Page 27 of Silenced

It’s intimate yet not.

Clinical, sure, but too close for comfort.

Just like his goddamn erection.

There’s no evading it from this angle and the sight does strange things to me. Things I shouldn’t be thinking at a time like this.

No, I should be punching him instead of staring at something that I’ve been repeatedly told I’m incapable of triggering in a man…

As annoyance goes to war with my worry, which battles my insecurities, he confuses me further by shampooing and rinsing my hairtwicebefore applying conditioner to nourish it.

The products are for women—who do they belong to?

Does he have a wife who’s okay with her husband bringing strange women into his home to shower?

Maybe she’s like me.

If Harvey had brought a sex slave into our home, I wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it. I like to think I’d have contacted the cops, but I don’t know if I’d have been able to.

Fear is the worst type of chokehold a man can have on you.

Especially at the start of the abuse.

Back then, I cared if I lived or died.

After years of enduring it, years of isolation from anyone who had ever loved me, I often contemplated suicide to escape my life, then a random meeting with an old friend in the city made me realize what I’d become.

Something Harvey compounded a week later when I smiled at a delivery guy. He tied me to the bed and either went out for more of the Viagra that had stopped working on him years ago or tools to kill me with—I still don’t know which for sure. Knowing him, it could be either…

That’s when the friend I’d dumped at Harvey’s demand, a friend I didn’t deserve, came to my rescue.

As the memory from earlier this year plagues me, that’s when I have another ‘eureka’ moment.

Before Harvey had held a hand over my nose and mouth to force me to swallow the drugs he’d shoved between my teeth in the motel room he’d taken me to, I’d managed to get in touch with that friend again, Savannah Daniels, and had asked her for help.

Is this stranger the cavalry she sent?

Is my friend waiting somewhere for news on my status?

Quickly, I sign, “Do you know Savannah Daniels?”

No response.

I suck in an impatient breath.

“I asked her for help with my husband—”

A growl escapes him, and with snappish movements of his fingers, he signs, “You are nothis.”

If a man could sign in italics, then he’d just done that.

It’s his turn to suck in a breath, but this time, I can see he’s seeking calm.

He snatches one ofsixdetachable shower heads and starts to stream it over my hair, taking me aback with how gentle his touch is as he rinses it again.

Wordlessly, he returns to his earlier task.

Only this time, it’s worse.

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