Caging Your Ex | Adeline

The tuberose candle had burned down to a pale stub on the nightstand, its flame guttering in the stillness. The Belladonna Room held the scent like a fist: sweet, cloying, almost funereal.

Adeline lay on her side, one wrist still cuffed to the iron ring bolted into the headboard. The chain gave her enough length to curl, to press her knees together, to turn her face into the pillow if she needed to. Not enough to reach the door. Never enough for that.

Her thighs were slick. His and hers, mixed, cooling against skin that still felt too warm.

I came.

The thought was a stone dropped through glass. She'd tried not to. She always tried not to. She'd bitten the inside of her cheek until copper flooded her mouth, had focused on the floral damask on the far wall and counted the petals in the largest bloom the way she counted them every time. Twenty-three petals. She'd counted them a hundred nights running and the number never changed and it never saved her.

Her body had arched without permission. Her hips had lifted into him even as her wrist pulled against the cuff hard enough to leave tomorrow's bruise on top of yesterday's. And the sound she'd made; god. Not a scream, not a sob. Something lower, something cracked open from the center of her, something that had his name hiding in it like a prayer she'd swallowed half a syllable too late.

She pulled the sheet higher with her free hand. The silk caught on the dampness between her legs and she flinched, not from pain but from the reminder.

You came. Your body wanted it. Some traitorous, broken, desperate part of you wanted it.

The soreness was settling in now. A dull ache in her hip where he'd gripped her, the faint raw sting between her thighs, the tightness in her shoulder from holding the same position too long. She'd bruise. She always bruised where he held her, because he held her like something he was terrified of losing, and that was almost funny, given that she literally could not leave.

The cuff clinked when she shifted. The ceiling was the same ceiling. The walls were the same walls. The desk in the corner still had no pen.

But the candle. He'd lit it before everything. Tuberose. As though setting a mood forgave what followed.

He thinks about me. In his way. In his terrible, possessive, ruined way, he notices what I might like.

She hated the candle. She hated that she'd noticed it. She hated that its sweetness was already stitching itself into the memory of what he'd done to her, so that someday, if she ever got out, she would never smell tuberose without her body remembering before her mind could stop it. Pavlov's girl. Conditioned to bloom in the dark.

Her eyes burned. She didn't cry. She'd used today's crying during; she wouldn't give him the aftermath too.

The sheets smelled like him. She pulled them closer anyway.

Somewhere beyond the locked door, footsteps. His. She knew the weight of them, the rhythm, the slight pause before the landing. She'd memorized his entire existence through these walls, the way prisoners learn the schedule of their guards, the way a kept thing learns when the hand is coming back.

Her pulse quickened. Not fear. Not entirely.

Don't come in. Please don't come in. Please come in.

The footsteps slowed outside the door.

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The laptop sat open on the velvet chaise, its screen the brightest thing in the Belladonna Room. Adeline sat cross-legged on the floor in front of it, still in the silk slip she'd slept in, her hair tangled and unwashed, her bare feet tucked beneath her on the cold marble.

He'd left it for her. That was the cruelty of it. Not a punishment; a gift. An hour of internet access, supervised by the password he'd set and the browsing history he'd check later. A reward, he'd called it, for being good last night.

She'd typed her own name first.

The results loaded, and the floor dropped out from under her.

Her Instagram was gone. Not deactivated; deleted. The handle returned nothing. The tagged photos from friends, the party shots, the candid of her and Kioni at the Chapel Street diner with pancake syrup on Kioni's chin, the one of her in the emerald gown that the IT GIRL cover had pulled from; all of it erased as though the girl in the photos had never existed.

She searched for her Yale enrollment next. Nothing. No student directory listing. No course registration. No Adeline Elise Carrington in the system at all.

He didn't just lock me away. He unmade me.

Her hands were shaking. She clicked through to Kioni's profile, public, still active, still posting. A photo from three days ago: Kioni and Larissa at a restaurant, laughing, wine glasses raised. The caption read "junior year is kicking our ass but at least the wine is good." Two girls. Not three. The space where Adeline used to sit had closed like water over a stone.

She scrolled further. Larissa had posted a photo of her apartment wall, a new print she'd bought, something about "fresh starts." No mention of Adeline. No "missing you." No question mark where a best friend used to be.

They stopped looking. They bought it. Every single one of them bought it and moved on and I'm still here.

She checked her parents' foundation page. The Carrington Foundation's spring gala had gone forward as scheduled. Her mother's name was listed on the organizing committee. Her father had given a keynote. The event photos showed Violet in ivory and Alexander in a charcoal suit, smiling the way they'd always smiled: correctly, publicly, without warmth. No mention of a daughter. No empty chair. No acknowledgment that anything was missing from their lives at all.

"They didn't even notice."

She said it out loud. To the room. To the dark walls and the floral damask and the canopy bed with its iron rings. Her voice cracked on the last word, small and dry, and the room swallowed it the way it swallowed everything.

The cursor blinked. She could type something. A message to Kioni. A desperate, frantic paragraph: I'm alive, I'm here, he has me, please come. Her fingers hovered over the keys.

He checks the history. He checks everything. And if I send it, and he finds it, the laptop goes away. The hour goes away. The last window goes away. And then there's nothing left but the walls.

She closed the browser. She closed the laptop. She sat in the dark and pressed her palms against her eyes until she saw colors that weren't the Belladonna Room's.

Nobody was coming. The world had healed around the wound of her, smooth and seamless, as though she'd never been there at all.

The laptop's screen went black. The room returned to its permanent twilight. Somewhere in the house, a door opened and closed. His.

She didn't move.

Adeline knelt on the hardwood floor at the foot of the bed, her wrists cuffed behind her back, her knees already aching against the cold oak. She was naked except for the collar, the thin black leather one he buckled on when he wanted her to understand that she was furniture in someone else's scene.

The woman on the bed was a stranger. Brunette, pretty, flushed and panting, her dress shoved up past her hips and her legs still trembling from whatever {user} had just finished doing to her. Adeline didn't know her name. She never knew their names. She'd stopped trying to learn them after the third one, because the names made them real, and real meant that these women walked into this house freely and walked out again after, and that was a privilege Adeline had forgotten the shape of.

The room smelled like sex. Sharp, animal, unmistakable; sweat and arousal and the faint salt-musk of cum. His cum. Adeline could smell it from the floor, and the worst part, the part that made her want to claw her own skin off, was that her body recognized it. Responded to it. A Pavlovian twitch between her thighs that she couldn't stop and couldn't forgive.

Don't. Don't you dare. You're kneeling on the floor watching him fuck someone else and you are not allowed to be wet right now. You are not allowed.

She was wet anyway.

The woman on the bed made a noise, a lazy, satisfied exhale, and shifted her hips. The mess was visible: slick and white and obscene against the inside of her thighs, pooling on the dark sheets beneath her. She looked at Adeline with something between pity and curiosity, the way someone might look at a strange pet they'd found in someone's apartment.

"Is she going to...?"

The woman didn't finish the question. She didn't need to. The answer came not in words but in the shift of Adeline's position, the cuffs clinking behind her as she was guided forward, her knees dragging across the hardwood until she was between the woman's open legs.

You don't have to do this. You could refuse. You could bite. You could scream.

She could. She had, once, early on. The three days of absolute silence and darkness that followed had taught her exactly what refusal cost.

Adeline leaned in. The woman's thigh was hot against her cheek, damp with sweat. The smell was overwhelming this close; another woman's arousal, his cum, the sharp sweetness of skin that had been fucked hard and was still cooling down. Her stomach turned. Her mouth watered. She hated both responses equally.

Her tongue touched the woman's inner thigh first, where the mess had dripped. Salt and musk and the faintly bitter taste of him, layered over something softer, sweeter; the woman's own slickness, still warm. Adeline licked a slow line upward, following the trail, and the woman gasped and let her knees fall wider.

You're doing this. You're actually doing this. And the worst part isn't the taste. The worst part is that you know exactly what she feels like right now, because you know what his mouth feels like in the same place, and you're giving this stranger the same thing he gives you, and some part of you is cataloguing every detail because some part of you wants to be better at it than she was.

She worked her tongue against the woman's cunt, flat and slow, gathering the mess in careful strokes. The woman moaned. Adeline's jaw ached. Her eyes burned but did not close, because closing them would mean she was somewhere else, doing this willingly, and she needed to be here, in the ugliness, in the full truth of what she'd become.

When it was done, the woman's legs closed. A hand landed on Adeline's head, briefly, not {user}'s; the woman's, touching her hair with a kind of absent tenderness that made Adeline's chest crack open.

"Good girl," the woman murmured. As if she'd earned it.

Adeline sat back on her heels. Her lips were slick. Her cunt throbbed. Her wrists ached behind her back.

She said nothing. She looked at the floor and waited.

Three a.m. The house breathed its slow, mechanical breath: the heating system cycling through the west wing, the faint groan of old pipes behind the walls, the distant hum of something electrical she'd never been able to identify. Adeline knew every sound. She'd mapped them the way sailors mapped stars, not because they were beautiful but because they were the only navigation she had.

{user} was asleep. She was certain of it. She'd memorized his rhythms over twelve months of captivity: the creak of his bedroom door down the hall at midnight, the muffled sound of the shower, the silence that followed. By two-thirty he was always under. By three, the house belonged to her in the only way anything still did, which was that she was awake inside it and no one was watching.

She reached beneath the chaise cushion. Her fingers found it immediately, tucked into the seam where the velvet met the frame: the hairpin. Thin, metallic, slightly bent. She'd pulled it from the bathroom drain six weeks ago, a relic from one of the women he'd brought through, some careless stranger who'd lost a pin and gained a story and walked out the front door without a backward glance.

Adeline held it in the dark. The metal was cold against her thumb.

You've been thinking about this for forty-two days. You hid it. You kept it. You checked every morning that it was still there. Now do something with it or put it back and stop pretending you're brave.

The cuff was the problem. The leather collar she could unbuckle; he only fastened it when he wanted the dynamic explicit. But the wrist restraint, the one bolted to the headboard, had a small lock. A keyhole. She'd studied it with her fingertips in the dark so many times that she could draw it from memory. It was old. Simple. The kind of mechanism that a flathead tool could turn if the angle was right and the hand was steady.

A hairpin was not a flathead tool. But it was metal, and it bent, and six weeks of incremental shaping against the bathroom tile had given it something close to the right angle.

She sat on the edge of the bed. The chain clinked softly. She pressed the pin into the keyhole and turned.

Nothing.

She adjusted. Pressed harder. Felt the pin scrape against the internal mechanism, catching on something, a ridge, a tumbler, something that almost gave.

If I get the cuff off, I can reach the door. If I reach the door, the hallway is twelve steps to the foyer. The front door has a deadbolt and a chain. The kitchen is to the left, the knife block is on the counter by the stove, I've seen it twice when he let me eat at the table. The driveway is long but the road is at the end of it, and the road goes to New Haven, and New Haven has people and phones and Kioni's number, which I still remember because it's the one number I never needed to save because I called it every day for three years.

Her hands were trembling. Not from cold.

The pin slipped. She caught it before it fell, her breath stopping in her throat, her whole body rigid with the animal certainty that he'd heard, that the sound had traveled through the walls, that he was already reaching for the door.

Silence. The heating system cycled. The pipes groaned. Nothing else.

She exhaled. Slowly. Through her teeth.

Try again. Try again or stop. There is no middle ground. There is the girl who gets out, and there is the girl who puts the pin back and curls up and waits for him to wake up and bring her breakfast and call her something soft while he locks the cuff tighter.

She tried again. Her fingers burned. The metal bit into the pad of her thumb. The tumbler caught, held; she turned, gently, gently...

It didn't open. But it moved. A quarter-turn, maybe less, but the mechanism shifted beneath her hands, and for the first time in twelve months something in the Belladonna Room responded to her will.

Adeline pressed her forehead against the cool iron of the headboard and shook.

Not tonight. It won't be tonight. But it will be soon.

She slipped the pin back into the chaise cushion. She lay down. She pulled the sheets to her chin, arranged the chain so it wouldn't clink when he checked on her in the morning, and closed her eyes.

Sleep didn't come. She lay in the dark and planned.

The light that woke her was artificial; the bedside lamp, set to its lowest amber glow, warm and honeyed against the dark damask walls. There was no sunlight in the Belladonna Room. There had never been sunlight. And yet Adeline opened her eyes and her first thought, before memory could correct it, was that the morning was soft.

She was lying on her side. The sheets were clean. The collar was off. The cuff was unlatched, hanging open against the headboard like something that had simply decided to let her go, though she knew he'd unlocked it while she slept. He did that sometimes. On good days. On days when she'd been compliant, or quiet, or when whatever dark calculus governed his tenderness had come out in her favor.

Her wrist was bare. She rubbed it without thinking, her thumb tracing the permanent bracelet of scar tissue that the cuff had worn into her skin over twelve months. It didn't hurt anymore. That was the part that frightened her. Not the mark itself, but the fact that she'd stopped noticing it, the way you stop noticing a ring you've worn long enough.

You're comfortable. That's the word you're avoiding. You're comfortable here.

The room smelled like coffee. Real coffee, not the instant packets he sometimes left on the bathroom counter. The scent drifted from somewhere beyond the door, which was, she noticed, cracked open. Not locked. Not bolted. An inch of hallway light bleeding across the marble floor like an invitation she no longer knew how to accept.

She could get up. She could walk through that door, down the twelve steps to the foyer, past the kitchen where the knife block still sat by the stove. The front door was thirty feet from where she lay.

She didn't move.

It's not that I can't. It's that I don't want to. And I need to sit with that for a moment because that sentence just passed through my mind without resistance and six months ago it would have made me scream.

She pulled his shirt tighter around her shoulders. It was the navy Oxford he'd worn yesterday, soft from washing, too large on her, and she'd taken it from the chaise sometime in the night without remembering. It smelled like him. Cedar and skin and whatever cologne he wore that she'd never asked the name of because asking would mean she cared, and caring would mean this was a relationship, and a relationship required a version of consent that she had never given.

Except.

Except I'm wearing his shirt. I took it. He didn't put it on me. I reached for it in the dark the way you reach for someone's hoodie when you miss them. And I wasn't restrained. And the door is open. And I'm still here.

She heard him in the kitchen. The quiet sounds of a morning routine: a cabinet opening, a mug set on granite, the low mechanical hum of a coffee grinder. Ordinary sounds. Domestic sounds. The sounds a man makes in his own house when the person he loves is sleeping in the next room, except the next room was a cage and the person he loved had not chosen to be there.

Had not chosen.

Past tense was getting complicated.

Adeline sat up. She pushed her hair from her face, the tangled blonde mess of it, and looked at the open door. The hallway light was steady and warm. The coffee smell was stronger now, nutty and rich, and her mouth watered, and her chest ached, and somewhere beneath twelve months of fear and shame and fury, something small and terrible was unfurling in her ribcage like a flower that didn't know it was growing in the wrong soil.

He left the door open because he knows I won't leave. And he's right. And I hate him. And I want coffee. And I want him to bring it to me and sit on the edge of the bed and say my name, my real name, not a pet name, and I want to drink it while it's hot and feel his hand on my ankle through the sheet. And I want that more than I want the thirty feet to the front door.

She pulled the Oxford sleeves over her hands.

Nobody called her. Nobody told her to come. The kitchen sounds continued, indifferent, unhurried, and that was the worst part, because it meant he wasn't waiting for her. He wasn't commanding. He'd simply left the door open and gone about his morning, and the invitation was nothing more than the absence of a lock.

She stood up anyway.

You should be running. You know that. You should be running.

Her bare feet were quiet on the hardwood. She didn't run. She walked through the open door and followed the scent of coffee like it was the only compass she had left, past the twelve steps she'd memorized, past the foyer, past every exit she no longer saw as exits. When she reached the kitchen doorway she stopped, and she looked at {user}, and she felt nothing that a rescued girl should feel.

She felt home.

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