The stranger was walking around us, not close enough to touch us, but close enough. The gun in his hand was held casually as he strolled, and he occasionally picked up items from the old metal shelving units that lined the walls and created a couple of rows in the center of the room. I crawled up Helene’s body, settling beside her on the floor and wrapping my arms around her.
She instantly sank into my body, sobbing against my shirt and clutching at the fabric. Her sobs came out through gritted teeth, loud and nearly screamed out as she panicked. I’d never felt this level of fear before, and I knew exactly where her mind was at.
I closed my eyes, holding Helene’s body tight to me, and I whispered, “I’m sorry,” over and over again with my lips to her temple.
When I heard a zipper lower, I felt Helene’s body tense, and her fingers gripped tighter into my shirt. Her sobs loudened, and I cried silently at nothing more than the desperate sound of her fear. She wasn’t even looking at the man. Her face was buried against my shirt, and she was simply reacting to the sound.
“No, no, no, no…” she cried out quietly as her entire body squirmed against me. She was panicking.
“Get over here, bitch,” the man seethed.
Her squirming turned violent as she tried to sit up and crawl out of her skin at the same time. Her legs thrashed as she pulled her body back as far away from him as she could, but we were sitting against one of the shelving units, and there was simply nowhere for her to go.
“Leave her alone. You’ve done enough,” I said, holding my hands up.
Helene continued to squirm, and she was clutching my back as I let her wriggle her way behind me. I’d never seen this type of panic, this type of certain torture, and it was being directed at Helene. That wasn’t fair. I was the one who had been the asshole. I was always the one who was the asshole. She didn’t deserve this, and it was going to kill me if I had to watch her suffer for my mistakes.
When the man stalked toward us, aiming the gun at my head, I held my hands up again. But he reached behind me, dragging her out from her hiding place by the hair as she slid across the floor.
He held her up in front of him on her knees by the hair. He was hard and bulging against the front of his underwear that showed through the parted fly of his jeans. “You know what to do.”
She whimpered, but she reached for him. Her hands were still trembling as she fumbled with his underwear. When he held the muzzle of the gun directly to her temple, I sat up straighter, gasping and then panting as I watched. She whimpered, but the man’s focus shifted from its downward attention on her directly to me. He smirked.
“Oh, we’re gonna have some fun tonight, kiddos.”
And then he twisted his hand in her hair, tightening his grip and control of her head. And he thrust as a horrible gagging sound escaped Helene’s mouth.
Chapter Eight
Kane
“What the fuck, dude,” I snapped at the asshole that’d just bumped into me. “Tryin’ to fuckin’ throw darts, dick.”
Tia, the gal from Philosophy class, was hanging on my arm, and I shrugged it off as I squared off with the asshole.
The man sneered at me. “Then get outa my fucking way,” he snipped back, his shoulders tensing forward as though he were going to lunge. He was being cocky. Cocky didn’t fucking work on me.
I chuckled, dismissing his aggression as if it was nothing, and Tia giggled. “Hey, sweetie,” I said to her. “Get me another beer. This asswipe spilled mine all over the floor.” I handed her a five dollar bill, folding her fingers over the money as she batted her eyelashes and bit her lower lip. She nodded and bounced off toward the bar.
The man turned his back on me, and for whatever reason—reasons that never seemed to make sense even as they were happening in my mind—I tossed my half spilled beer on the back of his head and then threw the glass to the floor. It erupted in an explosion of glass that sent shards flying across the floor, but I had little time to listen to the sound as the man turned around and instantly took a swing at me.
I took a fist hard to my left cheek, and the searing heat that shot out from the point of contact to the rest of my head lit a fire in my gut. I threw the next punch, connecting squarely with his lower jaw. He staggered back, but when he regained his footing he lunged toward me, throwing me back against a bar top table. I fell, scraping my cheek on the side of the table where the cheap plastic veneer had chipped off leaving a jagged rough edge. When I landed on the floor, it was in a pool of beer and broken glass.
I pushed up, feeling the shards of glass slicing and grinding into my elbows and the backs of my upper arms. The sound of the bar was loud, people shouting, gasping, cheering, and yelling admonishments.
“Knock it the fuck off,” the bartender yelled over the crowd.
But that just wasn’t something I could do. I lunged next, throwing the man into the pool table. I came down on top of him, pinning his back to the worn green felt. I swung, connecting with his nose that time, and blood splattered across the table as his head snapped to the side.