His hair is a wilderness of short, unbrushed curls, and there’s a red mark around his eye which I can see will turn into a bruise. I got in one decent punch, I suppose. It doesn’t make me feel good. Days ago, I couldn’t have imagined a world where I’d have to hit Jack. The bruise is a mark of reality, a visible reminder of what happened on the hill.
He drags the green armchair from the reading nook and positions it beside the bed, far enough away I can’t kick out at him with my unbound legs. I am barely breathing, waiting for him to speak. ‘I’m sorry things got out of hand.’
I blink, trying to absorb his words but they jumble and tangle and knot in my brain. ‘Out of hand?’ I echo, because he can’t possibly dismiss what he tried to do to me with such nonchalance. ‘You tried to rape me.’ When I say it out loud, it’s like bursting a festering sore and watching all the anaemic yellow pus ooze out. It is painful and ugly, but it’s the truth. It’s the truth so I say it again: ‘You tried to rape me.’
‘No. I tried to make you see—’
‘You tried to rape me.’
He scrapes the chair back and comes over to me.
‘Elodie—’
‘You tried to rape me.’
‘Stop. Listen to me. I—’
‘You tried to rape me.’
‘Shut up!’ He grabs my face, hard. ‘Shut up! Just, fucking shut up.’ With each word he gives my head a quick, hard shake. He lets me go. ‘You wanted me last night. You wanted me this morning. We couldn’t keep our hands off each other. I thought if we – I thought if you remembered how good it was, that you wouldn’t want to leave.’
‘Just because I said yes last night, or this morning, it doesn’t mean you get an automatic pass.’
‘I know.’
I open my mouth to tell him I loathe him, but a sob breaks free. Then another and another. ‘Please let me go. Please, please, please.’ I hate that I am begging but I am petrified and desperate and don’t care that my face is damp with snot and tears.
‘If I let you go now, I lose you.’
‘You lost me the second I told you to stop and you didn’t.’
‘No. No.’ He turns and kicks the chair. ‘Up here, away from everyone else, you realised you love me. Give it time, you’ll get there again. I know you, Elodie.’
‘I don’t know you.’
‘You know me better than anyone.’
I twist and pull on my restraints; they slice into my wrists. I want the use of my hands, I want to be able to fight him off, shove against his chest, swing a fist if he tries to force himself on me again.
‘Stop,’ he warns so furiously, I do as he says. ‘If you keep pulling, you’re going to hurt yourself.’
‘Does it matter?’
‘Of course it matters.’
‘You’re hurting me by locking me up in this house. Let me go, Jack. You can’t keep me here. It won’t make anything better.’
‘It will. It did.’ He paces back and forth. I’m not sure if he is talking to me or himself. ‘I don’t care how long it takes, weeks, months, years.’
My insides plummet. Years? He can’t keep me here for years. Oh, but he can, can’t he? How would anyone ever know? Running through my head is a newspaper reel of all those stories of girls trapped in basement rooms, only to be discovered years or even decades after being taken.
‘We’re meant to be. I know it. It’s me and you. It’s us.’ He stops pacing and stands in front of the French doors, the same ones we sat in front of to watch the storm, and I ached to kiss him.
He pushes his fingers back through his hair. Then spins on his heel and strides towards me. I scramble back, pushing myself against the headboard, trying to put as much distance between him and me as possible. ‘I love you,’ he tells me.
I’m silent.
‘Jesus, the way you’re looking at me. Like I’m a fucking monster. Just how Jeffrey used to look at me.’ He whips away so all I can see is his back. ‘Maybe I deserved the beatings, the nights spent in that basement. When I was a kid, he told me my mother was too soft to abort me when she should’ve and so we all had to suffer her weakness. He was right.’ His voice is delicate, cold, like the thin layer of ice over a puddle on a frosty morning. A childhood stained with violence changes a person. Moulds them. ‘It should’ve been me with a gun to my head that summer.’
‘No.’ The word escapes before I can stop it.