Chapter Eighteen
Buzzing,earth-shakingvibrationswereall I heard, though Mason was arguing loudly with Mrs. Jones out in the hall.Brown hair, young, but all you fuckers look young.That’s all he got out of her about the man she’d seen before I tuned them out, and now the shouting was irrelevant noise. Police sirens blared in the distance and I wondered if they were heading toward me, but they faded into silence.
“Does the building have cameras?” he yelled at her, breaking through the feedback in my mind.
“The fuck you think this is, the Ritz?” she shouted back, and if I wasn’t so stunned, I would have laughed. No one was watching, except my useless neighbors and an uninvited guest. Mrs. Jones was right,this certainly was not the Ritz.
I sat on my slashed-up couch, sticking my fingers into the gaping holes, and toying with the bits of fluff, tugging them out and rolling them into tight balls. Mason placed me here after he cleared the apartment with his back to the wall and his gun trained like on one of those cop shows. The cuts on the couch were long and thick, fueled by rage. The violence in the act would have shocked me if not for the many worse displays surrounding me. I stared blankly at the wall ahead, over my ruined possessions.Whore.I imagined the rest of the sentiment painted as well.Whores burn in hell.
Tons of people answered my ad. At the time, the angry ones calling me names struck me as ineffectual zealots, shouting into a void, hoping one of their barbs would wound. So many worse postings went up in the casual meetups board regularly, genuine prostitutes, and extreme fetishists. I was surely one of the many. None of those scathing emails felt personal, but this did.
I turned over what Mason told me about the people he dealt with and the lengths they would go to. Was this torture? I didn’t think so, but I was too numb to tell. Perhaps, they wanted me to be afraid before they made me pay forhiscrimes. I believed what he said about the people he knew. It was possible this had something to do with him, but part of it still didn’t quite fit. I didn’t know what to do with the blistering intuition quietly burning me up.You’re missing something, Claire.It taunted me from the back of my mind.
“I’ll make theold bitch let you sit over there,” Mason told me for the tenth time.
“No. I want to stay with you...” my voice sounded dead, even to me.
“If her couch wasn’t soaked with cat piss, I would force you myself.” He shook his head in frustration. His knuckles whitened as he clenched his fists repeatedly. This was a rough night for him. His perfect control was as shredded and tattered as the couch I found at the salvation army two years ago.
“Mason, why do you have a gun?” I knew the answer; of course I did. It was the same reason he was certain someone was trying to hurt me to punish him. His past was creeping up on him. I was naïve enough to think he wouldn’t carry a gun everywhere he went, only taking the weapon out for special occasions. I wondered if he had it on him before that day in the café with Leyla, or if the threat to me upset him enough to pick it up again. Mason told me to stop being naïve; he always had it.
“If I needed a reason before tonight, I don’t anymore.” He confirmed my thoughts. I nodded at him.
A picture of me alone at graduation lay smashed on the floor. I couldn’t bear the sight of my sad face or think about the thick ribbons of the pearly substance covering the broken glass. I didn’t want to imagine where else I might find bits of the person intent on ruining me.Coating my pillows, my panties...I shook myself, dislodging the thought process before it broke me entirely.
Mason barked orders into the phone, but I couldn’t make sense of what he was saying through the buzzing.
“Should we call the police?” I pressed as I was sure it wasn’t a nine-one-one operator on the other line.
“I’m taking care of it.” I didn’t have the strength to argue or investigate the extent of the damage. Objects were never an important part of my childhood. I had few toys or clothes, things to call my own. Those particular items I collected for myself meant a lot to me. It took me so long to put this place back in order after the mess I made of it.
A tear slipped down my cheek at the memory of all the days I laid around doing nothing, feeling like no one, surrounded by my mess. I got up, got a job, cleaned the apartment all on my own. The thoughtof someone coming into my home and destroying the semblance of peace I built for myself cut deeper than the fear, though the fear was certainly present. What did this person want from me? To punish me, rape me, kill me?
More tears followed the first, and I let them fall. Why did someone want to hurt me when things were finally going well for me? No one other than Mason noticed me when my life was hell. I barked a short, crazed laugh. “Claire, come on, let me take you across the hall.”
“Mason, I swear to god—” I didn’t finish my sentence because of the hard knock on the door.
“Come in,” he shouted. Three men in black suits filed in. Their features blurred in my unfocused eyes as they drifted through my peripheral vision. Why did I put this couch here? Something about the view, but now I couldn’t see past the paint marring the wall, the liquid I hoped was paint anyway.
They looked through the apartment, picking things up and turning them over. I couldn’t help but notice they didn’t wear gloves. These were no crime scene investigators, and I shivered at the thought of what these men would do with the information they found. They made comments to each other, but I couldn’t make out their words, except them calling MasonMr. Sharpstuck out in my addled mind.
The tallest of the three stooped in front of me, picking up the cum-covered picture of me. He hissed in disgust, and I couldn’t blame him, “Mr. Sharp, you should see this.” Did he need to? Did he have to show the guy I was seeing the load someone shot all over my picture? I wondered if the intruder jerked himself off before or after he tore my life to shreds.
A shape interrupted my view of the angry red letters. Mason stood in front of me with a pinched expression covering the rage vibrating beneath. “They’re not cops, are they, Mason?”
“Come on, I’m taking you home.” He reached down, grabbed my hands and pulled me up. He wrapped his arm around my shoulder, knowing if he let go, I woulddrop back down.
“I am home.” Despite the truth in those words, it felt like a lie.
“No, my home. You’ll be safe with me.” He tried to coax me into walking, noticing I couldn’t force my feet to move, he scooped me into his arms and carried me out the door. I burrowed into his chest, smelling the delicious musky scent of his cologne and his body. I closed my eyes, letting the comfort he always brought wash through me.
“I’m so sorry, Claire,” he whispered into my hair as he put me down to open the back door to his car. I didn’t understand why he chose it over the passenger seat, but he laid me down and wrapped me in his suit jacket in answer to my unspoken question. I sat myself up, leaving my legs sprawled over the seat. My eyes stared blankly at the building as he pulled away. Someone stood on the sidewalk watching me, though before I could make out his features, he disappeared.
The darkened streets rolled past us, every blurred figure morphed into a monster with sharp claws waiting to dig into me and rip me open. When I couldn’t stand looking for another moment, I laid down and snuggled into the warmth of Mason’s jacket. It seemed like hours later we were passing the city limits and driving through the quiet suburbs.
Mason never struck me as the suburban type, but he had been full of surprises since I met him. We pulled into a horseshoe-shaped driveway and parked in front of a gorgeous stone-sided mansion. The night was too dark to tell the color for certain, but the shape was a classic colonial. Warm lights lit the walkway, and with the glow from the moon and the lamps, I saw the overwhelming size of the place, and I gasped.
“Are you okay?” He reached back and stroked his thumb across my cheek. I couldn’t remember if he tried to speak to me on the way over, but I knew for sure I said nothing.