Page 10 of The Fix
He knew her name. How did he know her name? Where had he seen it? A dozen places in the house maybe ... on their family calendar or a piece of mail. She hated that he’d said it. If felt like one more violation. She hadn’t given it to him. He’d taken it.
He unbuttoned his jeans and knelt on the bed, taking himself in his hand, and Cami closed her eyes and drifted even as tears poured from her eyes. The drugs made it easy to disappear. Her thoughts blurred as they hit her system, warm blood rushing under her skin.
She heard her eyeballs moving behind her lids, and she felt feathers tickling against her bones. She was numb and detached, and she knew she cared even though she couldn’t form thewhy. And the drugs did make it better for her, though she understood that they hadn’t been given as a kindness but as another way to control her. She understood this, and yet the feelings attached to the knowing floated behind a gauzy cloud, separate. She could see their outline, but the details were obscured.
She pretended she was floating, moving along the ceiling of her room, and that worked for a while, but then the cloud dispersed, bobbing away in opaque remains, and she saw what she’d been trying to pretend wasn’t there. She watched the girl trapped beneath the bucking, heaving man. She listened as he calledthat girlnames and debased her in ways that Cami promised to forget.
The room grew dark, and that made it better and worse. The chemicals inside her began eating away at her brain, shapes moving and shifting in the darkness, around her, on her. The monsters she’d feared all her life had crawled from their hidey-holes and were eating her alive.But not only her body, her soul. She watched it happen and couldn’t do a thing but survive. And it was better than nothing but only barely.
She saw the shadow of the other man by the door, his shoulders curved forward, phone held in front of his face as he recorded her torment. AJ. She still hadn’t seen his face. His laughter stabbed as much as the invasion of her body, and she struggled to stay separate from the girl being attacked as she bore witness to such casual evil.
“Don’t get my face, dumbass,” Trig panted.
“I’m not. Hurry up. It’s my turn.” Their voices were slurred and ghastly, their eyes glowed red.
She couldn’t speak. She could only bear what they did to her. She was nothing more than a body, a vessel for them to use, trapped inside her own skin. To have no voice. Not to be able to plead or ask why. A voiceless no one. And she vowed, somewhere deep down that she only accessed later, that if she made it through this, she’d never let anyone steal her voice again.
They left her when Trig was done. But the worst was yet to come because next they visited her sister. She slammed back into her sore, defiled body and suffered the worst torture of all as she listened to them do the same thing to Elle they’d just done to her. The drugs they’d fed her did nothing to ease the suffering.
A faraway screaming took up inside her head, a ceaseless wail that she knew, no matter what, would always rise inside of her when she remembered this moment. And how would she ever forget?
She vaguely smelled the marijuana they smoked afterward down in the kitchen, where they again opened beer bottles and clinked them together as they got high and congratulated each other on jobs well done upstairs and then laughed and called each other names and egged the other on, so they came back and did it again.
To her, to Elle, and to their mother. Their beautiful mother, who had only ever been with their father. His college sweetheart, the mother of his children, the love of his life.
They were showing him the videos from the prison of his office—Cami gleaned as much from their conversation in the kitchen. Her heart beat hollowly, the lump of grief and horror lodged in her chest, pressing on the organ so that it could barely pump oxygen through her blood. A mass there was no way to ever extricate.
She asked herself then if she wanted to live anymore and couldn’t figure out the answer.
It went on. And on. And then at some point, Trig lay beside her and smoked another joint and started talking. He sounded relaxed, his voice slightly slurred. Her head pounded, and her body ached. He complained about gas prices and some guy named Joe who’d slighted him. He called his father a shitbag and his mother a whore. She cataloged every detail, the small facts of him once more boosting her resolve to live. And as his voice became sleepy, as he began to snore beside her, Cami learned to hate. For the first time in her life, she understood true rage.
And it cleared her mind of the last of the narcotics forced on her. It cleared her mind of the chaotic, crowded fear. Rage scalded the hopelessness and despair, even if only temporarily. Even if only long enough to make the fragile vow to live.
Chapter Seven
The dark abated, and the first gentle light crept in. Cami cracked open her swollen eyes, surprised that she’d slept. She hadn’t wanted to. She’d vowed to stay awake in case an opportunity arose to escape, but her body had overridden her intentions.
She shifted and cried out beneath the tape covering her mouth as every muscle in her body screamed in agony. She hurt inside and out, in places she didn’t want to think about lest the visions of what she’d endured the night before invaded her mind and rendered her insane.
If she wasn’t already. She felt mostly out of her head. Maybe there was nomostlyabout it.
She heard noises from below, the buzz of conversation, and her heart sank. They were still there.Oh God, why?Why were they still there? They’d robbed them of everything they had to give.
It’s Saturday, Cami.Her father was supposed to leave on a business trip, but his conference didn’t start until Monday.No one will miss him until then. No one will miss any of you.
Oh God, no.She could not live through another twenty-four hours of this. Her body was raw. She’d peed the bed out of desperation, she was soiled in every way possible, and she was still at the mercy of monsters.
Something caught her attention, and she shifted her gaze all the way to the side, her sore eye throbbing. It looked like a corner of the tape covering her mouth had peeled up just a tad. Little good it did her with no available hands. And even if she got it off, what was she goingto do then? They’d be on her in a heartbeat if she started screaming. It was too early for Mrs. Willoughby to be in her yard. Most of the world was sleeping—it was barely past dawn.
She leaned up, grimacing at the multiple points of pain in her head, neck, and shoulders. Her arms were numb from having them restrained in the same position for so long. She didn’t want to look at her lower body, but she forced herself to. Her legs were splayed out, and she was only wearing underwear. Despite her internal and external pain, she looked normal from the outside. What had she expected to see? She wasn’t sure. All she knew was that she felt changed in a way that should be visible. The fact that it was not both relieved and panicked her. It didn’t seem right that anyone should be able to cause so much invisible pain to another.
When a tiny clink sounded near the wall, Cami froze in the act of lifting her thigh to bring her legs together.What was that?Slowly and carefully, she pulled herself higher, blinking down at where the minuscule noise had come from.Oh my God.She saw the edge of the compact she’d used to try to signal Mrs. Willoughby. It hadn’t dropped all the way to the floor—it had been caught in the quilt, where she hadn’t been able to see it from a completely supine position. Her breath came quicker as her heart rate jumped.
It must have been there through the night, and she’d been unaware. If it hadn’t moved despite Trig climbing on and off the bed, it was probably pretty stable within the folds of the quilt, but Cami needed to access it now. It was all she had.
She heard Trig’s and AJ’s voices more clearly now as they moved into the breakfast room. They sounded anxious, voices grittier and terser. Their sick version of partying through the night had obviously left them feeling rough.Bastards.She began scooching her body down the bed, reaching her toe for the mirror.
“We shouldn’t have let it go that far.”
