The meal isn’t asbad as I thought it might be while it was cooking. The pasta clumps together more than it should since I couldn’t find any oil and the sauce is…interesting.
We both clean our plates, then Malakai goes back for seconds, then thirds once he checks I don’t want any more. The way he eats reminds me of Josh as a teenager. I used to come home from work and find half the pantry missing, everything ready-to-eat hoovered into his mouth the moment he got out of school.
I stand, collecting the dishes and ready to clean up, when Malakai takes them from me. “You cooked; I’ll clean.”
Words that never came out of my son’s mouth. The only way Josh ever did a chore was through me nagging him, the effort involved in getting him to work outweighing the time saved by him doing it.
And perhaps part of that is my fault, because I grab a tea towel from where it’s hanging, doubled over the stove door handle. Appointing myself chief drier when Malakai’s more than capable of doing that by himself.
“Are we moving on tomorrow?” I ask, aware that my captor is about as interested in communicating with me as he is in going back to prison. The only information he’s willingly shared being those to do with his expectations. His expectations and his needs.
My monkey brain, the one that’s kept me alive through so much of the shit that’s populated my life, warns me that indulging him is its own danger. In the split second I had to weigh up options, coming down on the side of pleasuring him was a surprise, but I’m long used to capitulating to men’s desires if it means they don’t beat me half to death.
I say men. Make thata man.The only man I’ve ever been intimate with before today. My husband.
The twenty-two-year-old man who approached me as a fourteen-year-old hanging out at the nearby mall and began the job of explaining over days and weeks and months that I was the only person he wanted.
As a girl, so enraptured that a grown manneededme, I hadn’t noticed him peeling away every other person in my life. Not for years.
Not until the day I turned around, heavily pregnant, desperate to leave, and found that nobody was left around to care let alone help. The isolation that meant I had to take care of things on my own. Something I put off for as long as I could. Until I couldn’t stand it a moment longer.
The state of isolation is one I’ve never quite shaken. Even after I belatedly tried to get back on track, steering myself through university, teacher’s college, into a career. All the time raising our son alone. Always certain I was doing everything wrong.
I’m afraid to let people too close and I must put out a weird vibe because they’re afraid to try.
Except for Malakai. He’s wriggled under my skin in a few hours flat.
“Unless they come for us before then, that’s the plan.”
“And where are we—”
He pulls his hands out of the sudsy water and rests them on the edge of the sink. “Please don’t ask any more questions.”
When I open my mouth again because apparently listening isn’t in my repertoire today, he flicks those thick fingers, bubbles landing on my nose, my mouth, my forehead.
I blink. Unable to reconcile the playful gesture with the same man who pointed a gun at me. Before I can get a handle on this new part of his personality, he grabs me around the waist and swings me in a semi-circle, a pulse of warmth floods my lower body. His arms around me are so strong, the hands so close to my chest my nipples come to attention, straining towards his touch.
Foolish woman. A few hours ago, he forced himself on you without even stopping to ask.
And slightly less time ago he yelled at his colleague and stove his face in with a brick. To save me.
To save himself.
And me.
My lower lip pooches out as my internal argument grows more heated. A stupid situation, anyway, given if I hadn’t capitulated to his request, he was just going to take what he wanted. He said as much.
You think that and you’re still getting turned on by him?
At that, I get grumpy and push all thoughts out of my head, pushing myself out of Malakai’s arms at the same time to reach for the tea towel again.
He takes the signal without annoyance, leaning past me to turn on the radio again. With the time coming up on the hour, even the oldies music station has the headline news.
Unsurprisingly, the headline is us.
The few scant facts the broadcaster reads out in her poshest voice make me sound far more vulnerable than I am. Age, gender, occupation, marital status all said with tones of reverence, pairing them in jolting matches with opposite facts about Malakai.
Schoolteacher vs murderer. Old vs young. Female vs male.
