Tabula Rasa(56)

I needed to be surrounded by green things if I wanted to not lose my mind. And with the trees bare of leaves and everything so bleak and gray all the time, this was a necessary evil. I couldn’t stay by myself in a house where the only other living being hated me. I needed something friendly.





Chapter Nine





Without Shannon in the house, the nightmares came back even darker and more detailed than before. This time, I couldn’t will myself awake in time. I had to relive the whole f*cked-up thing. Somehow the worst of it wasn’t the too-hard whipping that exceeded anything I’d previously experienced. The worst part of the memory/dream was his voice and the awful words he said, blaming me over and over again for what he was doing as he made sure I knew what a filthy, disgusting little whore I was. Without that, I might have been able to pretend it was someone else, anyone else.

I jolted awake and scrambled to sit up. It was too quiet in the house without Shannon, and I knew the white cat wouldn’t comfort me. She hated me. That feeling was mutual.

I’d moved all my bags from my shopping excursion into the bedroom except the snacks, which were in the kitchen. I turned on every light in the house as I made my way there now.

I opened the dark chocolate drizzled kettle corn and took a bottle of water from the fridge and sat at the kitchen table with it. Shannon might kill me if he ever found out I’d been drinking red wine in the tub. I wasn’t even sure candles were allowed because wax could drip. I was pretty sure the coffee and toast in bed kindness had been a one-time thing. After my snack, I finished up the bottle of wine from earlier.

On a lark, and pleasantly buzzed, I checked Shannon’s office door. I couldn’t believe it when the knob turned easily in my hand. He never left this room unlocked. Even when he was home. It wasn’t as if there were any remaining doubts that he was trying to get me to leave, but why the f*ck would he leave his office accessible?

Of course, inside the office itself, pretty much every drawer and filing cabinet, as well as the closet were locked. The only thing that wasn’t locked down was his laptop on top of the desk. I booted it up. There was a split screen, one was a login for Shannon, and I was sure I’d never crack that password. But next to it was another login for “guest”. That must be me. But what was the password?

If he’d really set up a login for me it would have to be a really simple password I could easily guess like my name or admin or... I typed in password. The screen changed, and I was in my own desktop and internet connection.

It was yet another link to the outside world. Another window of escape I was just going to go ahead and ignore, self-preservation be damned. Maybe it was the effects of the Merlot, but I knew exactly what I wanted to do online and it wasn’t ask for help.

I typed in my old university’s web address. The screen loaded surprisingly quickly. I scanned around the site in the faculty section. Exactly what I thought. Professor Stevens was still there. Fucking tenure. Probably still assaulting students and getting away with it right under everybody’s nose. I could send him an email. But I didn’t know enough about computer security. It might be traced somehow back to Shannon. I was sure he had to have some really beefy internet security, otherwise there was no way he’d give me access to an internet connection at all, but still.

Besides, email didn’t have the satisfying physicality of a real paper letter.

I went back upstairs and got the stationery and the magazines I’d bought earlier and brought them down, trying to will my hands not to shake. But the adrenaline was surging full throttle now, and I couldn’t get the tremors to stop. I took several deep breaths and then went to the sink and splashed some cool water on my face. After several minutes, I felt myself begin to relax as my body realized I was in Shannon’s house. Safe.

When I felt calm enough, I put on some gloves from under the kitchen sink and found a glue stick and some scissors in a drawer in the kitchen. I began cutting out letters from the magazines and gluing them onto the stationery.

It took about an hour, but when I was finished, it said: “You must have been relieved when you thought I was gone for good. Watch your back. This isn’t over, f*cker.”

I folded the crude note, put it in the envelope, sealed it, addressed it, stamped it. I didn’t put a return address on it, but I was back to the trouble of the post mark. If I were in Savannah, it might not be as big of a deal, but I knew I couldn’t mail it from Stoney Oak, though I really wanted to.

I was tempted to get dressed again, sneak out, and walk back to town. I was sure there would be a mail drop off box somewhere outside one of the stores, maybe outside the courthouse a couple blocks over from where I’d been shopping earlier. But Shannon would kill me. Besides, what was I going to do besides mail a stupid, pointless letter? I was afraid to even ask Shannon to kill him for me, not just because it was crossing a line on a whole other level I didn’t know if I could cope with morally, but because I was afraid he would say no.

So maybe my problem with it wasn’t morals at all. Especially now with my memory back, knowing how Trevor had died safe in the knowledge that I was mourning him. I just didn’t think I could let someone else get away with hurting me like that. And yet, so far, Professor Stevens had. He’d gone on with his life in his cushy little tenured teaching position, smug in the knowledge he’d gotten away with it.

I wasn’t sure if what I wanted was justice or garden-variety vengeance, and I didn’t really care. Whatever it was, I wanted it so much I could taste it. It tasted vaguely like apple cinnamon bubble bath.