Still Beating

A stolen wallet sends Cora into Dean's car—and Earl's hands

Cora Lawson, a sharp-tongued English teacher, has spent fifteen years despising Dean Asher, her older sister Mandy's fiancé.

A stolen wallet sends Cora into Dean's car—and Earl's hands

Cora Lawson, a sharp-tongued English teacher, has spent fifteen years despising Dean Asher, her older sister Mandy's fiancé. At Mandy's thirtieth birthday party, their usual barbed banter is interrupted when Cora's wallet vanishes and she's stranded at the bar past one A.M. Every contact goes to voicemail except Dean, who arrives in his black Camaro. Outside, a balding man who'd been leering at Cora makes crude advances. On the drive home, flashing lights appear behind them—what looks like a routine traffic stop. The man from the bar smashes through Cora's window, wraps thick hands around her throat, and pistol-whips Dean unconscious. Cora bites his hand and breaks free for one desperate second before something strikes her skull. Everything goes black.

Dean's singing becomes Cora's only refuge from daily assault

Cora wakes handcuffed to a steel pipe in a cement basement, Dean chained to the opposite wall. Their captor—a pot-bellied sales clerk named Earl who calls Cora his kitten and Dean his dirty dog—boasts about previous victims whose bones fertilize his property. He rapes Cora every morning before leaving for work. Dean, unable to reach her, talks her through each assault, begging her to focus only on his voice. At night he sings Hey Jude—her favorite song, which he somehow already knew. He kicks off his sneakers and slides them across the floor to warm her bare feet. Days blur into a grinding routine of turkey sandwiches, shackled bathroom breaks, and darkness. The enemies who couldn't share a car ride now share the only thing keeping each other alive: sound.

Old secrets surface as Earl invents their worst nightmare yet

On day seven, trading confessions to pass time, Dean reveals he had a crush on Cora first—before he ever dated Mandy—the day she walked into freshman English in a denim skirt and purple blazer. He also admits Cora's ex-boyfriend Brandon was cheating; Dean caught him, roughed him up, and told Brandon to blame the breakup on Dean to spare Cora's heart. Before she can absorb these revelations, Earl returns with new orders: he uncuffs Dean, presses a gun to his temple, and commands him to have sex with Cora. Dean refuses, willing to die instead. Cora begs him to comply. As he enters her, Dean traces slow circles over her wrist pulse point with his thumb—the only tenderness possible while a madman watches. He buries apologies into her neck and weeps against her skin.