Run You Down (Rebekah Roberts #2)(3)

“Feel better?” he asked. I nodded, but I didn’t really feel better. Where was Brian? Chris reached for my hands and pulled me up and close to him, locking an arm around my waist. He kissed my neck, and in one motion slid the strap of my bra and tank top down my shoulder, letting my left breast fall out. He grabbed it and squeezed my nipple. I tried to squirm out of his arm but he held me tight.

“No,” I said.

“No?” he said, grinning, his cold hand kneading my breast like dough, pulling at it. He pushed me against the wall and put his mouth on mine, shoving his tongue between my lips. I twisted my head sideways and he moved his lips to my neck. “What’s the matter?” he said. And then he grabbed my hair and turned me around so my face was pressed against the greasy tile wall. I teetered on my high-heeled shoes and he righted me. He pressed one hand against the back of my head, and with the other he pulled my waist toward him and put his hand under my skirt, his clumsy fingers pushed aside my underwear, which, like everything else I was wearing that night, was new, still a kind of costume. Six months before I wore underwear my mother bought me. Big, thick “full-coverage” cotton underwear with tight elastic hugging the tops of my thighs and a waist at my belly button. I thought: If I was wearing my old underwear it would be harder for him to get in. I thought: I’ve brought this on myself. He shoved his hand up. I felt his fingernails scratch me and that’s when I thought of you. It was the moment I admitted you were inside me. I had allowed myself to ignore the fact that I hadn’t had my period in two months, but I could not let this boy hurt you. He took his hand off my head to open his pants and I struck him in the face with my elbow. He stopped smiling and stumbled backward and I ran to the door. It was a little latch lock, a flimsy nothing. Why didn’t Brian break in? I got it open with shaking fingers and burst into the hallway. One of the girls was still in line for the bathroom. We looked at each other and she pointed to my chest.

“Pull your shirt up,” she said.

I ran through the loud music to the front door and out of the bar. People were drinking beer from cans and smoking cigarettes on the patio. A different song was playing over speakers hidden in palm trees above our heads. I found a chair and sat down but stood back up immediately because it hurt to sit. I wondered if I was bleeding. I didn’t know how to get back to Brian’s room, but I couldn’t go back inside to bring him out to me. I was scared Chris would see me, and I was scared to try to walk home alone, and I was scared that if I told Brian what happened he would blame me. I stood on the patio shivering in the heat for a long time. People just moved around me. Finally, your father came outside.

“Aviva, are you okay? What happened?” He reached up to smooth my hair and I flinched.

“I got sick,” I said. “I fell. Can we go home now?”

“Of course,” he said.

When we got back to his room I climbed into bed in my clothes. I slept until noon the next day and woke to find Brian studying at his desk. He asked how I was feeling and I told him I was going to have a baby. When he asked me to marry him an hour later, I said yes.





CHAPTER TWO





REBEKAH


Every night I go to bed telling myself that I will call her tomorrow. And every morning I wake up knowing that I won’t. It’s been almost two months and I can still hear the gunshot in my ear. The doctor said the ringing would go away, but apparently not yet. I went back to the Trib two weeks after I came home from the hospital. My job is different, though, at least for now; instead of rushing from scene to scene, I’m in the office for the late rewrite shift. It’s supposed to be a step up because it means the editors think that in addition to being able to gather information, I can figure out what information is important enough to include in the article, and actually write the article myself. I come in at 2:00 P.M. and stay until 10:00 P.M. I sit at an old computer in one of several semicircles of old computers that make up the newsroom. Stringers, my former compatriots, call in their notes about dead bicyclists and celebrity nightclub shenanigans and corrupt hospital CEOs and police shootings, and I turn them into column inches. I also “rewrite” stories from other, often dubious, news sources. The British tabloids are the worst. They’re almost never right in the end, but we always print their stuff anyway—with “allegedly” and “reportedly” sprinkled throughout.

When I’m not at work, I sleep. Tony, the guy I was dating for a couple months, is out of the picture. I didn’t exactly mean to stop returning his texts, but I never really want to go out—or have anyone come visit—so it felt pointless to keep things going. He came over one last time at the end of February and said he really liked me but that it was clear I wasn’t ready to be involved in something. He was right.

In early March, my roommate Iris starts bugging me to go to the psychiatrists-in-training at Columbia.

“They charge on a sliding scale,” she tells me, looking all interested. We’re sitting on the couch—which is basically the only place I see her anymore. It’s Saturday evening and we’ve been arguing because she’s meeting some people we know for margaritas and Mexican food, but I’m not going.

“It’ll be like fifty bucks,” she says. “I’ll pay half.”

“You’re not paying for my shrink,” I say.