Kissing My Killer (24 page)

When he eventually lay still atop me, he brushed my hair away from my ear and whispered. “You are the most incredible woman I’ve ever met.”

Only then did he release my hands and draw himself from me. My arms dropped limply to my sides. He put his arms around my waist and turned and lifted me so that he was lying on his back on the seat, his knees pulled up to allow him to fit, and I was straddling him. I collapsed forward on his chest. Too late, I remembered his injury and jerked my head up. But he stroked my hair and pressed my head down again.

“Doesn’t it hurt?” I asked.

“A little,” he said, which in Alexei-speak probably meant
a lot.
“But it’s worth it.”

It was a half hour before we moved again, my back growing cold but my front kept delightfully warm by his body. When I started to fidget and shiver, he helped me get my clothes back on and then he put his on, too. Then he spooned me from behind, his body against mine and his strong arms wrapped around me. The storm clouds had made it as dark as night and, with the rain pattering outside and no other sound, the car became a private, intimate place.

After a long time, he said, “What did he do to you?”

I knew exactly what he meant, but the shock of the question, coming out of nowhere, made me stall for time. “Who?”

“The man who hurt you.”

I twisted around to face him. It was awkward because the seat wasn’t all that wide and, however much he squashed himself against the seat back, he still took up most of it. I had to press myself up against him or risk falling off the edge, so our faces were very close. “Why now?” I asked in a small voice.

“You don’t have to tell me.” He meant it. I could see it in his eyes. He was already regretting asking, having heard the tension in my voice. And that made me feel guilty about not wanting to talk about it, which I knew wasn’t his intention. The whole situation was twisting back on itself, turning into something that would come between us.

“Why now?” I repeated.

He stared into my eyes for a moment. “Because I’ve wanted, ever since I first saw you, to protect you.”

“You can’t protect me from the past. It’s done.”

“Is it? I think that man is still hurting you. Every time you panic.” His hands tightened on my back, pulling me even closer. “I want to protect you from everything. Even the things that’ve already happened.”

I pressed my lips together into a tight line, deciding. I loved that he could be so gentle when he needed to be, loved that he wanted to help. I wanted to tell him but I wasn’t sure I could. I sure as hell couldn’t do it while I looked into those eyes, so full of concern that they were already making me well up with tears.

I turned away from him and then nestled back against him as tightly as I could. He cuddled me into his arms. I lay there in the gloom for a long time.

Everyone has that place inside them, the dark cave mouth that leads down and down, down to where the worst memories live. I didn’t dare to venture inside, normally. Too cold and too dark. But the warmth of his arms around me gave me strength. It was like a fire in the mouth of the cave, providing just enough light for me to find my way back again.

I went deep.

And I started to tell him.

Gabriella

People get it wrong.

They think trauma is like an injury, like a broken bone. Something awful happens and you break, and then eventually, if you have the right help, you heal. Maybe you’re always a little weak after that, in one particular spot. Or maybe you don’t get the help you need and the bone sets badly and leaves you in constant pain, and someone has to come along and fix you—which might mean causing you more pain as they help you dig down to get to the problem.

A lot of trauma is like that. I know people who’ve been hurt like that and healed like that.

But that’s not how it was with me.

Sometimes it grows. Something awful happens and hurts you, like getting cut with a knife, and you get help and the wound closes up and it looks okay to everyone. Maybe it even looks okay to you. But what you don’t know is, the knife was dipped in poison. Deep inside you, where no one can see, something black and fetid grows and grows until it controls your entire body and your entire life.

Its slow progress means you can’t ask for help because that awful thing happened years ago and it would be crazy to be affected by it now. And, besides, everyone thinks you’re okay and your parents are so proud of you and you don’t want to let them down. So you pretend it’s something else. You blame kids at school or teachers and you nod and agree when doctors say it’s
social phobia
or
agoraphobia
or anything else that isn’t the truth. Because you don’t want to admit how he affected you—that would be letting him win and you’re stronger than that.

So you agree with your mom when she says she’ll home school you. You take that online college course instead of enrolling in person. You choose a job where you never have to leave the house and you make friends with women on the internet you’ve never met. And all the time this thing grows inside you, out of sight, a solid heavy mass that weighs you down and keeps you indoors.

Until someone comes along and forces you out into the open.

I’d been going deeper and deeper into myself, further and further into my past. I’d seen, maybe for the first time, how the thing inside me had ruined my life. And now I was finally back at the event that had birthed it.

I pushed back against Alexei and he locked his arms even tighter around me. He felt very far away, way up at the mouth of the cave. But his warmth and strength still reached me.

“I was eight,” I said.

I felt his chest move—a silent intake of breath. He hadn’t guessed that, hadn’t guessed I’d been that young. His arms seemed to grow harder around me, his muscles tensing in anger.

The simple act of saying my age made my stomach lurch. It felt as though the rocks in the dark cave had grown suddenly slippery. Just thinking about this stuff was risking a fall into the past, a full on meltdown that would make me small and weak again. That was exactly what had always stopped me from doing this on my own. But now, as long as I could feel that distant warmth from Alexei, I was okay.

“My mom had taken me to a shopping mall. Do you remember how big things feel, when you’re small? Well, this place was vast, even for a grown up. And they’d only just opened it, so everything was shiny and new. I loved it—I was so excited. And then it got even better because my mom took me to the big department store inside the mall, and all the women there looked like princesses. I was running around the clothing displays, trying on hats. It was great.”

I stopped for a moment. I could feel it taking shape around me: the smooth marble tiles beneath my little sneakers, the soft piped music...it was like viewing the past through a protective veil as thin and fragile as saran wrap. I could still feel Alexei behind me, warming my back, but my front had started to feel cold, so cold….

My mouth had suddenly gone dry. I wet my lips. “And then I turned around,” I said, “and my mom wasn’t there.”

I felt Alexei grow tense behind me.

“At first, I thought she was playing a game. I ran around and tried to find her, but I couldn’t. And the clothes around me weren’t familiar—I’d been in coats and hats and now I was in shoes...” On the last word, my voice shifted and changed, becoming smaller. Younger.

“I looked around and I realized I was all alone. I was in this huge, echoing place within
another
huge place and I didn’t know how to find my mom. What if she’d forgotten me and gone home without me? I didn’t know my way home!” The fragile barrier between me and the past was melting away, now, the saran wrap becoming just a few insubstantial cobwebs. My voice was thick with fear. “I asked, out loud, if anyone had seen my mom, but no one heard. It was a brand new store and all the staff were too busy running around, restocking things. No one was listening to me.”

I felt Alexei half-relax on the seat behind me. He’d heard the fear in my voice. He thought that he’d been wrong, that the trauma was just being lost in a store. He
wanted
that to be the case. And it killed me that I couldn’t make it so. Part of me wanted to lie to him, but I owed him more than that.

“And then
he
appeared. Stan. He was plain-clothes security in the store and he said he’d help me find my mom. I was so relieved. I took his hand and he walked me right through the store”—I swallowed—”to the exit. He said he thought he’d seen my mom leave, up ahead, and I believed him.”

I felt myself sliding in the darkness. There was no more barrier between the past and me. I fell right into it, immersed in it, as real as it had been then.

“He took me into another store, one that hadn’t opened yet. And I thought we shouldn’t be in there because there were big signs saying Do Not Enter and there was construction stuff inside and wires hanging from the ceiling. But he said it was all okay and my mom was just through here and that it was a short cut.” My voice was running on automatic, now. My body went limp in Alexei’s arms and he tensed as he felt the change. My eyes stared straight ahead. “There was an office in the back and—”

I was narrating the past. And then I was narrating the present.

“He...there’s a table and I’m—”

“Gabriella,” Alexei’s voice was a faint echo from far, far above.

I looked around the empty office, frantic. Stan had sat me down on the edge of the table and my little legs were kicking nervously in the air. I could feel a warmth behind me, as if someone was there, but that made no sense because Stan was in front of me, unbuttoning—

“Why is he doing that? I’m scared—”

“Gabriella!”

“No,” I told Stan, “don’t.
I want to find my mommy!”

“
Gabriella!
”

I was being shaken. I blinked two times. Three times. And then I was looking into blue eyes shot through with the coldest, most brutal anger I’ve ever seen.

“I will find him,” Alexei said thickly. “And I will kill him.”

I realized I was facing him. He’d turned me around and he’d been shaking me, too, desperately trying to bring me back. It felt like he’d only just succeeded. I wondered how close I’d come to being lost down there in the darkness forever, catatonic in a hospital ward.

I took a few breaths. It felt as if I was back up above ground, now, looking at that dark cave mouth from a safe distance while Alexei held me.

“Some construction workers found me,” I said. “Hours later. I’d crawled off the table where he’d left me and squeezed into an air conditioning duct—the smallest, safest place I could find. They never caught the guy, or even identified him. He didn’t work for the store.” I swallowed. “My mom had been maybe ten feet away, the whole time I was looking for her—she was on the other side of a display.”

I pressed myself to him but, however, hard I tried, I couldn’t seem to get warm. “My folks sent me for therapy, of course. And we all thought it worked, me included. By the time I realized it hadn’t, my whole life had changed.”

“And you were scared to go out,” he said.

“In case I got lost again. In case there was no one there to help me.”

His arms tightened around me and, at last, I started to feel his warmth seep into my fear-chilled body. “Gabriella,” he said, “from now on, I promise there will always be someone there.”

I wanted it to be true. I pressed my face to his chest and stayed there, with him holding me tight, until I
knew
it was true. And only then did the tears come, big hot floods of them soaking through his shirt.

It was a full hour before we moved from that position. But when we did, I felt stronger than I had in years. The thing inside me—the Dread—hadn’t disappeared or even shrunk. But I felt as if I had a handle on what it was, at least. It was the first time I’d ever talked to anyone about it since my original, failed therapy.

When we got out of the old junker, the rain had stopped and the clouds had cleared. Alexei slipped his arm around my waist and pulled me close as we walked back to our car. It felt as if everything was new again and that gave me hope, despite our situation.