STORM: A Standalone Romance (56 page)

I could’ve watched daytime television, or fixed myself something to eat, or even ordered takeout. The day was mine. I could do whatever I wanted. Instead, I languished in bed, trying to make sense of what had happened last night. There wasn’t anything I could think of that would make what had happened make sense.

At least part of me wished that Dan’s cryptic text—
we need to talk
—meant that he needed to explain himself. That maybe he’d lost himself in the alcohol and his attraction toward me and the smoldering build of our relationship. Maybe he’d realized what a terrible mistake he’d made. But was I ready—or even willing—to forgive him for what he’d done?

I’d been terrified that I was going to get raped. I didn’t think I could come out on the other side of that. There were already so many tragedies in my life that I didn’t think I could handle one more. The fact that Dan had passed out cold from all the booze he’d had was both lucky and telling. Maybe, if he hadn’t been that drunk, he never would’ve gone that far. I could maybe understand his sexual frustrations. We’d come close several times, but he’d always respected the boundaries I’d set, the restrictions I needed to feel sane. What I couldn’t understand was that he would force me to do anything against my will. That wasn’t the man I thought I knew. It was why last night had come out of left field for me. I was more bewildered than angry. It still felt like a dream, even if I was awake now.

I finally gave in and treated myself to a pizza. If comfort food wouldn’t make me feel at least a little bit better, then I wasn’t sure I’d ever get my day off on track. Out of the blue, the intercom for my door buzzed. I frowned. There was no way that could be my order. I had literally just clicked the button to submit my request for pepperoni pizza with extra cheese. Were the pizza gods smiling on me? It seemed unlikely. No restaurant was that lightning fast, and no pizza deliveryman had wings. Both miracles would’ve been required for the person wishing to gain access to the building to have my brunch on hand.

Puzzled, I wandered out of bed and pushed the button to communicate on the intercom.

“Yes?” I asked. “Who is it?”

If it was the pizza, I would give the biggest tip in the history of pizza tips.

“Beauty, we’re going to talk…whether you like it or not. Let me in.”

It wasn’t the pizza at all. It was Dan.

I didn’t understand what got into my knees to make them so weak and make me lean against the wall like I was about to faint. I didn’t understand, and I didn’t like it.

“Beauty. Buzz me in. Now.”

Why did something as simple as a voice cause such a reaction in me? He was whole floors away, and I was the one who held the power. Dan had sought me out, and he needed my help to get into my building. It was help I wasn’t going to give him. It was help I didn’t have to give him.

I reached a trembling hand to the intercom. “Fuck off,” I suggested, sounding a lot braver than I felt. That was good. He didn’t need to know how I felt. As long as I kept up a strong front, there was no way that Dan would ever figure out just how terrified I actually was.

“Language,” Dan laughed. “I thought I was the one who was supposed to be getting lessons on manners. You made your nice old neighbor lady blush. Oh, thank you for holding the door. I really appreciate it.”

I blanched, as I realized what had happened. One of my unwitting neighbors had entered the building and allowed Dan to do so, as well. Lurching to my front door on increasingly unsteady legs, I checked the locks and engaged the deadbolt. I was safe in here. It was hard to convince myself of that fact, but it was true. Dan might have been able to get into the building, but he couldn’t get in here to me.

The knock on the door made me sink slowly to the floor. I felt like I was going to vomit everywhere. I hugged my trembling knees to my chest and just stared at the door. It seemed impossibly thin, the locks shoddy and untrustworthy.

“Beauty?”

I shook my head violently. No. No, this wasn’t happening. I didn’t want this to be happening. Why had he come here? Why couldn’t he just leave me alone?

“I don’t want to see you,” I said, having to force the syllables out from between chattering teeth.

“That’s too bad,” he said. “We have things we need to talk about.”

“You mean things you have to apologize for,” I shot back, sassy despite my precarious situation. It struck me that maybe I should get my phone in case things went even further south than they already were, but standing up and walking to the bedroom was out of the question. I was rooted to the spot, and my legs had failed me.

I didn’t understand why my reaction to Dan’s presence had been so visceral, so physical. I was quite literally petrified, as in I was too frightened to move from where I’d fallen to the ground, and it confounded me. I’d never reacted like this to anything in my life. My adrenaline—the fight or flight sensibility that was supposed to keep me safe, or at least alive and kicking in these situations—had failed me. If Dan were a hungry wolf, drooling and growling in my face, I’d basically just offered myself up as supper.

“These things we have to talk about…they would be better said in person, face to face,” he said.

I wasn’t fooled—or swayed. “If you have something to say, I can hear you just fine with a door between us.”

I jumped and scrambled backward as the doorknob rattled and shook. I couldn’t believe that he would try to enter my home after I told him no. It made me extra thankful that I had checked the locks while he was on his way up here.

“Don’t you think if I wanted to, I could be in there with you?” he asked, his voice silky and threatening at the same time. “If I wanted to, Beauty, I’d kick this door down to say to you what needs to be said. I probably wouldn’t be as polite though.”

“And I would probably stab you,” I said, craning my neck and wondering if I could muster the strength—at least temporarily—to rise and fish a steak knife out of its drawer.

“You wouldn’t stab me.”

“If that’s what you think, you’re more than welcome to try and break down the door.”

I pulled myself up using the countertop to steady myself. My bravado was helping me pretend to be something I wasn’t, helping me ignore my fear. It was even better when I slid a drawer open to see the metallic gleam of the butcher’s knife I’d purchased with Roland’s credit card.

“Beauty, you and I need to come to an understanding,” Dan said. “We both have things the other wants.”

Putting the heavy wooden hilt of the knife in the palm of my hand and gripping it gave me enough courage to laugh haughtily at that statement.

“I can assure you that you have nothing I want,” I told him. I was still shaking, but at least I was making my stand.

“I have numerous things that you want,” he said, his words measured. “Numerous things that any woman would want. A prestigious name, for one. A fortune that gives me more disposable income than I know how to spend. Good looks. An incredible car, an incredible house, an incredible future. Any woman would want that. That’s why she would lie to the police when she didn’t get her way, when I rebuffed her affections. That’s why she would lie and say that I attacked her—because she is nothing and she wants a piece of something.”

“I don’t care about any of that,” I said, scowling. I knew he was threatening me with what he’d do if I tried to go to the police to file any kind of complaint against him. We both knew that Dan’s sparkling reputation would be all the assurances an investigating officer would need to see to dismiss anything I tried to say or show or do.

“Don’t be naïve,” Dan was saying. “Everyone cares about that. I’ve never met a single person who didn’t want to be comfortable in life, who didn’t desire the finer things.”

“Then go be with one of those people,” I said. “I don’t want anything you’re offering.”

“That’s the thing. I don’t want anyone else but you.”

“Leave me alone!” What was so special about me that Dan had to pursue this? I wasn’t special. He’d said it himself. If I went to the police, he’d tell them I was a nobody who wanted to be with a somebody, who’d escalated a friendly relationship into something it wasn’t. So why did he insist on pushing me? What was it that I had that he wanted? Why was he outside my door? Why did I feel so threatened that I was clutching the biggest knife I owned?

I had a moment of clarity: Fuck this guy. It didn’t matter to me if he wanted to lie about the cops if I called them. At this point, if calling the cops and telling them I had a stalker would get Dan out of here, I was more than willing to do it.

“If you don’t leave me alone right now, I will call the cops,” I said, looking over to my bedroom. I could see my cellphone gleaming with promise on my bed from my vantage point in the kitchen. If I had my phone in my hand, I’d already be dialing those three magical numbers to bring the police right to my door.

“Remember what I told you about the cops, Beauty,” Dan said. “They will never believe you over me. I can promise you that.”

“They’d have one or two questions for you, if you hung around outside my door long enough,” I told him. “Like why you were here, for instance. Or why you won’t go away when I tell you I don’t want you to be here.”

“And I’ll tell them it’s because you threatened to kill yourself if I wouldn’t ask you to marry me,” he responded, his voice cool, clinical. “I’ll tell them I came here because I felt like you were going to do something you were going to regret. That maybe you were a threat to yourself and others around you. That you were unstable. And so maybe they’d take you away and lock you up in one of those places…like the one you were in for a while after you caused all those people to die in that car wreck.”

The world, which had been careening around on its axis ever since Dan showed up at my door, began to slow.

“You don’t have anything to say to that?” Dan asked, his voice falsely innocent. “No way out of this one, Beauty? No insult?”

I didn’t have any of those things. I thought that I was the only one who knew the truth about that night, that I’d carry it around on my back for the rest of my life, my cross to bear for what I’d done.

Then, I’d found out about Roland, about the fact that he was there, receiving help from my parents at the same time that my best friend Caro, drunk behind the wheel with me drunk in the passenger seat, collided with the two stopped cars on the side of the dark road. Caro, my parents, and Roland’s fiancée had all been killed. Roland had been maimed for life, an ugly scar across his face serving as a souvenir of the night his love was taken from him.

I’d walked away from it all, eventually. I didn’t have any physical scars, but the mental ones were ever present. I had spent quite a bit of time in a facility to deal with my crushing grief and guilt after the wreck. Though it’d been what I’d needed to do at the time, it hadn’t been pleasant nor something I wanted to return to, and it definitely wasn’t something I wanted a person like Dan to know about. I’d been at my most vulnerable back in those days, and eager to leave, hadn’t recovered as well as I should. I lacked the coping skills necessary to get me through this tragedy of my own making, and it had sabotaged my attempt to go to college.

It had sabotaged my attempt to get on with my life.

I didn’t need Dan, someone who was quickly emerging as my greatest personal threat, knowing my greatest weakness. It made it way too easy for him.

“I’d love to know what you’re thinking, Beauty,” he was saying. “I’d love to be swirling around inside that brain of yours right about now.”

I didn’t even want to be inside my own brain right now.

“Let’s see, what could you be thinking?” he continued. Would he ever stop talking? “I bet you’re wondering how I could know such a thing, that you caused four people to die on a lonely road in nowhere, Texas.”

That was pretty accurate. I was morbidly curious about how Dan happened to know these things. The other things I was thinking, though, included how I could possibly make my escape from this thing. Would I be able to just flee again, like I’d done in so many other places when life started to go wrong? Or would this follow me wherever I tried to go?

“After my brother’s stint in the hospital—he refused to have his face fixed, by the way, did you know that?” Dan laughed. “The doctors tried to refer him to a plastic surgeon, tried to convince him to do basic reconstruction, but he told them all to go to hell. He wears that scar on his face like a badge of shame—shame at causing the wreck, at killing all those people, killing Mina.”

“He didn’t cause it,” I protested, forgetting myself in my defense of Roland’s innocence.

“That’s right,” Dan agreed. “You caused it. But Roland didn’t know that. He’s always been such a martyr, so eager to find something to take a fall for. Maybe he was waiting his entire life for something like that night to happen. As soon as he thought he knew what happened, he stopped asking questions. It didn’t matter to him that some drunken kid—I’m sorry, she was your friend, and I know that. But to Roland, it was just some drunken kid who would’ve spun out into some cornfield or whatever and been fine. It had been his fault for fighting with Mina and distracting her and getting them lost, his fault for her popping the tire, his fault for your parents pulling over to help, and his fault for providing a point of impact for a drunken driver.”

Roland himself had told me as much. None of this was really fresh news to me—besides the story behind the scar. He wore it to remember what he did, but locked himself away because he couldn’t bear for other people to see it. I realized that only Dan and I—and my predecessor, Roland’s assistant, Myra—ever gazed upon that wretched scar. He could’ve gotten it fixed. He had enough money now, I wagered, that he could hire a surgeon so good it would almost be as if nothing had ever happened to that face. Instead, Roland kept that scar as a punishment for a crime he hadn’t committed, as a memorial for the love of his life. That scar ensured that a talented businessman would only ever conduct his business through email or over a phone.

I realized that the scar crippled Roland professionally as well as personally. It was a testament to how much potential he had that he could make the kind of deals he made without anyone ever seeing his face. But that would only take him so far. To broker the agreements he was looking to expand the company with, Roland would have to rely on someone else to be the face of the company when he didn’t deem himself worthy enough to do so—not with that scar.

On a day-to-day basis, just at the office, that was me. Roland relied on me to report back to him what happened in meetings and even just daily observations and progress on projects and initiatives that he couldn’t verify himself via email or a stern phone conversation.

On a larger scale, however, on the company-growing scale that Roland was beginning to take aim at, I knew that this person would be Dan.

And Dan wasn’t to be trusted.

“What do you want?” I asked, dreading the answer, certain that I already knew.

“I want you to go back to work,” he said. “If you mope for too long, my brother’s going to get suspicious, and I don’t want him to be suspicious. That works against me. He knows we’ve been dating; you’ve seen to that little admission. I was the first person he called when you didn’t show up at the office this morning.”

I shuddered. I’d been missing at the office and the first person my boss called—even before he called me—was his brother? Was I not the first woman Dan had been problematic around? Was Roland already suspicious?

“I also want you to keep me informed of just what happens in my brother’s little late night executive sessions,” Dan continued. “I have a feeling they’re going to become more and more frequent. In fact, just keep me apprised of everything my brother’s been asking for. Everything he asks about. Whatever he might be doing.”