“I saved you.”
I stare up at him, feeling guilty for feeling anything but gratitude. He works out, takes care of himself, wears exquisite clothes to work at his standing desk with three monitors, an ergonomic keyboard, and a fancy Mac computer. I’m the one who should be ashamed. I don’t take care of myself until he tells me to. He tells me to shower, puts me in fancy clothes, makes me look like a girl who could be, in some fairytale in his mind, deserving of him.
And he treats me like I am. He cooks me fancy dinners and buys me everything I need or could want without me having to ask. He even took care of my mother. I don’t treat him half as well. I don’t cook or offer to help clean up. I don’t even talk to him when I come over. While he cooks, I sit curled on his fine leather sofa, sipping his fine wine. The only thing I do for him in return for everything he’s done is spread my legs.
If he’s made me a whore, I’ve let him do it. The first day he bought me something, the phone, I could have said no. But I didn’t. I let him dress me up like a doll, treat me like property, and fuck me like a whore. If anything, he’s shown me he values me more than I value myself. He bought me fucking diamonds. A girl like me, I have no right to even hope for this kind of man, this kind of treatment. I’m lucky to be his whore.
But for the first time in months, I want to speak, to voice my desires.
“You’re right,” I say. “You’ve treated me well. But I’m done being your whore.”
“You’re not—” He breaks off, pressing his lips together and shaking his head. “I didn’t mean to make you feel that way. That’s not how I see you, Harper.”
“How do you see me?”
He stares at me a long moment. “I just wanted to take care of you,” he says at last. “I saw what they did to you. You’re not the only person…” He shakes his head again. “And yeah, I wanted to fuck you to piss off Royal. I’ll admit that. But I never saw you as a whore. I only gave you what you needed.”
“Like these?” I ask, upturning the jeweler’s bag. The box falls out, the lid askew, one of the diamonds dangling out the side like something obscene.
“Fair enough,” he says, moving across the room and sitting heavily on the bottom of the bed. “Maybe I had selfish reasons. But I never thought you owed me. I know you won’t believe me. I know what I look like. You think I can’t get laid unless I buy a girl diamonds. And you’re right.”
“What about your girlfriend?” I ask, my voice thick.
He scoffs. “I don’t have a girlfriend. Look at me.”
“So you dressed me up and pretended you did,” I say, feeling like some weird blow-up doll. I’ve acted like one. I haven’t been a whole person since before the swamp. I’ve been a doll, broken into a million pieces, and he’s pieced some of them back together—at least on the outside. But he can’t fix me inside. He can reach in, but he won’t find anything to piece back together. I’m hollow.
“I never pretended to be a good guy,” he says. “Don’t act shocked that I’m exactly who I was all along.”
“But you never told me who you were,” I point out.
“You never asked.”
“I did.”
We sit side by side for a while, neither of us speaking.
“You don’t want to know who I am,” he says. “Look at me. Look at what I’ve become.”
I could say the same thing.
*
When I tell Mr. D I’m not coming back, he doesn’t say anything. But he doesn’t get ready to take me home as usual. I ask if he’s taking me home, and he says no, but he doesn’t stop me when I take his keys. I keep waiting for him to come after me, but he just studies me, his face behind that infuriating blank mask, his one good eye watching me leave.
In the garage, I climb into his truck. I’m sure he’s going to come down and stop me. My hands are shaking so hard I can barely get the key in. I open the garage on the bottom level of his building, and I drive out. I keep checking the rearview, sure I’ll see him coming after me. But he lets me go.
Some sick part of me deflates when I turn into my driveway and he’s not there. Not even Mr. D thinks I’m worth hunting down. I climb out of the truck and go inside. Nothing has changed. But everything has.
Without the Tuesday and Thursday excursions, I stop leaving the house. There’s no point. I don’t even return his truck. It sits like an oversized monster in our driveway, drawing attention from local gang members and Mom’s conquests, who stand around it wondering how good my ass must be to warrant such payment. I hide the keys inside a tear in my box spring, knowing that Mom will take off with it in a second if I leave the keys. I sleep with a switchblade in one hand for the men who come in almost every night, as if my fall from grace has given them permission to treat me like her. Or maybe they can smell my brokenness, my weakness, the way I can smell alcohol on their breath.
And even though I was sure I felt nothing all those months, now that I don’t see the Phantom, there’s an ache left inside me that he once soothed. When I wake myself up croaking feebly, from a dream where I’m gagged, silenced as I try to force sound from my strangled throat, there are only blankets to wrap around me instead of his strong, silent arms.
I stop leaving the house, stop doing anything. I can’t remember why it mattered to be clean, to eat, to live. One evening, as I’m lying corpselike in my bed, a tap sounds at my grimy window. I’m so startled I sit up before my brain can kick in and say what it says about everything—it’s not worth it. It doesn’t matter.
Outside my window, a pale face hovers in the twilight. I squint to see through the dirty window. Blue holds up a pack of cigarettes and points to it with her free hand, mouthing something at me through the glass.
I sigh and drag my ass off the bed and open the window.