Authors: Jessa Hawke
Dave’s mind is made up. No more. No more wondering, no more trying to figure out what is going on in the mysterious world of Alexandra. It’s never been his style, and he’s starting to have bad dreams. He does not deserve bad dreams. He should know better than to arrive on time, but he can’t help it; he shows up fifteen minutes early. Again with the steaming cup of coffee, again with the waiting. If he didn’t already have PTSD from the courts, he’d certainly be getting it today.
What he is not prepared for, however, is that an hour goes by, then an hour and a half, then two hours. By the end of two hours, four cups of coffee, and some extremely pissed-off Spot Café employees later, Dave is seething. That answers that, he supposes, but he cannot help the surge of pure anger that is pushing adrenaline through his every limb. Never again, he tells himself, over and over, buying himself more seconds, more minutes of time in the hopes that she will still show up. This is it, for the rest of his life, Dave tells himself; he is never going to let another woman show him up like this. He can feel his waiter’s eyes boring into his back, and then he sees her. She is standing right outside, he recognizes her from the underground vantage point. Why the hell has she not come outside?
He tosses a bill at the waiter, tells him to keep the change, and heads outside. The cool air clears his head, and he walks up the narrow, rickety staircase until he is standing right beside her. “Hey,” he says, releasing a white puff of air into the frost.
She jumps a little. “Hey! I didn’t see you there.” She is wearing huge dark sunglasses and her jacket is buttoned all the way up past her mouth. She looks even smaller than he remembers her, but in this moment, all he wants to do is shake her.
“Why are you standing out here?”
“I guess, I’m late, huh?”
“Alexandra, no offense, but what the hell?”
She doesn’t say anything. There is a stone bench before them, part of the café’s façade, and they sit down without saying anything. A full five minutes ticks by, and Dave cannot believe he is still here and has not stormed off. Finally, she draws in a long, sticky breath, and says, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you wait so long.”
“But what happened? Did something happen?”
Again the silence, the perfectly infuriating silence that is driving Dave up a wall. He is about to bubble over, he can feel it, and then he sees her slip off a glove and wipe a tear that has coursed its way down her cheek from beneath her sunglasses. “What’s wrong?” he asks, concern replacing his anger. This is fun Alexandra; tears are not her game. She sucks in breath after breath, and suddenly he understands that she is hyperventilating, that she simply cannot get enough air. Hurriedly, he unwraps the scarf around her neck and face and pulls down the zipper of her coat; she doubles over, the collar of her jacket spilling open, revealing a little bit of her neck.
It’s then that he sees it.
Some of them are yellow, some of them have tinges of red and blue at the center. There is no way of telling how old some of them are, but then, Dave has never had much reason to study the age of bruises before. Wordlessly, he reaches up and removes Alexandra’s sunglasses; she does not fight him, but when he sees her face, she drops it in shame at the expression of fury that comes over his.
Her left eye is swollen to twice its normal size, and the right one bears a contusion right below her lower lid. It is clear that someone has punched her, recently, and hard. As he considers this, Dave unwittingly remembers a part of his performance that Alexandra said resonated with her—something about his dad kicking a dog when Dave was about seven. He remembers that dog, a lively terrier pup who had pooped in his dad’s shoes. He remembers watching his dad kick it again and again until the pup could not even whimper any longer. The sick, helpless feeling he had then overtakes him again now as he imagines that someone somewhere has just done the same thing to this tiny girl, this happy, lively woman who feels unbelievably small as he gathers her into his arms.
She cries quietly and she cries for a long time. Every passerby who tries to stare at them as they walk by gets a death glance from Dave that tells them they better hurry up and get to steppin’. Dave is quiet for a long, long time, feeling Alexandra shudder and sob into his jacket, into his chest, and he can feel something lengthening inside of him, something on the border between protection and pain, something that is stretched so thin he knows that it, or maybe he, is about to snap. Finally, as he feels her sobs quiet, he tilts her face up to his; she shudders once, twice, and then swallows back her tears. He asks if she is okay. She nods and squeezes her eyes shut, as if that will stop the flow of tears, and it looks like it hurts. Dave stomps on the rage inside of himself.
“Alex, we’re going to go inside. And then you’re going to tell me who did this to you.”
She shakes her head no.
“Alex, Alex listen to me. I’m not a hothead. I just need to know exactly what’s going on here. You can trust me. Do you trust me?”
She raises her huge hazel eyes to his and nods. They stand up, and the whole way down the stairs and into the back of the restaurant, he holds her tighter than he has ever held another human being in his entire life. He settles her down into a chair and brings over the other chair from across the table. He waits. He has done a lot of waiting with Alexandra, but he knows that right now, he must wait because she has to be the first to speak. He’s got a sinking feeling in his stomach, and his mind is already racing ahead.
Alexandra tells him everything. She tells him about how she met her boyfriend—a fact that makes Dave feel as if someone has just pulled a rug out from beneath his legs—three years ago, and for a while they were happy. It was your typical relationship—they got set up by a friend of a friend, and after a year and a half, they were ready to move in with each other. It was right after that that all the problems seemed to start. “You never really know someone until you live with them, I guess,” Alexandra says, and does that hard swallow again. Suddenly, it seemed like there was more stress in his life than there ever had been before. The day after he had to fire someone from work, he came home and started acting petulantly about everything she did; the food was too cold, the beer was too warm. He ended up throwing a dish across the room, inches from her head.
He apologized, of course, blamed it on his day, and she forgave him. Who doesn’t get crazy when stress is an issue, after all? But it didn’t stop; there was a lull, certainly, but all of a sudden, he didn’t like the way she was dressing. Her shorts were too short—didn’t she see how the security guard at work was looking at her? Never mind that the security guard was in his seventies. Her boyfriend was suddenly driving her to work every morning and picking her up. It would have been cute, the jealousy thing, if it wasn’t so profoundly disturbing. She tried to bring it up, of course, and he laughed and said that he knew she was faithful. She had been confused; why would he even put that into question?
The domination had been subtle, but rapid. She found out that he was checking her phone for text messages and phone calls, tracing the numbers down; heaven forfend one of them was a guy of any kind. He would wait for her after work, and sometimes, she wasn’t even certain he had gone to work himself that day. It was ugliness bubbling up inside of the relationship, and after he found out that she was calling her parents to talk to them about it, he took her phone and slammed it against the wall. It shattered, and she started emailing instead. She felt her vivaciousness, everything about herself slowly start to shut down as she became cut off from the rest of the world.
“And what prompted this?” Dave asks, touching her eye gently. She winces and looks away. “Alex, c’mon.”
“He tapped into my Facebook account and found out we were messaging each other.”
Dave almost slams his fist into the wooden table before them, but then thinks about how scared Alexandra is already. Instead, he reigns himself back in a few thousand degrees and says, so quietly and gravely that she almost misses it. “Alexandra, I am sorry. I am so, so sorry he did this to you. But you did nothing wrong.”
She squeezes her eyes tight and the tears start again. “I shouldn’t have met with you. I’m in a relationship.”
“I know. But there’s no law that says you can’t meet with the people you want to meet with. It’s not like we had sex.”
He catches the flush on her neck as he says those words, the way she seems to curl her body in on itself. She cannot look at him. “I know,” she says, her voice barely above a whisper. “But the thing is, Dave, I do like you. He’s not wrong. I didn’t cheat, but emotionally—”
“You did nothing wrong. He is abusing you.”
“It’s just tonight. He didn’t really hit me, he just pushed me and I face first into a coffee table.”
“Do you really believe that? Alex, he has no right to touch you in any way that puts you into danger. Shouldn’t he be protecting you, not throwing you under a bus?”
“Dave, come on—”
“No, you come on. You’re better than this. You’re smarter than this. He’s invading your privacy, not letting you breathe.”
“Dave—”
“Do you love him?”
“I don’t know. I did, once. I don’t know if I do anymore.”
There is a silence after that so heavy that it is palpable on the air. She puts a hand on his chest, and then they both hear it. Her phone beeps. She grabs it, slides her finger across the screen, reads the message, and puts it away. She gets up. Dave is incredulous.
“Alexandra, don’t.”
“I have to.” Her voice is sad and scared at the same time, and she is making her way ‘round the table. “He’s sorry, Dave, he’s really sorry.”
“Come to me instead.”
“I can’t.”
Dave drags in some of the tension-filled air between them. She can’t possibly know it, but he understands how she feels. Doing the right thing when everyone else is doing it wrong. She doesn’t love the other guy, he knows. But there isn’t anything he can do to stop her from making this mistake right now, even though everything inside of him is trying to burst through his skin, grab her, and make her stay. So instead, he takes her hand gently.
“I want you to know something.”
“What?”
“I want you to know that I am always open to you. My apartment is always open to you. And not just because I know what he’s doing is wrong. But because I’m willing to use my fighting skills in a different way. I’m not going to go and punch him out, even though he deserves it. I just want you to know that if there is anything you need, that you always have a place with me.”
“Why?”
“Because you deserve better. Because you matter to me. Because I care.”
“Why?” Her voice is desperate, pleading.
“Because I’ve never cared about anybody like this before. Because for you, I’m willing to put it all on the line. Because I am not the kind of guy who does anything crazy, but you turn me inside out and flip me upside down. Because I want you. And I know you want me.”
Their faces steam underneath the force of the words. Through the absolute stillness that possess both of their bodies, a hard, sharp chirp from her phone alerts them both. Alexandra takes another look at her phone screen, and clicks a large red button. Without knowing what awaits, but also feeling it instinctively, she turns to Dave, and, with one final unkink of her shoulders, she says, “Where do you live?”
With any other woman, he would tumble with her face-first into the bed. He would toss her and ride her, and not open anything up. Alexandra steals into his psyche like a thief, like the world’s most precious, smallest person. He undresses her slowly, as he might a child. Except a child does not have softly rounded hips, or gently sloping shoulders that reach out into arms as elegant as an Egyptian queen’s. He unbraids her hair, standing almost a foot taller than her, and watches the silky strands tumble down her shoulders and back. He lifts them as the faint sound of thunder breaks into the room, and through its rumble, through the waterfall of dark hair on her back, he kisses her. Then he lifts her hair and gently runs a thumb over each bruise. Then he kisses every one of them and he can feel her body start to quiver.