“What time is it?”
His voice makes me scratch at my skin, my filthy nails leaving trails like I’m trying to scrape him off me. I can almost feel his breath on my neck—warm, invasive—his tongue flicking in his mouth as if it’s mine, pressing against my teeth.
“What difference does it make if I tell you?” I ask him. Truthfully, even if I did tell him that it had just turned two in the afternoon, it wouldn’t change a damn thing about his situation.
His hands are bound behind a wooden chair—ropes cutting into wrists until I had to undo and re-tie them twice to save his fingers from going numb. After dragging him into the shed, I had tied his feet together for good measure, too, and his knees. I haven’t fed him today, but I gave him water this morning. I had tipped the plastic Aquafina water bottle against his mouth, like he was a baby bird or a hamster. The water traced the cracks in his lips before disappearing down his throat. I almost had to cradle his head against my chest, to make sure the water didn’t spill all over his face. I hated every second of it, but something—some pitiful, primal part of me—insisted on caring for him.
The baseball cap that he was wearing when I lured him here is still on his head. His hair falls out of it and curls onto his sweaty forehead. He’s quickly growing a stubble, and there’s still blood caked on the space between his nose and his upper lip from when he had a nosebleed the other day. I didn’t hit him or anything, but I guess that the air in the shed is so dry that it gave him a nosebleed. At first, I had let him bleed all over himself, all over his t-shirt and khaki shorts, but then I felt fucked up or grossed out, so I begrudgingly wiped his face for him. The floor is littered with paper towels dotted with his bright red blood. Even now, some broken part of me wants to soothe him. That same part that was trained to stroke egos, to hush crying babies, to believe his pain is more important than mine.
I want to rip that part out of myself with my teeth.
“Please, just tell me,” he says. His voice has become very quiet. Since he awoke in the shed, I expected him to scream at me, to call me a bitch and threaten me or whatever. But he hasn’t. He’s been so submissive, which makes things all the more difficult. At this point, he’s been in my shed for nearly two weeks. “I don’t even know what day it is.”
“If you don’t know what day it is, what will knowing the time do for you, Rich?”
He huffs out air from his mouth and clenches his jaw.
He’s still so handsome, even in his state. Which pisses me off all the more. His blue eyes are still bright in the darkness of the shed, his cheekbones still high on his face, and the symmetry he was given was still perfect, mathematically perfect, almost. His lips, however, are still the same shape as the curve of a blade.
I know I’m going to get caught. I know it, I understand it fundamentally, and it doesn’t frighten me. I sit in front of him in this dusty-ass shed, breathing in and breathing out, watching the dust particles around him shimmer like gold. I’ll eventually be cuffed, dragged, tried, and sentenced. The sirens will come screaming through the trees. And I’ll go quietly.
I told him that I wanted to spend a sexy weekend with him at my parents’ cabin outside of the city. I didn’t even expect him to respond to my Snapchat, but he did, and he said he was down. I told him that I would drive, and he didn’t find that suspicious, since I hated driving. But he never really knew me, so how could he be suspicious?
We arrived at the cabin, and not even an hour later, I had drugged him and dragged him into the shed by his wrists, his body limp and uncooperative and painfully heavy, scraping through the wet earth with each pull.
Rich is the type of man who believes himself to be a god. Who couldn’t ever see how he could be prey and not predator, how he could be in danger, especially from someone like me.
He’s the type of man who would walk off a precipice and expect gravity to embrace him like a lustful lover, just another mistress. He never suspected a thing, even when the drink I handed him smelled funny. He’s so tall, so muscular, so smart. He’s a man. Why would he ever be scared?
And when he eventually did awake in the chair, he whimpered for a little bit, bargained with me, and begged me a little. I would hardly give him a response. I would just chew on the inside of my cheek until the blood became too sharp and metallic to swallow.
Never once did he ask why I had done this to him.
“I’m hungry,” he says.
“I fed you yesterday.”
I’ll admit, I’m a shitty captor. I kind of treat Rich like how a stupid, lazy kid would treat her poor goldfish that was swimming in its filth. On the topic of filth, he smells horrific. His skin smells like rot now. Like old meat left in the sun. I keep thinking maybe it’s me—maybe I’m the one spoiling. Maybe I’ve gone bad.
“Would it kill you to give me anything to eat? Jesus, I can’t believe this.” he twists up his face. I expect him to cry and prepare myself for the waterworks, but he doesn’t.
I met Rich in Economics 101. Ironic, considering his name, I know. He sat behind me, with a couple of his friends. I didn’t notice him right away, but I gradually felt his gaze on the back of my neck like a bite.
Admittedly, I was attracted to him, and liked that he stared at me in class. He began to notice me outside of class, too, like if he saw me in the library. He would fondle my body with his bright eyes and he would study my ass harder than any of the assignments Dr. Carson would hand out. In class, I’d turn my head just enough to catch him staring at me, unblinking. Then he’d quickly look away, his eyes darting to the clock, like he was trying to hide it.
I introduced myself to him one day after class ended, after weeks of my friends pestering me to go talk to the cute guy sitting behind me.
“Hey, I’m [redacted]”
“[Redacted]. That’s a really cute name. I’m Richard, but you can call me Rich.”
I’d never heard someone say “but you can call me __” except in a movie, so I thought it was really cheesy, and I snorted.
“What?” he laughed.
“Nothing, I just think you’re cheesy.”
“Well…I think you’re gorgeous. I’ve been staring at you all semester…I was worried you thought I was a serial killer.”
“You’re not as hot as Ted Bundy, though.”
That made him laugh.
“Can I have more water?” he says, pulling me back into what’s happening. “I’m so thirsty.”
He does look so sweaty. His forehead is shiny, and sweat streaks down his sinewy neck. I walk over to him, and with a shaky inhale, I place the back of my hand against his forehead and temples. His skin is burning. Fuck.
He must’ve noticed a flash of concern across my face, because he flinches away from me, and his voice becomes panicked. “What’s wrong?’
“Do you feel sick?”
“Yeah, I feel fucking sick. My throat is killing me, and so is my head. You’re fucking torturing me.”
I swallow, and it feels like a rock, sharp and cold, is passing down my chest. I place my fingers under his warm chin and tilt his face up towards mine, just like he did to me, before he kissed me on his couch.
Rich insisted on walking me to and from each of my classes, which I initially thought was chivalrous, but then turned into a feeling of unease when I would walk outside of the classroom and see him standing in the hall, waiting for me. He would smile and wave at me. I would stare at his canines whenever he smiled. Sometimes, he’d slip his hand into mine as we walked. My friends all thought that it was so romantic that he was the perfect gentleman. They said the least I could do was go on a date with him.
And we did. It was Wing Wednesday. We sat in a booth. He didn’t sit across from me, but rather, sat next to me, and smushed me into the corner of the booth, our knees knocking together. We ate hungrily, and I remember barbeque sauce dripping onto my skirt. He laughed, called me a messy eater, and fingered the stain. His hand landed on my thigh, like how a mosquito lands on your forearm in the summertime. But I didn’t swat him away. A masochistic part of me enjoyed his attention. I always wondered if I’m actually pretty, or interesting, or if my gap-toothed smile is ridiculous, and Rich’s attentiveness seemed like a stamp of approval from all men, that yes, I had sustenance.
“I can get you some Advil, I have Advil in the kitchen.” I tell him, tapping my foot nervously against the dusty floor of the shed. I try to hide my panic. I don’t want to kill Richard. I don’t even know what I want to do, but I’m not evil. I’m not.
“I don’t need Advil, I need to get the fuck out of here.” his voice cracks. His eyes are bloodshot, I notice. He hangs his head, and his chin grazes his chest. He doesn’t ask me to let him go.
“Well, I can make you a sandwich then. Maybe that would help. And some apple juice. There’s a shit ton of apple juice in the fridge.”
“Fuck your apple juice.” he croaks.
We went back to his place after the wings. We watched a couple of episodes of Friends. His fingers were like caterpillars at first—slow, creeping, innocent in appearance. But they became centipedes in the dark, all legs and purpose, crawling places they didn’t belong. I froze. The sitcom laugh track played like a jury in the background. I tried to inch away from him on the couch. I grabbed my phone to text a friend to help me come up with an excuse to leave, but he pried it from my hands and tossed it onto the floor.
“You don’t need your phone right now babe,” he smiled, like he had done something so charming. “Just focus on me. Focus on us.”
“I don’t know…it’s getting late. What time is it?” I asked him, but he tsked at my question.
“What? You have a bedtime?”
“No, but…”
He pushed me down onto the couch. Its leather skin cracked under my weight, and I felt like I was sinking into it, like the fabric was absorbing me, like he was touching the couch, not me. He began to kiss me, and began to use his hands. I just kind of froze. I let it happen. The whole ordeal felt like being wrapped in tight ribbon, over and over again, everywhere, like a kid sloppily trying to wrap a Christmas present. I took an Uber home in the morning. I was so sweaty, and I smelled bad, like weed, like a shitty, earthy smell, like a mushroom. Like something rotting.
I tried to forget about it. Honestly, I did. I told my friends nothing had happened, and they pushed me to see him again. But the more I pretended like I was okay, the more it felt like squeezing my eyes shut and hoping the world would vanish with me.
“I know I fucked up,” he suddenly says.
“What?” I whisper.
“I know, okay. I get it. I shouldn’t have…” he raises his head slowly, twitching his nose.
There’s a small window in the back wall of the shed. The sun is setting, and a pool of flaming pink light drifts into the shed. The light makes it look like there’s blood on the walls.
“Why can’t you say it?”
“[Redacted]. I’m sorry.”
I don’t know what to do. I cross my arms over my chest and then uncross them. Bile is rising in my throat. I hadn’t expected him to apologize, but I’m also not going to let him go because of it.
He’s all over the news. His parents are getting desperate for information on him, begging on cameras, trembling through press conferences. He’s their only son out of three daughters. Prized boy, missing. I haven’t been questioned by anybody yet, but I know it’s coming. Cops have been pulling aside all of his friends, trying to figure out what happened. And I know it looks fishy to everyone, even my Mom, how I keep driving in and out of the city to “clear my head” or whatever bullshit thing I’ve been saying. My Mom, who’s a sickly sweet altruistic woman, the type of mother who would buy me a Barbie doll after a temper tantrum, because seeing me pout would pull at her heartstrings. Even she’s suspicious.
I stare at him, and he stares back, unblinking.
Being so close to him after what happened always feels like I’m sinking into a bathtub of cold, dirty water. I want to shrink away from him, but dig my nails into his skin to make him hurt at the same time. But I know I’m too girlish to stomach the blood. Too steeped in softness to finish what I started.
I have the feeling that if I untie him, he would probably lunge at me and kill me. I don’t even know if his sorry was genuine, or a last-ditch effort at escape. But Rich could overpower me so easily and break my woman’s spine like a twig. I picture him strangling me, see his knuckles whitening, my breath turning sour in my mouth. I see the floor rushing up to meet me.
I head back into the cabin after a few more minutes of silence. It’s a small, hobbit-ish place. My parents and I visited it a lot more often when I was a kid. There are notch marks on the wall beside the fridge where Mom used to mark my height. I glance at the years, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, and they stop at 2007. The fridge has alphabet magnets that hang up photographs of me. There’s one where I’m grinning widely, showing that my two front teeth have fallen out. I remember running my tongue along the gaps, feeling what was lost, and how my adult teeth grew in, fast and too big for my mouth. In another photo, I’m holding up a soccer trophy, another photo displays a family barbeque with my cousins. There’s a photo of me and Mom, too. I was a red-faced, screaming baby, swaddled in a pink blanket, held in her arms as she gazed softly down at me. I grimace. She’s everything a woman is supposed to be.
If she were here, she’d untie him. Of course, she would. She’d pet his damp hair, call the police, and bake a casserole. She’d look at me and wonder where she went wrong. She’d see a monster, just because I’m not the one tied up.
I yank open the fridge door and snatch a jar of strawberry jam, apple juice sloshing in my other hand. There’s peanut butter in the pantry, along with a loaf of Wonderbread that’s only slightly moldy. In a feverish haze, I fumble for a butter knife, hands clumsy, and smear the jam in uneven stripes across the bread. It’s red and thick like guts, congealing on the blade as I drag it across the pale bread like I’m slicing open a wound. Peanut butter next, thick and resistant, on the opposite slice. I smush them together and head back to the shed, my feet sinking into the muddy ground as I march. The sky is on fire now, and the clouds look like they’re melting into the angry red sky. I push open the shed door, and it moans from my touch.
I feed Rich the sandwich. I stand next to him and hold it against his mouth, and he takes large, hungry bites, nearly nipping my fingers with his teeth. I pour some of the apple juice into his mouth, and whatever drips onto his lips, he laps away hungrily.
I do everything my mother taught me.
The sky outside is bleeding, clouds peeling back like blistered skin. The shed groans around us with every breeze, the ropes creak, the dust dances in the pink light like ash.
The sirens begin to howl somewhere out in the trees. I don’t run. I don’t cry. I stay exactly where I am.
Photo by Peter Thomas on Unsplash
