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Damn right, you won’t.Asshole.
But…the confrontation with Dylan about it ended pretty great, so I can’t complain too much. I see her in the back seat of my car again, feeling myself sliding all the way into her for the first time. The way her breathing shook against my body…
I’ll fucking take that one memory to my grave with me. I’m never letting it go.
It’s good to know that Kade is on my side. He wants me to love her.
We head down Frontage Road, toward the bridge, and I see an email pop up on my phone from Robert Cartridge from Clarke University.
I open the attachment, the essay Kade submitted loading on my phone.
I knew Cartridge would be confused about why I didn’t have it when I sent him an email, asking for a copy, so I gave him a story about being hacked. I hoped he didn’t need more detail.
The essay Kade submitted appears in my screen, and I almost download it and save it for later, but the first line catches my attention.
He’s put me in a new prison.
I glance at Kade, then back to my phone as he turns up the music.
That’s what he does with all of us, the essay reads.Hides us. Locks us up. All of his little treasures.
And there are so many of us. He’s grabbed, shoved, squeezed, bent, torn, and even bitten us, but he’s done that to me more than most, because I’m his favorite.
Or I used to be.
I narrow my eyes, unsure if I want to read more. This sounds a little creepy. Did he write this?
I remember the feel, you know? Watching him lick his fingers and slide them up my skin, touching me, turning me, and gazing at me for hours. Smiling while he chewed his lips and looked at me with wonder in his eyes.
I took him away. Far away to places he can only visit in his mind, but he got to go there, and that was enough.
And I wasn’t his just once, either. He picked me a lot. Out of all of them, I was the one he hid in his sheets the most after a long night and he got too tired to let me go. He mended my tears. Stitched my spine. Wrapped me in a band to keep me together. He loved me. Every scar he left me was proof of that.
It didn’t last, of course. New becomes old. Familiar becomes boring. He started trapping me in dark places with no room to move. Did he know I needed air? Time passed and I started to rot, but I’d see glimpses of him from time to time. When he flipped the lid on the case. When he opened the door. Light would spill in, cool air caressed me, and he’d run his hands over all of us, searching for whatever would feed his appetite. He never picked me again, though.
“What are you reading?” Kade asks.
I see him look over at me out of the corner of my eye, and it takes a minute to dislodge the lump in my throat.
“Uh, this study on Gingko trees and their effecton—”
“Never mind,” he groans. “Jesus.”
I keep reading.
I didn’t see him at all for a long time.
I’d hear him, though. Laughter, shouts, music, and fighting… My boy’s life carried on, and even though his voice got deeper, I knew he hadn’t left me. A fact, I confirmed when one day, he pulled us all out of his closet, and I thought, maybe he was going to let us go. Maybe he was going to give us to someone new or take us to another part of the house.
This is written from the perspective of an object, not a person. I exhale a little.
But he didn’t take us to a new room. He put us in a new cage—steel, cold, and hard—but strangely enough, it wasn’t worse.
I could see him for a while through the vents as he laid on his bed and held a phone in his hand. I liked watching him. He found a new way to enjoy us that no one would know about. He’d scroll, I’d watch, he never smiled, and I’d stare at his thumb moving up the screen again and again and again.
Over and over and over.
He didn’t smile. He didn’t laugh. He didn’t fight. He just tapped.
