Page 112 of Into the Dark
“Let’s go home now,” I say again. There’s a lump wedged in my throat, noxious and hot, and my legs feel weak with fright. I can’t cry in front of him. I won’t cry in front of him. I don’t know why I even want to cry at all.
His other hand slips around the back of my neck, and his fingers slide into the lengths of my hair as he pulls my head down to meet his, touching his forehead to mine. “Yeah. Let’s go home, baby. It’s done.” He nods before pressing a rough kiss to my lips. “Let’s go home.”
Everything happens in a sort of slow, soundless daze after that. As though I’m the one beaten to a pulp, my brain clunky and foggy. Jake’s demeanor shifts, a kind of cool, businesslike detachment overcoming him the moment I shake him from his cloud of rage. He doesn’t look back at Kevin again before whisking me out of the office by the main door and toward the main stairwell.
When we reach the top of the stairs, I stop moving. Jake turns to me with wary and expectant eyes. I hold out his suit jacket out to him, dipping my eyes to the bloodstained and bourbon-soaked shirt. A flicker of something uncertain moves over his face before he blinks it away, takes the jacket from me, and pulls it on. Then he takes my hand again and tugs me with him down the stairs.
Halfway down he makes a call, calmly relaying a set of instructions to whoever answers: Kevin is to be taken out the back entrance and to a hospital, and a car is to be waiting for us outside in the next five minutes. He offers no kind of explanation, but it doesn’t sound as though the question’s even asked.
The club’s still busy, and we draw looks from the occasional member of staff and reveler as we make our way to the front door. Of course, there’s nothing curious in the looks—there’s nothing curious about us—but I’m convinced what happened upstairs is written plain across my face.
Less than ten minutes later, we’re driven away from Surgery by a man I haven’t seen around Jake before. Young and good-looking, but skittish, looking at Jake with a kind of wide-eyed wonderment as we approach the dark car. He opens the back passenger door for us with an incongruously bright smile.
Surprising me, Jake opens the front passenger-side door and gets in there instead, leaving me in the back seat alone and not looking at me once throughout the brisk ten-minute journey from Brick Lane to St Katherine Docks. He chats easily with the young driver—whom he appears to know rather well—about entirely superficial topics, which feels grossly out of place to my tense, busy head. The new signing at Chelsea, Sunderland’s new manager, West Ham’s pitiful performance on Wednesday, the new bar two doors down from Surgery, the car itself, which Jake likes better than the previous model. I have to resist the urge to gape at him in disbelief. After all, isn’t this what he does best? Compartmentalizing his life, revealing only what he needs and wants to reveal when he needs and wants to. He’s a master at it. This is his theater. I’m in the audience, starstruck.
When we pull up outside the entrance to his building I’m desperate to be out of this car, to breathe, to get as far away from Jake’s world and those who live in it as I can. Everything has always felt more manageable when it’s just us. Nothing else but us. Jake gets out to open the door for me, looking at me finally. His eyes are searching, as if they’re looking for something in my stare—something he wants desperately to find.
In the elevator, I open my mouth to speak, but I’m not even sure I have the words for what I want to articulate. My thoughts are a mess, too loud and too many. I can’t decide how I feel about what I saw, what Jake did, if I should have stopped it sooner, if I could have. I saw it coming, knew exactly what was about to happen, and so, yes, I probably should have.
But then how do you stop a tornado?
Jake stares straight ahead, jaw and mouth pinched in thought, shoulders tense and back straight. Even now, I can’t quite believe how beautiful he is. A dark, dangerous beautiful that robs me of all other thought and reason. I know I should feel horror, disgust, maybe fear. The blood on his clothes, the bruised and bloodied knuckles, the violence still shimmering under his skin…
But I don’t.
I feel things like relief, satisfaction, gratitude, and love. I love him. No matter who he is, what he does. I love him. And it frightens me. It frightens me that I love him so much.
In the kitchen, I set my bag on the worktop and move to fill the kettle. Behind me, I hear the sound of the fridge being opened and beer bottles being dislodged, and then Jake is beside me searching the drawer by the sink. He uncaps the beer, drinking deeply for a few seconds, before tossing the cap onto the counter and going to sit on the sofa. I put the cap in the trash can and lift two bowls from the crockery shelf. I fill one halfway with ice and the other with hot water from the kettle, adding a little salt and some cold water too. Then I carry them both through to the living room and set them down on the coffee table, taking a seat on it to face him.
Wetting the towel with the saline water, I reach out and begin to clean his right hand.
Three of the knuckles are bright red and bleeding, the skin split apart to reveal the shiny, vulnerable flesh beneath. Blood has run down and dried, and so this is where I start, wiping the wet towel down between his fingers, applying pressure only when I’m far enough away from the ragged circular wounds. I work quietly and slowly, dabbing around the open cuts and across the swollen knuckles. When I touch each metacarpus, I study his face for anything that signals pain or might tell me if he’s broken anything. He doesn’t flinch. He just watches me intently, taking the odd sip of his cold beer now and then. He shows a little discomfort when I dab the saline solution directly over the angry open cuts, making me concerned I’ve oversalted the water, but he makes no further protest when I soak the towel and touch it to him a second time.
“Can you clench your fist for me?” I ask and feel his fingers retract into a fist without much effort. “And now splay your fingers out.”
He does it easily.
“And again.”
I nod, satisfied, when he does and turn to lift the bowl of ice from the coffee table, sliding the rim under his left wrist so his now clean hand can drape into the cubes at a relaxed angle, knuckles submerged. The other hand isn’t anywhere near as bad, but there’s some more blood, and the sight of it there as he drinks casually from his bottle makes me feel a little queasy. I reach forward to take the bottle from him and set it behind me on the table before moving to wet a different corner of the dish towel in the cooling saltwater. As I reach out to take his other hand, he reaches out to grip my wrist, curling his fingers around it. He squeezes gently.
“Alex, stop,” he says, and so I do. When I look up at him, his eyes have that same searching look they did downstairs. “Say something, baby. Please.”
Say something. Something. I can’t think about anything except cleaning his fingers, soothing the pain I know must be throbbing under the skin. When I try to retrieve my wrist so I can do exactly that, he grips harder and sits forward in the seat, waiting.
I look up at him. “What is it you want me to say?”
“Tell me you love me,” Jake says.
“I love you.”
His gaze flickers, and he swallows. “Say it again,” he says. There’s a strange kind of desperation in his eyes now, and it causes a rush of such pure, unbridled love to surge through me that it steals my breath for a moment.
“I love you, Jake. You know that.” My voice is firm and strong. It has the desired effect because he lets out a loud breath, drops his shoulders, and releases my wrist. “Now, can you please let me look at your hands properly?” I give him a small, reassuring smile.
He glances briefly down at his fingers and licks his lips before offering me his hand.
When he’s cleaned and dried, I move to sit next to him on the sofa, my body sideways so I can look at him in profile. Our stance is almost a throwback to the night in my living room all those months ago when I held the ice pack to his face after I accidentally hit him. His head rests on the cushioned back of the gray sofa, but he turns it to face me.