I smile, letting out a small cough when I ask, “So did you find it? Keep it?”
“There you are.” Smiling, he kisses my forehead and wipes the streaks of tears from beneath my eyes. “Keep what?”
“The emerald. The necklace,” I say as I sit on his lap on the stairs of my patio.
He shakes his head. “Auctioned it off. I couldn’t keep it. The emerald had been payment for one of our cleaning jobs. I’d probably buy it back if it ever was put up for sale. I didn’t have a reason to keep it indefinitely, but I like the idea of being able to see something so beautiful again.”
He looks at me with so much emotion that I almost choke out another sob. I don’t know if anyone has ever looked at me the way he is right now—softly, reverently. The way he’s holding me, not like I’m fragile or broken, but intensely cared for. Like he knows what I’m thinking, he holds me tighter as he tucks a damp piece of hair behind my ear.
I take a deep breath, and on the exhale, my breath stutters, but my chest feels less heavy. I do it over and over. In his arms, I finally breathe. Looking around my face and pushing away the pieces of hair that have fallen, he kisses my forehead like I’m something precious to him, like I’m something more to him than to anyone else. And he is something more to me.
“Tell me,” he says, his eyes searching. “Whatever it is, baby, I’m right here.” He tucks a piece of my hair behind my ear, and his thumb brushes away the wetness on my cheek.
I take one more deep breath and know that there’s no other way, that what happened has happened, and he deserves to hear it.
“I woke up in a train car. At first, I wasn’t sure what it was, but the sounds of it moving along the tracks clicked, as did the way it moved.” I swallow, my mouth flooding, trying to keep the nauseous feeling down as I play back my living nightmare.
“Professor.” He claps his long fingers together, like he’s so pleased I’m finally awake. My head feels heavy, and so do my limbs, like I’m moving in slow motion, but hearing everything in real time.
“Professor,” he says as I suck in a breath and cough. My heart thumps so quickly, I know I must have been given something to jolt awake like this.
“I screamed when I realized I couldn’t move my hands. I kept screaming when I realized nobody was close enough to hear me. When I begged him to let me go, I watched his pants tent and his head tilt to one side, like he didn’t expect it. He wanted me to be impressed by him. He had two other women in that train car, and he would...” My stomach churns at the memory of what he did to them.
“You don’t have to,” Julian says, holding my hand.
“The person who took me is dead now,” I say abruptly. “I wasn’t the only person, but the only one who survived it.” A shaky breath leaves me. “The only reason it was safe for me to come back to Rumor is because he is gone.” More tears track down my cheeks.
You’re safe.
“I had a student who started as an undergrad and was a person with selective mutism. I remember seeing her with her parents at graduation, and she was speaking with them. I was aware of her diagnosis, but to witness it...” I shake my head. “She was an entirely different person than I remembered. That’s always been something that stuck with me, how the mind works and copes in various ways when we feel varying levels of anxiety or even threatened.” I take a grounding breath. “I didn’t speak for one hundred and twenty-two days.” My nose scrunches, and I shut my eyes, thinking about all the ways he tried to get me to speak after that. An unpleasant shiver ripples through me, remembering what it felt like to watch him slice my side and thewillpower it took not to scream when his two fingers moved skin and muscle and dug around. I bat away another tear and sit up in Julian’s lap, shifting next to him to sit on the step.
“That was a choice, unlike my student. But it was the only sense of control I had left. It was intentional, and he hated it. The only thing I had in my favor was that I was a professor of organic chemistry—he told me how he had watched me deliver a keynote speech in front of a packed auditorium of brilliant minds. A monster that wanted to impress the smartest person in the room. When he realized that was me, he took what he wanted, thought we’d become colleagues or something.”
With his hand open and pressed to my back, it’s the only connection I can handle as I try to work through the rest. The piece that I didn’t see coming.
“He would take souvenirs of people, ingest parts of others?—”
Julian covers his mouth, rubbing his palm across it. “Jesus Christ,” he whispers on an exhale. I knew there would be a chance he wouldn’t be able to handle this, or the details that I still haven’t shared.Please let him be strong enough to hear this, to survive it with me, to stay.
“After the train, I had been drugged. I woke up inside of a small room that was soundproofed. I didn't scream or make much noise, but the others he brought inside did. And he was prepared. I expected to die inside that room. It was a storage facility. I didn’t know that at first, but eventually, I saw the outside of it.” I clear my throat. “It was in a quieter section of Queens. Just off of I-95 in New York.”
“There’s something so pretty about decolletage, don’t you think, Professor?”
I don’t answer. I don’t look. The last “guest” he brought in here, he had slowly sliced the skin that rested along her collarbone. He said, “It’s just like peeling an apple, Professor.” When I didn’t answer and tried to keep my eyes from watering,he asked, “Did none of your students ever bring you an apple?” As if that was why I struggled to keep tears from falling and not the meticulous violence playing out in front of me.
He tsks, like I’ve given him a response. “I hadn’t planned for it, but when the world decides to deliver,” he pauses, “you take.”
A grunting sound echoes, deeper in cadence than what I’ve become accustomed to hearing. It instantly registers that his newest guest is not another woman.
“He wasn’t a large man. Tall and thin, strong enough to overpower a woman my size, but a man your size...” I shake my head. “Not unless they wanted him to.”
“I’ve always admired men who grew too quickly. That’s all that makes up an Adam’s apple—rushing to grow bigger than the body is ready. But it’s lovely when it protrudes like this.”
“I focused on the sliver of light that came from under the garage-type door. It pulled up to open, and that time, he didn’t lock the latch. Like he’d been distracted. He wasn’t careless. The same way there was never another man in there. The space was no more than fifty square feet, at most, so when there were grunts and yells, and the sound of two large bodies hitting the cement floor, I stood up. I hadn’t been tied up—he had given me leeway with no longer being bound.”
“Go!” he yells as he pins the monster.
I stand, my legs barely holding me upright, heart pounding so fast it makes me dizzy.
