lasts. Not even homes.
After removing the brush from its packaging, I do a quick cleanse of my teeth and tongue, followed by a gargle of mouthwash I found in the medicine cabinet.
The shower controls are completely alien to me, and I stand scratching my head, trying to figure out which knob goes to which spigot.
“Far left,” Thierry says through the door, and I lurch back, instantly covering my bare breasts, but he doesn’t enter. For a shyster, he’s fairly respectable about boundaries.
Before Russ and I landed the cabin in Marquette, we stayed with an older man, a guy Russ bartered with to forego rent in exchange for some maintenance he offered to perform around the place. While Russ tinkered away in the guy’s garage one afternoon, the asshole snuck into the bathroom during my shower and cornered me in the stall. A scuffle ensued that ended when Russ found him on top of me and bashed his face into the toilet’s tank, leaving a bloody mess all over the white tiles. We fled afterward.
That was the last time someone tried to put their hands on me without my fighting back, because Russ made a point to teach me a small bit of self-defense.
From what little I gathered over the years, he’d spent a good amount of time in prison, and I’ve always been curious to know if that’s how my dad came to know him, as his shrink. If that’s the case, it never made sense to me that he’d trust the guy to his only daughter, but I guess it doesn’t have to. Because Russ never laid a hand on me. Never looked at me that way, or even hinted a single sexual thought toward me. Minus his flaws, he was probably the best stand-in my father could’ve picked.
Once the water heats, I step inside and let the pounding spray beat against my muscles, knees weak as if they might buckle from the utter relaxation of it all. It’s funny how much tension we walk around with, unaware of its presence until it’s literally beaten out of us.
In the quiet, my mind shifts to earlier in the evening and my little discovery behind the walls of the house. Brie. Russ. What I think is my mother, though I haven’t confirmed that. All the millions of answers I’ve searched for now slamming against one another inside my skull.
The urge to know what’s on the chip tugs at my curiosity, and I wonder if Thierry might allow me to use a computer, if he has one, to investigate. Since he seems to be naturally suspicious around others, it’s probably best that I don’t view anything in front of him, though. Perhaps I’ll just tell him I have to check my email, or some benign act for which most people in the world tend to use a computer.
A flicker of the woman in the photo flashes behind my eyes, and I shake my head. I will not go there tonight. That she’s creeping in is reminder that I need to take my pills. And I’ll surely have look into replenishing my supply soon, because the last thing I need to deal with right now are the withdrawals and consequences of not taking them. I’ve promised myself to try quitting once this is over, and I’m ready to move onto the next part of my life. But right now, as all these memories from my past begin to step into the light, I can’t risk the fragility of my head. Especially around a man like Thierry.
Foot hiked up on a marble-looking bench, I soap my leg, pausing a moment to sniff the delicious scent, and run the new blade over my shin, all the way up my thigh. When I reach the bumpy texture of my scar, I slow my stroke, careful not to tear over the damaged skin. The scar has been there for as long as I can remember. Longer than the one across my jaw. Can’t even say how I got it, except that it has a weird shape that looks almost deliberate. Like a branding, but healed wrong. From what I remember of the before, in my past, there’s no recollection, or explanation. No major injury that I can remember.
Clean, with the lingering scent of sandalwood that smells like him, I exit the shower and dry off with a towel I scrounged from the closet. It baffles me the way everything is so convenient here.
Like, who the hell stores