Even from this distance, I can see the change in her. The way her shoulders hunch forward. The careful way she walks, like something inside her is broken.
My beautiful Haven, defiled by a beast, while I watched from a fucking closet not five feet away.
Haven vanishes from sight, leaving me staring at the empty, rain-soaked street.
I dig the heels of my palms into my eyes until I see stars, trying to erase the images burned into my retinas.
Haven’s limp body.
Bastian’s hands spreading her thighs.
The blood on his mouth.
My own pathetic erection straining against my jeans as I filmed him eating her out. Spitting inside her. Fucking her. Kissing her.
A wave of nausea swells so violently I slide off the windowsill into a clatter of beer bottles. There’s a thump against my hip as gravity claims the phone in my pocket.
I’ve pulled it out at least twenty times today, thumb hovering over the delete button before I chickened out. It’s insurance, I told myself. Leverage against Bastian. That’s the only reason I’m keeping it.
Not because I’ve watched it countless times.
Not because I hate myself more with each viewing.
Not because some sick part of me gets hard every time I hear the sound she makes when he pushes into her limp body.
I fight back the urge to puke with a hard swallow.
Don’t need another written warning for puking inside the house. I’m on two strikes already.
The world tilts dangerously as I stumble for my bedroom door, but muscle memory takes over—grabbing jacket, shoving feet into boots. My body knows what to do, regardless how fucked up my mind is.
I’ve followed Haven since we met in the woods.
At first it was just walking her home to make sure she got back to her trailer okay. She would never let me inside, and always told me to hide so her dad wouldn’t see me, but I’d do it anyway.
When I realized she went to the same school as me, I began following her in the mornings, too. Our elementary school was only a few blocks down the road, but the shortest route went past some abandoned factories, and those were dodgy as shit.
I just wanted to make sure she was safe.
No one else was gonna.
She finished school before I did, but I’d cut class when the thought of her walking home alone left me unable to concentrate anyway.
That’s when I realized that she often went straight to the woods after school. That she’d been waiting for me to get home, sometimes two to three hours.
Alone.
In the woods.
I know she’s not a fucking pussy. She can handle herself.
If she’s conscious. Not fucked up on molly. Or drugged with sleeping pills—or whatever the fuck she was on today.
The rain is a fine mist that coats to my skin and hair as I track her across campus. She doesn’t care about being seen—stumbling across open spaces, taking the most direct route rather than sticking to shadows. I hang back, clinging to the shadows, using the cars in the lot for cover.
All while glimpses of that fucking video keep peek-a-booing my subconscious mind, forcing me to swallow down the nausea that threatens to bring up all the booze I’ve consumed.
Just before she reaches the woods beside the library gardens, Haven stops dead in her tracks.
