SIX
Sleep was evasive. She lay there, staring at the ceiling for hours, listening as Xander's breathing took on the deep, slow cadence of sleep. She should just tell him, swallow her fears and tell him. Because for all she knew, Gabe was going to tell him and then there was a chance she could be out on her ass because she lied. Because she intentionally put him in danger.
And he had been nothing but good to her.
She sighed, turning slightly onto her side, glancing over at him. He wouldn't throw her out. Not even if he found out in a less than perfect way. He was too moral for that.
That thought hit her as almost funny, as she brought her hand up to her mouth to cover the strange strangled snorting sound she made. Moral. The toughest, most ruthless private investigator slash private security guy in the city happened to be one of the good guys, one of the ones in white caps, one of the ones people could rely on to do the right thing.
She stayed awake for a long time, watching his chest rise and fall, finding the motion oddly soothing. Until, despite the ever-present anxiety, she drifted off to sleep.
-
And she dreamed of him. Back when she first met him. She had been barely out of high school and at a party her friend had dragged her to because someone had gotten their older siblings to buy them alcohol. She remembered the stifling isolation after her friend had ditched her to go make out with some shaggy-haired, burned-out hippie. She had been standing in a corner, looking out the window with a red cup in her hands full of some God-awful smelling liquor that she refused to even try.
She wished she had brought a book. She had promised she wouldn't do that. But she could have. She could have stashed it away in her purse, for that very reason. She knew she would end up hugging the walls and feeling utterly alone.
"You look like you'd rather be anywhere but here," a voice had said behind her, making her jump and slosh the alcohol all over her clothes.
She turned to see him. Tall, dark, handsome, cool, and confident. He was all the ridiculous stereotypes that women had been known to go gaga for since the beginning of modern civilization. And he was talking to her. Of all people.
"Here," he said, reaching into his jacket pocket and pulling out an actual pocket square. "May I?" he asked, holding it up, waiting for her response.
She had fallen hard and fast before she had any idea what he was really like. Or what he did for a living and how he conducted that business.
She had moved in before she even started her first college classes.
It hadn't started for a while. There were five blissful months of lazy, albeit unsatisfying, lovemaking, afternoon picnics, random gifts on the bedside table in the morning, and enough compliments to build up her fragile ego. She had called her friends and boasted about how lucky she was, how she was living a romance novel, how men like him were too good to be true.
It turned out she was all too correct.
One night, he had taken her to a restaurant with a bunch of his business partners. When he had asked her to step outside for a while right when the entrees got to the table, she had quietly objected. He had turned back to the table, his charming smile glued on his face and asked the men to excuse them for a minute. He helped her out of her chair and led her through to the back of the restaurant, his hand holding onto her arm roughly enough to leave bruises.
He pushed her out of the back door, waiting for it to slam behind him, locking them down a long, abandoned alley... and then he had turned her to face him quickly, then shoved her hard, making her slam back into the brick wall of the building next door.
She barely had a moment to register the pain before he was right in front of her, pulling an arm across his body, and backhanding her across her face.
"You stupid bitch," he had yelled, making a bird perched on the light post startle and fly away. "Don't you ever fucking embarrass me like that again," he said, his hand reaching out and grabbing her throat.
She didn't fight. She didn't even argue. She just stared at him, wide-eyed, too shocked to do anything but stand there, feeling his hand tightening around her throat.
"When I tell you to do something, you do it. No arguments. Do you understand me?" he asked, his hand pressing harder into her throat, making her make a gagging sound. "I asked you a fucking question. Do. You. Understand?" Her breath was caught under his punishing grip, making words impossible. She nodded her head slightly and he quickly released her, moving to push his cuff links back into place. "Now get yourself cleaned up and come back to that table and do what you're told," he said, swinging the door open and storming back inside.
Alone, she fell back against the wall, slowly slinking down, hugging her knees to her chest. She didn't cry. She sat there in stunned numbness, her hands shaking, for a long few minutes before the door opened again, making her yelp and straighten immediately.
But she didn't see him. She saw Bobby, one of his business partners. Or friends. She wasn't quite sure what the connection was at the time. All she knew was he was always around almost twenty-four hours a day. He could always be found within yelling distance of them. He looked down at her, his eyes oddly empty, taking her in. "I'm supposed to escort you to the bathroom to clean up," he said.
She should have run. She should have made a dash down the alley, hailed a cab, went straight home to her cop father and told him what had happened. She should have done anything but what she did.
She stood up, nodded, and followed him back into the building. Inside the bathroom, she carefully wiped the long gash on her face, courtesy of the huge malachite stone on the ring he wore on his right hand. Even wiped clean of blood, it was red and angry-looking. Her throat had a slight hint of blue under the skin. She straightened her hair, adjusted her dress, and walked back to the table, not meeting the eyes of the men sitting there, staring down at her lap.
His hand settled on her thigh, light and friendly, like nothing had happened. "Why don't you eat your dinner, Eleanor?" he asked and despite the rolling of her stomach, she picked up her fork and did what she was told.
He didn't touch her in anger again for weeks. Things settled back down and she had somehow convinced herself it was an isolated incident. He had been in a foul mood. He didn't mean it.
She knew better. She had been raised with a father who had carefully detailed to his teenage daughter the touchy subjects of rape and domestic abuse.
Yet somehow, despite what she knew, she didn't realize until it was too late that she had fallen for every last trick.
He had made her move in with him. He had happily suggested she share his cell phone plan. He slowly convinced her that she had outgrown the childish antics of her old friends. He took her own words about how her father had been absent a lot of her life, twisted them, made them into something ugly... and made her believe the man who had wanted nothing but to love and protect her was, in fact, a maniac. He'd convinced her to drop out of college because a degree in literature would get her nowhere in life. And, besides, didn't she want the free time to travel all around the world with him?
He had successfully isolated her from everything in her life and replaced it all with himself, making her emotionally and economically dependent upon him. So by the time the physical abuse started, she had no where to turn, no one to go to for help, no way out.
The next time he had hit her was after a night at the symphony. They had had a great evening. Or so she thought until they got back home. They got back into their bedroom where she stepped out of her high heels and was pulling one of her earrings out. He closed the door quietly.
"That was so much..." she never finished her sentence, feeling his hand grab her throat and throw her to the ground. Before she could even suck in her breath, he was down on top of her, his knee stabbing into her ribs, pressing with his weight until she felt a snap and cried out in pain. "What did I do?" she whimpered out, hating herself, hating her vulnerability, hating that she loved him.
"I gave you a beautiful fucking diamond necklace and you don't wear it?" he raged, moving to straddle her waist. "You wear these cheap plastic earrings instead?" he asked, reaching for the one still in her ear and pulling at it until it tore the piercing hole wider, the pain a burning, searing sensation. He leaned down close to her face, reaching behind her head, grabbing her hair, and pulling it violently to the side. "You will wear that necklace whenever we go out. In fact," he said, leaning forward and biting her lip hard, "you will never take it off again. Do you understand me?" Too terrified to do anything else, she nodded rapidly.
He stood up and moved toward the door, opening it and calling Bobby in. He walked in, looking down at Ellie like it was the most normal sight in the world to see a woman lying on the floor, clutching her broken rib, struggling to breathe. "Eleanor seems to have fallen and hurt herself," he had told Bobby. "You need to take her to the hospital," he said, reaching down and hauling her to her feet, completely oblivious to her scream of pain. He went over to her jewelry box and pulled out the necklace, putting it on her.
"Yes, sir," Bobby said. He led her down to the car, put her inside and drove her to the hospital, never allowing her a single moment alone with the doctors, never letting her have the chance to get help.
It escalated slowly. Days or weeks would pass and she would forget the pain. She learned to go out of her way to please him. She kept her head down and do what was told.
She never wore earrings again. She wore the necklace even in the shower.
But as she got more obedient, he got less tolerant. Everything she did irritated him. Every small misstep made him fly at her, slam her against walls, kick, punch, bite, and throw objects at her.
Ellie would lie awake at night next to him after another session of obligatory sex she had tried to convince herself wasn't rape no matter how much she hated it, no matter how much she didn't want it. She would crawl out of bed and shut herself in the bathroom, staring at herself in the mirror, but not crying. She never cried. She just watched herself, trying to figure out what had happened. How it had happened. What could be done.
But she never did anything.
One year in, she missed her period. Two months in a row. The nausea becoming overwhelming and she knew without having to take a test that she was pregnant. So, she started planning. She counted the steps through the house. She timed how long it took to get from her room to the front yard, from the kitchen to the back access road. And then a week later, when he was on the phone, yelling at someone about a botched deal... she grabbed a small bag and ran.
She had gotten as far as the end of the access road before he caught up to her, grabbing her and dragging her all the way back to the house by her hair. His silence was the most terrifying thing she had ever experienced. As he pulled her down the basement stairs, through the storage area full of cheerful Christmas decorations and through a door she never knew existed.
Inside she found a small square room, the cinder block walls covered in some sort of foam tile. There was a wooden chair inside, and two sets of shackles: one hanging from the ceiling, one poking out from the floor. He threw her against the wall, quickly securing her wrists and ankles and moving the chair away from her.
And then her left her. For two days. Standing. Hanging at times from her wrists, her legs too tired to hold her up.
When he finally returned, he had a sly grin on his face and a newspaper in his hand. He held up the paper, showing her the headlining story. It was about the death of a decorated detective who was shot in the back of the head, execution style.
Her father.
He killed her father.
And then he had beat her. Savagely. Mercilessly, until he was as drenched in sweat as she was in blood. Until she felt the blood trickle down her thighs and knew she had lost the baby. Until she was in so much pain that she passed out.
She spent six weeks in that room of pain.
She was beat until she was bruised everywhere. She was starved, humiliated. Then she was left with a raging infection and hallucinations for days before she was released to be cared for by one of the maids in the house.
--
Ellie woke up screaming, jumping into a seated position, looking around in the dark. Her pulse hammered in her ears as she reoriented herself to her surroundings. Safe. She was safe in Xander's apartment. She leaned forward, cradling her head in her hands, rocking, trying to soothe herself, trying to block the memories away.
"Hey," Xander's voice said from the other side of the room, sounding rough from sleep, but alert, "you okay?"
She didn't know what made her do it, but she heard his voice and then she was moving, her feet sliding silently across the floor. She sat at the foot of his bed, looking down at the sheets. "No," she admitted, surprising herself.
"Come here," Xander said, moving the blanket aside and patting the space next to him.
She shouldn't. She knew should just go back to her couch and try to catch her breath. But even as she was trying to convince herself that, she was crawling in beside him. He reached down, dragging the blanket up and over her body. He snaked an arm underneath her shoulders, turning her and pulling her against his chest.
Ellie settled slowly, holding herself at first ramrod straight, her arm glued to her side and her face hovering just barely over the warm skin of his chest.
"Want to tell me about it?" Xander asked, bringing his arm around her back and placing it around her waist. He looked down at the top of her head which she was shaking rapidly. "Okay," he said, feeling the uncharacteristic urge to lean down and kiss her hair.
He wasn't going to press the issue. He was just going to lie there and offer comfort. She wasn't sure she ever felt more grateful to anyone as she did in that moment. She slowly pressed the side of her face to his chest, scooting her body to press against his side. Her arm moved across his belly and then up toward the skin on his shoulder.
She forgot how nice it was to just... be held. How long had it been? Five years? Longer if she didn't count... him. If she discounted him entirely because those arms around her were the same ones to beat her... then never. There had never been anyone else.
Underneath her ear, his heart was slow and steady. The hand on her shoulder was rubbing slow, small circles across her skin. She closed her eyes, taking a deep breath, smelling a trace of his soap on his skin, but mostly just... him. It was a slight, personal, pleasant smell that she felt a little drunk on.
Xander tried to focus on the circles he was tracing. He tried not to think about the fingers on his shoulder moving slowly across his skin, her warm breath on his chest, her breasts pressed up against him, her leg she was pulling up and around his waist.
She was freaked out. She didn't need him reading more into it. She didn't need to think that he was suddenly finding himself turned on by her. Because he was. Completely against his better judgment. Completely against reason. She wasn't even his type. Not even close. But there she was, small and soft, her long blonde hair brushing against his stomach, her lips touching the skin at the center of his chest.
Her fingers slowly stopped stroking, her weight pressing into him more fully, her breathing slow and shallow. He wrapped his other arm around her as she slept, lying awake, staring at the ceiling for a long time, trying to talk himself out of his attraction, trying to convince himself he just needed to get laid. It wasn't about her at all.
But even as he finally fell asleep, he knew that wasn't the case.