18. Res
18
Res
I reconsider all the choices I made today that led me to this moment. Choices that I might not have made if I weren’t sleep-deprived, terrified, pissed off because of my terror, and hyped up on too much coffee, and energy drinks.
With all that fueling me, over a course of twelve hours, I was able to track Jaxson down.
First it was a matter of retrieving the texts from him that disappeared the second I read them. Once I retrieved them, it as a matter of tracking where they came from, which was a matter of unraveling the tangled mess of the pathway the text was sent through. An entire red herring of a network. Jaxson’s texts must take a least five minutes to get to me after he sends them.
It took twelve hours, but I finally traced the origin and got an address. Just outside the county, on the outskirts of the city. If I was driving past it for anything other than to find it, I would have never gone down the barely clear dirt pathway that led into the woods before it led into a paved concrete road a thousand feet in. It opens up to an entire swath of land making up a massive estate with a main house, a manor, at its center .
The gate opened as soon as I reached it, and I simply parked my car in front of the manor, stormed inside, and let servants point me in the right direction to confront Jaxson.
Now, in hindsight, maybe Jaxson was right. Maybe I shouldn’t have come without backup. Maybe I should have called Lyssa to drive me here and told her to wait outside in the car. But there’s no guarantee that would have worked. If Jaxson was willing to torture Zach the way he was, what’s to say that he wouldn’t do the same thing to Lyssa. That he wouldn’t lie and hack into cameras to splice footage and erase any evidence that could implicate him.
It was either do something or sit and wait terrified in my apartment for Jaxson to come to me when he was ready and end up in the exact same predicament I’m in right now. I was tired of sitting and waiting terrified in my apartment, so the only thing left to do was confront Jaxson and do it my way. On my terms. Show him that he’s not the only one who can stalk and dig up information.
Still, I can’t help reconsidering all the different scenarios when Jaxson drags me to what I’m assuming is his bedroom and places on his bed a decorative black box with a silk ribbon tied around it. I can’t help reconsidering every decision I made and all the logic behind it when he turns to me and orders, “Strip.”
My heart races in terror, and it gets harder to breathe. But I set my terror aside to snap, “You’re a real sick bastard if you think I’m going to do that.”
He sighs. “You can make this easy or hard on yourself, Lauressa. Which way is irrelevant to me. Either way, you’re going to be stripped out those clothes. Now, are you going to strip or am I going to have to do it.”
Neither.
Without hesitation, I snatch the door open and attempt to escape down the hall. I don’t look back. Looking back will only slow me down. I simply keep running, losing my house slippers along the way so that I can run faster. I get to the end of the hall. I can go left or right. There’s no time to hesitate. I go right. Even if I get lost, chances are in a house this fucking big, I’ll run into some stairs or a window or something eventually.
The hall is coming to an end, and there’s nowhere to go but the large window on the wall. I’m already reaching to brush the curtain aside and unhook the latch before I’ve even fully stopped running. I only stop to raise the window and punch out the screen.
I swing my legs out the window and propel myself forward, heedless of the fifteen foot drop. But arms wrap around my waist before I can get fully out the window pulling me back.
Where the fuck did he come from? I didn’t even hear him behind me!
“No!” I yell as I’m snatched back inside. “No. Let me go.”
“Someone likes the thrill of the chase,” Jaxson says, unbothered by my struggling as he throws me over his shoulder and carries me back down the hall.
He’s not wrong. Running. Knowing he was behind me but not hearing him. The soaring hope when I got halfway out the window, knowing escape was imminent, only to be pulled back. There is something exhilarating about it. It wars inside me with my terror .
We finally arrive back to his room, and once again, he closes the door behind him. But this time, he sets me down away from the door so there’s no way to escape him easily again. I look around the room. There’s the ensuite. The closet. Balcony doors on the other side of the bed. But at best, any of those options would only delay the inevitable, allow Jaxson to corner me even more than I already am, or both.
“Done exhausting all your options?” Jaxson asks sounding long suffering of all things.
“Fuck you.”
Jaxson stalks over to me. I step back. Back and back until I hit the wall. Jaxson places his hand on the wall to cage me on one side and runs his thumb over my lips with the other.
“I keep telling you, one of these days, I’m going to dirty that little mouth up myself since you keep begging for it with that dirty language,” he warns.
“You’ve been threatening me with that for weeks. I doubt it,” I snap, though I don’t doubt it at all.
“You don’t have to believe me. Just know that I make good on all my promises. Now. Am I going to be stripping you? Or will you do it yourself?”
I grit my teeth. I’m out of choices, and Jaxson is clearly out of patience.
I shove him in the chest, and he allows himself to be pushed back, giving me room.
If I have to be stripped, the last fucking thing I’m going to do is allow him the satisfaction of doing it himself .
Feeling like I’m the real life star of one of those fucking “embarrassed naked female” pornos, I start to strip.
First, I take off my jacket. I take the time to slowly and neatly fold it in a way I wouldn’t bother if I were stripping off my clothes at the end of the day at home. I place it on the bed, smoothing it to lay as flat as possible. Jaxson’s face remains neutral. He’s clearly humoring me, but somehow I can sense he’s about to tell me to get a move on. Wanting to have as much control over this as possible, I decide to keep going before he can get to that point.
Next are my sweatpants. I fold them and place them on the bed in the same deliberate way that I did the my jacket. Then I move on to my sweatshirt, wishing that wearing undergarments under everything to hide the natural movement of my “adornments” was one of the weird things I still insisted on doing from my cult upbringing even after leaving. But I was all too glad to all but burn my shapewear after I left Loving Eden. Especially the shapewear tights that the church mothers insisted I wear because I had such a huge ass and wide hips that switched and supposedly drew the attention of men when I my heels clicked across the wooden floors of the church.
I push the regret out of my mind as I lift my sweatshirt over my head, not bothering to take the time to fold it seeing as I would need both hands and one of them is occupied with trying to cover my breasts from Jaxson’s gaze.
“There,” I snap. “Happy!”
“Those too,” Jaxson says.
His gaze doesn’t move nor does he nod his head pointedly in any direction, but I know he means my panties. It’s the only thing left .
“You asked me to strip. I stripped,” I snap. “That isn’t enough for you!”
“Lauressa.”
It’s a warning. Either I do it, or he does.
I do it, struggling to keep my nipples covered at the same time. Once they’re off and kicked to the side, I place my other hand down to futilely cover my pelvic area.
I know what Jaxson’s going to do when he closes the distance between us again.
“Please,” I whisper, tears coming to my eyes. I’m far beyond being too proud to beg. “Please.”
Jaxson takes both my wrists in his hands and forcibly holds my arms to the side. Face becoming flush with embarrassment, I look down and to the side to avoid his gaze.
“Look at me, Lauressa,” he demands.
Either I’m going to do it, or he’s going to, and I’m not willing to let go of the last vestiges of control he’s allowed me to keep. I slowly look up at him, trembling in terror imagining what I’ll see, what torture his eyes will foreshadow.
To my surprise though, there’s something fond? No. Fond is too kind a word. It’s not intense enough for the way he looks at me. Like I’m a queen. No. A goddess to be worshipped.
He kisses my cheek, catching a stray tear with his lips. Then he says, “You don’t know how beautiful you are. More beautiful than Aphrodite incarnate. ”
He lets go of my wrists and goes back over to the box sitting on the bed. As I watch him open it, my hands go to cover my most intimate places again, despite the fact that Jaxson has already gotten an eyeful.
I expect handcuffs or a vibrator or some torturous sexual device so that he can exert some sick, sexual fantasy on me. But to my surprise, he takes out… a dress? A normal dress. Well, there’s nothing normal about it. It’s clearly expensive and made of the finest materials. That’s all I can glean from it before Jaxson lays it on the bed and takes out a pair of shoes, earrings, a thick, gold cuff necklace, and a sexy black lace thong.
He picks up the panties first and says, “Come here.”
I stay rooted to my spot. I would have preferred the box to be a bunch of sex torture items. I would have preferred him to tie me naked to the bed and sexually assault and rape me rather than what he’s about to do. Because being dressed up like his personal doll is worse. Being made in into his image, into who he thinks I am, and who he thinks I should be is worse than him breaking me. If he breaks me, I can pick up the pieces and put them back together into a semblance of who I was before. That’s easier than being buried under what someone else wants you to be and then trying to dig out and resurface from that grave.
I did that once. It was hell. I never want to do it again. I’ll die first. I rather be forced to walked around naked for the rest of my life than let someone do that.
“Lauressa,” Jaxson says in a warning tone.
But it doesn’t matter what I’d rather do. Jaxson isn’t giving me a choice, and I don’t put it past him to sedate me or something and dress me the way he wants. Again, I decide to take what little control I can get.
So I go over to him and let him help me into the panties first. Then he takes the dress and makes me step into it, helps me get my arm in the single sleeve, pulls the halter pieces behind my neck to clip them together, and zips up the back. The earrings and the smooth gold cuff necklace follow. Then he helps me get into the shoes. All the while, tears drip down my face like I’m a three-year-old whose mom won’t let them wear their favorite, expensive dress to the playground and dresses them in practical jeans and t-shirt instead.
Next, he sits me down on the bench in front of the bed, grabs a brush and pulls my hair back into what feels like a sleek bun and then puts makeup on my face. I can’t lie and say that I’m not curious about where he learned to do hair and makeup of all things, but I’m too distraught and stubborn to care or ask.
Finally, when he’s done, he takes me over to a floor-length mirror and stands me in front of it while he stands behind me.
The dress is long, heavy, and smooth with the top wrapping over the side of my neck and down into the one sleeve, showing swaths of skin. The bodice perfectly hugs my torso and accentuates my cleavage. It fits around my hips and then flares some at the knee and is accented by a side split up my thigh. The jewelry and shoes perfectly accent it, and the makeup is just heavy enough to hide how tired I am and accentuate my features while also light enough to make me look recognizable. The sleeked-back bun finishes of the look, making me look clean and sophisticated and …
I don’t hate it. And because I don’t hate, I hate it even more than if I hated it at all.
Back when I was growing up, this is the kind of dress I wanted to wear when I was an adult. I wanted to look like the confident and sophisticated women I saw in magazines and in sexy thriller and suspense films. Put together. Gorgeous. Sexy. But also no nonsense. Totally in control. Completely impenetrable and unable to be defeated. Powerful
This woman in the mirror is the kind of woman I wanted to be. This was my dream. This is my dream. But now I hate it. Because not only do I not feel powerful, I hate that this is the image Jaxson wants me to be. I hate that the image he wants to make me into is the image I want to be. I feel seen but also seen through.
“Look at you,” Jaxson says. “My Snow White. The most beautiful of them all. You are worth everything. You are perfection.”
I huff. Perfection.
“No. I’m not perfect,” I snap. “I won’t let you put me on that pedestal. I’m not some perfectly crafted object to be made someone’s prize. Least of all yours.”
Jaxson buries his face between my neck and shoulder and pulls me flush against him.
“Doesn’t matter what you want. You’re already on the highest pedestal. Whether you like it or not.”
“And what if I fall and break? What if I’d rather fall?”
“I’ll make sure you don’t.”
“That sounds an awful lot like control.”
“It is control,” Jaxson admits. “But if I can’t control you, how am supposed to be able to protect you from falling, Lauressa?”
It’s more or less the same benevolent sexism crap that I was taught at Loving Eden. Because I was born with a fucking uterus, I was precious. I needed to be protected. I needed to protect myself and men from their natural inclinations to ruin me. From the world’s attempts or this theoretical Satan to ruin me.
It wasn’t protection, though. All it really did was enable their sexism and justified their disappointment and punishments when I dared to climb down from their high shelf and degrade myself. In their opinion, anyway. The same shit that was my final straw and caused me to leave and never go back. Different players, same game when it comes to cults. But then…
Why do I almost believe Jaxson when he says it?
Worse than that, why do I actually want to believe it?