Page 20 of To Have and to Hold

I remained standing as Sandoval replied, “Not at this time, Your Honor,” and took his seat beside Torro, the encouraging mutterings to his client already in full swing.

Yet instead of Nicholas beside me, Emme flashed into my vision, under the sheets of our bed, hair everywhere, finding my vulnerable bits and giggling with evil because her hands were always freezing no matter how many layers of heat sources she used. Then I lifted the sheet and saw the whites of her eyes wide, her blood-cracked lips screaming for help.

“Your…” I had to clear my throat to use my normal pitch. “No, Your Honor.”

“Excellent. Let’s proceed.”

Except, there was something I had to do. Request. “Actually, Your Honor.”

A note I made, scrawled during trial yesterday. I fanned through my legal pad, picturing the scribble in my mind…

Emme and me in Central Park. A picnic of food truck finds and boxed wine, the drink sloshing in her red plastic cup as she belly laughed so hard, she snorted up chardonnay.

Judge Anderson glanced up above the rims of his spectacles. “Yes, Mr. Rolfe?”

Nicholas froze somewhere between a sit and a stand. Enough silence passed that Sandoval halted his endless monotone at Torro and peered over at me.

“Um…”

Judge Anderson steepled his fingers under his chin.

There. What I’d written, in red pen, right after Cerise Watts’s botched testimony.

“Could…we approach the bench?”

“As you wish.”

Sandoval made a production of laying down his pen and stood, and both of us stepped up to the judge.

“Your Honor, I’d—”

Emme wearing my shirts to bed, and nothing else. Standing over the stove attempting to make Hollandaise but putting most of the ingredients on my old t-shirt—and my high school mascot—instead.

Sandoval was regarding me strangely,

I continued. “Regarding Ms. Watts’s testimony yesterday, I’d like to…to recall her to the stand…”

It was clear, by the slits behind his glasses, Judge Anderson’s patience was wearing thin. But there was Emme again, silver lining her eyes as she stood in my hallway, a box of her things in her arms, her left ring finger bare, pleading that maybe we could have one more shot. Maybe we shouldn’t be over for good—

But that silver changed to red. Streaking down her cheeks, pooling at the corners of her mouth. Blood. Blood lining her voice as she screamed my name.

Spence, find me.

Find me.

PLEASE!

“Mr. Rolfe, are you all right?” Judge Anderson asked.

I held a hand to my temple. “I’d like to treat her as hostile.”

“Cerise Watts?” Sandoval asked. “Why in the ever loving—”

But I didn’t hear him. Emme was busy bumping into me in the hallways of NYU, stealing looks over her shoulder in class, offering a wicked wink after she flicked her tongue against my lips.

“Your Honor,” I repeated. I lay my palms against the judge’s bench, higher than my shoulders, but there I could find balance. My fingers had gone ice cold. “I apologize to The Court, but I would like to request a temporary adjournment.”

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