Precious And Fragile Things. Megan Hart
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you think I’m a guy who takes women?”
“You did take me!”
“Yeah, well,” he said, “I didn’t mean to.”
I didn’t mean to.
It was one of the things Seth said when he wanted to sound like he was apologizing but really wasn’t. Gilly hated that phrase so much it automatically curled her lip and made her want to spit. The noise forced from her throat sounded suspiciously like a growl.
“How could you not mean to? I was in the truck. You got in with a…with a knife!” Her words caught, her voice hoarse. “How was that an accident? What happened? Did some big wind come up and just blow you into my car?”
“I didn’t say it was an accident. I just said I didn’t take you on purpose!”
“There’s no difference!” Gilly cried.
Todd stared at her long and hard. “There is a fucking difference.”
Shouting would solve nothing and might, in fact, make things worse. Gilly made herself sound calm and poised. “I want you to let me go, Todd.”
“Can’t.”
His simple answer infuriated her. “What do you plan to do with me, then?”
He shrugged, sucking on the cigarette until his cheeks hollowed. “Hell if I know.”
“Someone will find me.”
He stared at her, long and hard, through narrowed eyes. Todd didn’t look away. Gilly did.
“I don’t think anyone will find you,” he said. “Not for a while, anyway, and by then…”
“By then, what?” She stood to face him, but he only shrugged. She softened her tone. Cajoled, tempting that boot-kicked dog closer with a piece of steak. “Look. Just give me my boots. I’ll hike down to the main road and…hitch a ride. Or something. Find a gas station.”
He snorted laughter. “No, you won’t. You’d never make it. Christ, it’s…” He stopped himself, wary again, as if telling her the distance would give her any sort of clue where they were. “It’s too far.”
“I’d make it,” Gilly said in a low voice.
“No,” Todd said. “You wouldn’t.”
Images of a mass grave, multiple rotting bodies, filled her brain. Gilly swallowed hard. Fear tasted a little like metal, but she had to ask the question. “Are you going to kill me?”
Todd started. “No! Jesus Christ, no.”
There was no counting to ten this time, nothing to hold her back from rising hysteria. “Because if you are, you should do it now. Right away! Just do it and get it over with!”
Todd flinched at first in the face of her shouting, then frowned. “I didn’t bring you here to kill you. The fuck you think I am, a psycho?”
Gilly quieted, chest heaving with breath that hurt her lungs. Her throat had gone dry, her mouth parched and arid. Todd stared, then shook his head and laughed.
“You do. You really do think I’m crazy. Fuck my life, you think I’m a fucking psycho.”
Gilly shot her gaze toward the front door and expected him to step in front of her, but Todd just tossed up his hands.
“Go, then,” he said derisively. “See how far you get. People die all the time in the woods, and that’s ones smart enough to have the right gear with them. You don’t have gear, you got nothing. See how long it takes your ass to freeze.”
“The police,” she offered halfheartedly. “They’ll be looking for me.”
“Where?”
He had a point, one she didn’t want to acknowledge. “They can trace things. The truck, for one.”
“The fuck you think this is, CSI?” Todd shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not.”
Gilly looked again to the door and then at the floor in defeat. “Please. I’ll give you whatever you want.”
“You can’t give me what I want,” Todd said.
Gilly went to the front windows and looked out at the yard. Her truck was there, but she had no keys. The forest ringing the patchy, rocky grass looked thick and unwelcoming, the road little more than a path. He was right. She wouldn’t get far. Running out there would be stupid, especially without shoes.
She had to be smarter than that.
“I need to clean up,” Gilly said finally. “Brush my teeth, wash my face…”
She trailed off when he walked past her. He picked up a plastic shopping bag from the dining room table, and for the first time she noticed there were many of those bags on the chairs and beneath the table. He tossed her the first one.
It landed at her feet, and she jumped. Gilly bent and touched the plastic, but didn’t look inside. He’d bought more than groceries.
“Go ahead.” Todd poked at the other bags on the table. “Look.”
“What’s all this for?” Gilly sifted through a stack of turtleneck shirts, one in nearly every color.
Todd pushed another handful of bulging plastic sacks toward her. “I had all my stuff with me. You didn’t have anything.”
Gilly pulled out a pair of sparkly tights. She said nothing, turning them over and over in her fingers. They were her size. She didn’t even know they made sparkly tights in her size. She looked up at him.
Todd shrugged.
She let the tights drop onto the rest of the pile and wiped her now-sweating palms on her thighs. Her heart began to pound again.
“All of this… You bought enough to last for months,” she said finally.
Todd stubbed out his cigarette in a saucer on the table and lit another, flicking the lighter expertly with his left hand. He sucked deep and held it before letting the smoke seep from between his lips. “The fuck am I supposed to know what a woman needs? You needed shit. I bought it.”
Gilly steadied herself with one hand on the back of a chair. “I won’t be here for months.”
Todd flipped the lid of his lighter open and shut a couple of times before sliding it back into his pocket. Without answering her, he stalked to the woodstove and piled a few logs on the fire it didn’t need. His faded flannel shirt rode up as he knelt, exposing a line of flesh above the waist of his battered jeans.
If she could stab him there, he’d bleed like any other man. The thought swelled, unbidden, in her mind. She could run at him. Grab his knife. She could sink it deep into his back. For one frightening moment the urge to do it was so strong that Gilly saw Todd’s blood on her hands. She blinked, and the crimson vanished.
Gilly sifted through the contents of the bags. He’d bought soap and shampoo, toothpaste. Shirts, sweatpants, socks, a few six-packs of plain cotton underpants in a style she hadn’t worn in years. No shoes, no gloves or scarf, no hat.
She rubbed her middle finger between her eyes, where a pain was brewing. It seemed he’d thought of just about everything. Nothing fancy, all practical, and probably all of it would fit her. She thought she should be grateful he hadn’t bought her something creepy like a kinky maid’s outfit. She thought she should be happy he’d bought her clothes and wasn’t going to skin her to make a dress for himself, that’s what she should be grateful for.
Gilly gathered as many of the bags as she could. “Is there a shower?”
“Outside. There’s a tub in the bathroom.”
The plastic shifted and slipped in her fingers as she took the bags and went into the bathroom. She shut the door behind her. There was no lock. The room’s one small window slid up easily halfway,