Page 13 of To Have and to Hold

“There. There she is.”

Knox pointed at the computer screen we were using in a security room off the lobby of Emme’s building. Unconsciously, I moved closer.

“Sorry, man. You have to stay back.”

I obliged Knox’s command, fisting my hands in my pockets. Knox was doing a huge solid by letting me in this room, but as an observer only. He couldn’t have me within reaching distance of the keyboard, or even smear distance from the screen, for risk of tainting the evidence. Whether I accepted it or not, I had a history with Emme, one police might want to explore. But Knox owed me one, after I got his sister off on a DUI. She’d had a terrible relationship with cocaine, and it took ramming her car into a tree and barely scraping out to slightly wake her up. It then took the threat of serious jail time and a felony record to pry her eyes wide open. With my help, we could reduce her charges substantially with her promise of entering rehab. At seventeen, it seemed Lucy Knox had already lived thirty.

Knox didn’t forget a favor like that. I wasn’t about to call in a favor like that. But there was an unspoken agreement between us, an evenness to our friendship, and Knox wouldn’t tip the balance. By allowing me limited access to surveillance footage, Knox was adding weight to the scale. It didn’t matter if I demanded it or not—he wanted to do what he felt was justifiably owed.

We began watching footage that morning but started focusing in at three hours before Emme’s arrival, around 6 PM, to see if we could spot any suspicious movement. So far, there was none. The footage was grainy, as most cheap security systems were, and while I preferred an HD-quality silver platter with this guy on it, I had to accept what I received, because any clue could bring me closer to Emme. I’d take a pebble cascading across the deserted sidewalk at this point.

And then Emme appeared. Coming in to the right of the screen, huddled against the cold, nothing but a white slash of her forehead peeping out between her giant scarf and beanie. Typical, her legs were practically bare as she toddled forward in high heels and a pencil skirt.

My Emme. My girl—though she’d never let me call her that out loud, saying the only entities that could argue ownership over her was her corporate dependence on tampons and coffee shops. In my mind, however, she’d been everything. Seeing her for the first time was enough, when she stepped into our first college class together (late), her espresso-brown hair tangling freely around her face and carrying with them the crisp scent of the city in autumn. She plonked down a few seats behind me, making all the noise in the world as she dug through her bag and apologized profusely, unaware or maybe immune to the death-beams coming from her new professor.

When her water bottle, stainless steel, clattered to the floor and echoed across the lecture hall with the grace of a wildebeest stampede, I covered a smirk. It was enough to have her looking up from her crouch on the floor and pinning me with her own beams of promised destruction, and my beguiling chuckle turned into a choke. As I coughed into my hand, she arched a brow and held her canteen over the chair separating us. She said loudly, “Need a drink?”

Four years ago turned into yesterday. Standing here with Knox and an overweight, over-tired security guard slumped in a rolling chair between us did nothing to prevent the monsoon that was this woman from pulling me under. Back to her.

“She’s going into the doors. See anything behind her?”

Knox’s voice had the film over my vision turning to smoke, and I peered closer at the screen.

Emme’s only company on the street was blackened windows and white concrete. Peaks of sludgy snow framed the gutters and curbs of the street. A few cars were parked on the side, some blatantly disregarding the alternate-side parking rules of winter. Maybe one of them was her kidnapper. But no, the windows remained a solid black, any reflections muted by the evening. No movement came behind her.

“Switch to inside,” Knox said.

The guard did as he was told, one mouse click bringing Emme back to us as she entered the lobby and danced across the tiles with a warm-up shimmy. We had a birds’ eye view, above the elevator, as she rubbed her hands together and mouthed something.

“What do you think she’s saying? Is she talking to someone we can’t see?” Knox asked.

“Nah. She’s telling Jack Frost to go fuck himself,” I said.

That drew a smile from Knox.

After a few more seconds, Emme stepped out of view. My jaw locked at the thought of her disappearing. I knew it was coming—an unavoidable nightmare—but right now we had her, healthy, cranky and whole. “We got an elevator shot anywhere?” I asked.

“In a sec,” the guard—Stan was written on his nameplate—said.

He shifted us to inside the elevator. We only had one monitor to go on, so Stan had his job cut out for him as he bounced between shots, but so far, he was doing it seamlessly and without complaint. Abduction, regardless of its intent, tended to awaken the most lethargic of individuals.

Emme inserted something into the button panel and turned it.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“A key,” Stan replied. “To access the floor.”

Emme was still attempting to get warm, giving a few knee bends into the air and rubbing her arms. She unwrapped her scarf, exposing her features to us, and even glanced up, right through the screen.

It was a second, a sliver of time, before her attention went elsewhere, but in that split between then and now I was in front of her, bent on one knee and giving her the rest of my life.

They were blue, those irises of hers. Not ice blue or pale or sky. Azure, and they could turn liquid with passion at the most inopportune times. Like finals or just before job interviews or at her job or spending the night with her parents. But always, I would cave. Touch her skin, kiss her breasts, find her pleasure the instant she moaned in my hands.

Too soon, she went out of frame. I stared, unblinking at the empty elevator, motionless pixels of white and grey, willing her to reappear.

“Let’s see the loft then,” I said.

But Stan shook his head. Poor Stan, he was about to get side-punched in the temple if he was going to say what I thought he was.

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