Shapiro
“Cindy? Did I leave my phone up here?” I holler over the counter. In a hurry to find my new phone and head back upstairs to tell Penny, that my worst nightmare is about to come true.
Marcus Mannard, a childhood friend and now worst enemy is out of prison. The notes, the signs, I thought they all pointed to Tyler, but that is what he wanted me to believe. Typical Marcus.
First, he tried to destroy my life and then my family’s and now Penny’s. There is nothing logical in the way Marcus thinks which makes him a dangerous man.
“Yeah. Just give me a second and I’ll get it.” Cindy is standing at the register cashing tabs out.
A second is too long. I need that phone to get to the woman I love and explain what exactly is going on and how we need to figure out a way to protect her from this bad blood between me and Marcus.
“Okay.” She claps her hands together. “Where did I put it?”
“Cindy …”
“Oh yeah.” She reaches under the cabinet pulling it out. “Here you go.”
“Thanks.”
Heading toward the back. I swipe the phone to life and start to text Penny.
What?
I’m not sure what I’m seeing. I never texted Penny this.
Me: Meet me at the bakery in 30.
Penny: Really? You don’t need to hold my hand.
Me: 30 min, babe. Tick-tock.
“Fuck!” I holler and take off for the door. I have to get to Penny.
Running through the bar, I spot Jordan talking to the hostess.
“He has her, man. He fucking has her. Call the police,” I shout to him as I run out the door and run down the street.
Pounding the pavement to get to my girl.
Protect her.
My legs never ceasing to stop. They’re in a constant cycle of motion, my mind never straying from my single thought. Penny.
Lungs on fire, heart beating out of my chest. I bob and weave block after block to get to her. Ignoring the sensation to stop, I keep going.
Fuck!
A change in stoplight causes the path to be blocked. Skidding to a stop, I stand there searching for her. I’m almost there. When I spot Marcus.
Standing there with my girl backed up against a pole and a scarf around her neck, Marcus looks up and gives me a fucking evil grin. I’m going to fucking kill him if he touches her.
Penny.
I hear the sirens echoing in the distance, but they’re still not close enough.
“Penny, run!” I scream. “Run now!”
She doesn’t hear me.
Reaching them, I jump up and raise my fist in the air letting it come down on this asshole.
“Shapiro!” Penny shrieks.
Together we fall to the ground. Marcus under me as I fucking beat his ass, wiping that fucking evil grin off his face.
“Keep your fucking hands off her,” I spit.
Pound after pound, blow after blow. His smirk doesn’t fade. “This is for Eden, you bastard.”
“Shapiro! Please …” I hear Penny behind me, but Marcus needs to know he can’t fuck with my family.
“Help him,” Penny pleads with someone.
I get a few more blows in before I’m lifted off.
“What the fuck, man?” Jordan and Jake are standing behind me, holding me back.
“Marcus. That’s Marcus. He had his hands around her neck.”
Penny.
“Shit.” I jerk my way free and rush over to her side. “You okay, sweetheart?”
“No.” She frantically shakes her head. “I was so scared, but …” She scans the area before her eyes come back down to Marcus’s. “He didn’t hurt me.”
“Shapiro,” Jordan hollers, but I can’t take my eyes off Penny. Seeing her like this and the thought of what could happen. “Marcus.”
At the mention of his name, I turn. The mother fucker is up on his elbows, bloody as fuck, asking if anyone got any video.
“You’re going down, motherfucker,” Marcus warns. “You let me pay for what you did and now you are going to serve your time.”
“What’s he talking about?” Penny pulls on my elbow.
“Not now, Penny.”
I’m so fucked.
“And when you are locked up in your little six by ten cell, I’m going to be fucking your girl. Have a little piece of that dessert you can’t get enough of.”
“Fucking shit!” I break free from their hold and run to give him one last kick to the side before a cop pulls me off.”
“Your freedom for mine,” Marcus shouts as he’s being lifted in the waiting ambulance.
“Frances Shapiro, we need you to come down to the station.”
“He was only protecting me. He had a scarf tied around my neck and he was tightening it,” Penny pleads with the officer as her body wracks with uncontrollable sobs.
“Ma’am. We are aware of the situation.” He nods over to Jordan. “But we still need you both to come down to the station to give a statement.”
“I don’t understand what is going on.” Penny is searching the area, looking for answers.
“Baby, you’re in shock.” I reach up to brush the hair out of her face.
“Your knuckles!” Penny gasps as she reaches for my wrists. “He doesn’t need to go to the station. He needs a hospital.”
“Ma’am, the quicker you come down, the quicker you are back to whatever it was you were doing before,” the officer explains.
“Come on.” I guide Penny to the back of the cruiser. “Watch your head.”
“Are they going to arrest you?” She looks up at me as she slides in to the back.
“I’m not sure.” I slide in after her and pull her into my arms. “But it’s going to be okay.”
“Promise me. You aren’t going to jail. Promise me what he is saying isn’t true.”
“I can’t.”
Penny
This wasn’t supposed to happen. I was supposed to go home and tell Shapiro about Tyler and then we were supposed to ride off into the sunset, not downtown in the back of a police car. Now we are both sitting in a small interview room awaiting his fate and I couldn’t be more pissed off.
We wouldn’t be here if he had just been honest with me. How could he do this to us? To me.
He made me need him. And I can’t help but feel like the rug is about to be jerked from under me if I lose him. If he goes to jail.
“So, are you going to tell me what that was about? Because I’m still struggling to make heads or tails of what the hell just happened.” I look over to a cleaned-up Shapiro.
My chest feels tight as I try not to notice how sexy his five o’clock shadow looks as his jaw is set tight in a brooding stare. Apparently, Jordan knows someone on the force, and he let Shapiro get washed up. More connections I had no idea about. Seems it’s a need to know basis, and he assumed I didn’t need to know.
“It wasn’t Tyler.”
“I know.” Which angers me even more. He kept me locked away, and the whole time I was blaming Tyler. But turns out, I was at risk because of the person who was supposed to protect me. The irony is not lost on me at all.
“You know?”
“Yeah. Well, I mean, he was following me, but not like you think.”
“You talked to him.” He leans forward, still sitting across the table. I can sense his anger building at my omission.
“When did this happen?”
“Today.”
Shapiro is fuming. His vein popping out of his forehead, ready to explode.
“Before you get all crazy. He came to say goodbye.” Doesn’t feel very good to be the last to know does it, I think to myself.
“I don’t even know what to think about that.” He stands and begins to pace the room. “Are you hiding more? Just like you did with the note?”
“Are you serious right now?” I stand to match his movements. “You’re turning this on me, making this about me?”
“It’s always about you.” He turns, eyes boring into mine.
“I didn’t make us end up in here.” I wave my hands around. “You did that all on your own. All I’ve done is what you have asked. And he still got to me.” My voice raises an octave as I take a few steps to stand in front of him.
“Don’t you think I know that?” he yells.
“I still have no clue as to why. Who is he? What did he want?” I want to understand, I’m really trying. But trading one cage for another isn’t worth it, no matter how much I feel for him, if he can’t trust me.
Turning my back, I worry my lip between my teeth as I try to figure out what questions to ask. He beats me to it.
“It started with a note.”
“The one I got downstairs?” I’m trying to understand, turning I search his face. The anguish I see there is sobering.
“No, there was one before that.” He looks the other way.
“There what?” I’m confused. Why would he hide a note from me?
“When I ran to the store to get pads. That day, there was a note.” He continues, “I thought it was Tyler. So, I enlisted a couple contacts to track him down. That is where I went those times I bailed on you. I needed to see where Tyler was at all times.”
He knew all along where Tyler was. And wasn’t.
“Okay, let me understand this. You got a note and kept it from me. Then you had Tyler tracked? Again, keeping it from me.” I throw my hands in the air. “The one you are trying to keep safe.”
“It was for your own safety,” he defends.
“So how does this Marcus fit into this picture?” I ask.
I’m laying out all the pieces and the puzzle still won’t come together.
“You know how I told you I was a troubled teenager. Well, I was pretty damn bad, and Marcus was my best friend, who just so happened to be my older sister, Eden’s boyfriend.” He sits back down. Almost as if he’s defeated, and he stares past me at the wall as he recounts the painful memories. “Eden started to pull back from the rest of the family. Making excuses to stay at girlfriend’s houses. She knew if we saw her, we would know.”
“Know what?” Dread fills my stomach at where this is going.
“He would beat the fuck out of her. He would lay his hands on my sister and then make her feel like shit.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Well, one night I found my sister lying in the back of Marcus’ car, beaten and bruised. Curled in a ball, her clothes ripped away from her body like an animal had attacked her. It didn’t take long to piece together what he had done.” His eyes fill with unshed tears. “He fucking raped his own girlfriend. My sister was violated by a man she loved, by my friend. A man I trusted and brought into our lives.”
I gasp.
“So, as you can imagine the guilt I feel, the shame that still eats at me. I couldn’t save her in time, but maybe I could save you.”
Hearing him say it makes it all the more real. Makes me realize that what Tyler called “loving me” had another name. A name I have been ashamed to label it as, because that word makes me a victim. Rape. Abuse is abuse regardless of relationship status.
But after standing up to him today I realize that I have nothing to be ashamed of. I’m not a victim.
I’m a survivor.
His voice draws me from the dark thoughts of the past.
“So, I set him up. He wanted me to go on this run with him and originally, I refused because I told Mama Ang that I would stay away from that shit, but this time, I went and I fucking sold him out so he would go to prison.”
“Why didn’t your sister go to the police?” I ask the question like it’s the easiest thing to do. If it was, I wouldn’t keep coming back.
“She was his girlfriend. They talked about marriage. She didn’t want there to be talk. She was afraid. A lot of reasons I guess, but none of them good enough. So, I took the law into my own hands.”
It all starts adding up. His overprotective and paranoid demeanor. His need for control. To keep me safe. But it doesn’t change the fact that he lied.
“So, the phone? When you threw it. Was that because of this?”
“Yes, I can say for one hundred percent it was Marcus. He sent me a photo of us in the kitchen that night. The night I stopped all security footage in there.”
“Shapiro. Don’t you see what you did? You were trying to protect me, but instead you kept me in the dark and made it worse. Aren’t you the one who told me to be more aware? How can I be if you don’t share the information with me?” I turn his words back on him.
I’m angry at him for thinking that he couldn’t tell me. Trust me. The way I trusted him.
“All I wanted was transparency and you didn’t give it to me. I’m not sure …”
“You’re not sure what?” The door swings open and the officer walks in interrupting our heated talk. His question remains hanging in the air. Just as well, because I don’t know that I have the answers he is wanting.
“Penny Reed, you are free to go.” The officer looks at his sheet. “And Frances Shapiro you are free to go too, but we might have some follow up questions, so please don’t leave town.”
“Very well.” He reaches for my hand. “Ready?”
If that’s not a loaded question. Am I?
I thought so. I thought I was ready to start rebuilding my life on truths, not lies. On my terms. But now … I’m so confused. And once again lies are tainting what was supposed to be my fresh start.
“No, I’m not ready. I just don’t have anywhere else I can go.” I brush past him, refusing to take his hand and hoping my words hit their mark. Knowing we have unfinished business, I walk outside to where Jordan waits with a car to take us home. To the apartment.