Page 73 of Run Rabbit Run

I walk his tree line with a guard at my back, the fresh cold air in my lungs, and I’ve never felt more owned in my life.

The first time he let me out, I stood at the edge of the timber and looked at the dark trees and waited to feel the old pull.

The one that used to live in me, the certainty that woods meant safety, that if I could get in among the trunks I could disappear the way I'd disappeared a thousand times.

I stood there and I reached for it and it wasn't there.

He took that too, out in the pit, the night he showed me the woods were his and not mine.

Now the trees are just… trees.

Cold, wet, beautiful, and no more mine than the locked door upstairs.

A woman who spent her life certain she was the most dangerous animal in any forest, standing at a tree line with nothing in her that wants to run, because the running was beaten out of her on this exact ground.

He comes to me most nights now.

I've stopped pretending, even to myself, that I brace for it.

Bracing is effort, and the effort's gone out of me.

What's left in its place is worse, a kind of readiness, a settling-in ahead of his footsteps that I hate with what's left of the part of me that still hates.

Tonight he takes me out to the old cabin at the edge of the near woods.

It's the first time he's moved me for it.

A stone hearth, a bed, one lamp turned low, the black trees pressing at the windows, and I understand without being told that this is another door opening.

Another inch of paddock, that he's testing whether I'll run now that there's a tree line thirty feet from an unlocked door.

I won't run.

We both know I won't run.

That knowledge sits between us in the low light like a third person in the room.

He undresses me slowly, the way he does everything.

I stand there and let him, and my mind does what it's learned to do, starts drifting up and out toward the black windows and the trees beyond.

Then his hand comes to my throat, and my body answers the way he built it to answer, and the drifting stops.

That's the part I can't get away from anymore.

In the early nights I could leave, float up above the cedars, keep the far cold watching part of me clean.

He's closed that exit too, patiently, the way he closes all of them.

My body won't let me leave it now.

It's been taught to stay, to feel, to want, and it drags my mind back down into itself every time I try to rise.

There's nowhere left to go but here, present, in the low lamplight, with his mouth at my throat and the heat climbing me against my will.

He lays me down on the cabin bed and takes his time, and the old panic starts to rise, the animal thrash of it, the useless fight my body still tries to put up even now.

And without deciding to, I reach for Gramps.