AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She hates me, but it doesn’t change my feelings in the least.
I blink hard as I quickly pull off my shoe and use my sock to bind my foot wound and slow down the bleeding, then I limp over to the driver’s side car door and climb in. My eyes are watering.
Am I crying?
Elizabeth is dead, because of me, because of my monstrous selfishness.
Tamara might not choose me. If I keep my word to her and let her go, she might leave. After everything I did to her, she’d be insane to stay with me, and my beautiful girl is many things, but she is not insane.
Yes. I am crying. I am a man who is capable of sorrow, who is able to shed tears. There is something astonishingly freeing in this. I wish I could have cried for my brothers. For my mother. They deserved my tears. This feeling is like a scouring fire, cleansing and painful at the same time.
“Thank you, Tamara,” I whisper, and I turn the key.
* * *
Tamara
It’s suffocatingly hot and dark, and I scramble wildly, trying to find a trunk release latch. Joshua probably disabled it. I kick the trunk lid, uselessly.
Will he really set me free?
Of course not. He’s lied to me before without even blinking. And he’s not the kind of man who’d sacrifice his life for someone else.
He called me Tamara. He opened up the trunk again, and I could hear sirens. He took the time to tell me how he felt about me, even when it meant he was risking prison, or death.
I want to believe.
If he were willing to let me come and go as I pleased, would I come back to him?
I can’t possibly be thinking that. Not after what he’s done to me.
Me, in an empty apartment… Going to work, talking to people on the subway… I’m trying to picture it in my mind, but all I see is a blank screen. What would I do without him? Where would I go? I can’t imagine life without him anymore. I don’t know if it’s because I forced myself to stop thinking about the outside world in order to survive, or if it’s because I’ve developed some twisted, symbiotic attachment to him.
Or a terrible mixture of both.
The car starts to move.
Elizabeth is dead, and shockingly, that makes me feel awful. I was vile to her, but she was as much Joshua’s victim as I was. She was so wretched that she killed herself to escape her eternal torment.
We’re bouncing over rutted roads. I’m trapped. It’s dark. It’s like a coffin.
Calm down. Calm down.
The car stops.
I coil my legs back so I can lash out with a kick when he opens the trunk. Nothing happens.
The car sits there for a long time. Have the police pulled us over? That must be it. I start kicking the trunk and screaming at the top of my lungs.
The thought of Joshua being arrested makes me feel queasy. That’s ridiculous. It’s so stupid.I will tell the police everything. I have to.
Would he really have set me free?
I want to believe it. After all this time, after everything I’ve been through, I still want to believe in the basic decency of humanity, and more, I want to believe in him.
I don’t understand my snarled, tangled feelings for him, but I don’t want him dead. I had the chance to kill him, but I couldn’t do it.
What will I do? What will I say when I’m freed?I don’t even like the idea of him being in a jail cell for the rest of his life, but I refuse ever to be a prisoner again.
