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I twist my body, trying to see if there are any other marks…there.

There’s another one at the base of my shoulder. How on earth did it get there?

I don’t recall Nico’s mouth moving to that spot, but last night already has that hazy dream-like quality and I don’t think I will be able to remember specific details.

I curl my hands around the sink basin and take a deep breath.

My cheeks are still flushed, hours later, as if my body has not caught up with the fact that he is not with me.

I don’t recognize this…this stranger.

This strange woman who let her fucking captor have his way with her. Who wanted him.

You are a doctor, I chide myself, still unable to take my eyes off this strange woman. You save lives. You are the person your patients cry to, the person people trust with the worst hours of their lives. You are not this. You are not a woman who lets herself be talked into a stranger’s bed or kitchen counter. You are not a woman who sleeps with kidnappers. You are not a woman who—for fuck’s sake, you are not the woman in this mirror. What did you do?

What did I do? The evidence is all over me.

I can still smell Nico on me.

Unable to stand it, I quickly turn on the spout to the coldest water available and splash my face, hoping the iciness will shock my system and I will snap out of it.

It doesn’t. Fuck. Nothing about looking at myself is going to help. I need to get all of him off me.

That is the only thing I know for sure.

I cannot spend another second walking around in the skin he touched last night.

The soreness, the marks, the smell of him still on my hair—I need it gone, and I need it gone now, even if it is only the beginning of what I have to answer for.

I turn the shower on as hot as it will go.

When the shower door is steamed up and it feels like I just walked outside into a New York summer, I get in.

The water is as hot as I can make it. I know there’s the joke that women like to shower in boiling water, but I’m convinced that Satan himself would find this water to be too cool for him.

I stand under the water for a long time, until my skin turns pink then red, and when my nerves are finally starting to say hey, we’re kind of boiling alive here, only then do I scrub myself clean, but it’s not enough.

I’m not able to wash him off but I keep trying because it’s something to do, which means I don’t have to think.

I can still feel him and that scares the shit out of me.

I can wash and scrub and get my skin raw and I can still feel his hands on me.

His mouth.

The way his hand felt in my hair.

My body remembers everything and will not give me a moment’s reprieve.

Underneath the shame, some small and horrible part of me is not sorry.

Some small and horrible part of me would do it again if I were pushed and would like it right now, thank you very much.

That is what I can’t forgive myself for.

I can hate what I did and hate the man I did it with, but there is still this tiny screaming voice in the back of my head going more, more, more, and I do not know how to make it stop.

Overwhelmed, I sit down in the shower, hissing a bit at the coolness of the tile compared to my overheated skin.