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Sweat and sex and candle wax coat the air. Thanks to the setting sun and the blinds he now ritually keeps closed, it’s grown dark in the room.
His voice rumbles in his chest when he speaks. “You said something,” he breathes out and I feel uncertainty in that pause. “Luv, when we were trapped underground. You said you were supposed to die as a child. Can you… would you tell me?”
My turn to let out a breath. That’s not an easy story to tell. That story is rooted in my past. The silence stretches out. I wrestle with my demons, and he draws me closer to his side, squeezing me tight.
Suddenly, I find I not only want to, but Ineedto tell.
I know from my big family that developing a relationship as a person rescued from adverse circumstances gets complicated. It’s a risk in many ways, but I feel I know Sean. He won’t ever see me as only my wounds. That’s the wonder of who he is. I breathe him in, the pleasing musk of his maleness, and relax into his strong arms.
In a voice so small it somehow seems to belong to the child I once was, I quietly say, “I was kidnapped from Puerto Rico when I was nine, taken by boat to New York City, and held captive in an apartment for three-and-a-half years.”
The temperature in the room seems to change as Sean tenses beside me.
I look up to see his face a mask of both pain and anger. I know those feelings.
I kiss his chest. “I’m here. I’m safe. It’s okay now.”
He nods and chokes out, “I’m sorry, luv. So very sorry.”
He kisses my head, the side of my face. He runs a hand down my arm. I hear his heart beating loud and unsteady. He whispers, “We’re both survivors, it seems.”
Oh, I do like this man. How easily he sees me not as what I endured, but how I’ve thrived.
“How did you get free?”
I pause for a moment, going back in time to that room, that apartment.
He doesn’t rush me, waits for me to find my way forward as he strokes my arm and kisses me lightly again and again.
After a moment more I say, “When I first came to be held prisoner, I was conditioned to want and long for… the man who took me. I wasn’t allowed out of my room. I rarely saw anyone else. I was given food and, because he knew I could read and that I craved learning, he brought me many books. I feared displeasing him and losing those small kindnesses. Years passed that way. Then I got pregnant.”
Sean’s breath rushes past my ear. He tenses, but stays quiet.
“After that, the man—whose name I no longer say because I have released him along with my pain—stopped coming into my room. He fed me sporadically. I believe he was trying to solve the problem of my pregnancy by starving me.”
“Sinister fuck.”
“Yes. Until that time, I hadn’t sought to escape or rescue myself. It’d never crossed my mind to try. The absolute belief that I was his, the belief he’d programmed me with, was that strong. But when I had the child inside me and we were starving, I realized I had to find a way out.”
I shake my head. “As if it were that simple. I cannot tell you how afraid I was of even the thought of defying him. I believed going against him was wrong in every way. I believed he controlled my fate, so to go against that… it didn’t seem possible for myself. But for another, for the child, I did it. Trembling, terrified, I began to drop notes from the bathroom window of my prison.”
“No one saw them,” he says flatly, guessing the result.
“Someone did, actually. A boy. He came into the alley every day, picked up my notes, then ran off. I thought he’d bring me food. Help. What I didn’t know, what I learned later, was that he kept them, saved them at home. He thought they were a game.”
“Good Lord.”
“When I went into early labor, the man I lived with came into the room, gagged my mouth, and left me. He never came back. I would’ve died. My body couldn’t do what it was being asked to do. The boy who got my letters came, as he did now every day—when he saw there was no letter, he began to worry that maybe the letters were real. In a panic, he went to a police officer on the street, told him where he’d found the notes, showed him the letters.
“By luck or fate, something in the story motivated the officer to act. Not in a year. Not at the end of the week. Not even after contacting his department.
“He ran down blocks to where my letters told him I was imprisoned. He got the super to unlock the apartment and found me bleeding to death on the floor.
“Dear God.”
“Yes. And on that same day, a day when I should’ve died, a day when my sondiddie, I was taken to the hospital.”
“Oh, luv.” Sean’s voice is ragged, choked with tears. “A bloody miracle you survived.”
