Chapter 37 Haven #2
“If my body responded, then I wanted it. I was sending mixed signals, so of course they didn’t stop. They’re my friend. My parent. My pastor. They wouldn’t do that to me, would they?”
I feel Bastian’s hands on my thighs, wrenching them open, the pressure of his fingertips digging into my soft flesh, slipping inside me—
...you’re lying with your mouth and begging with your cunt…
The memory hits so hard, I can’t breathe.
My chest constricts, each breath shallower than the last. Sweat beads on my forehead, the room spinning around me.
Bitter saliva floods my mouth, and it feels like the ground opens up beneath me, that I’m seconds away from plummeting down into the depths of hell.
“Stockholm Syndrome is perhaps the most widely recognized example of trauma bonding,” Bastian is saying, his voice cutting in and out like a badly tuned radio.
He’s talking about me. About us. Here, in front of everyone.
The fucking arrogance.
The lecture hall door slams open. I rip my eyes away, staring at Kai as he stalks over the linoleum toward Bastian. There’s a stack of papers in his hand, but he holds it like an afterthought.
He ignores Bastian, scanning the students with narrowed eyes, only stopping when he spots—
—me.
The moment he sees me, his gaze locks on and doesn’t look away until he’s at his desk on the podium. Even then, it’s only to glance toward Bastian as he holds out the stack of pages.
“Nice of you to join us, Mr. Jordan,” I hear Bastian say.
Kai answers without taking his eyes off me. “You said you wanted these before end of—”
“Yes, thank you.” Bastian waves a hand at the desk, and Kai stiffens before turning to sprawl in the chair. “Now, as I was saying—”
“Hey, are you okay?”
I turn my head with effort, Melissa’s concerned face swimming into focus.
“Breathe,” she mouths, demonstrating by taking an exaggerated breath.
I try to copy her, dragging air into my lungs. In through the nose, out through the mouth. The darkness recedes.
“You look like you’re going to pass out,” she whispers. “Do you need to leave?”
I shake my head slightly, still trying to regulate my breathing. “I’m fine,” I mouth back, though I’m anything but.
“—we see the same psychological mechanics in domestic abuse, cult indoctrination, even toxic workplaces,” Bastian continues, out of sight as I let Melissa bring me back to reality.
“The cruel figure becomes the center of the victim’s universe. They even begin to speak the language of their abuser, to see themselves through the abuser’s eyes. ‘Damaged goods,’ ‘asking for it,’ ‘deserved it’. These phrases become internalized.”
…you’re damaged goods now, sweet girl. Broken, branded, mine…
He’s not looking at me now, addressing the opposite side of the room. Without his eyes drilling into mine, it’s easy to dismiss the sinister thoughts in my head.
Am I imagining the knowing looks? The way he’s speaking to me as if no one else is in the room?
My breathing slows, the vise around my chest loosening. I uncurl my fingers from the edge of the desk, blood returning to my whitened knuckles with a prickle.
“What happened?” Melissa asks.
“I—” I clear my throat. “I’m okay. Just a little dizzy.”
“No, I mean Tuesday.”
My jaw clenches.
She knows? How can she—
“They were convinced you had alcohol poisoning,” she hisses. “If I hadn’t convinced campus security that you were fine, they’d have taken you to the hospital.”
I blink at her, struggling to process her words through the lingering panic attack that felt like it almost claimed my fucking life. “What?”
“You don’t remember? They found you out by the woods, wet, in the freezing cold.”
Fragments float back—rain on my face, the taste of liquor burning my throat, shouting at shadows. But everything after that is blank.
“I just...” I trail off, not sure which fucking lie to tell.
When I glance away from her insistent stare, I catch sight of Kai. He’s glaring at me, toying with a sucker in his mouth, his other hand tucked under his elbow.
“Don’t tell me you’re fine again,” she says.
“You slept the whole day yesterday. Wouldn’t speak to me this morning.
Now you almost pass out in class?” Her eyes narrow, then widen, glimmering with concern.
“When last did you eat?” She gives me a quick scan, laying a hand on my shoulder. “You are eating, right?”
I twist my body away from her touch. “Jesus, Melissa, I said I’m fine.”
My gaze drifts over to Kai. He’s rocked back on his chair, glare gone and a sucker in his mouth, but there’s nothing relaxed about him. He stares at Bastian with undisguised hatred—jaw clenched, shoulders rigid with tension.
Guess he has every reason to hate Bastian as much as he hates me after what happened on Saturday morning.
God, how did this all get so fucked?
“—and to quote van der Kolk, ‘the body keeps the score’.”
His eyes hunt mine out, no mistaking it.
“The idea being that trauma lives in our physical being even when the conscious mind tries to deny it. The body remembers pleasure even when the mind remembers pain.”
For a second, we lock eyes. Just long enough for a flicker of something to pass between us before he looks away.
It feels like a silent question.
What do you remember, Haven?
“This contradiction creates cognitive dissonance. A psychological state the brain desperately attempts to resolve,” he says, voice dropping low.
“End result? Anxiety. Guilt. Shame. And at the furthest end of the spectrum…? Attachment. The victim finds themselves longing for the very hand that hurts them.”
Bastian goes to fetch his coffee from the desk, taking a long, slow sip to let his words sink in. He turns to set the cup back down, catching Kai’s eye.
From my angle, I’m the only other person in the room who sees what Professor Rooke does next.
He licks the rim of his coffee cup, and then languidly runs his tongue along his bottom lip…right where Kai bit him.
It’s an obscene, pornographic taunt directed straight at the green-eyed boy across the desk from Bastian. Kai jerks his sucker out of his mouth, color leaving his face as his chair legs thump down with a loud thud.
An unwelcome pulse of heat flickers between my legs, burrowing deep inside me as I witness their exchange.
Shame engulfs me, burning hot on my face.
I shift, pressing my thighs together, seeking relief even as I grind down into my chair.
What in the goddamn trauma bonding is this?
How the fuck can I be turned on by this? By him?
Professor Rooke just gave me all the reasons I need, but logically, I’d have to be fucking crazy to be sitting here like nothing happened.
Maybe I am.
What are the signs?
Blackouts? Mood swings? Depression? Suicidal thoughts? Hallucinations? Risky behavior?
Hi, sex with practically-strangers, drugs, and neon rave parties in the woods wearing nothing but a fucking trash bag. Remember me? It’s Haven fucking Lee!
“—bringing us back to our core question,” Bastian says, walking back to the board to draw a circle around his triangle diagram. “What keeps someone trapped in a toxic relationship? Fear? A touch of psychological conditioning? Or is there something more primal at work?”
He paces slowly across the front of the room, every movement fluid and controlled.
A predator in his natural habitat, surrounded by prey.
“What if…”
He stops talking, stops walking, staring silently at the words scrawled on the blackboard. Then he ambles back to the desk and perches on the corner with one leg, swinging it idly as he crosses his arms over his chest.
“What if we’re hardwired to form attachments even in the face of cruelty, because for our ancestors, being cast out meant certain death. What if this so-called ‘trauma bonding’ is actually an evolutionary adaptation meant to keep us safe, like so many other trauma responses?”
His eyes find mine again. Latch on. Bore deep.
“What if some part of the victim not only responds to the abuser, but recognizes it,” he says, voice carrying effortlessly. “Remember, we all know what cruelty looks like. We all know how to be cruel. What if we find comfort in that familiarity. Kinship…”
He strokes the edge of his lower lip, then drags it through his teeth.
“…Like recognizing like.”
To the casual observer, he’s just musing to himself. A brilliant intellectual, simply polishing the filigree eggs in his mind palace.
To me, he’s getting ready to spit inside my cunt again.
“The monster in me calling to the monster in you.”
…the dark in you craves the dark in me…
His words warp and transform to those he whispered to me in Laramie’s dressing room. Right before he told me to control myself.
Me, control myself?
Me?
The motherfucking hypocrisy.
But he’s right. He’s fucking right, and I hate him all the more for it.
I can’t control myself.
I am broken. I am damaged goods.
The dark in me doesn’t just crave the dark in him.
I hunger for it like a starving beast.
That’s why I haven’t stood up and denounced him in front of everyone yet. Why I spent the whole of yesterday—according to Melissa—asleep in bed, when I should have been down at the sheriff’s office, laying a case of assault against my professor.
I shudder, biting down so hard on my lower lip that pain radiates through my flesh.
Bastian looks away, snapping the ghostly cord between us. I sit motionless as he reminds everyone of overdue assignments, required reading, and midterms coming up before dismissing them.
I hear everything, but register nothing.
I’m too busy willing my clit to stop tingling.
I should have escaped. Instead, I’m still planted like a fucking flag when my professor looks over at me and beckons with a flick of his hand.
“Miss Lee? A moment, please.”
Around me, students gather their things, chattering as they file out of the lecture hall. Melissa gives me a curious look.
“Want me to wait?” she asks quietly.
“No,” I blurt.
She hesitates, then nods stiffly. “Alright. See you later, I guess.”