SOMEONE KICKS the door from the lock, splintering the plasterboard, dusting the air in small white fragments.
‘Fawn, are you sick?’ Henchman Jeeves says, panic an ever-ready entity, making his words pitch higher. Am I sick? Am I sick?
As I stare at the carpet, sucking in air—sharp, hot, thick air that doesn’t want to be inside my tiny, shrivelled lungs, I see him kneel beside me. He reaches for me—his hands and skin and warmth hurdling me further into despair, and I jolt away from the horrible feeling.
‘Don’t touch me,’ I gasp, my mouth filling with tears around each sharp desperate draw for air.
He sinks back. ‘Fuck. Talk to me, Fawn.’
I hate the tears. I fight them, but the wrestle forces a broken groan from my throat. I don’t want to cry in front of him, in front of them, for them or because of them, but I can still hear the grunts that are now a part of my soul. A blemish in my brain.
Fuck.
My shoulders.
My fucking shoulders and chest won’t stop shaking, and air won’t flow freely into my lungs.
‘Fawn? I’ve called Mr Butcher. He’s on his way.’
When I curl my fingers into the carpet, fending off the tremors, shooting pain rushes beneath the nailbeds like electrical currents, warning me they are bending the wrong way. I revel in the pain.
It’s real.
Pain is truth.
Undeniable. No one can keep the pain from me, and I’ll decide what is too much, what is enough.
It’s my body and I’ll decide!
I don’t want to cry as I force the words out. ‘I’m sick.’ And sick people cry, Bolton. They howl and try to rip their nails from their flesh because they feel so terrible inside.
I’m sick.
‘Can you stand?’ he asks, but I haven’t looked at him, focused on a spot on the carpet that has a tiny black fibre thread through it. A tiny imperfection. I couldn’t see the fibre before; it is so small, but it’s hard to unsee now that I’m homed in on it. I reach for it, plucking at the strand that is imbedded so tightly, this little imperfection in his otherwise perfect office space. A tainted blemish.
‘I need tweezers,’ I say, gritting my teeth as the defiant black thread only moves deeper into the cream-coloured strands around it. ‘I need tweezers!’
Within a few seconds or maybe it’s ten or twenty minutes, I don’t know or care because Bolton is handing me tweezers. I need them. I tear the fibre free from the carpet. Sitting back, I hold it up. Squint at it. Air fills my lungs as I stare at the crinkled little strand between the pinched tips of my tweezers. I inhale relief, but the air is caught in the back of my throat when my eyes land on another.
And another.
Little black fibres everywhere.
No. No.
I don’t like them. My cheek muscles start to ache from the lock I have on my jaw. As I begin to rip them all out, I become a vessel expelling grunts and growls. Removing the threads. One by one. ‘I need to get them!’
I don’t notice Bolton stand and move away, but I’m suddenly lifted into the air.
Hands on me.
Hands on my body.
My heart beats painfully, threatening to hammer right through my ribcage, crack me in two. His hands scorch my skin, melting the flesh away from my bones, leaving only the shrivelled, sick essence of me inside. Touch hurts. I cry out and flail around in his grasp, kicking and screaming, eventually managing to gyrate free from his arms.
The burning stops when my feet touch the floor.
My pulse is a drone now; it sounds in time to the grunts and groans in my mind. Suddenly, the room press in on me. It is too small. There are too many bodies. I don’t see who. Just the shapes. All around me. So many. I snap my head around, needing an exit, an escape, a way out of this space—this body.
‘Step away from the door,’ Clay orders, and even though I register his words, register his tone, and everything him, my legs bolt for the newly revealed exit.
I fly from the room, but not before hearing him roar, ‘Search the grounds!’
A blur of people dart from my path. Henchmen bracing their weapons in two hands, ready to unleash hell, pour out into the gardens. Ahead, I see the pool glowing, drawn to it. I sprint harder. My lungs sting. My muscles ache from being thrown around. Dragged along the couch. Thrust into. My body remembers as my mind churns the images, the sounds of being fucked, curdling them through my reality. Tumbling back to me, hitting me like the sky falling, is the truth.
My body remembers.
My skin set afire by the truth.
I run straight into the pool.
The cool water hisses as it coats the phantom of their touch, the scorched skin that didn’t remember but now acutely blisters under every ghosting caress, every lick between my legs, every bruising squeeze of my thighs, every heavy breath.
The water soothes it. Swallows it. Holds me. Under the water, I’m free from the sensation of my body. Free from the weight of it. The burden. Under the water, I’m free.
With my heart so loud, so intense, it’s presence inside me is violent, I fight to keep myself from the clutches of the world above. Feeling a straining sensation in my chest, my body wanting breath, I fight it. I’ll burn in the air. My skin isn’t my own when I can feel their touch, their breath, them—
No, I can’t.
I have to fight it.
Strong.
My lungs burn.
I’m resilient.
My chest aches.
A survivor.
I fight it, oxygen-deprived and willingly losing consciousness, but then the water changes, pushes me up, and I’m dragged from the pool’s hold.
Dragged into the air.
My flesh ignites again.
I fight to get back into the water where I don’t hate the feel of my own skin. I fight in the arms around me, slapping his face and beating my fists into a wall of muscles. Don’t fucking touch me. ‘Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me!’ Screaming, I savagely attack him, scratching the plane of his handsome face, his soaking wet shirt, ripping the scene apart, fighting back. I’m fighting back.
He grabs my wrists, singeing my skin within his palms. ‘It’s me, little deer.’
I release a long, throaty cry, ‘You’re burning me!’
Don’t touch me. The voice in my head from that day, the one they couldn’t hear, the one that froze in fear on my tongue, howls in my mind.
Don’t touch me.
Don’t touch me.
Don’t touch me.
I’m suddenly dragged to the floor, smothered in him, locked against him. ‘Stop, Fawn! You’re going to hurt yourself.’ He’s suffocating me. A snake made with scorching human flesh. My skin bubbles. But then his lips hit my temple, his voice saying, ‘Shhh.’
His hushing timbre soars through the grunting, the chanting, the little voice, the groans, through all the fear reaching me somewhere inside. Bringing with it the memories of the past few weeks while I have been his.
Mine!
The gun to Lee’s face.
The way people part for him.
The deadliest man in the city.
The man who lied to me.
Protected me.
‘Shhh.’
It goes deadly quiet in my mind. The burning stops to the sound of him, and I go limp to his deep perpetual white noise. ‘They can’t touch you. You’re mine. You’re mine.’
I’m his.
My knees collapse, my body a decaying mess he supports in his arms. And I let go. Cry. I cry so hard my brain seems to detonate, bashing at my skull under the pressure of my violent sobs, of my racketing mind. I cry for every night between that one and this, becoming nothing but a vessel for every unshed tear. He holds the tattered pieces of me. He doesn’t press for answers. Who gave it to you? What did they say? He doesn’t ask me what he can do or what hurts…
He knows the answers.
Nothing.
And everything.
