Nicole

 

It was the finality with which he said it that finally sent me careening over the edge. I don’t want him in your life anymore. Period. It was this sense that he had any right to be telling me what I could and couldn’t do, like he owned me. And that was how he said it. Like I was a stupid child who couldn’t handle things responsibly. Who was going to mess up everything because I had the option to.

 

My body was shaking at this point and I thought initially it was from the anger. How dare he assume he could do something like that? That I would let him? The indignation felt good, better than anything else, but as I stood up from the corner of the bed I’d been sitting on, I had to admit to myself that I wasn’t shaking over indignation or anger.

 

I was shaking because I was afraid.

 

Terror began to wind its way through my body, keying me up until I felt like I might bolt or explode or just crumple up into a tiny ball and roll underneath the bed until the boogeyman went away. Except the boogeyman was my husband and I wasn’t sure if I could get away from him so easily now.

 

I stood there staring at him, seeing all the things that initially attracted me to him, even when I was trying to deny it. He had those broad shoulders that dropped down as they turned into well-muscled biceps, the kind of strong arms that could scoop you up and heft you high up into the sky without much effort. His chest was like that, too, incredibly strong and defined, built as though carved from stone. It tapered off to a trim waist with those darts cut into his hips, leading down to other things. Things that were equally as impressive as the rest of him. He’d proved that the other night when my towel had dropped to the floor in a heap as he explored my naked body. I was begging for him without even realizing it at the time and he’d delivered in ways I couldn’t have possibly expected. And even then, I’d been ready to go again.

 

Probably, if he tried that with me right now, pinned me to the bed and started caressing my flesh beneath my clothes, I would cave to him. I would want him, even as the next thing occurred to me: Maxwell is dangerous.

 

I shivered as I thought it, but couldn’t deny its truth. I’d thought so when I first met him, but it was for different reasons then. He was part of some motorcycle club—I didn’t see why they didn’t call it what it really was, a gang—and clearly was on the wrong side of them. That was why they were trying to kill us. But that wasn’t what made him dangerous to me right then. It was the unnerving similarities I was finding to the man I had just left.

 

The only thing that terrified me more than the sinking realization that I’d found yet another man who was just as bad as the last one was the knowledge that now I’d have to find a way to get away from him, too. And I’d only just barely managed to ditch Ben.

 

Fear thrummed through my veins as I realized how much more resourceful—and how much less afraid—Maxwell would be. Would I be able to shake him? He was going to come looking for me, I knew. He wouldn’t be the kind of man to just let me walk out of his life. It would be a form of disrespect, wouldn’t it? Like I was somehow challenging him. He looked like the kind of man who held dominance in high regard. I shivered at the thought. If I walked away now, what would he do to me?

 

I didn’t want to know. Not letting myself finish that thought, I finally snapped back to the present, finding myself standing there petrified in fear in the middle of that hotel room. Looking apologetic—ha, like I haven’t seen that before!—Maxwell tried to approach me, reaching out for me.

 

I jerked back away from him quickly. That movement set me into action. I had to get out of there. Quickly, I reached down for my already packed bag. I grabbed it up and when I straightened, I found he had moved closer to me.

 

His sudden nearness again made me blanch. I jerked away from him and nearly knocked myself over onto the bed.

 

No, don’t fall onto the bed! I thought in horror, because despite my fear, I was still worried that if he got me on the bed, it would all be over. I’d succumb to whatever deep-seated desire I had for him, the desire I couldn’t seem to shake even as I was angrier and more terrified than I ever had been in my entire life.

 

“Stay away from me!” I yelled at him, my voice sounding pinched and high pitched.

 

“Nicole,” Maxwell tried in a deep, sultry voice that was either meant to calm me or seduce me. It did neither, instead ramping up my already in overdrive survival instinct. “Please, calm down.”

 

“Go to hell!” I yelled at him, and when he reached for me, I made my move. Moving as quickly as I could, I ducked down beneath his arm and scrambled away from him, heading for the door. Thankfully he hadn’t closed it, so I was able to just dart out onto the hallway, which was more of an outdoor veranda than anything else. I could hear him calling after me as I ran, but I was already halfway down the stairs—I could be fast when I needed to be—when he came barreling gracelessly from the room.

 

“Nicole! Wait!”

 

But I wasn’t waiting. I was running, pumping my arms and legs as hard as I could, aiming for the street. I saw a couple of cabs parked there waiting for passengers and hoped if I ran quickly enough, I could catch one before they took off. I heard Maxwell behind me, and pushed myself harder.

 

I have to get to that cab!

 

He wasn’t even across the parking lot when I jerked the door to the cab open and tossed my bag inside. “LAX?” I asked breathlessly, risking a glance behind me. Maxwell hadn’t given up and was quickly gaining on me.

 

“Yeah, sure,” the cabbie answered in a deep voice.

 

I slid the rest of the way in and slammed the door behind me. “Go! Go now!” I all but yelled at him. The cabbie pulled out into traffic just as Maxwell hit the curb. I saw him wave at me, trying to get my attention, and saw my name mouthed on his full lips. When I saw that he wasn’t going to try to chase after the cab, at least not on foot, I turned away from him and relaxed back into the leather seats.

 

We were silent for several blocks before the cabbie glanced at me in the rearview mirror. “Ex-boyfriend or something?”

 

I glanced down at my hand to see the silver wedding band on my finger. It made me want to cry and I couldn’t keep myself from shaking. I began to spin the ring around the meat of my finger, using that one thing to focus my energy on.

 

How did I mess this up so badly?

 

After a moment, I shook my head in answer to the cabbie. “No,” I told him, feeling worse and worse by the second. “That…that was my husband.”

 

I saw his expression in the mirror shift. His thick eyebrows rose in surprise. I couldn’t see more than his eyebrows and eyes in the mirror, but it looked like his mouth pulled down in a frown, maybe? “Huh, I didn’t see that one coming,” he admitted. His tone was strangely lighthearted, and almost giddy, but maybe I was just imagining the whole thing. Since he was sitting in the front like that, pointed away from me, I couldn’t see much of him. He sounded young and there weren’t a lot of wrinkles around his eyes, though I noticed a dark, nearly black freckle on the outside of one eye and I saw that his skin was wrinkled and leathery. It looked like he spent a lot of time out in the sun, which seemed odd given that he was a cabbie. Wouldn’t that keep him out of the sun most of the time?

 

Maybe he usually drives a convertible, I joked silently to myself, seeing if I could cheer myself up, but it didn’t really work. I still felt miserable.

 

How had I let this happen with Maxwell?

 

I sat back in the seat, they were worn a little, but leather and thanks to the air conditioning, still cool despite the sun and the general heat of California. I thought the climate here was really pretty similar to Nevada, though there seemed to be a faint undercurrent of sea and salt hanging on the air, but I thought maybe I was just imagining that. We were a ways from the ocean, I thought, and probably it was smog I was smelling anyway.

 

Looking out the window, I tried to focus on anything besides what was going on. I focused on the movement of the car beneath me, imagining the tires spinning quickly and then screeching to a halt abruptly as we didn’t quite make it through a stoplight. The vibrations I imagined were like a massage, easing the tension from my body.

 

But it was mostly useless. If I found a distraction, it barely lasted a minute or two before I was brought back to what was going on, to what was wrong. To what I was running from.

 

How was it possible that I had escaped one controlling boyfriend only to run into the arms of another? And that one I married.

 

The thought sent a chill through me. As soon as I got home, I would have to see what I could do about that. I’d make an appointment with a lawyer and see if I could get the marriage annulled or if we both had to be present or just what it was I would have to do to get out of this. What an idiot I was! How could I have let this happen?

 

But my thoughts didn’t stop there. I followed my train of thought and realized I was in a lot more trouble than I had initially realized. Things with Ben were bad—and likely Maxwell ditching my phone had made them worse—but he was just Ben. He had friends and family, sure, but none of them would be interested in participating in his creepy stalking of me. In fact, if he told anyone there was a strong likelihood the police might get involved. Sure, they hadn’t listened to me, but maybe if they spoke to someone outside of the relationship who was also concerned, they might actually take notice.

 

Either way, Ben would be too cautious to ask for help from his buddies, right?

 

But Maxwell was different. He was from a different world. From the outside, Ben was an upstanding citizen and it was only in his personal life that he was a dangerous creep. But someone like Maxwell? He was dangerous on the outside, too. Maxwell wasn’t just some everyday, nine to five office job, sit in a cubicle all day type of guy. He didn’t have a regular job like that and while I knew he said he worked at an auto shop, I was beginning to wonder if that was true. What if he said that so I wouldn’t get suspicious? What if he was hiding something much, much worse? And even if his job was working at an auto shop, fixing up cars or painting them or whatever, what if there was a good chance that his job entailed more than that? What if there were other things he did, too?

 

After all, I knew he was part of that motorcycle club. So even if his regular day job was on the level, there was still that chance that he lived this frightening, dangerous other life. What if he was just as bad as the men who came after me?

 

I shivered as I thought of them. They had terrified me that night, and not just for the obvious reasons. I had truly worried I would be raped and that I would probably be murdered after, but it was made all the worse by how much they didn’t even seem to care. This was my life they were ruining and it meant nothing to them.

 

It took everything I had to keep from breaking down and sobbing right then and there in the backseat of that cab.

 

The man in the front glanced back at me again and I took a shaky breath, trying to regain my composure. “You all right, lady?” he asked mildly. He didn’t seem overly concerned and for a wild, paranoid second I even thought he was grinning at me. But that seemed ridiculous and I told myself I was just upset and imagining the worst in people.

 

But what if I’m right to imagine that? I found myself wondering.

 

After all, wasn’t it crazy that I wound up with Ben only to dump him and end up later with Maxwell? The same kind of man? What if it was both more and less complicated than I was making it out to be? I started to follow this thread as it unraveled my whole world. I thought about Ashley’s boyfriend. I had gone back and forth between believing he was a good guy because he was able to share her sexually without freaking out and thinking he was a controlling asshole like Ben, because they would get into fights over stupid things and he would always use her car instead of getting his own. I never really leaned too heavily in either direction and Ashley had always told me I was paranoid because of the whole Ben fiasco, but now I wasn’t so sure. I tried to come up of other examples of men in my life and the lives of my friends that I didn’t trust.

 

It was surprisingly easy. My mother had been a show girl once upon a time, back in the seventies when it was a big deal to be a show girl and it meant you probably had some dealings with the underbelly of Sin City. I never asked her too much about it, but there were a couple of drunken, slurring stories of how you couldn’t trust men and how they were always going to use you and lose you. As a teen, I’d worked hard to ignore her words and suppress the things she was trying to stir within me. First, I had tried to do this by avoiding all men. If I never got overly attached to anyone in the romantic sense, I could hardly get caught up in the stupidity and heartache of it. Then, when that didn’t work, I decided I would just try to date a certain type of boy. The sweet kind, with good manners and upbringing and preferably with a lot of money so I would be taken care of and not have to worry about the bills my mom kept getting in the mail.

 

But that didn’t work either. Instead, I found myself attracted to all the wrong boys. I didn’t know why—and I still didn’t today—but even when they seemed like the good kind from the outside, they would always turn out to be creeps. The same kind of creeps every time.

 

That was when I finally started listening to my mom as she rambled on about how love fucked up her life. Maybe I didn’t really think she had any useful advice, but I tried to hear her out. It was difficult when so much of what she was saying was filled and slurred by alcohol. She would lose her train of thought, pick up another, then decide everything she’d just said was pointless. Then, turning around again, she would tell me I was beautiful and some Prince Charming would whisk me away into storybook town.

 

I was about seventeen at this point and knew full and well that there was no such place as storybook town, nor had there ever been. Besides, I knew if I gave her a few minutes, she would drop the Prince Charming crap and come back full circle to tell me that all men were even in the end, and I should know better than to trust the likes of them with anything beyond a dulled butter knife.

 

Sometimes it was hard growing up with my mom, but it got harder when my dad finally decided he wanted to hang around.

 

Dad was special in a lot of ways, but I never saw any of them. He was good-looking and charming, but beyond those qualities, I didn’t know him very well. Just well enough to know I didn’t like him very much and that I thought my mother could do so much better. I never did decide whether or not that impression was true, but I had always liked to think it was. Dad was the kind of guy who enjoyed the idea of being a dad more than he enjoyed being a dad. The same went for husband, though I doubted he much cared for that title at all. He was a sleaze ball car salesman, so the whole “I’m family oriented” thing helped his customers to trust him. Which they definitely shouldn’t have. He was the sort of guy who would sell a family of five a rotting piece of junk that would guzzle gas and every bit of their expendable income and then when they brought it back to complain, he’d deny that he was responsible in any way. In fact, he’d probably spin a pretty convincing lie to tell them how it was all their fault that it was like that.

 

That was how he got ahold of Mom in the first place. He was a real character.

 

About the only good thing about him was that he spent a lot of time out of my hair. Having a kid around was good for pictures on his office desk and barbeques in the backyard, work parties, and promotions; otherwise, he didn’t want to even so much as see me, much less interact with me.

 

I wasn’t stupid, I knew how much worse it could have been for me growing up. So I took the good with the bad and was just grateful he wasn’t one of those dads who did something terrible to his daughters. Something you couldn’t take back or erase even after years of therapy after the fact.

 

Unfortunately, I did see him enough to know how much he hurt my mother. For all her flaws—the addiction to plastic surgery and booze there at the end, not to mention her obsession with glamour, her youth and looks, and the hormonal outbursts she’d always been prone to—she was a real softy on the inside. A sensitive soul who only wanted one man. Well, at least one man at a time. But that was what my dear old daddy just couldn’t manage. Loyalty.

 

I wondered if that was because he couldn’t control my mom. The idea was a little out there, maybe, and came sort of unbidden from a place of fear and hurt on my part, but now that I’d encountered it, I didn’t think I could let it go.

 

Dad couldn’t keep ahold of Mom, so he fooled around on her? I didn’t know if that was true, but it fit with what I was feeling right then, so I was happy to run with it. It made everything sound more reasonable, rather than simply it being a me thing. I just picked bad men. I was just that unlucky. I just had terrible taste.

 

If it was the whole dad thing, maybe it wasn’t just me. Maybe it was all men.

 

I shuddered involuntarily at the thought. I didn’t care for my idea, but I had to admit it sounded plausible. I snuck a glance at the man up front, but I could still only see a small portion of his face. This time I caught part of his cheek and noticed a large, dark colored freckle.

 

The car began to slow down suddenly, making me frown. “Uh, are we almost there?” I wasn’t really familiar with the area, so it was possible that amidst all my brooding and worry, we’d hit the huge airport already. But I didn’t think so. Especially given the ungodly traffic Maxwell and I had encountered when we first got into L.A. Thinking of him made me scowl.

 

The man glanced back at me in the mirror. He sounded chipper as he said, “No, we’re still a ways, but I gotta make a living, you know? If it’s all right with you, I’d like to pick up another passenger. I recognize him; he’s local, so he won’t bug you. Hate to make him wait…”

 

I bit my lip. I really didn’t want to, but the cabbie seemed unconcerned, and if the guy was local, then he probably wouldn’t be traveling far. With a sigh, I nodded. “Uh, yeah, that’s fine. How much farther to LAX?”

 

The cab came to a halt along the street and picked up a man who was standing along the side of the road. I didn’t get a good look at him, because he was already sliding in almost before the car even came to a stop. I frowned and was about to comment about the guy’s eagerness, when he slammed the car door shut and swiveled around to face me. The words, whatever I’d been about to say, froze in my throat, lodged there halfway as fear rose up along my spine and filled my body. I didn’t recognize the man, but I didn’t have to to be afraid, because he was holding a gun and it was aimed right at my head.