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A liar. A coward. A mess.
I heard some voices then, male voices, low and nasty. Dangerous laughter. I lifted my head to see a few men standing by a stoop between me and my house. I put my head back down. I wouldn’t let them scare me, I wouldn’t, but my body rebelled. My body felt fear. My heart pounded fast because of the way they looked at me, like they were going to do something. Like they were on the edge of action, making a decision. When I passed by them they fell into step behind me. My blood whooshed almost painfully in my ears.
“Hey,” said one of them.
I kept walking.
“Hey, I’m talking to you, bitch.”
My breath backed up in my chest. Should I start running? They would catch me in an instant and probably have a good laugh over it. So I didn’t run. I just kept walking.
“Hey, you little bitch. You too good to talk to us, you skinny little whore?”
I just kept walking, one foot in front of the other. I might have shaken my head, a pointless gesture. If they were going to do something, so be it. I wasn’t going to run and I wasn’t going to scream. I was just going to keep walking, one foot in front of the other, because I’d survive this or not, just like everything else.
Then I saw two more men approaching from the other direction. Oh great, it was a party now. Come one, come all, some girl is trying to walk home alone and it’s after midnight, so she’s fair game. But then the men behind me stopped and crossed the street. I soon saw why. The man coming towards me was one of the most threatening, muscular men I’d ever seen, and next to him, even dressed in a tuxedo, Mr. Norris looked pretty threatening himself.
“Come on,” was all he said to me, and he put his hand on my elbow like he’d done twice before. This time he guided me over to a black SUV and pushed me into the back seat. No, he didn’t actually push me. He just opened the door and helped me in. I guess it was the fury on his face that made me feel manhandled. He got in beside me and slammed the door behind us. I just sat in silence, not looking at him.
“Felt like getting raped tonight?” he finally muttered.
“There were no cabs. I left the theater too late.”
“I offered you a ride home.” I watched the muscle man leaning against the door outside, lazily rolling a cigarette.
“Who is that?” I asked.
“My driver.”
We both just sat there, two feet apart. It was chilly in the car and I shivered.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“What are you doing here?”
“What do you think?” he snapped.
And that was enough. I started to cry. The sound of my sobs disturbed me but there was no way to silence them. I pulled my coat around me like I could pull myself together, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t stop. It had been far too long since I’d cried.
He sat still and silent next to me and watched me, his eyebrows drawn together in a frown. I cried forever, months worth of tears. I cried staring out his front window, then dropped my head in my hands until my fingers were slippery with tears. How long had I needed to cry like this? An eternity. I cried until I was breathless, until I felt weak. He didn’t try to soothe me or hold me, although he did eventually offer me a tissue. I realized he had dug in my own bag to get it. He held it in his lap, my big ugly dance bag, while I dried the tears and blew my nose. After a moment he offered me another one, and then another again.
“Thank you for helping me,” I said when I was finally calm enough.
“Are you finished now?”
“I don’t know. I’m sorry. I don’t know why I act this way around you.”
“Don’t you?” He flicked his wrist impatiently and looked away with a frown.
“What do you want from me?”
“Let’s get some coffee, Lucy. We need to talk.”
At some unseen signal, the driver walked off down the street, and Matthew climbed into the driver’s seat while I stayed in the back.
“Why do you have a driver, if you can drive?” I asked him.
“He’s more than my driver.” And he left it at that.
* * *
He drove me to a coffee house right near the theater. I’d never noticed it before but he seemed to know it well. I must have looked like a mess as we waited at the counter for our drinks, but I really didn’t care. It was after two by this point, and the whole world seemed to have taken on an air of unreality.
He led me to an isolated table in the back. Low music played as we sat in darkness and clouds of cigarette smoke. There was a hum of people talking, laughing. They were night time party people, wide awake and full of life.
But not me. I was beyond tired. I was so tired that I was painfully and frantically awake. I sipped my coffee and stared down into my lap. He sat across from me, leaning back in his chair, looking like a million bucks. He’d taken off his jacket and loosened his silk bow tie so that it hung perfectly over his open collar. His short blond hair was ruffled just so. It looked like all he had to do to style it perfectly was to run his fingers through it. He watched me. Stared at me, really.
“You don’t talk much,” he finally commented under his breath.
“I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry I cried for fifteen minutes in the backseat of your car.”
“It was more like thirty minutes.”
“It’s been a really hard couple of weeks,” I said.
“Has it?”
“Let me put it this way. I was supposed to have been on my honeymoon this week.”
“Your honeymoon?” I could tell he was taken aback. “Well, what happened? Do tell.”
“Do you want the long version or the short version?”
“The true version.”
“Do you think I’d lie to you?”
“No, not really. I’m just a lover of truth. It thrills me,” he explained in an ironic tone.
“Okay, then.” I took a deep breath. “My fiancé invited his ex-girlfriend to our wedding. When she came into town, he fell back in love with her. He cancelled our wedding and took her on our honeymoon.”
He thought a moment. “Was it to have been a big wedding?”
“No, a very small one.”
“So he wasn’t sure all along.”
“No. I guess not.”
“And neither were you,” he said, and it wasn’t a question.
“No.”
“Why did you get married, if you weren’t sure?”
“We didn’t get married.”
“You almost did.”
“Are you really going to lecture me? You haven’t exactly got a stellar marital record yourself.”
His eyes narrowed.
“At least, I read online that you were divorced,” I finished weakly under his darkening gaze.
“Well, that’s not fair. It seems you know more about me than I know about you. Now you have to tell me something about yourself. Something deeply personal and humiliating, if we’re going to be fair.”
“I just told you I was left at the altar. That’s not humiliating enough?”
“Did you love him?”
“Did you love her?”
He didn’t answer me at first. Then he said, “Yes, I loved her very much. She didn’t love me though. When you have money...” His voice trailed off, and then he looked right into my eyes. “There was no truth between us. Did you love your fiancé?”
I shook my head slowly.
“Why not? Why didn’t you love him?”
“Because he didn’t make me happy.” I stopped and shook my head. “No. Because he didn’t know the real me. Because there was no truth between us,” I finally admitted.
He looked over at me, leaning forward on his elbows.
“Would you like to hear some truth, Lucy? Right now?”
“Yes, that would be really refreshing.”
“I’d like to bend you over, stick my fingers up inside you, and see if you really can do more than pony tricks.”
My mouth dropped open.
I closed it a moment later and stood to leave.
“Sit down,” he said in a way that halted me in my tracks.
I turned back to him. “You’re being rude to me.”
“You were rude to me too, weren’t you? More than once. Now we’re even. Sit down.”
For some reason, I did as he ordered. I sat back down across from him, my gaze in my lap.
“Lucy, what do you think is happening here?”
“I really don’t know. I wish I did!”
“I think you do know, but I’ll play along. What did you think of me? How do you feel around me?”
“I... I...”
“Think first, and then tell me the truth.”
“You scare me.”
“Why do I scare you?”
I looked down at my hands, swallowed hard. “Because of how you make me feel.”
“How do I make you feel?”
I shook my head. I couldn’t admit it, never.
