Intrusion (16 page)

And I guess he has to say something, too. He leans back against the tiled wall, face as weary as I've ever seen it, and tells me something that I would rather poke out my own eyes than hear.

“I don't worry about what our time together does to
me
. I worry about what it does to
you
. I'm pretty much used to climbing out on rooftops and waking up in Walgreens—but you almost definitely aren't. In fact, I would say you're just about the worst nighttime roof explorer I've ever seen.”

“That isn't funny, Noah.”

“I didn't intend it to be. I rarely make jokes at the thought of you horribly plummeting to your death because I sleepwalk.”

“I didn't horribly plummet anywhere.”

“Is the insertion of an
almost
in there really all that helpful?”

“Well, no but—”

“You could have died.”

“This isn't how the conversation is supposed to go. You're the one out there, doing God knows what because of trauma I am probably making worse. Stop trying to make this about me—what about you? What about how you feel?” I ask, but he just shakes his head and circles back around to the beginning of the conversation again.

“I feel that I'm hurting you. Putting you in danger.”

“Because you went for a nighttime walk?”

“Because being around me is dangerous.”

“That's bullshit. You know that's bullshit, right?”

“If I was you I'd probably think so, too,” he says, pausing just long enough to make it clear that something else is coming. I can almost see the shadow of it slanting across his face. I can hear it lurking in the silence, dark and terrible. “But then you don't know everything about me, do you? I've taken great pains to make sure you don't even ask.”

“What? What are you. . .what are you saying?”

I hate how flummoxed I sound. It has a ring of denial to it.

“I make sure you don't ask, no matter how much you want to.”

“That's insane. How would you do that?” I ask, and though I throw up my hands and make a big show of incredulity, some part of me is dreading his answer. Not because I think that he must be hiding some terrible secret—I know that he could never say anything too terrible for me to hear. No, no, it's the idea of how deep he can drive in the knife that scares me.

All the way into the hilt, blade so sharp it barely stings as it goes in.

“By making sure you feel guilty for even wanting to know.” He pauses it again then, but this time it's worse. This time I'm bleeding through the silence, and completely unprepared for his next words. He just says them so casually, so coolly. So matter-of-fact.

“Please don't feel manipulated. I do it almost unconsciously. After Humphries they sent me to a dozen shrinks, and I did the same thing with all of them. Sometimes, I was barely even aware of it—and they certainly weren't. I would tell them exactly what they wanted to hear, and they signed my forms and files, and everyone believed I was okay. And I am, in a certain manner of speaking.”

“Too smart for therapy. Too smart for your own good.”

“I would say so, yes. I'm so smart that I'm going to tell you to walk away, and you're going to listen. I even know how to make it so good you need never look back. It'll be easy, like sinking into a warm bath full of your own blood.”

He's right, of course. I can already feel it filling up the tub.

It's just that I'm not sinking in at all. He's forcing me down.

“Then don't do it. Don't do it. Let's just go back to bed and make love and forget any of this ever happened. Next time you take a walk, I'll just let you. Or I'll be better at coming for you—I'll get a ladder. This isn't a reason to break up. You're just trying to think of one because you don't want to deal with things.”

He smiles at that—but dear Lord, it's the most deathly one I think I've ever seen. It looks like the kind of thing you see frozen onto the face of a corpse. Nothing in the world could be bitterer, except maybe his eyes. He won't look directly at me, but I can see them anyway. They seem lost, and as flat as he once told me they are to anyone else.

“You could be right. You probably are. I think sometimes you see me as the clever one, but you are infinitely smarter than I am in almost every way. You push through, where I retreat. You take back, where I give up. And when I tell you that I lied to you and kept you from the worst of me you'll walk away, because walking away is the right thing to do.”

“Nothing you can say will make that happen, Noah.”

“Do you ever wonder why I keep my clothes on?”

“I don't have to wonder, you told—” I start, but even before I finish I know I'm wrong. He never said to me that his aversion to sex meant clothes on at all times. I just assumed. I guess I assumed a lot of things, in my race to never disturb any of his boundaries.

“I didn't tell you anything. I made sure you wouldn't ask, because underneath my clothes I look like this.”

He takes off his T-shirt as though it hurts to do it. The muscles that make that move happen have atrophied, apparently—and I can see why. He probably keeps all of his clothes on even when he's alone. I know I would if I had those reminders of some nightmare all over me, and especially if I got them the way he did.

The way he then tells me about, in that same dull professor's voice.

“The one over my ribcage was a butcher's knife ringed with razor wire. You can see where it cut me on the inside—that's what makes it pucker in this unpleasant way. Of course, the fact that he left it in there for a few days contributed to the mess, but really the one I remember is this here on my thigh,” he says, and then he looks away—almost as though he's reminiscing about some happy event. Only the event is this: “I did that one myself on day four, when he raped and murdered a woman in front of me.”

“Oh God, Noah. I'm sorry. I'm sorry,” I say, but only because the real words I want to use don't exist. They beat against the bars of my heart, too full of my feelings to live out there in the real world. He thinks he's to blame. He always thinks he's to blame even though he lied, he lied; oh, fuck, he said it was just writing and feeling guilty and instead there's this.

His body, like a road map to the middle of hell. Not just in terms of the scars—though they are numerous and nightmarish beyond anything I could comprehend—but in the shape and tone of his every muscle. He looks as though he spends his time climbing mountains in the dark. Terrible mountains filled with mountain lions, which all want to eat him.

This is why he's bigger than any professor should be, I realize.

This is why he can leap across the roof like an Olympian.

Because he's still there amid the jagged rocks, fighting for his life.

“What are you sorry for? For me? Don't be sorry for me. Be sorry for them. I told you, remember—they were murdered because of things I said and did. I just got what I deserved.”

“How can you say that? How can you think that?”

“Because he told me, right after he took me hostage,” he says, but it has the opposite effect to the one he intends. I think he wants me to see surety in that. To believe Humphries somehow, even though Noah has to know I never could. He talks about being taken hostage as though that was really nothing at all and then he echoes the words of his abuser.

“You could have told me all of this. It doesn't change anything—it only makes me surer that none of this was your fault. That you're not responsible for the crimes of someone else. No one is ever responsible for their own torture.”

“The thing is you say that, you say it and yet I know the second I tell you that I need to be strangled when you fuck me because if you don't I imagine I'm strangling you. . .I will see the flinch in your gaze. It isn't just in dreams, Beth. It feels real to me. It's my reality.”

God, he always sounds so sure.

It makes it hideously hard to fight against—but goddamn it, I try. I put on my armor and get every weapon in my arsenal, and I launch them at him. I speak as though my tongue is on fire. I push every word out with all the conviction in my body.

“I could run across the room, and it still wouldn't make any difference. He was the killer, not you. He was the rapist, not you. You're the kind of man who hides his scar-covered body just because you think I might be afraid. Who wants to be fucking throttled in case a single thought about a horribly traumatizing incident leaps to the forefront of your mind. If I flinch, it isn't because I'm scared. It's because it hurts me that this happened to you. It hurts me to hear you talk like this. It's just not okay to feel this way about yourself,” I say, half spitting by the time I'm done and so red in the face he couldn't fail to miss it. My hands are shaking fists at my sides—hell, my toes have clenched as tightly as my fingers have.

And for a moment, I think it's made a difference.

He cocks his head to one side, like he's taking it in.

Only he's not taking it in at all. He's getting ready to fire his own weapons right back at me, sharper than anything I could manage and twice as blistering.

“Is it okay that you have a pattern?”

“What? What are you—”

“You have a pattern. You go from one abusive man to another.”

“Don't you dare fucking say that to me. Don't you say that about yourself. Some psycho took you hostage and fucked your mind forever and you're going to call yourself abusive? Don't fucking bullshit me, Noah. I can smell it a mile away,” I say, so furious I can hardly get the words out. They emerge in a big messy jumble, while his replies remain as calm and certain as they were a second ago.

I don't even know if he really believes this stuff.

It sounds like he's reading from a book—and maybe he is.

It's called: How to Get Your Girlfriend to Leave You in Ten Easy Steps.

“And yet I can already see you leaving.”

“I don't want to leave. I don't want you to feel this way.”

“But I always will. Love doesn't magically heal all wounds.”

I hate the way he says that. I hate how sardonic his voice has become—so unlike him it hurts to hear. By this point, I know this is just a book, a script, a series of mechanical moves. But Lord in heaven, to hear him speak that word in this context. . .

“Don't say
love
in the middle of that sentence, oh my God,” I say, and then I have to put my hands over my eyes. Listening to him is already too much. Looking and seeing the contrast in his face—between the things he's doing on purpose to drive me away and the pain it's causing him to do it—is unbearable. Monstrous. Inhumane.

No one has ever been crueler to him than he is to himself.

“Then pretend I didn't. Just walk away, and on Sundays we can wave to each other across the street, and sometimes as we're out walking we might meet, and not so far from now, you'll start dating some perfectly normal guy who never thinks about murder in the middle of making love and never makes you risk your life on some rooftop, and I'll see you together. I'll be glad, I'll be so glad, because more than anything, my love, I want you to be safe and happy. Part of being in love with someone is knowing that their happiness is more important than any transitory dream that we might have conjured up, for just a moment,” he says, voice softer now but no less torturous.

“It wasn't a dream,” I say, from the middle of the river that's running down both sides of my face. Forlorn now, and all the fight gone out of me.

“But it is now. Go on, love. Go live your happy, normal life.”

And so I do, even though he doesn't understand.

I will never be happy and normal again.

Chapter Ten

I
DO MY
best to go back to my life the way it was. But the trouble is—my life the way it was had no Noah in it. If I'm being honest, it had nothing in it. Every day was exactly the same as the one before it, and where once that routine kept me safe, now it does nothing but stifle me. It steals my breath. I go to work and feel as though I'm walking into a prison.

I come home and the sensation is the same.

And there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. He lives three inches away from me, but crossing those three inches is out of the question. If I do it, he will only say more things that make my heart die in my chest. He's so good at it—he could probably kill me with a couple of words. Sometimes I picture him lying awake at night, coming up with them.

Sometimes I picture him doing something worse. I have dreams about him swinging from those beams in his attic, or falling from the roof in the middle of a rainstorm. And though I try to tell myself that saving him is not something I can do—or even should do—the urge is a burning fire in my chest.

It follows me around. It stands like a shadow over my shoulder while I file and fill out forms and give out medicine in tiny plastic cups. I know it does, because by the third week some of the residents start to see it. Mrs. Lindeman asks me why I look so sad. Mr. Patterson wants to know what's wrong.

But all I can tell him is what I tell myself every day:

Nothing is wrong. Everything is fine. I'm not the first girl in the world to lose someone she loves because of a psychotic serial killer who fucked with his head. It probably happens all the time in romantic movies that have never been made ever due to how fucking nightmarish and disturbing that is.

He took him hostage.

He took him hostage for
days
.

And yet no one seems to know the first thing about it. I give in to my worst impulses somewhere around week four and search his name, but all I can come up with is a small article about a Professor Noah Grant who briefly worked at some university in Nowheresville, USA. Apparently, he once organized a student rally about campus assault.