Page 11 of Exit Strategy
Of course, none of what he blustered about would really happen. Sometimes it did, but Arik wasn’t as all powerful as he liked to think. I sat in frozen terror and listened to Arik rage some more.
There was something about insulting Rob Dee’s strap-on beard, and that if he wanted, he would have the plastic surgeon repossess Heather Dee’s fake tits so he could use them as paperweights on his desk, because that was all she was good for. I couldn’t guess who was on the other end of the line, but he fell silent as he listened, and whoever said what? Well, he seemed to be placated by it. He stopped screaming, his tone dropping, emanating from him scathing and acidic. Then there was a final reprimand that if they pulled a stunt like this again, he would personally show up to fuck all of them in the ass, and then beat them to death with their own microphones.
There was a long pause, a foreboding like a pending storm.
I felt Arik’s seething gaze fall upon me.
I looked up slowly. The puzzle box lid I had been holding fell from my suddenly nerveless fingers.
I’d seen Arik angry; I’d even seen those eyes wild with a combination of alcohol, drugs, and raw emotion, but the coldness that radiated from them now terrified me in a different sort of way, as though the fire of his anger had gone out, as though the tide of his emotion had been pulled back from the shore and this silence, this deafening silence was simply the calm before all of it came rushing out, came rushing back in and I was right in the path of his impending tsunami of rage.
Arik wasn’t the tallest of men, quite average in height and build in person, actually, but right now? He positively loomed in the doorway that separated my sitting room from the rest of the house. I stood up slowly and he asked, voice hollow, “Is it true, Radiance?”
“What? Is what true, Husband?” I asked, feigning as though I hadn’t heard.
“Don’t fucking play with me,Callie.”
Oh, oh no, he never used my preferred nickname over my given one unless he were absolutelyenraged.
I went to brush past him casually, to get out of the room and hoping against hope that I could make it, saying, “I don’t know what you’re talking about Arik. You’ll have to tell me.”
He caught my arm and fixed my eyes with his and I felt my mouth go dry. I swallowed hard, my throat very nearly clicking with the effort when he said, voice the embodiment of winter itself, “Don’t play with me,child.”
“Arik, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I frowned and his hand flashed, faster than light, lighter than air, but when it crashed into the side of my face, it did so with the force of a cinder block. I cried out and put a hand to the stinging print of the back of his hand and tears stung my eyes. I felt the color creep and he threw me out into the living room and down the two carpeted steps. I put my arms out and gritted my teeth as the heels of my hands slid across the carpet, stinging with a burn almost right away.
I scrambled to my feet before he could start kicking and the tsunami crashed. He was screaming at me, my ears still ringing from the slap. When I turned to face him, I turned right into his closed fist, crashing into the same side of my face he’d only slapped the moment before.
I screamed and he came at me. Both of us tumbled to the carpet. I think I was screaming, his fist crashing into the side of my face, my head, boxing my ear. I had my arms up, trying futilely to protect myself, but there was no protection from Arik when he was this angry. There never had been.
“Are you not entertained?” Arik screamed. “Everything I do, everything I put up with, and that is the garbage that won the awards?” My head might as well have been underwater for all I could hear, all I could see.
His fist crashed into the side of my jaw, a strike that for a moment I could appreciate. It was almost his signature move, his finishing strike for different fights his different movie personas all ultimately used. My vision winked out for a few seconds, and everything seemed to be caught in slow motion. That was bad, but it didn’t hurt. Everything started to shift, like the sun was moving in the sky.
I was falling, my legs were gone.
Consciousness would chase quickly after that.
I wanted to thank whatever higher power there might be that existed, but I didn’t really believe in any. I couldn’t. Not when there were men like Arik Rex. Not when there were men like the ones who put me with him. Not when my ownmother…
There wasdarkness.
Silence.
Then a jarring intrusion into this floating museum of introspection.
“Callie?” I put up my hand and tried to pull myself away from the masculine voice. I wept; my own voice as broken as the rest of me as I feebly tried to pull myself across the blood-smeared carpet.
“Oh, no, love. You’re safe. I’ve got you now.”
I shrieked at a touch on my arm, strong fingers wrapping around my forearm. I couldn’t breathe, chest heaving, breath sawing in and out of my lungs, head pounding with heat. The taste in my mouth – metallic with blood and fear – made me nauseous.
I was hoisted to my feet and everything rushed and whirred, swirling in a miasma of color and then blessed calming black. The last thing I remember was fetching up against something hard and covered in cloth, the sensation of floating.
The Woodrow Linea couch. I’d fallen against that awful, hard, modern couch in our living room. With my face pressed against it, I could make out the pattern in the upholstery, the tasteful use of different colored fibers making up its limited-edition Warhol orange fabric, and my blood smeared across it.
I hurt, everything hurt, so I welcomed the ensuing oblivion with open arms and prayed that this time would be the time I wouldn’t wake up.
5
