Page 14 of Shattered Obsession

He talks while he moves; ordinary words cut into something ugly. Instructions. Corrections. That almost-bored tone, like he’s tidying a room. The sound of his breath in my ear turns the air thick, and the world narrows to heaviness and heat and the bright, wrong knowledge that I am not steering any of this.

An unsettling calm settles over me as my body obeys, even while my mind continues to scream a resounding ’no.’ His breath is uncomfortably warm against my ear. I fixate on the ceiling, concentrating on the rhythm of the spinning fan blades, the beats between his sentences, the seconds I can hold a breath before the panic demands air. I press my teeth together until my jaw aches so I won’t beg. I go still. Smaller. Quieter. Anything that could distract me from the weight of his body, the smell of sweat, and the oppressive pressure that threatens to split me apart.

My body feels foreign, an object, a prop in someone else’s narrative. His words slice through the stillness, poisonous and sharp.

“You wanted this, didn’t you?”

A flicker of anger ignites within me, fragile but undeniably alive. No, I didn’t. I never did. But my voice is locked in my throat, a prisoner of fear.

A part of me watches from above; it’s always above—still, distant, clinical. He is heavy. You are pinned. The door is far. You have no car. This voice keeps inventory while another voice, mine, goes hoarse, insisting none of this is right. A third voice, the cruelest, wants to bargain. If you say please, he’ll be gentle. If you don’t make him mad, he’ll stop.

Don’t make him mad. Don’t make him mad.

The mattress creaks. The wall thuds. His fingers bite crescents into my wrists. I can feel the shape of my heartbeat in places that have nothing to do with a heart.

Then, as if it were a perfectly ordinary decision, everything shifts. A command becomes a shove, becomes a weight that crushes the air right out of me. The room goes soundless and loud at once. My skin doesn’t feel like mine. He tells me I’m being good. He tells me what I am to him. He laughs. He sounds pleased with himself. He sounds like he’s grading a paper. I coil inward until there is only a string of facts I can stand to think of. The fan ticks every three seconds; the sheet smells like detergent.

If I keep breathing, time must move; if time moves, this ends.

When it does end, it doesn’t feel like an end. It feels like a door slamming in another part of the apartment. He exhales like he’s finished something and steps away, leaving the air loud with my heartbeat. I pull the sheet over my hips because it’s the only thing I can control. As he adjusts, he says something like, “That’s better.” The next second, I’m not a person in a bed but a person being guided down a hall like I might get lost in his small home.

The next moment drags me down further as I find myself huddled on the couch. Damian drapes an arm around me, pulling me close, as if everything is perfectly normal, like we’re a picture-perfect couple relaxing after a night out. His tone is nonchalant, almost bored, as if his actions in the bedroom were merely a casual interruption to our evening. I sit here in silence, my eyes glued to the muted TV flickering across the room, the world blurring at the edges while I feel rooted in a reality I desperately want to escape. He smells like soap and something metallic. My cheek is trapped against the rough knit of his shirt.

“I like you like this,” he murmurs, a hand spanning my waist. “Quiet.”

My body is here, but my mind floats somewhere above, detached, like I’m watching another girl sit in this place, another girl tucked neatly under a stranger’s arm.

Every twitch of his hand sends a jolt of fear through me. He tells me to relax, but every time his hand moves, my lungs seize. I wish I could simply vanish into the cushions of the couch, slip between the seams into oblivion, and never come back. But I can’t move. He ensures that with an easy squeeze at my hip and a warning stroke along my throat that pretends to be tender but lands like a threat. He laughs at a joke only he can hear. He calls me good when I don’t speak.

He adjusts me to face him on the couch, which is really just a narrow stage where he directs every angle. My spine curves to fit the space he leaves me; my knees tuck because he pushes them where he wants them.

“You’re so good when you listen,” he murmurs. “So calm.” The words sink into me, heavy and sharp all at once. I stare at the TV as the glow slides over us like water. He keeps up a low commentary in my ear—what a good girl I am, how sweet, soft, and quiet—each word dropping like a stone into a pond I’m trying not to drown in. He tells me I’m beautiful, then that I’m lucky, then that I should be grateful. Each word lands heavier than the last. He likes to measure my stillness with his palm to test how much weight the moment will bear before it cracks. My pulse hammers against his fingers when they circle my throat—light, then firmer, then light again, teaching me the shape of silence. It’s a rhythm he’s learning, a silence he’s tuning to perfection. My breath stutters. My pulse stumbles against his fingers, betraying every fear I’m trying to hide.

A commercial flashes white across the screen. A woman laughs like nothing in the world can touch her. I blink hard until she blurs and becomes a smear of light. I keep count of breaths. I catalog the stitches in the couch seam and the hum of the refrigerator. I memorize the way the window blinds cut the evening into thin, prison-bar shadows.

“Perfect,” he says, the word stretched thin and satisfied. He sighs like a man admiring his handiwork. “See? You’re perfect when you don’t fight it.”

When he’s satisfied with how pliant I am, he sighs, pleased. I stare at the TV and try not to exist.

“Back,” he says eventually, with the same tone you’d use for fetch. He leads me back down the hallway like nothing has happened. The lights are dimmer now, or maybe my eyes have just learned not to look too closely. The door stands open, waiting, and the air in the room feels heavier, like it remembers. The bedroom is the same, but it feels smaller now, as if the walls leaned closer while we were gone. He moves with the bored efficiency of someone repeating a task, like this has never been a question for him, not once in his life. The door stays open, an extra humiliation, and I can see the edge of the living room, the silent TV, my bag like a lighthouse I can’t reach.

As the mattress creaks, I brace for what’s coming. The heavy weight pins me down, wrists aching under his hold. He arranges me with clinical precision. How my legs should fold, where my hands should go, what words I should not say. Each refusal becomes a harder rule. Each tremor under his grip is something he wants to erase. My chest burns with each shallow breath I take, strained and labored. His venomous words land like blows against my psyche, words etched into my memory that I’ll never forget.

He rewards obedience, not with gentleness, but with a slackening of menace, the way a storm loosens its jaw without moving off. I find the tiniest places where I can still choose something. I angle my face toward the window, keep my socks on, and turn my cheek so the pillow catches tears before he does. I count scratches in the paint near the headboard. I fixate on the whir of the fan. I bargain with time. One more minute, and then another, and then another, until time stops being minutes at all and becomes a single-stretched thread I’m sure will snap.

I close my eyes tightly, wishing I could turn invisible, wishing I could be just a wisp of smoke in the air. I imagine the door unlocking by itself. I imagine standing up and walking out and none of this being real. I imagine another version of me who says ‘stop’ in a voice that can’t be ignored.

He shifts against me, impatient. The world jolts back into hard focus. The overhead light is too bright. Words he said earlier start to replay, dull and sticky, as if my brain is trying to solve a riddle where the answer is always the same. ‘You wanted this.’ It perches there, that lie, and tries to take root.

At some point, after what feels like an eternity, it stops. Or rather, he decides it stops. He peels himself away, leaving the bed tilted and the room full of a noise I eventually realize is my breath. He stands, satisfied, like he’s finished a workout. I tuck myself into the corner of the mattress and pull air into my ribs as quietly as I can.

I watch as Damian walks out of the room and sprawls across the couch, and as I sit on the mattress with the sheet over me, I debate staying here when I hear him calling from the couch for me to join him. After what happened, I know it’s not a question but a demand.

I walk to the couch, sitting as far from him as possible, but he slides over, grabbing my waist with his arm to pull me close. His arm remains, heavy and suffocating, even in his newfound stillness.

“Stay and cuddle,” he mutters lazily, but I can barely breathe. “Relax. You’re so tense.”

My body listens to him more than it listens to me—a horrible, automatic obedience. There is a moment when I think about getting up, but standing means moving and moving means drawing attention. I understand that attention is currency here, and I don’t have any. So, I stare at the TV. The images blur into bands of color. My eyes sting. I count the tiny holes in the lampshade and reach sixty-three.