He took me back and he bathed my blistered, sunburned skin and rehydrated me for a whole day. He cared for me gently and made sure I lived, even going so far as to spoon-feed me chicken broth after starving me for a full week.
When I was well enough to move and scream, he put me in a pine box, poured….snakes in there with me—those small, nonvenomous ones—and then closed me in there while I screamed so hard, I lost my voice and spat up blood.
All those slithery little bastards slipping and sliding over every inch of my naked body almost drove me nuts, and for one glorious second I sort of disconnected with my mind and started floating away.
I welcomed it at the time because I couldn’t suffer if I couldn’t feel, but it didn’t last long. I came back to myself, still trapped with the snakes, with no air and a heat unlike anything I’d ever felt.
He took me out hours later, just before I was smothered to death, and warned me that if I ever ran from him again I’d suffer worse. That, more than anything, broke me, because my instinct was to run but I was so terrified of what he’d do that I just gave up.
He didn’t even have to chain me anymore, because I was docile as a newborn lamb.
That’s where my head’s at now.
I’m terrified because I could love Wyatt Lane so easily it’s ridiculous, but that would give him the power to destroy what’s left of me.
“Baby?”
I look over and see him standing in the doorway, frowning, and I realize there’s wetness on my cheeks.
“Ellie, princess, why are you crying?” He stalks over to the bed and pulls me up onto his lap.
“I need to pee.”
It’s not the most original thing I’ve said, but I can’t be near him right now, feeling raw and out of sorts. I haven’t cried in years.
“Talk to me, baby. Please.”
“You know why I’m so afraid of snakes?”
He stiffens, and I feel his arms squeeze tighter around me, making it hard to breathe.
“You don’t have to tell me.”
But I do.
I want to.
“I never used to be. Alan and I used to go down to the river and catch those little garter snakes, the harmless ones, because he was fascinated with the critters.”
I laugh, remembering his sweet innocence and curiosity when they would slide so seamlessly through his fingers.
“It was great and he was so proud that a girl wasn’t scared of those things. Anyway, I never feared them, not once since I was a little girl, and my dad would take me exploring and fishing and camping…but then, you know I was…taken.”
“Ellie, baby, don’t talk about it if it’s scaring you so bad,” he pleads, burying his face in my hair as his frame trembles around me.
That one sign of weakness in him, his show of care and angst for me, gives me the strength I need to suck it up and go on. I have to because if by some miracle we can have something, he needs to know what he’s getting himself into with me.
I will never be normal and okay.
“I’m not afraid. Not now. Not here with you.”
It’s true. I’m not afraid anymore, and I want him to know it because he deserves to understand that I’m not comparing him and this….I don’t know what to call it, but it’s nothing like the other. He is nothing like the other.
“Ellie, I—”
“I escaped, did you know that?” I interrupt.
It was my moment of pride knowing I’d outsmarted Bolton and gotten free. I still remember his screams of rage echoing around me as I ran.
“No,” he says gruffly, breathing into my hair.
“Well I did. I got loose and ran, but it was hot. I had no water and I was dehydrated and weak from hunger. I didn’t get far at all before I collapsed and he came and dragged me back. For a rich, pampered college boy, he was very strong and determined. Anyway, he took me back and cared for me.”
Those words make us both shudder, and I’m almost sure I feel tears wetting my temple where his face is pressed to mine.
“He fed me and made me drink through my cracked, bleeding lips and bathed me in some medicine or something to heal the places the sun had blistered me. When I was strong enough, he…put me in a box, poured snakes in with me, and sealed me in.”
Saying it out loud is easier than I expected, and if not for Wyatt’s shudders, I would feel victorious at this huge breakthrough I’ve made. That one time I told Dr. Hanley, I’d needed to drug myself half to death just to function.
“Christ, Ellie, I am so sorry.”
“Not your doing, Wyatt, so no apologies required. I screamed, man oh man did I scream. Things are scarier in the dark when you can’t see them. They feel bigger. More sinister than your rational mind can grasp. They were everywhere. In my hair, my ears, trying to crawl up any crevice or hole they found.”