Kill For Me by M. William Phelps Page B

Forgive me this one last time.
    Sandee wouldn’t allow him into the apartment. “I’m very angry with you,” she said. “I won’t speak to you! Your actions were absurd. I want you to leave.”
    Humphrey bit his tongue and left.
    Sandee drove Humphrey to work after those incidents, she said, about five more times. She never said why. Only that she wanted to help the guy, and, likely, she felt sorry for him.
    But again, that was the extent of the relationship: rides to work and back.
    Nothing more.
    Humphrey was a ticking time bomb, Sandee knew. She, of course, had no idea that it was ’roid rage fueling Humphrey’s anger—or that he was all jacked up on the juice. One of his ex-girlfriends later told police that he could be fine for days and weeks. Sincere. Loving. Caring. But then he’d be sitting at the table one night, digging into his white rice and boiled chicken, and, for no reason, he would stand up and flip the table over, yelling and screaming.
     
    As February came around, Sandee was transferred downstairs and now worked nearly side by side with Humphrey. She couldn’t avoid him. Slowly he worked his way back into her good graces, using his well-seasoned, calculated controlling skills to woo Sandee and gain back her trust.
    On Ash Wednesday, for example, Humphrey asked Sandee if she would take him to mass with her. He knew Sandee was a Catholic at heart. It was a way to show her—even if the guy wasn’t Catholic—his amiable, good side.
    Sandee said okay. And they went.
    Then he asked her for a ride to the gym—and if she wanted to work out with him.
    She did.
    “Twice,” Sandee recalled.
    Those two workouts turned into dinner afterward.
    Two times.
    Not by candlelight or on the gazebo of a dock overlooking the Gulf, watching the dolphins dance gracefully like sickle blades through the seawater. Just dinner. A quick bite to eat somewhere.
    “We were spending time together,” Sandee said.
    As late February approached, Humphrey started to pressure Sandee once again into having sex with him. They were getting closer. The only thing not in the picture was sex. So he begged, she said, like an adolescent boy going through puberty, trying to get his first taste.
    “Come on, Sandee, it’s been four years since I’ve had sex with a woman,” he said one night. They were inside Sandee’s apartment. “You’re the chosen one! And I am going to have sex with you one way or another.”
    Sandee didn’t know how to react. Was he kidding? Was he serious? What was happening? How had their relationship gone from work and workout and dinner buddies to sex?
    When Sandee didn’t respond, maybe the way in which Humphrey had wanted her to, he continued, adding with a slight tinge of remorse in his voice, “You’re a prick tease…. You enjoy walking around and making men sexually excited—and you need to pay for the way you act!” There was a short fuse of anger there in the last part of the statement. Sandee could tell Humphrey meant what he said—or, rather, believed what he said.
    Sandee started crying. Humphrey picked up on her vulnerability and began to berate her. He made Sandee feel like she was waltzing around town, strutting her stuff, shaking her ass, making every guy she came in contact with go crazy. Then, to top it off, the whole “not putting out” thing. Humphrey said she was playing a game with him, using him for friendship and dinners, and he was not getting anything out of it but sexual frustration.
    Here they were again: back to square one.
    As she cried and balled herself up into a fetal position on the couch, Humphrey leaned into it, taking his verbal assault, the emotional abuse he was so good at, one step further.
    “He made me feel so bad about myself,” Sandee recalled, speaking of that day. “So I gave in.”
    In order not to have to endure whatever it was he had planned for her after he was finished emotionally abusing her, Sandee said, she had sex with him. But she felt like