Night, Forgotten: Draft 1

Chapter 5: Then

I woke to the sound of rushing water. It seemed to fill my ears to the brim, loudly seeping out around my body and shocking me the rest of the way awake. In a few panicked blinks, I recognized that the lower half of my body was submerged in lukewarm water, which rushed forcefully into the deep tub where I lay.

My head felt as though it had been stuffed with cotton and I could barely pry open my eyelids. Through swollen slits, I observed the exposed tops of my knees and thighs, covered in goose bumps and streaked with red lines that stung when the water lapped against them.

I twisted onto my side and pressed down against the edge of the tub, trying to hoist myself up. The motion triggered a sharp pain from inside my ribcage and I gasped, falling back into the water. "Ow!"

"You probably shouldn't try to move." The man's voice was suddenly right behind my ear, deep and raspy. I wrenched my neck toward it, unable to see its source. Now another type of pain crashed through my skull. Blood pounded rapidly in my ears.

Questions like 1) "Where am I?" and 2) "Why am I in a bath?" didn't matter now that I wasn't alone. I needed to get the fuck out of there.

My first idea was to sit up and swing my legs underneath me, so I could kneel in the tub and crawl out.

It was immediately clear that wasn't going to happen. My legs felt as if they had been crushed beneath something powerful, then reattached slightly incorrectly. They trembled pathetically and I could not will them to support me.

A man has hurt me and is going to kill me.

"Please – " I began to plead, my voice breaking in my throat.

His hand came down forcefully on top of mine, pinning it to the edge of the tub, and I screamed.

"Julie!" His face was too close to mine and his breath smelled like the sticky floors of a college fraternity.

It was Marcus.

First I felt relief – if Marcus was here, I was probably close to home, so my kidneys most likely had not been harvested for sale on the black market – followed by confusion. If I'd been kidnapped by a stranger, at least the narrative would be recognizable from horror movies I'd seen and Dateline episodes my mother-in-law Diana had emailed to me with subject lines like, "You can never be too careful."

But Marcus's presence sent my brain spinning into a thousand new directions, none of which provided any acceptable explanation for why we were here alone and why one of us was lying – naked? Yes, oh my god I was lying there naked from the waist down – in a bathtub.

"Sorry." He smiled down at me weakly and pulled his hand away from mine to rest it on his knee, which was at the level of my shoulder. I realized that he must have been sitting on the closed lid of the toilet seat, beyond the end of the tub where my head was propped. "Is the water... is it, um, warm enough?" He asked too loudly.

His question was so ridiculous that I actually considered the possibility that I was dreaming. I often had vivid dreams, and most of them were horrible. But I knew from the way my skin burned raw in the water that I had been sleeping and now I was awake. Groggy, though.

"Marcus, what the hell is going on?" As I became more and more alert with each passing moment, I was beginning to feel sick with humiliation and maybe something else. The gold-flaked sweater Owen had helped me pick out earlier that afternoon was soaked through and stuck densely to my breasts and shoulders.

It was the only item of clothing on my body.

"Marcus?!"

"Sorry," Marcus said again, as if it had just occurred to him that it might be uncomfortable for me to be exposed like this. He leaned over to turn off the faucet at the far end of the tub and the room became conspicuously silent.