My heart is racing hard and I feel like I can’t get enough air in. There’s another line to that thinking but I won’t follow it, I can’t follow it. And yet, I can’t ignore it.
“If they can find me here, they can find me there too,” I say. “Only they won’t find me. They’ll find my sister.”
I feel exactly like I do every time I watch a horror movie—paralyzingly frightened to my bones. No. This is worse than that because I’ve lived this horror once before.
He winces and sucks on his teeth. “Fuck.”
That word encapsulates this crazy situation exactly. Yet it solves exactly nothing.
“It’s you they were after,” I say.
He nods. “And again, I’m sorry.”
He comes over and sits down on the edge of the bleached hardwood coffee table, rubbing his eyes with the thumb and index finger of his left hand.
“I don’t know if they’ll really come after you to get to me. They might not risk it,” he says. “And for what it’s worth, the danger won’t last long now.”
“How can you possibly promise me that?”
He winces and looks somewhere to the side of me. “I can’t tell you that.”
“Can you tell me why they want you dead?”
I highly doubt it, and the look in his eyes as he glances at me before looking away again, confirms that.
“You say you’re not what I think you are, but you almost get me killed and now my sister’s in danger too, because of you. And you won’t tell me anything.” My anger is rising again.
“I told you we shouldn’t go to that place,” he says. How can he be so infuriatingly calm about all this?
“Don’t you think I have the right to know what’s going on?”
He gets up and puts some distance between us, and the energy that my reignited anger and indignation brought starts seeping away like air from a balloon. How can he be the source of all my anger and all my calmness at the same time?
“Look, it’s something I can’t tell you,” he says. “Do you want my protection or not? For you and your sister?”
I stand up and face him, and I think I did it because I wanted to be closer to him. I need the grounding. He gives it me. And it makes no sense. “If I say yes does that make me a criminal like you?”
“Fuck, Veronica,” he says, looking really angry for the first time since I met him. His eyes are like two hard blue rocks, beautiful but lifeless. “I am so sick of your accusations. My best friend is fighting for his life because those assholes attacked us two days ago, I almost got you killed tonight, and now I gotta worry about your sister’s safety on top of it, and you’re still going on about this shit. Should I just leave?”
And with each word he spoke his eyes somehow glowed brighter, until they’re not so dead anymore, but buzzing and glowing with life. His whole face is.
“No,” I hear myself say before I even decided to. “But maybe we should go to the cops.”
He scoffs and moves further away from me. “No cops. They can’t fix this.”
“But how can you?” I ask, not even being confrontational. I just really want him to be able to.
He gives me a disgusted look and I can just hear him thinking that he’s not gonna answer that question in any way again.
“You say you can keep a secret?” he asks and I nod.
“Well, you’re gonna have to,” he says. “Now go get changed, I have to make a call.”
He walks further away from me, all the way back to the window by the kitchen island. His shirt is stuck to his back over his right shoulder blade, but it looks dry. I don’t think it’s bleeding anymore, but maybe I should look at it anyway.
“Go,” he says and he gives me a warning look over his shoulder. I walk to the bathroom, slamming the door behind me.
What is going on? And what did I just agree to?