Would death be better than whatever this man had to offer me?
If I went by the only time I was rented out, I already knew the answers to those questions.
Death would always be better. For me, that was the only way out of this place. And it was tempting to find a way to sway my own destiny to do just that.
Before I could wrap my mind around any of the possibilities that sat right in front of me, Alpha Harris and one of the Betas from the front desk were in the room. I hadn’t even heard either of them, let alone heard a single word they spoke. My thoughts swirled in a hazy fog.
The Beta spoke, but the words didn’t land. They scattered across my brain like broken glass, sharp andunreadable. With his words, he secured a thin metal band around my wrist.
My arm dropped back to my thigh, but the pressure stayed, like a reminder.
I tried to breathe. In. Out. But my chest didn’t listen.
The room tilted, or maybe I did. My fingers twitched, useless. My thoughts blurred, then fractured.
I opened my mouth when the order came, along with a tap to the side of my face. Yet, my thoughts raced too fast for me to catch a single one. My heart beat too quickly as reality set in.
Sure, I was ready for death to take me, but my body rebelled against the idea.
I didn’t want to die at the hands of some man who wanted to choke me out. I didn’t want to die strung up by a rope. I wanted to die on my own terms, gosh dang it. Like a slow, quiet death with the company of the sunflowers that I could see from my window.
Of course, I always knew at the back of my mind that my death would be at the hands of another. Some clients would get too carried away. And really, it wasn’t that hard to snap my neck if any of them wished to do it.
“Breathe, boy.”
Breathe? That was the last thing I wanted to do, and I wanted to say just that. But then, my mind stuck on the fact that my lungs were burning, crying out for release. They stabbed me from the inside out, as though they were on fire inside my chest.
“Breathe, Charles.” The voice was soft, but commanding in a way I couldn’t ignore. It was spokenright in front of me, and as everything began to zoom past me in the room, he was the only solid object I could latch onto.
My hands fisted into tight balls on my thighs as I tried and failed to get my body to do what was ordered of it.
How could I possibly take a breath in when it felt as if invisible hands were on my lungs in a tight grasp? How was I to breathe if death was knocking on the door, so close it was able to call my name as though I were its best friend?
“Come on. You can do it. Breathe for me.”
Without my say so, my lungs took in a gasp. It was short and felt like a million and one tiny little needles poked at my lungs from the inside out.
I repeated it twice more, sure that I’d start coughing up sharp splinters as the man before me kept telling me to breathe. He kept talking, his words seeming both far away and too close. I couldn’t make out his words, some of them clumped together as they were processed in my hazy mind.
“There ya go, boy. Another deep breath for me.”
I couldn’t,I wanted to beg that it wasn’t possible, yet my body did as it was told. The sharp gasps slowly turned into slow deep breaths, each one easier to handle than the last.
I hated it. Hated everything about breathing and still living.
My body gave out before I could stop it. I slumped forward, everything inside me drained and hollow. If he hadn’t been kneeling there, I would’ve hit the carpetface-first. Instead, my forehead nearly collided with his chest.
His hands caught me, fingers settling on my upper arms like he’d done it a hundred times before.
He didn’t pull me in. Just held me there.
A small part of me that was buried deep, wanted to lean in. To let him wrap his arms around me and block out everything else.
But that wasn’t real. No one wanted me like that. Not to protect. Not to keep.
Even though I couldn’t remember the last time someone touched me without taking something.
I was nothing more but a body to be rented out, and this man saw nothing else of me other than a hole to play with.
