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I release the breath I was holding, my apprehension morphing into confusion. “Pictures?” He has a video to blackmail us with. Not pictures. I mean I guess he could have pictures but he wouldn’t need that many and they couldn’t possibly be more incriminating than the video.
“Yeah,” she hesitates. “The thing is, the file name…” she swallows again, finally looking up at me. “It’s named Brielle.”
I start to laugh. There’s no way. “You can’t possibly think,” I stop at the look on her face. “You can’t mean to say you think he has thousands upon thousands of pictures of me saved on his computer. Can you?”
“That’s exactly what I think,” she answers glumly. “I haven’t opened it yet, but we can do it together if you’d like?”
I think about it, I don’t really want to. But this is exactly why we wanted to get into his computer. To find anything that I could use against him. I slowly nod and tap the spot next to me on my bed. If I’m about to be subjected to whatever horrors Carson has hidden on his computer, I at least want to do it from the comfort of my own bed.
Taking another deep breath and pulling a bottle of whiskey from under my bed, I uncap it and nod at Shelby. She clicks on the file and she was right. Instantly the screen fills with thumbnails of photos, each one marked with dates. The first ones to pop up all have more recent dates, but as she begins to scroll and scroll and scroll. And scroll some fucking more, the dates go back months. Before he ever approached me with the video.
I press the bottle to my lips and chug back a few swallows, savoring the burn, before handing it to Shelby. She’s been swiping her fingers rapidly over the mousepad, making the thumbnails and dates all blur together as they fly over the screen. She takes a sip and I point to a random photo that’s from almost a year ago. She double clicks it and a photo of me from the beginning of senior year fills the screen. I take the bottle back and take another sip.
Okay, that isn’t so bad. Odd, uncomfortable. But it’s just a photo of me walking down the hallway at school as I look at my phone, a small smile painted on my face. Shelby and I trade looks, both shrugging as she hits the next button. More pictures from the same day, all over campus. In classes, eating my lunch, getting in my car.
Chills run down my spine as they get increasingly personal and in places Carson never should have had access to. Classes I know I never shared with him, the girls’ locker room. There are so many of me in the locker room in different states of undress, everyone around me either blurred or cropped out. I sip more whiskey as we keep clicking.
Pictures of me in my room fill the screen and I start to feel sick. Hundreds of me in the shower, of me asleep, changing. Shelby’s face drains of color as she stops clicking. “Keep going,” I whisper.
If I thought it couldn’t be worse, I was sorely mistaken. Photos of me with Zaiden have been manipulated to look like it’s Carson giving me a piggyback ride down the beach. Ashton’s arms around my waist, but Carson’s face looking over my shoulder.
Then we get to the video clips. The camera pans over my bed, my sleeping form in the middle. I watch, horror building as the sheets are pulled back, revealing my nude body. The camera shakes and deep breathing can be heard. That sick feeling builds as tar slides over my skin and ice runs through my veins.
My eyebrows pinch in my sleep but I don’t wake up, murmuring before falling back into a deep sleep. The camera pans down to where we can see Carson begin to jack off over my sleeping body. Is that my underwear in his hand?
I drop the bottle of whiskey and dash to the bathroom, making it just barely to the toilet before I start hurling up everything that has been in my stomach. Over and over, I puke as images from his files roll through my mind. He was in my room. How often has he watched me sleep? Assaulted me without ever knowing?
How the fuck did I never wake up and catch him?
Shelby’s hand lands on my back as she attempts to soothe me, but I can tell she’s shaken up too. We barely made a dent in those files. There’s so goddamn many of them. I don’t think I can detach and look at them logically.
We’ve got iron proof evidence of him stalking me, assaulting me. But fuck. I wasn’t expecting this. My world feels like it’s shattering at its core, everything I know no longer seems like the truth. Everything I thought was safe, now tarnished. I’m unstable. Unsteady on my feet as my world is tipped on its side.
What do I do with this information?
My stomach finally settles enough for me to climb back onto my feet. I brush my teeth and then brush them again. It still doesn’t feel like enough. I start stripping and turn the water on as hot as it will go. Shelby sits on the toilet, staying with me as I step into the burning hot water. Even as my skin turns angry and red, I can’t feel it. I don’t even want to feel it anymore. Don’t want the heat to seep into my bones and take away the numb.
The numb seems like a great place to fade away into right about now. A void of nothing. No hurt, no shame, no fear. Nothing.
After scrubbing my hair and body to an inch within my life, I climb back out mechanically. Sinking into the black hole is the only option for now. We can try again tomorrow. Maybe logic and reason will find me then. Hope and strength.
Today though? Today, I’m giving up. Today, Carson wins.
I hate him for it, and I’ll hate myself tomorrow, but today I just can’t care. My strength has hit a wall. It’s run out. The dark abyss I’ve been struggling against has pulled me under and I don’t really have any desire to break the surface.
I make it back into my room and find the laptop off my bed. Good. I throw on aTorchedt-shirt several sizes too big and panties, too vulnerable to sleep in the nude after what I just watched. I dig into my bag and find my pills, throwing two of them back and dry swallowing them. Shelby watches me, fretting the whole time, but her words don’t even reach me.
My head is filled with a buzz, like I’m deep underwater, completely isolated. Totally alone. Everyone else is distorted, out of place. Doesn’t sound quite right.
I climb into bed and force my eyes closed, pulling the blanket over my head and wait for the numbness to even take away my thoughts and memories. Ready to be consumed. Because being nothing feels better than to be reduced to this small and insignificant thing that Carson has made me feel like.
He stole my safety, my power, my control, my light. He’s taken everything and still finds a way to take more. I’ll get angry enough to fight back, but this comes first. A moment of weakness, a moment to mourn, a moment to just turn off my fucking brain. No more feelings, no more plans, no more worries.
Just quiet.
It’s been quiet.
A reprieve after the breakdown I had last week. But now, I’m starting to feel like maybe it’s been too quiet. There’s a nagging feeling that just won’t go away. Carson has all but disappeared, only ever texting me a few times a day to check in. Everything that could be going wrong for his family is. I never could have expected so much fall out from a single deal going wrong. Well, I guess it’s been a couple of them at this point.
