I called Priya before I’d even reached the car, my voice coming out steadier than I felt, and asked if she’d have Noah for the night. I didn’t explain. She didn’t ask twice, God bless her, just told me to drop him round whenever and that there’d be pancakes in the morning if he wanted them.
I didn’t call Damian. That, I understand now, was its own kind of answer.
I dropped Noah off with a bag of pyjamas and a lie about a headache, and drove myself to the one bar in Glenfrost that didn’t know my name well enough to cut me off early, and I drank the way I hadn’t let myself drink since the week after Michael’s funeral, methodically, grimly, chasing a numbness that kept staying just out of reach until, somewhere around the fourth or fifth glass, it finally arrived.
I don’t remember deciding to leave. I remember the cold air outside hitting me like a wall, and a voice, warm and familiar in the worst possible way, saying my name.
“Sarah. Look at you.” Grant Okafor’s face swam into focus far too close to mine, his hand already closing around my elbow with a steadiness I was too drunk to match. “Let me get you home, eh. Can’t have you walking round like this on your own.”
I should have said no. Some fogged, distant part of me knew that. But my feet were already moving, guided by a grip that had learned, over a year ago in a spin studio, exactly how much force it took to make a woman too unsteady to argue, and the streetlights blurred past in the wrong direction, away from the main road, down toward the narrow lane that ran behind the old cinema and dead-ended at a brick wall nobody had reason to walk past after dark.
“This isn’t the way home,” I managed, the words thick and unconvincing even to my own ears.
“Shortcut,” Grant said, and the hand on my elbow tightened, and something in his voice had lost whatever thin line of neighborliness it had started with.
He shoved me back against the brick hard enough to knock the breath out of me, one hand pinning my wrists, the other already too far along the front of my coat, and I registered, through the drink and the panic both, the particular cold understanding of exactly what was about to happen and being entirely unable to stop it.
That was when I saw them.
Further down the dead end, past a stack of old crates I hadn’t even noticed in the dark, Damian had a woman pinned hard against the opposite wall, one forearm braced across her collarbone like a bar across a door, his whole body a coiled, violent thing with none of the care I’d ever once seen from him. His head was down at her throat and it did not look like an embrace. It looked like something feeding, teeth buried deep, his shoulders working with a force that should have broken her in half.
And yet she wasn’t fighting him. Her back was arched off the brick, her mouth open on a sound that had nothing to do with pain in it at all, her hands fisted not in protest but in something closer to need, her whole body flushed and shuddering the way I had only ever seen a body move in the grip of its own release. The dark hair. The shawl, gone now, dropped somewhere at her feet. The girl from the gym, from the doorway, from the accusation I’d told myself I didn’t believe, and she looked, God help me, like she was in ecstasy while he tore into her.
He was drinking from her.
I don’t know which came first, Grant’s hand or the sound that tore out of me, but something in me simply stopped fighting either horror long enough to fully arrive. It wasn’t fear anymore. It was something colder and older than fear, a truck on a hill and a woman who wasn’t me and six years of learning exactly what it looked like when the man you loved had been lying about where his hunger went. I watched the brutal working of his jaw. I watched her hips move toward him instead of away, chasing something even as he savaged her. Every single thing the girl at the gym had said arrived in me all at once, fully believed, fully true, and Grant’s hands on me stopped mattering at all next to it.
Damian’s head came up before I’d made another sound. I watched him go still, then not still at all, the girl forgotten and sliding down the brick behind him as he crossed the alley faster than my eyes could properly follow, and Grant was simply gone from in front of me, thrown clear, crumpling somewhere near the crates with a sound I registered from very far away.
“Sarah.” Damian’s hands found my face, my shoulders, checking me over with a franticness that should have undone me the way it always did. “Sarah, look at me, I’ve got you, you’re safe.”
I looked at him. At the blood, dark and unmistakable, at the corner of his mouth. At the hands that had been on me a hundred nights, gentle, careful, the same hands that had just been pinning another woman to a wall like something to be consumed.
“Don’t touch me,” I think I said, though I’m not certain the words made it out whole. “Don’t you dare touch me.”
“Sarah, it isn’t what you think, let me explain…”
I didn’t hear the rest of it. The alley tipped sideways, the brick and the crates and his face all sliding together into one long streak of grey, and the last thing I remember, before the ground came up to meet me, was the absolute certainty, calm and total the way only shock can make a thing feel calm, that I had done this exact thing before. Loved a man. Trusted him completely. And found out, too late, standing in the wreckage of it, that I had never known him at all.