Completely. And without mercy.
2
Mehar
I couldn’t feel my hands.
That was the first thing my brain decided to report, which was real helpful considering the rest of me was also falling apart. My arms were above my head, wrists bound in something metal and cold, chained to a beam in the ceiling, and I was hanging just high enough that my toes barely grazed the concrete. Just enough contact to tease my calves into thinking they could take some weight off my shoulders, and not enough to actually do it. Every muscle from my neck to my ribcage was screaming. My wrists had already started bleeding. I could feel something warm running down my forearm and pooling at my elbow before dripping off.
The gag was cloth. Thick, knotted tight behind my head, pressing into the corners of my mouth so hard I could taste the fibers. I’d been working it with my tongue since I woke up and it hadn’t budged. Whoever tied this knew what they were doing.
Obviously. Because my therapist tied it.
The warehouse was big, dark, and industrial. High ceilings, exposed beams, stained concrete, no windows. One fluorescent tube overhead buzzing and flickering like even the light was overbeing here. The air smelled like motor oil, mildew, and regret. Mostly mine.
And then there was Thad.
Because of course there was Thad. Because my life was a never-ending episode of a show that God was writing while drunk and vindictive and clearly holding a personal grudge against me specifically.
He was about fifteen feet in front of me in a wheelchair that looked like it had been swiped from a hospital hallway. And he looked like hell reheated. He was a fraction of the man he’d been when I locked him in that cage. His body had eaten itself alive. Arms like sticks, ribs pressing through a stained t-shirt, beard grown down past his chest in thick matted ropes that hadn’t seen shampoo since what felt like the Obama administration. Both knees were still swollen and bent at wrong angles from where I’d taken the bat to them, locked into positions that were never straightening out. That was my work. I’d do it again.
But this man was sitting in that wheelchair with his head cocked to the side and a grin on his face. A grin. On his gaunt, hollow, barely-alive face. Like he’d been waiting for this scene and somebody had finally called action.
“An angel saved me,” he said. His voice was thin and raspy from months of barely using it, but his eyes were clear. More lucid than I’d seen him since the early weeks when he still had the energy to curse me out. “Apparently you got enemies, Mehar.”
I tried to respond. The gag turned it into nothing.
“Mmm.” He tilted his head the other direction. “Can’t talk? That’s new. Usually I can’t get you to shut up.” He wheeled himself forward a couple of feet using his hands on the rims. They were moving slowly, weakly, shaking with the effort. But moving. “I’ve been waiting a long time to have a conversation with you where I’m the only one who gets to speak.”
I wanted to tell him to enjoy it while he could because the second I got out of these chains I was going to wheel him off a cliff.
“I don’t know who she is,” he continued. “Don’t know her name, don’t know why she did it. All I know is a woman showed up one day and pulled me out of that cage. Fed me real food for the first time in months. Got me this chair.” He looked down at himself. “Cleaned me up some. Well. As much as you can clean up what you left of me.” He tilted his head. “She didn’t tell me much. But she told me to wait. Said she had something to take care of and she’d be back. And then she brought you in.”
He wheeled himself a little closer. His arms trembled with the effort but his eyes were steady and full of something ugly.
“And when I get my strength back?” He leaned forward. “I’mma make you wish you’d killed me when you had the chance. Believe that. Everything you did to me in that cage, every day, every hose-down, every time you walked out and left me in my own piss — I’m giving all of that back to you. With interest.”
I looked at him. Really looked at him. At the arms that could barely push a wheelchair. At the knees that were never unbending. At the ribs I could count through his shirt and the hands that shook when he tried to hold them still. This man couldn’t get out of that chair without someone lifting him. He couldn’t stand. He couldn’t walk. He couldn’t make a fist hard enough to bruise a peach.
He was never getting his strength back. Ever. And somewhere underneath all that bravado, behind the grin and the threats and the big talk, he knew it too. He just wasn’t ready to say it out loud yet.
If I could’ve spoken, I would’ve told him that. Would’ve looked him dead in his face and said,Baby, the only thing you’re getting back is a bed sore.But the gag had opinions about that.So I just stared at him and let my eyes do the talking, and my eyes were saying some very violent things.
Janelle had been visiting him, though. That part I filed away. I’d told this woman everything. And paid her to listen. This bitch had been making house calls to the man I’d been keeping in a cage. Feeding him. Nursing him back to just enough health to prop him up in a wheelchair and park him in front of me like a prop in her little production.
I kept replaying it. My brain wouldn’t stop looping back to the trunk, to Janelle’s face above me, to the way my mind had just… stalled. Because I’d called that woman. After Quest said “cool we done” and walked into his hotel room without looking back, I had sat on my bed with tears running down my face and called Janelle. I told her I was falling apart. I told her I thought I was losing the first man who’d ever made me feel safe. And she’d said all the right things. Breathe, Mehar. Write it down. The pain is temporary. You’re strong enough to survive this.
And then she drove to my hotel and cracked me over the skull in a parking garage.
The sequence kept running on repeat. I was getting out of my car. Keys in my hand. Thinking about Quest, whether I should text him even though we were done, whether pride was worth more than whatever we had, whether I’d already lost the one good thing I didn’t deserve. And then the impact on the back of my head. It was something harder than a fist. My knees gave out and my face hit the side of my car and then hands were grabbing me and dragging me across the concrete and everything tilted sideways and went black.
I woke up in the trunk. “My Boo” playing through the speakers. Gravel under the tires. And when the trunk popped open and I saw Janelle’s face staring down at me. Those hazel eyes I used to think were warm, that long hair parted down the middle, and an expression on her face I’d never seenbefore, something still and settled and completely unmasked. I screamed. “What the fuck?!”
She didn’t answer. She just looked at me, calm as Sunday morning, and pressed something sharp against my neck. It was a needle or a syringe. I don’t know but the world folded up and went dark again.
I woke up here. Hanging from a chain. Gagged. Staring at the man I’d caged for months sitting in a wheelchair looking at me like I was the entertainment.
“She really hates you,” Thad said. “And I mean hates you. I’ve earned my share of hate in my life, but what that woman has for you?” He let out a low whistle.
