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Lucy never did get the tattoo removed.
Some days, she would find herself in front of the removal shop, seconds away from barging in and shoved a wad of cash in the receptionist’s face. Other days, she would trace the ink, trying to find strength in her most vulnerable moment.
Perhaps getting the tattoo removed would have been the smarter idea. It would have represented a cleansing, marked the moment she finally moved on. But she knew, from all the nightmares and relapses, that no single moment could define such an acute change better than the moment the ink was etched into her skin.
Lucy didn’t know how she ended up at the bar. She remembered the stickiness of her skin when she woke up, the throbbing of her head from some lingering headache. The whole morning, a strange heaviness had hung over her bones, dragging her feet as she entered the station.
She’d downed two cups of coffee before beginning her shift and wished the caffeine could numb her senses. Every call left an uncomfortable tingling sensation in her skin, made her head pound even harder.
She should have called out. She’d procrastinated it for weeks, because she couldn’t possibly balk every time the date rolled around. She had to learn to face it, especially after learning that even the most invariable constants could leave her in the dust.
Thankfully, she’d only gotten low-level calls that day. No loud yelling. No crashes, glass broken, young girls screaming for help. Regardless, the badge clipped to her chest felt too heavy to bear, and she couldn’t shake the guilt that she should have done better.
Once she left the station, she went on autopilot. She didn’t go to the bar often, and definitely not alone. But she couldn’t go back to that apartment, and if she didn’t go back to her apartment, she literally had nowhere else to go.
The first glass went down easily. She welcomed the bitter taste, the dizzying bliss that greeted her after the third glass.
Why did it matter whether or not she got the tattoo removed? It was just a little bit of ink. If it haunted her so much, she should just get the fucking thing removed. It didn’t even cost that much.
Why did she want to hold onto it so badly? The tattoo represented him. Reminded her of him. He was dead now, six feet under the earth, so inconsequential and utterly irrelevant. Why should she let him hang over him like this? Why should she let his memory live on in that stupid, stupid tattoo on her abdomen?
You’re stronger than you think, he once said.
Stronger? She’d already endured the scars. She’d been shoved into the dirt. She’d driven herself insane while trying not to suffocate in an oil barrel. Why did she need to prove that she was strong enough for him?
It wasn’t your day of death, Officer Chen. But in a way, it had been. He didn’t understand, not in the way she needed him to. The filthiness of her skin, the dirt under her nails, the suffocation in her chest had fucking killed her.
He’d been shot plenty of times. He’d seen bombs and bullets and so much carnage, and she didn’t know how to explain to him that the touch of his hand against her chest was worse than that. How that tiny second of realization was worse than everything she’d experience on the job.
That tiny second of realization meant everything to her, in the way he could never fully grasp. It was the ice-cold fear in her veins, the knowledge that she’d fucked up, and the knowledge that there was absolutely nothing she could do about it as the drugs overrode her system.
It wasn’t like the spy movies, the dosage of sedative, the dragging away to a torture chamber. It was the knowledge that she’d possessed the power to stop him, to protect herself before she put herself in that position. The knowledge that if she hadn’t been drunk, she could have knocked the wind out of him. She could have ran, and she could have survived.
It was the knowledge that he could have done anything he wanted with her. She feigned indifference, pretended to be strong. But he could see it in her eyes—that raw, undilated fear, the horror movie she’d heard of many times over.
She had nothing. She was tied up. Her muscles could barely move. Her brain could barely connect to the rest of her body.
If he wanted to, he could have drugged her once more. Done whatever he wanted. He could have knocked her out, could have carved his name into her skin.
It was terrifying, the knowledge that despite his craziness, he could have been even more sadistic. She was lucky, wasn’t she? Her coworkers had found her just in time. Her heart had stopped beating, but not for long enough.
She’d survived. At least, a piece of her had.
Then there was the song. The stupid sycamore tree. The stupid birds and the stupid dreams that paralyzed her whenever she heard anything resembling the melody.
She hadn’t been strong enough to watch the tape for the trial. She didn’t want to relive the brittleness of her resolve. Most of all, she didn’t want to see the hope draining from her heart with every passing second.
Lucy had always prided herself in being an optimist.
Dying was one matter. She didn’t even remember how it felt to die. How it felt to struggle for each breath.
She only remembered the panic. And maybe the panic was partly because she was dying from suffocation, but she knew the panic was mostly the fear settling in. The more time passed, the darker the barrel seemed, and the dimmer her hope burned.
She didn’t remember if she’d held out. If there had been a few charred embers left, or if there had only been a pile of ash when they’d found her crumpled body.
Lucy downed another glass. The alcohol worked quickly. She wished it had worked quicker. She wished it had knocked her out, or at least stuffed her ears with cotton.
A familiar tune blasted from the speakers, with a haunting cheerfulness. It had been written during the Great Depression as a gentle lullaby. She had hummed it as an anthem for hope at the end of the tunnel, and it had turned into an anthem for acquiescence. She froze, the glass of beer nearly slipping from her fingers.
Stars shinin’ bright above you.
Suddenly, she couldn’t breathe.
Suddenly, she was in the barrel again, eyes straining for any sliver of light that seeped through the cracks of the dirt, counting down the seconds until her inexorable death.
Suddenly, she was that young rookie police officer again, lost and drugged and utterly alone, holding on to that tiny futile hope she could feel slipping through her grimy fingers. She sang of stars she could no longer see. She sang of the night sky she might admire again one day if she held on for a few minutes longer.
She would have given anything to see the stars again, to feel their warmth one last time. She would allow herself to scream and thrash in fruitless desperation, as long as she might have a chance to let the light guide her home.
The cut on her cheek stung, and the zip tie scraped against her skin. She wiggled her wrists, trying to find a way out, but the plastic held tight.
Her breaths came in shallow gasps, like a broken animal choking for air. She knew she should have conserved her energy instead of pounding the barrel walls for help. She should have stopped yelling, because she was beneath the dirt in the middle of nowhere and no one would have heard her anyway. She could have saved air if she stopped hyperventilating, but her heart wouldn’t stop pounding and her mind wouldn’t stop begging to be broken free.
Seconds turned into minutes and minutes turned into hours. When she woke up, she had been too scared to ask them for the time. She didn’t want to know how long it took for them to find her. She didn’t want to know how long she was trapped in that barrel, because those numbers would only be another set of statistics haunting her mind forever.
A tear slipped down her cheek. She tried to control her breathing, racking her brain for the breathing exercises her mother had taught her when she was six years old.
She tried to conjure her mother’s face, but she hadn’t seen her mother in years. What had her mother said when she called her after waking up in the hospital?
I told you that men only ruin your life. You never listen.
Her mother had called her something like a whore in Cantonese. Lucy’s finger had hovered over the red button, but she’d been too tired to hang up.
When one of her friends walked into the hospital room, she had schooled her expression and pretended that her mother hadn’t just yelled at her for nearly getting killed by a sadist.
Lucy pulled at her collar, her shirt pressing against her skin uncomfortably. A shot appeared in front of her and she downed it in one gulp.
She could remember the anger on her mother’s face when she dropped out of university. Not sadness. Not even disappointment. Rather, a barely contained rage, as if Lucy’s life meant nothing more than a machine that had gone haywire.
Minutes ticked by. Someone kept pushing another shot of tequila toward her, until the flashing lights of the club started to look like shimmery waves and she completely lost track of how much she had drunk.
Someone sidled up beside her, brown eyes gentle but sharp with an underlying intention she should have been able to identify earlier. “Hey, Beautiful. Want to get out of here?”
No, not really. She opened her mouth, but no sound came out.
Night breezes seem to whisper, "I love you"
Lucy’s throat tightened. She blinked, and through her hazy vision she could see a kind man at the bar with his ugly fists around her neck. He wore an arrogant smirk, like the football boys who tried to hit on random girls during passing period. Except the smirk wasn’t pure arrogance. Something more sinister bubbled under his mask, something ugly and black and rotten to the core.
Lucy saw a younger version of herself laughing, walking along the sidewalk. A man strolled beside her, oddly sober. His hand gripped her arm a little too tightly.
Run, she wanted to scream, but it was just a fleeting memory.
He could have been a kind stranger helping her to her car, making sure she arrived home safely. He walked in a straight line, letting her lean against him as she stumbled down the road.
Lucy fumbled with her phone, brushing a stray piece of hand away from her face.
“I should call an Uber,” she mumbled, cheeks still rosy with laughter. Her legs felt like jelly, her back nearly colliding with the side of her car. “You don’t think that they would tow my car, right?”
“No, the bar’s used to it.”
Her phone tumbled out of her hand.
She would have died if not for her job, Lucy realized with a wave of cold clarity. If she had not joined Mid-Wilshire and found her fellow colleagues, she would have been a rotting corpse buried in the outskirts of California, another forgotten victim her killer could gloat over for the rest of his life.
The man’s hand caught her phone immediately, as if he had been prepared for this outcome.
“Oh! Sorry,” she said sheepishly. She had been so drunk that she never noticed him slipping it into his pocket.
Phone completely forgotten, she felt her cheeks turning a light shade of pink. “Okay, well, if you can’t tell, I had a really good time.”
He looked even more handsome in the dim lighting, the lone streetlight casting a soft yellow glow on his sandy brown hair.
“Me too, unfortunately,” he said.
Originally, she thought he had been cracking a joke. She should have caught the way his eyes darted to the floor. His voice sounded too low to be fooling around, but the alcohol numbed her senses and her sense of reason.
“Why, you wanted to have a bad time?” she asked.
“Might make this next part a little easier.”
She chuckled, slightly confused, but not on guard. “What?”
Lucy giggled softly as he led her forward by the arm. His trunk popped open, and she nearly tripped over her own feet. He held her steady, calmly pushing her forward.
In the aftermath, she asked herself when she began to notice something amiss. She couldn’t remember when she started suspecting him, couldn’t remember what clues she should have caught earlier. All she knew was that she had found out too late.
Now, reliving the memory for the first time in years, she found the answer with renewed clarity.
She had been horribly drunk. She used to convince herself that some part of her always suspected him, but she had been wrong.
She hadn’t suspected him at all until the conversation after they exited the bar. Even then, she had been too dizzy to put her walls up.
When she stumbled, he pushed her forward instead of waiting for her to gather herself, as if he needed to rush somewhere. All the pieces began to click into place.
The phone. The drinks he kept pushing at her. The open trunk.
Me too, unfortunately.
Might make this next part a little easier.
God, she had been such a fool. The smile fell from her face. Her eyebrows knit together as she slowly cut through the haze in her mind, stomach churning with alcohol and cold, hard terror.
He adjusted his grip on her arm. His nails dug into her skin, as if fighting to keep her under his control.
“You put something in my drink,” she mumbled, blood roaring in her ears.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Her heart lodged her in her throat, an icy cold wave of fear washing over her body. Her brain hurried to pump adrenaline through her veins, initiating her fight-or-flight response mechanism, but she was a fool and she had seen the signs too late.
With his free hand, he clamped a hand over her mouth, muffling her screams. He shushed her gently, lifting the trunk and shoving her forward.
She struggled against his grasp, trying to make as much noise as she could, but barely any sound escaped. Her heart pounded in her chest, but her limbs were too sluggish to put up much of a fight.
Lucy used the remainder of her energy to twist around, blurry vision barely registering the dark figure looming above her. Traitor. Acid burned in her stomach.
The world went black. She flinched at the cruel sound, marking the end of the line.
She must have passed out shortly after Caleb slammed the trunk shut. She probably hadn’t had enough time to start panicking. Whatever he used to spike her drink had worked fast.
What a shame.
Birds singin' in the sycamore tree
When she woke up, she heard birds singing in the distance, their dulcet melodies accompanied by the steady thrum of her own heartbeat. Weak sunlight filtered into the unfamiliar room, little patches of hope escaping through the blinds.
Her head pounded with a dull ache. How much had she drunk?
Buzz.
Lucy blinked a few times, the sudden light stinging her eyes. For a second, her vision flashed, and she saw the fuzzy figure of the man who’d tried to slip his number to her a few days ago.
Someone else had snatched the little piece of paper away, huffing with exasperation. It had ended up back in her hands anyway, though now she wished he had shredded the number into pieces.
She tried to swallow, but her throat felt as dry as ash. Her head pressed against something hard, almost like she laid on a slab of wood instead of her mattress for the entire night.
Lucy didn’t do one-night stands—and besides, who in Los Angeles slept on a wooden table? She shifted her head slightly to the right so she could get a view of something that wasn’t the ceiling.
Two small paintings hung on the wall. Next to the paintings, the outer panel of a bay window was a mess of broken blinds. A vintage pattern virtually no one would use in a Los Angeles apartment lined the walls.
If she had to guess, she would surmise she was in some type of abandoned house. How did one go from flirting at the bar to lying in an inhabited structure?
She needed to remember. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to draw the previous night’s memories back to the front of her mind, but the pain in her temples flared whenever she tried to focus.
Buzz.
Pain flared in her abdomen. She lifted her head slightly, neck straining as she tried to look somewhere other than the plain white ceiling. Her shirt was pulled up just below her chest, cold air chilling the exposed area of skin. The same man from her memory sat in a chair to her left, holding a tattoo machine in his hand.
A buzzing sound emitted from the machine, etching ink into her skin. She could have reached out and swatted him away, but she doubted she had the strength to even lift a pinky.
He hummed, admiring his creation. “Do you know what it is?”
She pushed back on her elbows, eyes flicking down to the writing on her abdomen.
DOD12919.
The blood drained from her face. She knew those numbers, knew the three letters at the front even when she wished she didn’t.
How damning the gift of knowledge could be.
“Tell me.” He wasn’t asking.
She swallowed again, tongue brushed against cracked lips. “My day of death?”
His lips curled into a cruel smile. She felt the urge to punch the smugness off his face. The dream faded away.
Dream a little dream of me
Her father used to scold her for using scissors to cut duct tape. You can rip the good ones with your hands, he told her. No tools needed.
But how could she use her hands when they were strapped to a chair, shaking and useless?
Wood splintered, one arm of the chair clattering onto the ground. With her free hand, she reached for the tape around the wrist still bound and tore the adhesive into two with a satisfying rip. She risked a glance behind her back, heart thundering in her chest as she listened for footsteps.
The tape around her ankles gave easily, now that both her hands were free. She stood up a little too quickly, nearly pitching forward onto the ground, weak legs almost crumbling below her. She caught herself and took a few moments to catch her breath, widened her stance so she would be less likely to fall over.
She heard his feet before she heard his voice,
“Okay, we are ready to go—”
Her fist collided with his nose, slamming him onto the ground. Her whole body still weighed with dehydration and fear, and the momentum of the punch pushed her backwards, knocking her off her feet.
He groaned on the floor, clutching his injured head. She took the opportunity to stumble to her feet, cursing herself for wearing heeled boots.
She sped through the maze of rooms, looking for the exit.
Light stung her eyes as she burst out the front door, screaming for help. Adrenaline had led her to fresh air, but not her salvation. She skidded to a stop, breathing heavily as she took in the miles and miles of vacant hills surrounding the small house.
No.
She could scream until she tore her vocal chords and no one would hear a thing. She glanced back at the house.
She didn’t have much of a choice, did she? She could run and die later or she could die immediately.
In hindsight, she should have paid more attention to her surroundings, instead of being solely focused on putting as much distance between her and her kidnapper as possible.
She broke into a jog, and then—
Pain, searing and nauseating, spreading through her fingers and knees and forearms. Rocks scraped against her fingers. She saw nothing but tiny stones, hair splaying onto the floor in front of her.
The sound of footsteps thundered behind her.
Needles pierced her fingers.
Get up. You have to get up.
Her entire body ached, but somehow she found the strength to push herself to her feet. She saw him approaching steadily, anger written on his face. He had believed she would be another one of his toys, utterly helpless and unable to put up much resistance. She had slipped between his fingers and he was out for blood.
He raised his arm and droplets of liquid dispersed into the air.
Her face exploded into fire, like he had doused her with gasoline and struck a match, setting her into flames. White, hot pain seared through her skin, and her eyes forced themself shut involuntarily. Her head whipped to the side, a layer of hair protecting her, but the damage had already been done.
Her nose burned, lungs constricting with fear as she clawed uselessly at her face. The pain barely subsided, but her eyelids cracked open a little wider, giving her a broader view of the world before her.
Without thinking, she lurched forward, fists swinging, but her limbs lagged behind, and she missed horribly. She could barely see anything, the flames in her eyes burning hotter.
She couldn’t afford to stop now. A lucky hit collided with the corner of his chin, jerking his head backwards. She charged forward, grunting, trying to get in closer for another hit.
He recovered quickly, grabbing onto her shoulder, and thrusting his knee into her chest. She cried out in pain.
With ease, he threw her into the ground, spitting blood onto the dirt.
Her hands trembled as she pushed herself up. The lack of water and food enervated her bones, and she was sure adrenaline was the only thing keeping her alive.
She managed to get one look at him before his foot slammed into her temple, sending her flying back into the dirt. Her head collided with the ground, and she fell into another fitful sleep.
Say nighty-night and kiss me
She didn’t remember calling him. She had removed his contact from her phone when she couldn’t stop debating whether to text him or cry, but she still knew his number by heart.
“Lucy?” he asked groggily on the other line. His voice sounded rough with sleep and deliciously husky.
Her voice shook along with the rest of her body. “I—I can’t do this.” The words tumbled out of her mouth, incoherent and slurred and nonsensical.
She heard rustling through her phone. “Lucy, where are you? What’s going on?” Her heart squeezed at the raw concern in his voice.
Tears burned at the back of her throat. The world felt too big, too hot, too loud. She was the young girl sitting at the corner of the lunch table, hunched over her container of dumplings. She was the rookie with her hair pulled back into a tight bun, sitting rigidly at the front of roll call. She was nothing. She was invisible.
She should have hung up, but the alcohol didn’t just make her dizzy. It made her bold and stupid, more inclined to commit silly mistakes. She never learned, did she? Her parents made her avoid bars and parties and alcohol until she turned fully twenty-one. She swore off going to the bar alone after Caleb, but she still found herself back in the same vulnerable position again and again.
“I—I don’t…the fucking tree…everything is spinning,” she mumbled, pressing a hand to her forehead. She could feel the heat and perspiration through her fingers, anxiety clawing up her throat.
Lucy heard the sound of keys dangling from the other line. Her head pulsed painfully, the world tilting before her, as if she had spun in circles continually, like she had when she was a small child. Her fingers latched onto the wooden counter as she doubled over, bile rising in her throat.
“Lucy.” His voice cut through her haze like a lighthouse’s glowing lamp at the end of the shore. She heard creaking and then a door slamming shut. She flinched at the abrupt sound, nails digging into her arm.
The song continued in the background, this time, slower. It began to warp, the voices distorting until they no longer sounded human. The sound, rough and gravelly, sent shivers down her back.
Just hold me tight and tell me you'll miss me
“I’m coming to get you.” He didn’t leave room for argument. She didn’t have the strength to make any. “Stay where you are.”
A humorless chuckle escaped from her lips. Her whole body felt like a sack of flour, sagging and heavy and unmoving. She wasn’t going anywhere. She would live and die with those memories replaying in her head.
“Don’t hang up,” she found herself saying. “I like hearing your voice.”
A few seconds ticked by. “I’m not going anywhere,” he promised. A small smile formed on her face. Then her fingers slipped and a sharp beep marked the end of their call. She cursed, fumbling with the device, but she couldn’t see the numbers clearly in her blurry vision.
Finally, she let the phone clatter onto the counter with a defeated thump. She folded her arms onto the wood and rested her head in the crook of her elbow, slowly humming to herself, trying to drown out the song blaring in the background.
If she drank enough, would her vision blink out? Would the memories go away?
A distant thought nagged at her. She tried to push it away, but she only unlocked a new wave of memories.
I can’t just go back—
—you failed to secure a crime scene—
—if you’re looking for an apology, you’re not going to get it—
—just like you were when the lid came down on that barrel—
—you deserve so much better—
—I’m sorry, Chen—
—I’m sorry—
—Lucy, I’m sorry—
Sorry was never enough, was it?
Sorry could never bring someone back to life. Sorry could never erase the trauma from her nervous system. Sorry would never help her sleep better at night or stop the knife from sinking into her skin.
Sorry widened the chasm in her heart, pushed her closer and closer to the edge.
She didn’t want them to be sorry. She wanted them to be afraid, to be embarrassed, to be torn apart, just as she had.
Her mother used to yell at her for being ungrateful. Lucy used to take the razor to her skin in the bathroom, careful to not let the blood drip or the hiss escape from her lips. But her mother found out anyway, flicking the light on and filling the crime scene with a harsh white glow and the sound of her yelling.
The blood had formed a little pool on the floor, seeping into the cracks of the tile. Vanessa yelled and yelled, because Lucy needed to pull herself together and face the truth—she didn’t have a reason to hate her life.
She had loving parents who provided for her. She had a clean house with electricity and water at will, a belly full of food three times a day. She had access to opportunities others could only dream of, so she needed to stop feeling sorry for herself and do something useful for once.
Everyone suffered. The world didn’t owe her better. She didn’t deserve to cry over her own mistakes. If she fell, she only fell into a trap of her own making.
Still, water welled up in the corners of her eyes. Her fingers shook as she wrapped her arms around herself, teeth biting down onto her lip as she tried to stem the tears.
Broken fingers fumbling with the zip tie, trying to pull the locks loose. Lungs struggling for air, every breath more difficult than the last. A lost lullaby in the center of it all.
Remember me, she sang. Don’t forget me when I’m gone.
Dream of me when I’m gone.
A childish tune she heard over the radio one day when she was seven years old. She used to sing it in the shower to comfort herself after failing a test or being yelled at by her mother.
The song became her safe haven. She didn’t understand the lyrics then. She held on to the melody as tightly as she tried to cling to her childhood.
One last time, she sang of two lovers separated, not in bitterness, but in lasting love. They would not forget each other. They would look back on their memories with fondness, with sweet nostalgia.
She was distinctly aware of the increasing difficulty that came with each breath. Did it matter if she kept breathing? Did it matter if she kept clawing at the plastic, kept banging on the steel siding?
He’d pointed a gun at her head. He’d commanded her to get in the barrel. She’d been utterly powerless.
She hated the smirk on his face. The confidence that he’d won.
He’d walked her all the way there. She’d felt the sun on her neck, the sting of the cuts on her face. He’d pushed the end of a knife into her back to keep her moving.
The moment she saw the hole, the pile of dirt to the side, the yellow barrel, she knew she was done for.
“You suffocated the other two victims aboveground before you buried them with Rosalind’s kills,” she observed. Hoping. Wishing. For what? Suffocation above the surface didn’t give her a much better fighting chance. It wouldn’t have made a difference.
He shrugged. “Given the setbacks, I’m taking extra precaution.”
The setbacks. The victims she’d discovered, the truth she’d been so close to unraveling.
“Climb in,” he demanded.
She turned around in disbelief. Her heart thundered in her chest. “I’m not getting in there.”
“You know, they all say that, and then they all get in.” He grinned. “Do you know why?”
He paused, for dramatic effect, or to let the panic in her chest boil a little hotter. “Hope,” he said finally. “Inside that barrel there’s still life.”
What a sick, twisted way to force her hand. She hated that she understood his words on a technical level. She’d studied this—the human urge to hope, the unappeasable desire to live.
She hadn’t even noticed him tucking the knife into his pocket, switching it out for a gun. He lifted it now, and it was aimed for her head. “Out here? Only death. And you and I both know that despite the evidence literally tattooed on your side, you don’t think you’re dying today. So get in the barrel.”
His hand wasn’t even shaking.
She stared at the barrel, long and hard, as if she could think of a solution if she just stared hard enough. Then she came to the same conclusion that he had—she had to get in the barrel.
She stumbled forward, fingers grazing the rim.
Think, she urged herself. Think.
She was dead if didn’t think. She might be dead either way.
She could almost feel the barrel of the gun pressing against her head. Could almost hear the deafening shot ringing through the air.
I will not die today, she told herself. She just had to believe it.
Before he could blink, she slid the moonstone ring off her finger, letting it fall into the dirt.
Then she experienced the single most humiliating moment in her life. She got on the fucking barrel.
She swung her leg over the edge, keeping her head up, keeping the tears away.
He scoffed. “Get down,” he said, as if it was obvious, as if it didn’t go against her every instinct. She obeyed.
He took his phone out of his pocket. “Look.”
He snapped a picture. She fought the bile rising up her throat.
“Any last words?” he asked, tucking the phone back into his jeans.
She sniffed. She wouldn’t die like this. She wouldn’t let him humiliate her, even if she was about to die, even if her words would mean nothing in the end. “Yeah,” she said. “You’re gonna be dead long before I am.”
Maybe it wasn’t true. Maybe she knew it, deep in her bones. Or maybe part of her always held out hope. And maybe that hope was enough to plant a seed of suspicion in his mind.
A shadow passed overhead. She glanced up, at the elaborate wiring of batteries attached to the bottom of the lid.
He smiled, showing his teeth. “So I can watch.”
She felt her shoulders sag. If she died here today, the whole world might witness her choke to death. But he wouldn’t share the tape with the whole world—he would keep it all to himself, as a prize. As a reminder of his infallibility. Then everything he did to her would mean nothing. Everything he did to her would be something for him to brag about.
She didn’t know why, but she couldn’t accept that. Couldn’t die knowing that she had aided him through her shame.
The lid slid onto the barrel. She was engulfed in darkness, and for a few moments, she dared to hope.
Then the world flipped upside down. She felt her shoulder collide with something, felt the familiar sensation of falling. Her stomach lurched. It was like a roller-coaster, except she could barely see, and the end of the roller-coaster was death.
She didn’t know her heart could beat any faster. But it did. She tugged at the zip ties around her wrists.
No.
She could hear the sound of dirt and rocks falling above her. She kicked against the side of the barrel, felt an animalistic scream tearing from her throat.
Then the dirt and rocks stopped falling, and she stopped kicking. She had to conserve her energy. Survive for as long as she could.
They would find her, wouldn’t they?
No, they wouldn’t.
She fought back tears, and sang a little lullaby, a gentle tune she used to hum when she was younger.
While I'm alone and blue as can be
Warm, steady fingers pressed against her back. She was hit with the smell of pine and dark espresso.
“Lucy?”
Her head whipped back, so fast that she almost gave herself whiplash.
“He was here,” she croaked, before she could stop herself. Her head was still pounding, and suddenly she felt the reeling urge to vomit. Her fingers fumbled with the fabric of his Henley, pulling him closer to her chest. “He was here, and he took me, and I couldn’t breathe.”
Tim nodded slowly, letting her blabber. “It wasn’t real,” he told her gently, wrapping his arms around her waist. “He wasn’t here.”
She wiped a stray tear away, body trembling. “It felt real. It felt so real.”
“It wasn’t real,” he repeated. In another context, his words might have sounded cruel. But was trying to remind her to stay grounded, to distinguish her nightmares from reality. She sunk into his embrace, clinging onto his familiar scent.
Lucy put her hand over his heart, feeling the steady rhythm of his heat. “It was so clear,” she said, her voice hoarse from the tears she refused to spill. “I saw him, and it felt so real. Like it was happening to me again. Like I was living that day all over again.”
She inhaled sharply. “I couldn’t remember it well before,” she said, praying he would understand the haze that occupied her mind where the memories should have been. “I couldn’t remember what he told me, or when I started to suspect him. But I remembered today. I dropped my phone and he slipped it into his pocket. He led me to his open trunk and I finally noticed that he had drugged me.”
He placed his hand over hers, interlocking their fingers. “He was a psycho. He was a killer in disguise. You couldn’t have known.”
A lump formed in her throat. “But I should’ve,” she whispered, swallowing hard. “I looked back and there were so many signs. I was so stupid.”
“You were young,” he said, squeezing her hand. “You were young and still learning. You look back on those memories now and think you were stupid, but that’s because hindsight is always twenty-twenty. Of course there were signs, but you only know about them because you lived through it once already. You survived, Lucy. You’re here.”
She twisted the ring on her finger. “I don’t know,” she muttered. “It was so stupid. Such a simple mistake.”
“Everyone makes stupid mistakes.”
“Not you,” she said.
He gave her a rueful smile. “Especially me.”
She waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t. He got a faraway look in his eyes, as if her words had sparked a wave of memories.
They stood in the middle of the bar for a few minutes, his arm still possessively wrapped around her body. She brushed her thumb against his, trying to catch his attention.
“Tim,” she prompted gently. “Where did you go?”
He shook her head, chuckling to himself. “Nowhere,” he replied.
“I shouldn’t keep you here,” she muttered. “Sorry for waking you up. I’ll call an Uber or something.”
She tried to push herself up, nearly tripping over her own feet. Strong hands caught her by the waist, steadying her shoulders.
“I’ll drive you back,” he told her, leaving no room for argument. She let out a defeated hum, resting her head against his chest as he carried her out of the bar.
Outside, the air was frigid, the stars concealed by all of Los Angeles’s glimmering lights. Her body tensed as they approached his truck.
“Lucy,” he whispered, lowering her body so her feet could touch the ground. “You’re safe. You’re okay.”
You’re safe. He was safety, even when he tried to push her away.
“You love me,” she slurred, head spinning. “Real or not real?”
He pressed his lips to her forehead. They were warm and soft and heartbreakingly familiar. “Real.”
Dream a little dream of me