Gregg Hurwitz - Do No Harm

She was sucking air through her nose, moistening his index finger. Her face was hot with pain and fear.

"Close your eyes," he growled through clenched teeth. "Didn't you learn your lesson?" The force of his words sent a soft spray across her face.

She closed her eyes, her chest pounding, her breath coming so hard she thought she might hyperventilate. The smell of him choked out the air. She felt him growing hard through the thin fabric of the scrub bottoms.

When he spoke again, his voice was different. Harder, more confirmed. "You can open your eyes now," he said. "I don't give a shit. I'm not scared of you. Or the guard they put here to protect people from me."

It took her a few moments to force her eyes open. He was even closer, the tip of his nose brushing the bandage of her cheek beneath her eye.

"You scream, I'll carve you up even worse. My little jack-o'-lantern." A smile spread his thick lips into a grin. "You tell him," he said. "You tell him I did this to you."

Slowly, he released the hand over her mouth. Diane's eyes flickered to the security guard, but he still lay perfectly still. Any other guards would be at least several tiers away, and even if one of them could hear an interrupted cry over the noise of the cars on Le Conte, the needle's tip remained, pushing into her larynx.

Clyde's laugh came as a shudder, a grunt that blew back her bangs. His breath was sour and rotten. "I'm gonna show you just how unafraid I am," he said.

His hand disappeared from view, down to his waist. He pulled at the drawstring of his scrubs. She opened her mouth to scream, but his eyes flared wider, dead and cold, and the needle pushed deeper into her neck, threatening to break the skin.

She tried to bring into focus a rape prevention class she'd taken in college, but its calm setting seemed distant and oddly irrelevant. A stream of maxims cascaded through her brain, and she tried to focus. What were the three steps she'd been taught? Something facile and probably defunct. Her scrambling mind grabbed on to the catchphrase: Fight, Personalize, Intimidate. She was too overpowered to fight.

"Listen," she whispered, her voice trembling. "My name is Diane Allison Trace. I was born in Los Gatos, California. I swam in high school."

His nostrils flared and his eyes seemed to withdraw into their deep cavities. "Don't," he said. "Don't. Shut up." The slur had returned, blurring his words together.

"My mother died of breast cancer when I was eight, and I lived alone with my father." Diane fought off the panic sobbing that threatened to interrupt her speech, but her voice still wavered, filling with fear. "He sold insurance. Now he's-"

Clyde slammed his hand over her mouth, gripping it hard, drawing her lips and cheeks forward in a half fist. She felt skin sliding, wounds breaking open, hot razor blades of pain lashing across her face. His other hand gripped the back of her neck, hard. His hands seemed to encompass her whole head.

His eyes were clouded, his forehead wrinkled under a fresh sheen of sweat. His mouth fought itself away from a frown. "I don't care," he said. He released the back of her neck and ripped his scrub bottoms down roughly. His forearm flexed against her stomach as he worked himself up. She sobbed against his hand, mucus leaking down onto his fingers.

She prayed for a car to drive by, but it was the bottom tier of the lot and mostly deserted. Any scream would be terminated by the needle.

He turned her around, bending her roughly over the trunk of her car. He yanked her scrubs down, pressing up against her. She started to scream finally, not caring anymore, but his other hand quickly blocked the cry before she could put anything into it.

He bent her head back, and she saw his reflection in the rear window of her car, hunkered down behind her, sweaty face colored red with fear and excitement. He kicked her legs wide and reached with the hand holding the needle to pull down her underwear, but she thrashed on the trunk, preventing him.

Thoughts streamed through her head, and she clamped her concentration around one, holding it. Step three: Intimidate. She felt a sudden, cold lucidity.

She made herself go dead still and tried to say something calmly, though it was muffled by his hand. He stopped laboring behind her, confused by her abrupt shift in demeanor. "Huh?"

She repeated herself, her voice calm and quiet beneath his hand.

He released his hard grip on her mouth but kept his hand hovering over it, in case she tried to scream again.

"All right," she said. "You win."

He stared at the back of her head, nonplussed.

She continued in the same low, assured voice. "You can fuck me."

He withdrew from her, ever so slightly.

"In fact, I want you to fuck me. But let me tell you something." She squirmed in his grip, twisting to face him. "You'd better fuck me long and hard." She glared at him, trying to pierce his eyes with her own. His face loosened, anger giving way to fear. She felt him going soft against her. His hand hovered, then withdrew.

She knew her words-aggressive and sexual-would strike at the heart of his vulnerability. An incisive psychological attack was her last chance, so she continued. "I need a man with endurance," she said, spitting out the words. "I hope you're up for that. I hope you're man enough to fuck me how I need to be fucked."

He released his other hand, baffled, and leaned back, pulling his weight off her. She reached back, yanking up her scrubs, not yet daring to scream. A crescent of sweat darkened his shirt at the collar. His face had turned pasty, almost totally devoid of color. He was mumbling to himself nervously, "Three, two, one. Step back from the door."

His putty-fat cheeks quivered, then drew tight. He tried to say something to her, but the words came out a jumbled mess, an animal's low-throated bellow. Reduced again to the pathetic creature he was.

He slapped her once, hard, across the face, and scampered across the lot, struggling up and over the concrete wall, the posts of his legs kicking in the air.

Pain ringing through her slapped cheek, Diane waited until he dropped to the other side, then cried out as loud as she could manage.

She sank down to the ground, bumper digging into her back, and tried to hold her throbbing face in her hands as she wept with relief.

David and Diane sat in perfect silence at their ends of the telephone. Listening to the quiet hum of the line, David watched the minute hand of the bronze clock in his study make a full rotation, then another. He was running late for his morning shift.

Diane had just relayed the news of her near-rape, leaving him stunned. For the first time, the thought of Clyde elicited in David a cold, vengeful rage. The perfect dark outside his bedroom window mirrored his mood.

"I'm leaving now for the hospital," he finally said. "Can I come see you?"

"No. I don't want to see anyone right now." A long pause before she spoke again, her tone more recognizable. "You've got the night shift tomorrow, right? You can come upstairs and see me then. I'm the new permanent addition to the ninth floor. Me and a bad Monet print they hung across from the elevators."

"And the wounds?"

"Reopened. It set me back a few days, that's for sure. Won't help with the scarring either."

"No. No, it won't."

"He told me to be sure to tell you about his attacking me. He's using me to threaten you. To hurt you. To get you to back off."

"I wish more than anything he'd come after me."

"That probably would have been less effective."

He considered this.

"Hey, David? I know that what you found out about the study has replenished your store of empathy, but don't expect that from me. The first time, with the shower, well that was awful. But this. This was so much more personal. His smell, his dead eyes. There was nothing there behind those eyes. Nothing. He's already dead. Death masked in flesh and bones." He heard her breathing for a moment on the other end of the line. "I think if the police found him first and shot him, well that might be all right with me."