CHAPTER THIRTEEN | DUKE
I pressed the bag of frozen peas against my face, then immediately sucked in my breath and winced as a sharp sting of white hot pain shot through my eye socket.
I had to admit, for a scrawny drunk guy, the creep at the bar had thrown a pretty decent punch.
Keeping a firm grip on the makeshift ice pack, I shuffled across the kitchen and nudged open the door of the liquor cabinet, then used my good eye to survey the selection of spirits. Grey Goose wasn’t going to cut it tonight; I needed something stronger to ward off the horrible pain that was throbbing through my skull.
I located a suitable painkiller and gripped the bottle by its neck, then I trudged wearily towards the apartment living room and collapsed on the leather sofa. Through the tall glass windows I could see Hartford’s skyline lit up against the black night sky.
I sank deeper into the cool leather sofa, then I wedged the bottle of Fireball between my knees and unscrewed the cap with one hand. I was about to take my first swig when I heard the sound of the apartment door being unlocked.
I glanced up just in time to see the door swing open and Beck stumble inside. She was panting for breath and her eyes were wide with panic as they scanned the apartment urgently. When she spotted me, her shoulders sunk down in relief and she slumped against the wall.
“Thank God!” she gasped, wiping the sweat from her forehead. “I thought you were arrested!”
“Arrested?” I made the mistake of frowning, and I immediately felt a fresh wave of pain shoot through my swollen face underneath the bag of frozen peas.
I remembered the bottle of Fireball, and I raised it to my lips and took a swig. The hot cinnamon-flavored whiskey engulfed my senses like a five-alarm fire, burning even hotter than the pain that seared through my pummeled brow and eye socket.
“I tried to follow you out of the bar,” she explained breathlessly as she kicked off her Adidas sneakers. “But by the time I got outside, all I could see was a car driving away—”
“Did you really wear sneakers to the bar?” I asked with an amused — and painful — grin.
She glanced down at the discarded Superstars and frowned, then she ignored my question and said, “When I saw that car drive away, I thought you might have gotten hauled into a police cruiser…”
“Oh,” I had to chuckle at that. “No, that was just a taxi.”
“Don’t laugh!” Barefoot Beck stomped across the apartment until she was standing directly over me. Her arms were folded over her chest and there was a glare etched into her face. “I was worried about you! The bouncer practically dragged you out of the bar by the ear!”
“He was just keeping me out of trouble,” I explained. “The crew has been going to Rusty’s for a long time, so we’re pretty tight with all the bouncers. Those guys always have our backs.”
She frowned, crossing her arms tighter over the front of her Guns n’ Roses t-shirt.
“So… is this something you do often?” she blinked down at me.
“Do I do what often? Rescue damsels in distress from creepy perverts?”
“No,” her glare tightened. “Get into fist fights with random guys at the bar.”
“Only when they try to start shit with one of my bros,” I teased. I tried to stretch my face into a goofy smile, but that just made my eye throb.
Beck must have caught me wincing, because the frown immediately faded from her face and she bent forward.
“Can I take a look?”
“I’m fine,” I insisted. “It’s not the first time I’ve taken a punch…”
“I’m sure,” she rolled her eyes. “But you’re in pretty bad shape.”
“You should see the other guy!” I joked.
She rolled her eyes again, and then I felt her hand wrap around mine on top of the bag of frozen peas. I was surprised by how smooth and warm her skin felt…
“I’m an EMT,” she reminded me sternly. “Let me do my job.”
I relented with a sigh, then I let her guide the bag of frozen peas slowly away from my swollen face.
She had propped herself on the edge of the coffee table so that she was facing me on the couch at eye level. Our knees collided as she leaned towards me to take a closer look, but neither of us moved away…
I could feel her breath on my cheek as she inspected my injury.
“It’s really not that bad,” I promised her. “I used to get hit a lot worse than this when I was a kid.”
“Really?” her eyes flicked away from my swollen eye as she met my stare. Our faces were only a few inches apart, but she didn’t move away.
“Oh yeah,” I said nonchalantly, holding her stare. “I used to get into fist-fights all the time.”
“Let me guess,” her lips curled into a smile. “You were the playground bully?”
“Actually, the opposite. Kids always gave me shit because of who my parents were, or because I came from money. They’d tell me that I hadn’t worked for anything that I had—”
“But did you?”
“What?”
“Did you actually work for anything that you had?”
“That wasn’t the point,” I frowned and immediately regretted it.
“So… what was the point?” she asked, still holding me in her stare. Her icy blue eyes felt even colder than the frozen peas; so cold that they sent a tingle down my spine and filled my head with bright white blizzard clouds that obliterated all of my thoughts.
“I don’t know anymore,” I admitted. Then I changed the subject. “So what happened back at the bar?”
Her smile melted and she blinked down towards the ground, breaking our silent staring contest.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” her voice sounded suddenly flustered.
She leaned away from me as she sat back on the glass coffee table and straightened her shoulders. Then she grabbed the bottle of Fireball that was pinned between my legs and helped herself to a long swig. Her face twisted from the burn of the whiskey.
“I saw what that guy did to you at the bar,” I told her slowly. “But you didn’t say anything to him. You looked… terrified.”
She still couldn’t look me in the eye as she shrugged her shoulders.
“I don’t get it,” I shook my head. “The other day at Vaughan’s, I honestly thought that you were going to rip my balls off, smother them in Ragu, and serve them for dinner on a bed of angel hair pasta… and that was just because I said ‘hello’ to you. But tonight I saw this pervert touch you, and you just… froze.”
“So it’s my fault?” she glared at the floor, where her toes were digging swirls into the shag rug.
“Of course not!” I said quickly. “That’s not what I meant at all!”
“So what did you mean?” her eyes flicked up, and that ice-cold glare caught me off guard for the second time. “Was I supposed to rip him a new one? Was I supposed to kick his ass? Tell me. What was I supposed to do, Duke?”
“You know what? Forget I said anything,” I reached for the bottle of whiskey and took a swig as I slammed my back against the leather sofa and sighed.
But Beck wasn’t about to forget anything.
“No,” she said defiantly, shaking her head. “Tell me what I was supposed to do, Duke. How was I supposed to handle some guy grabbing my ass at a bar?”
I remained silent.
“I’m tired of reacting,” she said. Her voice was quaking and her face was red with emotion. “I’m tired of ignoring catcalls or fighting with strangers. I’m tired of having to defend myself. I’m tired of running away.”
“Beck—”
“Do you know why I transferred to Hartford in the first place?” she glared up at me, and it was like staring back into two frozen orbs of ice. “I came here to get away from shit like this. Coming to Hartford was supposed to be my fresh start.”
For several seconds we were both silent. The only sound between us was the splash of whiskey sloshing around inside the glass bottle.
“What do you mean?” I asked finally. “Why did you need a fresh start?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does matter,” I insisted. “Beck, you can tell me. You can trust me.”
Her face went still and she took a deep, shaky breath. This time she didn’t drop her eyes away from mine as she spoke.
“I worked my ass off to become an EMT,” she began. “I grew up in a small town in Rhode Island. Everybody knew everybody, and everybody knew my father. He was the town sheriff. I had always dreamed of being an EMT, but I wanted to earn it outright. I didn’t want anyone to think that I had gotten a shortcut because of who my father was.”
I can relate to that, I thought to myself as I remembered how hard I had worked to earn my spot on the crew at Firehouse 56. My spot on the crew was something I had earned entirely on my own, and that meant that it was something my parents could never take away from me.
“I was so proud of everything that I had accomplished, because I knew that I had worked so hard to earn it,” she continued. “I loved my job, and I loved being part of a great crew.”
I can relate to that, too…
“One day the department chief asked if he could take me out for lunch. I thought that all of my hard work was finally paying off, and all I could think about was how proud my mom would have been if she was still around…”
I saw the tension flood her face, and I waited patiently for her to continue.
“I knew that something wasn’t right as soon as I got to the restaurant. I tried to ignore my instincts and act normal, but in my gut I knew.”
“Beck… did something happen? Did the chief…?” I couldn’t finish that question.
“Not that day,” she said. Her voice was tiny and soft; a far cry from the Beck I had met that day at Vaughan’s.
“He insisted on taking me out to lunch again the next week. Then again the week after that, and again, and again… this went on for months. At first, it was completely innocent. I’d order a salad, and he’d get a beer and a burger. We would talk about the department, or what happened in the field. He would give me advice. He said that he wanted to be my mentor,” she scoffed and shook her head, wrinkling her nose in disgust.
“Then things started getting weird. His questions would become more personal. He started getting too close to me, and he would stare at me for just a little bit too long…”
I became conscious of my own eyes, staring straight into hers, but I didn’t look away. I couldn’t.
“I confided in a few coworkers and friends, but they all thought that I was overreacting or imagining things. They made excuses for him, and made me feel like I was the one with a problem. Then one day, something happened that I knew I wasn’t imagining. We were in his truck, and he was driving me back to the station after lunch.”
“Beck—”
“He tried to kiss me.” I could see the storm of emotion and disgust and vulnerability swirling in her face. It was like watching her relive all of those emotions all over again. I wanted to say or do something that could take it all away, but the pain that was burning inside of her was one kind of fire that I had never learned how to put out.
“I pushed him away, and then I jumped out of his truck and ran without ever looking back. I had no idea what to do. I was mortified, but I loved my job and I didn’t want to leave,” she sighed. “I thought I would just pretend that nothing ever happened. In retrospect, ignoring him was the worst thing that I could have done.”
“Why? What happened?”
She sighed heavily and glanced down at the floor, and I knew that she was struggling with what she was about to say next.
“Basically, he made my life at work a living hell,” she sniffed. “Finally, when I couldn’t take it anymore, I decided to confront him. But before I could, he turned the tables and told everyone that I had tried to make a move on him.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?! That’s ridiculous!”
“I thought so too,” she said. “But he had thought the whole thing through. He had evidence.”
“Evidence?”
“Yeah,” she nodded, wrinkling her face into a frown. “He fabricated love notes. He wrote fake incident reports. He claimed that I was the one who tried to kiss him. He even stole a pair of underwear from my locker and accused me of planting them in his office.”
“That’s disgusting!” I gasped, furious. “What about all of those lunches he made you go on?”
“He claimed they were innocent,” she shook her head. “He said he just wanted to be my mentor.”
“And people believed him?”
“Why wouldn’t they?” she sighed. “He was a pillar of the community. He had been at the department for over thirty years. Nobody was going to take my word over his.”
“But you had already told people that he was a creep…”
“It didn’t matter. Everyone turned on me. My friends, my coworkers… people I thought I could trust.”
“What about your father?” I asked. “He was the sheriff, right? Couldn’t he do something?”
“That was the sickest part of it all,” she grimaced. “The chief had been close friends with my father since before I was even born. When the chief made his accusations against me, my father didn’t doubt his word for a second.”
“Beck, that’s so…” I trailed off, shaking my head is disgust.
“Fucked up?” she finished for me, finally blinking up at me.
“Yeah. Incredibly fucked up.”
“I know,” she sighed. “That’s why I came to Hartford. My career and reputation were ruined. I just wanted a fresh start. But now things feel just as fucked up as they were back home…”
“No way,” I insisted firmly. “The only thing that got fucked up tonight was that asshole’s career as an EMT. Come Monday morning, I doubt he’ll even have a job.”
“It doesn’t work like that,” she said sadly. “I’ve learned that the hard way…”
“Trust me, Beck. That guy isn’t getting away with what he did to you. I won’t let him.”
She sighed as she reached for the bottle of Fireball and brought it up to her lips.
“I know that you’ve been burned in the past, but you’ve gotta give us a chance,” I pleaded. “Give Hartford a chance.”
It was only after I had said those words that I realized what I really wanted was for her to give me a chance.