The light rattle of metal decreased as my depleting energy slipped away. I was too hungry, too weak, too fucking skinny to fight my confinement.
I was broken beyond fucking repair—but that was both a blessing and a curse. Because now, he could never hurt me more than he already had.
“Let me out!” I huffed again. My rage burning me, as I seethed full of hatred.
“Ollie, I’ll call you back.” Woodrow hung up the phone. He shuffled it into his jeans pocket before standing.
His hands rushed through his dark hair. Sweat beads formed on his pale face, along with lines brought by stress and tiredness. Well, at least he didn’t have to sleep in a fucking cage, right? I laughed at the irony, sounding more crazy than I felt.
And I couldn’t stop laughing.
Apparently, that was common during times of anguish, a reactionunable to be controlled. . . or, so I’d heard.
He stared at me like I’d lost my head.
The fucking cheek of it.
“Jolie,” he said my name but nothing more. The sympathy on his face was exactly what I craved yesterday, but that feeling had been put to bed.
I was done waiting. Waiting for him to continue. Waiting for the next punishment. Waiting for fucking death. I was ready. My time was now.
“Open the cage.”
“I need for you to calm down.”
“You need me to calm down?” I quizzed, as calm as possible. As calm as a rifle ready to fire. “I am calm. But know when I get out of this cage, I will fight back. This time, I will fight back. And one of us will die, but either way, it will be the fucking end. And I hope it’s you. I hope you die a cruel and painful fucking death, because that’s what you deserve!” I was spitting as I screamed, crying as the words left my lips. I’d never voiced anything so hateful.
“You don’t mean those things.” He looked over. “So, don’t say them. They can’t be forgotten, only forgiven.”
“I do mean them. You’re a cancer to this world—a disease that needs to be blasted from my life. It would only take one good hit. And you’d be gone, and I’d be fucking free.”
He knew exactly what I meant. A painful blow to the throat for this to be over.
“You’ll never be free, Jolie.”
“No, you’re right. I’ll always be trapped. Always be tied to you by all the awful fucking memories. And that’s not even the worse part.”
I waited a minute, possibly two. Each one feeling closer to an hour as I sat playing with the hair that was no longer a part of me, moving it around on the dull gray floor.
Woodrow didn’t talk, either. He’d taken a seat at the edge of the bed, staring at the walls, wishing for them to close in on us.
“Do you want to know what the worst part is?” I looked over, my wet brown eyes dripping with sadness. “The worst part, is the only way to survive you, is by loving you, despite how much I fucking hate you. And regardless of what you putme through, that won't fucking change. My broken mind always needed a little extra help dealing with trauma. A coping mechanism, you remember?” He knew of the daydreams, once upon a time, he’d pulled me from them. “It’s no longer my dad taking me on trips we never got to go on. It’s you! You’re the person who comforts me through all the pain you cause. I still see the person I once thought you were. He lives in my head every day. And because of that, my broken heart is still in love with him. A man who doesn’t exist anymore.”
“I’m right here, Jolie.” The pain plastered on his face would have crippled me if I’d seen it before seeing what he’d done to me.
Even after yesterday, after being raped, how he was feeling now would have still fucking hurt me.
But now, I couldn’t focus on his pain, I was too wrapped up in my own.
“No, you’re not. My Woodrow would never let Hell do that. He’d have convinced him to help me, not hurt me. Not like this.”
I hid the scarred side of my face behind my hands, and he stared at me without saying a word.
“You’re dead to me.”
He sucked in air, stealing all the oxygen we were meant to share from the room before he stood, eyes darting to the exit, and then he walked towards it, feet stomping towards the door that he slammed shut on his exit.
I sucked in a gulp of air, a tear slipping out to make room inside me for the tiny breath.
