He wiped the tears off my face, and softly kissed my lips. I was too broken, too tired and pathetic and hurt to move, too afraid to try, so I lay there, feeling his breath against me, alcoholic and warm, shuddering inside. This was what happened when one falls in love, after all. His hands roamed across my flesh, and he kissed me over and over, as though the current gentleness he displayed absolved him of his earlier force. My body was wracked with sobs, and I shook in his arms.
"Isaak, it's okay, I'm not going to hurt you," I wanted to yell, to scream that he had, that I would hurt forever, that this would never end, never be better, never go away, but instead I squeezed my eyes tight, and tried to hold my breath, willing myself to pass out, to die so I would never have to face what had just happened between us.
He caressed me, and I could taste bile rising in my throat. My hips throbbed, and my wrists ached dully, but I was mostly concerned with where he'd ripped me open, wondering how badly torn I was. I would never have expected it, and that was what made the whole thing so terrible. I'd thought William was my friend.
I was still pinned beneath his weight, but he no longer had me trapped with my legs up and my feet by my head. My hands were free, and when he leaned back, looking at me, witnessing the wreckage he'd created, I slapped him. I'd caught him off guard, and I scrambled away from him as quickly as I could, but didn't make it far. Jolts of pain shot through my whole body, and I cried out from the agony.
William crooned, and wrapped me in his arms again, lightly brushing hair from my face. "Everything is going to be okay, I promise. Just relax…" I struggled then, unheeding of the pain, feeling nothing but terror at William's actions and words.
"I hate you." I hissed it at him, wanting it to hurt, wanting him to know that it was the truth, but he only grinned.
"If you hated me Isaak, I think you would have been more discreet, and you'd never have come on to me." He grinned and I wanted to bite him, to see his blood, and make him scream like he'd done to me.
"Come on to you?" The absurdity of it infuriated me, I saw him stumbling into our shared flat, totally wasted, and I forced myself to stop. It was too soon to relive it, too soon to think about the way he'd smashed me into the wall, how he'd pushed me down onto the hardwood floor, and ripped my clothes away and off, slurring that he knew what I wanted, and that he was going to give it to me.
"We both know you loved that, you don't have to act offended. I won't tell anyone, it can be our little secret." He smiled at me, hopefully. I pushed myself up, and tried to stagger to the bathroom, I knew I was going to be sick. This whole thing was wrong, it had to be a nightmare.
I threw up for some time, and William held my hair out of my face, which only made me feel sicker still. That my best friend, my only confidant, could rape me, and casually hold my hair out of the way while I vomited just seemed so wrong. I felt unutterably crazy. Gasping for air between retching, William pressed his lips against my face, and ran his fingers through my hair.
The true horror of it was how gentle William had become, how he whispered his love to me.
A mere half hour before, I'd fancied that I loved William. We'd been so close now, for just over three years, and he was the only person I'd ever met that I thought really understood me. I had, however, never pursued my baser instincts, I'd never attempted to push our relationship any further because I was afraid of ruining it, and losing him.
I'd been shocked at the manner William had decided to take me though. Something I would have given willingly, happily, had instead been ripped painfully away from me, taken and desecrated, torn apart and made into something else. In those moments, I knew, I'd not been Isaak at all, I had been a thing, a toy, something unliving. It was afterwards, when William felt my bleeding body convulsing beneath his own, and saw the damage he'd done, that I became a person again. And he'd already justified everything, had already decided that it was what we'd both wanted.
When my retching subsided, William stood up and I heard him turn the shower on. I stared into the toilet bowl, unable to be sick anymore, unwilling to look at the man who'd done this to me. The flesh of my wrists bore tiny fingertip bruises, proclaiming William's strength, and denouncing my manhood. At length, he pulled me to my feet, and took what remained of my bloodied shirt off me. He led me into the shower, and I stood beneath the water, unable to think, move, or function whatsoever.
Thus it came to pass that William, hours before my best friend, and object of my desires, became the monster that raped me, held me, bathed me, and tried to comfort me. Once he'd toweled me dry, and pulled a too loose cotton shirt over my head, he tucked me into his bed, not my own, and smoothed my wet hair away from my face again. He smiled at me, and kissed my forehead. I pushed my revulsion down, tried to mask it with my love for the man, but I couldn't fully accept this.
Beside me, William slept heavily, warm breath on the back of my throat, but consciousness would not release me. I cried into the night, lost and afraid. Love held me there though, prevented me from struggling, from trying to stumble back to my room, and I tried to tell myself that it hadn't been so bad, it had in fact been what I'd wanted (but the pain… I had never wanted that pain… I thought it would be perfect, but it had been so horrible…) and finally, as the sun peaked through the drawn blinds, sleep took me away, and I faded into William's embrace.
We never spoke of the incident, and William acted as though nothing had ever occurred. I followed his cue, but I knew that things would never be the same again. Fits of depression began to attack me, and the bleeding would begin again without warning, but though I began slipping into madness, William seemed more alive than ever, happier than I'd ever known him to be.
I was too naïve to think that it would never happen again though, and when he crashed into my room a few weeks later, I wanted it to be different. It wasn't.
I ended up on the floor, crying harder than ever before, spitting up blood. William sported the imprint of my hand across his cheek, but was otherwise undeterred, fumbling with his pouch of pipe tobacco as I died inside at his feet. He offered his love to me, smiling gently, kissing me softly, as I lay broken and bloody, desecrated, defiled, he the instrument of my suffering. I couldn't believe it, that any of it was real, that this could have ever happened, nonetheless twice.
My love, though abused, stayed as strong, only now it was fueled with a guilt. I did not try to leave because I knew I'd never be good enough for anything now, that I would always be his. My body belonged more to William than to myself, and every time he destroyed me, he recreated me, fashioning me into a monster just like him.
It could have carried on forever, but I wasn't enough. I never tried to leave him, but he forgot about me, and discarded my broken body when he met her. I should have been grateful, should have taken it as a blessing, but I could not.
If William could destroy me, she at least afforded me a way to return the favor, to spread the misery, and to have my vengeance. Through her death, I was reborn, and I left. It was William's turn to suffer, his turn to die by my hand, and I felt a smug bit of satisfaction that he could never hurt me again.
Though I'd never regain what was stolen from me, I knew it would always be 'our little secret', however, I knew that William would never escape the shame of her death, or the suspicion of murdering her.
In the end, it was worth it. Everyone knew that William was a killer, they just didn't know who he'd really murdered, or how.
