Waking with him in my bed is very strange, I’ve never had him in my bed all night. He’s always up and walking out the door, but he’s still asleep and I take a moment to stare at his face. It’s so different when he’s asleep. He looks gentle, not hard. His eyelashes fan across his cheek and I want to run my hand across his face. He opens his eyes sleepily, looking straight at me.

I wonder what he sees when he looks at me. Is it the same girl I see when I stare in the mirror? Or is it someone completely different?

His hand reaches out, and he brushes my hair back.

“I’ve missed you.”

Okay, so they’re not words I expect to hear from him.

“You need to leave.” My voice is small.

He drops his hand from my face and sits up to look at me. “I owned her, for the sole purpose to own you, Milanka.”

Jumping up and out of bed, I look down at his calm face. “You wanted to own me?”

“Yes.”

“How can you say that, and lay in my bed as if you’re my lover?”

“I don’t want to own you anymore, Milanka. Not in the way I owned her. I want to own you in every other possible way.”

“I’m not your thing, Connick, I’m a person. And you can’t be this stupid…” I wave my hands around “… this idiotic. I may let you into my bed because I am just as much of an idiot as you, but that’s as far as this will ever go. You and me… we’ll be nothing more than bed partners.”

“You’re lying.” His teeth grit hard as he stands, naked, looking at me.

I shake my head.

“You’re mine, Milanka, and just because you don’t like the meaning of that word doesn’t make it any less true.”

I feel like this is a merry-go-round, and we keep on coming back to the same problem again and again. Will it ever stop? Will either of us actually decide to get off, because the way it’s going now we keep jumping back on? One of us is going to have to say enough is enough. I’m afraid that won’t be me because I’ll keep on riding it until I can no more.

“Please leave,” I almost whisper.

He bends down to pick up his clothes, and I can do nothing but watch as he gets dressed. The minute the hat slides back onto his head, guilt starts washing over me and then he speaks.

“I’ll be back later, Milanka. We haven’t finished speaking.” He walks out the same door I let him in last night, leaving me standing there on the ride, spinning.

* * *

Derrick wants me to go back to that place, that place where I left him. I know exactly where it is, exactly the moment I knew I was going to leave him. My car sounds like it’s about to die any second now as I reach the destination. Coming to a stop, I look ahead. The place I once called home no longer stands, in its place is another beat-up trailer.

I wonder if the people who live in it now hate it as much as I did?

The door opens, and Derrick steps out. Maybe he loves it. Maybe I was wrong. If this is his, he’s sicker than I thought.

Opening my door with shaky hands, my shoes hit the dirt ground, the same dirt ground I left on all those years ago. He thought he was taking me to be helped, to stop some of the voices that were screaming in my head that night. Instead, he gave me hope. He just didn’t want to think that hope didn’t include him.

“Mil…” The door stays open behind him as he strides down the steps. Walking toward me, he stops halfway and holds his hand out. Taking a step forward and closer to him, but without touching him. “Smart girl, Mil.” His eyes roam me up and down.

“Where’s Nicole?” He clucks his tongue at me.

“You don’t want to talk first? Do you even remember? I know you must recall some of it… if you’re here, that is.”

“Yes.”

“Ahhh… so you do. You remember, Mil. You remember our love then?” He starts moving now, he’s circling me while I stay exactly where I am.

“We didn’t have love, Derrick, you used me for your own sick purposes.”

“I love you, Mil. I saw it that night, that night you showed me who you really are.”

“I was sick, Derrick. That was not me.” He stops back in front of me now, looks behind him to the trailer then back to me. I look around and see that the trailers that were previously there look like they haven’t been lived in for years. It’s too quiet, everything is too quiet.

“She told me she could help you. Calm you down that night. That doctor you still see. What’s her name? Marina?” His eyebrows rise. “She didn’t see that she made you a shell of the person you once were. The you before that night was quiet and giving. The you on that night was ruthless and unforgiving. The you now, is shy and quiet, always holding yourself back. I want to bring her back to me, and I will.”

My head starts shaking slowly before his next words leave his mouth.

“You can have it back, Mil. But to have it back, I need something from you in return. I want you back.”

“I’m not yours to have.”

Anger floods his eyes. “You think you’re his?”

I don’t answer him. His lips curl up in disgust. Derrick pulls the knife out, the same one that was in my dreams, the same one I killed that man with.

Blood on my hands, blood in my heart.

It’s all real.

All of it was real.

He wasn’t lying to me, he was there, and he saw the aftermath of what I’d done. Is he as evil as I am? He must be if he covered it up and held it in for so long.

“You’re mine, Mil, and I’m about to prove that to you yet again.”

Before a word can leave my mouth I turn to try to run from him, but I hear his footsteps and know he isn’t letting me go. He has other plans and it was all a lie. His hand grips my shoulder and something hard lands at the back of my head. My hands go up to it to protect it, but it’s too late because my vision becomes blurry and my hands drop as my body does.

My last vision is of him. The last person I want to see.

I wake with my hands tied to my side, sitting up against a wall, in the trailer he stepped out of. I know exactly what it is, because I have lived in one all my childhood life. I look around to see if I can find him, but my vision is still blurry, and I can’t make out everything in the room. I hear his footsteps then his hand touches my face the minute he’s in front of me. He lifts my face up so I can see him as my vision stills.

He is my devil.

Of this I’m sure.

I let him in as you let in sin, easy and smooth.

Then it rips you to shreds.

“You’re awake. I was afraid she’d knocked you too hard over that head.” He touches my scalp and it hurts, and I flinch trying not to focus on the pain. My hands are in cuffs again like the last time.

“Who?” My voice is raspy, and my mouth is dry.

“Your mother.”

My eyes shoot up to his, and he likes that because he smiles wider. He picks me up by the cuffs and makes me stand, then he pulls them hard, so I have no choice but to move with him.

“I made her leave. The stupid bitch thinks I want her, over you.”

“Why?”

His breath comes hard on my face as he pushes me into a room that was just like my mother’s, and my feet trip as I fall backward onto a bed.

“I only have a taste for one woman, Mil, you should know this.” He begins undressing by pulling his shirt off over his head. That’s when I notice my name which is branded on his chest over his heart in large black writing.

I bet Nicole would have loved seeing that every day, I think to myself.

Then it clicks what he’s doing, he’s going to have sex with me. He’s going to rape me. And I will have no way to stop it.

“Don’t… don’t do this.”

His shoes come off next. “It won’t be as bad as your head is making it out to be, if you remember our love, Mil.”

Lies, all lies.

Shaking my head, he keeps going, removing each piece until he’s naked in front of me, and I’m in a ball on the mattress waiting to see what he’s about to do next, and wondering how I can stop it.

Upon hearing a clanking noise, he looks behind him, walks away then slams the front door, locking it before he reenters. I try to slide my hands free to remove the cuffs, to get myself out of here, but it’s no use, my hands can’t slip through.

“Don’t! Untie me, and I’ll fuck you, Derrick.”

He looks down at my hands then back up at me again.

“You fucked him with cuffs on. I see it, Mil, in that place he calls a business… you fucked him.”

Shock again. He was there?

“You liked it, so you will like this.”

Closing my eyes, a single tear drips free.

Lies, all lies.