Monsters 09: The Game

I can feel her body shaking next to me. I turned my head to see her head buried under the pillow, can hear her breath catching as she cries. Gently, I touch her shoulder, and she jerks upright, arms flying out to protect her. When she realizes it’s me who grabbed her, she stares at me through a curtain of hair.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to wake you.

“You’re not okay,” I mumble. It’s not a question. It’s the truth. “You also know I’m not an idiot, so stop treating me like one.”

“I don’t think you’re an idiot.” Her voice breaks as she touches my face. She pulls me clover and leans into my chest, her arms wrapped around my back. “I’m sorry for how I’ve been treating you,” she whisperers.

I can smell her hair, the calming scent of lavender. I try to relax as I hold her. She’s stopped shaking now, which is good. I can’t stand to see her this way. I peel her away from me to hold her at away from me, and in the dark I can see her shadow sag, and I know she is tired.

“Will you tell me?” I asked. “Will you forget the nightmares and just talk to me?”

When she reaches over and flick on the bedside table lamp, I am blinded for a moment, the light filling the entire room with a low glow. I stare at the picture behind our bed, of an empty park bench, the grass much greener than our lawn, and I try to focus on it so I don’t have to see her face. Not yet.

When she presses a hand to my face, to pull my eyes back to hers, I frown. This is not how I want the conversation to go. I want to be able to look at her, to see every emotion etched into her face, to read all of what she’s feeling in her grey eyes.

“Okay,” she whispers. “I’ll tell you what happened.”

We’ve changed positions on the bed. I’m sitting propped up against two pillows, and Alexa has her head in my lap, her one hand holding mine. She’s speaks softly at first, like she’s trying to get up the courage to talk louder

“I was on my way home to you and I didn’t have my car, so I walked from the office. It was raining, just like the forecast said it would. I walked along Burke, you know where we used to go and get flowers?” As she speaks, she watches me. “I couldn’t hear anything because of the wind, and then I dropped one of the papers I was holding, and I bent to pick it up.”

I squeeze her hand as her voice cracks.

“When I straightened up, someone was standing over me. He startled me again so I dropped the rest of what I was holding. When he bent down to help me, he apologized for scaring me and asked if he could buy me some coffee. I said yes, which I know I shouldn’t have, but I thought that was the least he could do. Plus, he saw the ring.”

None of this explained the bruises I saw on her face and neck.

“We had coffee and it was nice, and when he was walking me home, we were stopped by two men. They asked if we could help them find their car because were new in town and misplaced it. When I said I was sorry, that I had to get going, one of them laughed. I turned around to leave and felt a hand on my throat. I didn’t know what was going on until I saw Quinn --that was the coffee buyer--being held by the second man. When I tried to get away, the one holding me slammed me face-first into the nearest brick wall.”

Her hand trembled in mine.

“I don’t know what happened next because I blacked out. When I woke up, I was in an abandoned building, in a secure room, and I wasn’t alone. Quinn was with me. They had beaten him, almost to death. They threw him on a cot and left him there. I thought he was dead. I--“ She stopped and squeezed her eyes shut, shaking her head. “I was afraid I’d gotten him killed.”

I exhaled sharply before asking, “Who were they? What did they want?”

Alexa sat up and gave me a small smile. It made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

“I don’t know who they were but I knew what they wanted.” She paled. “They wanted us to kill people,” she told me, her eyes glassy as she lifted her head. “They wanted us to kill everyone we saw or they would kill us.”