Page 20 of Felonies are Forever

My heart is about to slam through my chest wall and the muscles in my back feel like tightened springs.

His eyes narrow and I note their droopy lack of focus. He looks like he’s about to nod off so I take a big step toward the goal line and that wakes him up.

“Oh no.” He’s alive again, stomping around the counter and lunging for me. “You’re not going nowhere.”

I throw myself in the other direction. Next to my purse is a copper skillet that Thorne used last night to make me fried eggs at midnight.

One hand grips the brass handle of the frying pan, the other my purse, and I swing both around. My purse hits him first, then I wind up again; the damn skillet is so heavy so I barely get it up to shoulder height but it’s a direct hit on his forehead.

It knocks him sideways and I don’t stick around to gloat. I’m out the door and down the stairs, wondering if karma is having fun.

NINE

CEE CEE

I didn’t botherto use Thorne’s driver. I ran out the front of his building and found the nearest bus stop. I know the routes pretty well after all these years. As I rode, I thought of calling the police. Reporting the attack but right now, I just want to forget it all.

In the office, the dark cloud only grows as I feel the horror of my actions. Not hitting that man with a skillet. That I can live with. But I could be pregnant.

Again.

Yes. Fuck. I’m a fucking idiot when it comes to men. What the hell is wrong with me? Do I have some switch that men can use to turn off my brain?

I was a senior in high school. I felt so excited when I got asked to the spring dance by one of the popular boys. What I got was a lesson in not drinking what someone hands you at a party and not being ashamed when you realize you were in no condition to give consent.

The worst part? I found out the same my brother Phillip was shot and killed in the street by a stray bullet from a gangster’s gun that I was pregnant. My brother was everything I wasn’t. Good student, good son. Funny. Bright future. Always at my father’s side, his business protégé, ready to take the helm of the family import/export business.

Me? I couldn’t have cared less about good grades in school. I did what I needed to do, but my heart was in my books, the elegance of languages and my music. Only, I didn’t play classical piano like my parents had wanted. I went for the electric guitar and learned to play the drums. Even joined a little garage band in my sophomore year, much to my parents’ horror.

To this day, they know I speak French and English. But, they took no interest in my ability to assimilate other languages, so I stopped telling them and it just became my own little hobby. The value of which I never realized until I got older.

The baby’s father’s family did much the same thing as mine did to me. He disappeared on a sudden trip to a new boarding school. That was it.

The day I woke up doubled over with pain and called my mother collect from a payphone, she wouldn’t take my call. I sat in a curtained room in the ER while a doctor explained to me it was an early pregnancy and the loss of the baby was just Mother Nature’s way of saying something must have been wrong. The doctor’s not so veiled dig on the young, poor, single girl who clearly had no business being pregnant stung.

Yeah, well, Mother Nature is a bitch then, isn’t she, doc?

No, I didn’t say that out loud. But I thought it. Or should have, if I hadn’t been sitting in a pool of my own tears.

Now, here I am sitting at work, and even after the quick shower when I woke up, I can feel Thorne’s seed seeping into my underwear.

Seriously, what is wrong with me?

With the visit from whomever that was at the loft, the things he’d said about Thorne. Sure that guy was wacked but there is a connection there. Am I so needy I was so easily used? When I got to work, I did what every self-respecting girl does after she meets a guy.

Googled him.

Thadeus Maxum Avery.

I saw his full name on the copy of the New York Times that sat on the kitchen counter next to the donuts. So I type it in and there it is in a Detroit News article from five years ago.

Felony for manslaughter. Convicted of providing the murder weapon that was used in the murder of one and serious injury of another.

I wonder who they were; the article doesn’t give me the names. What was the last thing they said to their loved ones that day? What hopes and dreams did they have for the future?

“Cecelia.” Dr. Stinson’s gruff tone tells me he’s none too happy about my abrupt departure last night. I’m surprised he’s here on a Saturday, usually it’s only the other dentists that help out that work weekends.

“Yes?”

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