Saved by the Outlaw(197)

He’s gonna be onto me as soon as he sees that I’m not at my apartment, and being on Ivan’s bad side does not bode well for anyone. I know what he’s capable of, and I know what he could do to me if he wanted to.

Especially knowing what he did to my own father.

Another shudder of nausea rips through my body as I remember every detail of my sex life with Ivan. The same hands that have cradled me, gripped me, stroked me to orgasm — are the hands which ended my father’s life. I feel so betrayed, so angry, and so incredibly disgusted with myself. I should have known. Somehow, I should have caught on before now.

And he’s coming for me, with his muscles and his guns and his pinpoint rage.

Suddenly, my paralysis breaks and I am filled with a buzzing energy as I throw back the bedsheets and rocket myself out of bed. I have to search the house for something to protect myself, some kind of weapon. I am trembling as I tear through the kitchen, digging through silverware drawers that haven’t been opened in years, knife blocks with too-dull knives.

My heart is pounding in my chest. I can’t find anything to save myself. I will be totally helpless when Ivan inevitably finds me. He’s going to tear me from limb to limb. He’s going to kill me like he killed my father — ruthless and cold.

There are tears in my eyes while I look desperately through my father’s old things. Anything, even a wood hatchet or a fire poker, would be nice. But there’s nothing. It’s as though the house has been child-proofed or something.

“Come on, Dad,” I mumble tearfully, “I know there’s gotta be something.”

In my frenzy, I accidentally drop a box packed with old Polaroids and they scatter to the ground. I slump to the floor, sitting in the middle of a circle of memories. There are pictures of me as a toddler, my brother in his elementary school play, my mom baking cookies and poking her tongue out at the camera. My dad holding up a big fish with an even bigger grin on his face.

“I’m so sorry. I’ve let you down,” I whimper, holding my face in my hands. Then, as though by magic, a lamp I clumsily moved to the edge of a coffee table during my search clatters to the ground across the room. I groan and walk over to it, careful not to touch any of the broken glass. The dusty floor-length tablecloth that’s been covering the table is lopsided, and when I try to arrange it back into place, it just slips off the table entirely.

I gasp at what I see underneath the coffee table.

There’s a gun.

At first my eyes refuse to believe what they’re looking at. There’s no way I just found a fucking gun just sitting underneath the coffee table I used to play card games on. I mean, I must have played a thousand games of UNO with my dad, sitting on the floor at this exact, innocuous-looking table. Carefully, slowly, as though in a trance, I reach my hand underneath the table to touch it.

The metal is ice-cold, and there’s dust on the barrel, but it feels real. Too real. I’ve never handled a gun before in my life, and I’m not even sure I can figure out how it works. I’m half-expecting the thing to just explode at any moment like a bomb.

But then I realize that I have what I’ve been looking for, at least to some extent. This is certainly a weapon. Whether I can actually use it or not, it will definitely serve to make Ivan hesitate. All I have to do is pretend I know what I’m doing. That might just be enough to stall him while I call the cops or something. Maybe. I hope.

So I pick it up and examine it a little, my heart hammering wildly in my ribcage. This is the scariest thing I’ve ever done, and possibly the stupidest. But I’ll be damned if I don’t at least try to stand up for myself when Ivan comes to find me. I turn around and bend down to scoop up some of the Polaroids to take with me. If there’s a chance I might die today, I want to revisit some sweeter memories before I go.

I move into the living area to watch the front door, sitting with the gun and a stack of photographs in my lap. I stare at the photos longingly, willing myself to somehow dive into the pictures and live in those worlds instead. I stay this way for what has to be several hours. There’s no clock in the house (my dad always said that the cottage was his “escape from time”), and with my phone deactivated in the other room, I have no real way of knowing the time.

But the sun is low in the sky when there finally comes a knock on the door.

By this point, I am no longer shaking. I am calm and resolute as I stand up, letting the photos fall to the floor. I cross the room and unlock the door, then back away a few steps. The door pushes slowly open and Ivan is standing there in the doorway.

I lift the gun and aim it at his handsome face.