“No! Fuck you!” I storm into the bathroom, looking for my shoes so I can just get the fuck away. So I can run off, the way I should have ages ago. “Fuck this whole thing! Fuck all this shit!”
I spin, eyes wild, but my shoes are nowhere to be seen. They’re gone. My breath freezes in my lungs and my muscles lock up tight, like I just got paralyzed. I grip my chest. My heart is going so fast, my blood is rushing so loud. Fuck, my jaw hurts from the punch yesterday and the way I’m grinding me teeth right now isn’t helping.
“Tommy.” His voice behind me startles me and I whirl. He’s standing in the doorway, staring at me. “Take a deep breath.”
“Shut! Up!” I practically scream at him. “Where are my shoes?!”
“You need to calm down.”
“Oh, likethat’sever worked before! Just tell me to calm down, that will do the trick!” I jeer at him, mock him, backing up because I feel like the walls are closing in on me. “Get out!”
“I wasn’t telling you to calm down,” he comments idly, not getting out at all. “I was making an observation. It’s clear that you have no idea how to regulate yourself. Telling you to do so would be setting you up to fail. And I don’t do that to you, remember?”
Right, that bullshit about trust.
I scrub my fingers through my hair, pull at the strands until my scalp stings. I think my brain might be melting, or splitting in half. Something in there is reaching down into my guts and moving things around, setting off alarm bells in my body that I’m about to fucking die. I think I’m about to die.
“Shit–” I grip the counter top. “Fuck you. You don’t do anything for me. You don’t mean anything to me. You’re nothing, I’m nothing. We’re not- we’re not doing this, alright? I don’t want to hear you go on about trust. We don’t have trust, okay? I’m not interested in that bullshit with you. I’m not one to trust or be trusted, alright, Young-gi? I’ll fucking blow your shit up, tear your house apart, ruin your goddamn life. Look at me! Huh? Look at me! What the fuck do you even want me for?Trust? I can’t trust you, I can’t trustanyone! And if you trust me, you’ll be making the biggest mistake of your life. So set me up to fail, beat the shit out of me, stiff me on a paycheck, toss me back onto the street where I belong, I don’t give a fuck! But stop acting like you give a damn when you can’t==don’t!” I correct the ending, knowing that ‘can’t’ and ‘don’t’ mean two different things, say two different things about me.
I’m panting, my throat hurts from yelling and the bathroom echoes with my words. And he’s just watching me, waiting meout, his eyes like spotlights on the mess of me, the spilling of my emotional baggage out onto the shiny floor tiles.
I feel that beast inside me, the one he pulled out with that word–‘child’. It’s ugly and so hungry, so evil, so abused. I wish I could just kill it. Kill it and never see it or feel it again.
“Fuck you,” I mutter, pushing my palms against my eyes hard enough that I see stars. “Just… fuck you, Young-gi.”
The only sound for a long minute is my ragged breathing. I finally open my eyes and sit on the edge of the tub, staring at the floor between my feet. My emotions are going numb, sucking the storm back inside where I can tuck it away until next time.
He’s watching me, I can feel it.
“What?” I demand, tired and lost. “What do you want me to say, Young-gi? Huh? Just spit it out.”
“Look at me.”
I grip the tub on either side of my legs, and brace myself. I damn near hold my breath as I force my head up to obey, to get this over with. To have him just throw me out already. To have him treat me the way I deserve, with derision and anger, because I can’t keep living this fantasy. It’s not real.
His words, when they come, are slow and deliberate, everything clear and concise and full of finality. I’m so hypnotized by the way he stares at me that I almost miss it, because he watches me like he can pull me in with his eyes alone. Like he’s compelling me to submit to him.
“You have thirty seconds to correct the lies you just said about yourself.” He touches his bare wrist like he’s pointing at a watch. “If you do, you’ll just get corner-time to help you calm down, and I’ll tell you how good you are. If you don’t, you’ll be getting something else.”
Wait… what?I shake my head like something’s in my ear. “I don’t–what?”
“You said, and I quote,” he holds up a finger and I finally read something in his expression, in his mannerisms. He’s not angry, but it’s anger-adjacent. He’s… displeased. “That you don’t deserve my trust, that you belong on the street, and that I can’t, or don’t, give a damn about you. Correct yourself. You now have twenty-five seconds.”
I huff, stand back up. My emotional numbness is being blasted away, and I hate, hate,hatethat the feeling coming to replace it is… a sick kind of excitement. A fearful thrill, a terrified elation. “Or what?”
“Twenty seconds,” he warns. “Or I’ll help you. You can pretend you don’t want it, but if you choose not to obey me, I’ll know. I’ll know that you’re asking for something a little extra. Something a little more. More attention, more correction, more of that embarrassment I gave you last night. I’llknow,Tommy. Fifteen seconds.”
No, I can’t be that transparent, can I?
I try to deny it. “That’s not what this means–”
“Ten seconds.”
Wait–!“I don’t have to listen to you!”
He actually smiles a little at that, and it makes me want to pace around because I’m feeling way too much right now. I’m angry with him, hate him, but this–is this… did I want this? Why am I so… thrilled? Was Ihopingfor this? Was I manipulating him into this? Did I wake up needing it?
“What the fuck is wrong with me?” I whisper, grabbing my head like I’m suffering a migraine, feeling like my reality is splintering apart. “Why am I like this?”
