Love Grows in the Valley of Death
Chapter Nine: The $64,000 Question
As Dr. Wakefield began rummaging through the ugly yellow folders in the rows of tall, grey steel cabinets, each containing four drawers of files, across town in Helena’s kitchen, Tig kept his grip tight enough that his touch brushed into near painful as his eyes bored into her, “please,” he finally growled, his tone reeking of outright, face down begging.
Helena pressed her dry lips together and tried to control her breathing, distracted by his ironclad hold, making it difficult to form words. “Can you pretend you didn’t hear the message or see the flowers?” she managed to stammer.
Tig shook his head before she lapsed into silence. He lifted a hand to pinch her chin with his fingertips as he dropped his face until their lips were a breath apart. “Talk to me,” he demanded on a whisper.
In the space before Helena spoke, her mind whirred with the intensity of the turbine engine of a jumbo jet. “What do I say? Will he end up hurting me?” Helena thought before she stopped being able to think when Tig pressed his lips to hers. His kiss turned urgent, and she felt herself left breathless when he lifted his lips, foreign patience shrouded him as he gave her time to think.
Helena blinked and found herself unable to look away from Tig’s probing, penetrative stare. The press of his body made Helena fight competing lust-fueled thoughts as she cleared her throat. “How do I fit in?” she finally asked.
Tig frowned, unsure of what she was asking, and Helena continued before he could speak.
“How do I fit into your world?” Helena asked as her mind once again conjured the seemingly inerasable image of the skinny, glossy-lipped, spike-heeled, gonorrhea ridden, parasitic whore trying to play with Tig’s stick.
Tig dropped a strong hand to encircle Helena’s wrist, the tips of his middle finger and thumb overlapping. He lifted her hand to his mouth and pressed his lips to the center of her palm. Tig squeezed her smaller hand, free from scars, lines and nails gaudily encrusted with rhinestones before he spoke.
“I should be askin’ you the same thing baby,” Tig murmured on a heady rasp, his exhale a hot tease against her skin.
Helena drowned in the electrical sensation that was ignited the nanosecond he pressed his lips to her palm, the wiry strands of his facial hair, near-singeing where it brushed against her skin.
Helena blinked hard as she tried to collect her flurrying thoughts, she was suddenly a snow globe that had been violently shaken and left to find herself again amongst the falling chunks of artificial snow. “How does he fit in?” Helena asked herself. “How do I tell him that he scares the nightmares away, that since the moment I met him, he filled a space inside me that was empty?” Helena asked herself as her face turned a brilliant, fuchsia hue as she let her mind wander down a sexual rabbit hole.
“Because you’re different,” Helena finally managed and added in a quick stammer as Tig’s hands slid down to rest on her hips. “You’re not like the rest of them.”
Tig squeezed her taut hips, massaging the supple flesh through her jeans. “Who do ya think I am doll?” he asked on a heady tease.
“I think you’re dangerous,” Helena whispered on an exhale as Tig tugged her closer and slid one hand up the length of her spine, his fingertips brushing each of the protruding vertebrate until he could tangle his fingers in the silken fall of her hair.
Tig couldn’t even pretend to deny the veracity of her words as he tugged on her hair until her neck pulled taut and Helena met his unblinking eyes. “Not towards you in any way baby, nothing bad will ever happen to you again,” Tig rasped and crushed his lips to hers, stealing her breath with the intensity of his want.
Helena was forced to surrender in Tig’s embrace, his hands everywhere at once while holding her immobile.
Tig’s strength was equal parts frightening and protective, his physical intimidation was not lost on himself as he settled closer to her.
“I’m not the kind of man you think I am,” Tig whispered as he pressed his lips against her ear and smoothed one hand down her side and cupped a hand under the curve of her bottom.
“What do you think I have wrong?” Helena asked on a low murmur.
“That I’m some kind of monster, inhuman,” Tig growled in a low tone.
“I don’t think you’re a monster,” Helena said softly and lifted a hand to cup his jaw. Tig captured her wrist, keeping her palm pressed hard to his face. Helena shivered as she felt the stubble against her warm palm and could feel his words vibrate against her skin as he spoke.
Helena almost didn’t hear him add in a strangled whisper against her flushed skin over the thundering beat of her heart. “Please don’t reject me,” Tig growled.
As Tig and Helena’s red blood cells bloated and their pupils pulsed with the increase of their collective and rising blood pressure, across town in the Human Resources office at St. Thomas’s, Dr. Andrew Wakefield pulled open a metal drawer and pawed through the folders until he found Helena’s personnel file.
Andrew began to whistle a lively show tune as he opened Helena’s folder on top of the HR secretary’s desk.
For a second Andrew looked like a reptile, so much so, one would’ve expected a forked tongue to slip out from his thin lips and wet his twisted smile as he read her name aloud from the sunny yellow folder tab.
Andrew skimmed her contact information, most of which he already knew, before he fished his phone out of his pocket and took pictures of each page in the manila file folder.
Andrew replaced the file and easily slipped out of St. Thomas’s before he casually made his way back to his hotel room.
As the prominent and adored Floridian doctor returned to his hotel room, back in Helena’s kitchen, the air had become charged, and Tig found himself closer and closer to losing the mere semblance of control he possessed.
Helena found her voice as Tig began to tug open the top button of her jeans and deftly lowered her zipper. “No, I, I can’t,” Helena began before she trailed off into silence and desperately tried to avoid his gaze.
“Ya can’t or ya won’t?” Tig hissed, his exhale fell from lungs surrounding his heart that began to gallop in its opaque pericardial sac.
Tig never stopped his touch even as Helena unsuccessfully pushed at his hands and incoherently protested. “I can’t right now,” Helena finally spit, her anxiety had melted into vulnerable defensiveness.
Tig tried to lessen his hold but failed as he took a deep breath in through his nose as he softened his tone but fell flat in an effort to blunt the crassness of his words. “I’ll do anything you tell me, just let me fuck you baby,” he grumbled, his words delivered under the growing roughness of his touch.
Helena couldn’t help but laugh nervously once she caught her breath and dropped her hands to close around Tig’s wrists, simultaneously brilliantly blushing at his ragged admission. She shook her head, “I should probably tell you something,” Helena lamely managed.
“Tell me,” Tig said on a rasp as he buried his face in the curve of her neck, his exhale causing her to break out in goosebumps.
Helena danced her fingertips up his forearms and along the curve of his triceps as she tried to formulate a coherent sentence. “I need some air,” she said in more of a shrill tone than she would’ve liked.
“Could we go outside for a few minutes?” Helena asked on a breathy moan as Tig slid a hand to cup over the clothed junction of her thighs, shuddering with the urgent want to sheath himself in her wet center.
“Just a few,” Tig finally conceded on a frustrated groan.
Helena looked past his shoulder as she raised her hands to his chest, feeling his heart pounding under her palm. Tig let her slide along the edge of the counter away from him as he drummed his fingertips on the outside of his thighs.
“Don’t fuck this up,” Tig told himself as he followed Helena outside.
They each settled into the new turquoise chairs that Helena had picked up at the hardware store, the southwestern round chair pads were still stiff with newness but stood out brightly on the sagging porch.
Helena tapped the arm of the metal chair. “I bought these the day I moved here.”
Tig squeezed the cold arms of the matching chair, “from Harvest’s?” he asked, not sure how to have a casual conversation with her when all he wanted to do was fuck her until he forgot how to spell his name.
Helena nodded, “that place is great, I think I’ve been there more than the grocery store.”
Tig nodded and fumbled for his freshly opened pack of cigarettes out of his pants pocket as Helena directed her gaze out at the overgrown yard that needed countless full weekends to clean up and who even knew how many trips back and forth to Harvest’s for mulch, weed killer and topsoil.
Tig was grateful to whoever was on the other end of the incoming call that made his phone buzz in his other pocket.
Helena moved her eyes off a trio of overgrown Meyer lemon trees, their wickedly sharp thorns ready and waiting to rip the flesh from anyone who dared supplant them, to look over at Tig as he frowned down at the caller ID.
“I gotta get this,” Tig murmured, suppressing the anger from his tone that he was being pulled away from her. Helena nodded and watched Tig disappear into the house before he answered the call.
“Yeah,” Tig grumbled tersely as he picked up Clay’s incoming call.
“Where are you?” Clay barked, irritated that Tig had been ignoring a laundry list of calls and messages.
“I’m just working on some things,” Tig benignly answered.
“Well brother, we’re meeting with the Irish in a few hours. Can you break away from your ‘things’ for a while?” Clay added with a chuckle, recalling Gemma telling him what she’d seen in the grocery store aisle with toiletries and over-the-counter products.
Tig walked over to the kitchen counter and stared down at the chipped tiles on the edge and ivory-colored grout lines as he tried to come up with an excuse to not have to leave.
As Tig was trying to come up with an excuse that would hold water to skip out on Club business, Helena’s phone chimed from where she had left it by the stainless-steel toaster.
Tig glanced over his shoulder and could see Helena still sitting on the rear porch, staring out at the yard just as she had been when Clay called.
“Tig? You there?” Clay asked when Tig fell deathly silent as he picked up her phone and glanced at the message preview that popped up on the phone.
“I gotta call you back,” Tig muttered abruptly and hung up on Clay.
Tig clenched his teeth until his jaw popped as he read the first sentence of the incoming text message. Helena’s locked screen kept him from reading any further than the three words displayed on the smudged screen.
“Remember this baby?” Tig read aloud before another message arrived. Tig squinted down at the small square photo that was too tiny to discern much detail.
Helena flinched when Tig stomped back outside and held her phone out towards her, the screen facing her.
Helena’s face first drained of color as she swallowed hard and was then replaced with a wave of defensiveness as she reached out for her phone. Tig held it just out of her reach, “tell me who sent this.”
Helena blew out a low breath before she moved her eyes from the rectangular screen to settle on his face. “Fine,” she finally said in a heated tone as she began to flush. “Give me the phone first,” she demanded as she held her hand out.
Tig pressed his lips together. Feeling his salivary glands leak and a trill of excitement stimulate his nervous system as Helena’s indignation at his invasive encroachment into secrets she wanted to keep hermitically sealed in a titanium coffin, buried under three million miles of earth.
Tig’s watched her eyes grow wide as her irises practically vibrated in their sockets. In the center of his brain, his pituitary gland ejaculated hormones that further fanned his lust as her pink tongue darted out to moisten her lips.
Helena felt the tiniest lessening of the electrical heaviness in the air when Tig gently placed her phone in her waiting palm. They both felt a tingling jolt as his fingertips brushed against her open hand.
Tig sat back down on the firm chair pad and watched Helena unlock her phone and read the messages. He watched her eyes move back and forth over the words before she began to speak.
Helena spoke without meeting his eyes, never taking her gaze off her phone clutched in her hand. Her voice grew in strength as she gripped her phone so tight that the skin over her knuckles turned white as it was pulled taut.
“Before I started in the neurology ward, I heard all sorts of rumors about several of the physician department heads and a game they played.”
Tig waited as she gathered her words, willing to give her eons to continue, as long as she would speak only to him.
“Dr. Gatez, with a Z, was the one who started everything. He paid off a guy in maintenance to put cameras in the bathrooms, changing rooms and staff lounges. They had competitions for best pictures and videos recorded. They set aside one department head meeting a month to talk about their other conquests,” Helena said before closing her eyes and resumed leaning back in the metal chair.
Tig didn’t have to wait long for her to continue.
“Besides their surveillance fun, they would often use the footage to blackmail people they found in compromising footage or threaten to release still frames. Sometimes they’d try to leverage more with their threats,” Helena said as she looked down at her phone and reread the simple message and tapped on the photo, enlarging it.
Helena was transported back to the events she had moved three-thousand miles away from as she stared at the screen.
Helena turned the phone’s face towards Tig, she cleared her throat as his eyes fell on an image of her emerging from the employee shower. She positioned her fingers to cover most of her nudity.
“After I was sent this and a few that were similar, there was another message that said I could find out how to keep that picture and more from being circulated to the entire staff.”
Helena settled back in the chair and turned the screen back towards herself as she struggled for a moment to find her words.
“One of the doctors told me that all I had to do was perform a few free favors and I’d get the originals.”
Tig felt himself hit with a simultaneous tsunami on each hemisphere of his brain as he battled vastly different thoughts about what Helena described. Tig was both compelled to comfort her while at the same time he felt a coiled charge of excitement in his body as he wanted to rip her phone out of her hand to see the uncensored image of her wet nakedness.
“He tried to take payment when I said no,” Helena started to say before her voice broke and she sniffed hard. “There was a security guard close by,” she added and pinched the bridge of her nose as a headache decided to start brewing behind her eyes.
Tig finally spoke when Helena didn’t seem like she was going to offer more. “What happened after that?”
“I filed a report with the hospital and police department but of all places the cameras weren’t working was the parking garage and the security guard never got a good look at him. It became my word against the esteemed Dr. Wakefield and Gatez,” Helena spit.
Helena blew out a low breath. “The threats quickly escalated, and I tapped into my trust and left everything behind. I didn’t even put them down as a job reference for St. Thomas.”
Tig left his chair and dropped to a knee in front of her. If someone had been watching, without words, it would appear he was proposing. “Let me in,” Tig breathed as he pulled her phone from her tight grip and set it aside. He gathered her hands and smoothed his fingers over her soft, unscarred skin.
Tig pressed his lips to her palms before he buried his face in her lap. “Please let me in,” he begged.
Helena stared down at Tig’s head, his face pressed against the tops of her thighs, his ragged exhales were hot through the denim.
Tig held himself statue still on the outside while inside his chest cavity, his heart leapfrogged itself with its rapid beating.
Helena lifted her hands and slid her fingertips through his hair, the strands tickling her palms.
Tig closed his eyes and smoothed his hands up and down the outside of Helena’s thighs as she rubbed her fingertips in slow circles on his scalp.
As Helena and Tig remained in silence, across town at the Clubhouse, Piney was eating a second sandwich, the new anti-nausea medication had made his appetite return with a vengeance.
Inside his body, the cancerous cells continued to divide. Piney’s discomfort was trapped behind a narcotic wall that was difficult to maintain, the breakthrough pain made his spine practically bow with its intensity.
Piney lowered the volume on the game show rerun as Cassie brought him an extra slice of pie she had brought from St. Thomas’s cafeteria. As the two of them talked about bland topics and then shouted out their answers to the game show trivia, back on Helena’s rear porch, Tig squeezed her hips until she hissed from the pressure as her whispered words fell around his ears.
“Can I trust you, Tig?” Helena asked. He began to nod his head the nanosecond she was done speaking.
“I need something, “ Helena began and trailed off as she lost confidence in her words.
“Talk to me,” Tig demanded as he snapped his head up to find her eyes on him.
“I want,” Helena began before she paused briefly. “I need to know I mean something to you, I’m not disposable.”
Tig rose to his feet and pulled her up and out of the blue wrought-iron chair to join him. “You’re everything,” he growled and crushed his lips to hers.