Him

Never again would I be able to trust him. I gagged as I recalled the feeling of his tongue in my mouth. My cheek stung as tears trickled over the place where the back of his hand had made contact. Mostly, my trust was wounded. The venom in his voice, “is that what you wanted?” He walked away laughing.

Finally the paralysing shock seeped out of my body, leaving me with only my fear and silent sobbing. I picked myself up off the cold ground, and I ran. I ran without consideration or care. I ran to get away, from him, from that place. What I couldn’t run away from was the tears. They came swiftly and plentiful.

The tears made my eyes cloud over, and with that, my sense of direction lessened even further. I stumbled, landing on all fours. My knees were torn, pebbles implanted themselves into the skin of my palms, but the pain was cleansing. I sat, in the middle of this unlit road, picking the rocks from beneath the surface of my skin, crying. Crying for what had been, or what I thought had been; for what I had lost.

He had been my best friend; he had helped me through the loss of so many others, yet was this how he really saw me? As an object? As a plaything?

My heart physically hurt as though wrenched from its place and twisted by the iron claw of betrayal.

Yet what hurt the most, what kept the tears flowing was that feeling like this made me want to turn to him to ask for help, to ask for a hug. I wanted him by side. I had no one else.

I felt the first droplets of the morning rain on my arms, but I barely even registered it. Everything was a fog, reality becoming secondary to my pain. And so I sat, until the first signs of life began to appear.

I was told later that it was the milkman who had found me. I woke in a fever-distorted haze. Pneumonia. I think I had given up on life. My mother and my sister stayed by my bedside at all times, it was their devotion which made me see that I still had a few people to care for; a few people who cared for me too.

When I began to return to health, though still bed-ridden, my mother told me I had a visitor. My stomach dropped as he entered the room. Yet he smiled, and inquired after my health as a proper gentleman, leaving me to wonder had it all been a hallucination brought on by the on-set of my illness.

He bent beside me, to whisper something in my ear, but it was then that I flinched; the malice hardened his eyes once more as he spoke quietly, “You won’t get away that easy poppet.”