Page 12 of Unorthodox
He doesn’t know it yet, but even through the haze of the drugs, I know one thing with certainty. My mind is already fucked.
It has been since I was a child.
Ben isin my room before the sun rises again.
It’s been this way for the past six days. Six days, and I’ve marked every one of them with a tiny cut on my inner forearm, from another dull razor left in my bathroom to replace the one I lost when Ben pushed me down the stairs.
The door to my room is the only escape.
After the pain I was in the last time I tried, I don’t try again.
The window in here is at the very top of the ceiling, a small square looking out at a blue sky. I can see nothingbutsky from it.
I don’t know where I am.
The only way to find out is through the door, but beyond the door is the same man with the rifle strapped across his chest. The same man that was outside of my window at Danik’s house. The same man who let Ben take me down those stairs.
“Up.” Ben’s voice is jarring in the silence of my room.
I stumble out of bed, my eyes heavy with sleep. Every night is the same. I crawl into bed and close my eyes, knowing I won’t escape this hell. I whimper in the night, half awake, half drugged, and Max comes.
Max steps into my room and he holds me.
He tortures me, but he caresses me.
He makes my body respond to him in ways I don’t like, but I don’t care. I don’t care because his touch is the only gentle thing I’ll receive all day, even when it’s not that gentle. Compared to the rest of the hands that have touched me, his are featherlight.
My feet scurry across the wooden floor, away from the bed, so Ben understands I’m listening to his command.
I thought I was immune to the scent of the pine floor cleaner the woman in this house uses to clean with, even though it’s overwhelming in my room.
But I haven’t puked any more at night like I did the first three. Not that that ever did me any good anyway. The scent was still there. And the housekeeper brought more drugged food, waited until I forced it down.
The drugs brought relief.
And after those three nights, exhaustion won over the flashbacks, and I stopped getting sick. I found myself lulled to sleep with Max in my bed, his heady, masculine scent—a lot like the smell of the ocean, in the strangest of ways—covering the pine.
The pine, and the memories of Uncle Cade and what he made me and Danik do.
In the mornings though, I smell it all over again. Almost as if getting out of the bed Max slips away from when I fall asleep is like walking into the room all over again.
I feel hot all over, like I’m going to be sick. My stomach convulses and I try to breathe through my mouth to dull the scent. To block out the memories of Cade. And Danik. And the things we did to each other.
The memories with my father, though more recent, are easier to push away. There’s no scent attached to those. Nothing but the feeling of lying in his bed, my eyes locked on the ceiling afterward.
But the pine cleaner is like a constant reminder of what happened with my uncle.
“Bathroom,” Ben commands me, crossing his arms over his chest. He has wavy, dark blond hair and deep blue eyes. He’s nearly as tall as Max, and he’s broader. He can’t be much older than me, and yet the way he treats me…it’s as if I’m…nothing.
In this house, that’s true.
I shudder, remembering what Ben did to me when I came to that second morning. After I tried to run.
I head toward the bathroom, arms wrapped around my chest.
I’m in a white tank top, white shorts. I don’t have a dresser here. There are a few items in the closet that Max hung up when he first brought me here, but I’m not allowed to pick my clothes.
Ben has them laid out on my bed every day when I leave the bathroom.
