Chapter Eleven

Eli

I didn’t ask Nina why she came limping into Toasty’s with a busted lip and a bruised cheek. I didn’t ask her why her skirt was torn or why she wasn’t wearing a jacket. I wrapped my wool-lined jacket around her shoulders and kicked everyone else the fuck out. I locked and barred the doors and went to get the first aid kit behind the bar. I wasn’t going to ask any stupid questions. We both knew where the marks came from, but she could tell me the story if she needed to. That, I could understand.

I pulled out a sport bandage and knelt at her feet, taking her high heel in my hands and tenderly sliding it off her stocking-covered foot.

“Sometimes I feel like I don’t know him at all, even when things go well,” she whispered. She seemed to be talking to herself. “There’s still this sense that someone else is in there. Behind the guy I’m looking at.”

I nodded and ran my hand up and down the curve of her ankle. I began to wrap the bandage tightly. The compression would might hurt more but it’d be good for circulation.

“I never saw the mask,” I said, but my voice seemed to come from someone else inside myself, someone far away. I never thought I’d say it out loud. “He would only put on his mask when we were out in public together, but at home, there was no mask. There was only monster.”

I stood to get an antibiotic ointment and two more bandages. Nina’s eyes drank me in as I moved. I tried to ignore them, but I couldn’t. I looked back at her.

Her hair was everywhere, and her eyes were shining with something wild I’d never seen before. Her lip was swollen. I smeared antibiotic on my finger and dabbed at the cut. She inhaled sharply, and it inexplicably turned me on.

“It started early, though,” I whispered. These were words I had never said before, to anyone. Never to anyone. “And it never ended.” I took a breath and spoke the truth: “I was lucky he kicked me out. He was afraid of me, afraid of me getting stronger and overtaking him. He would’ve killed me out of fucking fear if I had stayed.”

“He… beat you?” Nina’s tiny voice piped up.

I slicked another touch of antibiotic ointment to the cut on her cheekbone and gently pressed a Band-Aid over it.

“Oh, yeah.” The omission was almost casual. “He kicked me out because I was defending myself. And my mom.”

“What happened to your mom?” Nina whispered up to me. “He never talks to me about a wife.”

“That makes sense.” Bitterness gripped at me and wouldn’t let me go, so it was hard to say the words. “He killed her.”

Color steadily drained away from Nina’s cheeks. “You know that?”

I nodded. “It might’ve been blamed on a fall or on another person, the same way the bad ones were, but I knew it was no fall. Her autopsy said the cause of death was a fractured skull.”

“Oh, my god, Eli. I’m so sorry. I had no idea.” Nina wrapped her arms around me, and I let her. I bowed my head but otherwise didn’t respond. My heart beat like it was trying to break free from something holding it back. “I’m so sorry.” Her hands ran up and down my back, and I let out a deep breath. The tension ran from my muscles. I was used to doing this. A body can’t carry around the amount of stress that’s been packed on me all my life. It can’t.

I let go.

My hand slid into Nina’s and gave it a squeeze. “I don’t want you to go back to your apartment. I don’t want you to be where he knows you can be. I—I don’t want him to touch you, Nina.” My face darkened. “You don’t know what he’s capable of.”

Nina nodded meekly. “I’ll stay,” she vowed. “Just show me where to go.”

I took her upstairs and gave her a brief tour, because I knew it was nothing special. Upstairs from the bar were two apartments, and I lived in the third, on the third floor. “Those two apartments belong to Margot and Bethel,” I explained, “and I’m on the top. All by my lonesome.”

As I was unlocking the door, Nina said, “You never told me what happened to the window.”

“Ah.” I didn’t want to scare her any more than she already was. I didn’t want her to know that being seen with her had already put me on her father’s list, and he didn’t even know that I was his loathed stepson. He probably didn’t know, anyway. “Someone threw a brick. No big deal. It’s being replaced.” The front door swung open, and I ushered her inside. “If it makes you feel any better, though, there are bars on my windows up here. Fire escape too.”

“It does,” Nina breathed as she crossed the threshold. “I lost all concept of time when I was running.”

“It’s about nine o’clock now,” I told her.

“Do you have somewhere I could lay down?” She slipped off her heels.

“Come with me.” I took her hand and led her to my bedroom, which was the nicest room in the apartment. We spent a third of our lives sleeping, so I spared no expense in this one area. My bedspread was plush and silky smooth, all black. The Japanese artwork on the walls was mellow and relaxing. I turned the lights low and gestured to the bed, indicating that she should lay.

“Just one of those days,” Nina whispered, crawling into the bed without looking at me. Her skirt was torn almost to her ass, and my jaw tightened with equal parts of desire and rage. The rip stopped beneath her tight, round buttocks, but why the hell was her skirt ripped? Why the hell was her skirt ripped? “Haven’t you ever had one of those days? What am I talking about? Of course, you have.” She tugged the blankets open and slithered beneath them. “I’m stupid. Sorry.” She buried her face in the pillows and didn’t look back at me.

I slipped into bed beside her, but I stayed above the blankets and laid behind her. I ran my hand up and down the arch of her hip, but I didn’t try to do anything else.

“It’s okay,” I whispered to her in the dim-lit room. “It’s okay to be stupid sometimes.”

I nuzzled up against her neck in the darkness, inhaling her scent, letting her breath move in and out with mine. I threaded our fingers together without even thinking about it, about how intimate of a gesture that was, and I laid behind her. My cock throbbed, but I didn’t make a single move. I laid, my beard tickling her neck and my breath in her hair.

Her voice came out of the darkness: “You didn’t ask me what happened.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No,” she whispered abruptly. There were two more beats of silence, and Nina spoke in a high, slippery voice, like she was trying desperately not to cry. “I think you were right about him. I think you were right about everything.”

“Shh,” I whispered against her neck, unable to stand the feeling of her body crying. I couldn’t stand the tiny trembles on her shoulders or the sound of her tear-filled voice. I pressed a warm kiss against the side of her neck. “Shh,” I soothed, peeling the blankets away from her. She twisted toward me and followed my movements with her eyes, silent and watchful. “I’m going to make you feel better,” I promised against her ear. “I’m going to make everything all right.”