Tabula Rasa(22)

Shannon undid the nylon holding my borrowed pants in place and ripped it out of the belt loops. Before I could process what he was doing, he had my hands over my head and tied to the headboard. He could have used the rope in his bag, but I got the feeling he wanted to move into and own my space.

The headboard was older and solidly well-made with slats to run rope through. Maybe Shannon was just super lucky. Or maybe he’d done this before. Though I was sure, even without such a convenient way to tie me down, he would have easily figured something else out with whatever the room had offered him instead.

“Please, don’t do this.” I was crying and blubbering, and right on the cusp of a panic attack. And despite my best efforts not to become too much trouble for him to keep dealing with, I struggled, however vainly. But it was nothing to him and didn’t slow him down more than a few seconds in his goal.

Once I was secured, Shannon shut off the lights, kicked off his boots, and lay down on the other side of the bed, turning his back to me.

“Go to sleep. Things won’t seem as bad in the morning.”

Shannon was a man who obviously knew how to create trauma but didn’t know the first thing about undoing it. Nearly everything he’d said or done from the moment we’d met had triggered one fear or another. He’d kept me on a razor’s edge of anxiety, but somehow I didn’t think it had been intentional.

Even so, it was well past the point when Shannon’s breath deepened in sleep before I could find my own fitful peace for the night.





***





The next morning, I had that experience where you wake up in a new place and forget how you got there. Except for me, this was a bit more upsetting, seeing as the last time it happened, no memories came back to fill in the spaces.

I felt my hands tied, panicked, and screamed.

Shannon rolled over faster than I thought a human could move. His hand clamped over my mouth so hard I was sure there would be a red hand mark when he removed it.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he hissed.

I whimpered behind his hand.

“If you scream again, so help me...”

I shook my head frantically. What good would that do me? It wasn’t as if I’d planned to scream in the first place.

He pulled his hand away slowly.

“I forgot where I was, and my arms are asleep, and I freaked out. I-I’m sorry.”

The sun streamed into the room around the edges of the curtains. Shannon untied the nylon around my wrists and rubbed them until the pins and needles sensation faded. It was the first time I’d gotten a really good look at him.

The castle had been dark except for the fireplace the previous night, and it had of course been dark outside. It wasn’t as if he’d been a total visual mystery to me. But there were details you could only fully catch in the light of day—like the fact that he had the longest, most beautiful dark eyelashes I’d ever seen on a man. But somehow they didn’t make him seem less scary or any less masculine.

“What?” he said.

“N-nothing.”

He got up and left the nylon belt or rope or whatever the hell it was meant to be used for—it was f*cking versatile—lying on the bed beside me.

“If you want a shower, now is the time.”

God, yes, I wanted a shower. I hadn’t had a real shower in months, and even worse was the fact that I couldn’t remember it when I actually had.

I was in there a lot longer than he preferred. Probably fifteen or twenty minutes. Until the water ran cold. It was just such a lovely novelty having hot water pouring over me.

Shannon banged on the bathroom door. “Let’s go.”

He probably thought I’d climbed out the bathroom window. There was no bathroom window, but I’m sure it didn’t prevent him from imagining some way I could still do it. Or maybe he thought I was fashioning a weapon out of the sink pipe.

I was just turning off the water and pulling back the shower curtain to get out when he kicked the door in. I jerked the curtain around me.

“We need to get on the road,” he said as if he hadn’t kicked the door down. Just a normal day with Shannon. I wondered what his friends thought of him or if they were just as bad. Maybe they were all just like him: highly paranoid and shady.

Shannon retreated back into the bedroom, and I got out, dried off, and put the clothes he’d given me at the castle back on. He didn’t say another word about either my long shower or busting in on me like that. Every time he had an opportunity and I thought he was going to pounce on me and just... take... nothing happened. I was becoming increasingly convinced that I was right about Shannon not prioritizing sex.

In a way, that scared me more. I felt sure it was some deeper sign of sociopathy or something. Like he got all his thrills from the big death instead of the little one.

We got back in the SUV, Shannon turned in the key, and we were on the road again. I wondered what he’d used for ID when he’d gotten the room? Had he used his real information, or did he have fake IDs? Or had he talked his way out of it, using the kid’s desire to leave work against him?

Shannon stopped a couple of times for gas, a couple of times for food, and gave me a few more bathroom breaks. He watched me like a hawk at each location.

I was about to go crazy without the radio or human speech. You’d think I would have gotten used to it with all the time with only Trevor, but there were the chickens. And birds. And sometimes deer would wander into the park. A few times I sat so statue-still that they’d come up to me. But it had taken weeks. It had been a game to see how close one would come. I think six feet from me was my record. And then a stupid crow had sent it running.