom and Will picked up on the second ring.

  “Did you get home all right?”

  “Yes. I survived.”

  Apparently, survival wasn’t benign enough for Will. “What happened?” he asked.

  Noelle sighed. “I’m just glad I’m not in his car anymore. I’m okay, please don’t worry about it,” and she meant it. The last thing she wanted to do was upset him on his birthday.

  “Noelle, did he hurt you?” Will asked.

  “Well, no, not really. I’m fine, Will.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Nothing. I’m fine, really. I’m just glad I got to see you for your birthday. I know it was stupid of me to call Joel for a ride, and I will never do that again, but at least I got to see you.”

  “Noelle, tell me what happened.” There was a serious glint in his voice that told Noelle she had to tell him more. If she didn’t he’d assume the worst.

  So much for not ruining his birthday, she thought.

  “Noelle, I’m waiting for you to tell me what happened on your ride home,” Will said to the dead air.

  “He squeezed my thigh, and then he scared me by driving really fast. I thought we were going to wreck. Then he spent twenty minutes telling me about horror movies where the girls die after taking rides from guys they shouldn’t have. He just wanted to scare me, I guess.”

  “What? This guy is a nut. He physically hurt you?”

  “Yes, but he scared me more, it’s my fault though. I never should have called him. I went against my own good judgment.”

  “Did he touch you anywhere else?” Will was calm and businesslike in his query.

  “No.”

  “All right, how did you handle it?”

  “I told him to stop.”

  “And did he?”

  “Stop?”

  “Yes. Did he stop when you told him to?”

  “No.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “That’s when he squeezed me like a vise.”

  “Okay. Look at your leg, are you bruised?”

  Noelle took a moment to pull up her fitted skirt that went to just above her knee and examine her thigh. There were faint welt marks in the shape of his fingers. She thought she might vomit seeing them.

  “A little bit. You can kind of see his finger marks on me.” Though it was quiet on the other end of the phone, Noelle was sure she could hear Will’s concentrated effort not to explode with anger.

  “Please don’t be angry. It was so stupid of me to try to come see you tonight,” Noelle pleaded.

  “Noelle, I’m not angry with you. You surprised me. You put yourself in a real bad place to come see me. I shouldn’t have let you go home with that guy. What he did was wrong and I’ll take care of it,” Will said.

  “What do you mean?” Noelle asked.

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Really, I shouldn’t have said anything, Will. Please just enjoy the rest of your birthday, and forget about it.”

  “It’s after midnight, Noelle. My birthday’s over. You should be resting.”

  “I can’t rest if you’re not.”

  “Let me take care of everything, and I’ll pic
k you up at 2:00 p.m. this afternoon. Is that all right?”

  “Is this a date?”

  “I’d still like to take you fishing, Noelle. I know you don’t fish, but there’s this place that is really peaceful. I thought we might go there.”

  “Well, you are twenty now, so yes, Will Martin, I’ll be waiting for you.”

  Chapter Seven

  Will rang Noelle’s bell right at 2:00 p.m.

  “Oh, a man who’s punctual, that’s a good sign, Noelle,” called her mother from her downstairs workroom where she was refinishing an oak table. She came up the stairs smelling like turpentine and paint with a devilish grin ready to meet her daughter’s date. If this was her only criteria in judging a man then Joel Smith would have taken a gold star yesterday.

  “Mom, we’ve talked about this. Really, it’s very early. I don’t think you need to meet him just yet.”

  “Nonsense, Noelle,” her mother stated as she swung open the door and announced, “Hi, I’m Noelle’s mother and Noelle doesn’t want me to meet you.”

  “Really, Mom?” Noelle was embarrassed. Her mother had accomplished her goal. She quickly tried to recover from the snafu, introducing Will and vice versa.

  “It’s nice to meet you, Mrs. Snow.” Will seemed to have won her mother over with his dimples and smile. Noelle wondered just how often he used this to his advantage with the ladies. Probably always, she noted, since it worked, even though her mother would say it was her sixth sense that gave him her approval.

  “Where are you going and when will you be back?” was her mother’s next question.

  As Will explained they would be fishing, Mrs. Snow interjected that Noelle did not fish and she would not touch a worm or a fish so good luck to him. She then proceeded to tell him how she loved to fish and had been fishing her whole life. Just as she finished her story of fishing for snapping turtles and boiling them out of their shells, Noelle saw her opening and jumped in with, “Oh, Mom, it’s getting late! Will, we should go now.”

  She kissed her mother good-bye. “I’ll see you later.”

  Noelle practically dragged Will out the front door with her as he said good-bye to her mother, replying to all her requests to not be put off by her daughter’s squeamishness.

  Will opened Noelle’s door and she slipped into the black leather bucket seat while her mother yelled from the screen door, “Oh, Noelle, he’s a keeper!”

  Elton John came on the radio as Will drove them north to the reservoir where perch and rock bass were swimming.

  “Your mom was very nice,” Will commented.

  “Thanks.” Noelle managed to laugh in retrospect. “I think she’s lonely and gets a kick out of trying to embarrass me.”

  Only a few clouds dared pierce the bright blue sky as they climbed the rocks, tackle and poles in tow.

  “Do you mind?”

  “Do I mind what?”

  “Baiting my hook,” she said with a smile, though she was quite serious about not wanting to hook a worm.

  “Not at all,” Will replied as he pierced the night crawler three times onto her hook, leaving a tail to dangle in the water. Noelle watched, repulsed, remembering her one visit to a PETA meeting, but then having chicken fingers after justifying the difference between human emotions and bird brains. “The horrifying truth of life. We will always hurt what we can dominate,” she said philosophically.

  Will looked up from the hook to her. “Not necessarily, babe, but yeah, it sucks to be a worm. I don’t like doing this, but I do like fishing with worms. I’m not into lures.” They stood there, worm ball with wiggly tail between them, feeling a pang of guilt for the worm’s torture.

  “It’s part of life. I guess. Those at the bottom get hooked.” Noelle continued on dramatically.

  “Or caught.” Will interjected. “There’s a lot of carp in here, they’re bottom feeders.”

  “This is how you cast.” Will glided his line out to the water and planted his rod in the rocks so he could help as she struggled to cast. He shadowed her and gently put his arms around hers pulling her through the motions of cast and release to no avail as she was a lefty, and he a righty.

  “It’s all right. I don’t mind if you cast for me.” Noelle tucked her pole into the rocks near his and they sat together in the spring afternoon sun.

  “Have you ever dreamed about living somewhere else, Will?”

  “Sure. All the time.”

  “Where?”

  “I’d like to drive a motorcycle across the country and decide from there.”

  “Do you have a motorcycle?”

  “Not yet, but I’d like to get one down the road.”

  “Hmmm…” Noelle sighed. “That sounds really exciting and dangerous—to ride a motorcycle across the country. It sounds like something out of a movie. How amazing if you actually were to do it.”

  “Yeah, like Easy Rider, but without running drugs. Just the free-spirited hippie mentality. I’d just like to see the country, some of the national parks, Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, Yosemite.”

  “I’d love to visit all of those places, plus Alaska and Hawaii. I would hike every one of those parks if I wasn’t afraid of the grizzly bears and mountain lions.”

  “You like to hike?”

  “Well, we go for walks together. Doesn’t that count?”

  “Yeah, the sidewalk doesn’t count. Would you like me to take you for a real hike?”

  “Where, State Park?”

  “Yeah, we could go there.”

  “I know this sounds silly, because I grew up in the country, but the woods freak me out.”

  “Well, if you were to go hiking with me, you would be safe.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, I’ll take care of you and Richard never stops barking. Animals know we’re coming and stay away.” Will re-cast Noelle’s line for her.

  “Wild animals don’t always stay away from dogs. A golden retriever was taken by a pack of coyotes not far from here last winter when it was with its owner, and he had fired shots at them.”

  Will looked over at her. “I remember, but Noelle, if you live your whole life scared, you may grow to be old, but you won’t have lived at all.”

  Noelle looked out at the water, watching her line bob up and down on the reserve. She had lived her life without fear, and would live with the consequences of that for the rest of her life. Mistakes are what happened when she lived without fear, last night being no exception. Granted, if she hadn’t taken that risk, she wouldn’t be here right now, fishing with Will… No more mistakes, no more dangerous situations she had promised herself, ever since “recovering” from that one night in Boston, a single night and its devastating destruction, the real reason why she had packed up and moved home right after graduation.

  She had told Will a lot about her past, spilled more than would be considered polite, revealing her big secret without saying it, because to say the words aloud was humiliating and unbearable, the reason she had become sick with depression. She had been raped in her sophomore year of college and would have dropped out if not for the help of a couple of consecutive boyfriends who she weighed down like boulders with her resulting neediness. The second probably would have dumped her sooner, but he had felt a moral obligation to see her finish school. So on her graduation day, he drove her to the train station, and told her good-bye for good. At the time, she was sure she was drowning, but somehow she lived.

  Will Martin knew all of this, and now, almost a year later, she was more than treading water on her own, regaining her self-confidence and thinking about New York City again, the capital of the publishing industry.

  “Hey, you okay?” Will smiled down at Noelle who had a glazed look on her face and missed what he had just said to her. She looked back at the water and willed herself to push the nightmare away and enjoy her time on the water with Will, who was actually whisking her off her feet in a good way.

  “I’m sorry, Will. I tend to do that sometimes. I get lost in my though
ts and zone out.” She flashed him a genuine smile of apology and asked him to repeat what he said.

  He had a suggestion for where they could go hiking, the Grand Canyon of the East, a serious gorge in northern Pennsylvania. They could go as a day trip if she didn’t mind an excessive amount of time in the car, but it would be better to camp there overnight.

  “Camping? Hmmm …”

  Will smiled. “We could rent a cabin, Noelle, but if you’re not comfortable with camping, that’s all right.”

  “Do you camp a lot?”

  “I don’t know, what’s your definition of a lot?”

  “I guess a lot would mean you camp more than me, meaning you do it for pleasure, pitch a tent, build a fire, cook your dinner there, and sleep on the ground with wild animals all around you. That kind of a lot.”

  “I camp a couple times a year. Growing up, my family and I would camp at Lake George for a week every summer, until the summer there was this spider the size of a ping pong ball in our cabin. My mother ended the tradition after that, but it was pretty common for me to go camping with friends when I was in high school.”

  “High school …” Noelle sighed and leaned back on the rocks, enjoying the sunshine on her face. She looked up at Will, her baby blues caught in his sparkling green eyes.

  “Well, maybe someday, but first I have some questions for you.”

  “What would you like to know?”

  “Well, how did you end up at Harness, and how does a boxer smoke and drink?”

  “It’s a job. I needed one and they were hiring.”

  “All right. What about the strange party and box thing?”

  “Noelle, I don’t smoke and drink very often, especially around a lady, and when I’m training. Last night I chose to for my birthday until you showed up, and then I stopped, so I could take better care of you.”

  “Oh.”

  “It killed me that you were there with Joel Smith and I couldn’t get you home. I thought you’d be home resting after the accident. If I’d known you would go with that guy I would have picked you up myself. It shouldn’t have happened. You put yourself in danger. I don’t like it.”

  “Yeah, I know. I was pretty stupid. I didn’t want to miss your birthday.”