Chapter 13: Safety Off
The city had that slick, post-rain sheen that turned headlights into smeared stars. Alyssa walked from the bus stop, the weight of Scott’s gift—a compact Sig Sauer P365—a familiar presence in the inner pocket of her jacket. He’d given it to her three days after the range, along with a leather holster and a single, unembellished sentence: “Just in case.” She’d laughed it off then, a dramatic token from a dramatic man. Now, with the damp chill seeping through her sneakers, it felt less like a gift and more like an echo of his voice: The world isn’t a straight line.
She’d been staying late at the campus library, catching up on sociology readings she’d neglected. Her car was in the shop. The shortcut through the old Southside retail park, a concrete graveyard awaiting redevelopment, saved her fifteen minutes. Her footsteps echoed in the vast, empty parking garage, a hollow rhythm under the sporadic drip-drip of water from cracked upper levels.
The flickering bulb by the east stairwell cast a strobe-light effect, making the shadows jump. She was halfway to the opposite ramp when a voice slithered out of the dark to her left.
“Aly? Jesus, Alyssa, is that you?”
She froze. She knew that voice, even slurred. Chad leaned against a concrete pillar, one arm in a sleek black sling, his face pale and drawn under the sickly light. He looked diminished, like a photocopy of his former self.
“Chad.” She kept her voice flat, her hands in her jacket pockets. Her right thumb found the textured grip of the Sig. “You’re supposed to be in the hospital.”
“Checked myself out. Against medical advice, they said.” He gave a weak, lopsided smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “Couldn’t stay there. I’ve been going crazy thinking. About us. About what happened.”
“You fell.” She stated it, watching him.
“Did I?” He took a shuffling step forward. He smelled of antiseptic and cheap whiskey, a small flask visible in his good hand. “It’s all fuzzy, Aly. Real fuzzy. But I keep having this… feeling. Like I was helped down those stairs.”
Alyssa’s pulse kicked up a notch. She didn’t move. “That’s the pain meds talking. You should go home.”
“Home is empty. You’re not there.” Another step. The gap between them closed to twenty feet. “I miss you. I’ve been a fucking idiot. I see that now. This…” He gestured weakly with the flask-hand toward his sling. “…this was a wake-up call. We can fix it.”
“There’s nothing to fix, Chad. We’re done. We were done before your accident.”
The word ‘accident’ hung in the damp air, too loud. His affable mask cracked, revealing something raw and confused beneath. “Why are you being like this? So cold? Did you… did you meet someone? Is it that older guy? Your dad’s creepy friend?”
Her body went very still. “Don’t talk about him.”
“Why? What’s he got that I don’t? Money? A bigger car?” Chad’s voice rose, bouncing off the concrete walls. “He looks at you like a piece of meat, Aly. I cared about you.”
A laugh burst out of her, harsh and unexpected. “You cared about what was convenient. You cared about not having a label. You cared about keeping your options open. That’s not care, Chad. That’s inventory management.”
He flinched as if she’d slapped him. Drunken hurt curdled into anger. “Fuck you. You think you’re so mature now? You’re a kid playing in a world you don’t understand. That guy is dangerous. My accident…” He spat the word. “…reeks of him. I can feel it.”
He took three quick, stumbling steps forward. The space between them evaporated. She could see the broken capillaries in his eyes, the sweat on his upper lip. The trapped, frantic energy of him pressed into her personal space.
“You need to back up, Chad. Right now.”
“Or what?” he sneered, his good hand coming up to grab her arm. “You’ll call your bodyguard?”
Her reactions were no longer her own. They were a series of practiced, calm movements imprinted on her muscle memory from the polished floor of the range. She didn’t think. She did.
She stepped back, her arm slipping from his grasp like water. Her right hand drew the Sig from her jacket in one smooth, unhurried motion. She didn’t aim it at his face. She presented it, holding it steady at her own torso level, finger indexed along the slide, outside the trigger guard. Just as she’d been taught. A clear, unambiguous command to stop.
The metallic snick of the draw was deafening in the quiet garage.
Chad froze, his eyes widening, darting from her face to the matte black pistol and back. “What the hell… Aly? Is that real?”
“It’s real. Now turn around and walk to the stairwell.” Her voice was a stranger’s—low, even, devoid of panic. Inside, her heart was a wild thing against her ribs, but her hands were rock steady. Patience. Precision.
“You’d shoot me? You?” Disbelief warred with a dawning, terrible understanding in his gaze. He was finally seeing her, not the girl he’d dated, but the person she was becoming. It terrified him.
“I don’t want to. The choice is yours. But if you take another step toward me, it stops being a choice.” She could hear Scott’s ghost-whisper in her ear. It’s a tool. You decide what it ends.
Chad’s mouth worked. Rage, humiliation, and fear played across his features. He took a half-step, a testing shuffle.
It was then that the lights appeared.
Three tiny, perfect points of crimson light bloomed on the front of his grey hoodie. One directly over his heart. One on his sternum. One low, on his abdomen. They shivered slightly with his ragged breathing.
He looked down, baffled. He swatted at his chest as if at flies. The red dots held firm, unwavering.
Alyssa’s breath caught. She didn’t lower her gun. Her eyes swept the darkened upper levels of the garage, the skeletal openings where the next floor overlooked them. She saw nothing. No shapes, no movement. Just inky blackness and three laser-guided promises held on the man in front of her.
Scott’s words from the diner coiled in her mind. I was focused on you.
He hadn’t just given her a tool. He’d given her a role in a play that was already in motion. She was the visible actor. The lines were her words, her draw. But the stage was his, and he had crew in the rafters.
Chad stopped breathing. All the color drained from his face. He understood, on some primal level, what those lights meant. This wasn't a drunken argument anymore. This was a different language altogether.
“What is this?” he whispered, his voice cracking.
“That,” Alyssa said, the reality of it settling into her bones, cold and certain, “is the un-arguable.”
She finally lowered her own pistol, re-holstering it slowly, deliberately. The message was clear. She was no longer the immediate threat. The threat was everywhere and nowhere, a geometry of imminent violence painted on his skin.
“Walk away, Chad,” she said, her tone almost gentle now. “Don’t call. Don’t come by. Don’t think about me. Go home and heal. This is the only conversation we’re ever going to have.”
He stood there, paralyzed, the red dots holding him in place as effectively as chains. A stifled sob escaped him. It was the sound of a boy who’d bumped up against a world with real, terrifying rules.
He turned. He shuffled, then walked, then almost ran toward the distant glow of the street, his shoulders hunched as if expecting an impact between his shoulder blades. The three red lights stayed glued to his back until he vanished around the corner into the night.
The moment he was gone, the lasers winked out.
Silence rushed back in, thicker than before. Alyssa stood alone under the flickering bulb. She could smell her own adrenaline, sharp and coppery. Her hands began to shake now, the delayed tremor after the performance.
She looked up into the darkness where the lights had originated.
“Thank you,” she said to the empty air. Her voice didn’t echo. It was absorbed by the concrete, by the watching dark.
No answer came. But she hadn’t expected one.
She turned and walked toward the exit, her footsteps steady. The weight in her jacket pocket felt different. It was no longer just a tool. It was a key. And she had just unlocked a door into a much darker, quieter room than she’d ever imagined.
And she had just unlocked a door into a much darker, quieter room than she’d ever imagined.
The walk home was a blur of streetlamps and muffled city sounds. Her fingers, tucked deep in her pockets, traced the compact shape of the Sig over and over. It felt warm from her grip. The adrenaline that had kept her steady in the garage was dissolving, leaving behind a hollow, vibrating space in her chest. It wasn’t fear. It was a raw, cellular hunger.
Her apartment was too bright, too silent. She dropped her keys on the counter and leaned back against the door, closing her eyes. She saw the red dots on Chad’s chest, perfect and steady. She saw Scott’s hands, large and capable, adjusting her grip on the Glock a lifetime ago in the range. The memory wasn’t visual. It was sensory: the heat of his chest against her back, the scratch of his stubble near her temple, the low timbre of his instructions vibrating through her bones.
“Just in case,” he’d said.
He was always there, just outside the frame. A curator of her safety, a architect of these violent, quiet lessons. Her skin felt too tight. The shower she took was scalding, but it didn’t touch the deep, restless ache that had taken root. The water sluiced over her shoulders, her breasts, her stomach, and it was an irritation. It wasn’t the pressure she wanted.
She wanted calloused hands. She wanted his specific, contained weight. She wanted the smell of gun oil and clean cotton and him. It was a craving that lived under her ribs, sharp and undeniable.
Wrapped in a towel, she stared at her phone on the bathroom counter. The screen was dark. He wouldn’t call. That wasn’t the dynamic. He had shown her, in the most brutal terms possible, that he was listening. He was watching. The next move had to be hers. It was always her choice. That was the contract.
Her thumb hovered over his contact, listed simply as ‘S’. She didn’t type a message. She pressed call. It rang once, twice.
“Alyssa.” His voice was the same. A low rumble that bypassed her ears and went straight to her spine.
“He found me. In the Southside garage.” She didn’t bother with hello.
A beat of silence. “I know.”
“The lights…”
“Were a clarification.” He said it simply, a fact. No apology, no drama.
Her breath hitched. She leaned against the cool tile wall, sliding down until she was sitting on the bathmat. The towel gaped at her chest. The air felt cool on her damp skin. “It clarified things for me, too.”
“Did it.”
It wasn’t a question. It was an invitation. She swallowed, her throat dry. The words felt too big, too revealing. But the quiet room she’d unlocked demanded truth. “I’m… buzzing. From it. And I’m alone. And I don’t want to be.”
She could hear the faint sound of his breathing, the whisper of fabric. He was moving. “Where are you?”
“Home.”
“Stay there.” A soft click. The line went dead.
The stillness in her apartment became charged, every second stretching thin. She didn’t move from the floor. Twenty-three minutes later, a single, firm knock sounded at her door. Not the buzzer from downstairs. Her door.
He had a key. Of course he did.
She stood, tightening the towel around herself, and opened the door.
Scott filled the doorway, dressed in dark jeans and a grey henley. He looked like he’d come from nowhere, his eyes scanning her face, then the empty hallway behind him with a single, professional flicker before settling back on her. He stepped inside, shutting the door behind him with a quiet, final sound. The lock engaged.
He didn’t touch her. He just looked, his gaze a physical stroke from her damp hair to her bare shoulders, down to where the towel clutched at her chest and ended on her thighs.
“You handled it,” he said. His voice was quieter now, for the room.
“You were there.”
“I’m always there.” He took one step forward, closing the distance so only a sliver of air remained between them. She could feel the heat radiating from him. “The question is, are you here? All the way in?”
She answered by letting go of the towel. It pooled at her feet. The air was cold, but the look in his eyes was furnace-hot. Her breath came in short, sharp pulls. The craving was a live wire under her skin, sizzling and desperate.
His control was a terrifying, beautiful thing. He didn’t pounce. His hands came up slowly, hovering just above her hips, not yet touching. “Tell me what you need, Alyssa.”
It was the first time he’d ever asked. The raw demand in her shoved the words out. “You. I need to not think. I need to feel something that isn’t that garage or those lights or that fucking gun. I need your hands on me. It’s been too long.”
A faint, almost imperceptible tremor went through the muscle in his jaw. Then his palms settled on her hips. The contact was electric, solid, and real. His thumbs pressed into the dip of her pelvis, a claiming pressure that made her gasp.
“Then don’t think,” he murmured, his head dipping, his breath hot against her throat. “Just feel.”
His hands were not gentle. They were specific. They moved over her skin like a man reading a map in the dark, tracing the tension in her shoulders, the rigid line of her spine. His touch was clinical and devastating all at once. He turned her, his palm a flat, warm pressure between her shoulder blades, guiding her toward the bedroom without a word. The silence was a fourth presence in the apartment, thick and humming.
The dull city glow from the window painted everything in shades of charcoal and dusty blue. He sat on the edge of her bed, the frame creaking under his weight. He pulled her down to stand between his knees, his eyes level with her sternum. She shuddered.
“Look at you,” he said, his voice gravel. “All that fight. All that steady aim.” He leaned forward, his lips brushing the valley between her breasts, a whisper of contact. “Your heart’s trying to punch its way out.”
“So stop talking.” Her hands dove into his hair, short and bristly against her palms. She tried to pull him closer, to force the contact she needed.
He resisted, his hands clamping on her hips, holding her in place. His head lifted. His eyes caught the scant light, glinting. “No. You don’t get to just disappear into it. Not this time.” One hand released her hip, came up to cradle her jaw. His thumb stroked the hinge, back and forth. “You called me. You said you were buzzing. Tell me where it is. In your head? Your hands?”
She was trembling. “Everywhere. It’s under my skin. It’s… it’s like the smell of the garage is still in my nose, but all I can think about is you cleaning that Glock last week. The sound of the slide.”
A low sound escaped him, almost a growl. “Good.” That was all he said before his mouth was on hers.
It wasn’t a kiss of comfort. It was a claiming, an answer. It was teeth and desperate pressure and shared breath that tasted of coffee and the metallic edge of adrenaline. She moaned into him, her fingers clawing at his shoulders, trying to merge with the solid reality of him. He consumed the sound, his hands finally, finally moving with intent.
He broke the kiss, breathing harshly. “The garage is gone,” he muttered against her lips, his hands sliding down her back, over the curve of her ass. He lifted her as if she weighed nothing, settling her onto his lap, straddling him. The rough denim of his jeans scraped against her inner thighs. “Chad is gone.” He yanked his henley over his head and tossed it aside. Her palms slid over the hard planes of his chest, over the ridges of old scars she’d only ever glimpsed.
“Those lights…” she breathed, her mouth following her hands, kissing a pale, ropy line that cut across his pectoral.
“Are my problem.” He captured her face again, forced her to look at him. “Your problem is right here. Look at me. Only me.”
And she did. In the dim light, his expression was stripped bare. The careful control was still there, a rigid architecture, but behind it burned a focused hunger that mirrored her own. It was for her. This terrifying, capable man was undone by her. The power of it was more intoxicating than any fantasy.
He shifted then, rolling her beneath him onto the cool sheets. His weight was perfect, anchoring the chaotic buzz in her nerves into a single, screaming point of need. He took his time, his mouth and hands leaving a trail of fire that erased every other touch she’d ever known. He was meticulous, thorough, leaving no part of her unexplored or unchanged.
When he finally entered her, it was with a slow, inexorable pressure that made her cry out. He went still, buried deep, his forehead damp against hers.
“Alyssa.” Her name was a fractured thing in his mouth.
“Don’t stop,” she begged, arching beneath him. “Please, Scott. Don’t be careful.”
That broke him. His control shattered into a rhythm that was pure possession, each thrust a punctuation to the unspoken words between them. She met him move for move, her nails scoring his back, her legs locked around his hips. The world narrowed to slick heat, driving pressure, and the raw, animal sounds torn from both of them. It was nothing like her vague, girlish fantasies. It was real, and it was violent, and it was exactly what she needed.
The climax hit her like a silent detonation, a white-out of sensation that robbed her of breath and sight. He followed a moment later, his body going rigid above her, a single, guttural groan expelled into the crook of her neck.
For a long time, there was only the sound of their ragged breathing syncing, slowing. He didn’t collapse on her. He shifted his weight to the side, pulling her with him, keeping her close. Her cheek was pressed against the damp skin of his chest, her ear over the steady, strong drum of his heart.
The buzz was gone. In its place was a profound, limb-heavy quiet. The kind that comes after a storm has passed.
His hand stroked her hair, slow and steady. Outside, a siren wailed, distant and faint.
“I meant it,” he said into the darkness, his voice raspy. “The lights are my problem. But you made it your problem when you drew down on him. You understand that? There’s no walking that back.”
She nodded against his chest. The gun in her jacket across the room, the three red dots on Chad’s hoodie, the feel of this man’s skin under her hands—it was all one tangled, inseparable truth now. “I know.”
“He’ll be trouble,” Scott stated, no emotion in it. Just a forecast.
“You’ll handle it.”
His hand paused in her hair for a second. Then resumed its rhythm. “Yeah.”
She tilted her head back to look at him. His profile was sharp against the grey window. “Did you have someone follow me? Or were you just… watching?”
A faint, grim smile touched his mouth. “I own the security contract for the redevelopment group that bought that retail park. The cameras have been… selectively operational for weeks. I was at the office when the motion alert tagged your face.”
It was so simple. So thorough. He hadn’t needed to lurk in the shadows. The shadows worked for him.
“So you saw everything.”
“I saw you handle it,” he corrected softly. His fingers traced the shell of her ear. “I saw you be exactly who I thought you were.”
The words wrapped around her, warmer than any blanket. She nestled closer, sleep pulling at her. Just as she began to drift off, his voice came again, low and clear.
“We leave for the cabin Friday. Pack for a week. Your dad thinks it’s a surfing trip.”
Her eyes opened. “A week?”
“You need to learn more than how to shoot a stationary target. And we need to talk about what comes next.” He kissed the top of her head. “Sleep now, Alyssa.”
The command was gentle, but it was a command nonetheless. She closed her eyes, the steady beat of his heart her lullaby. The quiet room she’d unlocked had a door, and it was opening onto a landscape she couldn’t yet see. Friday felt both too soon and an eternity away.
But for now, in the dark, with the scent of him and sex and spent gunpowder lingering in the air, she felt, for the first time, truly found.