I step into the doorway, and there’s Jag.
On the couch.
With the two women.
My mind connects the shapes and shadows fast enough to understand what’s happening.The women are pressed against him, wrapped around him.One has her boobs in his face.The other straddles the back of his legs.Skin everywhere.Three naked bodies moving in wet, sloppy, panting rhythm.
This is worse than the dicks he sucked and the women he fucked for money.Worse than the men who took him from behind and left him crying alone in the dark after.
This is forhispleasure.He wants this.He chose these drugged-out women over me.
Because I’m disgusting.
He lifts his head, his gaze instantly finding mine.And his eyes…
They’re empty.
Dead.
Blank.
“Go to bed,” he says coldly, flatly.“Now.”
He doesn’t stop what he’s doing.
He doesn’t look disgusted.
He doesn’t look away.
He thrusts harder and watches me break with a hollow stare.
My chest caves in, and something rips open so wide inside me I know I’ll never be the same.
I turn away.My legs carry me toward the bedroom, but I can’t feel them.The air won’t go into my lungs.I choke on nothing and drown in everything.
The door shuts behind me, and I grab my backpack.I don’t think.I don’t look back.I just go.
The window screeches open.The dank air smacks my wet cheeks.I climb through and drop into the dirt below, my knees buckling.
I can’t see.My tears blur the whole world into smeared lights and colorless shapes.But I shove myself forward, across the yard, around a shed, and through a wire fence.
Sharp metal catches my shirt.Then my skin.Then deeper.It slices across my shoulders, deep and unforgiving.The barbs tear me open, dragging through flesh.I know it’ll scar.Many, many scars.But I don’t stop.I push through it, ripping myself free.
I’m crying too hard to feel anything.
Then I run.Through yards.Down alleys.Across streets where cars honk.My sobs wrench out of me, echoing loudly in the night, but I don’t stop.My legs keep moving until they give out.I crumple, get up again, keep going, going, going, beyond the reach of cameras.
I run until the lights of Fresno disappear behind me.Run until my lungs burn and my throat tastes like metal.Run until my legs buckle a second time and won’t stand back up.
Before the sun rises, I’m miles outside the city, stumbling along the highway with my backpack sliding off one shoulder and blood drying on my torn shirt.
A pickup slows beside me.I don’t ask where it’s going.I don’t care.
The driver jerks a thumb toward the back, and I climb into the bed without a word.The truck pulls forward, heading south to nowhere, to anywhere, to someplace Jag isn’t.
Rain starts to fall, cold and relentless.I curl into myself in the truck bed, drenched, shaking, and sobbing into my knees.
In the rain, in the back of a stranger’s truck, heart split open and bleeding, I make a promise, one I never go back on.
