Page 45 of Stay Away from Him

Melissa nodded. “Yes.”

Then he kissed her, and she gave in to him again. Gave him what he wanted—which happened to be what she wanted too.

***

The job was easy—it took Melissa just a little over twenty hours a week, and because the clinic’s financial records were all electronic, she mostly didn’t even have to leave the apartment. But somehow the job paid six figures, and her first paycheck was more than she’d ever been able to put into her checking account in a single transaction.

On the surface, the job didn’t change anything between Thomas and Melissa. The midday visits and the occasional evening dates continued, and they never mentioned the fact that he was technically her employer now. But there was a new charge to it when he came from the clinic to the apartment to make love to her—in spite of herself, Melissa imagined it as two coworkers sneaking away from the office for a tryst, the boss screwing the secretary. There was something just a little bitwrongabout it now, and maybe that made it more exciting—maybe there was even something wrong and exciting about the two of them all along. Something forbidden. Something secret. The divorceé and the accused murderer.

It became another thing they didn’t talk about.

But Melissa would have been lying if she said she didn’t think about it.

She did. All the time.

She thought about whether Thomas had showered Rose with love and adoration too, the way he was showering her.

She thought about when things may have gone bad between them.

She thought about whether things would go bad between Thomas andher, and whether she’d be able to recognize the signs if they did.

If she’d know when it was time to get out. If she’d even be able to get out. If she was already in too deep.

Sometimes she even thought about how perfectly Thomas had orchestrated things. Made her financially dependent on him. Emotionally dependent. Living on his money, waiting in her basement room for him to come every day and save her all over again. Feeling sad on the days she didn’t see him, perking up when he walked through the door. Was it normal to be so dependent on one person for happiness?

This was precisely what she wanted to avoid after she got divorced. Why she didn’t want to get in a relationship too soon. Because she wanted to learn how to be happy on her own again. To reconnect withherself.

Then she’d tell herself that she was being crazy. That Thomas was the best thing that had happened to her in a long, long time.

***

Sometimes, when she was alone, she’d simply gaze out the tall windows at the back of her house—lake to the left, woods to the right—and wonder at the wildness that existed alongside the everyday of life in this place. The wildness in people. The wildness that lived in her: an animal thing that came out when she looked at Thomas, or when she thought about what she’d do to protect her son. What she was capable of.

People still talked about the coyote. Pets went missing sometimes: a cat one week, a toy poodle the next. The pleas showing up on an online neighborhood group—Have you seen this dog?—alongside photos that purported to be of the animal responsible for all this worry. Grainy, distant images captured on trail hikes, reminding Melissa of people who hunted the Yeti or claimed to have seen the Loch Ness Monster.

This creature seemed to be real, though. She’d hear it sometimes at night—at least, she was hearingsomethingfrom those woods, an unearthly yelping that might either be the cries of an animal dying, or the howling of the coyote to its pack—blood calling to blood.

She’d wake up to the sound, sometimes. Listen to it in darkness. Then lie back and try to go back to sleep, thinking of predators and the way they circled just out of sight, waiting for the weak.

***

What lingering doubts Melissa still had about her all-consuming relationship with Thomas Danver—Dr. Dangerto his detractors—came calling one Monday morning in mid-autumn, after she dropped Bradley off at school. The weather, which had held on with summery high temperatures well into October, had finally taken a turn for the cold with two weeks until Halloween. The chill in the air bit at Melissa’s ankles as she got out of the car to walk Bradley to the school doors, and their breath was visible in puffs of steam that curled from their nostrils with each exhale, then dissipated on the air. Bradley whined at the way the cold pricked at his earlobes—he regretted refusing the stocking cap Melissa had tried to press on him when they left home—and when they got to the doors, he dashed into the school without giving Melissa his usual goodbye hug, eager to get to the warmth.

On the drive back home, Melissa decided to treat herself with something warm: a vanilla latte, a dirty chai, or maybe—it being fall—something with a bit of pumpkin spice in it. She pulled off the road into a strip mall parking lot with a drive-through Starbucks at the corner. Everyone seemed to have had the same idea, and the line snaked all the way from the pickup window to the end of the lot by the grocery store and the franchise sandwich shop. The line inched forward one car length at a time, and Melissa settled in for the wait.

Her mind wandered to the bookkeeping work waiting for her when she got home, which rarely took her more than three or four hours. Mondays were for sending statements of care to insurance companies, Tuesdays were for mailing out bills, Wednesdays were for receivables, Thursdays were for expenses, and Fridays were for anything she’d missed—which was often nothing. The rest of the time was taken up withThomas.

A car horn honked, and Melissa looked up to see that the line had inched forward a few car lengths while she’d been getting lost in thought. More horns sounded behind her, and she fumbled to throw the car into gear, ears burning.

“Sorry, sorry,” she mumbled, though no one could hear her.

As she finally began to move forward, there was some movement to her left, and a minivan zoomed from the parking lot into the empty space in the line ahead of her.

“What the hell?”

Now the chorus of honks grew louder, seemingly everyone behind Melissa joining in with their displeasure at the line cutter. Melissa gave her horn a tap to join the chorus, but she knew that, in part, everyone was still mad ather—it was her inattention that allowed the jerk in the minivan to jump the line in the first place. For a second, she considered getting out of her car and walking up to talk to them. But she didn’t, and neither did any of the otherhonkers. The people of the state she’d moved to might have been as quick to anger as anyone else in the world—but they were also fundamentally conflict-averse.

Melissa continued inching slowly toward the front of the line until, finally, it was her turn to order. At the pickup window, the barista handed her a white cup, and then shook her head when Melissa tried to hand over her credit card.

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