By the time I’d managed to rein it in, his chest was saturated with my tears and the pills he’d given me must have been taking effect. My limbs felt heavier, weights pressing against wounds and dulling the ache. Even my thoughts felt heavy and tangled in my head. I think I fell asleep, but Derek was still holding me when I awoke sometime later.
It was easier to pull myself up as if subconsciously I knew there were no new horrors awaiting me at the surface. It was easier like this, opening my eyes to see the muscular curve of his shoulder and the sinewy muscles of his arm. From this position, I didn’t have to look in his eyes and wonder what it was he saw when he looked at me now. A used slave? A broken girl? He knew what had been done to me.
The time since he’d appeared outside my cell had come back to me in better clarity, and I could see him in that examination room, seeing the proof on every part of me. He didn’t know everything though. How could he possibly guess how my vile body had turned against me? He could never know. It would be better to return to that hell than for him to see the whore I’d become.
“You’re due for more pills,” he said.
I’d slept for four hours? He’d sat here and let me sleep all that time? I moved to slide off his lap, but his arms tightened to hold me here. I didn’t fight.
He uncurled my fingers on one, fisted hand and dropped two pills into my palm. I popped them into my mouth and chased them down with water. I liked these pills. They made escaping into sleep easily, and kept it dark there. No dreams, no nightmares. Only darkness. Layers and layers of black between me and the reality my life had become.
But when I woke up next, still wrapped in his arms, he must have realized what I was doing and it didn’t appear that he was going to let me do it anymore.
“I know you’re hurting, but you can’t just retreat. You have to talk to me Scar, not pull away.”
He’d tilted me back to see his face, and his fingers were brushing the hair back from my brow. Then he slid me off his lap and fluffed up the pillows behind me so I could lean back against the headboard too. He took my hand back in his and stared straight ahead of him at the wall across the room.
“You don’t have to tell me what happened right now, but I need to know what you’re thinking.”
“I’m thinking you should go,” I whispered to the wall.
“No.” Simple, but the determination in his tone was powerful. Of course, there was no making Derek do anything he didn’t want to do. There would have been no way my tormentor would have been able to wrench from Derek’s body what he’d taken from mine.
I stared at the wall, trying not to focus on the strong hand holding mine, but every time I succeeded, my mind thrust me back to the place I’d been. Vile hands and teeth, the fire of his whip, the pain of him tearing me apart and the even sharper, knife-twisting agony that accompanied every release he ripped from my body. I wanted to curl back up in Derek’s arms, but I didn’t.
“But I’ll tell you what I’m thinking, Scar. I’m thinking you’re in pain. Every kind of pain. And you feel like you’re never going to recover.” He spoke as if he could somehow relate innately to what he was saying. “I think you feel like what happened ripped chunks of your soul clean out of you, and you’ll never get them back.”
Is this what the foster home he’d been sent to had done to him? Is that how he could relate? My heart broke a little more, thinking of the vibrant boy he’d been, subjected to horrors that changed him, irrevocably in some ways. But it wasn’t the same, not entirely.
“I have no soul left,” I told him honestly, and then I closed my eyes, letting the pile of plush pillows support my weight and the blessed drugs in my bloodstream pull me under.
It felt like not long after I’d drifted off, I was being pulled from my dark hiding place. When I opened my eyes, Derek was all around me. He’d gathered me up in his arms and we were no longer on the bed.
“What are you doing?” I tried to struggle to get free, but he held me tighter as he strode from the bedroom and into the connecting ensuite. The determined look in his eyes concerned me more than the sudden departure from the bed.
Without putting me down, he turned on the shower faucet, then stepped in, still half-dressed. The warm water cascaded over my body, igniting dozens of cuts and scrapes along its way. I writhed in his arms and whined pathetically, but his hold remained firm. He slid to the floor beneath the spray and gathered me on his lap. I tried to sit up, but even with my veins teeming with narcotics, the shooting pain through my ribs stopped me.