by JB Duvane
I heard footsteps and Max's figure emerged in the light of the doorway.
"We need to talk, Emily," he said firmly.
I said nothing. The way he had tossed me down here like an animal scared the hell out of me. I knew what I had revealed to him was beyond shocking, and I wished I hadn't have done it. And even though I knew that him treating me like this was wrong, all I could think was that I had to gain his trust back. I stood up off the bed that sat against one wall, my legs shaking and unsteady.
The light from the house upstairs created a shadow of the man standing in front of me. I looked up at his black, expressionless face and just wished we could go back. I wanted more than anything in the world to just go back to the way things were before I told him. I would lay on the bed and let him fuck me for the rest of my life if only he didn’t hate me. If only he didn’t look at me like he did before he brought be down here.
"I'm so sorry, Max," was all I could say before breaking into tears again.
Max descended the stairs, and approached me with a length of rope. He expertly tied my hands together, and I didn't fight him. I didn't know of he was going to kill me, and at this point I didn't even care. I welcomed it more than anything.
Without a word, he led me up the steps. He didn't seem cross with me, there was no anger in his eyes or aggression in his touch. He brought me to the kitchen, where the table was set with a plate full of steaming eggs and sausage. He pulled out the chair and instructed me to sit.
"You're going to eat this meal that I feed you, and then we are going to talk. Is that clear?" he looked at me sternly.
I nodded. I wanted to obey him, to do anything I could to make him trust me again. I wanted him to see that what I had done was for the best, and that we were meant to be together forever. But even if I couldn’t do that—even if he never understood what I’d done—I was going to make sure he saw that I was willing to do whatever he wanted.
He sat next to me in a chair and cut up a bite of food. I had never been spoon fed as an adult, and the whole act seemed embarrassing, but I knew better than to object. He needed obedience out of me, and I was going to give him whatever he wanted.
I opened my mouth, allowing him to feed me breakfast, sipping from the orange juice glass when he offered it to me.
Once I had been fed everything from the plate, he led me to the sink and washed my hands, then took me to the bathroom. He instructed me to sit on the toilet and go, while he stood in front of me, watching.
By the way he looked at me, I knew that throwing a fit was going to do me no good. He viewed me as a murderer now, no saner than his worst patients must be. Probably worse, since I had killed the woman that he loved.
Normally I wouldn't be able to do anything with someone watching, but I had been locked in the basement for so long that I was about to burst. I hadn't even bothered to look for a bathroom down there, although now I realized there probably was one. It seemed like a room where someone had lived.
He handed me some toilet paper, and once I had cleaned myself off, he led me back into the bedroom, where he untied the ropes that bound my hands and transferred them to the waiting restraints that dangled from the bedposts.
He looked at me long and hard, and I waited for him to speak, but he said nothing. Instead he pulled my legs apart, and tied them to the posts as well. Then he took off his pants and shirt and threw them in a pile on the floor. His cock was already hard, but he stood there for a moment, stroking himself and staring at my body, before positioning himself in front of my face. He offered himself to me, and I readily took him between my lips, getting his massive cock wet with my saliva and straining my neck to take more of him into my mouth.
I wanted to please him. I wanted to do everything he wanted. I had to get him back. It had killed me to see the way he’d looked at me before, and I never wanted to see that look in his eyes again.
He ripped his cock from my mouth suddenly, and without ceremony, plunged ferociously into my pussy. I was still sore from the day before, and I cried out in pain. He didn't say a word to me, didn't touch my body at all except where his cock entered me.
Max just stared into my eyes and fucked me, oblivious to any pain he was causing me. He stared down at me, but it wasn’t with the sweet smile I had seen the day before. The way he looked at me was cold and distant. A look you might give a stranger that had bumped into you on the street. I didn't care, I knew I deserved much worse. I just wanted to please him, to make him believe that I was lovable.
Max finished quickly and withdrew himself. He untied my hands for the first time since he had brought me back upstairs, and I went to hug him, tears in my eyes. He pulled away and left the room, heading into the bathroom.
While he was gone, I heard a buzzing noise. I looked down at his pile of clothes on the floor and noticed the corner of his phone sticking out of one of his pockets. I listened in the bathroom and didn't hear water running yet, so I took my chances and picked it up. I knew that if he caught me with it, things would get much worse than they already were, but I had to know. I had to know how he felt about me. If it was me that he loved. It wasn't fair that I always opened up to him and told him the truth, when I knew there was more to him than he was letting me in on.
I was surprised when the phone lit up in my hand. I wasn’t really expecting to be able to get into it. I figured a man like him would have his phone under secured passwords, or would be using a fingerprint scan—but to my surprise, there was nothing. The home screen popped up and I quickly scanned his apps, then tapped on the photos folder. The last few photos that he took looked like they had been taken on accident—blurred images of moving objects. I flipped through a few more, and an image of a woman looking through a dresser came onto the screen.
My heart dropped. The woman was my mother, and that dresser was in her bedroom. The picture was taken from high above. I scrolled through and there she was again in a state of near undress. Again, in her bedroom, and taken from a high vantage point. She didn't seem to be aware that she was being photographed.
A realization dawned on me—these were secret candid photos. My fingers trembled as I flipped through the next ten or fifteen photos. They were all of my mother. They looked fairly recent, like they had been taken weeks or even days before I had arrived back home. Probably just before her death.
I heard the sink in the bathroom and I quickly turned off the screen and replaced the phone. My heart pounded in my ears and my hands were sweaty. Max was spying on my mother. He must have installed the camera in her house without her knowledge. But the clincher was … there were no pictures of me.
Max was so obsessed with her that he needed to see her at all hours of the day, even when she wouldn't let him. Instead of being horrified at the invasion of privacy that he was capable of committing, I felt betrayed more than anything.
Max was never going to care about me the way that he cared for her. I was something else to him—and obviously that something did not involve love. I had killed my mother, and although I didn't miss the rotten bitch in the least bit, now I couldn't help but feel it was for nothing.
All this time he had led me on—all these years of flirting with me, for his own entertainment and nothing more. I was never anything more to him than a sexual plaything—a young and naïve girl who he thought he could finally feel powerful with. I choked back a sob as Max re-entered the room.
I got up to use the restroom. I felt like I was walking in a tunnel. Max stepped in front of me, blocking my path with a dark look in his eyes.
"What do you think you're doing?"
"I need to use the restroom," I replied softly, looking away.
"Leave the door open," was his only reply.
I walked toward the bathroom in a daze. I stood and looked at myself in the mirror, and what I saw, I wanted to end. I turned around to see if he was watching what I was doing. I heard him in the bedroom, fiddling with the restraints that hung from the posts, probably deciding what he was going
to do with me next.
I looked back to the mirror, and tears welled in my eyes. I thought about the earring of hers that he had held on to, and now the pictures that he kept. And I thought about that night so long ago when I watched him fucking her. But he hadn’t been looking at her. He had been looking at me! I watched everything, his enormous cock entering her after he told her to roll over, then his attention turn to the doorway when he heard me.
I had spent the last few years believing that it was me that he really wanted. After all, it was me he stared at while he came inside of her.
But I had been so wrong. His heart was not with me, and it never would be. I slowly opened the medicine cabinet without making a sound, and rummaged through the bottles of prescription pills inside. I didn’t know what most of them were, but I knew some were sleeping pills and some were pain killers. Being my mother's daughter made me very familiar with the pharmaceutical names of those particular pills.
I also knew that if I took enough of them, my pain would end.
I carefully opened the lid to a bottle of high dosage oxycodone and dumped the whole thing into my palm. Then, silently padding to the doorway, I checked on Max again. While his back was turned to me I tilted my head back, dumping some of pills in, then dipping my head under the faucet to wash them down. I repeated that a few more times until I had swallowed the whole bottle. Tears streamed down my face as I emerged from the bathroom.
Max approached me, slipping the rope back over my wrists.
"Are you through?" he asked.
I nodded. I was through with everything.
"Ok, then. I think it's best that we separate for now. I'll be taking you back downstairs."
“No!”I sobbed as he pulled me down the hall and toward the basement steps. "You can't leave me down there!” I sobbed. "You can't! Please, please don't!" I was terrified that he was going to leave me down there forever. "Please, Max! Please don’t take me down there!”
He said nothing, opening the basement door and gently but firmly pushing me down the stairs and into the room.
I screamed as he shut the door and turned the lock, crumpling onto the cold floor below me.
Don’t Leave Me (Max)
I flipped on the television to drown out the screaming coming from the basement.
My head was pounding and I couldn't think straight. Emily was a murderer, and it was all my fucking fault. The girl was already a mess before any of this happened, and now she was going to have to live with what she had done for the rest of her life. I knew I wasn’t the most ethical psychologist, but I had enough experience to know that Emily was not a sociopath. The girl obviously had feelings, and she felt remorse—which meant this was going to weigh on her the rest of her life.
As horrified as I was by what she had done, there was no way I could turn her in. I just needed time to think. Time to figure out what I was going to do with her. I wanted to help her. I truly wanted her to get better.
I remembered the times that I happened to be at her mother's house while Emily was home on holiday from school. She would saunter into the kitchen and I would flirt with her, asking her about school and her friends, asking her how she had gotten to be so pretty. I had convinced myself at the time that it was innocent, but I know now that it was more than harmless flirting. I meant it at the time and I knew it. I wanted her then, and I still want her now. Even after what she’s done.
Even at the funeral, she showed an obvious interest in me and I still played along, leading her to believe that she could get me if she just acted grown up enough. I was playing games just as much as she was. But what I was really doing was playing with her life. I should have anticipated something would happen.
Emily thrilled me in ways that nobody else ever had. Not even her mother. I had been in love with Amelia, but she was different. She had a hardness to her that could never be softened, no matter how hard I tried. She seemed to thrive on the danger she put her own life in on a daily basis and the thrill of tricking me into being her drug dealer. Emily was never anything like her—and on top of it she had everything I loved about Amelia.
But she wasn't mine to toy with. She was and is a fucking child and she had known what she was doing that night. The night I may as well have fucked her while she watched her mother and me from the hallway. She had never experienced anything even close to love from either of her parents, and I took advantage of that. I’d taken advantage of plenty of patients throughout my career, but this was too much. It was all too much. I had no idea who the hell I was anymore.
I got up to fix myself a drink in the kitchen, and on the way back I stopped in the bathroom. I washed my face then ran my hand over a couple days of facial hair growth while I looked in the mirror. I hated the person I saw looking back at me. I didn’t know when I had become such a monster, but that’s exactly what I was. I wasn’t saving lives, I was ending them right and left.
I opened the medicine cabinet to find something for my headache and when I picked up one of the bottles of oxycodone to look behind it, I realized it was empty. I opened it up and was astounded to see that every pill was all gone. It was the highest mg dosage available and had to be used under close supervision. There had been enough in there to bring down a team of men.
When I returned to my den, I switched on the monitor so that I could see what Emily was doing in the basement. The thrashing had ceased, and I no longer heard her voice. When the screen displayed the scene downstairs, all I could see was Emily curled up in a ball on the floor, writhing and shivering with a pool of fluid collecting on the floor near her mouth.
She had taken the pills.
I rushed down the stairs and found Emily on the floor in a puddle of her own vomit.
“Emily!” I yelled, shaking her shoulders and slapping her face. Her head just bobbed from side to side and her eyes didn’t open. I picked her up and ran up the stairs with her in my arms. If she died I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.
I took her up to the bathroom and set her down on the floor, her body immediately slumping to one side up against the bathtub.
“Please don’t leave me, Emily!” I felt for her pulse and checked to see if she was breathing. “I need you!” Tears filled my eyes. “I need you to stay with me.”
She hadn’t been down there more than twenty minutes and she had to have taken the pills right before I had moved her back down there. I couldn’t believe how stupid I had been to leave all those drugs in the bathroom where she had access to them. I wasn’t used to keeping any of the girls up here with me and it just didn’t occur to me to clean out the bathroom. Besides, I hadn’t even dreamed that she would try to kill herself.
I rummaged through the drawers and found a syringe and some naloxone, then set everything up next to her on the floor. She had a very weak pulse and I could barely detect any breath sounds so I gave her CPR for a minute, then filled the syringe and shot it into her arm. Within seconds she was gasping and shaking her head back and forth on the floor.
“Emily,” I yelled again. “Emily, you have to listen to me! Did you take all the pills in that bottle?”
Her eyes were still closed even though she was much more active—thrashing her arms and legs around.
“Emily!” I yelled as I slapped her face.
“Y-yes.”
I pulled her up into a sitting position and leaned her against the bathtub, then found something I could use to induce vomiting again.
“You have to take this, Emily.” I pulled her mouth open and got her to swallow some charcoal pills, then gave her another injection. She still had a lethal dose of opiates in her body and I needed to get as much out as possible before it all absorbed into her blood stream.
I held her for over an hour while she alternated between throwing up into the toilet and laying on the cold tile floor. Then when it seemed that everything was out of her system I cleaned her up and carried her to the bed.
“Max,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry, Max.” Tears filled
her eyes as she looked up at me.
“I know.” I brushed her hair back and kissed her forehead. “Don’t think about any of it now. Just rest.”
Emily closed her eyes and smiled.
“What are you smiling about?” I asked, my lips still hovering near her face.
“You kissed me.”
“Yes.” I closed my eyes and touched my forehead to hers. “I kissed you.”
I left her alone for a moment while I cleaned out the bathroom. I wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice. I took everything out of the medicine cabinet and drawers that could even remotely serve as a poison. As well as any scissors or anything sharp. I put everything in my room and locked the door that led from there into the bathroom, then spent the rest of the day sitting with Emily.
I checked her vital signs every hour to make sure she was okay. I felt completely responsible for everything. I hated myself for the way I treated her. I couldn’t just let my guard down. I had to make sure she knew her place with me first. I had been an utter bastard and I was going to do everything in my power to take care of her. Then, once she was better I’d figure out how the hell I was going to start acting like a fucking human being.
Lost (Emily)
I didn’t know if I was awake or if it was a dream. Max was there. His arms were around me and we were drifting across the floor while an orchestra played in the background. I didn’t know the steps but it didn’t matter. My feet didn’t even seem to move a step as Max and I twirled around in circles. When I looked up at him his eyes were twinkling like the stars in the sky behind him and he bent down and kissed my forehead.
I was filled with a feeling of love. I had never felt it so strongly and it seemed to travel through every inch of my body. I could feel his love for me coursing through me in waves.
He really does love me, I thought as my eyes fluttered open.