Arrogant Monster

Chapter 4 Episode 4

The sound of his voice alone is setting off a cascade of reactions in her. Her chest is rising and falling fast. Her eyes are flushed with anger. Her fingers tremble as she stares at the black screen. She seems to have forgotten that I’m here at all.

“You… you—” She looks up and catches my eyes. Her cheeks bloom with color. “You scared me today,” she says at last. “The way you behaved, the way you reacted—

“Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard the sob story. But I’m not your damn father, Kinsley. So stop putting that on me.”

“This is not about him.”

“This is all about him!” he retorts. “You assume that we’ll end up like your parents did. Lord knows you dragged me to enough fuckin’ couples therapy sessions to make all that s**t perfectly clear.”

I watch as she fidgets in her seat. Her knee is bouncing up and down, up and down, and the moonlight catches the dried blood on her face.

“I’m hanging up now,” she says at last.

“Yeah?” he scoffs. “And then what, Kinsley? Where’re you gonna go?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere new. Somewhere far. It doesn’t matter.”

“Right, because you’ll do so well on your own. Who do you have, Kinsley?” he asks viciously. “No friends, no family. I’m it. I’m your whole world. Without me, you’re nothing.”

That bit, I admire less.

I scoop the phone up and hold it close to my mouth. I want to make sure this son of a b***h really hears me. Kinsley gasps and makes a flailing grab for the phone, but the attempt is half-hearted. All it takes is one withering glare for her to retreat back into her seat.

“Tom, from one man to another, let me say: go f**k yourself.”

I hear him splutter into a stunned silence. It stretches on for a few long breaths before he finally sacks up enough to talk again.

“Who the hell is this?” he spits.

“Don’t you worry about Kinsley. I’ve got her now.”

“What the f**k? Who are you?”

I smirk. “The man Kinsley is moving on with.”

Then I hang up and place the phone delicately back between us. She stares at it for a while before she moves her gaze to me.

“I… I can’t believe you just did that. He’s… he’s my fiancé.”

“I believe ‘Thank you’ is the phrase you’re looking for. And he isn’t your fiancé; he’s your ex-fiancé. You ran out on him, remember? Because he hit you. Or is it that you fell? I can’t remember where we ended that discussion.”

She frowns and shudders all at once. It looks like the timelapse of a flower wilting. Chin falls, face falls, shoulder falls, all of her crumpling in on herself.

“Things got heated,” she whispers down towards the floorboards. “He didn’t mean to do it. It was the first time—”

“Today a liar, tomorrow a thief,” I intone mercilessly. “Today an abuser, tomorrow a killer. If you start justifying it now, you’ll spend the rest of your life justifying everything he ever does to you. Every scar, every curse, every bruise that no one else can see. You made the right choice in leaving.”

She sighs deeply. Tension whistles out of every pore. “I know I did.”

I hear the wail of another siren. Time is growing short, and we can’t stay here forever. They’ll be combing the woods soon.

I look at Kinsley. “You can get out if you want.”

“Do I really have a choice?”

“You always have a choice.”

“If I come with you, I’ll be aiding and abetting a criminal, won’t I?”

I nod. “Among other things. But every good story starts with a leap of faith, princess. Care to jump?”

She swallows hard. That seals it. When she looks up at me, I see the determination in her eyes. “f**k it. Let’s go.”

I start to reverse the car down the dirt path. “That’s the spirit.”

“What will you say if they catch us?” she muses.

“Simple,” I reply. “Every bride needs a groom. And you’re in the market for a new one. So… ‘til death do us part, princess.”

“You don’t exactly look like a groom,” I remark, surveying him from head to toe.

My eyes catch on his hands. They’re huge, matching the rest of him. Rough, too. Callused and veiny, covered in grit and small scars like shooting stars. Tattoos spiderweb across the backs of his knuckles.

“What do I look like?” he asks.

“A man on the run.”

He rolls his eyes. “f*****g Petro…”

“Nothing. I look like what I am. That’s fine.”

“There’s a suitcase in the trunk,” I blurt. “This was… It was supposed to be the car we were driving to our honeymoon. We were supposed to leave after the ceremony. Anyway, we packed a bag for the trip. Tom probably has some clothes that might fit you.”

He regards me for a long moment. Those cool blue eyes pass over me like they’re seeing stuff I never meant to show him. Then he nods, stops the car just before we’ve re-entered the highway, and gets out.

I watch in the side mirror as he walks around and opens the trunk. I hear the double pop of the suitcase latches unclasping, then the rustle of clothing.

There’s a weird sort of anxiety churning around in my gut as he starts to unbutton his shirt. The first slices of his chest appear. Two abs, four, six. A smattering of dark chest hair.

He shrugs out of it and tosses it into the woods, revealing biceps with a thick green vein winding through. He undoes the buckle of his pants, starts to shrug them down his hips—and then he glances right into the mirror.

I blush stop-sign red and drop my gaze quickly. I could swear I hear an amused chuckle, although that might be just my overactive imagination.

I keep my eyes fixed in my lap, even when I hear the trunk slam closed, the crunch of boots on gravel, and then the driver’s door opening again. Only when the still-nameless man clears his throat do I look up.

He’s got the too-short pants cuffed over his ankles and the sleeves of Tom’s too-small shirt rolled up in a way that is somehow inexplicably stylish. The fabric clings to him like a second skin. I can trace every curve in his abs, the path of every vein in his forearms. He’s a walking anatomy chart.

“It fits,” I mumble unnecessarily.

“Not quite,” he says as he slides behind the wheel. “But it’ll do for now.”

“Now,” he says ominously, “we decide what we’re going to do with you.”

My eyes go wide with panic. “You… you said you wouldn’t hurt me.”

“Don’t be so dramatic. I was talking about your face.”

I pull down the sunshade and slide open the pocket mirror on the surface. My face stares back at me, unrecognizable and broken.

I tried to clean up when I first hit the road, though you wouldn’t know it by looking at me. Sweat, makeup, tears, and flecks of blood have caked together to form a grotesque picture of a wedding day gone wrong. I look like something out of a nightmare.

And just like that, I’m ashamed. Not just because of how I look. But also because the outsides match the insides. This stranger from the woods is seeing me at the lowest point in my life.

Well, one of them, anyway. Though it’s more of a “take your pick” kind of deal. There are plenty of low points to choose from.

I turn my face side to side. Each angle is worse than the one before it. I’m so wrapped up in self-pity that I don’t see him reach for me until he’s touching the bottom of my chin.

I gasp and flinch away. He just sighs, grips my chin again, and draws me forward.

He rummages around in the glove compartment and pulls out a box of wet wipes. Then he brings one to my face and starts drawing it along my skin. I smell the tang of alcohol and the lemon fragrance.

I find myself wanting to explain. To tell him that this isn’t how I normally look, how I normally act. This is the result of a series of harsh realizations and bad choices. This is the face of a desperate woman who decided she had to make a drastic change to keep herself from becoming the very thing she always feared she would turn into.

“I don’t usually wear so much makeup,” I say before I can bite my tongue. He makes no sign to show that he’s heard me, but the silence is so loud it’s starting to hurt, so I keep talking just to hold it at bay. “Tom’s mother is the one who insisted on a makeup artist for today. So I just went along with it to make her happy. I do a lot of that, I think. Too much. I’m always trying to—”

I clamp my lips shut. More shame burns my cheeks. It’s bad enough to be falling to pieces on your wedding day. It’s worse to do it in front of a man like this.

He turns me this way and that, then nods. “Good enough.”

I look in the mirror again. My skin is mostly bare now, though if I peer close, I can still see where the tears and the blood ran together into a single winding track.