Ellie

I was already regretting my scant choice of clothing. I couldn’t help but think about what Rick would have said if he could see me rocking it.

"Who’re you trying to fuck wearing that?"

I picked up the cold bottle of beer, watching as droplets of condensation formed and then fell down its green glass sides, and brought it to my mouth with my hand trembling. Sometimes it was hard to remind myself that he wasn't here anymore, and that he couldn't hurt me.

For now, anyway.

Maybe forever, if the detective does his job.

The ice cold beer flowed easily down my throat, and it wasn't long before I felt a pleasant, warming glow spreading throughout my body. Bars weren't my scene, not recently anyway, they hadn't been since Rick –

Cut it out, Ellie. Stop thinking about him.

A couple of bar napkins took flight, zooming off the wooden bar and fluttering down to the floor as the door opened and a group of rowdy off-duty construction workers staggered in, letting a draft in with them. I turned round at the interruption in the quiet bar, but barely noticed them. Instead, my tension was taken up by a brooding mountain of a man sitting in a dark corner of the bar. I couldn't make out much about him, but his posture told a story all of its own. He was slumped forward, his body contorted into a position that masked his true height, which had to be six foot or more.

"Hey, get us some beers," one of the construction workers shouted. I didn't pay them any attention.

"Hey, lady, I said get us some beers, will ya?"

I turned my head jerkily to the source of the sound, confused. "Are you," I stammered to the rowdy leader of the pack. "Are you talking to me? I don't work here."

The air in the leather cushion of barstool next to me hissed as he sat down next to me. He put out his hand, grinning, and his boys howled with delight. "Mikey. And you are?"

I realized that coming here had been a mistake. I wasn’t ready for it. Not yet. Maybe never.

Why won't he just leave me alone?

I stared nervously at him, stuck like a rabbit in the headlines.

"Look," Mikey said, turning to his construction crew, who were standing around me in a loose half circle. "The little lady's sweating bullets. Do I look that bad?"

His crew hollered out a slew of whooped insults and encouragements. My blood ran cold. I knew I wouldn't find any help in that quarter…

I mopped my brow. Mikey was right, I'd come out in a cold sweat. "Listen," I said. My voice cracked with nervousness, and I hated my body for betraying me. I could feel myself shutting down, that familiar stretch in my back as my shoulders hunched over to make myself small. My brain was just doing what it thought it had to do to protect me, to survive. Turning off was the only way I had managed to escape Rick's attentions for years, but sometimes it wasn't the right option. Like right now. What I needed to do was make myself big, imposing, and to take no shit from these predatory thugs.

But I couldn't. Any courage I'd ever had had been sanded away by my ex-husband's abusive, abrasive temper. Now, all I could do was shrink from Mikey's assault, and beg helplessly for his mercy.

"Can you just leave me alone? I've had a bad day." I squeaked. My stomach dropped like a stone as I heard how weak I sounded and, on cue, the huddle of men around me collectively licked their lips, as if they had realized I wouldn't, or couldn't, fight back. Their expressions turned from rowdily drunk to sly and predatory – leaning forward, eyes narrowing, bared teeth.

Make that a bad decade.

Mikey leaned in and threaded his arm around my shoulder. His breath smelled rancid, and he had flecks of chewing tobacco caught between his yellow stained teeth. "Aw, come on now. Big Mikey can make all that better…"

I squirmed and tried to escape, but his arm felt like it weighed a hundred tons and pushed me down onto my stool. His crew took an ominous step forward, and my eyes flickered around the faded bar, searching for someone, anyone to help. But none was forthcoming. I kicked myself for ever coming here. This wasn't the kind of place where white knights lurked in dark corners, ready to help damsels in distress like me. Not by a long shot. "That's right," Mikey breathed into my ear. "We're going to have a good time, you and me."

I closed my eyes. Not again.

I shuddered reflexively as Mikey's hot, rancid breath invaded my nostrils, foreshadowing the wicked things that he wanted to do to me. My brain was screaming at me to pull away, dumping adrenaline into my bloodstream to force me into action. But instead, my body froze, all that adrenaline only serving to muddy the waters, and turn my mind up to full throttle, while hitting the pause button on my limbs. "What do you want?" I groaned, my eyes still firmly shut.

"What do I want?" Mikey hissed. "I would have thought that would be obvious, with a pretty little thing like you." He stroked the back of my neck with hands that were rough from a lifetime spent outside, and filthy from a day spent digging up roads. I shivered with horror as he touched me, and a sensation of unbridled fear began to gnaw away at my stomach. The drunk construction worker's touch was every bit as terrifying as Rick's had been. If I'd opened my eyes, I would have seen his fluorescent orange road crew jacket reflected in my glass. I'd also have seen another set of eyes focused intently on the scene, drinking in every little detail.

"Please, I'll give you whatever you want," I begged. "Just leave me alone." I was sick with worry, and even sicker with myself. I wanted to rise up, to turn round and smash a glass bottle against the bar and charge at the man, like you see in the movies, but my legs didn't want to work, and my arms felt like jelly. My brain flashed rapidly through a hundred memories, a hundred nights where Rick had come home stinking of booze from a night spent hitting the bars with his friends, a hundred nights when sleep had evaded me as a creeping sense of fear seeped from every pore in my body as I worried and waited and wept for what was to come. My body bore the scars of every one of those nights, marks that I'd carry to my grave.

No. Not again. I sat up straighter on my stool, not that's my assailants seemed to notice. Their attention was too busily occupied elsewhere, their eyes raking across my body like I was a piece of meat on their plate, bought and paid for and ready for them to enjoy.

"Now boys," Mikey laughed, standing up and playing to the crowd. "It looks like little missy here didn't read the playbook. You see," he said, leaning back down and placing his mouth right up next to my ear, "what my friends and I want is, well, how can I put this?" He paused, deliberately stringing out the sentence as long and threateningly as he could. "Is you."

By the time he'd finished talking, I was barely listening to a word that came out of his putrid mouth. My eyes flickered open, and I began to take stock of my options. I resolved, right then and there, that I wasn't going to be a rubber duck anymore, just bobbing on the waves generated as someone stepped into the tub. I was going to be better, had to be better. I weighed up my options, brain settling on just two.

And neither of them were good.

Option number one: I could run. Mikey and his crew were pushing forty, each and every one of them, and they had all spent a long day working under the hot sun. They'd be tired and drained from their efforts, and there was every chance that if I made a break for it, they wouldn't bother rousing themselves to follow. Even if they did, I had a runner's frame, and I'd worked hard to get it. I had no doubt that I could outpace them. But… But they had me surrounded, and it wasn't outpacing them once I hit the asphalt that I was worried about, it was slipping their noose in the first place.

Option number two: I could call for help. I read this article once, about a woman who got stabbed on the streets of New York, stabbed more than twenty times, and when the police interviewed the neighbors, more than fifty people recalled hearing her scream in pain, then sob and slowly slip away into the cold embrace of death. I remember how sick I felt, that nobody so much as lifted a finger to help, all trusting that someone else would, and the journalist's final sentence seeped into my head. "If you ever find yourself in an emergency, point at someone, make eye contact, and order them to do something about it."

Of course, there was a third option, too. It wasn't a good one, and it was the riskiest of the bunch – a plan that offered just as much a chance of ending up in hospital, again, as it did with me getting out of here scot-free. I trembled just thinking about it, and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up with worry. For half a second, I considered just letting them do what they wanted to me, with me. But no sooner had the foul thought appeared in my brain that I dismissed it. I was done with being that kind of girl, done with letting men just walk all over me.

I felt Mikey's hand sidling down my body, looked at it, seeing the dirt trapped under his fingernails, and a cold shaft of rage erupted inside my brain. All conscious thought disappeared, and my primal brain took over. "Get your filthy hands off me, you pig." I spat with rage. Mikey jerked his face back and his cheeks drained of color, then erupted in a violent, angry red as he processed what I'd said. I got the sense that women didn't talk to him like that very often.

"What the fuck did you just say to me?" He growled, and thick droplets of his enraged spittle landed on my bare shoulders. My face wrinkled with distaste, and I reflexively brushed the offending fluid off myself. Mikey grimaced, as though I had somehow committed a grievous offense, and pushed me hard, half rocking me off the stool.

"Hey," the bartender interrupted for the first time, wiping his hands nervously on a towel as he cowered behind the thick wooden bar. "No fighting in here, you okay. You break anything, even a glass, and I'm calling the police, you hear?"

I would have apologized, but he hadn't been all that helpful when I'd first, silently, begged him for help. I shrugged. You made your bed, I thought, now lie in it. Besides, that was the whole point. I wanted him to call the police...

When I'd looked around the room for help, I'd seen nothing but a dozen cowering heads, a dozen people studiously studying the table in front of them as if they'd never seen anything more interesting in all their lives. Cowards, every one of them.

Mikey's crew were getting restless, and the tallest of the bunch, a spindly, sallow cheeked man wearing a dark green Alexandria Eagles jersey under his fluorescent orange jacket, spoke up for the first time. He spat dismissively onto the floor, a huge glob of chewing tobacco, and spoke with a voice that reminded me of sandpaper. "Enough of your talk, Mikey, you always talk too much." He stuffed his hand in his pocket, and I shrank back, knowing even then that that couldn't signify anything good.

I got a sinking feeling in my stomach. It was clear that I'd made a terrible mistake. I wished that I could back away, but I was still stuck to my stool.

And that's when the guy with the Alexandria Eagles jersey pulled out a knife.