Page 59 of Run Rabbit Run

He isn't breathless.

He isn't spent.

He's simply satisfied.

I lie very still, stare at the ceiling, and I feel the horror of it settle into me, colder and heavier than anything in the woods, because the woods took my freedom and this took something worse.

This took the last certainty I had, that my own body was mine, that whatever he did to it he couldn't make it turn on me.

He made it turn on me. He knew he could.

He waited nine days to prove it, and now I know it too.

The shame of it is physical, pressing me flat to the bed.

My skin crawls where his hands were, not because they hurt, but because my body remembers them as something other than harm, and I can't make it forget.

I want to scrub myself raw. I want to peel off the layer of me that answered him and leave it on the floor.

I lie there naming every place he touched and hating each one for what it did.

And under the hating, rising, is the grief.

It comes up my throat like water filling a well, hot and thick, and my eyes sting and blur. I stare hard at the dark ceiling. I will not let it spill, because tears are a door too, and everything I give him, he keeps.

So I hold it there, the aching weight of it pressed behind my eyes, and it hurts worse than crying would.

It's the grief of a person learning she can't trust the one part of her she never once doubted, the animal she's lived inside her whole life, and there's no bottom to it that I can find.

Gramps used to say your body is the only tool you never get to put down.

He meant it as comfort.

He meant it to say you always have yourself, out there in the cold, when everything else is gone.

He never imagined a man who'd turn that tool against its owner, who'd take the one part of you that can't be set down and make it the part you'd give anything to escape.

He dresses without hurry, stands over the bed, and looks down at me with those pale eyes gone soft, satisfied, a man admiring work he's proud of.

"Sleep," he says gently. "You've had a hard night. You did beautifully."

Then he's gone, silent as ever, and the lock turns over. I'm alone in the dark with the ceiling, the horror, and a body I no longer trust.

I don't sleep.

I lie there for hours thinking about everything, and the worst part isn't what he did.

I keep circling back to that, waiting to land on the violation as the wound, and it isn't the wound, or it isn't the deepest one.

The deepest one is that he told me exactly what he was going to do, step by step, before he did it.

He read me my own undoing like a weather forecast, and then the weather came exactly as he called it.

I don't know how to keep fighting a man who can name the next thing my own body will do before I know it myself.

Every time he's right, something in me gives a little more, some floorboard I didn't know was load-bearing. I lie here in the dark and feel the give of it and can't stop it. I’m furious, sick with shame, giving anyway.

Somewhere in the black middle of the night I hear footsteps in the corridor, faint, a set that scuffs the stone—Delia, or a guard, someone ordinary doing something ordinary.