Chapter 2: Burying The Pain

I unlocked the door to my apartment just after seven in the morning and stepped inside like a stranger trespassing in someone else’s life. The air smelled the same, the faint lavender from the diffuser, the residual smell of the perfume my roommate Amber always wore to heavily and seemed to have now invaded every corner of our condo ... but nothing felt familiar. My keys hit the little ceramic dish by the door with a sharp clink that seemed too loud. I locked the deadbolt behind me, then the chain, as if that could keep the night from following me in.

The note I had left on Mike’s bedside table replayed in my head with every step down the short hallway. “I am going home to try and get some sleep. I will call you when I get up. Love, Beth.” The word “Love” still burned. I had written it automatically, the way you sign a card, and the second the pen left the paper I had wanted to scratch it out until the paper tore. I had driven home with the windows cracked even though the early morning air was cold, trying to force the last of the party smell out of my hair and skin. My phone had stayed muted the entire way. I could not bear the thought of it lighting up with his name.

In the bathroom I stripped without looking at myself. The borrowed sweatpants and paint-stained shirt went straight into the trash can under the sink. I never wanted to see them again. Naked, I stepped in front of the full-length mirror on the back of my bedroom door and forced myself to finally look.

The marks were everywhere! “SHIT!! ... FUCK!! I hissed in utter disgust as I turned my body!

The purple bruises of different sizes on my arms, hips and thighs from fingers pushed to tightly into my skin, the bite marks along my breasts, my chest and running up towards my neck, some dark red, others already the color of old wine. A long, faint scrape along one hip. The side of my neck had a long red angry line, either from his teeth or from his hands when he had choked me during the most intense pounding I had ever experienced. When I turned and looked over my shoulder, the lower curve of my ass was mottled with deeper bruises that were now just forming that ached when I pressed them. I ran my fingertips over every single one, slow, clinical, as if cataloguing evidence, they created a lattice telling the story of level of pleasure I had reached and now had to pay the price for. Each touch sent a dual shock through me ... memory of how the mark had been obtained, and the immediate betrayal of my own body answering with heat.

I remembered the weight of him. The way he had held me down. The way my body had opened and begged. The intensity that had pulled multiple orgasms out of me harder than anything I had known possible. My fingers traced a particularly dark bite on the soft underside of one breast and my nipples tightened. Between my legs a slow, traitor pulse began. I was already wet. The shame of that fact made my stomach clench, but my hand kept moving, mapping every bruise, every mark, every place he had claimed.