“Wait a minute. Hold on,” he said. He worked at the gag, unknotting the tie. As soon as I could, I spit out my panties and turned around and punched him in the face. He deflected my fist, but I punched him again, punched him as many times as I could before he grabbed my hands and stopped me.
He laughed and tried to catch my gaze. “Stop, Chere. Jesus. It was just for fun.” The Texas accent was gone. W was back, laughing at me, laughing at all the horrible things he’d just done. “Don’t be mad. It was fucking hot.”
“Hot for who?” I shouted. “I didn’t know it was you!”
“You weren’t supposed to know. That would have ruined all the fun.”
Fun? Fun? I tried to hit him again and then I thought, why expend the energy? Why am I still here? I’d gotten to see W, which was the only reason I’d come here. I’d learned that he was a handsome, smiling, blond psycho, and that was pretty much all I wanted to know about him.
I hated him. I despised him. I pushed past him, staggering away from the bed and pulling down my skirt. “I need my clothes. I need my clothes.” I saw my bra and blouse on the floor, but I felt too numb to bend and pick them up.
He studied me with his brows drawn together, and his lips pursed in a line. “It’s okay,” he said. He wasn’t laughing anymore. He reached out to me with the same hand he’d used to suffocate me. “It was just a kinky game. If it upsets you this much, I won’t do anything like it again.”
“Stay away from me.” I was afraid to take my eyes off him. I still didn’t know. What if he wasn’t W? What if he was? My mind was officially broken. “I don’t know you,” I said. “I want to leave.”
He reached for me again, and now he looked worried. “Chere, come here, please. It’s me. I wouldn’t know your name if it wasn’t me. I’m not fucking with you now. The game’s over. I’m sorry, I took it too far.”
He kept calling it a game, which I didn’t understand. You couldn’t scare someone that bad and call it a “game.” I couldn’t stop shaking. The danger was over, but the adrenaline was still coursing through my veins with nowhere to go.
This wasn’t a stranger. This man wasn’t going to kill me. He wasn’t going to snuff out my life and cram me under the bed, and fuck off back to Texas, but for ten whole minutes I’d believed that would be my fate, and my mind couldn’t seem to grasp the fact that this had all been W’s idea of “hot” and “fun.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m really fucking sorry. I didn’t think you’d freak out this bad. I thought you’d realize it was me.”
“How?” I started bawling, loud, awful bawling in the silent room. “You choked me and raped me. I thought you were going to kill me when you finished. How was I supposed to realize it was you?”
“You know my body. You know what my cock feels like. I even used a condom.” He held it up in his hand like he deserved a medal.
“I don’t think about those kinds of things when someone is raping me.” My voice rose to a shriek and broke, and I knew I had to stop talking to him, or I wouldn’t be able to figure out how to get dressed again, how to breathe and talk and leave. He threw away the condom and watched me struggle with my blouse. I couldn’t put it on. I was shaking too bad.
“Shit,” he said.
He came toward me and I held up a hand to ward him off, but he still came. He yanked up the comforter and wrapped it around me, and sat with me on the edge of the bed. He held me tight and nuzzled his lips against my ear.
“Okay, baby. Take deep breaths. Try to calm down.”
I couldn’t calm down. I turned my face into his neck because I needed shelter, even if that shelter had to come from him. He ran a hand up and down my back and told me everything was okay now, but I couldn’t stop shivering.
“I thought I was going to die,” I repeated, over and over. “I thought I was going to die.”
“I’m sorry, Chere. I’m really sorry.”
He didn’t make any more excuses. There were no excuses. He’d fucked up. At least when Simon attacked me there was a reason, an explanation. W had done this thing for fun.
I cried and cried, because he was awful and what had just happened was awful. The fact that he was soothing me now was awful, but he made me curl and rest against him until there were no more tears.