Comfort Food

by Kitty Thomas

  The pen plan was even less successful than the lamp plan. I just wasn't fast enough or strong enough. I had a moment of absolute shame over that, shame that I wasn't a superhero, or one of those girls on TV that somehow manages to overpower someone three times their physical strength. Fiction had sold me pretty lies, and none of them did me any good now.

  He moved the rest of the way into the room, and the door clicked shut. I knew he wasn't going to give me another opportunity like that. I'd had it and lost it. He released my arm and instinctively I backed away from him. The disappointment he'd had in his eyes was replaced by some indefinable hardness.

  It wasn't quite anger. It wasn't human enough or uncontrolled enough to be anger. And he was always in control.

  “I'm sorry. Please, I'm sorry. Please don't hurt me.” I moved backward until the heels of my tennis shoes hit the wall behind me.

  He calmly held his hand out to me, and I took it. What choice did I have? He led me to the door and then produced the blindfold from his pocket. I didn't try to fight him; I complied.

  Whatever he had planned for me would be worse if I kept fighting. After the blindfold was in place, I heard the electronic beeps of the keypad, and then the door lock released. He took my hand gently and led me from the room. My arm still tingled where he'd gripped it to prevent me from hitting him with the lamp.

  I was crying as we walked down the hallway. I knew he'd restrained himself from harming me. It was confusing to a degree I couldn't handle. It made me feel ridiculously and inappropriately grateful to him, and I knew that was what he wanted.

  We didn't go far, so I knew we weren't going back to the bad cell just yet. In fact, I was sure we were next door. He closed the door and removed the blindfold. It was a plain gray room, much like my cell, only there were screens everywhere. Half of them showed the cell he'd kept me in originally. The other half showed my new suite of rooms. I didn't know where the cameras were exactly, what they were hidden in, but the point was they were there.

  He'd known I was waiting for him with the lamp. I'd had no chance. Satisfied with my new understanding of reality, he put the blindfold back over my eyes.

  When the next door opened, I heard birds and felt a warm breeze on my face. He removed the fabric from my eyes and we were standing outside. The sun was starting to peek through the clouds.

  I shouldn't have been shocked by what I saw. I'd seen something similar staring out the window of my room, but I just hadn't thought it would be like this on all sides. He linked his fingers through mine and led me around the house, as if we were lovers or friends, his grip never tightening or becoming threatening.

  I could break the hold at any time and run, but to where? From the outside I could see my assumptions of his wealth weren't idle. He had money, possibly never-ending pots of it. The house wasn't a house, it was a fortress, a mansion. In another time, with slightly different architecture, it would have been a castle.

  There were trees in the front yard and then what felt like a vast nothingness that stretched as far as my eyes could see. There were woods in the distance, but it was so far off I thought it might be a mirage. His house was situated on what felt like a grass-covered desert that seemed to roll on forever in all directions.

  We could be literally anywhere. The driveway went on for what appeared to be several miles. And what then? He led me over to the large garage that housed his cars, plural. No surprise that there was a combination keypad over the door.

  He released my hand and sat on the grass, staring up at me, that look of mild amusement on his face, as if to say: what now? What now was right. I spun slowly in circles trying to grasp how far out we were, the vast nothing.

  If there had been lots of trees I could have believed we were close to a main road somewhere and I just had to find it, but we weren't. I wanted to run. I should have, but I couldn't help but believe running would make my punishment worse.

  There was nowhere for me to hide, and without a car, nowhere for me to go. He wouldn't go to all this trouble just to release me. I fought with myself over what I should do. I'd been so ready to kill him and now, faced with such a long trek to even a deserted road, I was giving up?

  I found myself walking down the driveway, toward the vast nothing that I hoped eventually would turn into something. I felt his cold eyes on me, sending a chill over my skin. I knew he was toying with me, and I was buying into it, but I couldn't just stand there or go back to my cell.

  He was there, ready at every turn. He'd known I would try to kill him, and he'd been prepared. He knew I would do what I was doing now, and he was mocking me. But to react any other way would have been unnatural for me. It would be to give in. He won either way. It was a game stacked against me on all sides.

  I walked until I was a good bit away from the house, if one could call something that imposing a house. I didn't look back. I was afraid to see him following behind me at some kind of perceived safe distance. Eventually I did turn back because I couldn't stand the way my stomach clenched at the idea that he was close behind me, playing with me and waiting to pounce.

  He was still sitting there, casually in the grass. I was too far away now to see his face, but I could make out his shape. And then he stood. My heart dropped into my stomach. I imagined he was smiling, a hunter intent on outrunning his prey, though I was too far away to see his mouth to find the truth of this theory. He started to move toward me.

  I turned and ran. I'd always been in great physical condition, but I couldn't run for distance worth shit. I just never built up that kind of endurance. It didn't take long before I was winded, and he was close enough for me to hear him running up behind me.

  I couldn't outrun him; I knew it. I'd known it from the beginning, but if I didn't make at least the token effort I'd be beating myself up over it for as long as he let me live. If there had been trees, I could have zigzagged between them and hidden. It was just too open here.

  His feet pounded closer and closer to me against the ground, dry and packed hard from lack of rain. Before he caught up to me, I stopped, turned around, and held my hands out in surrender. He stopped running a few feet from me and smiled that unfriendly smile, then nodded. Then he turned and started walking back toward the house.

  I stood there for a moment, gawking after him. I wanted him to physically drag me back kicking and screaming but he wasn't doing that. He seemed so sure I'd follow. Well fuck that. He'd had me almost three weeks. I wasn't that far gone.

  I stood defiantly with my arms crossed over my chest. He turned and when he didn't see me following right behind him, the smile left his face, and his eyes narrowed. He started to stride purposefully toward me, and I found my feet defying my desires and moving me back toward the house.

  For all my tough thoughts, I didn't want him to hurt me. At root I was a coward, and I knew it. I didn't take enough risks, never had. I was just the kind of girl men like him dreamed of taking. The kind that was too afraid of pain to rebel in any meaningful way.

  I'd stopped running because I was terrified of him knocking me physically to the ground. I was afraid if he did that, if he got a taste of violence toward me, he wouldn't stop. We were in the middle of nowhere, and he was my only hope. Keeping him from turning on me was the only thing that mattered.

  He slowed his strides to match mine as we walked together to the house. If the situation were different, it would have been companionable silence. I didn't know how he managed the willpower to not reprimand me. But he'd managed the willpower to do every other completely calculated thing he'd done. So why not?

  He was the most terrifying person I'd ever encountered, like a wild animal, and yet he reasoned. Predatory animals are so frightening because you can't speak or understand their language. You can't reason with them.

  As we got closer to the house, I kept thinking of the ramifications of its size. Surely a house that big, there had to be servants at some point. He couldn't possibly do everything himself. So people came to the house, and i
f they came to the house, I had a chance. If I screamed my head off someone would hear me.

  As we got closer to our destination, he pulled out the blindfold again and I let him put it on me. When the cloth was removed from my eyes, the fear I'd been secretly harboring was realized. I was back in the bad cell.

  “Please, take me back to the other room. I'm sorry. I won't try anything again. I won't try to get away.”

  He skimmed his fingers lightly over my face, cupped my chin, and brushed his lips softly against mine. I leaned into the touch because I knew it was the last one for awhile. I hated myself for trying to savor it. I should be happy he wouldn't touch me, that I'd have a fucking break from his constant ministrations, but all I could think about was that I'd have to dance again in order to feel anything at all.

  It didn't matter what I did or didn't do in that cell. I would be there until he thought I'd properly learned my lesson. He turned and left me alone, that deafening door click sealing my fate. Would it be a week? Two weeks? Surely a murder attempt, no matter how lame, would require more than one week's penance.

  I pounded on the door until my knuckles bled, screaming and begging for him to let me out, to not abandon me again. I couldn't be alone like this again. Being in the cell now was worse than the first time. Seeing how bearable my imprisonment with him could be, and what I was getting instead.

  I pushed down the feelings of shame at having displeased him enough to warrant punishment. Some part of me still knew it wasn't true, or thought it might not be true. I wasn't sure anymore, but I was starting to feel like I deserved the bad cell now.

  He'd given me everything, and I'd tried to kill him. I finally moved back to my corner, cradling my injured hands. I soaked in the stinging feeling because it was something, and it let me know I was still real. Not long after that, the door opened.

  My usual bathing necessities were slipped into the room, along with a tray with bandages and ointment for my hands.

  “Thank you.” I couldn't stop the words. And somehow I knew any attempts at escape now were just denial and an unwillingness to accept reality.

  I scooted the pail of water, soaps, and bandages to the drain and first worked on my hands. I was sobbing by the time I'd finished bandaging. It was like that moment when you know you're going to die and it's too late to do anything about it. You just have that sickening knowledge that that's what's about to happen, that apprehension.

  I knew what had happened, I just couldn't stop it. I wouldn't scream for help; I couldn't. Not anymore. I couldn't scream because he was taking such good care of me. He'd gotten me bandages.

  The rest of the day I didn't make a fuss. I did what I was supposed to do. I ate my chicken soup, and I slept in my corner. I scratched off a day into the concrete behind the toilet and ran my fingers over all the other days I'd spent there.

  I don't know why I still hid the marks. I knew he watched me and had probably at some point caught me doing it. But he'd ignored it. He didn't seem to care about my crude calendar. I repeated the date over and over again in my head because it was important for me to know what day I was on.

  When I slept that night I dreamed of the good cell, bubble baths and music, rows and rows of books and CDs, blush pink nail polish, and fuzzy slippers. And I dreamed of him. His eyes boring through me, seeing all my secrets, his hands on my body, and his voice whispering in my ear.

  When I woke up, I was bleeding.

  Five

  In the master bathroom of what I had come to call the good cell, in the cabinet had been tampons and pads. Both. I hadn't thought anything about it at the time. If I was going to rebel and potentially fail, I should have thought about it and picked another date.

  Now I was stuck in a bare cell bleeding like a stuck pig. It was disgusting. Still, he didn't change the routine. Whenever he opened the door I begged him for something. All he had to do was go down the hall to the bathroom and get it, but he didn't acknowledge my request. Instead, he let me bathe twice a day.

  Finally, I stripped off my clothes and went about the cell naked. I knew he did it just to punish me. Feminine protection in his book was a luxury not a necessity.

  I spent a lot of time in the corner thinking, trying to analyze my captor. I wondered what his background was. Surely he had to understand psychology at least a little to be able to do this. Maybe he was some type of quite literally mad scientist, using me as a study in behavioral conditioning.

  That's the thing about conditioning. You can know it's happening all you want; it doesn't change the results. Eventually you break, reduced to something less than human. I felt like an animal as I crouched in the cell, blood dried on my leg. I felt wild.

  I reacted like an animal. I found I listened for every little sound, watched every movement he made. I read body language and communicated through touch more than I had in my entire life. I spoke to him, mostly when I was scared, begging. But I hadn't spoken any words of substance in over three weeks.

  He opened the door again and brought in my food. It was the first meal since I'd decided to hell with clothing. I wondered if he would be repulsed by it, if he was the type of man who was deeply disturbed by a woman's natural cycle. But he seemed neutral on the matter.

  I spoke then, not my normal begging or pleading, but something more meaningful. I wanted to fight this degradation of communication and not forget how to talk.

  “Are you a scientist?” My voice sounded strange to me when it came out at a normal volume and pitch, not through tears or panic.

  He had been on his way out the door when he turned sharply toward me, his face shocked. It seemed to unbalance him that I would bring up casual conversation at a time like this.

  It made me bolder. In my time as his prisoner, not once had I ruffled him even the tiniest bit. He'd expected everything I'd done, found it amusing and predictable, and now I had done something he found surprising. A part of me was afraid I was digging my hole deeper, but another, much larger part believed I might buy myself reprieve from my punishment if he found me sufficiently interesting. So I kept talking.

  “You aren't shocked by anything I do, except maybe this. So I wondered if you'd studied it. I studied it in college. I was originally going to be a psychologist specializing in research, like this, only . . . more ethical.”

  His lips quirked up in the least disturbing smile I'd witnessed on him so far. Still, he didn't speak to me. But he didn't leave me alone either. He sat on the ground a few feet away, watching and waiting for me to continue.

  I wrinkled my nose at the soup and crackers he'd put before me. God, I wanted the real food again. I'd do anything for a steak and a baked potato. I crumbled the crackers in and started to eat. I wanted to touch him, wanted him to touch me, but I knew if I made any move toward him, he'd leave again.

  “Instead, I ended up getting my degree and writing self-help books of all things. But then you probably know that.” A pause. “Why did you take me?”

  No answer.

  “Do you hate women?”

  No answer.

  I took another bite.

  “If you talk to me, I'll still do whatever you want. I'll still let you touch me.”

  His eyes darkened; I'd crossed the line. He stood and went for the door.

  “Wait. Please. I'm sorry. I won't ask for anything. I know you have your reasons, okay?”

  He turned and nodded at me once, then sat beside the door. The distance he'd put between us wasn't lost on me. I took a deep breath and then a few more bites, chasing it down with water. He wasn't leaving, and so I felt brave enough to ask what had been on my mind for awhile now. Getting my period had reminded me of more than just basic survival, but biological realities.

  “Are you going to kill me if I get pregnant?”

  No answer.

  My voice shook a little as I spoke. I wasn't crying, but there were tears in my voice, that catch you get when you start to get emotional but are holding back the floodgates.

  “ . . . B
ecause I know you can't just take me to the hospital. And I don't know if you have anyone you can bring in . . . or if you would even want me then. Please, I don't want to die. I was on the pill before. The prescription is in my purse. You can put me back on it . . . ”

  He shook his head.

  I took another bite, and more water to try to calm down so I could talk without going into blubbering sobbing fits. “No? You want me to get pregnant?”

  He shook his head again.

  “Are you sterile?” God, I hoped so. These were genes you didn't want to spread. I didn't want to give birth to another sociopath.

  His eyes were cold as he stared at me. As far as he was concerned, the question and answer portion of the day was over. But I could see in his eyes I'd figured out the truth, and I felt relief wash over me. One less thing to worry about.

  I finished my food without speaking again as he watched me. I didn't know what else to say. I wasn't sure what more he could take from me, but I knew he'd think of something if I pushed too hard. As it was, I wasn't sure if I'd be in the cell longer now because of speaking.

  When I finished eating, he took the tray and brushed my hair out of my face with his fingers. I leaned into him. I was ready to do anything he wanted, just to let me out.

  The cell was bad because there was nothing to do, but it was worse because it meant I had been bad. I'd displeased him, and that was starting to matter to me. I'd fought the desire to please him, but I couldn't help it. I knew what he was doing to me, but it didn't change how I felt, how I longed for him to touch me.

  “Please, take me out of here,” I whispered, as he ran his fingers through my hair, “Please.”

  I stood, and he kissed me. I moved my arms around his neck, but he gently took my wrists and moved them down by my sides. Then the kiss was over and he was leaving again. He turned away, and I felt the panic bubbling over.

  I'd made no progress. I'd just been a diversion, but it wouldn't affect anything. What if he never forgave me for trying to kill him? What if he never let me out of the cell?