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This time, I got about four feet. Four feet before an arm came around my waist, and it was like walking into a bar of iron, before my feet came off the floor. He lifted me straight up off the tile and pinned both my arms to my sides with the one arm he had used to catch me, and he did it as easily as a man picking up a bag of groceries.

It was terrifying how strong he was.

“Let go of me!” I screamed but even this didn’t make him angry.

“Shh, calm yourself, little bird.”

“Help, somebody! HELP ME!” I screamed louder this time, ignoring his gentle words. But just like the alarm, it was pointless as no one was coming to save me. So, the only other option I had left was to try and fight him. To fight my way free even though it made no difference at all. And the worst part, the part I would never be able to explain, was how careful he was about it. He kept one hand flat across my ribs and the other under my arm, and when my head went back as I fought him, he moved his shoulder, so I didn’t crack my skull on his collarbone.

He walked me into a shower and pushed the button on over both of us.

I screamed as it was scalding. It came down on my shoulder like a burn, and I arched away from it. He made a small sound of annoyance in his chest, then he turned us both, so that his own back and arm took the water. I was out of the spray, with the heat coming off him instead.

He stood there and let it run down him and he didn’t so much as flinch.

“Better?”

“You’re insane,” I seethed, making him grin.

“That is the general consensus, yes,” he agreed and looked entirely unapologetic about it.

As for me, I was drenched. My pale blue scrubs were hiding nothing at all, stuck to every inch of me. My hair was flat to my skull, as water dripped down my face, falling from my nose and chin. He had put me on my feet in the corner of a shower stall with the wall at my back and his body across the whole of the opening.

“I told you, little nurse…” he said, putting one hand on the tile beside my head, leaning down until the water ran off him and onto me.

“…I told you that next time there would be no knock at the door to save you.” I swallowed down the fearful lump stuck there, and he watched it go down with amusement. But then the second I tried to escape him again, his grin died and he released a sigh, as if deciding something.

Then he took my wrist in his large hand and slowly he turned it over. Naturally, I tried to yank it back, but it was no use. He kept his grip on me and looked at the inside of it. At skin he had once held before and left no mark on at all. He then ran his thumb once across the place where my pulse was going far too fast for either of us to pretend otherwise.

“Are you going to run again?” he asked in that deadly calm voice of his that made me shiver.

“No,” I lied, and the second it was out he knew it, so his hand tightened. Not fast. Not in anger. Just a slow, deliberate force as his fingers closed around my wrist and went on closing.

Slowly… steadily… and without any apparent effort at all, until my bones moved against each other and the first sign of pain registered.

“Try again,” he ordered, making me wince.

“I’m not going to run.” It came out of me on a sob that time. “I’m not, I promise, I won’t, please stop.”

The pressure came off immediately and that was all it took. Four seconds, maybe five, with no anger shown and no threat issued. There hadn’t even been a single raised word.

Now I was no stranger to violence, enough to make me run and keep running. But this, this was something else entirely. This I had no name for and that scared me even more. He had taken an answer I had already given him and squeezed, until it came out sounding the way he wanted it to sound.

But then he lifted my arm and moved it toward the corner of the stall. Or should I say, toward where the pipe was running up it. One of steel, thick as my wrist and going into the ceiling. I had been in that stall for two minutes without ever once looking at it, but I knew what it meant. I had accidentally touched a scalding hot faucet in the shower before, just like millions of other people had. Which was why I started to plead with him,

“No… No, please… please don’t!”

He stopped six inches short of it.

“I am not going to burn you,” he said. “Look at me, little bird, I have no intention whatsoever of burning you.” I frowned at that, letting him see for himself that I didn’t trust him.

But then, while still holding my wrist, he put the tip of his own index finger flat against the steel.

And he held it there.

One second. Two. Three. Long past the point where any human hand should have come off it, and yet he didn’t move. Hell, he didn’t even blink! His eyes didn’t leave my face for a single instant, and I sucked in a quick breath. One of shock as I questioned why he would do this. Was it to prove a point and if so, what the hell could it be?

Then he took it away and showed me. Showed me the clean white stripe across the pad of his finger, already going red at the edges.