3. CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER THREE
I close the door behind Lila and Tucker and take a deep breath, wishing my buffers weren’t leaving so soon.
I can do this.
Steeling myself against rejection, I fake-smile and turn to Mark. “Looks like we’re on our own tonight. Want to grab dinner somewhere?”
His jaw tightens slightly. “No.”
No excuses, no explanations, just “no”.
I take another deep breath. “Alright. How about we sit down and talk instead?”
He exhales sharply, refusing to meet my eyes. Then he shakes his head, whirls around, and heads into his room. When he shuts his door, it’s not exactly a slam, but it’s close.
That’s when it sinks in.
We’ve ruined things beyond repair.
His anger, his icy chill when he looks at me, his refusal of my massages even to ease his pain – I can’t take any more of his blatant, unrelenting rejection. When I hear his shower turn on and know I can escape unnoticed, I collect my pillow and my things from his bedside table and take them upstairs. Fuck the night terrors. I survived them before. I’ll survive them again.
I’m starving, and since I don’t feel like cooking, I need takeout. I slam my car into drive and speed to the closest restaurant. It’s a pizza place, the kind where you can buy huge wedges of hot pizza by the slice. I pick up some sausage and olives for Mark and Hawaiian for me. As I let myself back into the house, I hear his shower cut off. I deposit his pizza and a bottle of beer on his bedside table before he can finish toweling off, then scurry to the living room for the bottle of wine and my half-full glass. I take my wine and pizza to my room upstairs. Mark can’t manage my steep stairs, at least not very well. He’d probably have to crawl, which is actually an appealing thought. I’m hit by a momentary stab of guilt for my pettiness. Then again, he’s the one refusing to speak to his so-called best friend.
Maybe ex-best friend if we can’t figure this out, and it doesn’t seem like he wants to.
For the rest of the evening, I eat pizza around the giant lump in my throat and sob between glasses of wine. I drink the entire bottle, knowing I’ll hate myself for it in the morning, but I don’t care. I need to numb tonight’s pain. I’ll deal with tomorrow’s pain tomorrow. Before bed, I remove my handgun from my soft belly-band holster and place it in my top dresser drawer, accessible in a true emergency but not within reach if I freak out with night terrors.
I lay atop my covers, crying until I fall asleep.
Charlie wants to talk? Talk? After ignoring me all week, now she wants to talk? What’s the point? I glare at her injured expression and escape to my shower, mad as hell with no idea why. I stay in there longer than usual, avoiding her while trying to sort out my jumbled thoughts.
I had difficulty managing my emotions after my injury. That’s shrink-speak for, “I acted like a complete dick.” My entire world had shifted, and I had to recalibrate my life. Meds, my psychiatrist, and a support group for new amputees were all beneficial, but Charlie’s really the one who helped me find my footing in my new reality. She keeps me grounded. She always has. The problem is, now that things are rocky between us, I’m backsliding into an emotional mess.
We have to sort things out. I know that. This impasse is hurting both of us. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to stop acting like an ass long enough to sit down and talk with her.
When I step out of the steamy bathroom, I’m greeted by the smell of sausage and pizza sauce. My eyes follow the scent to its source – my bedside table. There’s a pizza box and a beer. But something’s different. I scan the room.
Charlie’s pillow is gone. So is her lotion, her brush and her hair tie. Even her book is gone, leaving her bedside table empty. Sterile. Cold.
No. NO. NO NO NO NO NO!
She can’t leave me. I can’t do this without her.
I haul myself as fast as I can on crutches into the hallway, jerking open the front door, breathing hard. Her silver SUV is in the driveway. I stop short, listening. The house is silent. Where is she? Did she leave with someone? Did she go off with Tom?
Then I hear it. Muffled sounds upstairs, from the direction of her room, or at least, where I presume her room is. In all the months I’ve lived here since my injury, I’ve never attempted to climb her stairs. Crutches combined with a missing leg and a steep staircase has the potential for a rapid descent and a trip to the emergency room.
It slowly sinks in that Charlie’s moved upstairs.
Away from me.
The icy panic I felt moments ago morphs into scorching anger. She won’t even stay downstairs now? She wants to get away from me, to go somewhere she thinks I can’t follow. She wanted to talk? Fine. I’ll talk. I’ll give her a damn earful.
I climb the sharply-inclined stairs cautiously. It takes forever, because my crutches force me to forego the handrail to stabilize myself. By the time I pass the halfway point, I’m wobbly as a newborn foal. I’m forced to lower myself to my ass and scoot backwards up the last four steps. Thank God no one’s here to see my humiliation.
That’s when I lose my grip on one crutch. It glides gracefully down the stairs, landing with a soft thump at the bottom.
Perfect.
Just. Fucking. Perfect.
The effort involved in mounting the stairs has downgraded my anger to bristling annoyance. I stand, tucking my single remaining crutch under my right arm and bracing my left arm against the wall. I glance around. There are six closed doors, but only one has a strip of light shining beneath it. I hobble toward that one.
Then I hear Charlie crying, harsh, gut-wrenching sobs.
Because of me.
She’s in there crying her eyes out because of me, because I’m stubbornly clinging to my frustrated sexual desire instead of my promise to her that kissing me wouldn’t damage our friendship.
Fuck.
The sound gouges my heart, filling me with shame. I want to go to her, to console her, but I don’t, because she came up here to escape my open hostility. I sink to the floor in the hall, my back against the wall outside her door, bending my left knee up and wrapping my arms around it. I bury my face in my arms, trying to drown out the sound of her tears.
I’ll talk to Charlie tomorrow. We’ll sort this out.
We have three options, at least as I see it.
Go back to being friends and forget this ever happened.
Decide we can’t move past it and call everything quits – not an option for me, and, I hope, not for her, either.
Or explore the possibility of more.
Her screams awaken me just after three-thirty, when her night terrors begin.
Pain. So much pain. My wrists burn from the bite of the barbed wire around them, chewing into my bones. The wire loops over a pipe in the ceiling, suspending me several inches above the floor. My shoulders scream for relief. My head pounds from the Chihuahua’s beatings, and my cheek and nose are taut from the swelling that closes my left eye. Fire blazes across my back and hips where he’s torn them to ribbons with his leather and razor-wire whip and seared my flesh with his goddamn brand. My breasts sting where he sliced them with his rusty knife, and low in my belly, the deep ache echoes the internal violation of his filthy blade between my thighs. Despite my nudity, I’m burning up.
Angry male voices approach from behind. Boots clomp discordantly on stone floors, out of step with each other, moving closer. Keys jingle behind me. I wonder why they even bother locking my cell when I’m all trussed up. It's not like I'm a flight risk.
I fight to clear my foggy mind. It feels like I’ve been here for months, but it can’t have been much more than a week, can it? There are no windows, no way to distinguish between day and night. I measure time by torture sessions, not by hours or days.
I blink rapidly, trying to focus. Sharpen up. Game face on. No weakness. I grit my teeth, dreading what’s to come.
The metal door screeches, clanging into the stone wall behind me. Sharp pain rockets through me as a booted foot slams into the small of my back. My body swings, the barbed wire digging deeper into my wrists. I bite back a groan as my entire abdomen throbs. I struggle to focus, shifting into medic-mode to clear my mind.
Internal bleeding – a leak, not a full-blown rupture. And sepsis setting in from open wounds in squalid conditions.
Either one can kill me, though, regrettably, not immediately. Death, even a painful one, is preferable to this torture.
I’ve tried pushing him hard enough to goad him into killing me, but he enjoys playing with his new American toys too much. Still, he’s insecure and hot-tempered, and that makes him easy to manipulate. I’ll keep provoking him. Eventually, he’ll snap and kill me, ending my torment.
The Chihuahua steps in front of me, dark eyes glittering. He’s the ringleader of this fucked-up circus. I’ve nicknamed him the Chihuahua because he reminds me of a hate-filled ankle biter, bullying others because of his own cowardice. His stubby body is full of rage and loathing, and he unloads it on me.
Based on the laughter of the men behind me, I can guess they’re here to torture me. Rough hands grind a gritty substance into the raw flesh of my back. I struggle, recognizing the fiery burn of salt. Four males jeer as I silently writhe in my restraints. When they fail to elicit cries from me, the Chihuahua holds out a hand for the whip, and the real pain begins.
“No!”
My own cry awakens me, and the room around me slowly comes into view. I’m alone on a bed, upright against the headboard, my back still burning with remembered pain. My bed. My room. I scan the reclaimed wood dresser and bedside tables with clear glass lamps, both lit because I can’t handle darkness. My beige recliner sits in the corner with a red blanket draped across it. The closet and bathroom doors are closed. I shut my eyes, panting, breaking out in a cold sweat.
I can get through this.
Four things I can see. I open my eyes and silently name them. The wall-mounted television. A print of a bright red cardinal in a monotone birch forest. My empty pizza box. My equally empty wine bottle.
Three things I can touch. The white comforter beneath me is soft. My yoga pants feel slick to my touch. I reach for my aqua glass lotion bottle on the bedside table. It’s cool and smooth under my fingers.
Two things I can hear. I strain, listening. A light breeze rustles the leaves of the maple tree outside my window. The rest of the house is silent, except for my rapid breathing. I’ll count that as the second sound.
One thing I can smell. I open my lotion bottle and inhale its soft jasmine scent, exhaling slowly, deliberately.
Four, three, two, one.
I’m fully present.
And awake. Fully fucking awake.
Dammit, it’s not even four in the morning. Mark is probably still awake. I can’t go downstairs until after daylight, when he normally goes to sleep.
I may not have slept up here in years, but I still remember my old hiding places. I slide off the bed and pad across the plush carpet to my closet. A bottle of rum perches on the top shelf.
Just enough to get back to sleep.
It takes four shots to stop my trembling. Three more to get sleepy. I push the bottle, still open, onto my bedside table and lie down, praying for dreamless sleep.
I’m not that lucky.
Loud voices advance, speaking Dari too quickly for me to grasp individual words. I glance up. Wire digs into my wrists, which are lashed together above my head. Blood drips from the raw wounds encircling them, warm ruby liquid rolling over brown trails of dried blood. I’m thirsty, so thirsty. My lips and tongue are parched and cracked.
The cell door shrieks open on rusty hinges, banging into the wall. I try to count feet as they file in. Four men, I decide.
Game face on. No weakness. I clench my jaw and wait.
The Chihuahua moves in front of me. His soulless black eyes shine with hatred. He rattles off something I don’t understand, and the others laugh. He leers, reaching a hand up as if to stroke my face, but I know better. He slaps me hard, and I taste blood. Without hesitation, I spit on him. It lands on his cheek, more blood than saliva, and he drags his sleeve across his face, glaring. He grabs my face in an iron grip, crushing pudgy fingers into my bruised and swollen flesh.
I can’t spit, but I can still kick. I glare at him, and he laughs. While he’s celebrating his manly prowess in battering a restrained woman, I drive the solid bone of my shin into his soft groin. He releases me and groans, dropping to his knees. It’s not the first time I’ve done so. A smarter man would learn situational awareness. I laugh rudely, and he shoots me a contemptuous look.
When he can stand, he beats me until I lose consciousness. When I wake, I wish I hadn’t. Each man takes a turn raping me, and there are five of them, not four. When they finish, one of them grabs a section of rusty pipe and shoves it inside me. It rakes my torn flesh, and I suck in a sharp breath. Raucous laughter echoes around me as blood trickles down my inner thighs. I will not cry. I will not show weakness. I fight the bastards with everything I have, but it’s not enough. There are too many of them.
When I wake, I’m on my knees on the floor, screaming, drenched in icy sweat.
Fuck.
I fall back onto my backside, panting, as I lean against the bed and allow myself to cry.
Charlie’s screams and subsequent sobs are nearly my undoing. It’s all I can do not to burst into her room, but (a) the last time I did that during one of her night terrors, she nearly shot me in the head, and (b) she came upstairs to get away from me. I don’t blame her, but I’m also not sure I’d be welcome.
Only when I hear her shower turn on shortly after daylight am I reassured she's okay.
Well, relatively okay.
That’s when I hop my crippled ass down the stairs, gripping the handrail tightly as I take it one step at a time. It’s a relief to reach the bottom and retrieve my second crutch. I return to my room, gently closing the door. I crawl into bed, but sleep is my enemy, evading me at every turn.