“My date. Lance Matthews. The man who was shot last night.”
Calvin smiles, but it’s not a nice smile. He places his fork down and looks across the table at me. “Do you think it’s wise to keep trying to provoke me, Hallie?”
No.
I don’t say that. I look down at my plate as I spear one of the last pieces of chicken and swirl it in the remaining teriyaki sauce. “I’m only forced to be here. I never said anything about being pleasant. If you’d like pleasant company for dinner, I would suggest inviting a woman who wants to be here with you. You’re well aware I don’t.”
He shakes his head faintly. “Oh, I’ll have pleasant company. And it will be exactly the woman I desire. You’re the only one who will suffer if you choose to be a brat. I’ll have fun either way.”
I wait, silent, hoping he will say more. A pit of dread opens in my stomach at the notion of suffering at his hands, particularly given what I know about his appetites.
“What does that mean?” I finally ask, after letting my mind wander for a few moments.
This time, he gets to give me the silent treatment.
Mine didn’t seem to faze him, but his is agonizing. As he sits there not saying another word throughout dinner, I consider all the different ways he could punish me. Not just sexually, either. I suppose if I don’t play his game the way he wants me to, he has already proven he’s not hesitant to hurt people in other ways. He compiled a dossier on my best friend’s sins. He shot a man I barely even know because he took me out on a date.
I’m not playing on fair ground, here.
It’s not remotely fair to make me play nice, but I suppose none of this is fair.
“Can we come up with some rules of civility?” I request.
He glances at me but doesn’t answer, so I go on.
“It just seems like maybe we should have rules, that way we both understand what’s expected of us and where the limits are.”
“I had a man shot, Hallie. There are no limits.”
My horrified gaze shoots to Chef Ryan, but the man is dishing out ice cream, unfazed by whatever he may or may not have just overheard.
Noticing my gaze, Calvin says, “He’s worked for worse men than me, Hallie. Stop waiting for him to be horrified. It’s not going to happen.”
He’s used my name twice in about a minute, leaving me with the impression I might be annoying him.
I know I set out to annoy him today, but a wave of emotion rolls over me and I start to wonder if that was the best idea.
“Look, I don’t know how to do this, okay? I don’t know how to be… whatever I am to you. I just need a few rules so I know nobody else will get hurt. The only assurance I have is that you won’t kill me or irreparably… mark me,” I say, for lack of better terminology. “That you’ll let me leave at the end of this. But that’s not enough. I told you before I need some kind of assurance of safety, not just for me, but for the people around me. I didn’t think to stipulate that before, but you told me you’d never…” Even though he said Chef Ryan won’t be fazed, I glance at him before altering what I was about to say. “Dirtied your own hands with certain tasks, and I think perhaps I took that more literally than you meant it. I didn’t think you meant you just hadn’t dirtied your own hands, I thought you meant you hadn’t done that sort of thing at all.”
Calvin shakes his head faintly, spearing a piece of meat. “I didn’t say that,” he says before popping it into his mouth.
I stare at him. “Didn’t say what? That you’d never killed anyone?”
“No. I never said I wouldn’t irreparably mark you. I said I wouldn’t harm you so badly that you were incapable of leaving, and I said I wouldn’t physically injure you beyond repair. I said nothing about not leaving my mark. I can’t make a promise like that. I could let you go right this instant and I would have already marked you, Hallie. You could walk out the door tonight and never see me again, but you’ll still carry me with you for the rest of your life.”
My chest feels hollow as he utters the unutterable. It’s indecent, completely fucking depraved to acknowledge a thing like that.
Unfortunately, I know it’s also the truth.
When a vicious storm finally passes through, its path isn’t left clear. You have to deal with all the wreckage left in its wake. And even after the arduous work of cleaning up and repairing everything you thought was damaged, you’ll find tiny fragments of debris and things that are still broken long after you’ve convinced yourself you’ve put it all behind you.