“She isn’t doing any research on my behalf,” Michael barked defensively. “She’s writing some paper for school, and I’ve been giving her pointers. I have no idea what she was thinking being out with Sean tonight, but you can be damn sure I didn’t put her up to it. If you guys are such good friends why didn’t you know where she was?” Michael was dumbfounded at the attack. All he had tried to do up until this point was steer Piper away from danger. He certainly wasn’t putting her in harm’s way.
“She dropped out of school months ago. She isn’t writing any paper. What the hell is going on?” Bobby replied, looking back over his shoulder at Piper.
“Guys,” Johnny said. “I’m sorry but I need to either get her to the hospital or not. Can someone keep an eye on her tonight?”
“Bobby, I don’t have all the answers, but I think you should get her home. Getting any deeper into this isn’t going to help her.” Michael wasn’t naive enough to think his knowledge of Piper or their friendship was that deep. He did, however, know the Donavans and the lengths they would go, to avoid prosecution.
Bobby climbed back into the ambulance and lifted Piper, holding her close to his body. Michael shook hands with Johnny, nodded a thank you to his partner and opened the rear door of Bobby’s cruiser.
Once Bobby had placed Piper in the back of his car and positioned her in a way he thought she’d be safe, he turned back to Michael. The ambulance had driven off and now it was only the two men standing uneasily on the quiet corner.
“Thanks for keeping her safe tonight. I’m glad you were there. I don’t want to think about what might have happened if Sean left with her.” Bobby’s mind was churning with questions and worry. He wasn’t completely sure what he thought of Michael yet, but, at a minimum, he seemed to have stepped in when Piper needed him.
“Cindy Martin,” Michael whispered, shaking his head. “I know you don’t want to think about what might have happened, and tomorrow neither will she, but you both should. She’s mixed up in something, Bobby, and tonight could have ended much differently. Sean has been charged twice with some pretty serious crimes, one of which was drug facilitated sexual assault. The details of that crime will be seared into my mind forever. Cindy Martin, the girl he drugged and assaulted had three broken ribs, a fractured cheek bone, and was covered in scrapes and bruises. He rolled her out of his moving car and left her on the side of the road in the middle of December. She was on the verge of hypothermia when she was discovered by a woman driving home that night. Yet, there was a parade of people willing to corroborate his alibi. Once they had destroyed Cindy’s credibility on the stand because she had a history of recreational drug use in her past, the case started to fall apart.” Michael was speaking mostly through his teeth with an angry hiss. He was motioning his hands animatedly as if he were giving an impassioned closing argument.
“I almost didn’t come out tonight. I was tired and had more work to do, and if it weren’t for my buddies convincing me I needed a break, I’d be at home trying to find a way to prosecute a crime while Sean was out committing another one. Tomorrow when she wakes up and doesn’t want to tell you what the hell she was doing here tonight, when she tells you she’s fine and that she had it all under control, you tell her about Cindy Martin. You tell her about the beautiful twenty-two year old girl who can’t eat out at a restaurant anymore without having a panic attack, has three locks on her door, and hasn’t been on a date in a year and a half. Here’s my card,” Michael said, pulling a business card out from his pocket. “If you’re really her friend you’ll get her to tell you what she was doing with Sean tonight, and you’ll convince her to stop before it’s too late. Give me a call in the morning to let me know she’s all right.”
Bobby tucked the card into the breast pocket of his uniform shirt. “I hear you,” he said, shaking Michael’s hand. “I’ll see what I can find out tomorrow. Hopefully a scare like this will be enough to get her out of whatever stuff she’s mixed up in.”
Michael nodded a goodbye. As he turned back toward his car he spoke over his shoulder. “I don’t know what it is about this girl that makes me give a damn. It’s impossible to cut my losses and mind my business. The easiest thing in the world for me to do would be to get in my car and forget this night every happened, forget about Piper all together. She shoots down every date I ask her on, she plays me like a fool, and I know almost nothing about her. She’s like fireworks, captivating and gorgeous, you can’t help but watch and be amazed, but you better keep your distance or you’ll get burned.”
Piper refused to open her eyes. She had woken up a few moments earlier and realized something terrible had happened. She thought if she could only keep her eyes closed and attempt to piece the previous night’s events together she could make sense of it all. She knew once she let herself come fully awake, she may not like what she faced. She remembered talking to Michael in the back of the bar, she remembered finishing her awful drink and making idle conversation with Sean, and she remembered rapidly losing control of her faculties. Had Michael come over and intervened, and now she was safely sleeping in his bed? Had Sean been able to slip her out of the restaurant unnoticed and now she was who-knows-where and in further danger? As fear began to overcome her she took mental stock of what she could with her other senses, still unwilling to open her eyes.
She was dressed, still in the uncomfortable black cocktail dress, though her shoes were off. These sheets felt like her own, the flannel set she had just put on the previous day. Her body was sore and her head ached, but she didn’t feel violated or injured in anyway. All these things brought her anxiety level to a manageable place, and she dared to let the light pour in as she cracked her eyes open.
There was her dresser, her nightstand, and her curtains. She was in her own room, in her own bed, seemingly safe. But who had brought her here? Michael didn’t know where she lived; perhaps he had looked at her driver’s license and used her key to put her to bed?
“Piper?” a man’s voice called from behind her. She was still cloudy and her reflexes sluggish, but she was fairly certain it was Bobby. She rolled over toward him and groaned. She didn’t think of the repercussions or the questions he may have for her, all she could think was how glad she was that he was there.
“You were given a dose of Royhpnol last night, it’s a powerful sedative that causes a person to blackout and usually have memory loss and some fatigue the following day.” Bobby had pulled the chair from Piper’s desk over to the side of her bed. He had spent the night perched there, as she slept.
“The date rape drug?” Piper whispered. Her voice was hoarse and her throat dry. She closed her eyes again. It was hard to focus on anything and the light was making her head pound.
Bobby reached for her hand and laced his fingers in between hers. “Nothing happened. Your friend Michael got you out of there before Sean could do anything. I was driving by when I saw the ambulance and stopped to see if they needed help.”
As wonderful as Bobby’s hand felt in hers, as sweet as his voice was, thick with concern—all those words brought reality back into focus. Bobby met Michael, he knew she was out with Sean, and there was an ambulance involved, probably a police report. Bobby was too insightful, too good of a friend to not pry into this situation. However happy she had been to wake up and see him sitting vigil by her, she knew everything was about to change the moment he wanted to know more.
“Piper, I’m going to ask you some questions, but first there is something I want to say. We haven’t known each other very long, but I care about you. The kiss we shared, the time we’ve been spending together, for me it isn’t some flirty game I’m trying to play. I can see myself with you. I can see this working between us. I think it’s important that you know that so when I’m asking you these questions you understand my motivation. Does that make sense to you?” Bobby had ample time that night to think about how he would approach this precarious conversation. He waited for Piper to nod that she understood and then he pulled her hand, still linked with his own, up to his lips and kissed it gently.
“When you first started coming around Betty’s house I wanted to know more about you, but you weren’t very forthcoming with information. No one else seemed to notice, but I kept leaving every Wednesday night with more questions about you than answers. Jules and Betty mean the world to me, and I was concerned that you had some ulterior motive. I called in a few favors and did a background check on you. The preliminary one came back as though you didn’t exist prior to two years ago. I thought maybe it was a glitch in the system so I pushed for more information. I went up as high as I could and even indebted myself to some guys with pretty high clearance, and still there was nothing. It really freaked me out at first, but the more I got to know you, the more I started to care about you, and the less I let it bother me. I convinced myself that you had your reasons for not sharing your past with me and that when you were ready, I’d be here to listen. I decided that you were not a threat to Jules and Betty and that I would give you time to open up to me. I committed myself to trusting you even though it wasn’t in my nature.” Bobby could feel Piper’s grip on his hand loosening, and he knew it was her recoiling from his harsh honesty, but she didn’t speak, so he continued.
“That was, until last night when I found out you’ve been untruthful about why you’re so interested in the Donavans’ criminal history. I couldn’t understand, and still can’t really, why you’d be out with Sean. I don’t know why just weeks after you and I are rummaging through their court cases, discussing how unworthy they are of the benefits of our justice system, you’re sitting across from one of them having drinks. So what I’m asking is: who are you? Who were you two years ago? And what were you doing last night? If you can tell me that, I promise you I’ll help you in any way I can. You need to trust me.” With that last sentence, Piper pulled her hand away from his, and he felt a piece of his heart go with it.
“Sure I’ll trust you, let me run a background check on you first.” She pulled herself up to a sitting position knowing she looked too weak crumpled under her blankets to be taken seriously. “I think you’re being a little dramatic, and I’m guessing so was Michael. The two of you together probably blew this whole thing out of proportion. I’m sorry that I’m not turning out to be who you hoped I was, but I’m not going to sit here and be accused of having questionable motives. I think you should go.” Piper pointed at the door, and she wondered how her mouth and her mind could betray her heart so deeply. Would there ever be a time in her life that they pulled in the same direction?
“I don’t want to go, Piper. I’m not looking for an easy out.” Bobby stood and raised his voice slightly. He felt this conversation, this woman, getting away from him and it wasn’t how he wanted it.
“What do you want?” She threw her arms up in exasperation and immediately regretted the sudden movement. She had momentarily forgotten how much her body was hurting and how fast her head was spinning. She didn’t want him to leave, but she wanted him to take back everything he had just said.
“What do I want? I want to take off this uniform and crawl into bed with you. I want to spend the entire day under these covers. I’d tell you how terrified I was when I saw you lying in the back of that ambulance. I’d tell you how I’ve never been so full of rage or had such a desire to track a man down and kill him for what he had done, what he could have done to you.” Bobby’s hands clenched into fists as he thought of Sean. “I want you to feel like you can tell me everything about yourself, the hard stuff, the scary stuff. I want you to talk until you lose your voice, and I want to hold you until I can’t figure out where I end and you begin. I want today to be the first day of something incredible for us. There is nothing that you can tell me that would scare me away, nothing that could change how I feel about you.”
He was practically yelling now, his face red with frustration. He realized how worked up he had become, and he softened his voice. “I want to stay here and find out who you are.”
Piper forced the tears forming at the corners of her eyes to stay right where they were. She swallowed back the lump in her throat and dug her fingernails into the palm of her hand to help redirect the pain away from her heart. She let the thought flash through her mind for a moment. What if she did tell Bobby who she was and what she had planned? Would he do as he said and stay?
“I don’t think there is anything more real to you than your convictions, Bobby, and I can assure you there isn’t anything more important to me than mine. The problem is that ours happen to sit at opposite sides of the moral spectrum. I won’t ask you to stand by me when I know it would mean you’d have to set aside things that make you who you are. I’m also not naïve enough to believe you’re even capable of that. Who I was two years ago isn’t something I’ll share with you. What I was doing last night isn’t something you’ll approve of. So the only thing I can do, because I do care about you, is not lie. I’m asking you to go, so that I don’t have to.” Piper knew it would be more convincing, more final if she could be staring into Bobby’s eyes as she spoke, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She thought if she raised her eyes and looked at him, she’d see his heart being pulled from his chest, and she couldn’t stand to think of him hurting.
He didn’t dissect her words about morals and convictions or try to argue his way to the truth. He grabbed his things from her desk and quietly made his way to the door of her bedroom. He dropped his head, and rubbed at his eyes, clearly feeling like he was out of options. “When I go, you need to understand that’s it for us. I won’t stand by and watch you put yourself in danger. If I walk out this door right now, you’re on your own. That goes for Betty and Jules, too.” He was facing away from her as he spoke.
“You really think they’ll just stop talking to me because you tell them to?” Piper, for the first time in this conversation, felt a righteous indignation about Bobby’s decree and ultimatum.
“No, I won’t tell them they can’t talk to you. I’m hoping that the person I started to care about is as principled as I thought. If you’re putting yourself in a compromising position I hope you won’t be selfish enough to subject anyone else to it. Especially people who have suffered enough already. If you truly can’t let anyone in, at least you can minimize the collateral damage. I might not know who you were, but I’d like to think I was starting to know who you are.” He didn’t wait for her response, he didn’t look back to see if his words had impacted her. There was nothing left to do but leave.
When she heard the thud of his truck door slam and the rumbling of his engine starting up she knew she was in the clear. She let a few warm tears roll down her cheeks, thinking they’d be enough to release the pressure of emotion that had built up inside her. Instead they were the beginning of a flood. She lay back down and pulled the blankets up over her face and sobbed. She cried at the thought of losing Jules and Betty’s friendship. She cried for what could have happened last night, where she could be waking up this morning if it weren’t for Michael. And she cried at the thought of living the rest of her life without ever being kissed by Bobby again.
As she lay in bed aching mentally and physically she realized stories like these, the ones filled with revenge and vigilantism, all had one thing hers did not. A capable, trained person with a litany of abilities. She was not an assassin skilled in martial arts and able to physically protect herself. She wasn’t a robotic, cold-hearted black widow void of all emotion. She didn’t carry a gun. She didn’t even have mace for that matter. She was like someone who’d never played football joining the NFL and playing without pads. Yet, even all that wasn’t enough to stop her. She might be the underdog here, but it wasn’t impossible, and that’s all she needed to know to keep driving forward. There was a chance that this journey was a self-inflicted masochistic punishment for the failures of her past. Happiness seemed at her fingertips, but she wasn’t ready to indulge in it, and there were miles to go before she’d feel worthy of it.
Her eyes were puffy and burning from the salt of her tears. She had managed to stop blubbering and wailing long enough to reach for her phone. She squinted and queued up a familiar number. It rang three times and finally an answer.
“Michael,” she mumbled, trying to mask the devastation in her voice. She may not have been able to give Bobby what he needed to keep him around, but Michael needed much less from her, and she wasn’t ready to go back to being completely alone in this world.