When Eric Met Sarah
~A Short Story~
Smashwords Edition
Copyright (c) 2011 by Frank Provo
Part of the Guilty Displeasures series
Warning: This story contains brief depictions of sex and violence that may be triggering to some readers.
All rights reserved. This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. Do not reproduce or redistribute it without the author’s permission. This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events depicted are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, places, or events is coincidental.
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 1: The Getaway
A thin mobile phone slid under the door. Outside, a voice bellowed through a megaphone: “Come on, Mr. Jones—let’s talk! Take the phone!” The man inside the house looked down at it, lowered the gun to his side, and reached down to pick it up. The woman cowering in the corner whimpered again when she caught a glimpse of the gun. He wondered how it had come to this.
Two hours earlier, he had been hurrying out of Seattle Bank’s Wallingford branch with the duffel bag. The teller had filled it without saying a word. He hadn’t pulled his gun; the note was sufficient. No one stopped him while he jogged down the walkway. When he slammed the car door shut, he was surprised that no cop cars showed up to block his escape.
Everything had been going according to plan. He’d chosen a sleepy branch that wouldn’t have many customers at ten o’clock on a Thursday. He had grown out his facial hair and affixed a convincing fake scar to his cheek, made from rubber cement and foundation makeup. He had spent a hundred bucks on a car at some sketchy corner “rental” place down in the Rainier Valley.
He hadn’t even pulled his gun!
It would’ve been a ten-minute drive to his own car parked behind the closed Red Robin restaurant on Fuhrman. He had the route programmed into his GPS: south on Stone Way, left at 40th, hang a right at Eastlake.
Then, he heard the sirens. The light had been red at the intersection of Stone Way and 40th. Flashing lights appeared in his rear-view. He freaked. Instead of slowing down and waiting to go left, he blew through the intersection and veered right at Bridge Way just down the block. He felt like a jackass when he glanced in the mirror and saw an ambulance zipping down the street behind him.
Barely a block later, relief turned to terror when the chirp of another siren brought his attention back to the rear-view. It was a patrol car. Maybe it had been leading the ambulance. Maybe the cop had been enjoying coffee in the 7-11 parking lot when the junky brown sedan tore through the red light. Maybe the bank had called 911 and they were after him.
Pull over or floor it? The busy confluence of Bridge Way, 38th Street, and Highway 99 was dead ahead. If he didn’t pull over before reaching the intersection, the cop would know something was up. He literally had two seconds to make a decision.
He floored it and hauled ass through the underpass and down the hill toward Fremont.
Big mistake.
The cop car gave chase.
It was an unfamiliar neighborhood. He saw what appeared to be a dead end at the bottom of the hill. In a panic, he swung right and turned onto a residential street. The street was narrow with cars parked on both sides. There was too much to keep track of. A minute, two minutes later, he slammed into the back of an old Volkswagen bus. Done in by some damn hippie’s crooked parking job, he thought as he debated what to do next.
The neighborhood was right out of Leave It to Beaver. Two-story homes with large yards flanked each side of the street. Canopies of leaves from the tall western red cedar trees hung over the sidewalks. Every other driveway had a minivan parked in it. Up the street, a yellow school crossing sign suggested this was a good street to raise kids.
Instinct took over. Spooked by the cop car that was screeching to a halt behind the wreck, he ran up the concrete path leading to the house. “Hey, help me!” he shouted, banging his fist on the door. He forgot what the woman had said when she opened it. He remembered shoving past her and slamming the door shut. And he remembered the horrified look on her face as he pulled out the Smith & Wesson and told her to keep quiet.
CHAPTER 2: Introductions
He looked at the phone in his hands. There was a sticky note affixed to it that read, “SPEED DIAL: 1.” They wanted to talk, but he knew the conversation would be one-sided. Let the girl go and surrender. When do you want us to kill you? He saw no way of talking himself out of the situation.
“M-m-maybe you should hear what they have to say,” the terrified woman in the corner whispered. Her gray slacks were wet. She had urinated on herself.
“Please! Please, just don’t say anything right now,” he barked at her. She jumped and turned away, tucking her knees even closer to her chest.
He hunched against the wall and used the barrel of the gun to peel back the drape a little ways. There were five or six cop cars out there. Barricades had been setup. An armored van was parked on the neighbor’s lawn across the street. Men in blue uniforms were everywhere, along with a few wearing black vests and helmets. It looked like the whole God-damned Seattle police force was out there.
He stepped away from the window and approached the woman. She recoiled as he drew close. “Look, I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to bring you into this. I didn’t mean for any of this to happen.”
She wiped her cheek, wet from tears, and pleaded with him, “Why?! Wuh—why are you doing this to me? Why don’t you just let me go?!” She was blubbering so badly she was barely able to eek out the last comment.
He raised the gun, as if to strike her with it. Her upset frustrated him. Adrenaline had amped his emotions. He lowered it a moment later.
“I—I can’t do that,” he told her matter-of-factly. “There are too many cops out there. You’re probably the only reason why they’re not busting in here right now. I need to think.”
He took a few steps toward the couch and then turned to look back at her. She was a mess. Her face was moist and swollen from crying. The dark patch going down the front of her pants and between her legs was obvious. A wave of guilt rushed through him.
“Listen... lady, I really am sorry,” he told her. “We should get you cleaned up.”
She looked up at him. Her expression was the most vulnerable he had ever seen.
“We’ll grab you a change of clothes. You can get yourself together in the bathroom while I wait outside.”
It took another five minutes of convincing her he wasn’t going to molest or rape her before she marshaled the confidence to stand up.
While she was in the bathroom, he decided to use the phone that had been slipped under the door. May as well keep them at bay a little longer, he thought.
He selected the telephone icon, tapped the speed dial option, and pressed “1-Det. Mays.” A stoic voice picked up on the other end. “This is Detective Mays. Thank you for calling, Mr. Jones.”
“How do you know who I am?” he answered back.
“That’s not important right now,” the detective replied. “How’s the girl? Is she safe?”
He considered his words carefully.
“Y—Yeah, yes, she’s safe. I—I haven’t harmed her.”
The detective asked to speak to the woman. He didn’t know how to respond to the man’s request, so he kept the phone pressed to his ear without saying a word.
“Mr. Jones, don’t make me repeat myself. I need you to put her on the phone,” the detective said firmly. “I need to know for sure that she’s OK or I won’t be able to keep these SWAT guys back.”
He shook his head and sighed. I’m in over my head, he thought as he reached out and rapped his knuckles against the bathroom door.
“Um, Miss? The police want to talk to you.”
She slowly opened the door and stuck her head out. She had changed her pants and underwear, but her face still needed some tender loving care. She reached out for the phone.
“H—Hello?” she whispered into it.
There was a pause while the detective talked to her, and then she spoke again. “I’m OK, I guess. I’m scared, but he... he hasn’t done anything to me.”
She handed the phone back to him.
“Why don’t we work something out, Mr. Jones?” the detective proposed. “We can find some way out of this. What can we do so you’ll let the girl go?”
Nothing came to mind. He was too scared to consider letting her leave.
“I—I’m sorry, detective,” he said. “I’m not ready to do that yet. I need some time to think. I’ll call you back soon.”
He tapped the End Call button and looked at the woman. She had a dejected look on her face. “Finish cleaning yourself up,” he told her.
She came out a short time later.
With the police at bay for the time being, he found himself observing the woman more closely. She had beautiful shoulder-length blonde hair with red streaks in it. He thought the proper term was “highlights,” but he couldn’t remember. Her eyes were inset deep, her lips full. She half reminded him of the girl in that Jason Bourne movie, Julia Something-or-other.
She had on a tight yellow shirt that was straining against her handful-sized breasts. He never was very good at judging a woman’s chest, but he was one-hundred percent sure she wasn’t wearing a bra underneath.
In lieu of her soiled gray slacks, she had changed into a flattering black lounge pant that emphasized her firm, round bottom. She probably wasn’t a runner, but she clearly kept in shape.
It dawned on him that it had been a long time since he had spent this much time in the same room with a woman—longer still with a woman as attractive as her.
He led her back to the living room and asked her to take a seat on the couch. He collapsed into the plush chair next to it.
“So, Miss... uh, what’s your name?”
She looked up, inhaled, and struggled to speak. “Sarah,” she said finally. “Sarah Elliot.”
He forced a half-hearted smile.
“I’m Eric. Eric Jones. And I’m very sorry we met this way.”
CHAPTER 3: Eric’s Story
Eric told Sarah about the robbery, the botched getaway, and the crash that led him to her front door. He apologized to her profusely, multiple times, for involving her in his blunder. To his surprise, she wasn’t angry with him. Her hysterics had calmed significantly since they had exchanged names (and she was allowed to change into fresh clothes).
After an extended period of silence, she asked him meekly, “Wha—what made you do it?”
“What?” he asked. “What do you mean?”
Sarah took a breath and spoke with more confidence. “Why did you decide to rob the bank?”
He frowned. He didn’t want to tell her about his biggest failure of all, but he felt compelled to do so. After all, he had broken into her home, scared her out of her mind, and caused her to piss her pants.
“I—I, uh... two years ago, I lost my job,” he explained. “You know, the usual story: layoffs due to the bad economy.”
She nodded, listening intently.
“I tried to find another job. For months, I sent out résumés and went to interviews. Didn’t get any bites. Eventually, my unemployment ran out...”
He found himself choking back tears.
“The mortgage... it adjusted. Is that the right word? Anyway, the payment went up. We couldn’t afford the payment. My wife and I, we... we were having problems anyway.”
Sarah gave him a look that would’ve melted the hardest of hearts. He was awestruck that she could be so sympathetic towards him after he had inflicted such terror on her.
“You probably don’t know what it’s like to not be able to contribute to the house... how helpless it makes you. My wife, Maria... she started to blame me. One day, I came home and—”
Sarah reached out to take his hand. He set the gun down on the cushion next to him and accepted the gesture. Her hand was warm, soft. It reminded him of Maria’s hand.
“There was a piece of paper taped to the television. It was like a laundry list of everything that had gone wrong the past two years. She left me.”
He bit his lip and paused.
“At the bottom of the note, she told me she had been seeing someone else for four months.”
Sarah squeezed his hand to comfort him.
“They’re foreclosing on my house. I still have no job. I—I felt trapped. I was going to be homeless, alone. I was going crazy...”
His story paralleled the ones that she heard every night on the news. She felt sorry for him. It didn’t change how scared she was, but she could almost understand why he ended up in the place he did.
“But why rob a bank?” she asked.
“This is going to sound crazy, but I thought—I thought if I could get some money, I could catch up on the house, maybe get her back.”
He shrugged his shoulders. She smiled at him.
“I couldn’t borrow from my friends, family. My buddy, Ed, he told me—he told me about the branch up there near 45th and Stone. Said it was rickety, didn’t even have a security guard. Said the place felt unsafe. He was just telling me because he needed someone to complain to, you know?”
She nodded slightly.
“But something clicked in my head. It was like fate had given me a hint. Where can you find gobs of money? A bank.”
He slapped his forehead impishly. She gave a slight grin.
“I cased the place for a couple weeks. Have you been there? You wouldn’t believe it,” he said with a touch of elation in his voice, raising his arms and widening his eyes in a mock gesture of dumbfounded surprise. “I sure didn’t. It’s the size of a closet. The glass is all plate, not reinforced. They only have one camera, and it doesn’t even cover the whole counter! It seemed like an easy target.”
Sarah nodded again. What he said made sense to her, even if the reasoning behind it didn’t.
“I rented a different car, grew out my whiskers, and put on this silly damn fake scar,” he said, peeling the flesh-colored rubber cement from his cheek. She tried unsuccessfully to stifle a laugh.
“No one stopped me. I didn’t have to pull out the gun. I figured I got away scot-free... Well, you know the rest—I guess my getaway wasn’t clean after all.”
Sarah let his story sink in. She fidgeted on the couch for a moment before broaching the subject of the police surrounding her home.
“Y—You know, if you give up,” she began, “yeah, they’ll take you to jail... but given the circumstances, I bet they won’t totally throw the book at you. They can get you some help.”
Eric wasn’t ready to consider the possibility. He shook his head vigorously and stood up. “No!” he bellowed, waving the gun around as he spoke. “I can’t do that! I can’t spend the next twenty years behind bars. And you haven’t seen the hardware out there.”
She peered up, hoping to catch a glimpse at the commotion outside.
“They’ve got a dozen cops, a SWAT van,” he told her. “I need to know they’re not going to blow my brains out. I need to—I need to think of something.”
As if on cue, the lights went out.
“What the—” Eric began. The shrill, high-pitched ring of the mobile phone interrupted him.
It was Detective Mays.
“Hello again, Mr. Jones.”
“You may as well call me Eric,” Eric said into the receiver. “What the hell happened to the lights?”
“Lights? What do you mean?”
“The God damn lights,” Eric shouted. “They’re out!”
Detective Mays tried to assure him it was a coincidence. “It wasn’t us. Looks like the houses next door are dark too.”
Clever, Eric thought. At this time of day, he knows I won’t be able to tell if lights are on in other houses or not.
“OK, detective. What do you want?”
“You didn’t call. I need to check in, see how things are going,” the detective told him. “My superiors are getting antsy. How are things in there?”
“We’re OK.”
Eric extended the phone in Sarah’s general direction. “I’m OK, too,” she shouted.
“Good, good,” Mays said. “Why don’t you tell me what happened? Help me understand the situation...”
Eric snorted. “Will it do any good?” he asked the detective. “Will it do a damn bit of good?”
Mays didn’t lie to him. “In the long run, probably not, but maybe it’ll help me figure out how to get you out of there in one piece.”
“Is this a negotiation?” Eric asked.
“Let’s call it a conversation,” Detective Mays replied.
Eric repeated the same story he had just told Sarah a few minutes earlier, minus the parts about the cheating wife and perfect disguise. He played up how he didn’t mean for anyone to get hurt and how the patrol car had spooked him.
After he finished, Mays made his pitch. “You sound like a reasonable man, Eric. Why don’t you come out? We’ll go down to the station, talk—”
“No! I can’t do that,” Eric shouted. “I’ve seen your guys out there! I’m getting out of here in one piece. You need to let me go.”
“You know we can’t do that, Eric,” the detective told him. “But maybe we can think of something, if you let the girl—”
“Augh!” Eric cried out. “So you can rush in here and blow my brains out?! Hell no!”
“Eric, Eric... you need to keep calm,” Mays advised. “Things go south when you don’t keep calm.”
“Tell you what, Mays. You get the fucking lights back on and we’ll talk about me keeping calm.”
Eric tapped the End Call button and threw the phone onto the couch next to Sarah. He was sweating and breathing heavily.
“So, that went well,” Sarah said sarcastically.
“Yeah,” Eric said. “I guess I got a little carried away there.”
She sat back down on the couch. Almost immediately, she stood back up.
“I’m thirsty. Do you want a soda?”
Eric nodded. “Yeah.”
He watched her as she stepped into the kitchen. He heard the sound of the fridge being opened. Seconds later, she returned with two cans of cola and a plate of desiccated puff pastry snacks.
“Here,” she said, tossing him a can. “It’s generic, store brand. I hope you don’t mind.”
He laughed and bent the tab on the can. There was a slight pssht sound as the carbonation escaped. “This is great, thank you,” he said to her.
She sat back down and toyed with her own can.
An awkward silence descended on the room. Eric’s tale had broken the ice, but they were both too nervous to keep the give-and-take going. Her beauty had him flustered. She was torn between sympathy and fear of the gun in his hand.
Somehow, he mustered the courage to engage her.
“So, Sarah... it’ll take them a while to get the lights back on... if they do. We may as well talk. What’s, uh, your story?”
CHAPTER 4: Sarah’s Story
“I lost the baby,” she told him. “After that, we really didn’t know how to relate to each other. I guess we were walking on eggshells. We drifted apart.”
Eric had asked her to tell him about herself. She told him it wouldn’t be an interesting story—that he would be bored. She was wrong. Sitting there on the couch, holding her in his arms, he found himself deeply saddened by her monumental loss.
Minutes earlier, the conversation had started out benign. “What do you mean, ‘what’s my story?’” she had asked him. His query had left her puzzled. Depending on the context, she might normally be able to respond to the question, but in this situation, the man doing the asking was a total stranger with a gun.
“Your story... these pictures,” he had said, waving his hand in front of the pictures sitting on the end table. “The men don’t look like boyfriends or a husband. And I don’t see any children in them,” he added. “But, this house? Single people your age—mid, late 20’s?—don’t tend to own houses. So, I wonder, what’s your deal? Ya know?”
He could tell by the sad look on her face that he had struck a nerve.
“Uh,” she began. “Yeah, I get what you mean.” She looked absolutely defeated. “I—I haven’t talked about myself with anyone in a long time. I was in therapy a couple years ago. It’s... complicated.”
“Indulge me.”
She started from the beginning, telling him about college, how she had been engaged to her college sweetheart, how they had both landed good jobs after graduation, and how an unexpected blessing had changed their world.
“I was pregnant,” she said. “Matt and I, we were so into it. I’d be at work looking up baby names on the Internet. He’d come home with a rattle or a Onesie for the baby, even though she hadn’t been born yet. I remember, we both cried when we saw the sonogram.”
Eric smiled at that. He had always wanted to have a baby with Maria.
“Just before my third trimester, Matt came home and said he had big news. He’d been given a big promotion. We’d have to scrimp by, but it meant I could take some significant time off for the baby. We felt like the universe wanted us to bring a child into the world.”
He could almost see a glimmer of joy in her face as she described the excitement in the run-up to motherhood.
“But then... a few weeks later, I—I woke up in intense pain. There was blood everywhere.”
By that point in her story, Sarah had started to sob. Eric felt guilty for making her re-live it. He lifted himself out of the easy chair and shifted his body onto the couch, putting an arm around her.
“You don’t have to continue,” he had told her.
“No... no, it’s OK,” she tried to convince him. She didn’t sound sure of herself. He let her continue anyway.
“They rushed me to the hospital. I passed out. Apparently, I had lost a lot of blood and my heart was going haywire. When I—”
She interrupted herself mid-sentence and wept uncontrollably for a solid minute.
“As I was saying, when I woke up... they told me I lost the baby. ‘Stillborn,’ they said. They called it a ‘placental abruption.’ All I knew was my baby girl was dead.”
Eric really wished he had stopped her when he had the chance. Her face said, better than her words, the unspeakable pain she still felt.
“After that, I was a basket case. I couldn’t go back to work. I went to therapy. Matt and I, we... we fought. Our relationship changed. We were constantly getting on each other’s nerves. We... were going to get married after the baby came.”
She was crying a torrent of tears.
Eric finally had to stop her. He pulled away from her and offered her a tissue from the box on the end table. “You were right. I shouldn’t have asked. It wasn’t my place. I’m so sorry I made you re-live your loss,” he told her.
“No,” she contradicted him. “It’s... OK. I shouldn’t keep it bottled up all the time.”
He nodded his understanding, and she finished the story. “After it all ended, I took over the payments on the house. My parents helped in the beginning, since I wasn’t well enough to return to work. I re-entered the workforce just before the economy went bad. It’s been about three years since it happened.”
Without pause, Eric asked a question that, in hindsight, was crossing the line. “And there’s been no one else since?”
Her face recoiled as if she’d been slapped.
“No,” she said in a drawn out wail that he thought only old women bawling at funerals could make. “I don’t know how to relate to people anymore. I’ve tried to go out on a couple of dates, and each time I break down, either when I’m getting ready, or during.”
Sarah collapsed into him. He didn’t know what to do, what to say, so he just held her. When she finally came up for air, he helped wipe away her tears and apologized profusely for upsetting her.
“So, that’s my story—I lost the baby. After that, we really didn’t know how to relate to each other. I guess we were walking on eggshells. We drifted apart.”
Eric couldn’t find words sufficient enough to reply to her dreadful tale, so he simply leaned in and hugged her. Two or three minutes passed by before his own sadness dissipated enough to allow him to loosen his arms and let her go.
In response, she did something totally unexpected: she kissed him.
He was dumbstruck. He thought she’d pull away in a second or two. Instead, she let the kiss linger. When he parted his lips, out of sheer disbelief more than anything else, she did the same.
He could have pulled away. His brain was telling him to pull away. But he didn’t.
The velvety wetness of her tongue was like electricity on his lips. When his tongue teased against hers, he felt a charge that bordered on orgasmic.
At some point, he reached a hand up to grope her chest. It was instinct. She didn’t stop him. She mouthed, “That feels nice,” and kissed him more frantically.
She shifted her position and swung her left leg up around him, climbing onto his lap to straddle him. In response, he reached his hands behind her and gave her bottom a rough squeeze.
With her sitting on top of him like that, he could have sworn he felt the heat of her arousal mere inches from his throbbing manhood.
Emboldened, Eric lifted the front of her shirt and slid his hand upward underneath it. The tight fabric forced him to run his fingertips up the entire length of her stomach, which made her moan quietly. He found the underside of her left breast and teased her nipple with his middle and index fingers. It was erect.
He wrapped his hand around her breast and grasped firmly. She answered by rocking her hips and grinding her pelvis into him.
When Sarah finally pulled away after what felt like a blissful eternity, Eric’s cheeks were ablaze and his breathing was labored. He hadn’t been that aroused, on the receiving end of that kind of passion, in months.
“I’m sorry. I—I don’t know what came over me,” she said.
He had to collect himself. He took a deep breath and found himself struggling to find words. Finally, he managed to stammer a reply. “Me either... It’s... OK... it’s been a hell of a day.”
She smiled when he said that.
“Yes, it has,” she replied. “And, you know what, if we get through this, I think... I think I’d like to see you again. If that’d be OK.”
Her eyes went wide as a glimmer of realization struck her. She added, “I mean, I know it’d probably be at a jail or something, but, um... would that be OK?”
A twinge of hope coursed through him. He hadn’t experienced that emotion in months. The tone of her voice left no room for doubt. From the way she had stammered her words, he could tell she wasn’t just saying what he wanted to hear in order to coax her freedom. She was genuinely offering to be a part of his life. “I think I’d like that very much,” he told her.
Moments later, the lights came back on. For lack of anything better to do, she flipped on the television. “May as well see what they’re saying about you, huh?”
A local news channel was covering the story. Their portrayal wasn’t kind to him. One of the tellers in the bank told the reporter he had roughed her up. An old lady that had been crossing the intersection at Stone and 40th said he’d knocked her down, almost ran her over. The stay-at-home moms in the neighborhood were beside themselves with fear that their children in school up the street would be caught in a crossfire.
“It’s not true,” he told her. “None of it.”
Eric reiterated how he’d encountered no resistance at the bank. He didn’t remember the old woman in the intersection, but he was pretty sure the path had been clear of pedestrians when he blew through. Tears welled up in his eyes again as he implored her to believe that he wasn’t going to hurt anyone—certainly not children.
Sarah scooted closer to him on the couch. “I know,” she said softly. She kissed him on the cheek and gave him a hug. It was her turn to be supportive. “It’s going to be OK.”
For an instant, he felt safe. I can’t believe any man would leave such a beautiful, tender girl, he thought while enjoying her warm embrace.
CHAPTER 5: Resolution
“Hello, detective,” Eric said as he tapped the Answer Call icon. There was a commotion on the other end of the line. If not for all the cops out front, he would have sworn the detective had called him from the food court at Northgate Mall.
He peered out the window as he spoke. A man in a shirt-and-tie was arguing with a man in tactical gear. “Hold on, dammit! I said hold on! I have him on the phone now,” the voice on the other end of the line said.
“Eric? Hey, you there?” the detective asked.
“Yeah, I’m here, Mays—what’s going on?”
“Look, man, we got you your lights, but I need your help here,” Mays pleaded. He sounded flustered. “We’ve got the whole neighborhood on lock-down. There’s a school not a mile away. We’re, uh, we’re getting close to rush hour.”
“Get to the point, Mays.”
“I need to get you out of there soon. What can I do to make that happen?”
The formerly confident detective seemed out-of-sorts. Something had spooked him.
“We’re not ready in here yet,” Eric told the detective. “What’s wrong?”
“Dammit, Jones—you need to give me something. I need you to give me something. Let the girl go. Fuck, man, let me take her place if you need a hostage.”
The detective clearly had lost his shit, but why?
Eric shouted into the phone, “Mays, what the fuck’s wrong?!”
“Eric... Eric, the guys in charge, man, they’re—you’ve got one hostage in there. We’ve got school buses out here, a neighborhood full of people about to come home. The bean counters have done the math, and it’s not looking good for you.”
“Why tell me this, Mays? Why are you putting this woman’s life in danger?!” He felt bad for exaggerating his mood when he had no intention of causing Sarah harm.
She stood up from the couch and looked out the window. Men in bullet-proof vests and helmets were crouched behind the squad cars parked in front of her house. The officers in blue uniforms were keeping their distance from the men in vests. A man wearing a tie was pacing back and forth with a mobile phone in his hand.
“Eric, what’s happening?” she asked furtively.
He covered the receiver and tilted his head toward the kitchen. “Get behind the doorway or up against the wall,” he commanded. “I don’t like this.”
She backed up against the wall next to the couch, near the doorway leading into the hall, and crouched down.
He put the receiver back up to his mouth. “Mays, I’m not going to hurt her if you give me space,” he calmly explained. “You need to make that clear to your bosses. I’m not going to hurt anyone. I just need space.”
“Eric, I don’t know how much time I can buy you.” The detective sounded dead serious. “A half-hour, an hour... I don’t know. I’ll see what I can do. Hold on—”
Eric watched as the man in the tie outside ran up to one of the men in a SWAT vest. They were gesturing wildly. Are they arguing? he wondered.
He mumbled to himself, “How much shit am I in?”
Sarah started to stand up. “What’s wr—” she muttered, likely meaning to ask him what was wrong. Instead, she interrupted herself when she noticed a dark shape moving in front of the window near the corner of the living room.
“Oh my God!” she cried out. “What’s that?!”
Eric turned to face the window. The gun in his hand was pointed in her direction, but the barrel was angled downward.
“Hey! You get out of here!” Eric shouted.
Simultaneously, the figure disappeared out of view and Sarah stumbled forward. Startled by the sudden movement out of the corner of his eye, Eric raised his arm defensively. She fell into him, arms outstretched.
BANG!
It sounded like someone had lit off a firecracker.
Sarah slumped against him and then fell to her knees. He looked down at her, stunned. He watched as she fell backward and came to rest on her back. Why is she on the floor? he wondered. What was that noise? His thoughts were racing a mile a minute, and he couldn’t catch a single one of them.
Then, he saw the blood on her chest. Her shirt had a hole in it, roughly where her left breast was—the same breast he had so tenderly squeezed only minutes earlier.
Blood flooded out of the hole. In a split-second, the small red patch on her yellow shirt grew to cover a major portion of her chest and stomach.
“Oh God! No, no, no!” Eric yelled. He dropped the phone and fell to his knees.
“Sarah?! Oh God, no!”
He set the gun down on the floor next to him and pressed his right hand onto the wound. It didn’t help. His hand came away drenched in blood.
Her mouth was moving, but no words were coming out—only grunts and moans.
“Please, no!”
He reached his left hand behind her head, moved it down to her shoulder, and then lifted her towards him. He cradled her in his arms.
“Sarah, stay with me,” he begged.
She lifted her arm slightly, beckoning him closer. He leaned in. Her mouth was moving, but he couldn’t make out the words. He leaned closer. All he could hear was gagging and wet coughs.
“E-Eric... I forg—” she began to say. She never finished the sentence. Her head tilted back. She let out one last weak cough, and then she was gone.
Eric held her close and screamed, “No! Oh God, no!”
Just then, all hell broke loose. A small, cylindrical canister smashed through the front window and landed in the hallway. White smoke was billowing out of it. The window in the corner shattered inward. A leg stepped through it. Something big smacked into the front door. Eric’s head twirled left and right in a futile effort to focus on one specific aggressor.
He set Sarah down, grabbed the gun, and stood up. Smoke was filling the room.
Eric looked down at Sarah’s lifeless body. She lay there, arms open—stuck forever in a “hug me” pose. Except she wouldn’t hug anyone again.
His mind assailed him with images of what they had shared during their brief time together and what they could have shared.
He saw them making out earlier.
He saw her visiting him in prison.
He saw them standing at the altar.
He saw her giving birth to their son.
All of the nervousness and tension coursing through his body ebbed away, replaced by feelings of intense sadness and loss.
He looked at the front door.
He looked at her body again and cracked a hint of a smile.
In a swift motion, he raised the barrel of the gun to the side of his head. The front door burst inward in an explosion of wood and paint. A SWAT officer rushed in.
Eric pulled the trigger.
Afterword
We live in a society that adores the concept of “love at first sight.” Me, personally, I’m a firm believer that the situation bears a great deal of influence over whether or not two people find a spark.
Have you ever pulled a series of all-nighters with a friend or project partner, only to find yourself smitten with them? Or, attended a particularly exciting sporting event and found yourself buying a beer for someone you didn’t know 30 seconds earlier?
Stress, adrenaline—oftentimes, these are the real predictors of love.
And don’t get me started on the phenomenon known as Stockholm Syndrome, in which hostages come to empathize with their captors.
My intent with When Eric Met Sarah was to take everything we know about “love in a time of stress” and cram it into a brief time window. In the story, we see two strangers meet, kindle a friendship, and ignite a romance in the span of six or seven hours. By the end, you find yourself rooting for the pair—even though you know it’s not meant to be.
Why did Sarah fall for Eric? What was she trying to say to him with her last breath? How would they have fared if he had surrendered and they had to carry on a jailhouse romance? I love that there are so many unanswered questions.
My goal with the Guilty Displeasures series is to come up with stories that delve into the darker side of the human condition; to explore what makes “bad” people tick. Sexual situations may make you feel uncomfortable. Acts of violence may verge on the extreme. Characters will do things that shock you. If you read a Guilty Displeasures story and find yourself feeling aroused one minute and guilty the next, then you’re on the right track.
When Eric Met Sarah is probably the tamest idea I’ve had for a story in this series. It’s also the closest to a pure “romance” story I’m ever going to get. If this is your first taste of Guilty Displeasures and you came away wanting more sex, more action, and more guilt, then I encourage you to check out the other stories in the series.
- Frank Provo, November 2011
About the Author
Frank Provo lives in the Midwest with his wife, two obnoxious finches, and an occasional guinea pig, Actual guinea pigs—That's not a euphemism for the test subjects that he locks up in the basement. Those are just test subjects.
He grew up in the seedy underbelly of Seattle, Washington during the 1980's and 1990's: The time of The Green River Killer, Nirvana, and Mary Kay LeTourneau. Many of his stories are set in the Seattle area and tackle subjects that may prove too intense for sensitive readers or for those that have been on the wrong end of a violent crime.
However, he has been known to pen an all-ages adventure caper from time to time. Remember how Judy Blume wrote all those children's books and then published Wifey? Frank's body of work is the reverse of that: a gaggle of Wifeys with one or two Fudges sprinkled in.
Influences include: Stephen King, Douglas Adams, C.S. Lewis, Ayn Rand, Raymond Chandler, Eric Nylund, and many, many others.
His bibliography primarily consists of short-stories. His current project is the Guilty Displeasures short-story series, which takes a cold, hard look at people caught up in not-so-nice situations. Each fast-paced story delivers action, love, violence, steamy sex, and unexpected twists meant to titillate and disturb the reader. These stories may be triggering to some readers.