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TAYLOR
It’s not until I’m safely inside my apartment, leaning against the door I’ve just locked behind me, that I can process what just happened.
What the fuck.
I’ve spent the last hour driving back to the city in a fog, almost numb. But now that I’m home, it’s like my lungs open up and I can actually breathe again. When I do, though, it hits me all at once.
A shudder rips through my body. My skin buzzes with a nervous energy as my hand drifts to my neck. My fingers trace over the places where he gripped—the tenderness in my throat. My jawline. My bottom lip, before it retreats between my teeth.
I look down at myself and shiver. My skirt is back in place, but the panties he sliced off me got lost to the forest when I stumbled back to my car after he left. My blouse is still ruined; I drove home wearing a suit jacket I keep in the trunk instead.
My heels are dirty and smudged. My hair is a mess.
I’m still shaking. From fear? Excitement?
Something’s wrong with me.
My preference in kinks and fantasies are one thing. I’m not sure anyone can help what they’re into. Sometimes I wonder if those dark desires have always been there in my head, or if they manifested because of something that happened to me during the times I don’t remember.
I read about that when trying to research my own fucked-up thoughts and urges. The brain is insanely complex, and experiential trauma can manifest as a fetish to a survivor.
The idea that something like that might have happened to me, before the accident, is terrifying. At times, it used to creep up on me in the middle of the night to claw at me and render me frozen in my bed. But I don’t really get like that anymore thanks to the mental exercises Dr. Jesnick taught me.
The beauty of retrograde amnesia is that you don’t remember the past.
Unfortunately, that’s the curse of retrograde amnesia, too.
Either way, you can’t change what happened in the past. So I choose to live life looking forward into the future.
Yeah, a future like the one you won’t have if you insist on meeting strange men with knives and a primal fetish in the fucking woods, you weirdo.
Shuddering, I pull myself from the door and head down the hall to the bathroom. I shed my ruined clothes as I wait for the water to warm up, dropping my eyes to my body’s reflection in the mirror.
For a second, my eyes land on the bruises by my throat and on my inner thighs. My cheeks flush, remembering his powerful grip. His strength when he yanked me to the ground and pinned me there. How even though I work out six days a week, including a serious lifting routine, the man who came for me out of the shadows tonight held me fast like my strength was nothing.
And goddammit, that’s hot.
I give myself one more honest once-over as I pull my long red hair out of the ponytail I’ve had it in since the drive home. I’m thirty-three, not twenty-three anymore. But still—cute face, perfect smile…thank you very much, Invisalign…slender frame, athletic build, tall and leggy. And great tits, if I do say so myself.
And single.
Again.
I’m about to walk into the shower behind me, when my gaze lands on my hip, in the small curve where the skin delves down toward the apex of my thighs.
A soaring bird—a hawk, maybe—with wings outstretched, holding an arrow in its talons, surrounded by a thin, circular border.
The whole thing is barely larger than a quarter, and I haven’t the slightest fucking idea what it means, or when I got it.
Going backward, my memories literally stop at eighteen. That’s when the drunk driver plowed into the side of the car I was in with my parents, killing them and hitting the reset button in my brain.
I’ve tried it all: medication, electro-therapy, rapid-light therapy, MDMA, counselling—so much counselling—support groups…you name it, I’ve tried it to bring my memory back. But fifteen years later, I’ve given up.
If it hasn’t happened yet, it’s not going to. And there’s a beauty in the whole “ignorance is bliss” thing.
I like the life that I’ve built, and the friends I have. I don’t need to know what lurks in the shadows of that past I can’t remember.
