Precise (28 page)

I
t’s hot. No, stuffy. What happened to the cool breeze that was settling in the air?

There’s a furry object slicing through the points where my lips meet. It forms a constricting circle around the circumference of my head. My hands won’t budge, my legs won’t twitch and a pain surges through my temple when I try to move.

I’m not sure if my eyes are open because everything is black either way. Plus, solving a problem, even one as simple as this, feels like carrying a boulder up a hill.

I don’t know where I am.

My head pounds again, yelling at me to stop rambling, start thinking. Anything. I’m sure of two things, if not anything else. I can’t move my clasped hands from my lap any more than I can pull my feet away from my ass. And secondly, I’m on my side, lying parallel to the surface below me that refuses to stop jerking.

Then once more—the swings and pulls of gravity are the puppeteer and I am the toy. It heaves me backwards and hurls something sharp in my back.

I gasp for air.

The air is too dense. It feels like I’m swallowing marshmallows but I have no choice if I want to live. I keep gulping. The air catches in my throat as if my lungs refuse any more of this sticky, thick gunk.

Another jolt. My temple hits a sharp bulge in the short, fuzzy surface under me. The pain is brief. It feels like I’ve been walloped with that boulder.

The blackness swallows me under.

• • •

M
y eyes snap open.

My limbs are still bound, mouth gagged, head pounding and sweat is trickling the outline of my ear and jaw in response. It’s the same place. My tongue is drizzled with carpet fibers. My body hurts as the hard surfaces around me hold me too tightly against them.

I woke here before. Has it been minutes, hours, days? I must be having the same dream.

Ella.
Why has her name popped into my thoughts? Is she okay?

Oh my God.

It hits me. I don’t know where she is and I should know this but I don’t.
Ouch
. My head hurts from the image.

My hair sticks to my skin. It literally
sticks
to my face. It feels as if there is an oozy substance smeared against the side of it.

This can’t be a dream, though I’m in the same sort of confused state I would be if it was. I try thinking where I am, what has happened to get me here, but the pain in my head is screaming. It’s much too loud for me to think. I have a banshee wedged in my head.

Something whirs beneath me.

Another jerk. I grip onto consciousness by remembering the pain, relishing it. Because what else is there if I can’t hold onto this? The rumble around me gurgles on itself, splatters, then cuts out. The jolt sends my head up again. For a moment I lie in a motionless existence, floating through space.

Then the crash comes.

Ella.

I expect the blackness before it calls for me.

• • •

“O
ut, bitch.”

The hiss in his voice sinks the banshee, the marshmallow air, the pounding, everything I feared into my imagination. My body aches. I want to be dreaming. I can’t understand this.

I’m not caught
. I hate the darkness and now it’s taunting me with this. I can’t remember what happened between running and here because I fell, hit my head and suffered concussion.

This doesn’t happen.

This.

Can’t.

Happen.

A stream of light floods my face as he moves to the side. I shy back.

The night is swollen, complete in the transition from blocking out the day. So, where is the sharp light coming from? I squint my eyelids and see the floodlight against a corrugated wall.

“I said
out
!” Brent roars.

I jump. I would have launched to my feet and held a salute to my forehead but something scratchy binds me together. I’m a helpless bundle. What sick game is he up to? I’m burning like Joan of Arc, I’m drowning in anxiety like the Katie who lived months ago.

He has tied me together
.

I can barely believe the words I’ve thought. Ella sleeping in Liam’s spare bed. Nancy calling to tell me something is wrong. These things flash in my mind.

I try thrusting upright but my efforts translate to moans and wriggles. Brent’s face twists like a pretzel. He pulls me out by a tight pinch under the loose skin of my arm. I bite the material in my mouth. I will be quiet. He won’t hurt me if I’m quiet. My muffled scream drowns out my thoughts and all my other senses. It obviously drowns out his patience, too, because it earns me a wallop over the other side of my face.

Reality begins to seep through. A freezing liquid filling my brain, my blood vessels, my tingling fingers. This hurts too much to be a dream. The dread cutting me open from inside, thinking about Ella, is too, too real. Nothing is appearing randomly like in dreams.

We’re standing on a slab of concrete, surrounded by wild grass as far as my eye will focus. The sticky ooze at my temple stings as the chill in the night hits me.

Over my shoulder, the warehouse from which the floodlight is hanging sits about two stories high with a flat, matching corrugated roof.

My calves are the only part of me not in pain; they are loose and all fuzzy inside. Warm air circulates around them from the car. But I know the heat from the exhaust is only a temporary relief. The chills continue to crawl over my shoulders and bare arms. My red silk dress is a dull shade under the film of dirt and scuff. It’s probably maroon now.

“I’m warning you: if you try and run, I
will
kill you.”

My breath quickens. Brent produces a teethed knife from the back of his belt. It has a curved end. He drives it at my legs, even before I can process that a
knife
is coming toward me. I tense, my lungs are pockets of plastic.

Oh. Oh. Oh.

Then my ankles spring out from each other and a wad of itchy yarn falls at my feet. I sigh.

It isn’t my time. Yet.

I don’t get time to move in the opposite direction. He’s quick to pinch the loose skin under my arm again and drag me forward with a fistful of my own hair.

“Where are we? What are you doing to me?” I say, audible to another ear only as
wheaaa arr he? Wha arr who mng o me?
I sound pathetic. As if I’m two-years-old and have a lump of food in my mouth.

A sickness stirs in my gut. I’m thrashing against the trunk of the car but I’m standing here and I’m on a rollercoaster.

The vomit is coming up so quickly; hot, clumpy. I try to stop him pulling me, but it’s to no avail. I need to sit and wash it away with a glass of water but they aren’t luxuries I’ll get. The sickness turns into a hot train pushing up my esophagus. I mumble to let me stop but he doesn’t so much as flinch.

It’s too late. It bubbles up my chest, my throat. The liquid burns. Then it explodes.

It can’t quite make it out of my mouth. Some splatters on the path in front of us, some on part of the right side of him closest to me. Some of the vomit clings to the cloth gagging me. The taste almost makes me want to heave again. By some miracle, none of the splatters make it onto my body, only on Brent, the floor and back inside my mouth. I cough the rest of it up when he rips something at the back of my head, taking a chunk of hair with him as the cloth falls slack.

It feels like a concrete pipe passes through me. It impales me in between the point where the two halves of my ribcage form an upside down “V”. I splatter some more. It hurts to breathe this time, and again and again after that.

“Just to remind you not to scream,” he chuckles, “in case you thought you could.”

I hang limp as he drenches my face in water and the sheer volume forces me to gargle and spit. I swish some of the remaining liquid to freshen my mouth.

He drags me to a wide metal door. The rows of ribbed lines disappear behind the wall, revealing a dark entrance to the warehouse. I can’t make out much besides crates of boxes. It hurts to hold my core upright. He will take me anyway.

Another rope secures me down once we stop. I want to coil up and rock myself to sleep. It hurts to sit. At least I can rest my back against the stack behind me.

“How pretty,” Brent says, flicking up the heart on my chest, then letting it smack against my raw skin. “This is
so
Liam that it makes me sick.”

He imitates a heaving action with his mouth then walks off and flicks something as two overhead floodlights inside open up.

Brent is pacing back and forward, snarling like a dog with lockjaw. The sound is familiar. He grunted the sound as my hands went purple under his weight and he thrust down onto my pelvis.

At this moment, I feel Brent replacing Marco and Cooper in Tim’s bedroom that night in my memory.

I scream. I plead more sincerely than I ever have before but Brent’s propulsions on me become stronger. I feel a rip. I empty my voice box as my ears fall deaf.

Brent suspends mid-pace. “I said . . .
shut
the
fuck
up!”

I remember the big, round eyes striking me like a knife’s blade. I can see his pupils clearly now. The eyes are fully dilated. It’s strange seeing the black against the white, with no humble medium separating them. I miss staring into his sky blue irises. I want my brother back. This pretend vision scares me.

His fingers tremble. He stomps over to me. I shake against the packs behind me but the weight would easily weigh ten times what I do. Fear quickens my heartbeat, as if the blood drumming in my head could burst me free. Why is he coming? His path diverts to the side, however, and I follow his hurried footsteps with my eyes.

He yanks out the knife from his belt and uses it to slash open a box from a crate a few columns across from me. I don’t dare breathe too deeply.

He pulls out a clear plastic packet filled with white powder. He slashes that too, then pushes the knife into the contents and sprinkles them onto the flat cardboard of the box next to him.

“What’s hap—p—pening? What are you d—doing?”

“What did I say? You speak if I tell you to.”

“What did you do to Ella? Is she okay? Where is she?”

Brent’s response? He rolls his eyes. This makes me sicker than if he came over and struck me. I just need to know.

He pulls his wallet from a rear pocket and empties the contents adjacent to the powder. Money and paper fall out. He chooses a twenty-dollar note from the selection and rolls it up. My memory flicks back to movies where I’ve seen this done before.

But then I remember seeing this. Cooper doing this with Brent after he kissed me under the monkey bars. When Brent woke up again.

If only I found the key to this trigger earlier I’d have a clue to help me see Cooper and Marco didn’t hurt me.

Easily, the roll angles toward the contents, providing a passage inside him. He snorts and most of it is gone. I was right; this
isn’t
Brent. It wasn’t Brent that night either, or me. Rather, a macho-I’m-invincible persona possessed him and rendered me senseless.

A couple of sniffs and coughs incorporated, and he shakes his head back to life. Keen eyes. They say,
I’m ready to go
.

He resumes the pacing. “Okay, okay, I’ve been rude. Let’s discuss what we both know. I’m the teacher and you can be my student. I’d like to see you grovel.
Really
want something from me for once.”

I can’t speak. I have so many things to say. I need to speak to him and I can’t say anything.

“Go!”

The moonlight floods on him. A shadow casts across the width of the warehouse. The column figure lifts a limb. It points at me. “I said
speak
!”

“I’m—I’m sorry,” I choke, a lump catching the words prematurely. “I don’t know what to do.”

“You know the game; a question for an answer. You’re very lucky, because I’m being just so damn nice.” He picks up a chair lined in a stack near the roller door and walks it over to me. He places it near the end of my feet and swings his leg over the base. He rests his hands loosely over the backing.

“Now, speak!” He aims the blade tip at my face, so close I can see the brushed metal.

“Why did you hurt my daughter?”

“Ella?”

No shit. “Yes, your niece,” I say, for effect.

“She’s not my niece. She’s my nothing. You’re my nothing.” He comes so close I can smell his sweat, alcohol and something else mixed into his hot breath. Can see the beginning of stubble on his chin. “See, I’ve wasted three decades trying to get you to love me and I give up, Katherine.”

I draw back a rising sob. I want to say a thousand words at once. “It was you, all along. You knew Coop wasn’t capable of raping me because it was
you
.”

“Come on now, Kates. I know you passed your high school English exam with flying colors. Your teacher wouldn’t be pleased to hear about this and neither am I. That wasn’t a question.”

“Why, then. Why did you do it?”

He nods, too pleased with himself. “It’s simple: Coop didn’t deserve you.
I
deserve you. I’ve loved you every fucking moment. He was all over you. Marco thought he deserved you too. I’ve been waiting my whole life. Then Coop took you to the side of the house after we came back from the park thinking that he was in with a chance, tried feeling underneath that sexy dress of yours. You said no, but he didn’t listen so I ripped him off, took you upstairs. You were so shaken, Kates. I made you a drink to calm you down.”

A sickness stirs in the pit of my stomach. Not like before, no. This is real, but it isn’t. This feeling is a slow and sticky Band-Aid, ripped off hair-by-hair.

“You were hyperventilating, you had too much attention; there wasn’t enough space to relax. I helped you. Then I tried touching you, kissing you. You didn’t understand that you wanted me as much as I wanted you, being so drunk and all, so I helped you understand. All these years of sexual tension. I was sick of waiting. You have no idea how good it felt after all those years of patiently waiting.”

“You monster! All of this time, you were practically my big brother.”

“Wrong kind of love. No one,” he pauses, “will
ever
have loved you as infinitely as I did.”