This is the track for the morning after. The one that sounds safe until you notice it isn't.
I wake up clean.
That’s the wrong first thing to notice.
Three men fucked a drugged woman for hours in a stranger’s apartment; she should notice pain. Or fear. Or the sick lurch of waking up in a place she doesn’t recognize, reaching for a phone that should have been ringing all night.
I noticed the soap.
Lavender. Salt. The scent clinging to my skin like a second layer. Someone washed me. As the water clouded with everything done to me, someone held a cloth to my face. I remember half of it. The grey eyes. The washcloth on my jaw. The owner of the low “I’ve got you,” while I sank into water exactly the right temperature.
My body reports in next.
The pain arrives late, the way a bill comes after the service. My jaw hinges wrong—pried open, left that way. My neck wears a collar of bruises, each one the shape of a different man’s teeth. Metal clamps and the rush of blood returning after their removal left my nipples raw under cotton. Between my legs, the map of last night: the delta where Ethan bottomed out, the trench Colt carved with his fingers, the shallow bay where Alex came.
I shift and a sound escapes; small, involuntary, the kind you swallow before it becomes a scream. My inner thighs burn like the inside of a matchbox after the match has gone out.
I lie still, letting the body finish its inventory.
I’ve always been good at cataloguing; annotating margins, filing observations into categories that let me survive without feeling.
My skin is a page written in someone else’s handwriting; I’m covered in bruises and bite marks. Muscles I have never worked before ache as if I had put them through a brutal obstacle course.
I should flinch when I remember the wand. The strangers. The way my body accepted its role like it had been waiting for an assignment. Like it finally found its purpose amidst the void’s denial.
I don’t.
