Abduction (25 page)

Her eyes teared up. She seemed miserable, and Vaughn was in agony, sure that he was to blame.

"I just want you to know…I…I mean, not that you care…you didn't ask me what I think, but…I think your feelings, your reactions, it's normal."

"Normal." He was challenging her.

"I mean, I just wish you wouldn't hate yourself for it. And I know you wish I didn't know that stuff, but I swear to you, I don't think anything bad of you."

"No?" Cold. Hard.

"No." Warm. Soft. "I understand. Really I do."

"You understand?"

"I understand now why a small girl like me could scare a big guy like you. I understand why finding me in your house was so horrible for you. I understand why you don’t trust me."

"What else do you understand?" He was speaking with a quiet control that betrayed his agony. "Do you understand that I’m…some kind of sexual freak?"

"I don't think you are."

She tentatively touched his hand, and he shuddered. She took her hand away.

"Stop it, Devan. I know you're trying to make me feel better…" He took a deep breath to keep his voice from breaking. "You're sweet, Devan. But you should leave it alone."

"Please, Vaughn. I know this is hard for you. That I'm asking a lot of you. But please let me say this."

"What?"

"I…" she half-laughed her tears. "I wasn't going to say this. I can't believe I'm saying this. But…I want you to know. I…understand getting off on things that aren’t supposed to be arousing… that are supposed to make you feel only fear or disgust. I understand the shame and the…strange pleasure of being forced to do something against your will."

"And just how is it that you’ve reached such a great capacity for understanding?"

he asked, bitterly and flippantly.

There was a long silence.

"Read it."

He finally turned from the fire and looked at her. A terrible and hopeful feeling crawled through him. As he looked at her, fragile and open, the moment was a painful intimacy. Her gray eyes lovely and dark like brooding storm clouds, eternally sad, wet with tears, were asking something, offering something. She glanced from his face to the notebook in his hands.

There was a one-two punch to the gut. She understood—maybe someone was really capable of understanding. And something bad had happened to her.

"You want me to read it?" He felt afraid.

"Yes. And no. I don’t want you read it. Everything I’ve written I thought I’d never tell anyone. What’s written here is humiliating. But I read yours It seems right that you read mine.

“And maybe you’re the one person who could understand it, at least in part. And maybe you’ll feel something like what I felt when I read yours—that you’re not 221

so…strange. At the very least you’ll finally have an answer to your question of why I’m here."

“And it means a lot to me, that you trusted me with your secret. I trust you, too.

Even though she'd meant it kindly, those words wounded him.

She left him with the notebook, filled with his story at one end, and hers at the other, and went to bed. He stayed there by the fire.

He opened the journal. His writing. His story. Then he flipped it over. Her writing.

Page after page after page of her writing. Different pens for different days, different handwriting reflecting different moods. He closed it, sitting there with the notebook clasped tightly in his hands, his knuckles white as he stared into the fire.

SIX: Revelations Part II

Day 2 at the cabin

I don't know where I am. I don't know why I'm here.

I've torn half this place apart looking for a map, even an address, anything to give me a clue as to where this place is, how I might get to a town or a road. But all I've managed to find are some envelopes with irrelevant addresses, and this journal. I guess fate's mocking me a little, denying me a means to leave, but inviting me to write, which is what started all this in the first place.

A few weeks ago it started. No, before then, but a few weeks ago is when I first saw him. In the coffee shop near campus, at Solstice, I was studying, sitting alone at a little table by the wall. I felt someone's eyes on me, the way we sense those things, and I glanced up. A man was sitting across from me at the next table, staring at me. When I met his eyes he didn't turn away, the way people usually do when they're caught staring, even if they're looking through you, not at you, lost in some thought. He kept his gaze right on me. I felt almost as if he were challenging me, playing a game of chicken.

Embarrassed, I looked away. I stared at the pages of my book, but I couldn't focus on the words there. I still felt him watching me, and in my embarrassment my concentration had foundered.

Completely unable to read, I looked up again, wanting to meet his challenge, make him turn his eyes away this time. He was still looking right at me, and if he moved at all when I met his gaze, it was only to let the suggestion of a smile curve his mouth, 223

very slightly. I felt myself blush, but I was determined not to let him win his little game, to force me to avert my eyes. I studied his face as he was studying mine. Pale skin framed by black hair, and striking, almost feminine features—high cheekbones, full lips, light hazel eyes fringed with thick black lashes. He was extremely good-looking, but more pretty than handsome. And, even then, in that brief, wordless encounter, he was incredibly…compelling.

Without breaking our eye contact he stood. He was sleek, a long lean body beneath the slim lines of a black sweater and slacks. For a minute I thought he was going to approach me. I blushed again, I think. Then he pushed in his chair and left. My study session was shot to hell.

For several days after that I thought about that man a lot. Almost constantly, actually. Always with a feeling of annoyance mingled with arousal. He'd planted a little seed of himself in my mind, and I couldn't eradicate it. I thought again and again of his eyes, so intense yet playful, their soft hazel suggesting something…tender, maybe, that contrasted with his impish smirk that felt so…condescending.

And, I might as well just confess it. I imagined fucking him. I imagined his long, delicate fingers touching me. I tried to guess what his voice would sound like, saying my name. I pictured his body, long and lean, how it would look nude, what his cock would look like, how it would feel inside me, how his mouth and his hands would feel on my body.

Fuck—it's awful to admit it after what's happened, but my fantasy of him was just like the others.

Weird, writing this. How self-conscious I feel. In a way I've written it all before.

Just not about me. Not anything real. It's strange to think of writing it all out, of seeing it on paper, reading it, and knowing I was the girl in the story. Maybe I'll cry when I write it, and later, when I read over my words, I'll see smeared ink and remember how I felt as I wrote it.

All right. Then it really began. One afternoon I drove home from school to my apartment. I remember with a weird kind of clarity pulling into my garage. I clicked the remote to close the garage door, collected my books, and got out of the car. Then, at my door, I remember the lock was sticking, and I was struggling with the key.

A hand clamped down over my mouth. Another reached across me from behind, grasped my wrist, forced it down to my waist, trapped my other arm against me. I struggled, but he had me pinned tight between his body and the door. I tried to scream but my cry was muffled against his hand. I felt his breath on my ear, heard his voice.

"Devan."

It was a lilting purr, and it turned my stomach.

"Tonight, my dear," he whispered warm and soft against my ear, "we have a date."

Then it struck me. He knew my name. For a second I wondered if it was some kind of demented joke. But even through that second I knew that wasn't it. I don't really have any guy friends. Certainly not guys with British accents. I was about to be raped.

Maybe killed.

I was too shocked to cry. His hands kept me still and silent. With all my strength I tried to break free of his arms, get away, scream for help, but he held me fast. I screamed my lungs out against his palm.

"Sshhhh,” he breathed into my ear, then his hand flashed away from my arms a moment and something sharp jabbed my shoulder. Before I could react his arm was tight around me once more. I felt suddenly dizzy, heavy. I was sinking, and he was holding me, sinking down with me to the cold concrete floor of the garage, holding me gently now that my strength was gone, cradling me until I went unconscious.

When I woke up I was in the passenger seat of my car. It was night. The car was moving. I couldn't really move. I was slumped against the door, arms hanging limp by my side. I think I lost consciousness again.

When I awoke the second time I could just manage to lift and turn my head to see who was driving my car. The man from the coffee shop.

I was terrified—that sounds so dull, so obvious, compared to what I really felt. I don't know if there's a word for it. In my mind flashed images: headlines, vague notions of others who have been kidnapped, tortured horribly for weeks in the cellar of some obscure neighbor in a small town, corpse dumped in the woods, or hacked to pieces and kept in a meat locker. I couldn't speak, I just started crying uncontrollably, sobbing hysterically.

We were on a one-lane highway in the middle of nowhere. No cars behind us. I got even more scared as he pulled onto the shoulder. I still couldn't move. He turned toward me and smiled—not a maniacal serial-killer smile. A gentle, sympathetic smile you would give to a child with a boo-boo. And I remember thinking that I had to be 226

wrong, that this guy couldn't be kidnapping me. He looked like an angel. That sounds ridiculous, but it's true. It wasn't just his feminine features—his face soft and beautiful like a woman's, his limpid eyes and pretty mouth—he had a strange luminosity. He seemed beautifully alien and I felt as if he were hypnotizing me with his gentle gaze, his soothing smile. I decided it was whatever he'd drugged me with that made me feel mentally and emotionally tranquilized as much as physically immobilized.

He reached over my lap and opened the glove box, got out a cloth handkerchief, and poured a little bottled water into it. With the dampened cloth he gently wiped my face, cooling my hot skin, soaking up my tears.

"There, that's better." With his English accent—London, maybe–his "better"

sounded like "betta." He spoke softly and slowly, fixing me with his compelling gaze.

"I know you can't talk, love. The drugs will wear off in another hour or two."

He was quiet for a moment, just gazing at me. I wanted him to stop looking at me like that, like he…I don't think I thought this then, but now I do—he was looking at me like he loved me. Even though I didn't know what was behind that look of his, it was completely freaking me out. Then his soft gaze snapped into focus and he seemed to be working something out in his head. Then he gave me a strange smile, serene and…coy.

"I'm sure, dear Devan, that you're wondering what I'm going to do with you, and that a thousand sordid notions are flying through that clever head of yours. No doubt some of the things you're picturing are just what I have in mind."

His eyes went sort of dreaming and his breathing changed slightly. My stomach lurched.

"But I want you to know, I'll won't hurt you." His expression of intent concern altered, and an infuriating, playful grin turned his mouth. "With the possible exception of a spanking if you misbehave."

His last words shocked me in a way I couldn't understand. I was still crying. His expression went soft and serious again.

"Listen to me carefully for a moment, Devan. You're in my care, and you won't be harmed. My words will be born out soon enough, you'll see. You don't know me, and of course you've no reason to be believe me, yet. But I know you. You'll find, in time, that I know you extremely well. I've been planning this little getaway of ours for quite some time."

He stroked my hair, like a lover, gave me a tender smile that made me want to punch him in the face, then put the car in gear and pulled back onto the road. Upset as I was, under the effects of the drugs I fell back asleep, and was woken up sometime later when the car made a sharp turn and we left the smooth pavement for a bumpy dirt road disappearing into the dark of a heavily wooded forest. The clock on the dash said it was almost midnight. There were no lights in sight. We were in the middle of fucking nowhere.

I began to realize how well he'd planned all this. I'd been unconscious as we left the city, driving on the busy freeways, so that the people in the other cars would just see a sleeping girl, not a screaming kidnap victim. Now that I was awake and able to move we were in the middle of nowhere. My ability to scream, to run did me no good. We'd been on the road for hours, and I had no idea which direction we'd gone.

I had to get away. Do something. I couldn't just let him cart me off into the wilderness to rape me, torture me, murder me. I thought about jumping out of the moving car. But I was so weak from whatever he'd shot me up with, I had no idea where we were, and with no light in sight, there was nowhere for me to run, no one to call out to. I reasoned, hopeless, that I would just hurt myself, that he would easily catch me, and I'd be worse off than I already was. Better to wait for a real chance.

He noticed I was awake, turned and smiled at me. He asked me if I was feeling better. I wanted to tell him to fuck off, but I stayed quiet.

"Well," he said, "I imagine the drugs are wearing off by now, so if you're not talking it's because you don't want to, not because you can't. That's fine Devan, you don't have to talk. But you had better listen. I realize, love, that you don't know me, but I'm going to tell you something about myself, and you'd best believe it. I'm a very methodical and determined individual. I've thought things through very carefully. You can't get away. And if you try, you'll only make things harder on yourself."