Chapter Text
You weren’t used to all the attention. You’d dated guys before who had remembered things about you – that was pretty standard stuff to expect from someone you were in a relationship with. But Cooper was different. He didn’t just remember things. He remembered everything. The clothes you owned, the three rotating hairstyles you did, the colors you painted your nails, what bags you carried, and what you ordered whenever you went out.
Cooper knew everything about you. It would be creepy if he weren’t such an amazing boyfriend. He never misstepped. He never said the wrong thing or bought you the wrong gift or took you to the wrong restaurant. It was like he’d been made in the Perfect Boyfriend Factory, and you were ecstatic.
Of course, until, things started to deteriorate. He was happy to spend his days off with you, but he’d never stay later than 9 or 10 at night. He’d say he had errands to run or needed to sleep or just needed to get back home. You began to worry. Was he cheating on you? Or were you the one he was cheating with? You’d never been the other woman before and you weren’t going to be one now.
So you followed him.
After he excused himself one night from your couch after watching a movie (your favorite, of course, because Cooper always let you choose your favorite movie and your favorite snacks and your favorite drinks – did he have any favorites, now that you thought about it?), you helped him get his coat and wallet and waved him goodbye from your front door. Once his truck was gone, you jumped into your car and followed.
You’d sneaked a peek at his driver’s license when you’d grabbed his wallet and knew where his address was. You’d plugged it into your phone, in case you lost his car on the dark streets, since you’d never been there before, not even to drive by.
Up ahead, Cooper’s truck stopped at a light. Your GPS was telling you to turn right. Cooper was in the far right lane. Your hands were slick with nervous sweat. What if you drove past his house and saw him being greeted by another woman? Or kids? You didn’t mind kids, but you weren’t exactly mentally prepared to be a step-parent anytime soon. Besides, that was a big deal, and if Cooper hadn’t mentioned them yet in your relationship, you weren’t sure you could continue dating him. If he could lie by omission about something huge like having children, what else could he lie about?
The light turned green. Cooper didn’t turn right. He continued straight.
That wasn’t a big deal. A lot of people had their own way home, and sometimes GPS gave a funny route. Besides, you’d never been by his home, so you didn’t know if this street was closed farther down due to construction, or if Cooper needed to run errands before going home. You continued to follow him.
His truck wove through different streets, seemingly circling back the same way you’d just come from. For several tense moments, you thought maybe he knew you were behind him and he was just driving in circles to screw with you. But then he started down a long, dark street filled with old houses. There were no lights on in any of the homes, even the ones with cars in the driveway. His truck lights, broadcasting yellow light across the dark asphalt ahead of him, suddenly turned off. You could still see the red glow of his taillights, but that was it.
Nervous that he’d see your lights behind him, you slowed down, still keeping his taillights in view. He stopped at a stop sign, crossed a street, and pulled into the driveway of one of the dark houses. You pulled behind a car parked on the road just after the stop sign, parking and turning off the lights. In the darkness, you could see the ink-black silhouette of Cooper walking up the driveway and into the house.
You looked at your GPS. This wasn’t anywhere near the address on his license. Was this a second home? Or was this where his other girlfriend lived?
Tucking your phone into your pocket (making sure it was on silence first – you weren’t going to get caught spying on him because your phone started blasting a ringtone), you hurried down the dark sidewalk, past empty houses and empty driveways. Only a few cars were parked along the street. It looked mostly abandoned, though. Some of the houses even had plywood covering windows and doorways.
You reached the house and stared at Cooper’s truck. A shudder ran through you at the sight of it. Were you really about to do this? To spy on your loving, attentive, amazing boyfriend? All because he kept strict hours and was a little too loving, attentive, and amazing?
Yes. Yes, you were.
You hurried up the driveway to the front of the house. As you got closer, you noticed that the siding near the front door was dark, almost black, compared to the siding above the garage. When you leaned against it, palm flat, you felt the dry, crumbling texture of something burnt. You pulled your sooty hand to your nose and sniffed.
It was burned.
A lot of it was burned. And not just the siding. The concrete porch was scorched, and the windows around the front door had been boarded up with the same plywood as the other houses. The columns holding up the front porch covering had been burned away – you could see the charred remains of where the ends had been buried in the concrete – and now the covering was supported by huge, temporary beams. The front door looked brand new, though. Or almost new. It was plain and wooden with no windows, no decoration.
Why on earth would Cooper come here? Surely he nor someone he cared about lived here. With as much attention Cooper paid to you, there’s no way he would let a loved one live in a burned-out house. It wasn’t just dirty, it was a safety hazard!
This was stupid. You were stupid. You needed to walk back down the street, get into your car, and go home. Whatever Cooper was doing in this house (it could have been his old home, destroyed in a fire, and he was just coming back to work on it, and the address on his license was where he had moved to after the fire!), it was his business, not yours.
But something still felt wrong. The hairs on the back of your neck were standing on end, but it wasn’t just from nerves. It was like the time you had been driving on the freeway and you got this weird, off-center feeling in the pit of your stomach that told you to move over one lane. You did, and a split second later, a tire exploded off of a van ahead of you and shot through the air, passing right by where you had just been driving. It would have smashed into your car. It would have smashed into you.
But there were no cars and no exploding tires and no freeway lanes here. It was a burned-out house in a dark, dead neighborhood, and your boyfriend on the other side of a window-less door.
You swallowed, turned the doorknob, and stepped inside.
The house was nearly pitch black. It smelled of smoke and water damage. Perhaps mold had grown in the time since the fire had been extinguished. You moved forward on wood flooring, tiptoeing into silence. You closed the door gingerly behind you but didn’t lock it. Too many people locked doors behind them when that was their only means of escape. You were gonna make sure you could book it out of the house if Cooper caught you. If not from fear, then from pure embarrassment.
Most of the furniture had been removed from the house, damaged from either the fire or the attempts to quash it. You moved easily through the open spaces, peering into pitch-black rooms, holding your breath, listening for any noise.
You stopped at the bottom of the stairs, peered into the void, and moved on. If Cooper was up there, you weren’t gonna find him. Running through the dark and trying to go down stairs was a surefire way to get both of your ankles broken.
The kitchen was empty, as was the laundry room, the bathroom, and two bedrooms. Then you found a door that was cracked open. You only knew it was cracked open because light was coming out of the space. It was faint, feathered out across the tile floor of the kitchen and along the wall. You’d missed it on your first pass through the kitchen, because you’d been facing the wrong way. Now you could see it clearly.
You approached it cautiously, hands trembling. Was it time to leave? It felt like a good time to leave. Neither you nor Cooper had any business playing around in a dark house. Or in a basement.
And that’s what it was. When you pulled the door open slowly, you could see wooden stairs leading down into an extremely well-lit basement with concrete floors and exposed wood supports. Something clanged down there. Something rattled. Something shifted.
Your first thought was to grab a knife, but that was ridiculous. Wasn’t it? Cooper was your boyfriend. He’d never hurt you. He’d never even said anything mean or backhanded. He got you flowers on the days your period started and he rubbed your foot after long days at work! There was no way he was going to hurt you!
Unless you surprised him. If you came up behind him and surprised him, he might accidentally hurt you. Out of surprise. Not out of malice.
Still, that off-center feeling came over you. The freeway, the van, the tire.
Move lanes. That’s what your mind was telling you. Move lanes before you get hurt.
In the kitchen, you found a knife. You tucked it into your hand and held it tight. Then you descended the stairs, silently, into the basement. You knew that he’d see you before you saw him, since there were no walls to shield the stairs. He’d see your legs, your torso, your face, before you could see anything. But that was fine. You had a knife. And the off-center feeling to tell you when to move lanes. And you were his girlfriend, and he’d never hurt you. You’d just come to make sure he was okay.
He was okay, wasn’t he?
Cooper might’ve been, but the person chained to a chair in the middle of the room certainly wasn’t. Their limbs were wrapped in heavy chains, which were secured to rings in the floor and the ceiling. Their head lolled forward against their chest. Their clothes were grubby and stained.
A noise escaped your mouth. A gasp? A sigh? It didn’t matter. The person lifted their head, eyes wide with terror. Dark bruises covered their face, scabs dotted their cheekbones and forehead. Freshly split skin spilled blood over their chin and down their neck.
A gag was put into his mouth – it was a he, you saw. A young man. Younger than you. With black hair and dark brown eyes and terror you’d never seen before in a human being’s face. He screamed around the gag, but the noise was muffled. He yanked against the chains. They rattled and clanged together, but did not move an inch to release him.
You held the knife tighter. “I’m not going to hurt you,” you said, because it felt like the right thing to say. It’s what you’d want to hear if you saw someone with a knife advance upon you in a basement, wasn’t it?
The man twisted in the chair, trying to yank his limbs free. It just looked like he was going to dislocate them instead.
You stepped forward, stopped, looked at the man. “I’m going to call the cops.”
Most people, you realized, in that situation always said things like, I’m going to find a way to get you out of here. I’m going to help you. And then they would spend precious time trying to undo the chains or release the gag. It was useless, doing that. All they had to do was to call the police, or run out of the house screaming for the neighbors to help. They had to get away first to help the person who was trapped.
Put your own oxygen mask on first, the flight attendants always said. It was the same thing in a survival situation. If you didn’t get out of the house first and get help, both of you would die. You just knew it.
You switched the knife to your other hand and grabbed your phone. The GPS was still up. You were, it gladly said, in the wrong house. Closing the GPS app, you opened your phone app. The number pad popped up.
The man screamed against his ball gag. The hairs on the back of your neck tightened with fear.
Move lanes.
“I’ll be back, I promise!” You turned and ran for the stairs, dialing as you went.
- 1. 1.
Your finger went to smash the call button when your legs flew out from under you. You crashed against the stairs, your knees slamming against the hard wood. You felt a kneecap twist the wrong way. Your phone tumbled out of your hands and across the steps, falling to the concrete below.
The knife was snatched out of your other hand. The blade sliced through your palm quickly, leaving a spray of blood along your clothes and the dark wood of the stairs.
Gasping, you grabbed your wrist and rolled over, retreating from the pain, from the fear.
Cooper loomed over you, one hand wrapped around your ankle, the other hand planted against the step with your blood. He had tripped you. You’d been running up the stairs and he had grabbed your ankle and tripped you. And then he’d yanked your knife from your hand. He’d been in the basement all along, perhaps hiding in the stairs when he heard you come into the house, perhaps in another part you hadn’t seen. But he’d been there, watching you.
Cooper was shirtless. He still had his jeans on, but he’d – for some strange reason you couldn’t even begin to comprehend – had taken his shirt off. Sweat glistened over his bare chest and his face. His hair fell ungraciously over his forehead. His cheeks were red with exertion. Or perhaps excitement. He huffed against your face.
“Coming to check on me?”
It was stupid to answer since he didn’t want an answer. It also seemed silly to tell him the truth: that you thought he’d been cheating on you.
And maybe he was. Maybe that’s what all of this was. Some sado-masochistic sex dungeon game that he liked to play, and that allowed him to be the kind, patient boyfriend you knew.
Cooper hoisted himself up, still with a hand around your hand, and yanked you down the stairs. Your head hit every step on the way down. You landed on the concrete and he stood over you, breathless.
“I appreciate you coming to see me at work, honey,” he panted as he began dragging you across the floor to another part of the basement. “But it’s really against policy. I’m afraid you broke the rules.”
“But, I–”
Cooper yanked you hard to the side so your head slammed against one of the wooden support beams. Stars danced across your vision. Blood filled your mouth.
“No excuses, hon,” he said, pulling you through the basement. You couldn’t see where he was taking you, but it didn’t matter.
The off-center feeling hadn’t saved you this time. You hadn’t moved lanes fast enough. As you stared up at the illuminated silhouette of Cooper, you could see it. The freeway lane, the van, the tire. It’d exploded and crashed right through your car. You’d waited too long to move lanes. You’d collided right into an unstoppable object.
It was too late, you realized. Cooper knelt down, straddling you. His large hands descended over your throat, his fingers wrapping tight. He pressed. Your vision continued to swim, stars bursting at the corners.
“I just need you out for a bit, babe,” he said. “And I know you won’t eat or drink anything I give you right now. But when you wake up, I promise, you and I are going to have a lot of fun together.” He squeezed harder.
Too late, indeed.