Black Mask, Blue Jeans

I saw the light first. Not light from the lamp, which was off. Light from outside, from the firepit, thrown long and thin across the floor when the door came open, and my first thought was Mae, my first thought was Theo, my first thought was that someone had come in to say goodnight and I was about to be embarrassed and I was pulling the sheet up and Eli was already moving, already sitting up, already putting himself in front of me, because that's what he did, that was the whole of him, his body between mine and whatever came.

And what came was a man.

Not a shape this time. A man. Filling the door, cutting the firelight into a long thin band around himself, and he was tall and narrow and the thing I saw first, the thing I will see until I die, was the mask. Black. A ski mask, pulled down to the collar of a dark jacket, the eyes two wrong-shape holes, the mouth a seam. And below the mask, below the jacket, a pair of jeans, light blue, skinny, the kind of jeans that are almost a joke, the kind you'd see in a mall, the kind that don't belong on a man who has come to do what this man had come to do, and the wrongness of them, the mundane blue of them against the black of the mask, was worse than the mask, was the thing that told me this was real.

Eli said, "Who - "

He didn't get to finish. The man moved and Eli moved and the two of them met the wall together and the lamp came on, knocked, light flaring, and the room was everything at once, the sheet, the floor, the mask, the blue jeans, Eli's bare back, a hand with something in it, and I screamed, I screamed the cottage down, I screamed so loud it should have brought the whole lake through the windows, and the man hit Eli, and the sound Eli made was a sound I had not known a person could make, and I went for the man with my hands and I was nothing to him, I was nothing, he moved me out of the air like a curtain, and I hit the floor and the breath went out of me and I couldn't get it back.

The screaming brought Mae and Theo. I heard them, the back door, the running, Mae's voice saying his name, my name, what is it, what is it. I was on the floor and I was trying to get up and the man had Eli against the wall and Eli was still fighting, Eli with his hand wrapped around the man's wrist, the wrist of the hand with the thing in it, and Eli's eyes were open and they were blue and they found mine across the room and that look, that last look, I will not describe it, I can't, it is the one thing in this world I will not put into words for anyone.

Mae came through the bedroom doorway. She saw it and she did not freeze, Mae did not freeze, she came at the man, and Theo was behind her. Theo. Theo was behind her, and Theo was moving, and in the half second before everything finished I thought, in the clear stupid way you think in a crisis, that Theo was rushing the man too, that Theo was coming to help, that the four of us would be four against one and it would be enough.

Then the man turned, mask toward the door, and I saw his eyes through the holes, blue, pale, the blue of a winter sky, and they were looking at Theo, and Theo was looking at him, and neither of them moved like strangers. And the room did a thing that rooms should not do. It tilted. Everything I knew tilted, like a picture coming off a wall, and I was still on the floor trying to breathe and the man I had loved was against the wall and my best friend was in the doorway and her boyfriend was there, and the blue eyes in the mask and the blue eyes at the door were the same blue and the same patience and the same wrong calm I had seen on the floor of the motel four nights ago, and I knew, and the knowing was worse than the knife.