The Dangers of Pain - Part 2 - A Change in Plans
After the night in the treehouse, with extra sex thrown in, Sally Calhoun was a five foot bundle of energy as she drove up and greeted us. Quickly, we were in her car, a Cadillac sedan that was a great vehicle for a real estate woman. The first apartment was an upstairs unit in a nice garden setting about a mile from campus. One bedroom, but a generous front room that could take a sofa bed.
"Sally, I need a quiet room to work on my thesis, so I hope the other choice is two bedrooms."
We were now on the east side of town, and the choice was actually a very small bungalow in a neighborhood that had seen better days. "These are mostly retired folks here. This house is a rental because the owner went to assisted living and her family doesn't want to do anything with it until she is gone."
It was perfect. The three of us could be our own fixer-uppers and there were actually three small bedrooms. I gave Sally a check, but she asked that I come along to meet the owner and her son, who wanted assurance that students were not going to wreck the place. I did my best behaved grad student routine and they seemed happy.
We were almost back to Tom's place when my mobile rang. Sally said, "The bank won't honor your check. Says there is a hold on your account. What's the story?"
I bit my tongue and told her she would hear from me in minutes. That bastard David!
I got the manager of my Seattle bank on the phone, seething. Before I could speak, she said, "Your significant other reported you were missing and someone might try to steal your funds."
"Annette," I said, "that no account guy is no other of mine. For your private information, he beat me up and I left him. I'm not going back. Period."
"You would like me to honor this check and release your account?"
"The check is a deposit on a rental that I am going to be sharing with some student friends. Please do not disclose my current address to anyone, and I mean anyone. He could be dangerous. And he might hire someone to come after me."
"Sounds bad, real bad. Sure you don't want to go to the police?"
"I'm paranoid, but not that paranoid - yet. I will be living with friends who know the situation. Thanks for your help."
I called Sally back and said it was a simple misunderstanding and the check was now good. And let out my breath carefully. Jeff and Denise were trying not to invade my privacy anymore than being in the car with me already was. They looked anxious.
I said, "Sorry you had to hear that. He's history, and you are helping me to forget him."
The rest of the day kept us busy moving stuff from the treehouse to the bungalow and doing some cleaning, especially in the kitchen. Denise and I left Jeff with a bucket and went to the store with a long list.
At five, a nice stew was simmering and we were on the back porch with beers. I closed my eyes and decided I needed to tell my young friends more about David.
"About that phone call, I should tell you a bit more about me."
Denise broke in, "Alexis, we are happy with you keeping that private..."
"No, you've been open with me, and that has built a lot of trust. You know I am a writer. What you don't know is that until a few weeks ago, I was hooked with a guy in Seattle. An architect. We thought we loved each other. At least, I did. But we both worked hard against tough deadlines and there was friction. A lot of friction sometimes, that we mostly worked out through good sex. But my partner, David, started pushing my boundaries. I'll spare you the details, but a hot afternoon session one day turned into his beating the hell out of my ass, and liking it. I asked him to stop, and he didn't. The next morning, I knew that we were history unless I became his little sex slave and sub. That's not me. I grabbed my stuff and ran. I have a friend in Portland who went through an episode with her guy that ended with him promising to behave. The verdict is not in. She has a friend who loaned me the cabin up on Mt. Hood where we met."
I looked at them, and smiled a little. "So there you have it. Girl likes guy. Girl moves in. They fight. He beats her. She splits. She needs to reboot her life."
I took a long drink of the beer. Jeff said, "He's really a dumb shit for not knowing what he had in you."
I laughed and said, "I'm writing that down, 'Jeff says David is a dumb shit.' "
Denise was behind me, working on my scalp and playing with my hair. "Does it help that we like you a lot. Maybe even love you?"
I stood and we hugged tightly. "That makes a world of difference. Right now, I need all the friends I can get. Especially ones that are good for me in bed!"
Dinner was relaxed. I looked forward to getting on the phone and reviving my writing assignments, covering my present arrangements carefully. Denise and Jeff sat on the sofa, chatting about life on their own terms, not their parent's and not the school's. It was going to be tough, but they had a new look of resolve. I would offer help if and when they needed it.
I went over and sat down. "I know you want to make it on your own, but for the next few weeks, please let me worry about money so you can concentrate on school and working out things with your parents."
Denise put her head on my shoulder and was teary. Jeff took her hands and held them.
"Another thing. We need to keep this address as quiet as possible. We should all get P.O. boxes, and avoid any kind of consumer contact that gives away our location. You don't know what crazy thing your parents or the school might do, and I don't know what crazy thing David might try."
Jeff said, "This is a CIA safe house, and we are not inviting visits!"
Someone was kneading my shoulders and the smell of fresh coffee was nearby. "Jeff and I are going for a run. Do you want to come along, or catch up on your sleep?"
I reached for the coffee. I'd slept well, even in the lumpy bed, and a run sounded good.
Oregon is running country, I thought, as my lungs complained about the pace Jeff was setting. I elbowed Denise, "What's got in to him?"
"He's putting on a brave front, waiting for me to show him up in front of you."
We went out about three miles and turned around. We were a block away when I saw a car cruising slowly by the bungalow. I abruptly turned us into a side street and said, "Suspicious car in front of our house, let's circle around the block."
I wondered whether it wasn't early to be paranoid. Keeping the pace going, I took us into the alley behind the house and stopped at the gate in the fence. No car, nobody on foot that we could see. We slipped carefully into the house and crouched behind the curtain over the front window. Luckily, my car was in the garage, with Jeff's in the driveway behind it. "How many people know your car, Jeff?"
"My uncle gave it to me a month ago, but it wasn't running. Cost me two hundred to get the water pump and some other stuff fixed. So my family knows about it, but not many others, and it has a new license plate."
I sat on the floor next to the window, my head in my hands. If this was David, and it was surveillance, I was going to be really pissed. Denise knelt next to me and offered a cup of tea. It was very hot and burned my tongue. I pulled her into me. "It hurts, doesn't it, when you are fighting people you were close to?"
Her arms went around my neck and she was kissing my face. "Please Alexis, don't worry so. You are strong. The three of us can deal with our troubles."
I smiled and hugged her tighter. This young woman, not even out of school, lecturing her new friend about being tough. I glanced at Jeff, who was sitting on the sofa looking unhappy. "Your girlfriend is tougher than I am." We went and sat next to him and got his arms around us. "We are not going to leave." he said. "It's possible one of them has some dumb kidnapping idea, but we can always travel together for a while, and avoid places where they might take us down."
"Yes. I don't want to call the cops, but will if we have to. We are all over eighteen and the police are sensitive about harassment in a college town."
After that, we made sure the ground floor windows were always shaded, and put the lamp by the living room window on a timer. We got a big piece of ruled paper and made a master calendar of scheduled comings and goings, and penciled in notes about how to handle delays and nonappearances. We went to an electronics store and invested in some motion detectors for the back fence, the garage, and the front yard. We talked about webcams and guns, and decided that level of paranoia wasn't justified. Jeff found a source for encrypted cell phones and I purchased three, one for each of us. We put the landline phone on an answering machine and never made outgoing calls on it.
On the first few days, all the security seemed like a big hassle, but after a couple of weeks, it faded onto our standard background. All three of us wanted to run everyday, and we mostly did this together in the early morning, which made any auto traffic in our vicinity obvious. Some days, Denise and Jeff would call me after class and I would drive to school and run with them on the track.
I re-established contacts with my editor, publisher and others important to my work. I told each of them there had been an incident of sex talk and heavy breathing on my phone and that everything was now recorded. If they needed a private chat, we should do that over secure Skype.
The piece I had been working on when interrupted by David so long ago, came back to life and finished strong. As I put it in the mail at the post office, I said to myself that perhaps our strange existence would work out.
After hesitating for days, I called Sonja. "Hi. I am reporting in. I'm ok. I'm living with new friends in a town not too far away. Not going to tell you where, so you don't have to worry about outing me. Are you all right?"
"Shit, Alexis, I was about to report you as a missing person. You didn't call my sister or anything. I'm mad at you. Actually, I'm supposed to be mad at you, but I'm not. I'm ok. Mark and I are fading. The sex isn't any good, and the rest wasn't ever there, it seems. You want me to come live with you?"
She babbled on. I tried to figure out what to say about living together. In a perverse way, it helped me to listen to a woman with a more screwed up life than mine.
