16. Leandra
The clamps bite.
They always bite, but I’ve learned that the first few minutes are the worst of it, that sharp, vicious pinch of metal against flesh that makes my eyes water and my breath come in short, stuttered gasps.
My vision blurs at the edges, and for a moment I am nothing but the pain, reduced to a single screaming nerve, a body that exists only to suffer.
But after that, it dulls into something else.
Something I don’t have a word for yet, something that sits right on the border between agony and sensation, and I hate that I’ve learned to navigate that border at all.
I hate that I know it exists and that some part of me hungers for it, depends upon it.
I hate that my survival has required me to make a home in this in-between place, this nowhere land where pain becomes something I wear like a second skin.
Isaac is beneath me, his hands folded behind his head like a man reclining on a Sunday afternoon.
Unbothered. Unhurried. His dark eyes track every movement I make with the kind of detached interest a collector might show a new acquisition; cataloguing, assessing, deciding what it’s worth.
I am not a person to him, I have not been a person to him since the moment they took me away.
I am raw material, I am clay to be shaped.
I am a problem to be solved through systematic, methodical cruelty.
He is doing nothing, and that’s the point. His stillness is its own kind of violence. His refusal to touch me, to guide me, to offer anything but that flat, evaluative stare. It’s a lesson. It’s always a lesson.
You will perform, you will please. You will do it all yourself, and I will sit here and judge the results.
Move, I tell myself. Just move.
I roll my hips forward and the clamps shift with the motion, sending a white-hot jolt straight through my chest. My hands press flat against his chest to steady myself, to anchor myself to something and beneath my palms I can feel his heartbeat-- slow, infuriatingly calm, the heart of a man who has never once in his life been afraid.
The heart of a man who has never been made to feel small, or powerless, or like his body belongs to someone else.
I press harder, as if I could somehow transfer my terror through his skin, as if I could make him feel even a fraction of what I feel.
His heartbeat doesn’t change. Of course it doesn’t.
Months. It has been months since my father handed me over, since I became whatever this hell is.
I know it because I’ve counted every single day with a kind of obsessive precision, scratching tallies into the soft skin of my inner wrist with my thumbnail.
As yet, no one has noticed. It’s a private record.
Proof that time is still moving, that I am still here, still counting, still me.
A secret rebellion written in faint red lines, a calendar carved into my own flesh because I have nothing else that belongs to me.
Though I’m less certain of that last part than I used to be.
Some days I look at the tallies and wonder if the girl who made the first mark still exists.
I wonder if I’m just a ghost wearing her face now, going through the motions she would have found unthinkable.
Some days I don’t wonder at all, because wondering requires a self to wonder with, and I’m not sure I have one anymore.
I roll my hips again, finding the rhythm he expects, the one I’ve been taught through repetition, pain, and the particular cold fury in his eyes when I get it wrong.
The clamps punish me for every movement and I breathe through it, I breathe around it the way you learn to breathe around a broken rib; carefully, shallowly, taking only what air you absolutely need.
The way you learn to breathe when crying isn’t permitted.
The way you learn to breathe when your body is no longer your own.
“Slower.” His voice is flat. Bored. As if I am a piece of machinery that isn’t operating at the correct speed. As if my suffering is an inconvenience, a minor calibration issue to be corrected.
I adjust.
He says nothing more which means I’ve got it right, and I hate how much I’ve come to rely on his silences as a form of approval.
I hate what these months have made of me.
I hate the vocabulary I’ve developed for his moods, the way I can read the set of his jaw or the angle of his shoulders and know, before a single word is spoken, what kind of night it’s going to be.
I hate that I’ve become fluent in the language of my own degradation, that I’ve learned to read the subtle shifts in his expression the way a prey animal learns to read the twitch of a predator’s muscle.
I hate that this knowledge has kept me alive, because it means my survival is built on a foundation of fear.
I keep my face masked in a show of ecstasy, though that is far from what I’m feeling.
That’s the most important thing I’ve learned.
More important than the rhythm, more important than the positioning, more important than any of the other degrading, specific, meticulous lessons he’s seen fit to teach me.
Keep your face masked. Because whatever I feel, whatever lives behind my eyes, he will find it.
He will drag it out into the light and use it against me, and so I have learned to bury it so deep that sometimes I worry I won’t be able to find it myself.
Sometimes I worry I’ve buried it so well that it’s simply gone, that the girl I was has been entombed somewhere inside me and I’ve forgotten the way back to her.
God, I hate him.
The thought rises up unbidden, hot, sharp, and dangerous.
I feel it in my chest like a second heartbeat, this hatred, this thing that is entirely mine.
It’s the only thing that’s entirely mine anymore, and I cling to it even as I know I have to let it go.
Even as I know that holding onto hatred is holding onto a burning coal and hoping he’s the one who gets scarred.
I bury that. I bury it fast, the way you smother a flame before it catches, and I smooth my expression back into something flushed and desperate and utterly, convincingly hungry.
I have become an actress of the highest order.
I have learned to perform desire the way other women perform small talk, casually, automatically, without thought.
The performance is so complete that sometimes I almost believe it myself.
That’s the most terrifying part, not that I can fake it, but that the line between the performance and the truth has grown so thin I can no longer see it.
His hand moves.
It comes up without warning, wrapping around my throat with that horrible, familiar ease, and he squeezes.
Not enough to cut off my air, just enough to remind me that he can, just enough to make my pulse spike against his palm.
Just enough to remind me that my life is literally in his hands, that he could end me right now and there would be no consequences, no one to ask questions, no one to care.
My father sold me. My mother didn’t stop him.
There is no one coming to save me. There never was.
“You’re not rolling your hips right.” He says it the way someone might comment on the weather, the way someone might note that a tool isn’t functioning properly and needs to be adjusted.
There’s no anger in his voice, no passion, no heat.
That’s what makes it so much worse. My suffering doesn’t even move him.
I am not worth the energy of cruelty delivered with feeling.
The clamps bite harder as he yanks me forward and I cry out before I can stop myself, the sound escaping me like something small and wounded, and I hate that too.
I hate every sound he pulls from me, I hate that my body has its own language now, one that answers to him whether I want it to or not.
I hate that he has taught my flesh to speak in a tongue I never consented to learn.
I hate that my own voice has become a traitor, betraying my pain, my fear, my unwanted pleasure, all of it laid bare for his satisfaction.
“Again.” He releases my throat.
I close my eyes.
This is the other thing I’ve learned. When I close my eyes, I can go somewhere else.
Not far, I’ve never managed truly far, but far enough.
I build it carefully, the way you’d build something fragile; a face that isn’t his, hands that aren’t his, a warmth that has nothing to do with cruelty or ownership or the slow, methodical destruction of a person.
I build it the way a prisoner builds an escape tunnel with nothing but a spoon and hope, incrementally, desperately, knowing it might collapse at any moment.
I don’t know whose face I use. I’ve never dared to let myself look at it too closely.
It doesn’t matter. What matters is that it isn’t his.
What matters is that somewhere in my mind, there is a place he cannot reach, a sanctuary I’ve constructed from scraps of memory and imagination.
It’s not much. It’s barely anything but it’s mine, and that makes it precious beyond measure.
I roll my hips, and the clamps send another jolt through me. Something shifts the way it always shifts, eventually, no matter how much I despise it and the pain bleeds sideways into something else, something that coils low and hot and makes my breath catch for an entirely different reason.
This is the part I hate most.