Over the Edge (32 page)
She’d been afraid of him from the start, from the moment she’d come down to dinner and found him sitting at the table. He was always watching her with those pale eyes, always sneaking up behind her, always touching her hair, her face, her bottom. Always asking for a kiss good night.
“I came home from school one day, and he was in my mother’s bedroom, going through her purse.” She’d stopped in the doorway, frozen with shock, just as he was taking twenty dollars from her mother’s wallet. “He was stealing from her, and as I watched, he didn’t try to hide it. He smiled at me, and put the money in his pocket, and put her wallet back in her purse. And I knew I had him. I knew my mother would kick him out. She wouldn’t live with a thief no matter how handsome she thought he was.
“But then he told me I couldn’t tell. He told me if I told anyone, anyone at all, he’d kill my mother.”
“And you believed him,” Stan said. “Oh, Teri.”
“I was eight,” she said. “He told me . . .”
“What?”
“That he’d make it look like an accident, and then he’d get custody of me. He said then it would be just him and me.”
She’d gone from the euphoria of knowing that he would soon be out of her house for good to the hot fear that came with the thought of losing her mother. Her mother was far from perfect, but Teri loved her. And the threat of spending the rest of her life with him . . .
“So you didn’t tell.” Stan held her even more tightly. “And, Christ, he was testing you, wasn’t he? He probably figured if you wouldn’t tell about that, then you wouldn’t tell if he . . .”
She nodded. “A few days later, he came into my room for the first time.”
“Jesus,” he said, his voice tight. “It happened more than once?”
“It happened nearly every night for I don’t know how long. Months.”
Stan made a strangled sound. “And your mother never thought that was strange? Him going into your room like that?”
“My mother passed out around eight-thirty every night.”
“God damn her!”
She pulled back so that she could look at him. “It wasn’t her fault—”
“God damn her!” He was crying. Senior Chief Wolchonok was crying. “She drinks so much that she can’t protect her own child from being abused, and it’s not her goddamn fault? Who’s fault was it, Teri? Yours?”
“I never told anyone,” she whispered. He was crying. “I should have told.”
“You were a baby!” He wiped his eyes with the heel of one hand, still holding her with the other. “Your mother should have protected you. This asshole—what was his name? Because I swear to God, I’m going to find him and I’m going to f— I’m going to kill him.”
He was dead serious. This man who was so careful not to use the f-word in front of her had killed before, in the line of duty. He knew what it meant to leave a body lying lifeless. This was no idle threat.
“Tell me his name,” he said again.
“I don’t know it,” Teri told him. “Honestly, I don’t think I ever knew. My mother called him darling. I thought of him as him or he. I don’t think I wanted to give him a real name.”
“He’s the one at fault,” Stan told her, pushing her hair back from her face. “He’s the one who was sick. Your mother should have protected you, and he . . . He shouldn’t have let himself get near you.”
He was silent for a moment, and then he sighed. “Teri, you’ve got to have mercy on me and tell me what he did when he came into your room, because what I’m imagining is pretty hideous.”
She tucked her head back into his shoulder. Maybe she could say it if she didn’t look at him. Maybe she could say it without actually saying it. “He exposed himself and he touched himself and he . . .”
“Jerked off?” Stan said it for her, and she nodded. “In front of an eight-year-old. My God, how sick is that?”
“I didn’t know what he was doing,” she told him. “I’d never even seen a naked man before, but I knew whatever it was that he was doing, him doing it there, in my room, was wrong. I tried closing my eyes, but he made me watch. He told me he’d kill my mother if I didn’t keep my eyes open and—”
Her voice was shaking so hard, she had to stop and take a breath. But once she’d started, it seemed to tumble out of her, this awful thing she’d never told anyone before.
“After dinner every night, when my mother was still awake, he started making me sit on his lap so he could read me a story. My mother thought it was cute, that he liked reading to me so much, but all the time he was . . . God, he was rubbing himself against me with his . . .” His thing. At the time, as an eight-year-old, she’d thought of it as a thing. A hideous thing.
Stan, too, had to work hard to keep his voice level. “And this went on for months?”
“I can’t remember exactly when it started. I remember he was around for the Easter party at Professor Bartley’s house, though. He hid jelly beans in his pants pockets and he got Connie and Mattie Bartley to reach in, looking for them, but I wouldn’t go near him.” She knew what he was really hiding in there. “It ended when I went away to summer camp in July. He and my mother broke up while I was away.” She laughed, but it came out very shaky. “I’d always hated camp, but that year I was packed and ready to go three weeks early.”
“How long were you gone?” Stan asked.
“Six glorious weeks.”
“Did you find out that this guy and your mom had split while you were there? I mean, did she call you and tell you so at least you knew you were finally safe?”
Teri shook her head no. “I found out when I got home.” Darling, come say hello. Teresa’s back, her mother had called out as they’d walked into the house, and Teri had braced herself, nearly sick with fear, ready to come face-to-face with him again.
“So you spent the whole six weeks thinking you were going to have to go home to this monster? Thinking he was waiting there for you.”
She nodded. Yes.
“So it wasn’t just three or four months,” Stan said. “It was more like six. Six months this fucker terrorized you. Excuse me.”
She laughed shakily. “It’s okay with me if you call him that. You know, the night I left for camp, he tried to . . .” She still couldn’t say it. “He came into my room and told me that I had to . . .” She had to clear her throat. “Kiss him good-bye.”
Stan knew what she meant and he was horrified. She could feel tension in his arms again. “But you said that he didn’t—”
“He didn’t,” she said quickly. “He didn’t get close enough because I, well, I threw up. On myself, on my bed. And he told me he’d see me when I got back from camp, and he left my room.”
She was talking now simply because she wanted to stay here like this for as long as possible, with his arms around her. She knew when she stopped talking, Stan would be that much closer to leaving her room. And despite what she’d said to him earlier, she didn’t want him to go.
“I made friends with Penny Stolz, one of the twelve-year-olds at camp, and I found out, well, if not all about sex, at least certainly more than the nothing I’d known. I didn’t tell her about him, but I think she knew. Because she set up a trade between me and Stacy Juliani—my radio for the switchblade Stacy stole from her brother.”
“You came home from camp with a switchblade knife?” Stan made a noise that sounded a lot like laughter. “Ah, Teri, I think I love you.”
He didn’t mean it. Not the way she wanted him to mean it.
“I don’t know if I would’ve had the guts to use it,” she told him, near tears all over again. Dammit, she wanted him to mean it. “I was lucky—I didn’t ever have to find out. Because when I went inside my house, he wasn’t there.” It was a new man, a giant stranger who’d walked out of the kitchen at her mother’s request. Darling, come say hello. . . . “He’d moved out and Lenny had moved in.”
Lenny, who had loved her the way an eight-year-old was supposed to be loved.
Lenny, who’d taken the time and made the effort to gain her trust. Lenny, without whose gentle help she might not have healed enough to have ever had a normal sexual relationship with any man. Lenny, who’d given her back her self-confidence—at least enough of it so that she wasn’t a total basket case.
Without Lenny, she wouldn’t be a helo pilot. She wouldn’t be in the Navy. She wouldn’t be even half as strong as she was.
She’d still be hiding somewhere, probably under her bedcovers, all the time. Still afraid to come out and face the world.
“I think you’re amazing,” Stan told her. “To have lived through all that.”
“I still sleep with the light on,” she told him.
“I sometimes sleep with the light on myself,” he admitted.
Teri lifted her head to look at him. “You do not.”
“You’d be surprised how often I do.” He touched her still wet cheek, brushing it dry with his thumb.
Now was the time to say it, while she was gazing at him, while he was looking back at her with such soft kindness in his beautiful eyes. I kissed you, Stan. I didn’t tell you to stop because I didn’t want you to stop.
But she couldn’t form the words. They were wedged too tightly in her throat. Part of her was still hiding in her bed, too scared to move.
And then the phone rang, breaking the spell.
“That’s probably Mike Muldoon,” Stan said, shifting away from her. “Wondering if you’re ready to go to dinner.”
Teri shivered, suddenly cold without his warmth.
“Come on,” he said, pushing himself to his feet, then reaching down and hauling her up beside him. “Take a quick shower. I’ll run to my room and do the same. Then I’ll come back here and walk you down to the restaurant.”
God, she was exhausted. “I don’t know. . . .”
“I’m not going to take no for an answer,” he told her. “I’ll be back in ten minutes. Be ready to go. And don’t forget your jacket.”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Fourteen
Sam Starrett was not going to be the first to leave the pool.
He was hungry, he was tired, but until Alyssa Locke walked her perfect ass out of there, he was staying right where he was.
If he worked really hard at it, he could pretend that it had nothing to do with the fact that she was wearing a bathing suit or his realization that this was the closest to her being naked that he was going to get, probably for the rest of his life.
Damn, she was gorgeous.
And she was going to dinner tonight with Rob Pierce. The British motherfucker.
Alyssa came out of the pool, adjusting her bathing suit in a way that made him want to scream. Sam let himself watch her from his lounge chair, wishing he weren’t so goddamn tired. He was too tired to be angry with her, too tired to feel much but sorry for himself for being the pathetic loser she’d had sex with and then rejected.
“Congratulations on being sent out here as an observer,” Sam told her as she dried her face on her towel.
She looked at him suspiciously, as if waiting for him to add a but and an insult.
“That’s all,” he said. “Just congratulations.”
“Yeah,” she said, “it’s been kind of obvious that you’re thrilled for me.”
He deserved that one. “Actually, I am. Your career’s going great. I’m . . . I am thrilled for you. I just wish I could be thrilled for you while you observed someone else’s takedown of a plane in some other country.”
She sat down on the edge of the chair next to his, where she’d tossed her sweats and sunglasses. “Word in my office is that this observation thing is the precursor to a permanent transfer to Max Bhagat’s A-team.”
Sam knew what she was telling him. The SEALs in Team Sixteen’s Troubleshooters Squad worked with Bhagat’s top team all the time. “Gee,” he said. “Maybe we should just go steady. I mean, since we’re going to be seeing each other so often . . .”
“Right.” She stood up. “Excuse me for thinking you were capable of carrying on a serious conversation.”
Sam stood up, too. “How am I supposed to react to that news, Alyssa?” God, he’d thought it was bad when he didn’t see her—he thought he’d go crazy from missing her so fucking much. But it turned out that was nothing—nothing—compared to being around her and not being able to touch her, not being able to talk to her, to make her laugh, to make love to her. Another few days of this and they’d have to cart him off in a straitjacket. “Are you going to be happy about working with me around most of the time? Can you really be around me and not—”
Want me. He stopped himself from saying it, aware of how egotistical it sounded. But he didn’t mean it that way.
She didn’t answer. Instead she jumped him.
It was the dead last thing he’d ever expected. He was completely unprepared, and she hit him, hard, in a way that pushed him back and down, as if she’d meant to tackle him instead of leaping into his arms.
It was as he hit the concrete, with Alyssa Locke on top of him, that he realized she had meant to tackle him. She was shouting. “Get down!”
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