Night, Forgotten

Original Edition - Chapter 11: Then

First, the sound of rushing water. It filled my ears to the brim, loudly seeping out around me and shocking me awake. In a few panicked blinks, I recognized that the lower half of my body was submerged in a deep tub of lukewarm water.

My head felt as though it had been stuffed with moth balls. 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 against the edge of the tub, trying to hoist myself up. The motion triggered a sharp pain from inside my ribcage. I crashed back into the water.

"You probably shouldn't try to move." The man's voice was right behind my ear, speaking quietly. I wrenched my neck toward it and another type of pain crashed through my skull.

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

My first idea was to sit up and swing my legs underneath me, then sit up on my knees in the tub and crawl out. But 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.

This man must have hurt me. He'd hurt me and now he was going to kill me.

"Please –" I began to plead.

His hand came down on top of mine, gripping it against the edge of the tub, and my voice broke off in my throat.

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

It was Marcus. He was seated on the closed lid of the toilet seat, beyond the end of the tub where my head was propped.

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 – but it was followed by confusion. If I'd been kidnapped by a stranger, at least the plot line would be recognizable from Dateline episodes my old roommate Bethany still forwarded to me and thirty others 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 together, alone, or why one of us was lying – naked? Yes, oh, my god, I was completely naked from the waist down – in a bathtub.

"Sorry." Marcus cringed down at me and pulled his hand away from mine. He rested it unsteadily on his knee, which was at the level of my shoulder. "Is the water... is it, um, warm enough?"

The question was so ridiculous I actually considered the possibility that I was dreaming. As soon as the idea occurred to me, I decided that I must be dreaming. I frequently had vivid dreams like this, after all, and most of them were horrible.

But then the water scorched the surface of my raw skin and I knew without a doubt that I'd been sleeping before, during the time when someone put me in this bathtub, but now I was awake. And I was becoming more and more alert with each passing moment.

The "little gold number" I'd picked out earlier that night was soaked through. It stuck densely to my breasts and shoulders.

It was the only item of clothing on my body. I began to feel sick with humiliation and probably with something else.

"Marcus, what the hell is going on?"

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