I woke with a really bad headache and noticed two things simultaneously: it was dark and I wasn’t alone. Were we moving? Vision hazy, my eyes rolled around, almost out of instinct, to gain a semblance of balance, recognition of something familiar. I was in a van, my body strewn haphazardly across the floor.
Startled, I attempted to move all at once, only to find my movements sluggish and ineffectual. My hands had been tied behind my back, my legs free but decidedly heavy.
Again, I tried to focus my eyes in the dark. Both back windows were heavily tinted, but even in the gloomy darkness I could make out four distinct shapes. Their voices told me they were men. They spoke to each other in a language I didn’t understand. Listening, it was a torrent of fast-speech, clipped tones. Something rich, very foreign…Middle Eastern maybe. Did it matter?
My brain said yes, it was information. Then that small comfort slipped away. Seeing the iceberg hadn’t stopped the Titanic from sinking.
My first instinct was to scream. That’s what you do when you find out your worst nightmare is playing out in front of you. But I clenched my jaw on the impulse. Did I really want them to know I was awake? No.
I am not inherently stupid. I’d seen enough movies, read enough books, and lived in a shitty neighborhood long enough to know that drawing attention to myself was the worst thing I could do – in almost any situation. A voice inside my head yelled sarcastically, “Then why the hell are you here?” I winced.
This was the worst of all my fears, being dragged off by some sick fuck in a van, raped, left for dead. From the first day I realized my body was changing, there had been no shortage of perverts on the streets, telling me exactly what they’d like to do to me, all of me. I’d been careful. I followed all the rules in becoming invisible. I kept my head down, I walked fast, and I dressed sensibly. And still, my nightmare had found me. Again. I could almost hear my mother’s voice in my head asking me what I’d done.
There were four of them. Tears flooded my eyes and a whimper escaped my chest. I couldn’t help it.
Abruptly, conversation around me halted. Though I struggled to not make a single sound or movement, my lungs heaved for breath, rising and falling in the rhythm of my panic. They knew I was awake. My tongue laid heavy and thick inside my mouth. Impulsively, I screamed, “Let me go,” as loud as I could, as though I were dying, because for all I knew I was. I screamed as though someone out there would listen, hear me, and do something. My head throbbed. “Help!
Somebody help!”
I thrashed wildly, my legs careening in every direction as one of the men tried to capture them with his hands. As the van rocked, my captors’ Arabic voices grew louder and angrier.
Finally, my foot connected solidly with the man’s face. He fell back against the side of the van.
“Help!” I screamed again.
Incensed, the same man came at me again and this time struck me very hard across my left cheek. My consciousness faded away, but not before I acknowledged my body, now inert and at the mercy of four men I didn’t know. Men I never wanted to know.
The next time I came around, rough hands dug into my underarms while another man held my legs. I was being dragged out of the van, into the night air. I must have been out for hours.
My head throbbed so hard I couldn’t speak. The left side of my face felt like a soccer ball had smacked it and I could hardly see out of my left eye. Dizzy and with practically no warning, I vomited. They dropped me and I simply rolled onto my side. As I lay there dry heaving, my captors yelled amongst them, meaningless voices, in and out, broken and jarring. My vision flashed, clear then hazy. This continued, one action triggering another. Too weak to resist, I lay my head next to my vomit and passed out again.
• • •
Sometime later I regained consciousness, or some state of being, similar to consciousness. I jerked. I felt pain everywhere. My head throbbed, my neck was stiff to the point of searing pain, and worse, when I tried to open my eyes I discovered I couldn’t. There was a blindfold over them.
It came to me in flashes. Screeching tires. Grinding metal. Footsteps. Running. Musk. Dirt. Dark. Vomit. Hostage.
Summoning every ounce of strength and resolve I attempted to lift myself. Why couldn’t I move? My limbs wouldn’t budge. My mind was telling my body to move, but my body wasn’t responding. A new wave of panic rushed through me.
Tears burned behind my closed lids. Fearing the worst, I attempted to remove the blindfold by moving my head. Pain shot down my neck, but my head barely moved. What did they do to me? I stopped trying to move. Just think, I told myself, feel.
I took a mental assessment of my person. My head rest on a pillow, and my entire body lay on something soft, so I was probably on a bed. A shiver ran through me. I still felt clothes against my skin – that was good. Fabric around my wrists, fabric around my ankles, it wasn’t difficult to figure out I was tied to the bed. Oh god! I bit at my lip, holding in my sobs as I acknowledged the fabric of my ankle-length skirt lay high up on my thighs. My legs were open. Had they touched me? Keep it together! Exhaling a deep breath, I stopped the thought before it could grow.
I felt intact, no missing fingers. Mechanically, I focused on here, now. Knowing my faculties were in order, I expelled a small sigh of relief that sounded more like a sob.
That’s when I heard his voice.
“Good. You’re finally awake. I was beginning to think you’d been seriously injured.” My body froze at the sound of a male voice. Suddenly, I had to instruct myself to breathe. The voice was eerily gentle, concerned… familiar? The accent, what I could comprehend over the sound of the ringing in my head was American and yet, there was something off about it.
I should have screamed, afraid as I was, but I just froze. He had been sitting in the room; he had been watching me panic.
After a few moments, my voice trembled, “Who are you?” No response. “Where am I?” My words and voice seemed to be on some sort of delay, almost sluggish, like I was drunk.
Silence. The creak of a chair. Footsteps. My heart hammering in my chest.
“I am your master.” A cold hand pressed against my sweat-slick forehead. Again, a nagging sense of familiarity. But it was stupid. I didn’t know anyone with an accent. “You are where I want you to be.”
“Do I know you?” My voice was raw, stripped of anything but my emotion.
“Not yet.”
Behind my eyelids the world exploded into violent streams of red; my dark vision drowned in adrenaline. Acid fear ate down my synapses carrying Danger. Danger. Run. Run! to my limbs.
My mind howled for every muscle fiber to contract. I willed everything to fight all of the constraints: I twitched.
I gave way to fits of hysterical crying. “Please…let me go,” I whimpered. “I promise I won’t tell anyone. I just want to go home.”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that.” Just like that a sea of despair dragged me under its crushing waves. His voice was devoid of so many things: compassion, inflection, emotion, but there was one thing that wasn’t missing and that was certainty. I couldn’t accept it, his certainty.
He smoothed my hair back from my forehead, an intimate gesture that filled me with foreboding. Was he attempting to soothe me? Why?
“Please,” I cried as he continued petting me. I felt his weight on the bed, and my heart stuttered.
“I can’t,” he whispered, “and more than that…I don’t want to.”
For a moment, only my crying and deep, anguished sobs punctuated the silence that followed his statement. The darkness made it all the more unbearable.
His breathing, my breathing, together, in empty space.
“Tell you what I will do, I’ll untie you and get these bumps and bruises cleaned up. I didn’t want you to wake up in a pool of water. I’m really sorry about the hit to the face,” he stroked his fingers across my cheekbone, “but that’s what happens when you fight without thinking of the consequences.”
“A pool of water?” I jittered. “I don’t want to get in any water. Please,” I begged, “just let me go.” His voice was too calm, too refined, too matter-of-fact, and too… reminiscent of Hannibal Lector in The Silence of the Lambs.
“You need a bath pet.” Was his terrifying response. Hello Clarice….
All I could do was cry as he untied me. My arms and legs were stiff and numb: they felt too large, too heavy, too far away to be a part of me. Was my entire body asleep? Again I tried to move, I tried to hit him, to kick him. And again my efforts reflected in twitching, jerky movements. Frustrated, I lay inert. I wanted to wake up. I wanted to run away. I wanted to fight.
I wanted to hurt him. And I couldn’t.
He kept the blindfold on and lifted me off the bed, carefully. I felt myself rise and become suspended within the dark. My heavy head draped over his arm. I could feel his arms. Feel his clothes against my skin.
“Why can’t I move?” I sobbed.
“I gave you a little something. Don’t worry, it’ll wear off.” Scared, blind in the dark, his limbs wrapped around mine, his voice took on texture, shape.
He shifted my weight in his arms until my head lolled against the fabric of his shirt.
“Stop struggling.” There was amusement on the surface of his voice.
Halting my struggle, I tried to focus on details about him. He was perceptibly strong and he hoisted my weight without so much as a strained breath. Beneath my cheek I could feel the hard expanse of his chest. He smelled faintly of soap, perhaps a light sweat too, a masculine scent that was both distinct, but only distantly familiar.
We didn’t walk far, only a few steps, but for me each moment seemed like an eternity in an alternate universe, one where I inhabited someone else’s body. But my own reality came crashing back to me the moment he set me down inside something smooth and cold.
Panic gripped me. “What the hell are you doing?”
There was a pause, then his amused voice. “I told you, getting you cleaned up.”
I opened my mouth to speak when the initial burst of cold water hit my feet. Startled, I let out a skittish yelp. As I pathetically attempted to crawl out of the tub by rolling my body toward the edge, the water turned warmer and my captor hoisted me back against the tub.
“I don’t want to take a bath. Let me go.” I tried to remove the blindfold, repeatedly smacking my own face as my lethargic arms countered my purpose. My captor did a horrible job of stifling his laugh.
“I don’t care if you want one, you need one.”
I felt his hands on my shoulders and mustered my strength to attack. My arms flew back haphazardly landing somewhere, I think, on his face or neck. His fingers speared through my hair to force my head back at an odd angle.
“Do you want me to play rough too?” he growled against my ear. When I didn’t answer he squeezed his fingers tight enough to make my scalp tingle. “Answer my question.”
“No.” I whispered on a frightened sob.
Without delay he loosened his grip. Before removing his fingers from my hair, his fingers massaged my scalp. I shivered at the utter creepiness of it.
“I’m going to cut your clothes off with some scissors,” he said flatly. “Don’t be alarmed.”
The rush of the water and the beat of my heart thundered in my ears as I thought about him stripping me down and drowning me.
“Why?” I let out frantically.
His fingers caressed the column of my tense throat. I shivered in my fear. I hated not being able to see what was happening, it forced me to feel everything.
His lips were suddenly at my ear, soft, full, and unwelcome. He nuzzled in further when I attempted to bend my neck and twist away. “I could strip you slowly, take my time, but this is simply more efficient.”
“Stay away from me you asshole!” Was that my voice? This ballsy version of me really needed to shut up. She was going to get me killed.
I braced for some act of revenge, but it never came. Instead, I heard a small burst of sound, like he was laughing. Creepy son of a bitch.
He cut my shirt off slowly, carefully, and it made me wonder if he was savoring my panic.
The thought took me places in my mind I willed myself not to go. Next, he removed my skirt.
Though I struggled, my attempts were pathetic. If my arms were in the way, he held them away with little effort. If I lifted my knees, he simply pressed them back down.
He hadn’t put the drain stop into the tub yet, the water hadn’t been rising. Cold overwhelmed me as I sat there in my underwear. He reached for my bra and I stopped breathing, just shaking uncontrollably.
“Relax,” he said soothingly.
“Please,” I managed to say through sobs. “Please—whatever it is you think you need to do, you don’t. Please, just let me go and I won’t tell, I swear…I swear it.”
He didn’t answer me. He pressed the scissors up between my breasts and cut my bra open. I felt my breasts slide out and I started another fit of crying.
“No-no, don’t touch me!” Immediately he grabbed my nipples and pinched them. I screamed in shock and surprise, sensations flooding me.
He leaned in close to my ear and whispered, “You want me to let go?”
I nodded, unable to form words.
“Yes, please?” he pinched my nipples harder.
“Yes! Please!” I sobbed.
“Are you going to be a good little girl?” came his voice, once again imbued with a cold indifference that was contrary to the gentleness he tried to convey earlier.
“Yes.” I whined through clenched teeth and managed to place my hands over his. His hands were huge and they held me firmly. I didn’t even attempt to tug his hands away. There was no way he was letting go.
“Good girl.” He replied with sarcasm. But before he let my poor nipples go, he rubbed the sensitized and tender buds with his palms.
There was seemingly no end to my tears, as I forced myself to succumb to his more merciful side. I sat quietly and tried not to earn another dose of punishment. As he removed what remained of my bra and cut off my panties, I could feel the cold metal slide against my skin, the sharpness cutting through cloth, and maybe even me if I pushed too far.
After spraying my body with what could only be a detachable showerhead, he finally put the stop in the tub. The water was warm enough, better than the air against my exposed skin, but I was too terrified to feel any relief that I was still in one piece, relatively untouched. Each time the water got to a cut or some area I hadn’t realized was damaged, it stung, making me wince.
I tried to control my crying and speak calmly. “Can you please just take off the blindfold? I’d feel better if I could just see what’s going on.” I swallowed, throat dry. “You’re not going to hurt me…are…you?” My teeth chattered as I waited for a response, still blind, still trapped.
He was quiet for a moment, but then he said, “You have to leave the blindfold on. As for hurting you, I’d only planned to clean you up for now. But understand there are consequences to your behavior, that when you do wrong, you will be punished.” He didn’t wait for my answer.
“So keep still and I won’t have to hurt you.”
He set about washing my body with a soft liquid soap that smelled of mint leaves and lavender. The darkness bloomed with the scent; it filled the room, wrapped around my skin. Like his voice. I’d once enjoyed the smell of lavender. Not anymore, now I loathed it.
When he passed over my breasts, I couldn’t resist the compulsion to once again try to trap his hands in mine. Without a word, he slipped one soapy hand free and squeezed my wrist until I released the other.
Later, he slapped my thigh when I kept closing my legs and wouldn’t let him wash between them. This part of me was private. No one had seen it but me, not since I’d been a child. No one had touched it; even I had not explored it fully. And now a stranger, someone who had done me harm was acquainting himself with…me. I felt violated and the feeling was reminiscent of a past I had tried long and hard to forget. I fought, but with every touch, with every invasion, my body belonged a little more to him than it did to me. I couldn’t stop shaking.
And then it ended. He pulled the stop out of the bath, pulled me out, dried my skin, combed my hair, rubbed ointment on my scrapes and gave me a bathrobe to wear. I was terrified, embarrassed, exhausted, and blind, but was still glad to feel clean – on the outside at least.
His voice was a soft breeze against my neck as I stood without assistance in front of him.
“Come with me.”
Unable to do otherwise, I allowed him to take my hand and guide me blindly out of the bathroom.
