During some meals, he would ask me things, questions like my favorite book and my favorite movie, and so long as I handed over whatever he wanted to know, he kept asking questions, staving off the silence I knew was coming. But the moment he ventured into personal territory and I refused to answer, he left. And the world was silent again.
The shower helped a little. At least, it did at first. But an hour or two of the monotonous sound of running water and it seemed to blur right into the nothingness. I couldn’t keep going like this. It was going to drive me mad.
Maybe that’s what he was trying to do. At first, when those men had stripped me and the devil had spanked me with his belt, I’d assumed what he wanted was sexual in nature. But now, even though I was forced to remain naked all the time, I wasn’t so sure. In the times he was here, feeding me like a dog and making my blood boil with anger and humiliation, I thought maybe what he wanted was a pet. But then he’d leave and wouldn’t return until it was time to feed me again. Who the hell only wanted a pet to feed it?
So, all I could conclude was that he was merely feeding me to keep me alive so he could watch me slowly go insane.
It was almost time for another feeding. I could tell by the way my stomach had begun to rumble. He must come at regular intervals to have my stomach so well-trained. It irritated me that any part of me had come to submit to him, but my stomach had willingly gotten on board that train.
No other part of me had though. It was still a humiliating struggle every time to go down on my knees, to open my mouth and let him feed me like an infant. The worst was when he did touch me, not sexually—aside from swatting my backside, he never did that—but intimately.
He would stroke my hair or caress my cheek. And what made it so horrible was that not once had I ever pulled away. His touch felt…good and I hated that. But after so much time with no sound, no new sights, no anything, my body seemed desperate for sensation. And the touch of my captor’s hand against my face was better than the nothingness. I was ashamed to admit it, but there were times when I’d secretly wished he’d touch me more, in new places. A hand on my arm, or his fingers on the back of my neck—new sensations to hold me over during the times when there was none.
Still, I wanted to scream at him—for humiliating me, for touching me, for not touching me, for asking me things and never sharing any answers of his own—and I nearly had so many times, but I held myself in check, knowing at any time he could stop coming back. The food would be gone and I’d starve to death. Much longer here though, and that might not be such a terrible thing.
I heard the slide of the lock and the door opened. It was him. Of course, it was him. Nobody else in the world existed anymore, not in my prison. I was irritated—more than usual—probably due to the compounding effect of so much time here.
He wheeled in the cart and closed the door behind him, and I watched him from the corner of the room. I’d long since abandoned the bathroom. The shower did little to curb the silence anymore. And at least the other room’s carpet wasn’t as hard against my backside as the cool, tiled floor in the bathroom.
I’d thought for a while I could gauge the approximate time of day by the type of food he would bring, but then he’d brought breakfast two times in a row, and two dinner-like meals after that, blowing that theory out of the water. It was the same foods though—three different meals rotated in some random order.
Crepes again, I could tell, when he’d lifted the lid. Maybe it was all he could cook, but I’d gladly take a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for a break from what had once seemed like sinfully delicious food.
He left the tray against the wall near the door and retrieved the chair from where he’d left it the day before. This was new.
He sat down against the wall and eyed me expectantly. I pushed away from my corner slowly and rose up onto my knees.
He nodded, but I was confused. If he planned to start throwing food at me and having me catch it in my mouth, he could kiss that idea goodbye. It was bad enough I had to kneel. I wasn’t going to do tricks, too. And as much as I hated to admit it, if he was going to stay over there, if he was going to stop touching me, I’d rather him just stop bringing me food, too.