Page 27 of Stay Away from Him

The next few weeks passed for Melissa like a dream.

The beginning of a relationship was usually a carefree period, and that’s what her time with Thomas Danver became after she let her guard down, after she allowed herself to see Thomas without constantly wondering what happened to his wife, if he had anything to do with it, if he was a murderer.

The thing that happened at the park—Kelli Walker, Bradley’s fall, then Thomas gently bandaging him up—wiped all that away.

Their first few days may have been more intense than most new couples got.

Mostly because of his past but because of Melissa’s too, they’d spent more time than usual excavating their baggage, talking about how their previous marriages ended.

Stuff most new couples didn’t get to until they were a month or two in, until they’d had some fun together and knew they liked each other.

That was where Thomas and Melissa had started.

But after the park, Bradley’s injury, and the clinic, they dropped all that.

They put the usual relationship rhythm in reverse: hard stuff first, then fun.

There were dinners, long hikes through the many parks and nature centers that seemed to dot the Twin Cities’ suburbs, flirty midday texts.

And sex. Lots of sex. Melissa would sometimes pause, in those heady weeks, to wonder how she and Thomas were making this work, dating (and having sex) like carefree twentysomethings when Melissa had a kid and Thomas had two, plus a job.

But somehow the work of it—the constant logistics, the finding of babysitters and the scheduling of dates and spontaneous quickies in the midst of everything else they had going on—barely registered in Melissa’s mind because of the high, the absolute euphoria, of being so tirelessly pursued by Thomas, by seeing him hunger for her the way he did, every day, every minute.

Thomas owned his own pediatric practice, with younger doctors coming on below him to pick up some of the work.

As a result, he was able to sometimes get away in the middle of the day to see Melissa, to take her to a lunch that went long and became an early-afternoon happy hour, getting tipsy, groping at each other under the table.

Or he’d text her to meet him at one park or another for a hike, where he’d eye her hungrily in the tight black leggings she put on for such outings.

His hands always seemed to find their way to the small of her back, the curve of her hips, in places where the trail turned and they found themselves alone in the trees.

The bark of a tree trunk rough against Melissa’s back, Thomas’s mouth on hers, grabbing for her breasts through the down of a puffer vest. No matter what, lunch or hike, they always seemed to end up back at Melissa’s place, in the basement apartment, tearing at each other’s clothes in the curtained half-dark of her bedroom, devouring each other, needing each other, with a ravenousness that startled Melissa—but that she never wanted to end.

They didn’t put their kids together anymore, not after that first date, realizing it probably wasn’t a great idea.

This was something they did talk about, both agreeing that they didn’t want to confuse the kids, didn’t want to bring any more uncomfortable questions, didn’t want to go too fast for them.

Not until they were ready. So whenever they went out in the evenings (as opposed to the midday trysts that were their most common way of seeing each other), they got separate babysitters.

Often, it was Lawrence and Toby who hung out with Bradley (he loved their landlords, whom he called his “uncles”) and Melissa guessed that it was Amelia who checked in on Rhiannon and Kendall, to the extent that the older girls even needed someone to watch them anymore.

Melissa knew Thomas still spent time with Amelia, met with her at least once a week for coffee—probably more than that, since they were neighbors. She didn’t ask about it.

Summer gradually became fall, and Bradley moved from daycare to school—kindergarten, where Melissa hoped he’d make new friends.

Changes came for Melissa as well: specifically, a job, which just happened to be at Thomas’s pediatric clinic.

He made the job offer one afternoon after they’d just made love, in fact.

He’d given some appointments to a colleague so he could sneak off and get a fix—that’s what he called it, “a fix,” like he was a junkie and Melissa was his drug.

She lay on the bed afterward with no covers on her, which was the way Thomas liked it: he wanted to see her after they had sex, all of her, and she was happy to oblige—happy to be adored.

She was on her stomach and he was running his hands down her back to her thighs, her legs, then back up, shivers rippling up her spine as he explored her.

Then her phone buzzed. She reached for it and saw an email from a company she’d applied to.

They wanted her to come in for an interview.

“I don’t know why you’re bothering with that,” Thomas said after he asked what was so interesting on the phone, and she told him.

“Bothering with a job?” Melissa asked. “You mean making money? Supporting myself and my son?”

“With looking ,” he said. “I’ll give you a job. We need an accountant at the clinic.”

“You do?”

“We pay a freelance bookkeeper, but we probably need to bring someone on full-time now that the practice is growing.”

“Are you being serious right now?” Melissa turned onto her side and looked at him. “Are you really offering me a job?”

He reached for her, pulled her close. “Do you want it?”

Melissa nodded. “Yes.”

Then he kissed her, and she gave in to him again. Gave him what he wanted—which happened to be what she wanted too.

***

The job was easy—it took Melissa just a little over twenty hours a week, and because the clinic’s financial records were all electronic, she mostly didn’t even have to leave the apartment.

But somehow the job paid six figures, and her first paycheck was more than she’d ever been able to put into her checking account in a single transaction.

On the surface, the job didn’t change anything between Thomas and Melissa.

The midday visits and the occasional evening dates continued, and they never mentioned the fact that he was technically her employer now.

But there was a new charge to it when he came from the clinic to the apartment to make love to her—in spite of herself, Melissa imagined it as two coworkers sneaking away from the office for a tryst, the boss screwing the secretary.

There was something just a little bit wrong about it now, and maybe that made it more exciting—maybe there was even something wrong and exciting about the two of them all along.

Something forbidden. Something secret. The divorceé and the accused murderer.

It became another thing they didn’t talk about.

But Melissa would have been lying if she said she didn’t think about it.

She did. All the time.

She thought about whether Thomas had showered Rose with love and adoration too, the way he was showering her.

She thought about when things may have gone bad between them.

She thought about whether things would go bad between Thomas and her , and whether she’d be able to recognize the signs if they did.

If she’d know when it was time to get out. If she’d even be able to get out. If she was already in too deep.

Sometimes she even thought about how perfectly Thomas had orchestrated things.

Made her financially dependent on him. Emotionally dependent.

Living on his money, waiting in her basement room for him to come every day and save her all over again.

Feeling sad on the days she didn’t see him, perking up when he walked through the door.

Was it normal to be so dependent on one person for happiness?

This was precisely what she wanted to avoid after she got divorced. Why she didn’t want to get in a relationship too soon. Because she wanted to learn how to be happy on her own again. To reconnect with herself .

Then she’d tell herself that she was being crazy. That Thomas was the best thing that had happened to her in a long, long time.

***

Sometimes, when she was alone, she’d simply gaze out the tall windows at the back of her house—lake to the left, woods to the right—and wonder at the wildness that existed alongside the everyday of life in this place.

The wildness in people. The wildness that lived in her: an animal thing that came out when she looked at Thomas, or when she thought about what she’d do to protect her son. What she was capable of.

People still talked about the coyote. Pets went missing sometimes: a cat one week, a toy poodle the next.

The pleas showing up on an online neighborhood group— Have you seen this dog?

—alongside photos that purported to be of the animal responsible for all this worry.

Grainy, distant images captured on trail hikes, reminding Melissa of people who hunted the Yeti or claimed to have seen the Loch Ness Monster.

This creature seemed to be real, though. She’d hear it sometimes at night—at least, she was hearing something from those woods, an unearthly yelping that might either be the cries of an animal dying, or the howling of the coyote to its pack—blood calling to blood.

She’d wake up to the sound, sometimes. Listen to it in darkness. Then lie back and try to go back to sleep, thinking of predators and the way they circled just out of sight, waiting for the weak.

***