6. Mina

SIX

mina

As soon as I uncuff Brian he flies into action. The first thing he does is gather me into his arms like a starving man in the desert. Like I’m the last puddle of water for miles and miles. He holds me and whispers in my ear: “When we get home, after you’ve rested, you’re getting a punishment.”

Not exactly the whispered endearments one expects after a harrowing near-death experience, but this is Brian we’re talking about.

I nod. I always knew that was the price, and I imagine it will be an actual punishment, unlike how he normally is with me. But I know he won’t harm me. He’s got to get this out. I saw how terrified he was when he saw me walk into the room. I know he still sees me—or saw me—as the helpless broken doll he rescued… twice.

I’m not sure what he sees now. I don’t know if we only work as long as I’m helpless. Will the fact that I came here like this and saved the day, change things? Will it make him not want me anymore? I’ve always known that part of what Brian sees in me, and the reason I’m safe from him, is because we’re alike.

We wear mirroring scars on our back from two separate and unrelated horrific pasts. His from his childhood, mine much more recent. But if I become more like him in his darkness, does that change his desire to protect me? Does it change how safe or unsafe I am with him? I don’t know. But I had to do it.

It was my turn to do the rescuing. He pulls back from me and looks away, taking a long deep breath, as though he’s gathering himself. Finally, he orders me to sit, then leaves me alone in the room. When he returns, he’s clearly raided the kitchen. He drops a box of round crackers, a sealed package of cheese, a sealed package of deli meat, and a bottled water—unsurprisingly also sealed—at my feet.

I know, as paranoid as Brian is that he has to have all food sealed in factory condition if he’s at another location besides the house. Not sure why Matsumoto would poison his own food, but… you just never know what’s going on in someone else’s space or who has it out for whom. Bad men have enemies, and you wouldn’t want to consume the poison meant for another. Better to be safe.

“Eat. It will ground you and help keep you from going into shock.”

I don’t think I’m going into shock, though I’m buzzy as hell with adrenaline, and my hands are a little shaky, so I don’t argue with him. I rip into the food and make little cracker sandwiches with the turkey and cheddar. It may just be snack food but with the energy he delivered it, it may as well have been a wild boar he hunted and wrestled to the ground for me.

“Where’s my mayo?” I ask.

He smirks. “That smart mouth is going to get you in even more trouble.”

Yes, but he smiled—or, what passes for a smile on Brian.

He leaves the room again, then comes back a few minutes later with a blanket he must have dragged off Matsumoto’s bed. I’m still naked and covered in the blood of our enemy. Brian wraps me in the blanket.

“After you eat, I want you to go up and take a shower, clean that blood off while I clean things up here.”

My gaze shifts to the dungeon shower, but Brian shakes his head. “No, you’ll be too distracting. I’ll never get anything done. Go upstairs. I had a look when I was up there. It’s a rain shower. It’s nice.”

I just nod. Brian needs to be in laser-focused body disposal mode. He’s got this from here. He doesn’t tell me how he would have died if he’d lost me. He doesn’t say sweet words of love, or even the word love. He can’t. But I felt him. I know. I feel the thread that connects us. I felt it vibrate and then pull tight against the tension of our possible fate. As though someone or something was there, poised to cut the thread of our lives, but then took Matsumoto’s instead.

I’m not sure how Brian feels about the sex, except that he came and I came. That’s about the extent of my wisdom on this subject currently. But he doesn’t bring it up. And if he decides to, it won’t be while he’s concerning himself with getting rid of two bodies and removing all evidence that we were ever here.

He leaves the room again while I sit with my snack and my thoughts. How do I feel about the sex?

I’ve never liked intercourse. Even before I kept picking bad men who hurt me, it just wasn’t my thing. Maybe it was always the men, even before I started picking worse and worse partners, I think I was choosing selfish lovers from the beginning. Men who wanted to use me as a masturbatory tool—a sleeve to fuck in, to get off in as quickly as possible.

They didn’t care about me. They didn’t care about my pleasure. I was never the one in control or the one whose pleasure was prioritized. It was always him. As fast as humanly possible. It was as though these men were engaged in some sort of race against time… come before your life runs out. Hurry, hurry!

I never agreed to play that game.

They didn’t know the meaning of the word slow, or tender. I always felt guilty even being there, taking up space, as though my pleasure was something in the way. And so that part of me shut off before it could ever open. And I just thought… I didn’t like it.

But today, when I was in control, when I straddled Brian and rode him. When I was drunk on the power of turning the tables on Matsumoto, showing him what he couldn’t have while playing his plans against him. When I was impaled on Brian’s cock, it was different. Because it was Brian.

It was twisted and fucked up. But it was me. And it was him. And somehow despite this entire situation, I was able to have the first orgasm of my life from penetration. I’m not sure what this says about me. I’m not sure I want to know.

I don’t know if I’m more broken than before, or just broken in a more complex way. I wouldn’t know where to begin in the journey to become normal. But if I were normal, I don’t think I would fit together with Brian anymore, and I’d rather be with him than be normal.

He finally returns, thrilled to have found a chainsaw and heavy duty trash bags.

“I’m not sure you want to keep eating while I do this. Blood splatter,” he says.

I shrug and pull back the blanket revealing the considerable amount of Matsumoto’s blood I’m already wearing. It decorates my body like war paint. But maybe Brian is right.

I keep waiting for the normal emotional response, and every second it doesn’t come I feel less and less human. I feel like I exist in the same half-life as Brian does. But is that such a bad thing? It’s our world, and as long as we’re in it together, everything is somehow still okay.

Aside from the adrenaline, which calms more with each cracker sandwich I eat, I’m not a shaking hot mess. I’m not crying. I didn’t have some meltdown. Despite how destroyed I’d be if I lost Brian, I didn’t lose him, and so I can’t seem to call up the emotions that the potential of losing him should cause.

Brian leaves again and comes back, happy this time to have found a giant blue tarp that had been covering a boat on the property. Honestly this is the happiest I think I’ve ever seen him, and I’m not sure if it’s because I’m safe or because he gets to cut up some bodies. Maybe it’s a bit of both.

“I-I think I’m broken. For real this time,” I say, as he unshackles Matsumoto and lays his body out on the tarp for disassembly.

He turns to me and levels me with a long hard stare. “Well, I think you’re a glorious badass.”

This draws a small smile out of me. Then I do feel something, a little warmth in my belly, a flush of pride that despite his determination to punish me and reclaim control of our dynamic, that he’s proud of me and sees something good in what I’ve become.

I’ve finished my crackers by the time he drags the guard inside, and without a word I go follow Brian’s directive about the shower. I grab my black bag which I hid behind a plant when I saw the guard. I knew it was foolish to think I could bring obvious weapons here, but I didn’t think Matsumoto would expect me to come packing heat anyway. So maybe he wouldn’t even have a security detail. There was only one guard, which in some ways proved my point. His father was always surrounded by bodyguards, and I know he was no different. But my weapons were in my bag and the lone guard was already pointing his gun at me.

So I’d gone with seduction, and while he was distracted, I’d pulled the capped syringe from the place I’d sewn into the back of my corset to hold it. I felt proud of myself for figuring out a way to alter the inner lining of the corset so that when I pulled the syringe, the cap stayed behind. If I’d had to fumble with it, the temporary distraction never would have worked.

And I couldn’t conceal the syringe on my body without the cap or else I risked injecting myself with the drug and being rendered completely helpless against whatever they decided to do with me.

I take the bag upstairs to the main floor and the master bathroom. I wonder absently if this is a secondary vacation home or if he rented it or borrowed it from a friend. I drop the bag on top of the bed and step into the shower. I’m only now realizing that when I’d finished my crackers, I just walked out of the room completely naked.

Old Mina never would have wandered anywhere, even alone, totally naked like that. She would have put some kind of clothes on, even the corset. Or she would have stayed wrapped in the comforting cocoon of the blanket. But I’d shed that without a thought like the new darker butterfly I’m becoming.

I barely feel the shower spray. There’s a sort of muted dullness that has overtaken all my senses. It started in Japan and had crystallized by the time we got back to the house. And today, with Matsumoto’s death, another layer of whatever this is, has wound itself around me. I feel like I’m falling down a dark well with no way to climb back out. And a part of me doesn’t care. I’m dimly aware that this part that doesn’t care is the pretty poison of the numbing.

I’m not sure if this is better or worse than the pain and fear I lived in as Mina version 1.0. I can see the protection of it, the utility of it. Had I been that Mina, no way could I have just walked in here like a badass, used the promise of my body to incapacitate a guard, and taken Matsumoto out without blinking. But there is a price, that thick cocoon wrapped around me. The way everything mutes into dull gray.

The way food tastes… less. Smells go unnoticed. The water falling on me feels as though it’s falling on a layer of plastic wrapping that stands between me and the pure experience of it and the rest of life as I knew it. I stare down at the blood running in watered-down rivulets down my skin, swirling and finally going down the drain. If only I could wash all my damage off so easily.