“You’re going to kill him!” I yelled suddenly. This had him stop and turn to me in surprise, like he’d just totally forgotten I was there. “My-my phone! You need to call the p-p-police.” I pressed my lips together tightly, hating that I was stuttering so badly.
Still breathing heavily, Jaxon regarded the now unconscious man for a short moment before pulling out his cell phone from his jeans pocket. He dialed a number and pressed the phone to his ear. “Manor Motel, room ten. Now.” Then he hung up and placed the phone back into his pocket.
I looked at him in bewilderment. “Who did you call?”
“Not important,” he answered, looking down at the blood on his fists.
“We need to call the police–”
“The police won’t do anything,” he interrupted impatiently, staring at me with his piercingly stern blue eyes. “We do things a little differently here in Gosnells, Sara. Let me take care of it. Understand?”
I didn’t respond. I looked away from his penetrating eyes and buried my face into my knees. I heard him moving around, in and out of the bathroom where he ran the water from the sink, no doubt washing his knuckles.
Five minutes later there was a knock on the door. I looked up at Jaxon who answered it. Wearing all black, a tall and broad man with the physique of a wrestler walked into the room. His dark hair was cut in a buzz, and the rain from outside was sliding off the top of his head and onto his leather jacket. His skin was tanned, and his eyes were dark and wide against his rough, stubble cheeked face. He scanned the room, meeting my eye before settling back down at the unconscious man at Jaxon’s feet.
“What do you want to do with him?” It was the kind of voice you’d expect from a scary ass man: low, deep and scratchy.
Jaxon didn’t reply, but he shot a look at the wrestler man. There appeared to be some kind of silent communication between them. The man simply nodded in return at Jaxon’s expressionless face and, before I knew it, was hauling the man out of the room.
“Send someone to clean up the room before morning,” Jaxon told him before he shut the door.
I hadn’t realized I’d been holding my breath for so long until I felt pain in my chest. When I finally breathed it out, it was as unsteady as my whole body. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from Jaxon, and couldn’t stop thinking about the man and the look he’d given him. It dawned on me that he was following orders from Jaxon. And although Jaxon was a big guy, that wrestler man was bigger and easily capable of defending himself against Jaxon if ever the need for it arose.
He was working for him. This was beyond strange. Ever since I stepped back into Gosnells, I felt like I’d walked into a Twilight Zone, but this – what just happened right now – topped the strangeness to a whole new level. A level that couldn’t be topped… or at least I hoped so anyway.
“What’s going to happen to him?” I asked so quietly I wasn’t sure he heard me.
He did. He looked at me and then down at the blood on the floor. “Does it matter?” There was an eeriness in those words that sent shivers down my spine. “He was an unstable man, psychotic and unpredictable. Don’t believe me? Ask all the women he’s raped and butchered.”
“Was?” I shuddered and shook my head. He was a stranger to me. “What the fuck happened to you?”
“You happened to me,” he gritted out roughly.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
He scoffed in disdain. “You’re not worth it.”
“Oh, so we’re back to the insults again, right?” I snapped angrily. “Well, then you can just shove them up your ass and go away now!”
“Why? So you can be successfully raped this time by another low life? They’re waiting out there in herds. Might as well save them the trouble and just head out there and show yourself!” The veins in his neck stood out as he yelled, taking a step toward me.
“Because that was my fault, right?”
“It was your fault! We told you! Everyone told you this part of town is unsafe! But you’re too fucking dense in the head to listen!”
“He came after me because of you!” I shrieked back, hugging my knees to my chest even tighter as the tears flooded from my eyes. “He saw you! He thought I was another one of your sluts, apparently! Because I’m sure you’ve got a whore house somewhere around here, right? Is that how you got your money?”
“Fuck you, Sara!” he cursed, shaking his head as he looked away in anger. “I don’t have a fucking whore house!”
“Then why’d he call me a slut?”
“Well you’re in this fucking motel for one thing, and you probably look the part with your fucking tight ass clothes–”
“I hate you!”
“You don’t hate me!”
“I do. I hate you so fucking much!”
“Yeah, whatever. Hate me and blame me, you really haven’t changed much at all. Typical angry Sara--”
“I think I have the right to be a little fucking angry right now--”
“Always so fucking eager to blame everyone around her instead of taking one ounce of fucking blame--”
We continued screeching obscenities, talking over one another until we were red and seething. Tears fell from my eyes at the wicked things he was saying repeatedly, always going for the low blow.
“Angry, violent and fucking bitchy as before! Hell, ten times worse, too! Why the fuck did I even bother coming back? Should have just left you with that rancid fuck--””
“Would you just stop being mean to me?!” I was sobbing uncontrollably now, burying my face into my knees. His words… Did he really regret saving me? Was that how far his hatred for me went? My body finally reacted to what had just happened – the near rape that might have ended my life. My muscles all over my body were sore from the nonstop shaking. It was harder to breathe all of a sudden. I thought I might pass out.
The last thing I wanted on top of it all was to be cussed out by him, to hear his anger seep out of him, to hear just how much he no longer cared for me. It was all too much.
The mattress beside me sank down. I smelled him before I felt him, that musky Jaxon smell that was impossible to forget. He rested his back against the headboard and then an arm went around my shoulder, tugging me to his side. “Just breathe,” he said, in the gentlest tone I’d almost believed he was incapable of. “You’re safe with me here. No one’s going to ever touch you again.”
I fully sank into his side, letting him support me with his arm as I wept. He moved away for a moment. “My shirt’s bloody,” he explained as he took it off of him and threw it somewhere on the floor. He brought me to him again, and my face rested on the heat of his hard, bare chest. I wrapped an arm around his midsection, trying to hug him to me as tightly as possible as the panic continued to rise.
“Shh, it’s okay,” he whispered, running a hand through my messy hair.
After a long while, the tears dried and my breathing evened out. The fear was replaced by the safety of being in his arms like this and knowing that no one was going to hurt me again. I could hear the strong, steady beating of his heart, and it soothed me along with his fingers gently caressing the long strands of my hair. He was so nice and warm; it was like hugging a fire that couldn’t burn me.