Chapter 32: Helena

Chapter 32: Helena
It was during transit that Helena came out of her soupy unconsciousness, and finally was fully awake. Ryan was driving a beat up old truck; she was curled in the passenger’s seat wondering why she felt sick and dizzy.
“What the hell happened?” she asked numbly. Her mouth had trouble moving the way it was supposed to. “What’s happening now?”
“I’m taking you to a new spot,” Ryan told her.
“A new spot?”
“It’s not safe at the apartment anymore now that Troy knows you’re there.”
Helena pressed her fingers against her eyes, exhaling hard through her nose. “Oh my god, I wasn’t sure if that really happened. I thought maybe it was just a dream.”
“No. It happened. And you sort of made it worse.”
Helena gave him a curious look but said nothing. The scene was coming back to her in glimpses but mainly what she remembered was Troy’s hunched back and shoulders tensing as Ryan went ragdoll under his grip. She recalled seeing this from the living room bay window then the next thing she remembered was being outside.
“I hit someone with a hammer, right?” she asked, cautious and unsure of herself. It didn’t sound like something she would do but then again, the past few days encapsulated a lot of firsts.
“Yes,” Ryan answered shortly.
“But not Troy.”
“You hit Daniel with a hammer and then you tried to hit Troy but he knocked you out and now they know we helped you and they know we were hiding you, and this whole thing just got a million times worse.”
Helena studied his knuckles gripping white against the red vinyl of the old steering wheel. His sights were focused forward, no deviation from staring straight ahead. Part of her wanted to apologize for that but the other part wanted to remind him that he was losing a fight to a man capable of extreme violence, and no other option presented itself.
“He was going to kill you, Ryan,” she said in her quiet voice, the one that she had used when they first met. “He was choking you.”
“He probably wasn’t going to kill me,” Ryan argued but Helena saw him shiver. She hadn’t been there to watch his vision go gray or to see his eyelids flutter the way hers had but she watched it all for long enough to know that she was right. Troy had no intention of stopping, and Ryan had lost his ability to fight back.
“Where are we going now then?” she asked, hoping to change the topic of conversation in general.
“Sheila’s got a friend who said we could stay at her place. She’s down in Santa Cruz visiting her family for the next week.” He made the briefest of eye contact accidentally when he looked to the right at a four way stop. His head snapped back to center immediately. “She’s a nurse so she’s got no connection to the pack. Hopefully that’ll throw them off our trail.”
“And speaking of nurse-”
“Sheila checked the both of us out before we left,” Ryan said. “I loaded you into the truck right away. Didn’t even bother to bring you upstairs.”
“Do I have a concussion?”
“Yeah, Sheila says I can’t let you fall asleep. In fact, she told me if you were still unconscious by the time we got to the apartment that I needed to bite the bullet and take you to the hospital.”
“Oh, look at that: I’m awake, and already making things better.”
She delivered this as a joke but Ryan seemed less amused than ever. There was nothing she could say to smooth it over between them, especially considering she didn’t actually want to apologize. She knew it was stupid and risky to come screaming out of the apartment brandishing a hammer (oh god, I did come out with a hammer, didn’t I? she thought as another glimpse appeared in her memory) but what if she hadn’t? What if she just sat idly by while the life drained out of Ryan then Troy turned his attention on her? With Ryan out of the way, he would have blown in that apartment door in a heartbeat with Helena cowering inside like one of the three little pigs.
“We’re here,” Ryan said, stopping in front of an apartment building in a well-kept and colorful neighborhood. “Take the keys, go inside. I’ve got to park this thing somewhere that won’t give our location away.”
Helena took the door keys from him without saying anything. She looked around for her bag or anything at all and realized just how quickly this had to happen. There was nothing now. Not even her purse. Rather than bring it up, Helena got out of the truck and headed towards the front door.
Inside was nice. Much nicer than Helena had expected. There wasn’t much in the way of food but there was a beautiful bathroom with a deep, classic clawfoot tub. Considering she had plenty of time to kill and wasn’t allowed to fall asleep, she decided to run a bath. It had been a few days since she had gotten a chance to clean herself, and she felt more disgusting and dirty than she ever had in her life. Of course, the only other time she went this long without a shower was the ill-advised camping trip she had taken her senior year. Somebody’s boyfriend at the time had been the outdoors type, and Helena greatly misunderstood his definition of roughing it.
She got undressed as the water filled the tub. Since it was so deep, it took awhile, and Helena sat cross legged on the closed toilet to wait. She thought about Ryan telling her she made it worse but now it occurred to her that he didn’t just mean the fight. What if, she thought with her stomach sinking, he found out I left a voicemail? What if that’s why Troy confronted him?
The water rose past the middle of the tub, its surface decorated with curls of steam. Helena tenderly put one foot in, gasping slightly when the heat penetrated through to her nerves. She didn’t realize how cold she had been until her body was completely immersed, and she felt the pins and needles tingle of numbness being chased off.
Lowering the rest of her body into the water was a slow process. She wasn’t used to these heatless San Francisco apartments in the damp part of town, how they stayed cold even when the weather outside was creeping its way towards summer time. Her extremities had gotten used to the chill, and they screamed as feeling returned to them. Helena sank in up to her neck, her long hair a waterfall over the lip of the porcelain.
There was a moment where she felt herself starting to doze off, cocooned in the warmth and safe for the time being. Had it not been for Ryan loudly entering the apartment, she would have probably fallen asleep but the sound of him rushing in then slamming the door behind him jolted her awake. Oh good, she thought sourly. He’s in a mood.
A knock at the bathroom door, sharp and rattling, confirmed this. “Helena?” Ryan said, muffled by the barrier. “Are you alright in there?”
“I’m fine,” came the distant and dreamy response. Helena’s head was floating, her body swallowed in liquid heat. The last thing she wanted to deal with was Ryan’s concern.
“Look, we gotta talk some stuff out,” he was continuing even though Helena was only half listening, “so when you’re done doing whatever it is you’re doing in there then…” Helena aligned her eyes with the door. She heard Ryan sigh. “Then...come find me.”
“Ryan, why don’t you just come in here and talk to me now?”
She waited for him to give her a reason for why that would be a bad idea. After a drawn out pause, she watched the door knob turn. When Ryan’s face appeared in front of her, she laughed at his wide-eyed expression. The door slammed shut.
“Ryan! Com’on! Come talk to me.”
“Why didn’t you tell me you were in the tub? That you’re naked?!
“I didn’t think it mattered. Just come in here. Stop acting like you’ve never seen a pair of boobs before.”
Ryan entered again, this time with his face conspicuously turned away. He fumbled around to make sure the toilet lid was closed. It would have been easier just to look and see but the toilet was very close to the tub, and the tub was where Helena was, bent against the curve of the porcelain with one long leg stretched up to the ceiling.
“I’ve got to shave,” she muttered to herself more than Ryan, running her hand against the grain of hair on her leg. She extended her foot towards Ryan. “Right? See? I need to shave.”
“You’re in a good mood,” Ryan said as he hesitantly lowered down to the toilet. He wasn’t doing a great job of not seeing Helena but he was doing a good job of not looking at her.
“The bath really helped.”
The bath was only part of it; Helena just didn’t know how to explain how relaxed she felt. Maybe it was due to a head injury, maybe it was no longer nervously hiding out in the apartment right above the men who kidnapped her. Whatever it was, she felt like she was flying. She felt fleetingly and momentarily invincible.
“You should have stayed inside,” Ryan chastised her. “What you did was dangerous and reckless.”
Helena shrugged but didn’t respond. She vaguely recalled him saying this to her when she woke up in the car, and even then with her mind half scrambled and the coppery taste of her own blood in her mouth from where she bit her tongue, she thought he was being silly. Unnecessarily proud. Ungrateful for her help.
“This apartment is lovely,” she said rather than engage with whatever conversation Ryan wanted to have. “You guys should see if they have any open units in this building.”
“Yeah, I’ll get right on that. Do you hear what I’m saying though?”
Helena sat upright, spooling her hair around her hand and holding it out of the water as she moved. Her breasts broke the surface, her nipples resting just above the level like the stones that rose from the ocean. She waited for Ryan’s gaze to fall to them but they stayed locked on her eyes.
“Is that all you wanted to talk to me about?” She rose out of the water like the Venus de Milo, her hands resting on the lip of the tub as she leaned towards him. “Nothing else on your mind.”
“What exactly should be on my mind, Helena?”
She shrugged again then took one of his hands by the wrist and pressed it against her chest. The nipple was hard, pointing directly into the center of his palm. “I want you to have on your mind what I’ve got on mine.”
Ryan didn’t pull away as Helena leaned closer to him. It was only when their lips actually touched that he jumped off his makeshift seat and jerked his hand away from her.
“What is with you today?” he asked, genuinely shocked.
Helena stretched her arms out to him, smiling as she beckoned him back to her. She was used to getting what she wanted but she had never particularly wanted a boy the way she wanted Ryan. There were boys at school who interested her because of their social standing or their families connections but not this cunt flooding burning she experienced from the smallest touches.
“I can’t go to sleep, Ryan,” Helena said with a wicked grin. “What better way to keep me awake.”