Freeing Tuesday (25 page)

Tuesday

I feel his hand slide over my hip and tuck underneath me, pulling me to him. My entire body stiffens but he doesn’t seem to notice and his heavy breathing continues to land on my neck and makes my skin crawl. I stop breathing and try not to wake him up as I inch myself away. Suddenly his hand tightens its grip and his voice echoes throughout my head.

“Pull the fucking trigger, Mallory. It’s the only way you’ll ever be free.”

I hear myself whimper and it seems a lot louder than it actually is in this empty room. His voice continues taunting me, telling me that one shot, one pull of my finger will set me free.

Under the pillow I feel the grip of the gun in my hand as he rolls to his back and his arm lets go of me. I flip myself as fast as I can so I am straddling the one person I never wanted to be this close to ever again. I have to keep reminding myself that it is for my freedom. One pull, one bang. That’s all it will take to get my life back. To let me be happy.

His hands shoot to grip my hips and I hear him laugh, asking me what I’m doing waking him up at such an odd hour, except it’s not just his voice I hear, but Evan’s too and it throws me off. I shake my head to free myself of all thoughts about Evan.  My free hand circles around his neck and forces his head back onto the pillow. I flick the safety off with my thumb and I can barely hear anything over my heartbeat.

His brown eyes glare at me, taunting me with the knowledge that doing this willingly will wreak more havoc on me than anything else ever has. My hands shake uncontrollably.

“Tuesday.”

My whole body jumps at the whisper in my head. I know it’s just in my head though. I’m still here in hell. A hell that I will be free of if I can get my fingers to work and just pull the fucking trigger. Why the hell won’t my hand follow my head’s instruction?

I hear my name being called over and over while Anthony laughs in my face but I can’t understand why he is calling me Tuesday. His hands circle my wrists and push them away from his body. His fingers bite into my flesh, hitting a nerve that makes my grip go slack on the gun and it falls to the mattress. I watch as it hits the blanket and when my eyes flick back to the man beneath me it scares me when I notice it’s no longer Anthony, but Evan.

“TUESDAY!” Evan’s yells finally break through the fog my mind is in. His eyes look like they’re about to pop out of his head as he grips my shoulders and shakes me back and forth. “Mother fucker. Tuesday! Wake up!”

My heart thunders against my chest and I can feel the wetness of tears running down my cheeks. I push off him and scramble toward the corner of the room, cowering as I wrap my arms around my legs. I pull them into my chest and ignore the pain shooting through my still healing shoulder.

The screams and cries I hear sound like they are coming from someone else and its only when I start having trouble breathing that I realize that they are coming from me. I tangle my hands into my hair as I try to hide more of myself from him.

I can feel his eyes on me and just knowing that I just did that to him, that I thought he was Anthony, even for a second, makes me sick. I can see him through the curtain of hair in front of my face.  The sad, defeated look on his face kills me as he disarms the gun that I had just pointed at his head and places it in the drawer next to the bed.

I just held my fucking gun to his god damn head. Please kill me now.

He drops to his knees in front of me but stops moving when he sees how badly I am shaking. “Tuesday,” he whispers roughly.

It’s the same whisper that shot through my head a few minutes ago. The one that I thought was my brain playing tricks on me.

I shake my head and a sob breaks free, “Just… G-go…”

“I’m not leaving you here,” his voice cracks as his hands slide up the front of my shins.

“I just tried to fucking
kill you,
Evan!” My fingers tighten in my hair as I scream. “I pointed a goddamn gun at your
head
!”

“You don’t think I know what just happened? You don’t think I know that you were dreaming about him. I heard you scream his name. I heard you cry out for me. For
me
, Tuesday. I’m not going to leave because you had a nightmare and thought you were back there.”

He leans back against the wall and pulls me to him, laying my legs across his. His face tucks into my neck and draws his fingers back and forth across my thighs. He calms my body with every movement but my mind still races knowing that one second later and he could have been dead. It makes me realize now more than ever that I am closer than I should be and I love Evan too much to put him in danger like this.

I pull him closer to me knowing that this will be the last time I let myself be this close and study everything about him in the dim light: The way his chest rises and falls with every breath, the feeling of his warm breath against my neck and chest. The way the muscles in his arm flex and relax with every movement of his hand on my thigh. I trace the edges of his tattoos until he carries me back to bed where he tucks me into him as close as he can get.

Evan

I reach out and search for the warmth of Tuesday but come up with nothing but cold sheets. It’s not the first time I’ve woken up alone when I fall asleep with her in my arms and after last night I’m surprised she even stayed in bed with me at all.

I stretch and think about everything that happened. I’m not even going to kid myself and say that I wasn’t scared, because I was petrified. That wasn’t Tuesday, not my Tuesday anyway.

I swing myself over the edge of the bed and rub my eyes, trying to figure out when she crawled out of bed. I call out for her but she doesn’t answer so I get up and walk into the living room. Nothing has changed since we watched movies in here last night, but Tuesday isn’t here either.

A piece of paper on the island catches my eye and my heart instantly drops. I know something is wrong without even looking at it. Tuesday’s handwriting is scrawled across the torn up paper and I know without even reading that the bed has been empty for way too long.

Evan,

Please don’t hate me for this and please know that it’s killing me just knowing how it’s going to make you feel. I’m sorry... For everything... For putting you in danger, for making you fall in love with someone so unworthy of the love that you give. For not being strong enough to be the woman you deserve. It’s killing me knowing that I can’t be that woman, but it kills me even more knowing something could happen to you because of me. Something almost happened to you BY me and that isn’t right. The words you whispered in my ear that night in the hospital still ring through my mind like you’re saying them again. Family protects family. Never forget that because this is my way of protecting you and everyone else.

I love you. Always…

Tuesday

She’s gone. Totally fucking gone and she didn’t even give me a chance to beg her to stay. The paper crumples in my hand as I burst out the door and over to Jameson and Abby’s, hoping that maybe I will get lucky and she will be there but in my gut I know better. She left this way so she didn’t have to say goodbye.

Jameson opens the door after a few solid knocks and I shove myself by him in a panic that he picks up on immediately.

“What’s wrong?”

“Have you seen Tuesday this morning?”

He shrugs, “Not my day to babysit your bed buddies.”

“Fuck you, asshole.” I have to take a deep breath to keep myself from giving my brother the beat down of his life for even thinking Tuesday is just another girl.

“Calm down. No, I haven’t seen her. Now what the hell is wrong?”

“Tuesday. She just fucking left,” I growl. Just saying it out loud makes it more real, everything is starting to hit me and I’m so upset that I am pissing myself off, I pace back and forth in the entryway.

“Evan, its Tuesday. She’ll come back.”

Biting my tongue, I try to calm down because he doesn’t know how serious this is. The shit that happened last night fucked with her head and I don’t know what she’s going to do.

He continues watching me pace before I settle my head against the wall, my fists clenching again and again by my sides.

“I can’t believe she just up and fucking left like this!” I yell at the wall.

“Settle the fuck down before you wake the girls up, Evan.” He watches me like I’m an idiot before continuing. “You couldn’t possibly have thought that this was going anywhere. All you were doing was playing house. I knew sooner or later some shit like this would happen. It’s why I said not to do it in the first place!”

I scrape my hands over my face, trying to calm down.

“You don’t get it Jameson…”

“What? What don’t I get? That your favorite toy is gone and now you have to go find a new one?”

The rage hits me like a punch in the gut and I get in his face. “What you don’t seem to fucking get is that I fucking love her!” I back away because I feel the need to hit something and I don’t want it to be him. Instead I turn to the wall and smash my fist against it over and over screaming, “I fucking love her! I fucking fell in love with her! I was stupid and fell for her and now she’s gone! SON OF A BITCH!”

My hand shoots through the drywall and connects with the stud, ripping the skin off my knuckles. The blood runs down my fingers and onto the floor and it feels like my heart is going to explode.

Everything we’ve ever done together flashes through my mind as I watch the blood splatter against the floor. From the very first second she barged into my apartment I knew she would break me somehow. I just didn’t know if was going to hurt this bad this fast.

“Shit!” I growl as I push myself by him.

Running back to the apartment I follow the tracks I always watched her take, looking for something, anything that would tell me where she went or was going. I notice that her bag is no longer under the edge of the bed and when I open the drawer next to the bed my heart sinks even further. The gun from last night isn’t in the drawer where I unloaded it and set it.

I back up until my back hits the wall and I slide down it. Grabbing my phone I hit send on my last call. Tuesday. Almost every call in the past few months have been to her. It goes straight to voicemail and I hang my head as I listen to her sweet voice tell me to leave her a message.

I do. I pour my heart out to a damn machine, hating that my voice cracks when I beg her to come home because I love her with every part of me. No jokes about how my dick is going to miss her and it hits me that if she would just come back, just be in my life some way, that’s all I would need.  I have never been like this with anyone and it scares the hell out of me. She’s irreplaceable. I hate that I don’t know what to do, that I don’t even know where to begin looking for her.

I sit there on the floor hitting redial more times than I can count, hoping that she will turn her phone back on for just half a second so she will see that I keep calling. So she’ll see that I’m not giving up. I sit there so long that Jameson comes searching for me with Izzy in tow.

She sees me sitting on the floor and pushes past him. Pulling my arms off of my legs she climbs into my lap and wraps them back around her before kissing my cheek and settling her head against my shoulder.

How is it that my eight year old niece always knows just what to do? Just having her here makes me feel a tiny bit better. Not much, but just that tiny bit makes a difference.

Jameson watches us for a bit before asking if he can get me anything. The only thing I can think that I need other than Tuesday is my phone charger so I can keep calling her.

Tuesday

I pull my hood over my head as I sink into the chair on the deck and pull my legs into me. The water from the lake sparkles everywhere but the shady area in front of my rented cabin. It’s like the sun knows I’m here and wants to warn everyone to stay away.  I’m shrouded in darkness in every aspect of my life now.