Thirty-Seven

And, like a thin pane of glass, everything shattered.

NOT THE USUAL FLUFF

A challenge to myself… Trying to break out of the lighthearted, romantic stuff I usually write. It's ultimately romantic, I'm physically incapable of straying from that, but it is decidedly anti-lighthearted.

She remembered the jingle of keys. Sifting through her keychain, fingers searching for the key to her apartment. Jingling keys. Car. Lab. Locker. Apartment.

Black.

She struggled; something was pushing against her shoulders, pining her to the carpet. Carpet? Searing, white-hot pain, throbbing. Grunting. Sweat.

She winced, slowly registering the weight moving erratically on top of her, shoving her torso roughly against the fibers in the carpet, turning her back raw with uneven pressure. A thick hand struck her jaw, flattening her features into the floor, gaining a sharp angle of leverage, rendering her motionless. She kicked out, the inside of her thigh coming into contact with a leg. Another hand shot out, pushing her leg away, and thrusting her knee abruptly to the floor, dislocating her hip with a paralyzing pop, leaving her leg limp as she screamed, rolling her eyes back as the burning pressure in her pelvis increased, causing her body to ricochet between the body trapping her, and the cheap, dirty carpet she was trapped against. Somewhere, across the room, she recognized the delicate ring of her cell phone.

Something was not right. This wasn't right. Lindsay squirmed, almost fainting from the shot of pain from her hip. The thick fingers lifted off her jaw for a moment, coming down against her cheek again, delivering a numbing slap, and shoving her face against the carpet further.

"Oh no you don't. Tryin'a fuckin' look at my face." His voice was gruff, thick with a New Jersey accent that she vaguely recognized, but hadn't been in the city long enough to identify. New Jersey. His tone was filled with revulsion, his sweat dripping onto her stomach and chest, smelling of anger and alcohol.

This wasn't Danny.

Danny wasn't this hard. Rough. Unrelenting. Dominant.

Danny would never hurt her, and this man; this man had dislocated her hip.

He was inside her, whoever he was. Oh God. Lindsay concentrated on relaxing her angry muscles, in an attempt to lessen the intensity of the pain. She opened one eye, groaning silently as the synthetic carpet fibers scratched at her cornea. Blue. The carpet was blue. Baby blue, faded with wear, dirty with neglect. She blinked away the tears that had watered in her eye, trying to focus on what else was in her line of sight. Blue carpet. She squinted, searching around the room, trying to ignore the rocking and the groaning and the pain.

God, the pain.

Forensics. Descriptions. Forensics. Think.

She stared determinedly at the far wall, waiting for it to come into focus, fending off the effects of what she calculated as a moderate concussion. There was no way she could overcome the man thrusting into her, the muscle he had shone by manhandling her body would clearly overtake her abilities, they were honed carefully, trained thoroughly, but at the end of the day, she still only weighed 116 pounds.

She'd have to get him with the forensics.

The dark of the wall slowly came into focus, enabling her to make out the decay of crusted lead paint and archaic wood paneling popular circa 1968. A worn out armchair. A window, curtains pulled shut. A television, an early eighties model with crooked rabbit ears, like the one her aunt had in the kitchen on the farm. Lindsay strained, tilting her head away from the man on top of her, squinting to make sense of a potential reflection on the tube. A door. There was a door to her left, behind her. Water stains on the ceiling. Multistory building. The light was shining in from the street, through the moth holes in the curtains, at an upward angle. Third floor, second floor. She could be anywhere in New York. Her cell phone rang again, and beeped once. Voicemail.

Fingernails. She balled the fingers of one hand slowly, glancing down in that general direction, wincing as the pressure increased on her skull and her ribcage. Her fingertips were bleeding. No. There was blood under her nails. Good. Even if he was using a condom, she'd have a DNA sample.

"Not so tough now, huh? Badge is worth shit, now." He grunted, grabbing her hips roughly and lifting them, jostling her hip unceremoniously, yanking her body toward him, slamming into her at a new angle, bringing tears to her eyes that blurred her vision, preventing her from visually analyzing the room. He slowed finally, rocking in a staccato rhythm accentuated with hoarse grunting, before she felt the heavy trickle of him leaking into her. No condom.

Her heart shattered abruptly, and with a wave of pain across her face, everything, again, became black.