Axel and even points out the exact spot in the cave where he took her for the first time.
We talk through lunch and past the time I was supposed to meet with the counselor. Not that I care. Talking to Zoe does far more for me than sitting with a shrink.
I show her how to do the more intricate braids, and she practices on my hair while I talk about the ship, how scared I was, how I got Bossman to kill Shelly, and relived every gory detail of Bossman’s death. Then the fear as I snuck around the ship, desperate to find a way off the cargo container and the sickening moment when I knew that would never happen.
“Then there was this light…” I mention the helicopter.
“You know, we share one more thing in common.”
“What’s that?”
“We’ve both been strapped to our man and lifted to safety dangling by a rope in the dead of night. How many girls do you know who can say that?”
We fall into a fit of laughter and spend the next hour talking about our men, sex, and the myriad of sexual positions they seem to love. Before we know it, the sun dips down toward the horizon, casting a warm glow into the cave.
Talking to Zoe helps, but there’s a lingering sorrow which stains my soul, layers and layers of trauma, abuse, and the depravity of men that are now a part of me.
I may want to be normal, but I’ll never be free of my past. It’s a sobering truth and an uncomfortable realization. I always thought things would change for me. In my mind, I saw an end. At first, it was in the embrace of death, but I’m too good at surviving.
Some point along the way, I thought that if I just kept going long enough, all the bad things in my life would fall away, piece by piece like an onion with all its layers. Maybe that’s a poor analogy, but maybe the reason I am such a good survivor is because some small piece of me clung to hope?
“Want to know something?” I push a small pebble across the cave floor with the tip of my shoe.
“What?” Zoe sits beside me again, staring out across the water as the sun sets the sky ablaze with ribbons of orange and bands of red streaking overhead.
“I want to kill the man who bought me.”
How upset was he when Bossman failed to deliver me?
I bet the asshole was livid, and I’m thrilled to be the one to deny his depraved desires.
He’s the man I want to rot in hell. Not Bossman, although Bossman deserves a special place there, along with Shelly. If there’s a circle in hell where a man gets fucked by his own dick, then has it shoved down his throat, that’s where Shelly belongs.
But the man who ripped away my illusion of being safe, he’s the one I want to confront. I want him to suffer horribly for doing that, and then I want him to die.
I don’t know why him, and none of the hundreds of others who took advantage of me, but he stole something precious the others never could take from me.
With the others, I knew what I was doing. I made a conscious choice, damn the consequences. I bartered my body, willingly allowing them to use it so that I might survive another night. At sixteen, I made a horrible mistake, but it wasn’t like I didn’t make that choice too.
If I’d stayed on the streets, I would’ve been dead within a year, probably far less than that. As a sex slave, I had inherent value to the men who owned me. They used me, but they kept me off the streets. They got me clean from drugs, and I never again went hungry. I always had a place to sleep.
This time, I didn’t choose. That’s what angers me the most, because it’s the first real time something precious was taken from me.
My free will had been brutally stolen, and I think that’s what I’m struggling to process. I felt safe for the first time, and I finally mustered the confidence to head back out in the world, venturing past the gates of the Facility to enjoy one weekend like any normal girl. My entire future lay in front of me. I could do anything and choose to be anyone I wanted. I felt free for the first time in my life.
That man who paid