Push(37)

We stood in his father’s office for a long time, looking at each other, breathing and thinking. Finally, he told me that if I want to try to make this better, I need to prove how much I care about him. I need to prove to him that I am choosing him and not his father. I need to show him that I am serious about wanting to make this work, about wanting his forgiveness, about loving him. I told him that, yes, I will prove it. I will do whatever it takes to prove that I love him.
He told me to meet him here, on Clawsen’s bridge. And so here I am, standing next to David and listening to myself tell him about how complicated life is. Apologizing again and again for my dishonesty. Telling him that I love him and that I will do whatever he needs me to do so that maybe, just maybe, we can move on. I don’t know if Shep can hear us from his place in the honeysuckles, but if he can, I hope he is sober enough to understand what is happening. I hope he doesn’t hate me. But more than that, I hope he doesn’t blame David.
David puts down his duffel bag and tells me that he forgives me. I am relieved, and I want to kiss him, to wrap myself around him and say thank you. As I lean forward, he reaches into his pocket, and in a second I am turned around and he’s wrapping something around my wrists. By the time it registers that he is tying my hands together, he is done. What the hell, David? What the hell are you doing? He tells me that before we start things over again, he needs to know that I am serious about not wanting to be with his father anymore. He bends down, places the duffel bag on top of my feet, and begins to tie it there. It’s heavy. I am in a complete state of confusion.
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 motherf*cker, 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.