I shrugged. “I left the basketball game and was walking through the courtyard when a couple guys showed up and banged me up a little. Not much else to tell.”
“Were they students?”
I wasn’t sure how to respond not knowing what the relationship between them and William was, but knowing I didn’t want to say anything that would jeopardize him, I answered vaguely, “They could have been. It was so dark I couldn’t really make out their faces.”
Simchuck frowned, doodling a football in the margins of his notebook. “No details at all? Not even height, build, approximate age?”
I shook my head, squeezing my lips together, nudging William in a get-me-out-of-here way. Right on cue, I heard a bandage being ripped open.
“The first man was in his late twenties, six foot, one-eighty, maybe one-eighty five,” William listed off. “Brown hair, green eyes and a medium complexion. He has a scar two inches long running down the left side of his face. The second one is early twenties, five foot eight, stocky build, reddish-blonde hair, brown eyes, and has a chain tattooed down his right arm.”
Simchuck’s pen was scratching like mad to keep up.
“I don’t think you have to worry about them showing back up here, but you’ve got their descriptions just in case.”
“Chain tattoo . . .” Simchuck whispered to himself as he continued to write.
“All done,” William said, brushing my hair back from my ear.
“You’re the best,” I said, nearly jumping up from the couch.
“If you’ll excuse us Officer Simchuck”—William winked at me from the side—“I need to get Bryn back to her room so she can get some rest. It’s been some night.”
“Yeah, yeah, sure,” Simchuck waved us on, continuing his note-taking. “I think I got what I need.”
“Have a nice night,” William said formally, reaching for my hand and knotting his fingers through mine. That moment, feeling him reach for my hand as if it was instinctual, was worth a hundred more run-ins with Ben and Troy. It felt so good it actually hurt.
He led me out of the room, and I allowed him to, swearing I was done holding back from him. I was going to be an open-book from now on. A Bryn re-model was in order, starting off by tearing down the walls barricaded around me.
“I knew I forgot something,” Simchuck said behind us, an audible smacking of the forehead following. “One more thing, Bryn,” he shouted out at us as we were escaping into the hall.
I stiffened, wondering if we were far enough away Simchuck might assume we were out of hearing-range. Unless we were practically deaf, I didn’t think that would fly. I turned my head back at him, keeping my hand rooted in William’s.
“What’s that?”
“Do you have any reason to believe you might know these guys? You know, had a run-in with them in the past where they tried to mess you?
I would have sworn Simchuck had just pounded me in the stomach than asked me a question. I felt the stopper burst from the bottle I tried to keep my past—that night—trapped in.
I felt my knees give a little, like my body had suddenly become too heavy to keep upright. My scars became open wounds, searing pain that sucked the air from my lungs. My hand fell out of William’s, right as the pain became too much. I clutched at my stomach and back, pawing at the scars as if I could extinguish the flames I felt burning in them.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, worry heightening his voice an octave. “Are you hurt?”
I couldn’t answer, partly due to the pain, but mainly due to there being no conclusive answer. The physical damage had healed long ago, but the hurt that goes deep and burrows in like a parasite never goes away.
William pried my hands away and nudged my shirt up timidly, running his fingers over the purple lines of my past.
“These are entry and exit wounds,” he whispered assuredly, although as if he wished he was mistaken. “You were shot.”
“Everything alright?” Simchuck called out as he approached us.
I found my voice, a small miracle in its own right. “Everything’s fine,” I said, before chancing a glimpse at William who was still rubbing over my scars, as if he was trying to erase them.
“I’m fine,” I whispered down to him. “Really.”
When he looked up, I knew I hadn’t convinced him anymore than I had myself.
I composed my face and turned back to the fast approaching Simchuck. “To answer your question”—I cleared my throat—“they’re no one I know. I’ve never seen them before.”
I held Simchuck’s stare until he was convinced. He clicked the top of his pen and hung it over his shirt pocket. “Thanks for your time. If you think of anything else, give us a call.”
“Thanks,” I replied, not having to fake the sentiment. I was beyond thankful he’d made our proceedings as quick and relatively painless as rent-a-cop possible.
“Here’s my personal number.” He slid a card in my hand and his eyebrows peaked in an expectant way before he hustled around William’s kneeling form.
“See ya, Savior,” he tapped William’s shoulder before extending his arm at Paul, perched halfway up the staircase—no doubt eavesdropping without looking too blatant about it. “Catch up with you later, Captain.”
Paul flashed a humorless smile, lifting his middle finger to the sky. It snapped back the instant he saw me looking at him. “Sorry,” he mouthed, looking down.
“Mature,” I chided, attempting to encourage William from his freeze-framed form. “You’re the one that called him, remember?”
“Let’s hope that’s the last mistake I make tonight,” Paul replied, his tone full of implications, but I was too consumed trying to pull William from his trance to decipher the meaning behind his words.
“I’m gonna hit the sack now to make sure it is.” He pushed off his thighs to rise, eyeing William. “Hasn’t anyone told you chivalry’s dead, man? Chics don’t dig that whole opening doors, getting down on one knee thing.”
“Good night, Paul.” I made the warning in my voice so obvious even a jock-rock (my term for jocks with rocks for brains) would hear it.
Without another word, he jogged up the stairs, hollering over his shoulder, “See ya, Bryn.”
I exhaled, two male problems attended to, one more to go.
I wasn’t sure how much, if any, of my past I was willing to divulge to William. I’d only told my account of that night once, to the police who were the first on the scene, and hadn’t whispered a word about it since. Not even when counselors, distant relatives from Texas I saw once every few years, or my professors back home, encouraged me to talk about it—let the pain ooze from the wound before sealing it up, not to let it fester. But I’d been a fester-er my whole life, how could everyone just expect me to change and bawl my eyes through a box of tissues every week at some support group?
William rose and I felt him studying me, trying to work out a problem in his head that was unsolvable, inconclusive . . . the null set.
“What happened?” he said finally, his voice so tight it seemed it might snap.
I sniffed, looking anywhere but in his eyes. “I was shot.”
He nodded twice before rolling his head into a shake. “With the location on your body, a centimeter to the right or left and it would have killed you instantly.”
I’d never looked at it that way—that I was lucky I’d made it. I chose to focus on the bad luck of being shot and having everything taken from me that night. “Lucky me, right?”
“That’s not what I mean,” he said. “It’s like something—some force—wanted you to survive. To make it to this moment.”
There was a serious lightness to his statement, so I replied in turn, “So I could be here with you, right now?”
A slow grin rose. “Something like that. At least that’s what I like to think.”
“Again,” I said, trying to look through him like he had so many times with me. “Lucky me.”
He held my stare like it was the most natural gesture between near strangers, with the practice of a staring contest champion. I felt my eyes puckering with dryness before I blinked, forfeiting the win to the master.
“I’ll take you to your room,” he said, resting his hand over the small of my back gently, as if I was too fragile to touch with any kind of urgency.
Up the staircase that seemed taller, down the hall that seemed longer, coming to a stop in front of the door that seemed more empty. Mine was easy to identify; it was the only door void of glittered construction paper cut-out names and corkboards splattered with photos.
I cupped my hand around the doorknob, stalling, still undecided. In the end, my soul made the decision for me.
“It was six months ago,” I said, sounding stronger than I thought I could breeching the topic.
He braced his hand against the wall, sucking in a long breath.
I twisted the door opened, the light of my room dosing us in 100 watt incandescent light. I always kept at least one light on now, the dark and I didn’t get along anymore. “I want to show you something.”
My legs fought the journey to my desk, my arms fighting even harder as I whooshed the bottom drawer open. I didn’t have to turn my head to know he’d followed me in, I could feel him—like the spring morning sun on my face. I dug under several pre-law course books when that dream had still been alive, finding what I was searching for at the very bottom. The metal of the drawer had cooled the thin paper. I fought back a choke, I wasn’t going to chicken out now.
Pulling out the cut-out newspaper article, I flung my arm behind me, not able to look at it. Once had been enough for one lifetime.
William took it, his contemplation saturating the air like a heavy night fog. I stayed crouched where I was, unable to look.
“Three Shot, Two Die, One Still at Large in Dawson Family Tragedy,” he whispered, reciting the title of the article that had turned into a highly publicized case. Despite the overabundance of violence out there, it still seems to turn a lot of heads when a respectable attorney and his wife are murdered in cold blood, while their Ivy-league daughter narrowly escaped her own death on her nineteenth birthday.
I closed my eyes, focusing on inhaling . . . 1,2,3,4,5 . . . exhaling . . . 1,2,3,4,5.
He didn’t read anymore aloud thankfully, although I’d already teleported myself back in time to that night and was sprawled on the asphalt drenched in blood and rain, shivering and alone.
He glanced down at me, his eyes filled with the rawness of someone who had experienced the kind of loss I had, although how could he truly understand my sorrow? William couldn’t know what it felt like to lose his entire family and know he was the one responsible for it.
He couldn’t know what it felt like to have a man walk up to you and shoot the two people you loved most in the world, before he turned the gun on you; what it would feel like to wake up in the hospital two weeks later to be told you were the only one to survive and there were no leads as to who’d killed the only people you loved—no one to hold responsible for your pain other than yourself.