Hi. Welcome back! So, who made it to the apartment first? Marcus or Jade? Let's find out.
All reviews welcome, I hope our slight change of direction hasn't put you off.
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The pounding went on. Tori put her hands to her temples. Opening this door had brought her nothing but trouble recently, and the temptation to ignore it was intense.
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"There's no answer."
"Break it down."
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The possibility that it might be Jade crossed her mind, but not even Jade would have the bare-faced cheek to come back after this. She should just go back to bed.
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"Are you sure, Boss?"
"If you ask me that again, Karl, I'm gonna bust it open with your face. Now do it."
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It didn't sound as though it was going to stop, though, and Tori's growing fury demanded a sacrifice.
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Karl put his muscular shoulder to the door, and braced himself. Whoever was on the other side of that door was...
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... going to be very, very sorry, she decided. She clenched her fists, and crossed the room.
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The lock gave with a crack, the tearing of splintered wood, and they were in.
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A journey interrupted. A destination unplanned. An unsuspecting girl.
An empty apartment.
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Living on borrowed time. But borrowed from who?
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"There's nobody here, Boss."
"Fuck."
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Thirty minutes earlier...
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The slap left Jade's teeth rattling. It wasn't the first time she'd been slapped, and it wasn't the worst, but it had the terrible weight of betrayal behind it.
"Tori..." she croaked.
"How could you?" Tori snarled. "You little... bitch."
"I'm sorry, I can explain-"
"No you can't!" Tori thrust the phone in Jade's face. "Not this time! I've listened to the messages, Jade," she said. "You never left him at all, did you?"
"I did, I-"
"He didn't even know you were gone! What was all this? Hmm? You got bored, did you? Thought you'd get a bit of action? Thought, hey, Tori hasn't had a bunk-up in a while, I'll drop over there, give her a thrill. Let her think she's in with a chance."
"No!"
"You lied to me, Jade."
"It wasn't like that!"
"Oh, please."
"Tori, I don't have time for this!"
"Oh, I'm sorry!" Tori said, outraged. "Got somewhere to be, have you? Got to get back and fix dinner, now Marcus has clicked his fingers?"
"No! Damn it, Tori, didn't you read the messages?"
"What?"
Jade snatched the phone and shoved it back in Tori's face. "Read the phone, Tori," she said.
Tori looked at it, finally focussing in on the last message. Her eyes went wide. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"It means, Tori," Jade said, "that he knows where I am."
"Well that's not my problem."
"Yes it is. Because he's going to come looking for me, and when he does, we are both going to be in deep shit."
"What do you mean?"
Do you have any idea," Jade said, "what's going to happen if he finds us? What he'll do? It won't just be me that gets hurt, Tori. Maybe you're fine with that. But he'll hurt you, too. He'll hurt you first, because that's the way he thinks. We have to get out of here."
"The hell we do. I'm calling the cops."
"We don't have time for that! For all I know he's in the parking lot right now. We need to go!"
"No!"
"Look, you can hate me all you like once this is all over, but if something happens to you, I'll never forgive myself."
"Well that makes two of us."
They stood glaring at each other, Tori's fury battling against a slow dawning of common sense - if she believed Jade, the very worst that could happen was that she'd feel pretty stupid if she was wrong, whereas the alternative was the ironic and potentially fatal embarrassment of being caught here still arguing about it if it turned out she was right. She made her choice. "Okay, fine," she muttered. "Give me a minute."
"What? Where are you going?" But Tori was gone, into the bedroom. Jade waited, hopping anxiously from foot to foot, until she returned with a small travel bag.
"Thank God for that. Right, we need to-"
But Tori was gone again, into the kitchen. "For Christ's sake, Tori! We don't... What's that?"
"My housekeeping money."
"He's not going to rob you!"
"I don't know how long I'm going to be away, thanks to you," Tori said, sharply. "I'm going to need money."
"But I'll... Right okay. Let's go."
They left the apartment, Tori carefully, and in Jade's opinion, slowly locking the door behind them. They took the stairs, peering over the bannister at each flight, wary of someone coming up. There was no sign of Marcus, and they slipped out of the building unmolested.
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"Get in."
"I'll get in when I'm ready, thank you."
"And when's that going to be? Come on, Tori, I'm not messing about here."
Tori gave an irritated grunt, and pulled open the car door. "This is ridiculous."
Jade jumped in and started the engine, pulling out of the parking lot with a sharp swerve that earned her no favors from her passenger.
They'd only been driving for a couple of minutes when Jade pulled in towards an ATM. She muttered something under her breath and got out of the car, and Tori watched as she stabbed furiously as the machine, snatching notes from its maw as though it might change its mind at any moment. She got back in the car, cursing.
"What's wrong?"
"He hasn't cancelled my card."
"And that's bad?"
"It means he doesn't care that I'm using it."
"So what? Maybe he doesn't care about the money."
"He cares very much about money, Tori," Jade said. "A lot more than he ever cared about me. If he's not bothered about me taking it, it means he doesn't think I'm going to have much time to spend it."
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"Now what?"
"I'm thinking."
"We could just let it go?" Karl said, hopefully, and immediately regretted it, because Marcus smiled, and that didn't bode well for anyone.
"No, Karl. We're not going to let it go," he said. "Because that would be no fun at all."
"Fun?"
"Take me home."
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"Okay," Jade said, once they were on the move again. "We should check into a motel for the night, and then in the morning we'll think about-"
"No."
"What?"
"I'm not going anywhere with you."
"But I thought-"
"You thought what?" Tori snapped. "That you could bundle me out of my apartment in the middle of the night with some half-assed story about your psycho boyfriend, and we'd drive off and live happily ever after in some shitty little motel somewhere? You can drive me to my mom's."
"Oh come on, Tori, at least give me chance to-"
"No! You lied to me, Jade. You lied to me and left me. Twice. What in God's name makes you think I'll ever trust you again? As far as I'm concerned you deserve everything you get."
They both knew that it was a step too far, but Tori's anger had driven her to it and now she couldn't bring herself to back down, even in the face of Jade's horrified stare. A word, anything, might have helped, but it didn't come, and after a moment Jade calmly and quietly hit the turn signal, changing lanes to head towards Tori's parents' house. Tori knew that when Jade drove carefully it meant she was very, very angry, but her own fury was still too raw to fully appreciate Jade's, and she said nothing more, folding her arms in steely defiance, bolstering her righteousness by focussing on the sheer unfairness of it all. She'd already done this, she'd played this game, she'd cried herself to sleep too many nights, until finally she'd swallowed her pride enough to consider spending the rest of her life with this woman, only to have her run away again. And now she was back, just long enough to tear her life apart, and send her scrambling out of her own apartment like a fugitive. This wasn't her Jade. This wasn't the Jade she loved, that had looked after her, protected her. This Jade brought nothing but pain and fear. Ashes and broken glass.
The drive was only a couple of hours, but it was the second-longest one of Tori's life. The silence in the car was suffocating, but she didn't dare break it by moving to open the window. She kept shooting sideways glances at Jade, but the other girl stared resolutely at the road, her face expressionless except for the slight shine to her eyes that said the future held tears, and as the journey wore on, Tori found her anger stagnating, curdling, leaving a sour taste in her mouth.
"I'm sorry," she said, suddenly. "About before. I shouldn't have said that."
"No, you're right, Tori." Jade said, quietly. "You're absolutely right. I deserve everything I get."
"No you don't."
A silence which was neither acceptance or denial sat heavy in the air, and finally drove Tori to distraction.
"Why, Jade?"
"What?"
"Why would you go back to him?" she said. "Why would you stay with him in the first place if he's as bad as you say he is?"
"It's not as simple as that, Tori."
"Well it should be!"
"Well it isn't!"
"Then tell me! Maybe I'd understand! Or am I too stupid, is that it? Poor little Tori's too stupid to understand the big, grown-up world?"
"No!"
"You know, half your fucking problem is that you'd never talk to me."
"Language, Tori! And anyway, I did talk to you."
"No you didn't! If you'd talked to me, maybe none of this would have happened in the first place!"
"What do you mean?"
"If you'd told me you weren't happy six months ago," Tori said, "maybe we could have done something about it. Maybe I could have changed."
"You didn't need to change!"
"Well clearly I did! Because you obviously weren't happy with who I was, otherwise you wouldn't have left me for some fucking lunatic, and we wouldn't be sat here having this argument on the run from our own fucking apartment!"
"I'm going to fix it!"
"It's always 'I'm going to fix it'!" Tori said, angrily. "That's the other half of your fucking problem! It was always you, wasn't it? You were always the big 'I am', you were always going to take care of things, with your stompy boots and your bad attitude, and I'd just sit at home like a simpering fucking idiot. If you didn't keep shutting me out, maybe I could help!"
"You just said you didn't want to help!"
"Well I do now!"
There was a pause. "Really?"
"Yes! So you just turn this fucking car around," Tori said, in a low growl. "And take me to whatever horrible little shit-hole you can afford, and we will sort this out, Jade. You and me. And you will be totally honest with me, for the first time in your life."
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Marcus sat in the darkness of the screening room, one hand wrapped around a tumbler of Scotch, the other busy elsewhere, and wondered how long he should wait. How long to give it before he destroyed her.
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A week, he thought. Maybe two. He was a busy man, after all.
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For those of you interested in the longest drive of Tori's life, you'll find it in 'Power Play', chapter 30…