Chapter 28
Chapter twenty-eight
Dante
Isit at the kitchen table for a long time after Dylan leaves.
The eggs have gone cold. The coffee has developed a film on the surface. Outside, the city hums with the distant sounds of traffic and voices and ordinary people living ordinary lives. None of it seems real. None of it seems like it has anything to do with me.
The shower is on. I can hear the water running through the pipes. It feels significant somehow. Dylan is in my bathroom, naked and wet, washing away the evidence of last night.
I should not be thinking about that. I should not be picturing the water running down his skin, tracing the same paths my hands traced hours ago. I should not be remembering the sounds he made, the way he looked at me, the devastating vulnerability in his eyes when he came apart.
I push away from the table and stand up abruptly. I need to do something. Anything. Something to occupy my hands and my mind before I drive myself insane.
The dishes. I can do the dishes.
It is a mundane task, almost laughably domestic given who I am and what I do. But there is something grounding about it. The hot water. The soap. The simple act of making something clean.
I gather the plates from the table and carry them to the sink. Turn on the tap. Reach for the dish liquid.
The sound comes from the bathroom. A heavy thud, like a body hitting tile. And then a noise that makes my blood turn to ice.
A strangled, animal sound of pure terror.
Dylan.
I am moving before I consciously decide to move. My feet carry me down the hallway at a dead sprint, my heart pounding against my ribs, every worst case scenario flashing through my mind in rapid succession.
The bathroom door is locked. Of course it is. Dylan always locks the door, a habit born of the few scraps of privacy I have allowed him.
I don’t hesitate. I slam my shoulder into the wood with all the force I can muster.
The door splinters. The lock gives way. Bits of the frame fly everywhere, scattering across the bathroom floor like shrapnel.
And there is Dylan.
Pressed into the far corner of the bathroom, as far from the shower as he can possibly get. Naked and dripping wet, his skin pale and covered in goosebumps. His eyes are wide and glassy, staring at the shower with an expression of absolute horror.
He is not seeing me. He is not seeing anything in this room.
He is somewhere else entirely. Somewhere terrible.
The shower is still running. I look at it, trying to understand what happened, and details click into place. The steam that should be fogging the mirror is absent. The water hitting the tiles sounds different, sharper somehow.
The water is cold.
Ice cold, from the looks of Dylan’s shivering body.
And suddenly I understand.
My plumbing is shit. I have known this for years, but it has never mattered because I live alone. When I run the hot tap in the kitchen, it pulls hot water away from the rest of the flat. I never really noticed before because there has never been anyone else using the water at the same time as me.
Dylan was standing under the spray, probably lost in thought, probably trying not to think about last night, and suddenly the water turned to ice.
Just like it did in my studio.
When I hosed him down with freezing water.
When I placed the chair he was tied to under the cold spray.
When I used the shock of the temperature to keep him disoriented, to break down his resistance, to make him more pliable for what came next.
When I cruelly washed away the evidence of him pissing himself from the horror of watching me work.
Then I left him there, in his cold, wet clothes, long enough to get hypothermia. Long enough to then develop pneumonia. I nearly killed him with cold water. Twice.
The guilt hits me like a sucker punch to the gut. It doubles me over, makes me grip the doorframe for support, and steals the air from my lungs.
I thought he was doing well.
I thought, stupidly, naively, that maybe the pneumonia had blurred the worst of his memories. That the fever dreams had somehow softened the edges of what I did to him. That he was recovering, healing, moving past the trauma I inflicted.
I was wrong. I was so desperately, pathetically wrong.
Dylan is not healed. Dylan is not recovered. Dylan is standing in my bathroom having a complete psychological breakdown because my shitty plumbing triggered a flashback to the worst experience of his life.
An experience I gave him. Deliberately. Methodically. With all the skill and precision I have honed over decades of making people suffer.
“Dylan.” My voice comes out hoarse. Wrecked. “Dylan, it’s me. It’s Dante. You are safe.”
He doesn’t respond. His eyes are still fixed on the shower, still glazed with that terrible faraway look. His chest is heaving with rapid, shallow breaths. His whole body is trembling, and I cannot tell if it is from cold or fear or both.
I take a step toward him.
He flinches. Violently. His whole body jerks away from me, pressing harder into the corner, and a sound escapes him that is barely human.
“No.” The word is raw, broken. “No, please. Please, I told you everything. I don’t know anything else. Please.”
He is not talking to me. He is talking to the monster who tortured him. The fact that we are the same person is a knife twisting in my heart.
“Dylan.” I try to keep my voice calm. Gentle. Everything I am not built to be. “Dylan, you’re not in the studio. You are in my flat. The water turned cold because of the pipes. That is all. You are safe.”
His eyes flicker toward me. For a moment, I think he sees me. Really sees me, here and now, not the nightmare version of me that lives in his memories.
Then his gaze slides past me to the broken door, the shattered frame, the evidence of violence that I have just committed to get to him. And whatever brief clarity he found vanishes.
“Stay away from me.”
The words are steadier now. More present. But they are filled with a fear that cuts me to the bone.
He is afraid of me. Genuinely, viscerally afraid. Not the low-level wariness that has faded over the past days. Not the careful tension that has slowly been replaced by something softer. This is the raw, animal terror of prey confronted by a predator.
I did this. I made him this way. And no amount of cookbooks or lovemaking or gentle mornings will ever undo it.
How do you help someone with their trauma when you are the one who caused it?
The answer is simple. Devastating. Obvious.
You cannot.
I take a step back. Then another. Putting distance between us, giving him space, even though every instinct is screaming at me to go to him, to wrap him in my arms, to hold him until the shaking stops.
But my arms are the arms that hurt him. My hands are the hands that wielded the tools he still sees in his nightmares. My presence is not comfort. My presence is the trigger.
I turn away from him. There is a stack of towels on the shelf by the sink. I grab two of them, thick and soft, the expensive kind I bought without really knowing why. There is also a blanket folded on the rack, left over from a bout of flu last winter when I spent days shivering in bed.
I place them on the floor. Within his reach, but far enough away that he will not have to come close to me to get them.
“Towels,” I say, my voice barely above a whisper. “And a blanket. For when you are ready.”
He doesn’t respond. Doesn’t move. Just stares at me with those haunted eyes, his body still pressed into the corner like he is trying to melt through the wall and escape.
I should say something else. Something reassuring. Something that might help.
But what is there to say? I’m sorry I tortured you. I’m sorry I broke you. I’m sorry that even now, even after everything, I am still the source of your suffering.
No words can fix this. No apology can undo the damage I have done.
So I do the only thing I can do. The only thing that might help, even a little.
I leave.
I step out of the bathroom and pull what remains of the door closed behind me. It doesn’t latch properly anymore. Of course it doesn’t. I destroyed it in my haste to reach him, adding one more broken thing to the list of damage I have caused.
I make it to the living room before my legs give out.
I sink onto the horrible orange sofa and put my head in my hands. My chest is tight. My eyes are burning. My whole body feels like it is being crushed under the weight of what I just witnessed.
Dylan’s face. That terrible, glazed expression. The sound he made when I stepped toward him, like a wounded animal expecting the killing blow.
I have seen that look before. On dozens of faces, in dozens of basements and back rooms and abandoned warehouses. In my studio, most of all. I have caused that look, cultivated it, used it as a tool to extract information and compliance.
But seeing it on Dylan’s face is different. Seeing it on the face of someone I care about, someone I have held in my arms, someone I have kissed and touched and wanted with an intensity that frightens me.
It is unbearable.
A sound escapes me. Something between a laugh and a sob. The absurdity of it all is crushing. I spent last night making him gasp and moan and call my name. This morning I watched him make eggs in my kitchen, wearing my shirt, looking for all the world like someone who belonged here.
And now he is huddled in my bathroom, naked and terrified, reliving the worst moments of his life because I ran the hot tap.
The universe has a sick sense of humor.
I sit in silence. Minutes, maybe. Or hours. Time has lost all meaning in the face of what I have done.
Eventually, I hear movement from the bathroom. The soft rustle of towels being picked up. The quiet shuffle of feet on tile. The door opening and closing.
He is moving. He is out of the corner. He is putting on clothes and trying to pull himself back together.
I should check on him. Should make sure he is alright. Should offer tea or food or whatever small comfort might help.
But I cannot bring myself to move. Cannot face him again. Cannot look into those eyes and see the fear that I put there.
So I stay where I am. Alone on my ugly sofa. Drowning in guilt and self-loathing and the growing certainty that I have destroyed something precious before it ever had a chance to bloom.
This is who I am. This is what I do. I break things. I break people. And no matter how much I want to be different, no matter how desperately I wish I could undo the past, the evidence of my true nature is cowering in my bedroom right now.
Dylan deserves better than this. Better than me. Better than a monster who cannot even comfort him because he is the source of the trauma.
But I don’t know how to give him better. I don’t know how to let him go. I don’t know how to be anything other than what I have always been.
So I sit in the silence of my empty living room, and I wait, and I wonder if this is what it feels like when your sins finally catch up with you.