Content warning: physical violence or abuse.

Red Handed

          The key would grind against the pressure of the stubborn lock before it’d let me turn it, then I’d have to dip my shoulder down a notch to punch the door open. This was required each and every time I entered the apartment, so it was a muscle-memory kind of deal for me right then. Except I thought about it, a little, but just that once. Only so I could be thinking less about anything else when I entered. And it was not a particularly loud task, once I got past the act of busting the door open a crack big enough to slip through, but I still crept through the doorway. I snuck in as if I feared disturbing something in the way I walked. I wasn’t a noisy person, I hardly feared the way I moved, but I wouldn’t want to create an inconvenience where one shouldn’t be. So I pressed the door snug into its frame and swiveled toward the darkness to get myself to bed. That was all I wanted by then. God, my head throbbed and my chest ached and I could feel the slick slice in the skin just above the meaty part of my cheek. The flap of skin had drooped from beneath my eye to graze the apple of my cheek and I couldn’t find it in me to care. I wanted to be asleep so badly that I didn’t care.

          “Hey,” a voice called. It startled me into a physical jolt. Just a touch larger than a typical flinch without becoming a full-fledged jump. My progression across the living room stopped. I blinked hard to force my sight to adjust to the darkness that folded into the corners of the room. It didn’t work for a number of reasons, I guessed, and only one of my eyes reopened all the way because the other was swelling closed. It took me a moment to remember what I needed an answer for. “Oh. Hi Max,” my voice responded. The sounds coming from my mouth weren’t directly linked to the thoughts in my head, but I figured there wasn’t much to connect to. I was reeling in what seemed to be a mass of nothingness, and any slight movement from the outside world would thump into it and echo around my bones upon impact. I thought I was thinking steady thoughts, fast and hard with a sustained rhythm to them, but I was so distracted by the shapes of the thoughts and the lack of noise in the silence that I couldn’t grasp anything concrete.

          When he asked: “You drunk?” I hummed back: “Mmm.” I knew he’d understand. He tended to. I stood there blindly for another moment. Motionless, I think. My mouth remembered how to move politely regardless of what the rest of my body was doing. “Where are you?” I had meant to ask how, but I wasn’t displeased with the slip of language because I hadn’t managed to figure that bit out either. “The couch,” he told me, and I could hear the familiar shape of his smile through the words. “Ah,” my voice mused. Max was a very simple person. Very easy to read, even in the dark. It was almost amusing to me, but only because it was one of the things I liked best about him. It made him excellent to live with. He didn’t keep secrets from me because he didn’t know how to do it. “You’re freaking me out by just standing there,” he told me next. “I’ll bet,” was all I said.

          The conversation lulled again. A beat of quiet while my head reeled. I couldn’t tell if that was a side effect of the alcohol or of the blood dribbling down to my jaw. I wasn’t sure how it was possible for it to still be actively bleeding in a way I could feel. I wished something had knocked me out already. The injury itself wasn’t courteous enough to do that for me, but I figured the exhaustion might be if I loitered in it for much longer. I stood there hoping it would. I imagined it’d be a relief to pass out naturally. The kind of blackout that would come over me so quickly I wouldn’t remember hitting the floor. He called my name then. Maybe. I thought he did, but I wasn’t certain until he did it again: “Holden.” “Mmm?” I replied, sure to tack the question mark to the tail of the hum so he’d know I meant it as a standalone response. It worked. He seemed to know. He began with, “Are you…” before his cautioned words drifted off, leaving the sentence abandoned before he got to attaching the rest of the question to it. For the first time in my moment spent idling there, I turned my head in the direction of his voice. And I found him, sitting there. I found I could see him if I tried to look. His entire face went slack. “Holy shit,” he breathed out. He leaned over the arm of the sofa to reach the lamp that sat next to it. “I’m alright,” I briefed. I was not, my hands were beginning to tingle and I could feel my heartbeat in my knees, I just didn’t want to deal with thinking about it right then. I didn’t want him to try to do anything about it, either.

          He twisted the light on, to shove the moment along, and revealed himself to me in all of his late-night, rugged glory—he wore a plain white undershirt, a pair of red gym shorts he kept from our middle school basketball uniform, and a concerning expression that crinkled his face. Ah, no, my mind backtracked, not concerning. He was concerned. I clenched my eyelashes into my cheeks a few times before his thoughts caught all the way up to him. “Let me get my keys,” was how he started. I knew what he meant by that. I knew where that was going. “I want to go to bed,” I countered. I felt like I had said it over and over by then, but he hadn’t heard any of it. He paused. “Your face is falling off,” he said. His words came out like it’d be difficult to swallow after he spoke them. I should’ve tried harder. Whined or begged or kicked or screamed, pounded my fists into the floor or the sides of my head. I should’ve done something obscene so he’d have to let me win, but I wasn’t thinking hard enough to play it smart. All I said back was, “Not all of it is.”

          I took sudden note of the way my eye was held in nearly a wink, scrunching my face in some sort of subconscious attempt to cradle the skin into place. I was too drunk to tell if I was doing myself any good with that. I probably just looked confused. “Come sit, then,” he presented cautiously. I was okay with an order like that because he proposed it like a suggestion. I knew it was a strategic move, a ploy to trick me into following along, but I didn’t really mind much. I thought I should be polite for as long as I was capable. I made my way over to the green piece- of-shit couch we found on Facebook marketplace a month or two after we moved into that apartment. I wasn’t sure I walked in a straight line to get there, but I wasn’t sure that mattered. I sat on the piece of shit. Max observed me from where he had been. He wouldn’t keep his eyes in one place for too long, he was scanning me over as if he was afraid I’d catch the look of worry on his face. The couch was losing stuffing through a growing rip in the cushion just above where Max’s shoulder dented the fabric, so I paid deep attention to that.

          “What happened now?” he questioned. The scrape on my face made itself known as a gash. The tingling numbness wore off as more attention was drawn to it. “I went to the party,” I told him. “And this happened there?” he asked. His eyes were still set a little too wide. I nodded. He paused. I began to suspect his patience was thinning the longer we sat, but he did not ever snap at me. His demeanor remained almost typical. I only thought he was over handling those situations because I knew I would’ve strangled him by then if our roles had been reversed. “What happened?” he repeated. “I dunno,” was my noncommittal answer to the question. His brow twitched. “Do you remember anything about being there? Where you were? Who you were with?” he asked on. I squinted my other eye to match up with the fucked one. “There was a dog there,” I said. And I thought about other answers to the other questions, but that was the only one I felt was worth relaying out loud. Max liked dogs, I thought, but the shadow over his expression made me wonder if I remembered that wrong about him.

          He breathed in, “Do you remember what happened? Did the dog have something to do with it?” “Yeah,” I replied. I wasn’t sure which bit of that I was responding to. A new wave of concern creased Max’s forehead. He leaned forward. “The dog tried to take your eye out?” I didn’t reply. And I would not have looked directly at him if I had been thinking straight, but my brain wasn’t sitting right in my skull. I met his eyes and felt like my mind slushed sideways. Everything felt uneven. The pit in my stomach solidified the way it would if I had been stone cold sober and my face started to hurt. “You’re gonna have to let me take you somewhere,” he decided. I was amused by his efforts to frame that like it had been my idea. As if I was allowing him to do something he was going to make me do anyway. It was all non-negotiable. “You can’t go to bed like that,” he elaborated, and though his voice was soft, I knew him well enough to recognize he meant to be pleading. I sighed. I wanted to react for real, but the sigh was all I could bring myself to do for him. “Okay?” he checked. He was waiting on my approval so he’d feel better about forcing me to go. And I still didn’t feel going was necessary, but I bobbed my head up and down. I hoped the motion didn’t come across as mechanical as it felt. I didn’t want him to feel guilty for anything he did as a favor. Even if I didn’t appreciate what the favor was.

          I could feel the layered skin on my face. At that moment, it seemed to be both missing from my face and added right on top. I could almost imagine what it’d look like, to see the slab of flesh draped over where it should have been seamlessly attached. I figured there had to be a sliver of what’s underneath showing past the unevenness of skin. It wasn’t lined up right and that separation felt prominent.

          “Please still be sitting here when I come back,” he said next. And he spoke it like he had already told me where he was going without me, but I managed to pretend I knew. Enough for him to shift his weight to stand, I guess. “And please be awake,” he tacked on. “Or what? You’ll make it worse?” I asked. He was standing by then. He sort of froze where he was, though, and he peered down at me like there was something wrong with me. And, I mean, evidently there was, but he fully acknowledged it right then. He had been tiptoeing around direct confrontation until right then. “Yeah,” he swallowed. He did it all so calmly. “So wait here.” “I dunno why I said that,” I confessed. He shrugged one shoulder, maintaining his charade of nonchalance. “You’re just drunk.”

I don’t think either of us believed that was truly my problem.

          He left me with that. I sat at the edge of the sofa and rocked my weight back and forth between my hips. My shoulders swayed, I could feel the skin settling off of my face. It was still slick and flimsy. I wondered when it’d get to be leathery or dry or stiff, and then I wondered if it’d ever do any of those things at all before I wondered how long it’d take for something like that to happen. I wasn’t entirely sure how long it had been torn off. I mean, it had been long enough for me to walk back to where I had dumped my bike at the curb and ride it back home. Long enough to strike me a bit confused by the blood still dampening my face. I wondered if it felt as wet to the touch as it did just hanging. The pads of my fingertips didn’t get the chance to graze the surface before the pain shocked my hand back as if the area had been charged with electricity. The wound was still soggy. I dropped the hand with fresh blood to meet with the aged blood that had spilled into my lap. “Fuck,” I muttered. I mangled my fingers together, twisting them into a thick knot of grime while my mind floated elsewhere. Then Max returned.

          I stood when I noticed he had entered the room. He was already still next to the couch, ready to hesitate in place like he assumed I wouldn’t be able to stick the landing, but I stood up fine. Dwelling on the pain was what started the flinching, so I had to avoid thinking about anything extra. I was so drunk that it wasn’t hard to do. Max had already grabbed his keys, at some point since his return to the living room, and he was now wearing slip-on shoes with his pajamas. I followed him out the front door. I walked much too closely behind him and I was aware I was doing it but I could not seem to stop. The toe of my shoe jammed into his bare heel five or six times, but he’d dismiss it by waving his hand to keep me from verbally apologizing each time. He led me through the parking lot toward his car in silence.

          He had to manually unlock both doors, so I stood with my arms crossed over myself until I heard the right side click. I slung into the passenger seat the same way I always did, and every moving part of that felt so normal that it threw my head for a loop. I could have forgotten what we were leaving for. I didn’t relay any of that out loud to Max, though, because I suspected it would elevate his concern at least a little bit. Max wasn’t a worrier. For anything, really, but I could tell that he was on the verge of perturbation that night. That meant I must’ve looked rough. Maybe even bad.

          I don’t remember exactly when he started driving. I don’t remember him backing out of the parking space or turning onto the actual road, and I could not have told you where I thought he was taking me for any sum of money. I had no solid bets. Only a short list of places I hoped it wasn’t. “Don’t make me see friends right now,” I warned. He had been driving, of course, but he turned his entire head to express the ridiculousness of that thought. “What would any of them even do to your face?” he asked. And I knew it was meant to prove his point. He just said it to exaggerate how stupid I sounded bringing him up, but I responded with, “yell at it, probably.” He shot a quick breath out his nose in place of an actual laugh. “We’re going to the emergency room. I didn’t call anybody,” he clarified. I figured that probably should have been obvious to me. I was missing a chunk of flesh near my eye. Visiting a doctor made more sense than anything else would’ve. I sighed and that was all.

          We didn’t speak much for a while. The floorboard beneath me looked so far away but my feet still rested in it, knees bent and everything. I still felt like my brain was roaming off without me. I still wanted to be asleep more than anything else. I contemplated the pros and cons of closing my eyes right then. But his car was so old that it moved like it was always on a bumpy road, so I could not forget where I was. I figured falling asleep would just be an inconvenience to him. It might even go a step beyond that, stretching into the territory of bothering him, and I didn’t want to do that. He was already driving me around in the middle of the night. And I knew he’d just wake me up when we got there, so I saved us both a bit of trouble and strained to keep my eyes open. I pushed them as wide as they could go. It was only the normal amount of wide, I thought. I didn’t look at much of anything that entire time because I couldn’t find anything to look at. “You really need to get a better hold on that dog,” he told me. I furrowed my eyebrows. I found myself looking at the door handle. “What?” was all I said. I didn’t have a dog. I didn’t and he knew that, we had lived a dogless life together in our shared apartment for the past two years.

          I could hear his shoulders shift against the seat, so I blinked up to look back at him. He had tossed another glance in my direction, but that time he held onto it longer because it was safer to. The red light cast over his face gave me the answer I needed without me having to check. I still looked, though, I turned my head toward the red traffic light in front of us before turning my eyes back toward him. “The dog at the party,” he clarified. “Oh,” I said. My brow twitched a notch and it flinched the rest of my face. I didn’t really get why he was talking about the dog. “It’s not mine to get a hold of,” I replied.

          Our eyes met for the first time in a while. He stayed attentive even when my mind wandered away. I could feel his eyes burning through me while mine did me no good. I thought they might as well be closed, though I had already sworn off closing them. I leaned my temple into the headrest instead. “You can’t let things like this happen to you.” He had crafted his tone well, so it’d swaddle the words like they were wrapped in sympathy rather than coming across how he meant them. It could have sounded like he had rehearsed saying it. I almost wondered if he had. I watched his face change shades in the traffic light. “Green,” I pointed out. His mouth had been closed but he still managed to appear as if his sentence had been cut short. He turned to focus his attention back to driving. Most of it, anyway, because I was not far enough out of it to tell where his mind was venturing. I wished it’d stop before it got all the way there.

          But he exhaled. “People are going to get to the bottom of your lies if you don’t tell them well,” he warned. I shrugged one of my shoulders. “I didn’t lie,” I responded. The words felt plain. “You gave me the tools I needed to jump to conclusions based on what you said,” he retaliated. I ran that through my head one more time. The tools and jumps and conclusions. I decided to be honest with that. “I have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about,” I answered.

          The drunkenness had me beside myself. I sat there and thought I could probably see my physical body from someone else’s perspective if I tried hard enough to do it. He sat there and thought hard about something, too. The wheels in his head practically cranked. “Avoiding telling the truth is its own form of lying,” he rounded out. I shifted in the seat in an attempt to earn some kind of comfort, but that all seemed to be a lost cause. I could not remedy that on my own. “I didn’t do that either,” I argued. And that was honest, because I always tried to be honest with Max. I wouldn’t lie right to him most of the time.

          There was a large gap between my words and his. A larger gap than there should have been, but Max would consider all of his options before he said anything out loud. He was one of those people who was particular with what he let slip, so we were quiet again after that.

          The pain overcame my face. Not even just my face, but my ear and jaw and neck all around it, too. I couldn’t even blame it on sobering up because I still wasn’t, I felt like I was being sloshed around in my own body with every bounce the car took. I was ready to be done talking and done being drunk and done feeling pain. My eye throbbed and my head pulsed withswelling persistence and that conversation had been dead long enough for me to think it could have been entirely over, but he parted his lips a little to prove that couldn’t end yet. None of it could. “I wish you’d stand up for yourself.” His voice was very quiet. So quiet it could have been drowned out by the sounds of cars racing by or a strong gust of wind or a song on the radio, but none of those things were happening around us. Everything went still when he spoke. Me, him. The whole rest of the world stopped with us. I thought about how I wished I could zip my skin back into place. Then I thought about how disgusting a zipper for skin would have been, and the chill that came over me was strong enough to shudder most of my upper body. And my brain kept wandering, taking steps further from the conversation I did not want to have, so I thought through waves of things instead. Things like, if the saying went beer before liquor or liquor before beer because I couldn’t remember the part of the rhyme that made it useful, and if I put the chain with the lock on my bike after I dropped it at the rack, and whether Annie had smeared her fingernail polish again or if her hands had just been red that night, and surely it was liquor before beer, right, because I drank beer first and I felt like shit as soon as we switched to harder stuff. Beer before liquor helps make you sicker, or something along those lines, and we hadn’t listened to the rhyme because I’d forgotten it. Then I thought about her. Annie. How we were dating and then we weren’t and now we were doing something in between those two things. And I didn’t know why, but that circled me back toward the conversation I had abandoned to wonder if Max was waiting on me to reply, but I couldn’t remember what he said.

          Instead, I huffed, “I don’t want to be here.” Max shook his head a bit, as if the motion was purely for himself. I hoped he hadn’t thought I meant I didn’t want to be around him. My stomach sort of ached at the thought. I opened my mouth to speak on it again, to rectify that so he’d know he was never the issue for me, but he beat me to speaking. “Obviously not,” he disregarded. We paused again. That sunk in far enough to settle through me like guilt. I confessed, “I don’t want to be drunk anymore, is what I meant.” I longed to be unconscious. To be not awake, not living that moment out. “Or ever again,” I supposed.

          The stinging pricked and prodded into my face, seeping so deeply through the rest of my body that my bones felt soaked in it, too. It was debilitating. Blinding. I squirmed, I squinted, but it could not help. I couldn’t feel anything but the discomfort of the wound and the occasional slip of the blood that had begun to crust all over me, I couldn’t see anything even when I held my gaze in one direction and tried. There was nothing left to aid me through the pain anymore. I closed my eyes to wallow in it. And I quit the conversation there, a little earlier than I should have, hoping at least Max wouldn’t feel compelled to speak anymore. The car jolted forward two or three times, proving to me through the darkness of my closed eyes that his gas pedal was pressed harder into the floor, but he let me have my way in the end. The car remained voiceless because it could not ever be truly soundless, and the noises of it running seemed loud enough then to drown anything else out. That was a good thing, to me. I had been ready for that moment to be over long before it began.

 

 

 

About the Author
Drew Payne has a BA in Creative Writing with a minor in journalism from the University of North Texas, where she still resides and works as an instructional assistant for students with accommodations in a local high school. In her spare time, she loves to go to concerts with her earplugs in and write with her cat in her lap.