my freshman year of college. I never wanted to be at that hoity-toity school in the first place. I went because Sawyer made me. I went because he made me feel like my mom would die if I didn’t. I knew my education played into some greater plan Sawyer and his mom had for me, like down the road if I was forced to mingle in their social circles, they wanted to make sure I had a pedigree that held up. I was being groomed, and I was achingly aware of it.
I was also aware it was risky to get close to someone new with the threat of Sawyer always hovering in the background. Regardless, I wanted one thing in my life to seem normal, to be in my control, so I let a boy in one of my classes chat me up and flirt with me while I was at school. I wanted to see how long the friendship would last. I wanted to know how far Sawyer would go to keep me isolated and alone. The answer was horrifying when I let things with the boy from school go a little too far and pushed Sawyer past a point of no return.
I went into the friendship knowing that the guy was bait more than anything else, but still, I couldn’t but feel a little dirty and slightly ruined by the way I used him when it was all said and done. I set him up to see exactly what would happen if I went against the rules and pushed back against the path laid out clearly in front of me. I lost my virginity to a boy I didn’t care about or have any real interest in because I wanted to see what would happen afterward. It wasn’t about me and him. It had nothing to do with pleasure or feeling good and making a connection. My first time was about me and Sawyer and power and control. Not my fondest memory by a long shot, and I still felt bad about ditching the guy whom I hooked up with almost as soon as it was over.
“I still can’t get over the fact that that guy you lived with had hidden cameras in your room. He has to be some kind of sick bastard to spy on you that way.” Mercer sounded as horrified now as she did months ago when I told her how I’d brought that boy home only to find out we were being watched, and that Sawyer never had any intention of sharing me with anyone.
Bringing the stranger home sent Sawyer into a rage no one could have predicted. He flipped out to the point that he threatened me with a hidden video of me and my classmate in a compromising position. He wanted to humiliate me, to bring me to heel. However, his obsession finally gave me a bit of leverage to push back. We lived in a state that was one of the few to adopt laws about revenge porn, so I could finally turn Sawyer’s threats back on him. I told him if he did anything to harm my mother, I was going to press charges against him and would urge my poor, innocent classmate to do the same. I might not have the name and clout to be a threat, but the kid from school did. And his parents were almost as scary as Sawyer’s mom. I felt like I finally had a way to get him to leave me alone, at least for a little while.
His mother was furious when she found out about the cameras and ordered him to stop watching me, but she also warned me what would happen if I bought another boy home and provoked her son. She promised she would find a way to make me pay, and I believed her. Sawyer slipped, and it was finally out in the open just how bizarre and dangerous his obsession with me and controlling everything in my life was. No one knew when he put remote cameras in my room, if it was before or after the accident. But there was no denying he’d been watching me in my most private moments, which was a whole new level of violation.
It was a turning point for me. It showed me I was going to have to do anything to get out of that house and away from Sawyer as soon as I had an opportunity to escape.