Page 9 of Acts of Contrition

What if they knew women hurt me too? That it’s not just men who do unspeakable acts?

My ribs heal. My mind doesn’t, but my soul begins to do … something. Call it hardening.

Mike wanted me dead. He expected me to have no life after he took away my childhood. For the first time since I was thirteen, I didn’t do what he wanted.

I survived.

I wanted to die, but I didn’t.

So now I have to live, if only to spite him.

The shelter has a network of apartments who will rent via cash payment and to women who have no credit and are looking to hide from abusers or have fallen on hard times. This landlord is new to the network and he doesn’t question me when I say I don’t even have a job yet.

“Rent is due on the first. You get three days’ grace period,” Rick tells me. “I’m sure it will all work out.”

I spent three months at the shelter, and now I have my own place. It’s tiny, and dingy, but it’s mine. Mine to decorate, mine to live in, mine to be safe in.

When the women see the movers out — all furniture is donated secondhand, but I don’t mind — I burst into relieved tears.

Is this my life? Really? Truly?

Did I go from three years of total horror, preceded by two years of abuse, to actual freedom?

It seems too good to be true.

Of course, things that seem too good to be true often are.

I cannot find a job. At all. Not a single place has hired me or called me back. Some wanted me to be bilingual, others didn’t trust that I don’t know my own social security number. And the list goes on.

The night before the first of the month hits, I make a decision after over a week of intense internal deliberation with my conscience.

I have to use what I have to make money. The one thing I’m good at. The only thing I’m good at.

The realization I have to be my own pimp, sell myself to earn my freedom, causes me to break down once more in tears. I cry for so long I pass out, salt tracks drying on my face.

Reality fucking sucks, and freedom is an illusion. We are all bound to something, usually money and debt. For some it’s a soul-sucking desk job. For others like me, it’s selling away my very soul along with my body.

I apparently was so exhausted I don’t hear anyone enter my apartment. I’m blissfully ignorant until a weight settles on my mattress and my eyes open automatically, thinking it’s Mike.

And honestly, what is the difference that it’s not?

Rick kneels over me, his cock out of his pants, rage in his eyes. The same sort of anger and insanity I saw in every man Mike sent to hurt me.

“No.” It’s not a plea. It’s a command. “You’re supposed to be here for women who need help!”

He slaps me. “Dumb whore. I let cunts like you in because it’s so easy to fuck your lying, lazy, sloppy pussies and who are you going to report me to? You’re no one. Nothing. You have nothing. They’d laugh you out of the police station but probably not before using you too.”

He paws at my oversized shirt and it tears at the collar. He’s like an animal as he forces me down, forces my legs open. “This is what happens to whores who don’t pay their rent on the first. You get three days of this until it’s paid.

“After that, you’re my property to sell.”

Chapter Six

Diana

I NEVER REALLY fully understood the meaning of the word irony until now.

I escaped my captor who forced me to have sex against my will only to move into a place where the landlord also forced me, and in order to get that to stop I have to … have sex for money by my will.

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