My legs muscles are tight, and my feet feel like one enormous bruise. I guess that’s more to do with my attempt to break a windshield with them rather than the paltry blows I dished out to Caylon last night.
Aside from that, the feedback from every quarter warns me of scrapes and bruises that mightn’t be enough to pull focus but exist as a cushion underneath the main spread of pain.
I blink as the watery rays coming through the window struggle to grow, to produce more energy, then fade into dimness, catching their breath before mounting another offensive.
I want to feel relieved Caylon saved me. I want to but I can’t.
It just means the struggle it took for me to take action last night is waiting in the wings, expecting a repeat performance.
It took so much out of me to do it the first time. I can’t believe I have to do it all again.
And I do have to. Nothing’s changed. I didn’t have a lightbulb epiphany as the consciousness faded from my brain. No new pathways forward have opened.
I bite my lip, refusing to give into maudlin self-pity. I need to stay alert, stay aware, stay abreast of Caylon’s intentions so I can get myself free and get out of here.
Like thinking his name drilled into his consciousness, his hand unbuckles from around my waist and flattens over the curve of my hip, slowly caressing its way down to my thigh.
The eager response of my body makes my brain turn white with fury. I whip around, trying to loosen my legs so they can kick, but a wave of such excruciating pain rolls across my body that it leaves me limp.
I thought everything was hurting before. A naïve assessment.Noweverything is hurting for real. Hurting so much I lose a few seconds to blankness before I become aware of myself again.
“You’re awake,” Caylon says in such a sexy, sleepy voice that if he released it as an ASMR album it would rush to the top of the charts.
I immediately diverge into two people; my brain sits back saying hell, no, and my body ignores it in favour of a far stronger hell, yes.
Something the boy lying next to me seems to know instinctively, his fingers no longer resting on my leg but moving further, burrowing under the waistband of the sweatpants to stroke along the outside of my pussy, making the fucking disgusting slut whore of a kitty purr.
“I need to find a whole lot of good things for you to live for, today,” he says with unambivalent confidence. A self-assurance that I wouldn’t know how to wear even if I possessed it.
There are a thousand things I would yell at him if I had the option, but the tape across my mouth reduces them all to unsatisfactory grunts.
“Shh,” he murmurs, as though he can hear the panicked thoughts swelling like a pus-filled lump inside my head. “You’re safe. Go back to sleep.”
And like a good little girl, I obey him. Not even aware of it until I startle awake, a cry from my nightmare caught in my throat.
My aching throat. My swollen throat.
When I swallow, it’s like someone shoving a wire brush into my windpipe to clean things out. The phrase pins and needles has never felt more apt.
It scares me.
I struggle and Caylon’s arms squeeze tighter around me. His sleepy voice mutters, “Shh,” again, this time near enough to my ear that the little hairs on the side of my cheek catch the sound as a vibration rather than speech.
Instead of settling, the fear ignites, running along the pathways of my body until my entirety is alight; in flames, my soft wet flesh a thousand times more combustible than it appears.
My fear wasn’t this bad when I fetched the rope from the boot of my car where it had lain, coiled in a circle inside the miniature spare tyre. Neither of them used, it looked like.
It wasn’t this bad when I slung it over the lowest branch of the gigantic tree, tying it off around the trunk before using it to lever myself up to sit straddling the wood, easier than my earlier struggles to climb the trunk.
It wasn’t this bad when I let my back slump so that gravity pulled my legs over and I skidded off the branch, one jutting twig scraping a long gouge on the edge of my collarbone as my body twisted, already fighting against the decision, appalled that no one stepped in earlier.
I want to move and shake away these maudlin thoughts before they can drag me down again, but my hands are still restrained, my mouth is still taped shut.
Caylon suddenly smacks me on the arse, the sting less shocking than the surprise.
“Every time you think about doing something bad, you get a spanking. Those are the new rules.”
If I could speak, I’d point out that he doesn’t have a clue what I’m thinking but when I glare at him over my shoulder, he’s wearing such a wide, amused smile on his lips that I get distracted by the curve of his upper lip, the outline blurring with his morning stubble.
