Page 40 of Ricochet

“I’m … sorry?”

“You’ve been staring at my wife’s thighs all night long.” Michael shrugs, and a sense of doom washes over me. I had a feeling he’d noticed. He always noticed. “I’m assuming you imagined your tongue buried between them.”

“I apologize—”

“No apology. I’m happy to share her. Now, please, have a taste.”

The stranger can’t seem to look at me again. His gaze only lifts to the level of my stomach and refuses to meet my eyes.

He leans forward, and the kiss to my inner thigh feels like an apology. A ball of tension curls inside my stomach, and I push back, halted by Michael’s arm, locking me to the chair.

When the man’s tongue glides along my cleft, invading me against my will, I cry out. “No! Stop!”

“That’s it,” Michael coos beside me.

Patrick continues his assault, massaging the stiff muscles in my thighs, as every corner of my soul screams in protest. I’m numb there, so lost to the horror that his tongue doesn’t feel like pleasure to me but a wet irritation that leaves me wanting to curl into myself and push away.

His movements turn fervent, and he grips my thigh, sucking, perhaps lost to the act, mistaking my agonized whimpers for moans.

Stop! Stop!

“Didn’t I tell you, friend?”

A flash of silver strikes the corner of my eye, and at once the licking stops. Patrick lifts away from my sex, falling back on his heels. Blood pours from his throat in pulses that likely mirror the waves of shock beating out the last seconds of his life. Eyes wide, mouth agape, he gasps for air.

Michael leans forward, his mouth to Patrick’s ear. “Her pussy is to die for.”

I cringed at the memory. After watching the man bleed out his neck, Michael had simply rolled him up in the carpet and burned his body. Poof! Gone. It was the first time I’d seen how easily my husband could kill and get away with it. No one asked about Patrick. No one cared.

As a result, I learned to become charming in the face of horror. To wear a mask of indifference and carry the same wicked undercurrent behind my smile. I’d come to understand one very important survival mechanism: Do not blink when looking the devil in the eye. So, I’d taught myself to make him believe he was staring at his own reflection.

I would eventually become Michael’s protégé in an effort to survive him. Bend just enough to please him, but keep my spine intact to challenge him. Build compartments on top of compartments, to protect the soft parts inside me that I’d never allow him to touch again.

Lock it up. Not here. Not now. Put it away.

I’d grown accustomed to smoothing over those images, tucking them away into the darkness burrowed in a place inside of me that I tried not to visit. Still, they haunted me sometimes. Drudged themselves from the black swamp of my soul, and left me feeling weak, dirty.

I wrung the panties out and hung them on the rack above the toilet.

Two days had passed in my new prison, and aside from tying me to the bedpost the first night, my captor hadn’t laid so much as a hand on me. Not my captor— Nick. Nick hadn’t touched me. Hadn’t hit me, even when I thought I’d broken his nose and kicked him in the nuts.

Sure, his eyes had gone wild, and perhaps he wanted to string me up and knock me senseless. He didn’t, though. Had that been Michael, I’d have been punished for nearly ruining his perfect face.

I rubbed the back of my neck as I made my way out of the bathroom, noticing, for the first time, that the string of constant tension I’d become accustomed to, that kept me on my toes and helped me stay alert, had dissipated. The knots I’d worked out night after night had dissolved, loosened into soft muscles.

Yeah, not knowing what was going to happen to me still weighed heavy on me, but I’d felt the same thing with Michael every day for years, all while enduring his abuses.

I sat down on the bed facing the prison window, its thick black bars mocking my freedom, and traced the scar on my inner thigh. That had been my punishment for Patrick’s staring. For allowing him to put his tongue inside of me, as Michael had accused. I tipped my head back as the small rays of sunlight hit my face. So warm. When I opened my eyes, a speck of green at the corner of the window caught my attention, and I stood to check it out.

From the exterior rotted wood, a small sprout of the fern climbed and had worked its way through a tiny gap in the frame. As if it’d peeked inside to see me. I smiled, rubbing my finger over the tiny leaves. Even through destruction, life could continue to bloom in the oddest places.

The perfect metaphor for my life.

At the click of the door, I spun around to find Nick standing in the doorway, wearing a white tank and jeans, holding a plate of fruit and what looked like orange juice. Broad shoulders, pared down to a slim waistline, gave some indication that he had a nice package going on beneath all the concealing clothes he’d worn every time I’d seen him.

“Are you hungry?”

Call me a masochist, but the question left me wishing I could cross my thighs. With a nod, I rounded the bed, taking a seat at the edge.