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“No,” Eva interrupts softly, running her fingers through my hair. “You need to power through it and emerge stronger on the other side. You can’t just survive this. You need to beat it.”
I scoff, but don’t argue with her. Her words of encouragement might be cliche, but they’re not void of value.
Mel disappears back into the bathroom while the other girls talk me through the darkest moments of my life. Soon, steam begins to seep into the room, inviting me to sink into the hot bubble bath. I let my clothes drop off of me next to the marble jewel of a tub sunken into a shiny cream-colored floor that’s soothing to the eye and warm to the feet. Soon I’m in up to my neck, my hair floating around me in the foamy, perfumed water. There’s only one thing missing so I can give in to the soothing sensation–privacy. My friends’ eyes are still watching me like prison wards.
“Don’t worry,” I assure them. “I’m not in any danger of hurting myself.”
Eva and Annie look at each other and finally nod.
“You know where to find us if you need us,” Eva says, and I allow a smile to fly across my lips in response.
“Mel will be just outside this door,” she adds, one foot out, but her eyes still scrutinizing me. I let my smile broaden just to make leaving easier for her and Annie. They hover for another few moments before they finally shuffle out, and the door closes behind them.
I stare up at the ceiling for a long time, soaking in the water and trying to visualize it cleansing me of tonight. Or was it even real? The water weighs heavy on my chest as I take a deep breath, wondering if all of the things I remember even happened. They float in my memory like a haunting dream. The boyfriend that betrayed me, his boy-next-door mask falling to reveal an evil grinning skull. My dark savior, Sade, riding to my rescue, his cape billowing behind him.
Something trickles down my face, and I only realize they’re tears when they contrast with the now cold water. With a shuddering breath, I grip the sides of the bathtub to haul myself up, my body heavy.
Reaching out for the fluffy towel hanging on the rack, I decide I can’t get out of this house the same woman I was when I came in. Not if I want to emerge on top of the cruel turn of events that my life has taken in just one night. I’m up against sharp-fanged wolves in the wilderness, and I’ll have to toughen up to fight them.
And run with them, which is what that piece of shit Dean wanted to crush me to prevent.
Water drips off my feet as I step out of the tub, wrapping the towel around me and heading towards the steamed-up mirror. Luckily, the windows stayed closed, so despite the water going cold, the room is still nice and cozy. I’m relaxed, a pleasant ache spreading through my muscles, but the moment I run my hand over the mirror to wipe it clean, the blood turns cold in my veins.
Dread shoots down my spine.
A masked man stands behind me, dressed in all black. Tall, broad-shouldered, and ominous as if hell itself spawned him, he seems to have descended right out of a Michael Myers movie. I stare at him with eyes so big they look unnatural.
A single phrase spins inside my skull over and over–what the fuck, what the fuck, what the Flying Dutchman’s fuck? The only thought that makes any sense is that I can’t afford even to blink, or he might jump me. What if he has a knife?
“H–how did you get in here?” I ask in a trembling whisper. Anything to make him speak. As if that would humanize him, but what if when he opens his mouth, a demon voice comes out?
No, I must be losing my mind. I scrunch my eyes shut and shake my head, the wet ends of my hair slapping my arms and back. When my eyes shoot open again, he’s not there anymore.
I spin around so swiftly that I lose balance, grabbing on the edges of the basin behind me. The towel I wrapped around myself slips off, pooling at my feet, and my hardened nipples pierce the air, my chest moving so fast up and down that I can barely cope. I gulp in the air, struggling to get a grip, my head whipping around as I check the bathroom for the place he came from. He can’t have just formed out of thin air.
Mel’s private bathroom is generous, to say the least, but there are no other doors except the one that leads to the bedroom, and the large windows are all closed. No matter how much I turn this around in my head, the only explanation that makes sense is that the masked man was a product of my imagination running wild. The relaxation is gone. Now I’m on edge again.
Write.
I need to write, unleash my poetry onto the paper, let the ink soak it. At least this time I won’t be needing to smuggle bottles into my bedroom in order to let go and just write. Without the booze, I couldn’t bring myself to imagine that Sade Royales would ever even look at me, let alone share my crazy fantasies. Turns out, I did pique his interest, in a way I never thought possible. And now, I need to work that out of my system.
***
Justine
IT’S BEEN DAYS SINCEI first hunched over the desk in the guest room right next to Mel’s. I’ve been drinking so much coffee that I can’t remember the last time I slept, and I’m shivering like a cat before bath time. I do know, however, that I haven’t brushed my hair in days, or worn anything but the robe wrapped around me. I have been showering daily, I just didn’t have the strength or patience to give my hair the proper care, or to put on proper clothes.
All I’ve been doing is scribbling, piles of crumpled paper surrounding me like one of those eighteenth-century mad geniuses. Writing was supposed to be a healing process, yet all those papers are filled with obsessive verse about Sade, explicit verse. I’m apparently the fucking queen of Stockholm Syndrome because there’s an ache in my pussy and a squirm in my thighs as the ink flows from my pen.
I never felt safe putting down my explicit thoughts in writing in a mansion where Sade Royales lived, so I grabbed onto this chance with both hands. The marvelous thing about poetry is that you can have catharsis without the risk of your real thoughts being exposed, should anyone find your writings, but I feel anything but liberated right now.
“Fuuuuck,” I let out with an exhausted breath as I throw my back against the chair, running my hands through my tangled hair. It must look like a nest of cobwebs. Not exactly what a man would fantasize about when jacking off–which I’m gonna have to do now, thinking of Sade, if I want to relieve this terrible tension. My hand is itching to trickle under my satin robe and into my panties, my creamed clit throbbing at the idea.
I stopped counting my days here, but they weren’t few. Enough for my wrist to ache, and my pen-holding fingers to feel battered. Pouring myself onto the pages helped with the feeling of powerlessness, of being nothing but a toy to be used for a bunch of guys’ perverted desires, but it fired up my own fantasies, too. Turns out, they aren’t any less twisted than Sade’s. I haven’t been this turned on in my life, putting down those masochistic lines.
Talk about the eroticization of abuse.
Staring down at the smudged ink on the papers scattered on my desk, I wonder when the hell my brain cracked. I mean, wasn’t emotional self-abuse a thing for fatherless children? In my case, it was the woman who birthed me that left us before I could even walk. She was young, too young to have a child, and she had big dreams that drove her to Hollywood in hopes of building a career. No one who knew her ever heard from her since, which means she could have ended up as anything from a huge star with too much plastic surgery to a serial killer’s victim. But if I have abandonment trauma from my mother, shouldn’t I be a lesbian or something?
