The irony didn’t escape me. I’d spent two years trying to convince myself that I wasn’t a slut, yet I’d just taken every single drop of my dignity and handed it to him.
I was no longer a slut. I was his slut.
And, in my mind, that made one hell of a fucking difference.
I won’t lie. It made me feel like I was thirteen when I wrote in my journal, but sometimes, there are emotions you can only tell yourself. A lot of those were connected to my job, and I’d felt just about every single one known to man over the last two or so years.
Disgust. Self-loathing. Guilt. Anger. Frustration. Helplessness. Worry.
The negative ones were the only ones that ever made it into the journals. It was my way of letting them out, and the best part was that, when I closed the book, they stayed on the pages. The ink dried and sank into the soft paper, taking my crappy feelings with them. There was something about writing them down that made me feel like I could fly.#p#分页标题#e#
I guessed that was because words were the most powerful things in the world. It didn’t matter if they were spoken or written, whispered or screamed… They could maim, devour, and destroy as easily as they could lift, heal, and soothe. Even if the only place the words exist is in your head.
My emotions existed inside my head in the form of words, destroying me internally, until the moment they shone in the black ink on the page, where their destructive effects became oddly soothing.
I hated words.
As my hand flew across the page, the fresh, wet gel ink glinting as the light skated over it, I realized just how much. They were binding and permanent, and it didn’t matter even if you burned the pages you had written them on—they still existed. Words could exist in any form, even if that form was charred, black ashes.
I wanted to do that to the contract sitting on the desk next to me.
Burn it. I wanted every inch of the perfect, white paper with its solid, black type to go up in flames. I knew that it wouldn’t undo what had been done. It wouldn’t take the agreement away, but it’d sure as hell be cathartic.
I wanted to burn it the very way its presence burned me. It was almost as if it had eyes with the way it glared at me. It was terrifying and unnerving that a small stack of paper could do such a thing. That an inanimate object could affect a living, breathing human being so strongly.
I hated it. I wanted to cut it. Tear it up. Rip it. Kill it. Burn it. Slash it. Crumple it.
I wanted to make sure it never existed again.
The contract was airtight, and that was perhaps the worst part about it. There was no wriggle room. I’d read it clearly enough after class. He’d made it perfectly clear. What had been written was written, and to be fair, it wasn’t totally unreasonable. Despite his initial words to me about his desires, everything really was an agreement. The word no would be understood and respected for what it meant. I had the power to veto anything I wasn’t comfortable with.
But I came on camera for a living, so there wasn’t much I wasn’t uncomfortable with.
Still, I was so torn. For the last two hours, I’d been going back and forth on whether or not to tell him I had been clearly insane and I hadn’t mean it when I’d signed. That was an acceptable response, right? I could back out? The contract itself said that I had forty-eight hours to do so.
I just needed to e-mail him and tell him so.
I figured that was why I’d been staring at my e-mail for thirty minutes with a new message box open on the screen.
So, why couldn’t I do it? I didn’t know. I wanted to. I wanted to type his address into the “To” bar, write, Fuck You, in the subject one, and tell him what he could do with his contract.
Yet my fingers still didn’t move to the keyboard.
They didn’t move for another ten minutes. One hand was poised on the keyboard, the other writing in my journal what I was sure was nonsense, but most of it was. It was the rambles of a crazy cam girl. If I ever wrote a book, that’d be what I’d call it. The Rambles of a Crazy Cam Girl.
After another few minutes, my right wrist seized up from all the writing, and I shut my laptop. The blank e-mail died when the screen did, and I found myself too tired to care.
I put my pen down, the nib still out, and stumbled across my room. Then, clad in my soft shorts and tank top, I crawled into bed.
My light was still on.
I didn’t care about that, either.
The weekend passed in a swirl of indecision and regret. I’d written the “fuck you” e-mail around ten times a day, and I’d deleted it every single time. It had been too brash, too ridiculous, too what-the-hell-are-you-doing? It hadn’t ever seemed right. Even when I’d cut out every F-bomb, it just hadn’t worked.#p#分页标题#e#