Comfort Food (6 page)

I pretended I was okay. I was docile, submissive, pleasing. My eyes lit up when he entered the room, and I eagerly did whatever he guided me to do. Thankfully his tastes weren’t too exotic. I’d gotten through the first times, and nothing had changed. I could handle it until I could make my move.

It got to a point where my acting became almost too good. I leaned into his kisses just a touch too eagerly, sighed a little too deeply when he brought me off with his mouth or fingers. I was falling for my own seduction. So it was now or never, while my desire for freedom and escape still meant something to me.

I still understood his touch wasn’t the only touch in the world, and the pretty things he lavished me with weren’t the only things in existence. There was still a world outside that room. So the fourth day in the new cell, the first day clouds darkened the window so the sunlight couldn’t stream through, I was standing by the door, waiting.

I intended to kill him and run for my life, in case any other dragons guarded the castle. I had a pen and a sock in my pocket, and the heaviest table lamp in the room held in my hands in a death grip.

The lamp normally sat on the desk beneath the window, so his eyes wouldn’t find it missing in time to stop me. I stood, tense, waiting. I’d decided his mistake was conforming too closely to a routine. He always brought my breakfast at nine am, according to the clock on the desk. It was no trouble at all for me to be standing crouched by the door at 8:55.

I knew I had exactly one shot at this. My intention was to hit him the second the door opened. Then if he fell forward into the room I could use the sock to keep the door from sealing shut, jab the pen in his throat to finish him off, and run for it.

The keypad clicked to life on the other side of the door. When people have these moments they believe are big, they often speak of time standing still, how it dragged on forever in slow motion. But for me it didn’t drag. It was so fast I almost missed it. The door swung open and I pounced.

There was no time to be precise. The fraction of a second I took to aim, would be all it would take for him to stop me. I wasted no energy on that; I just swung out. His hand gripped my wrist so hard I knew if he twisted just slightly he could break it.

That was it. My big escape plan. And it was over before it even started. I searched frantically for something, anything to use as a weapon. It couldn’t be over this quickly.

There had to be a way to beat him. He couldn’t have shut off all my routes of escape. Criminals always made a mistake. Didn’t they? Maybe his mistakes would never make a difference to me one way or the other. My sole source of help might be some random stranger noticing something shifty about this guy and following him.

I released the lamp finally, and it crashed to the floor. My eyes met his and instead of the anger I expected, they held disappointment.

Something inside me died.

If I didn’t get out now I would lose myself entirely to the beautiful monster in front of me. I dug into my pants and pulled out the pen. He still stood partially in the doorway. If I could get past him before he stepped the rest of the way into the room, I could still escape.

The pen plan was even less successful than the lamp plan. I just wasn’t fast enough or strong enough. I had a moment of absolute shame over that, shame that I wasn’t a superhero, or one of those girls on TV that somehow manages to overpower someone three times their physical strength. Fiction had sold me pretty lies, and none of them did me any good now.

He moved the rest of the way into the room, and the door clicked shut. I knew he wasn’t going to give me another opportunity like that. I’d had it and lost it. He released my arm and instinctively I backed away from him. The disappointment he’d had in his eyes was replaced by some indefinable hardness.

It wasn’t quite anger. It wasn’t human enough or uncontrolled enough to be anger. And he was always in control.

“I’m sorry. Please, I’m sorry. Please don’t hurt me.” I moved backward until the heels of my tennis shoes hit the wall behind me.

He calmly held his hand out to me, and I took it. What choice did I have? He led me to the door and then produced the blindfold from his pocket. I didn’t try to fight him; I complied.

Whatever he had planned for me would be worse if I kept fighting. After the blindfold was in place, I heard the electronic beeps of the keypad, and then the door lock released. He took my hand gently and led me from the room. My arm still tingled where he’d gripped it to prevent me from hitting him with the lamp.

I was crying as we walked down the hallway. I knew he’d restrained himself from harming me. It was confusing to a degree I couldn’t handle. It made me feel ridiculously and inappropriately grateful to him, and I knew that was what he wanted.

We didn’t go far, so I knew we weren’t going back to the bad cell just yet. In fact, I was sure we were next door. He closed the door and removed the blindfold. It was a plain gray room, much like my cell, only there were screens everywhere. Half of them showed the cell he’d kept me in originally. The other half showed my new suite of rooms. I didn’t know where the cameras were exactly, what they were hidden in, but the point was they were there.

He’d known I was waiting for him with the lamp. I’d had no chance. Satisfied with my new understanding of reality, he put the blindfold back in place.

When the next door opened, I heard birds and felt a warm breeze on my face. He removed the fabric from my eyes and we were standing outside. The sun was starting to peek through the clouds.

I shouldn’t have been shocked by what I saw. I’d seen something similar staring out the window of my room, but I just hadn’t thought it would be like this on all sides. He linked his fingers through mine and led me around the house, as if we were lovers or friends, his grip never tightening or becoming threatening.

I could break the hold at any time and run, but to where? From the outside I could see my assumptions of his wealth weren’t idle. He had money, possibly never-ending pots of it. The house wasn’t a house, it was a fortress, a mansion. In another time, with slightly different architecture, it would have been a castle.

There were trees in the front yard and then what felt like a vast nothingness that stretched as far as my eyes could see. There were woods in the distance, but it was so far off I thought it might be a mirage. His house was situated on what felt like a grass-covered desert that seemed to roll on forever in all directions.

We could be literally anywhere. The driveway went on for what appeared to be several miles. And what then? He led me over to the large garage that housed his cars, plural. No surprise that there was a combination keypad over the door.

He released my hand and sat on the grass, staring up at me, that look of mild amusement on his face, as if to say:
what now?
What now was right. I spun slowly in circles trying to grasp how far out we were, the vast nothing.

If there had been lots of trees I could have believed we were close to a main road somewhere and I just had to find it, but we weren’t. I wanted to run. I should have, but I couldn’t help but believe running would make my punishment worse.

There was nowhere for me to hide, and without a car, nowhere for me to go. He wouldn’t go to all this trouble just to release me. I fought with myself over what I should do. I’d been so ready to kill him and now, faced with such a long trek to even a deserted road, I was giving up?

I found myself walking down the driveway, toward the vast nothing that I hoped eventually would turn into something. I felt his cold eyes on me, sending a chill over my skin. I knew he was toying with me, and I was buying into it, but I couldn’t just stand there or go back to my cell.

He was there, ready at every turn. He’d known I would try to kill him, and he’d been prepared. He knew I would do what I was doing now, and he was mocking me. But to react any other way would have been unnatural for me. It would be to give in. He won either way. It was a game stacked against me on all sides.

I walked until I was a good bit away from the house, if one could call something that imposing a house. I didn’t look back. I was afraid to see him following behind me at some kind of perceived safe distance. Eventually I did turn back because I couldn’t stand the way my stomach clenched at the idea that he was close behind me, playing with me and waiting to pounce.

He was still sitting there, casually in the grass. I was too far away now to see his face, but I could make out his shape. And then he stood. My heart dropped into my stomach. I imagined he was smiling, a hunter intent on outrunning his prey, though I was too far away to see his mouth to find the truth of this theory. He started to move toward me.

I turned and ran. I’d always been in great physical condition, but I couldn’t run for distance worth shit. I just never built up that kind of endurance. It didn’t take long before I was winded, and he was close enough for me to hear him running up behind me.

I couldn’t outrun him; I knew it. I’d known it from the beginning, but if I didn’t make at least the token effort I’d be beating myself up over it for as long as he let me live. If there had been trees, I could have zigzagged between them and hidden. It was just too open here.

His feet pounded closer and closer to me against the ground, dry and packed hard from lack of rain. Before he caught up to me, I stopped, turned around, and held my hands out in surrender. He stopped running a few feet from me and smiled that unfriendly smile, then nodded. Then he turned and started walking back toward the house.

I stood there for a moment, gawking after him. I wanted him to physically drag me back kicking and screaming but he wasn’t doing that. He seemed so sure I’d follow. Well fuck that. He’d had me almost three weeks. I wasn’t that far gone.

I stood defiantly with my arms crossed over my chest. He turned and when he didn’t see me following right behind him, the smile left his face, and his eyes narrowed. He started to stride purposefully toward me, and I found my feet defying my desires and moving me back toward the house.

For all my tough thoughts, I didn’t want him to hurt me. At root I was a coward, and I knew it. I didn’t take enough risks, never had. I was just the kind of girl men like him dreamed of taking. The kind that was too afraid of pain to rebel in any meaningful way.

I’d stopped running because I was terrified of him knocking me physically to the ground. I was afraid if he did that, if he got a taste of violence toward me, he wouldn’t stop. We were in the middle of nowhere, and he was my only hope. Keeping him from turning on me was the only thing that mattered.

He slowed his strides to match mine as we walked together to the house. If the situation were different, it would have been companionable silence. I didn’t know how he managed the willpower to not reprimand me. But he’d managed the willpower to do every other completely calculated thing he’d done. So why not?

He was the most terrifying person I’d ever encountered, like a wild animal, and yet he reasoned. Predatory animals are so frightening because you can’t speak or understand their language. You can’t reason with them.

As we got closer to the house, I kept thinking of the ramifications of its size. Surely a house that big, there had to be servants at some point. He couldn’t possibly do everything himself. So people came to the house, and if they came to the house, I had a chance. If I screamed my head off someone would hear me.

He pulled out the blindfold, and I let him put it on me. When the cloth was removed from my eyes again, the fear I’d been secretly harboring was realized. I was back in the bad cell.

“Please, take me back to the other room. I’m sorry. I won’t try anything again. I won’t try to get away.”

He skimmed his fingers lightly over my face, cupped my chin, and brushed his lips softly against mine. I leaned into the touch because I knew it was the last one for awhile. I hated myself for trying to savor it. I should be happy he wouldn’t touch me, that I’d have a fucking break from his constant ministrations, but all I could think about was that I’d have to dance again in order to feel anything at all.

It didn’t matter what I did or didn’t do in that cell. I would be there until he thought I’d properly learned my lesson. He turned and left me alone, that deafening door click sealing my fate. Would it be a week? Two weeks? Surely a murder attempt, no matter how lame, would require more than one week’s penance.

I pounded on the door until my knuckles bled, screaming and begging for him to let me out, to not abandon me again. I couldn’t be alone like this again. Being in the cell now was worse than the first time. Seeing how bearable my imprisonment with him could be, and what I was getting instead.

I pushed down the feelings of shame at having displeased him enough to warrant punishment. Some part of me still knew it wasn’t true, or thought it might not be true. I wasn’t sure anymore, but I was starting to feel like I deserved the bad cell now.

He’d given me everything, and I’d tried to kill him. I finally moved back to my corner, cradling my injured hands. I soaked in the stinging feeling because it was something, and it let me know I was still real.

Not long after that, the door opened. My usual bathing necessities were slipped into the room, along with a tray with bandages and ointment for my hands.

“Thank you.” I couldn’t stop the words. And somehow I knew any attempts at escape now were just denial and an unwillingness to accept reality.

I scooted the pail of water, soap, and bandages to the drain and first worked on my hands. I was sobbing by the time I’d finished bandaging. It was like that moment when you know you’re going to die and it’s too late to do anything about it. You just have that sickening knowledge that that’s what’s about to happen, that apprehension.

I knew what had happened, I just couldn’t stop it. I wouldn’t scream for help; I couldn’t. Not anymore. I couldn’t scream because he was taking such good care of me. He’d gotten me bandages.

The rest of the day I didn’t make a fuss. I did what I was supposed to do. I ate my chicken soup, and I slept in my corner. I scratched off a day into the concrete behind the toilet and ran my fingers over all the other days I’d spent there.