Save Me from Dangerous Men (Nikki Griffin #1)(77)

I hated the validity of his words. My voice was tight as I answered. “It’s not like that. We’ll spend so much normal time together you’ll be bored sick. The closest we’ll get to excitement is overtime in Boggle.” Bleaching blood off floors, picking bullets out of walls.

He didn’t laugh. “I don’t think that exists. Are you in trouble?”

“I can handle a little trouble.” The smell in the tub. The big toe left stuck in the bath drain after the last of the red water had swirled away.

The nonchalance of my reply, rather than defusing the tension, seemed to make things worse. He was trying to talk quietly but his words tumbled out in frustration. “I guess I just don’t get it. I mean, you know so much about books, food, everything; you’re beautiful and funny and charming; we have this great connection; but you have this other side—this darker side. A scary side. The violence, these situations you keep getting into that I don’t even know about—I honestly don’t feel like I know who you actually are. And if I feel like that, if I’m always going to wonder, how can this work? How can we work?”

I stepped closer to him and took his hand. “I want it to work. What do you want to know? I’ll tell you.”

He didn’t move away, but his hand stayed limp in mine. “I want to know you, Nikki. I don’t mean all at once, I don’t mean everything, I’m not asking for your e-mail passwords or to share bank accounts, but for this to work I need to feel like I understand you. And right now, I don’t feel like I do.”

“Okay,” I said. “If you want, I’ll tell you about myself.”

He glanced over at his friends again and I added, “But not here. Come with me.”



* * *



We sat on the grass near the campus library, the sweeping pillared steps behind us, the four-sided clock tower of the white stone campanile lancing the sky. A group of students threw a Frisbee. Others clustered on the grass with books and blankets. His hand rested on my leg and he waited for me to talk.

“I guess it starts on a Saturday, when I was in sixth grade,” I finally began. “This was in Bolinas, where we lived.” I felt the giddy thrill of releasing a secret. Like standing on a high building preparing to leap. “I’d been down on the beach playing with friends, and eventually we all headed home for lunch, except on my way back I decided I wanted an ice cream so I stopped at a place in town. I remember I ordered chocolate, two scoops in a waffle cone, and I filled a bag of jelly beans for my brother because they were his favorite.”

I went on after a moment. “That ice cream saved my life.”

His hand was holding mine. “Saved your life?”

I didn’t answer directly. Just kept telling the story. “My parents were having a bunch of friends over for dinner—my mom loved to cook, loved to entertain. When I got home I remember smelling seafood and saffron, hearing a pot boiling. But everything was so quiet.” A strange smell under the saffron. An alien, metallic smell. “Then I looked down and saw the floor.” A red pool spread across the linoleum. A silver wedge, partly covered by the spreading pool.

“What was on the floor?” Ethan asked quietly.

I didn’t say anything and after a moment he asked again. “What was it?”

“A butcher knife.”

Sight scored by clicking sounds. Jelly beans skittering on the floor. Colorful ovals rolling, slowing as they reached the red puddle’s viscosity. I continued. Jaw muscles tight, eyes fastened on the clock tower. “My mother was in the kitchen. Behind the counter. My father was in the living room. I read the police report years later. He must have heard my mom’s screams, come running downstairs. They stabbed him immediately but he was able to crawl into the living room.” Clips of memory stitched back together, unevenly. Hard to know what went where. The severed cord to the kitchen phone. Kneeling. Touching. Crying. Then that accidental glance over into the living room. More shock. Seeing the pair of eyes staring out at me. “My brother was in the living room, too. Under the couch. He had been there the whole time, hiding.” Later, grown-ups would try to explain to me that he was silent not because he was angry at me but because what he’d seen had left him unable to speak. “He started talking again after a month. And I’d been out eating chocolate ice cream while it happened. I’ve never been able to eat it since.”

When my family had needed me most. I had failed them.

Abandoned them and left them to die.

Ethan hugged me as he asked, “Who did it?”

I moved away. I didn’t feel like being held or touched. Not by anyone. Not just then. “Two men from a little East Bay city, Hercules. Jordan Stone and Carson Peters.”

“Why?” he wondered. “What would make them do that?”

It was too much. “That’s enough,” I said. “We can talk more another time. Not now. But that’s part of who I am. Like it or not.”

“I had no idea, Nikki,” he was saying. His words seemed to float in from a distance.

“How could you have? I don’t talk about it. But, like you said, you had a right to know. And I wouldn’t have told you if I didn’t want this to work.”

I was standing.

“Did I do something wrong?” Ethan said, getting up quickly.