The Bride Collector

38
THEY HAD REMAINED under the tree for less than a minute before Brad knew their raw emotions would only betray them here, so close to the barn. Paradise could not stop crying and he could not stop trying to comfort her. Quinton was already on the hunt and they couldn’t stay here in such a state of ruin.
He’d taken her by the hand and together they’d run into the field, careless for a few minutes, then with calculation when they came to the ditch that ran perpendicular to their flight. In this light the killer would not know if they’d turned right or left.
Brad took them left, single-file down the center of the ditch. A hundred yards, no farther. From where they crouched they could just see their original point of entry. If Quinton followed them, the moon would reveal him on the bank without betraying their crouched forms in the ditch.
They would rest here until he decided what to do next. The sun would be up in a few hours, and they had to put some distance in before the light made tracking them an easy task. It might take hours for them to reach safety. In the meantime, the more distance between them, the better.
There was another alternative. He could hide Paradise and go on the offensive. Not even Quinton Gauld would expect such a brash move. In a matter of hours the killer would be gone, and the more Brad considered it, the more he was sure that Quinton would be gone for good. But he would never be gone, because in one week or one month or one year he would return for the one he had lost. For the last favorite.
For Paradise.
But for the time being, they were safe.
Paradise clung to his arm, still trembling, staring back down the ditch.
“Are you okay?” he asked, smoothing her hair back. She looked different. Even by moonlight he could see the change in her. Her hair was still messy, but wavy and cut to cup her delicate features. She wore a red shirt and jean shorts.
She faced him, lips trembling. “I’m scared.”
“I know you are. It’s okay, I swear we’re going to make it out of this.”
“You came back for me?”
He hesitated, then nodded.
Her tears glistened in the moonlight. “I love you, Brad.”
It was a simple declaration of understanding, stripped of any social posturing, etiquette, or purpose. And Brad’s heart flooded with this same understanding.
“And I love you, Paradise.”
But her face twisted with anguish. “I’m scared, Brad.”
“No, you don’t need to be scared anymore. I have you and I won’t let you go.”
“But…” She could barely speak past her emotion.
“But what?”
“Is that okay?”
He was reminded then of her own horrors extending beyond this night. Her fear of memory and the outside world. Any human would crumble if taken by the likes of Quinton Gauld to be drained of blood and glued to a wall. But Paradise faced a thousand demons more.
And didn’t they all, he thought. The struggle with inner demons was fierce and private and universal.
Brad extended his hand to her, and Paradise was hardly capable of taking it. She couldn’t accept love from a man like him. Not yet. She might try, but she faced a history that darkened the waters of love like brine. Like himself, but worse, so much worse. The truth of this covered him with shame for his self-absorption. To think that he’d felt sorry for himself for so long…
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, it’s okay.”
Then he leaned forward and kissed her on her forehead. He wanted to kiss her lips. He wanted to hold her gently and swear his undying love for her. He wanted to take her from this place and never let her out of his sight.
But she was too delicate for any of that. Too precious. Too beautiful and rare and beyond his clumsy ways. She, not he, would dictate what she needed and when she needed it.
So he just touched his lips to her forehead, let them linger for a moment, then pulled back and said, “You are very special, Paradise. And I love you, the way a man loves a woman.”
PARADISE HEARD THE words and she believed them. For the first time in her life she really did believe that a man loved her, not the idea of her or the image of what she could be, but her, Paradise, the woman crying in the ditch battling an inner demon that had made loving any man impossible.
I’m a woman, she thought. I’m a woman and Brad loves me.
It was such a startling revelation that for a moment she forgot to breathe.
His hand touched her cheek. Maybe he would kiss her the way a man kisses a woman. She was far too nervous for that, but secretly, so secret that she wouldn’t admit it even to herself, she begged him to kiss her on the lips.
But no, a prince would wait to be invited by the princess. And Paradise didn’t know how to be a princess.
“Are you okay?” he asked again, cocking his head to look in her eyes.
She didn’t know what to say.
“You’re safe, Paradise. I swear, as long as I live, I won’t let anyone lay a hand on you ever again,” she heard him saying.
But you can’t save me from myself, she thought. My problem is me.
She looked down the ditch again. No sign of Quinton. Her mind went back to the confession he’d made in the truck, thinking that she was passed out.
My father hurt me, too.
The comment had run through her mind like a merry-go-round. Quinton, the man who she now clearly remembered from her early days at the center, was just like her, at least in some ways. They were cut from the same cloth. He’d been born into an abusive family.
Maybe I still am mixed up.
The longer they had driven, the more she fantasized about ending all of this by sitting up and giving Quinton a hug. Absurd, of course. A product of her own intense fear and a profound desire to survive him by making him her friend.
But the notion refused to leave her.
My father hurt me, too.
She tried to imagine the ways in which a younger boy named Quinton might have been hurt. It was no wonder he’d studied to be a psychologist. Like it was no wonder Brad had joined the FBI because of his own pain.
If Quinton could see and confess that he was mixed up, couldn’t he see the light?
“If he faces the truth he might change,” she said aloud.
“What do you mean?”
Paradise faced him. “In the truck, he told me his father had hurt him. That he was mixed up. I was thinking…” She looked back down the ditch. “Has anyone ever shown him love?”
“I know the kind of love he needs,” Brad said. “It’s administered in a chair that’s plugged into a very powerful generator.”
She hardly heard him. “He’s like me,” she said. Truth began to fall in place. Not just about Quinton, but about her. “Sometimes we have to face our demons.”
“And sometimes we have to kill our demons.”
“He’s psychotic,” she said. “I think I might be psychotic, too.”
“He’s a psychopathic killer. He isn’t Roudy or Casanova, and he isn’t anything remotely like you.” An edge had entered his voice. He seemed deeply bothered by her logic.
But there was something else whispering through her mind. This crisis wasn’t just about a psychopathic killer named Quinton Gauld or a schizophrenic girl named Paradise. This was about a man named Brad Raines and about the fact that he loved a woman who couldn’t be a woman because she lived in fear of herself.
It was suddenly clear to her. Like a sunrise in her mind. She was able to remember details she’d never remembered because she was facing her past. She was even okay out here in the ditch with Brad, far from the safety of CWI.
But until she confronted the abuse that had crushed her head seven years ago, she could never be free to accept love or to love in return. And there was nothing in this world that Paradise wanted more than to love and be loved.
“I have to go back,” she said, dazed by her self-revelation.
“What?” He was appalled. “Absolutely not.” Angry even.
Paradise eased her arm away from him. “Don’t you see? I have to go back for my own sake. I have to confront and forgive—”
“No!” He gripped his right side in a way that made her wonder if he’d been hurt. “There’s no way I’m going to allow you to go back there. You’re wrong about this, he’s a monster.”
But Brad didn’t know how Paradise worked. She felt a strange resolve. This ditch was just another crack in the surface of her mind that would lead to another and another until the whole world was full of cracks. To reach the barn was to reach freedom.
“It’s not your choice,” she said. “If you…” She stopped, but then finished anyway. “You should allow me to do what I know is best for me.” He started to open his mouth, but then shut it.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. But I have to live with me,” she said, standing.
Brad grabbed her hand, on one knee, trying to hold her back. “Please, Paradise. You’re not thinking! He’s a ruthless killer. He abducts women like you and drills holes in their feet and bleeds them dry! Please, get down.”
“You’re right, he’s all those things,” she said. “And I know it makes no sense to you, but you’re going to find that lots of things in my world won’t make immediate sense to you. I’ve lived with the fear of this monster for seven years and it’s debilitated me. Now I’m out and I’m staring the monster in the face and I have to kill him.”
“Kill him? With what?”
“With what I do and say. With me.”
He looked over her shoulder at the point where Quinton would appear if he followed their tracks. “Sit down. Please just sit down and listen to me for a second, Paradise.”
She squatted in the ditch.
“Okay, look, you’ve been through hell. Your mind isn’t seeing the picture—”
“My mind has never seen the picture clearer,” she said. Her tone was stiff, but his concern for her was making her feel weak in the knees. So she said something about it. “What you don’t realize, Brad, is that the more heroic you are, the more I have to go. You’re only making my case.”
What she said was true: Quinton was a monster. But so was she. And as she saw it now, clearheaded or not, the only way to defeat the one monster was to defeat the other. She stood again, desperate and hopeless at once.
“That’s it, isn’t it?” Brad said. “You feel you have to go in there to somehow prove your worth to me?”
Tears flooded her eyes and she looked away. He was only making things worse by being even more understanding. Didn’t he see that?
“Stop it,” she said.
“Stop what? Saying the truth?”
“Trying to save me. You’ve saved me enough.” She took a deep breath and wiped the tears from under her eyes. “I have to do this, Brad. It’s for him, but it’s for my sake. You understand?”
“No, I don’t understand. I really don’t understand. You don’t have to overcome the monster in you for me to see your beauty.”
He couldn’t really mean that. No man could really feel that way about her.
“Listen to us!” he whispered. “We’ve both just escaped this freak and we’re a few hundred yards from his barn arguing about whether you should go back. This is crazy.”
“Yes, I am.”
They remained silent. He was right, of course. Going back was crazy. But then so was she, and she knew somehow, some way, this would end in the barn tonight. A fresh batch of tears flooded her eyes. She couldn’t even stand next to him without falling apart.
Where was she? What was she doing out here? A sudden darkness crept over her horizon and she felt the familiar tendrils of fog curling into her mind. She couldn’t do this! She had to get back to the center!
The world was closing in on her and it took all of her strength to stand still. Brad was right, everything she’d said was hogwash! Even now, she was only saying things that proved she wasn’t sane, that she wasn’t worth anything out here, that she could never, never be loved that way.
Brad’s arm slowly settled on her shoulder. He pulled her close and she put her forehead against his chest, trying hard not to fall apart. But it was almost impossible.
He kissed the top of her head. “I can’t lose you, Paradise. You have to understand that. I just can’t lose you again. We can find another way for you to face and defeat your fears tomorrow when this is all over, but I just can’t bear the thought of letting you go back to that barn.”
She lost it.
She threw her arms around his stomach and she held him as tight as she dared and she wept long bitter tears into his shirt. She knew she didn’t deserve this kind of love, but it felt like heaven to her. She would repeat everything that had happened to her over the past seven years for this feeling. To be loved, even for one minute, the way she imagined that Brad was loving her now.
The way she knew he was loving her now.
She couldn’t tell him this because a knot had stopped her throat and she couldn’t speak. She could only sob as he stroked her hair and kissed the top of her head.
If God was love, as they said, she never could have guessed that she would find God in the bottom of a ditch three hundred yards from the man who’d tried to rape her seven years ago.
The night seemed to end, or at least to stall. She rested in his arms for a long time and she didn’t ever want to let go.
But then it occurred to her that he had gone very still. And his breathing seemed heavier. She calmed herself.
“There is one thing, though,” Brad said. She looked up and saw his steeled stare back in the direction of the barn. “This has to end tonight.”
Now it was her turn to ask. “What do you mean?”
But there was no mistaking the look of rage and resolve on his face, the flexing of his jaw, his glare in the moonlight, his flat lips. They sent a shiver down her spine.
Brad kissed her forehead again, then gently took her face in his hands and looked into her eyes. “Listen to me, Paradise. I know this isn’t going to make a lot of sense to you, but I want you to do something for me.”
“What?”
“I need you to wait here for me. Wait fifteen minutes, and if I’m not back, I want you to run west, down this ditch, as fast and as far as you can. They’ll see you from the air, he won’t—”
“No!” she cried, pulling back in disbelief. The thought of his leaving her was like a mule kick to her head. “No, I can’t.”
“Sh, now listen. Yes you can. He won’t catch you.”
“You can’t leave me!”
He paused. “I know I can’t. And I won’t. I won’t because I’m going to go back and put an end to this tonight.”
“You can’t leave me!” she said again. “Not now. You’ve just found me, you’ve just said you love me, you’ve just…” The words came out in a rush, but all the while her mind was saying, He must, he loves you, he has to go back and kill the monster, he has to because he loves you…
“You can’t leave me…”
And you have to let him go.
He stared at her. “He’s going to get away if I don’t, Paradise. He’ll disappear and then come back for you, and I can’t allow that. He’s obsessed with you. He won’t stop until he kills you. You understand? I can’t let you live with that threat over you. I have to end this tonight.”
You have to let him go because you love him and you have to trust him to be who he is for you…
She threw her arms around him to keep him from going and trembled with fear, knowing he must. How many times had she longed to be rescued, written about the man on the white horse sweeping to save the maiden… But now she had found the man on the white horse and she dreaded the thought of losing him.
“Paradise…” He kissed her head again, then gently pried her arms away. “Paradise, please.” He kissed her face, her lips, just lightly. “Please, I love you. I’ll be back. He isn’t expecting me, right? No one in their right mind would go back, he knows that.”
She just looked up at him, letting his stumbled-in words fall away because in truth he was right, neither of them was in their right minds, not her for wanting to go earlier, not him for going now. They were thinking with their hearts, and she would trade nothing for it.
“I didn’t mean it that way,” he said.
Paradise stretched up and kissed him on his lips. It was the first time she’d ever kissed a man. They were warm and soft. And she wanted to cling to him and cry and kiss him again.
Instead she put on her bravest face and looked up into his eyes. “Come back quickly,” she said.
He nodded once.
“I will.”