Page 47 of The Outcast
“I’ll never kiss you back,” I screamed inside my head.
His kisses moved to my jawline and my nostrils flared to keep up with my shallow, frightened breathing. With both my hands tied at my back, I couldn’t push him away, but I had my eyes closed, and hammered my tied feet up and down on the mattress while screaming to signal my resistance.
“Shhh…” He continued to pull down my pajama pants and panties, and just when I thought he would surely rape me, he picked me up again and carried me to the bathroom, setting me down on the toilet. Stepping two steps back he said, “I’ll give you a moment of privacy.”
With my hands still tied behind my back, my mouth covered with tape, and my feet bound together, there was no way for me to escape. To get out of this room, I would have to get past Keith, who blocked the exit.
We had flown all day and I’d held my bladder for hours. As I peed, it struck me that despite the desperation and horror of my situation, my body still reacted with relief when I emptied my bladder. I thought about my mom’s friend Athena who had once explained to me about the sign of Yin and Yang. She had pointed to the white spot on the dark side and said, “See, there’s no darkness without light and no light without darkness.” Was this what she had meant?”
Keith came back in and humiliated me by drying me before pulling my panties and pajama bottoms back up. Bending down, he once again hoisted me onto his shoulder and carried me back to the same bed as before. This time, however, he moved to the foot-end of the bed and rearranged the ropes, tying my right foot to the leg of the bed. Understanding that he wished to tie my left foot to the other leg and thereby effectively spread my legs, I furiously kicked and bucked like a wild horse.
It didn’t stop Keith, who was strong and worked with confidence.
The thought that he had done this before was so sharp in my mind that it felt like an epiphany. This wasn’t his first time tying up a person.
After my feet were spread and tied down, Keith did the same to my arms, and then he walked to the end of the bed and stood admiring his work. “Sweet girl, I hope you understand that I wouldn’t have to do this if you could try and see things my way.”
I was panting from fighting him, my vision blurry from the lack of oxygen.
“Are you comfortable?” he asked.
I stared at him with an expression screaming,Are you fucking joking?
Touching my bare feet, he spoke in a calm voice. “I don’t blame you for being upset with me. I never liked being tied down myself.”
With those words, he walked out of the room and left me to lie in the dusty bed. Unsure what he would do next, my brain ran amok with worst-case scenarios.
I could hear him moving around in the other rooms, humming a melody that was unfamiliar to me.
Think, Sparrow, think!I forced myself to analyze the room I was in. The walls weren’t damp, and it wasn’t cold in here. That had to mean that the cabin was heated by more than just a fireplace. At the same time the bed was dusty, which would suggest that no one lived here. Was this Keith’s cabin? No, he had referred to having a sex-bot at home. This wasn’t his home in Alaska. So, where were we?
He came in once hours later and gave me water and some bread with jam. The bread was still warm, which made me think he’d found a freezer with food and heated it up.
“Do you need to use the bathroom again?” he asked.
This time I shook my head.
He was just about to place the tape over my mouth again when he changed his mind and sat down on the bed. “Tell me about your childhood. Did you have a happy childhood?”
I felt no need to tell him anything but thinking about Athena’s lesson of light in the darkness, I figured that if he got to know me as a person and not just an object of his desire, then maybe his empathy would make him give up this crazy kidnapping.
“Yes, I had a happy childhood. For the most part anyway.”
“Were you abused?”
“No.”
He waited for me to continue, so I added, “My biggest problem was that I hated sharing my parents with a whole school of children.”
“What do you mean?”
“My mom is from the Motherlands. My dad is a Northlander. Both of them are teachers and they met when they were asked to teach in an experimental school where children lived and studied together from both the Motherlands and Northlands. It was the first school of its kind.”
“I’ve heard about that school.”
“The school was a success and my parents fell in love. Over the years they had Ryder, then me and later my brother Aspen. We lived at the school and it was a happy childhood in many ways. There were always kids to play with and I was never bored.”
“That sounds nice.” He paused. “I had no one.”
