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He almost certainly made the chair himself.
It’s cheap, uncomfortable wood, a stiff back at a ninety-degree angle that doesn’t allow for much movement, leather straps circling the armrests and legs to keep the occupant secure. It creaks in protest whenever I so much as shift slightly.
“Brand new,” Strade says with a hint of something almost affectionate, “just for you.”
He sits across from me on a metal stool, hunched over and resting his arms on his knees,
(Has he been there this whole time, just watching me sleep?)
with a hammer in one hand and a few nails in the other. He’s bouncing one leg like he’s restless and he has trouble keeping his eyes on my face, glancing around the basement and down at the floor and just past my head. “Actually, that’s not true,” he confesses. “I started working on it a few weeks ago.”
I believe there’s still a chance to get out of this alive,
(there has to be)
but I know it’s going to hurt.
“We’ve only really known each other for a few weeks,” I tell him.
He just smiles.
“So you knew all along,” I say, as if I didn’t know, too. “This whole time, you’ve been thinking about killing me.”
“No. This goes back further than a few weeks.” Suddenly he looks me in the eye with an unwavering, unblinking stare. He speaks quietly but his smile is widening. “This goes way back to the first time we spoke, the first time I came into the store.”
(He’s hesitating. It might be nostalgia. Maybe a disinclination to change things. I can work with that.)
“The first time you came in?” I ask. Stalling. Fishing for more time.
“You don’t remember?” He laughs, shaking his head. “I thought what we had mattered to you.”
My hands clench into fists and I bite back an angry retort about thinking the same about him. What did we really have, anyway, besides a basic understanding of what the other person liked and an implicit agreement to keep our dark secrets between the two of us? Calling it a tentative alliance or a truce or anything like that really isn’t fair, because those are even, two-sided agreements, and I
(naively followed him out to the parking lot like a lamb to the slaughter, saw her face, her face cold and bloodless, her body bound, poised to haunt me for nights to come)
I have never had the upper hand.
“I just needed help finding something,” Strade says. “You weren’t working at a checkout lane that day. You were organizing bottles of furniture cleaner. When you looked up to greet me, I…” He pauses, shuddering, his grin lopsided. “Ahh. I knew. I knew right away that you’d be my type. Nice and loud. Frightened. Not above begging.” He stands up takes deliberately slow footsteps, his eyes never leaving mine. I see sweat rising along his throat and disappearing beneath his shirt collar, his face reddening.
“I remember now,” I say, and try to think fast, what else, what else is there to talk about, because clearly this isn’t working
(this is how people die down here)
but it’s too late. I see his eyes glaze over as he loses himself in his memories.
“And I was right. You were terrified when I came back in after you saw the girl in my trunk,” he says excitedly, making wild gestures with his hands and waving the hammer around. “You would’ve done anything I said back then. Anything.” And then his smile falters and his eyes darken and the look he gives me makes me start to tremble in the chair. “What happened to that, huh?” he asks. “We really had some fun back then.”
“You did,” I mutter.
Strade gives a long-suffering sigh, and I immediately realize I’ve made a mistake. My tongue trips over an apology and I beg just the way he wants me to, a long line of “please” and “don’t hurt me’s” tumbling out of my mouth but he doesn’t care. He brings the hammer up over his head with lust in his eyes and I am screaming now, my whole body goes rigid in anticipation and I squeeze my eyes shut and I wait.
And wait.
And wait a little longer, timidly opening one eye and looking up at his crazed smile.
“You did enjoy it,” he says, almost petulantly insistent. “You liked the drives we went on. The time we spent together.”
I scowl up at him through angry, frightened, hateful tears. “How would you know?”
“Because we have a connection,” he says, and he brings the hammer down on my knee.
I hear the bone fracture beneath my skin, cracking and splintering, and the pain shoots through my leg like lightning. I can hear my own heartbeat loud in my ears as every instinct in my body goes haywire, telling me it hurts, telling me to protect myself, telling me to run but there’s nowhere to go.
“You were perfect then,” he tells me, and I barely hear him over my own screaming, would rather not hear anything at all but he’s determined to drag me back into the past with him, back to the day when this really all began. “I bet you didn’t think I worry about stuff like timing all that much, but I do. The timing has to be perfect.”
He caresses my throbbing knee, bleeding both inside and out, with the hooked end of the hammer, pressing down on the split skin with the metal, and I inhale sharply.
“Like waiting for fruit to ripen,” he says, sounding distant and distracted. “Or for flowers to bloom. There is a time in which a person is at their best, their most open and vulnerable.”
I whimper when he begins to tug at the splitting skin of my kneecap, toying with the bloodied ends of flesh and tearing the wound open larger.
The hammer suddenly leaves my knee and Strade holds up his other hand, picking one steel nail out of the bunch and setting the rest on the tables against the wall. He positions the point over one of my squirming hands, pushing the pointed tip against my skin.
“Don’t,” I say quickly, freezing when his concentrated gaze flicks back to my face and he takes in my expression with a thoughtful frown.
“Don’t?” he repeats teasingly, pushing the nail down a little harder and digging it into the top of my hand. “That’s kind of rude. You almost always say please.”
I look away first, eyes flicking to the basement floor. Strade abandons the nail, letting it clatter to the ground and roll away somewhere, to cup my chin and force me to look at him.
“It almost sounds like you’re more sensitive about your hands.”
I don’t speak. There’s nothing I can say that would make this better. Strade doesn’t need me to give any verbal confirmation, though. He knows what he’s doing.
(He’s told me that before, and it was always obnoxious. But I know he’s right.)
“Is that true?” he asks me, and he touches my hands very gently, running his fingers over mine. “Would you rather I hurt you somewhere else?”
I bite my lip and avert my gaze again. “Anywhere else,” I say hoarsely, though I quickly think better of it and begin to give a stipulation, but Strade is already reaching over to the table to trade the hammer for a small pair of pliers. I squirm anxiously in the chair when he brings them close to my right hand, carefully lifting my fingers and fitting the pliers around the very end of the nail of my index finger. “Wh-what are you doing?”
“Hm?” He grins. “Oh. I only asked because I was curious. I’m not actually going to hurt you anywhere else yet.”
He squeezes the pliers and starts to pull, my hand following as far as the bonds will allow before my wrist catches in the leather strap and he starts to pull painfully on my fingernail. “W-wait,” I stutter, starting to hyperventilate, “Wait, wait, I’m not, I don’t—p-please—!”
He tsks and shakes his head. “Too late to be polite.”
He pulls harder
(and really I was just unlucky. Wrong place at the wrong time. It could have been anyone tidying up the store display right by the doors when he came in, but it just happened to be me)
and I feel my skin pulling, the cuticle tearing
(it was me goddammit why did it have to be me why did I have to meet him and be fooled into thinking he was anything but a fucking monster why why why)
I feel my fingernail shifting and sloooowly ripping out of the nail bed, one sinewy strand at a time
(Why did I have to be a monster, too?
Why did he have to find out?)
before he yanks it out completely, his arm flying back, my fingernail stuck in the grip of the pliers and blood spurting from the wound on my index finger. I strain against the straps on the chair, vision blurring and head spinning, throat raw and sore from screaming, and hang my head as I try to remember how to breathe. Pain pulses through my hand and up my arm, and looking at the blood welling up where my nail used to be makes bile rise in my throat.
Strade lets out a breathy laugh and I reluctantly look up to find his gaze hazy and unfocused again, a prominent tent in his pants. “That was good,” he murmurs. “Really good. The look on your face just now….”
(There has to be a way out there has to be there has to be)
“One down,” he says huskily, dropping my bloody fingernail on the floor and drawing closer again, one ominous, slow step at a time, pliers raised, “nine to go.”
I shake my head and I look at the ground. I think about what I know. Strade’s fingers slide across my palm as he lifts my hand again, the same one,
(no rest no reprieve no end)
and this time he fits the pliers around the nail on my thumb.
(He doesn’t like it when I lie. He doesn’t like it when I don’t answer. He doesn’t like how I’ve changed.
Have I changed?)
He’s getting impatient, he holds down my arm with his other hand as though the leather strap around my wrist isn’t doing enough and gives a sharp tug, wrenching my thumb nail crookedly out of place, half-connected, blood oozing in the corner of the cuticle.
(What was I thinking about?
That I’ve changed? Have I, though? I’ve just followed his lead. I thought he wanted that. Maybe he thought he wanted that, too.
But we were both wrong.)
Strade’s grip on the pliers falters; his hands are shaking. He just leaves my nail hanging loosely and throws the pliers down on the table, and then he’s undoing the restraints
(he’s excited he’s getting too excited to concentrate anymore)
and pulling me out of the chair, letting me trip over my own shaky feet and fall to the basement floor, bruising my arms. Just like before, just like every time, he’s right there, he’s right behind me, and he pulls me by the forearm and makes me turn around to look at him, fumbling with the zipper of his pants.
He palms his cock, breathing labored, and tells me, “You wanna give me a hand, buddy?”
I glare at him. “Fuck no.”
His free hand grabs me by the throat, pressing me to the floor and cutting off my air. “How about now?” he chuckles.
I don’t, I really don’t, but my lungs are burning and I’m starting to see spots, so I shakily reach up until he shakes his head.
“Other hand,” he says, eyeing the one dripping blood.
I do as he asks, wrapping my finger around his straining cock and wincing when I feel it twitch against my palm. Strade eyes me patiently, squeezing my throat a little harder as a warning, and I quickly move my hand down the shaft, coating it with blood. He groans, eyelids fluttering, and bucks his hips.
“C-can’t breathe,” I whisper, barely able to get a word out. He chokes me even harder.
“Move your hand,” he urges impatiently. “Hurry up. I’m not gonna be happy if you pass out before I come.”
I can’t focus, I can’t
(I can’t do this)
but I know he doesn’t care so I try to ignore the unbearable ache in my chest and my lightheadedness and I give the worst hand job of my life, wrist limp and fingers spasming, but every movement coats him in more of my blood down to the base and that must be all that matters. He chases my movements, thrusting into my hand faster than I can keep up, just as the room begins to blur in and out of focus.
He says something—I see his lips move—but the words seem muffled. I lose my grip on his heated flesh as something warm and wet splatters across my face, but my eyes are already shut and everything has faded into blessed silence.
*
“Hey.”
I know I’m in the chair again before I even open my eyes. I feel the stiff mockery of a headrest behind me and can’t move my arms. The pain in my fingers has faded to a dull throb.
A hand waves in front of my face—small and hairless, not Strade’s—and I almost scream. “I-it’s okay,” I hear, a voice I don’t recognize. The person standing in front of me is a stranger, small and trembling, fuzzy ears pressed down against the sides of his head. “Well,” he says quietly, “I guess it’s not really okay. B-but I’m not going to hurt you.”
I look over him, from the clothes hanging loosely off of his body and the faded scars on his skin to the metal collar around his neck. I think I’m starting to understand.
“I-I’m not really supposed to be down here. With you,” he says nervously. “But I thought…I wanted to help.”
He looks harmless
(he looks like he’s been here for a while).
“What’s your name?” I ask, surprised at how scratchy my own voice sounds.
“Ren.” He tucks his chin into his chest shyly before he asks, “Do you want some water?”
“Please.”
He produces a water bottle, unscrewing the cap and glancing sheepishly at my bound hands.
“It’s fine. Just hold it for me.” When he hesitantly comes closer, his tail swishing behind him, it somehow clicks. “Oh. You’re the roommate.” It’s funny in a sick way, enough that the corners of my lips quirk up in a bitter smile, but I can’t muster any laughter. I’m too tired.
(I’m starting to think this is hopeless.)
“You must’ve really made him mad,” Ren says as he tilts the bottle for me to drink.
When he moves it away, I ask, “I did?”
“Yeah.”
“How do you know?”
He’s silent. He doesn’t look me in the eye. Eventually, he says, “Y-you should get some sleep,” he says. “It’s going to be worse tomorrow. He told me….” The color drains from his face and he bites his lower lip.
I ask,
(not because I want to, but because I need to know)
“Do you think he’s gonna kill me?”
Ren shrugs weakly, visibly uncomfortable. “I-it’s kind of hard to say for sure.”
“What’s your best guess?”
He finally looks up from his feet, eyes filled with pity. “I think,” he says carefully, “that if you do everything he says, you might make it.”
I take a deep breath and choke on a sob, nodding. “Alright,” I say hoarsely.
Ren disappears after that, slinking up the stairs with one last remorseful glance back over his shoulder.
(“You’ve changed,” Strade had told me the other night at the Braying Mule, and he sounded a bit wistful. Maybe he didn’t blame himself, but I know he has some regrets, maybe even as many as I do.
“We really had some fun back then.”
It’s a test of some kind, it has to be, like when he tried to teach me not to lie or how to find a target at the bar. There is an answer. There is a way out. There is)
My eyes wander to the wall, straining to see the array of blood-stained tools strewn across the table. A saw. A drill. A knife. I think of Strade’s face, eyes clouded and cheeks flushed with arousal. Too excited to think clearly. Ready to make stupid mistakes.
(more than one way out.)