When he is finished, he stands up and looks at me. He tells me I am going to jump. I am going to jump off this bridge because if I don’t, then I might as well have chosen his father. It is all or nothing, he says. I don’t understand. Is this for real? It can’t be. He must be bluffing. This has to be a joke. If I jump, I tell him, then you’ll know I love you, but I’ll be dead and that’s not good for either one of us. But if you don’t jump, he says, I’ll know you never cared about us in the first place. Jump, he says, serious as stone. Jump.
Fine, I tell him, hoping to call his bluff. Fine. I will jump. I will jump because I love you—but you are a sick motherfucker, David.
I am laughing now because I don’t know what else to do. Peels of nervous laughter pour from my throat, and when I look at David, he is smiling. A huge, face-splitting grin. Thank God. It was a joke. I look down at the ground and tell him he can untie me now, take this bag off my feet. I am his. But when I look back up, he is still smiling. Only it is different now, more twisted. Power-hungry. But also controlled. I stop laughing and I know. I know this isn’t going to end the way I thought it would.
And then I hear something coming from the honeysuckles. It’s Shep. But he isn’t coming to help me. He isn’t coming to stop David. He is snoring, loud and deep, because he is passed out in the bushes, drunk to hell. I deserve this, I tell myself with a bitter chuckle of resignation. I deserve this, because somehow I have managed to align myself with an alcoholic and a psychopath. Apparently, I’m a goddamned genius.
I start to scream at David to let me go, not to change his mind but because I want Shep to wake up. I want him to come flying out of the honeysuckle and stop all this craziness. Please, David, I yell, please, let me go. I will walk away, I tell him. I will not tell anyone about any of this. We can pretend it never happened. I try to pull away, try to run. But the duffel is heavy, and my legs are bound together.
I get no answer from David, and his smiling, powerful silence brings on another fit of nervous laughter. I can’t help myself. I am laughing at my own idiocy. David shoves me forward, and I spiral off Clawsen’s Bridge in a fit of giggles. I cannot believe this is happening. And I cannot believe that Shep is still asleep.
Chapter Eighteen
Emma—Present Day
The sun is fully up, and the city is slowly starting to wake. Saturday morning traffic is light, and on the opposite side of the river, I can see people walking their dogs along the shore. David is asleep with his head in my lap on the hood of his car. I am exhausted, but my complete lack of sleep is probably the reason I don’t have a hangover—you can’t get the bed-spins if you never go to bed. Right now, however, I want nothing more than to sleep for the rest of the day. I gently shake David by the shoulders to try to rouse him.
A few minutes later, we are on the road, and before I know it, we pull into our building’s parking lot. Together we walk inside and up the stairs. I don’t want to invite him into my place to sleep because I would actually like to sleep, and so we stand outside my apartment door with a haze of expectation hanging between us.
“Thanks, David. Really. I had so much fun last night. Everything about it was exceptional,” I tell him as I put my key into the lock.
“Yeah, it was a pretty great night,” he says, his voice trailing off and his eyes dropping to his shoes. “Thanks for not taking those guys too seriously. They get a real rise out of the whole ‘shock and awe’ thing.”
“I’m not usually shocked or awed by guys like that,” I say. “It takes a lot more than that to impress, or intimidate, me.” I try to laugh as I say it, but I’m just so damned tired that I can barely muster a smile.
“I can see that you’re itching to get some sleep, so I’ll just call you later, okay? You wanna get some dinner Sunday night?”
“Sure,” I say, twisting my doorknob. I hear someone coming down the stairs. Both David and I turn to look up at the landing, and there stands Brad. He has a black eye and a very swollen cheek, and he’s wearing a pair of jeans, a dark green T-shirt, and a ball cap with the Twin Cities emblem on it. He stops short when he sees us. Then he walks very deliberately down the rest of the stairs until he is standing directly in front of David.
“Where the fuck have you been?” he says to David, raising his hands in emphasis. “What the hell. Did you forget? You can’t just forget. That’s not how it works. We’re already so fucking late. Let’s...let’s just go.” Brad turns to me, smiles a conceited-prick smile, and looks me up and down. “Thanks for the black eye. It was a hell of a lot of fun.” And just like that, my anger comes back, rushing into my veins and burning. Making me want to take a swipe at him. But I don’t because suddenly David has his arm around my shoulders, and he is pulling me snug against him. He knows I am angry, and I think this is his way of telling me to shut it down.