She turned to the knife on the floor and lunged for it. I summoned everything left in me, grabbed a fistful of her hair and hauled her back. We rolled, and I realized she’d managed to grab the knife by the handle. With her hair still in my grasp, she twisted herself around on her knees, to face me, blade in both her hands, and her expression was wide open and gone.
Micah’s face and Julian’s face were the only things in my mind in that moment.I have to fight.I was taller than her, so I bent my knees into her chest, and made the decision to let go of her hair, so that I could use my long legs to kick-push her as far back as I could. She went back, then pushed forward on my legs, and I held her off with my feet, with her leaning forward with the point of the knife trembling in the air over my chest, eight inches back, then six, then five, both of us shaking with the strain of the struggle.
The knife dipped and caught the back of my hand, opening a line of cold that went hot a second later. It came down again and clipped my right calf. I yelped, then gathered everything I had left in my legs and kicked her back again.
She fell back onto the floor, with the knife still in her hands, and I rolled and came after it before she could reset herself. Both my hands back on the knife with hers, the two of us down on the floor, breathing into each other’s faces.
The ringing in my head was rising, my eyes feeling heavy, like I needed to sleep. I tried to blink the feeling away, and maybe she felt me weakening, so she leaned her whole body forward, our hands on the knife, its blade aimed at me, and her over me, bearing down.
I used the last strength I could muster, then twisted everything Icould, my wrist, my arm, my shoulder, the last of my core, desperate to turn the blade away from me, in the small space between our chests, as she came forward onto me with her own weight.
Then there was a scream.
It filled the room and kept filling it, and I could not tell whether it came out of Sabrina, or if it came out of me. It was the sound a body makes when it has been opened.
I couldn’t fight the heaviness of my eyes any longer. My head throbbed, as the room got darker. I could feel myself going under, the ringing in my ears going to a flat hum. And in the last bit of light, with her weight heavy on top of me, and blood warm and fast spreading out beneath us, I thought about Julian coming home any minute, calling my name into the quiet.
My heart broke in two for him. For what he was about to walk into. A second kitchen, and a second floor covered in blood. The last clear thought I had before it all went was the only one that mattered.
He can’t survive this twice.
53/
not me
julian
The last mileis always the best one. The morning air was crisp and cool, the sky blue and clear.
A year ago I’d run my last mile thinking about the things I needed to accomplish for the day. Now, I ran it thinking about the woman asleep in my bed, picking up the pace to get back to her faster.
It’s amazing how drastically things can change in the course of a year. I used to be so sure I didn’t want this. Knew for a fact that I wasn’t built for it. Being wrong about that turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me.
I was happy, and I was in love.
I came around the corner of my building and slowed to a walk to cool down. The doorman saw me as I passed through the lobby and lifted a hand.
“Good morning, Mr. Wade.”
“Morning, Fredrick.” I waved as I got on the elevator. I rode up and let myself in. I had my water bottle in my left hand, and pulled my phone out with my right, turning my music off as I walked inside.
I immediately heard a sound I did not recognize. A pained, wet sound. I stopped and tilted my head.Someone was crying?
“Alyssa,” I called out and began walking through my foyer into the living room.
The kitchen became visible from the entry, and I saw it before I understood I was seeing it.
Blood. A dark spreading gloss across the hardwood that my brain tried to call anything else. Spilled juice. Spilled anything. Then I saw the shapes on it. A body? Two of them. Two bodies on my kitchen floor in a pool of it, and one of them was?—
I shook my head rapidly trying to wake myself up.The dreams are back. Only now more vivid and real.I paused again, confused, trying to ground myself in where I was in space. I dropped my water bottle and the soundof the metal hitting the ground and the clink of it rolling away, snapped me into the reality that I was actually awake.You’re not dreaming.
I started walking again, with no clear thought anywhere in me. Then I started running toward the heap of two bodies.
One of them was Alyssa.
I knew the shape of her body the way I knew my own. She was on her back, half under another person. I saw the back of a woman. I could not see her face.
This isn’t happening. This isn’t happening.I repeated over and over as I ran, then dropped, then slid onto the floor, with the blood slick under my knees, and my arms reaching out. I pulled the other body off Alyssa. Didn’t even look at it. It was a mass between me and her, and I threw it off, and it landed making a sound, and I didn’t care.
