And Your Girl Can Sing

Chapter 92: Visits With the Tile Floor

"That'll be five quid, miss," the driver said, leaning over the headrest of the front seat, his mustache hiding his expression, eyebrows raised. I reached into my purse to extract the quid, but I felt a hand on my knee.

"Miss... do you live here alone?" He asked, pressing into my space, too quickly, too close.

"My boyfriend..." I barely managed to gasp out, eyes darting toward the window, but the car was shrouded in shadow, purring in a vacant, lightless corner. Everything seemed to be in slow motion, but I knew I needed, needed to make the right choices in order to get out of this alive.

"Boyfriend, eh? Bet he doesn't treat yer pretty face the way a real man should." He reached forward to unbuckle his seatbelt and I tried frantically to rattle the knob at the door, but it was locked.

"Don't be afraid of me," he said, and his hand crept up farther up my leg. I sat, frozen, nothing going through my head but John saying, Maybe it's different in the future but here, people get mugged, or raped, or worse. I couldn't believe this was happening. "Get off me, please," I gasped out, hating myself for the please.

"Try me, love," he said, and I couldn't tell if he meant try me, in your attempt to get out of here, or try yourself at being with me. Time slowed for a few minutes. I could feel every hair of contact of his finger pads with my bare leg. He was enjoying this, taking it slow.

"Please, I'll—" I started, but there was suddenly a terrific crash at his window and I saw his eyes widen and his arms go slack, his great paw of a hand sliding down my bare leg. I yelped, whipping my head toward the window, and saw John, holding a rock, which he had used to shatter the window, panting, rage spread across the brown in his eyes. My eyes followed his other hand to a pocket knife, to the pocket knife, the pocket knife stuck in the man's thigh.

"Open... her... fucking... door."

"My leg," the driver groaned, his face rapidly turning red.

John stuck the knife in farther. "Now!"

The driver howled and turned a switch, and I fumbled for my senses and got out of the car, breathing in the air, trembling at what had just happened and at the knife in John's hand.

"John!"

He wrenched the knife from the driver's leg and collected me in his arms. My fingers squeezed tightly against his skin. He was wearing a light shirt and pajama pants, and his shoes were on backwards. "If you tell anyone about your leg, I'll mention exactly what you did to invoke it, you scum." He looked like he was going to strike the driver again, but his face suddenly went slack, and I gently guided him back into the flat, away from the scene.

***

John was throwing up in the toilet.

I sat on the bed in our room, holding the bloody knife, and then decided to go wash and for good measure, bleach it. Some of the blood had gotten on my hand. I reached out to turn on the taps and watched the red flow down the drain.

"Cora?" I heard his call from down the hallway.

"Washing the knife, love," I called back to him.

"Could you come here?"

I had been afraid to go near him afterward, still unsure of what he might do or what he wanted. But now that he asked, I opened the door and headed across the hallway to the shared loo. Like I said, it was hard to live in the flat, but we had gotten used to sharing a loo with our neighbors. An older woman in her forties, Charlotte, opened her door a crack. "Yer man all right, love?"