Some Came Desperate: A Love Saga (15 page)

        “Are you sure you’re okay, sweety?” he asked her, studying every inch of her pretty face.  She wiped the tears from her large eyes and nodded again.  Her verbal skills suddenly non-existent.

        He pulled her back against him, but this time so tightly that she cringed.  He looked at her again.  “What’s the matter?”  She didn’t respond.  “What’s the matter, Simone?  Are you hurt?”

        “No, I’m not hurt, I just . . .  It’s my arm.”

        He put her back on her feet and looked urgently at her arm.  There was a gash on it, not a deep one, but obviously a painful one. “Simone,” he said in some anguish.

        “It’s not as bad as it looks.”

        “Why didn’t you go to the hospital and have this looked at?” he asked with an angry tilt to his voice.  “And where’s that officer anyway?  I told you not to let him leave here until I came.”

        Simone exhaled.  “I’ve bothered enough people for one night, Nick.  I wasn’t going to be keeping that man for no reason.”

        “Simone!”

        “And I didn’t go to any hospital because I don’t need to.”

        “You don’t?”

        “No.  It’s not that deep.  It’ll heal on its own.”

        Nick looked up toward the heavens and then back down at Simone.  What was he going to do about her?  He exhaled.  “What happened?”

        Simone hesitated and then began walking around her small living room.  Then she sat down on the sofa. Nick joined her there.  But she still didn’t immediately speak.  And Nick knew why. He had seen it many times before, in his old days as a prosecutor in the state attorney’s office when the jury returns with the guilty verdict and the criminal who thought he had gotten away with murder, stood dumbfounded.  And later it was worse.  The shock after the shock.  The realization that this was it, that it really did happen and was henceforth and forever more a fact in their life.  When Simone moved closer to Nick, and Nick placed his arm around her, he knew the shock was even more devastating for somebody like Simone, because it wasn’t about getting away with anything; because it was so wholly undeserved. 

        “I was coming home from work,” she finally said, as she placed her feet under her butt and snuggled closer against Nick’s big, warm body.  Nick thought about Delia, and how she would feel if she was a witness to this cozy little scene, but he couldn’t help himself.  He pulled her closer. 

        “I climbed the stairs to the second floor,” Simone went on, “and saw this dude walking toward me.  I didn’t think a whole lot of it, because I’d seen him before.”

        “Where?”

        “Out front.  I remembered seeing him a couple times out there when I came home from work.  I knew he didn’t live in the building, but I figured he was just hanging out with the others.  So I assumed he was visiting somebody on my floor when I saw him up here.  And he wasn’t acting menacing or anything.   He was acting normal.  He walked on by me, at least that was what I had thought he’d done, but as soon as I unlocked my door, he knocked me against it and forced his way inside.  I fought him as best I could, but he was so big and strong.”  She had to hesitate, as flashes of that horrific fight returned in her mind.  Then she exhaled.  “I prayed so hard.  I just knew he was going to... I prayed.  And God had mercy because those guys out front heard my screams and came running to see what was going on.”

        Nick shook his head, unable to even pretend that her little story didn’t terrify him.  And anger him.  And make him feel completely responsible for not being more insistent whenever the subject of her neighborhood came up.  She was always so adamant, always so certain that the war zone she was living in wasn’t so bad after all.  Now they were here, shaken by what might have been, and he could barely contain his rage, his guilt.  “Did they catch him?” he asked her.

        “They tried, but he got away.  He was able to hold them off with the knife.”

        “Knife?  What knife?  He had a knife?”

        Simone nodded.  It was horrifying to her, too.  “He apparently had it to my throat but I just didn’t. . . I was too shaken to realize it.”

        Simone could feel Nick’s entire body tightened.  He looked down at her.  “That’s how your arm...?”

        “No.  He didn’t stab me or anything like that.  I think I hit it against something when I was fighting him.”

        Nick nodded.  He should have felt relieved at least for that, but he didn’t.  The idea of Simone, his Simone, fighting off some attacker was too much for him to even try and imagine.  And the attacker had a knife, too?  He knew the deal.  A thug with a knife usually aimed to use it.  Thank God he didn’t, Nick thought.

        “The police are looking for him, though,” Simone said, as if that would comfort Nick.  It didn’t.  He ran his hand across his face and thought of the million reasons why he shouldn’t say what he was about to say.  He thought about Delia.  But he couldn’t help himself where Simone was concerned.  Their relationship had blossomed into a friendship, a very close friendship,  and he was just beginning to come to grips with the fact that he cared deeply for her.  He looked at her. “Simone?” he said softly, and when she looked up at him with those troubled green eyes, it nearly did him in.  His heart melted.  And he pulled her closer. 

        “I’m all right, Nick,” she said, seeing his anguish.  “I’ll be all right.”

        “Remember what we talked about?”

        “What?”

        “You know what.”

        “What?”  She said this somewhat irritably, not at all interested in playing any guessing games right now.  Then the bulb flashed in her head.  And she shook it.  “Not that again.”

        “Yes, that again.  We’ve got to do something about this, Simone.  Much as you might hate to admit it, this is one of the worse neighborhoods in the city you’re living in.  There’s so much crime in this community, and now with that crack cocaine in full swing it’s gotten even worse.  And you know it.  Have you at least given thought about moving?”

        “Of course I’ve thought about it,” she said.  “I’m not blind.  I know it’s rough around here now.  Sometimes late at night, something like 2 and 3 in the morning, I can look out my window and see all of those rock stars just walking around like skeletons from the graveyard, looking for some kind of way to get money to feed that habit, and it’s scary, I ain’t gonna even lie.  Yeah, it’s scary.”  Then she paused.  “That’s why I went to Jules,” she finally said.

        This surprised Nick, and hurt him, too, because she never came to him.  “You went to Jules?” he asked.  “When?”

        “A few weeks ago, after there was a drive-by shooting on this street.”

        “A drive-by shooting?  Why didn’t you tell me, Simone?  We talked every week.”

        “I know.  I just didn’t . . .”  In truth, she just didn’t want to bother him with her personal hang-ups.  He, after all, had never even intimated about any kind of intimate relationship with her.  Just a friendship was all he seemed to be after.  And, in her book, you didn’t burden friends with problems that required too much to solve.  You could lose them that way, she felt, and with Nick’s friendship, the closest she’d ever had, she wasn’t willing to risk that.

        “So you called Jules,” he said, to keep her talking. 

        “Yes.”

        “What did she say?  Why didn’t she help you move out of here right away?”

        “Because I didn’t ask her for that.  I asked her to lend me enough money to help pay my tuition through cosmetology school.  That’s always been my dream, to become a hair stylist and I figured I needed to get going with it.  Once I got my license and got me a booth in somebody’s shop, I could move my own self up out of here and could pay her back, too.”

        “So what happened?  She wouldn’t do it?”

        “She would do it.  At least I think she would.  But when she told me she first had to make sure it was okay with Jeremy, I just told her to forget it.  I’d die before I gave him a say in my life.”

        Nick hesitated.  He knew he was about to tread on secret ground, but he had to know.  “Why did you stab him, Simone?” he asked her.

        Simone looked at him.  “How did you know that I. . . How did you find that out?”

        “I’m an officer of the court, Simone, I have my ways.  But why did you do it?  Did he try to hurt you or—”

        “Hurt me?  Jeremy?  Like no way.”  She exhaled, as if just the thought of Jeremy Druce even thinking about harming her was ridiculous.  “But he hurt Jules.  The night of her eighteenth birthday.  I caught him. . . I caught them together, and I don’t know, I just thought it was really rude of Jeremy.”

        Nick almost smiled.  What a term of art.  “Rude?” he said.

        “Yeah.  I mean, now it seems really stupid, but back then that’s how I felt.  How rude of him to take advantage of Jules like that; to brand her as his woman before she had a chance to make up her own mind.  You saw my sister.  She’s beyond beautiful.  She could have any man she wants.  He never gave her a chance to have that choice.”

        “And because of Jeremy Druce you didn’t take Jules money?”

        “After I told her to forget it, she didn’t offer it, which was fine by me because I wasn’t about to take it.  Not if it came with Jeremy’s blessing.”

        “And your plan was to find you a better place after you got your career going.”

        “After I graduated cosmetology school, that was the plan, yeah.”

        “And you didn’t feel you could come to me?”  He said this with a smile, although his eyes were still filled with hurt.

        “Come to you?  Nick do you realize how much money we’re talking about?”

        “Does that matter?”

        “Of course it matters!  I’m not taking advantage of our friendship like that.  Come on.  It’s not like we’re down like that.”

        Although she was smiling, Nick wasn’t even trying to.  He leaned away from her and looked at her hard.  He looked so serious that Simone had to wonder what was it that she had said that was so wrong.  “We aren’t down like what, Simone?”

        “Down like that.  Like you owe me something.  I’m just somebody you call on the phone late at night when you need to clear your head, or you meet for lunch just to have somebody different to meet for lunch with, and I know that.  I understand the rules.  I’d look like a pure fool asking you to lend me money or to help me get up out of here when I know good n’ well I don’t mean that to you.  Not
that
.”

        Nick removed his arm from around her and leaned forward.  He pulled out a cigarette, a move Simone was becoming to realize as his normal reaction to stressful situations.  Even on the telephone, when they’d start talking about some particularly bad case he was working on, he’d excuse himself and grab a cigarette.  Almost always.  Now was no exception, as he pulled one out from that expensive gold case he carried them in, replaced the case in his coat pocket, and lit up. 

        At first he just sat there, leaned forward, taking slow drags on his smoke.  Simone sat still and watched him, as his back tensed with each drag, as his muscular frame seemed ill-suited for all of this drama.  Then he looked back at her.  And she could tell that he was quietly furious.  “What do I mean to you, Simone?” he asked her, his look dead serious. 

        Simone didn’t quite know what to say because she didn’t quite know what he wanted.  Did he want the truth, or did he want her to tell him what he probably wanted to hear?  “What do you mean to me?” she repeated, purposely cagey, which yielded no response from him, just a continual, hard stare. 

        “You mean a lot to me, Nick,” she said, opting for the truth.  “You know that.”  He continued staring at her.  What more did he want her to say, she wondered.  But his silence, as she suspected he had intended, kept her talking.  “I value our friendship very much.  When we have lunch together or talk on the phone, I really enjoy those times.”  She was speaking in massive understatements, since being with or talking to Nick Perry was easily the highlight of most of her days.  But she wasn’t about to tell him that.