Fair Play (14 page)

“Who you calling a pansy ass, you fucking rapist?”

He’s got his hands on my arm, trying to pry me off of him, when his strangled answer comes.

“You.”

I draw back and punch him in the kidney. An oomph escapes the pervert’s mouth, and I tighten my grip and go again, and again.

“Nick!” Téa tries to yell, but her voice is so hoarse she hardly makes a sound.

“Go! Call the cops!” I yell, and she starts to pull herself toward the door, but this asshole I’m trying to squeeze the life out of kicks her in the stomach as she crawls past with his thick-booted foot. Instinctively she curls into a ball and wraps her arms around her body. I want to scream at her to cover her head, because I can see what’s about to happen an instant before it does.

Her attacker kicks her in the side of the head, and I choke him so hard I can hear the bones of his vertebra popping. I swing him around and slam his head against the faucet in the sink over and over until his blood is everywhere.

I don’t stop. I can’t. His body is a limp noodle in my arms when I feel hands coming from everywhere pulling me away.

There is no sound in my vortex of rage. I’m dragged into the hall and slammed against the wall where I slide down to the floor. Slowly, I begin to hear my pulse pounding in my head. I hear it whooshing past my ears until the chaos around me explodes and then goes from absolute silence to deafening. I want to cover my ears, but I can’t see Téa. I have to see her.

“Téa! Where’s Téa?” I hear myself yell, but I can’t feel my lips moving or the vibration of my voice rising from my throat. My hands are numb, and my vision is blurry from the adrenaline rushing through my body.

And then she is there in front of me on her knees, blood trickling down her face, mascara smeared under her eyes, a swollen lip and trembling like a leaf in the wind on a cold fall day.  

I reach out and pull her into my lap.

“Oh my God, are you okay?”

She buries her face in my neck, and her shoulders begin to shake when the full realization of what just happened hits me. That fucker tried to rape her.

“Who the fuck is that guy?” I yell at the three men who are rolling him onto his back to assess his injuries. I fucking hope he’s dead.

“Oh God, what the? What the hell happened here?” Bridgette yells from the end of the hall when she sees Téa trembling in my arms. She’s breathing hard from running up the stairs, and men are shoving past her trying to get to us.

“That motherfucker tried to rape her,” I say, pointing at the bloodied body on the bathroom floor. She bends to look around the door and gasps.

“Oh my God, oh no, no, no. Is he dead? He looks dead. Did you check his pulse? Check his pulse, you idiots. You’re supposed to be paramedics, I don’t want that fool dying in my bathroom!” she yells. 

“He’s alive, barely though. Did anybody call an ambulance?” the guy supporting the rapist’s neck says.

“Good. Do you know him?” I ask Bridgette.

“Yeah, that’s Matt. He’s one of the firefighters at the station.” She grabs ahold of the broken doorframe and gasps again when she zeros in on Téa’s face.

“Holy mother of Jesus. Somebody get over here and take a look at this woman!” She kneels down on my right and reaches out to touch her face. She cringes and pulls her hand back when she realizes that no matter where she puts her hand, it’s going to hurt.

“What did he do to you, baby?” she asks with tears welling in her eyes.

Blake pushes his way through the people in the hall and stops behind his wife. He places his big hand gently on her shoulder, and she raises hers to cover it without looking to see who it is.

“B, let me look her over, baby,” he says. She scoots around to Téa’s back, and Blake takes her place next to us.

“Téa honey, can you look this way?” he says, trying to coax her away from my chest. She sobs harder, and I risk causing her pain when I rub my hand up and down her back.

“Hey beautiful girl, will you let Blake look at you for a second? I promise you won’t have to move off my lap.”

She surprises me when she pushes herself off of my chest and allows Blake to check her pupils and gently look at her injuries. Her cheeks are purple with petechiae, and her lip is twice the size it was just a minute ago.

Blake looks at me with a question in his eyes.

“He was strangling her. Her feet were off the ground. She couldn’t … she couldn’t breathe.”

He closes his eyes and runs his big hand over his bald head. “That bastard, he told me he was getting help. He’s had some violent outbursts at the station, but I had no idea his problems went this deep.”

“You knew he was capable of this, and you invited him into your home? For fucking dinner?”

“I didn’t know he was like this. I swear I had no idea he was this deranged.”

“He talked to her on the beach. She wasn’t interested, and he sat around mean mugging her the rest of the time we were there. Apparently he doesn’t take rejection too well,” Bridgette says.

“Well, I hope he takes well to breathing through a tube for the rest of his fucking life. If he lives.”

“Stop. Please, just get me out of here. Get me away from him.” Her voice is croaky as blood trickles from her nose.

Téa buries her face against my chest, and I place a feather-light kiss on top of her head, looking at Blake.

“Is it safe to move her?”

“I think so. She probably has a concussion, but nothing seems broken. Just hold your head still, honey, okay? Don’t move it around until the ambulance gets here.”

“Okay,” she says against my shirt in her scratchy voice.

I press my back against the wall and slide up, careful not to jostle her in my arms. Downstairs, red and blue lights sweep across the room through the glass of the front door. Blake pushes it open, and two EMTs are rolling a gurney up the path. 

“Put her here,” one of the men says, and Blake starts rattling off her injuries while I lay her down like she’s a china doll. I cover her hands with mine when she doesn't let go of my neck.

“I won’t leave you. I’m right here, you can let go.”

“I can’t.”

“You can, you’re safe, hold onto my hands.”

I can tell she’s concentrating on relaxing the muscles in her arms. She's working on letting go of me. A few minutes go by, and the EMTs work around me doing what they can until she’s able to let go.

“I’m going to put this collar around your neck …”

“Téa, her name’s Téa,” I say when the shorter of the two men looks at me for help with her name.

“It’s just a precaution until we get you to the hospital for a scan to make sure nothing’s broken.” 

When she is finally able to loosen her hold on me, I stand next to her holding her hands like I promised.

I’ve never seen someone so shaken before. I’ve witnessed hundreds of men flat on their backs on the field bleeding, broken, concussed, and even blind, but none with this wild look of terror and panic in their eyes.

But then again, none of them had their injuries forced upon them by someone twice their size.

The EMT tells her we are ready to leave, but a police officer approaches us as we are rolling down the path to the street.

“Excuse me, sir, were you involved in the attack?”

“Yes, I found him strangling her and pulled him off of her.”

“We’re going to need you to come downtown with us for questioning.”

“NO!” Téa screams, digging her fingernails into my palms.

“I’m not leaving her. You can come with us or meet us at the hospital. I’ll tell you whatever you want to know, but she’s scared, and I will not leave her.”

The cop looks at his partner, who had come up behind him when he heard Téa’s yell.

“We’ll meet you at the hospital then, as long as you’re riding in the ambulance with her.”

“Yeah, of course.”

“Why are you questioning him? He saved me from that monster,” Téa whispers. Her voice is completely gone.

“Just standard procedure, ma’am. We have to talk to everyone involved. We will need to get your statement too as soon as you’re able.”

She shifts her gaze up and away when she doesn’t want to see the officer anymore, unable to move her neck due to the brace.

“She’s not ready,” I say.

“We will meet you there,” the first officer says, ignoring my comment.

The ride to the hospital is bumpy and physically painful for Téa and emotionally painful for me. I can’t stand to see her hurting like this. It takes me back to the day I watched Mariah struggle through a long, difficult labor only to slip away, leaving me alone and destroyed. I can’t live through that kind of loss in my life again.

At Memorial Hospital, she is cleared of a spinal cord injury and the brace from her neck is removed. The officers from Bridgette’s house question her via pencil and paper. They insist on talking to us separately, much to her discomfort.

When they are satisfied that everyone’s stories match up, they clear out and leave a business card on the table next to her bed in the triage room.

She scribbles on the yellow legal pad. I want to go to your house but what about Scarlet? Will she be scared of how I look?”

She looks much better than she did at Bridgette’s house. The nurse cleaned the cut on her head and washed the blood and makeup off her face. She has four stitches in her forehead and a couple beyond her hairline, but none are visible when her hair is down. The only thing obvious is her lip.

“No. You’re beautiful. We will just tell her you had an accident and hurt your lip. She doesn’t need to know about the rest.”

Her swollen bottom lip trembles and two big fat tears race down her cheeks. She mouths the words I’m sorry.

“What could you possibly be sorry for?”

She writes again and turns the pad for me to see.

I’m sorry I disrupted your life. I’m sorry you had to see that. I’m sorry I made you go to that dinner.

I shake my head and prop my hip on her narrow bed and look into her eyes.

“You have not disrupted my life, you’ve affected it in more positive ways than you can imagine. This was not your fault, and I’m fucking glad I came to check on you when I did. Who knows what could have happened? And you didn’t make me go anywhere. I wanted to be with you, so I was, period.

“I’m going to ask the nurse when you can leave. I’ll be right back, okay?”

She nods, and I exit the room and walk to the nurse’s station.

While I wait for the nurse to finish up her phone call, I wonder if they brought Matt to the same hospital. I wonder if he’s breathing on his own. I even wonder if he’s still alive.

The nurse hangs up and says she’ll bring Téa’s discharge papers right in.

Back in her room, the nurse left a set of scrubs for her to wear home. I ruined her clothes when I carried her out of the house soaked in Matt’s blood.

“Do you want some help?”

She nods her head, and I remove the sheet from her legs and help her sit on the edge of the bed. She has a few bruises on her shins and a larger one on her hip where she hit the floor after Matt released his hold on her. She’s stiff and sore, but thankfully nothing’s broken.

I reach around and untie the gown behind her neck. She’s bare under her gown, I know, because she wouldn’t let go of my hand when they undressed her.

She lets it fall around her waist and raises her arms. I bunch up the scrub top and slide it over her head, but not without admiring the artwork on her skin and her perfect soft breasts.

It’s odd that a moment of what feels like deja vu hits me when I see her naked. I’ve never seen her naked before. Even when we were swimming with Scarlet, she wore a one-piece suit with large round cutouts on both sides and a back that consisted of a thin piece of material that ran from top of her ass to her neck. Hardly modest, but not a barely-there string bikini either.

The feeling leaves as soon as it starts when I see the large bruise on her flank under her ribs from being kicked. That motherfucker is going to pay for doing this to her. I don’t know how or when, but he will pay.

I squat down, holding the scrub pants open so she can step into them. She places her hand on my shoulder, and I close my eyes because the part of her that I had planned on spending a lot of time with tonight is right in front of my face.

When she has both feet in, I stand, bringing them up as I do. I tie the string in a bow, and she places her hands over mine, stopping my robotic assistance. I stop and look at her face to see what she needs, but she can’t tell me with her voice.

She rises up on her toes and presses her lips against mine. It’s a tender kiss full of gratitude and regret.

“Let’s go home,” I say against her lips. She nods, and I slide my arm carefully behind her knees and scoop her into my arms.

I carry her against hospital policy outside to where Cap is waiting with the Town Car.

Not a word is spoken when he opens the door, and I slide in the back seat cradling her in my arms. Not a word is spoken all the way home, and still none when I tuck her bruised and battered sleeping body safely into my bed.