Page 66 of Badd Love
I had zero control over my actions then. It was like watching someone else. Like I was that little alien dude fromMen In Black, the one who was sitting in a guy's skull, driving him like a mech. Bile at my teeth as my fingers pried the fork from the roll. Gripped it with white-knuckle intensity, tines pointing downward, away from my thumb.
Danny slid closer, one arm slithering alongside me. Alicia was saying something, but I couldn't understand it past the roaring in my ears.
His hand was in my frame of vision—scarred knuckles, tanned, weathered skin, faded prison ink along his knuckles and the backs of his hands, illegible.
With a sudden shrill shriek of awful hate that came from the pit of my stomach, I slammed the fork down into his hand as hard as I could. I'll never, ever forget the crunch of the metal tines scraping past bone, or the way it bit into the wood below his hand. He yowled, jerking his hand away—or trying to. I had, apparently, stuck the fork in him so hard it was fixed into the wood of the bar.
"FUCK YOU, YA CRAZY ASS BITCH!" he screamed, sagging down and away from the bar while trying to wiggle the fork free. "I'LL FUCKIN'KILLYOU!"
I pivoted slowly to show him my face. "Not if I kill you first, Daniel Cohen." I spat in his face, and when he reared away, howling in rage and wiping at his face, I closed my fist around the fork handle and used my hand like a hammer to drive it deeper, prompting renewed screams of agony from him.
"Remember me,Danny?" I was no longer frozen. Ohhhh no. Now I was caught up in a red haze of fury. "Surprised you'rehitting on me, actually, Danny, now that I'm not aFUCKING CHILD, you rapist, pedophileFUCK!”
He looked stunned, trying to get away from me. "L-L-L-Lindsey?"
I wiggled the fork back and forth, felt the tines scraping against bone. "Shut thefuckup." I grabbed a stack of bar napkins and stuffed them in his mouth when he went to speak, shoved them in so far he gagged on them. "Did you get raped in prison, Danny? I gotta say, I really, really hope some big-ass motherfucker used your asshole like his own personal Fleshlight." I leaned over the bar, snagged the soda gun, clicked the first button my thumb hit—the lemonade button—and sprayed his eyes with it. "I bet you could fit a Louisville Slugger up your asshole, now, Danny. Kinda feel like we should try. My boss keeps one in the office." I stepped back while he was sobbing and clawing at his eyes and choking on the now-sodden napkins clogging his mouth…and kicked him in the balls as hard as I could. "Maybe I'll just use it to turn your pathetic little balls into fucking ketchup."
He gargled something muffled.
"Sorry, I couldn't hear that," I said. "Let me help you out." I sprayed him with the gun again, directly in his mouth, effectively waterboarding him.
And then I kicked him the nuts again, complete with a step back, wind up, and follow-through like I was a punter making a Super Cup winning football goal in the fourth inning, or whatever the right analogy is—I don't know, I don't sportsball.
I wound up to kick him again, but hands wrapped around my arms and lifted me bodily off the floor, carried me away. I kicked and thrashed until I heard Saleh's voice in my ear. "Calm, calm. Calm. It is me. You must be calm now, Lindsey."
"I'll kill him!" I screeched, thrashing. "Let me go! I'll fucking kill him!"
"And then you will go to jail."
"I don't care! I'll kick him in the fucking balls until he dies! I don't care! Send me to jail, as long as he dies first!"
The red haze obscured my vision—I'd always thought seeing red was a figure of speech, but the edges of my eyesight were, quite literally, tinged red. I was thrashing, kicking, screaming, spitting. Saleh held me like he would a similarly-behaving feral cat, which wasn't far from the truth.
"Saleh, he's unconscious." Connor.
"Good. Leave him. I will deal with him." His voice was cold and hard and scary. To me, then, warmth and compassion in his voice. “Breathe, Lindsey. Breathe. You must try to breathe."
I wasn't breathing; my lungs burned.
I heard traffic. Fresh air hit my face—fresh air tainted with the sickly-sweet stench of old food trash from the dumpsters.
“He hurt you?"
I nodded.
"You were a child?"
I nodded again. "T-t-tw-tweh—twelve. Un-until I w-w-was s-s-s-sih—sixteen."
Saleh cursed floridly in Arabic. "Then what you have done was a kindness compared to what an animal like him deserves.”
"N-n-not an animal," I whispered. "A m-monster. I l-like animals."
"Sit, sit." He guided me to the wall and helped me slide down to my butt on the filthy ground. "Put your head between your knees and breathe slowly in and out. You know the square breathing?"
I nodded, doing as he suggested.
"You stay here," Saleh told me. "I will return soon."
