Alicia sat in silence for a long moment listening to the sound of her own breathing, trying to steady her pulse and keep herself from going crazy and perhaps going into shock. She began to catalogue her injuries. Aside from the nauseating ache in her bruised and bitten breasts where her nipples had been torn off, she had no major injuries. She had a few other bruises from where the college boy had smacked her buttocks and pulled her hair as he grunted, growled, and thrusted deep into her. Nothing she wasn’t used to.
Her wrists were scraped raw from trying to wriggle out of the leather restraints last night after she’d been left alone. Joe had cleaned them as best he could with hydrogen peroxide but still the skin ripped and bled as she tried again to squeeze out of the leather cuffs. Again, nothing she wasn’t accustomed to.
Joe had left a bucket by the side of the bed in case she had to use the restroom before he returned. On the nightstand he left a bowl of water. Alicia would have to kneel on all fours and lap it up like a kitten in order to drink from it with her arms still bound behind her. She didn’t want to think of what she’d have to do in order to use the bucket.
Her shoulders were killing her. No matter how she turned on the bed her weight rested on them unless she turned over onto her face, which aggravated the throbbing pain where her nipples had been, or sat completely upright, which felt uncomfortable with the bar wedged between her legs keeping them apart.
Even when she set upright, Alicia’s shoulders still felt under pressure from being forced backward with her arms locked behind her.
Alicia tried to scream again. She thrashed, kicking and bucking on the bed, hoping someone would come to her rescue, but she didn’t hear a single sound coming from any of the other apartments. Either the walls were soundproof or there were no other neighbors. She thought about what the rest of the building had looked like, the smell of garbage and urine, the cracked drywall and deteriorating paint, the fact that she had not seen any evidence of anyone else on her way to his apartment. The lobby had been dark when she’d come stumbling in late last night and there had been no sounds of televisions or radios or children crying, lovers quarrelling. It had seemed completely empty to her, but she’d paid no attention to it, attributing it to the lateness of the hour. She’d been too busy concentrating on getting some of that young gorgeous college athlete’s cock to think about how shitty his apartment building was. Now that she knew that her gorgeous athlete was a kidnapper and a cannibal, she wondered if perhaps she’d been lured into an abandoned building. The gang she used to hang out with had once converted an entire vacant department store into one big crack house and shooting gallery. Maybe she was in a condemned apartment building that he was just squatting in?
Giving up on screaming, Alicia began once again trying to work her way free of the restraints. The pain in her wrists competed with the pain she imagined if the cannibal returned to finish his meal. She began to jerk and pull furiously at the cuffs, only succeeding in cutting the leather deeper into her already abraded skin.
‘Oh God! I’m going to die here!’ She began to cry again and forced herself to stop. That wasn’t going to help anything. It would only get in the way of her thinking. She had to come up with a plan.
Maybe she could talk him into releasing her from the cuffs when he returned? He did seem to be remorseful. He even seemed to really like her. Maybe he wouldn’t kill her after all? Then she remembered the look on his face when he bit into her breast. He hadn’t looked himself. He hadn’t looked human at all. The thing that she’d seen gnawing into her nipples had been all appetite and lust. Maybe he had two personalities?
One that was caring and gentle, the one who’d washed her wounds and cleaned her up this morning and apologized for hurting her before leaving, and one that was vicious and dangerous, the one who’d lost control. Somehow she had to talk one of them into letting her go.
