Chapter 3: The Return Home
The apartment door closed with a soft, final click, shutting out the hum of the hallway. Lisa’s home always smelled of stale incense and yesterday’s coffee. In the dim light of the single bulb in the living room, the peeling wallpaper seemed to pulse, and the half-unpacked boxes formed shadowy monuments to a life perpetually in transit.
“Home sweet depressing home,” Lisa sang, tossing her keys into a ceramic bowl shaped like a skull. They landed with a discordant clatter.
Susanna moved automatically to the fridge, drawn by the ritual of normalcy. Her fingers traced the edge of a yellowed love letter taped to the door, one of dozens—poems she’d written in a different lifetime, receipts from their first dinner, a cocktail napkin with I’m sorry smudged in Lisa’s aggressive handwriting. A shrine to an obsession she both cherished and feared.
“You’re quiet again,” Lisa said. She was right behind her, having crossed the room without a sound. Her hands came to rest on Susanna’s hips, her chin on Susanna’s shoulder. “Thinking about what Dr. Wick said?”
“No.”
“Liar.” Lisa’s voice was a playful whisper, but her fingers tightened. “All that talk about boundaries and self-worth. Poison. It’s getting in your head, making you doubt this.” She turned Susanna around. Her eyes, in the bad light, were like chips of arctic ice. “You don’t need to talk to her. You just need to talk to me.”
“I do talk to you.”
“Not really. You just… float around.” Lisa’s thumb stroked the silver bracelet on Susanna’s wrist. The metal was warm now from her skin. “This is real. That office, that’s a fantasy. A place for broken things to pretend they can be fixed.” She leaned in, her lips brushing Susanna’s ear. “You’re not broken. You’re mine.”
The possessiveness was a live wire, crackling through the stale air. Susanna felt a familiar, devastating pull—the part of her that thrilled at being needed so absolutely, that mistook this intensity for a kind of sacred truth.
Lisa saw the shift in her eyes, the slight softening. A predator recognizing surrender. She took Susanna’s hand and led her towards the bedroom, not gently. The keychain on the hook outside the locked door jingled as they passed, a tiny, mocking fanfare.
The bedroom was a study in controlled chaos. Clothes were heaped on a chair, books stacked precariously on the floor. Lisa didn’t turn on the light; the streetlamp outside cast the room in a sodium-yellow gloom. She pushed Susanna backward onto the unmade bed. The air left Susanna’s lungs in a soft oof.
Lisa was on her in an instant, a knee on either side of her hips, pinning her down. She took Susanna’s wrists in one strong hand and forced them above her head, against the pillow. The bracelet glinted, a captive star.
“See?” Lisa whispered, her face inches away. “This is where you belong. Not on some shrink’s couch.”
She held Susanna there for a long moment, a tableau of submission, her gaze mapping every flicker of fear and desire on Susanna’s face. Then, her touch changed. The brutal grip loosened. Her free hand went to the button of Susanna’s jeans, working it open with a slow, deliberate focus.
The undressing was a ceremony. Each article of clothing was peeled away with a surreal tenderness that contradicted the force of moments before. Lisa’s lips followed the path of her hands—a kiss on the jutting bone of Susanna’s hip, a slow trail up her ribcage, a pause at the frantic pulse in her throat. When her mouth found the silver bracelet again, kissing the engraved words directly against Susanna’s skin, a full-body shudder wracked Susanna’s frame.
It was not making love. It was reclamation.
Lisa’s hands were everywhere, mapping, claiming. Her mouth was alternately soft and biting. She moved with a ferocity that felt like anger, or grief, or both. Susanna’s back arched off the bed, a silent plea for more and for less, her fingers tangling in the wild blonde hair, holding on as if in a storm. The world narrowed to the points of contact: the scrape of teeth, the press of fingers that would leave bruises in the shape of constellations, the hot whisper against her ear that was a continuous, breathless mantra.
“Mine. Always. Mine. Always.”
When it was over, Susanna lay gasping, the echoes of the words tattooed on her soul. Lisa collapsed beside her, one heavy arm immediately snaking around her waist, locking her in place. Her breathing evened out into sleep with alarming speed, a switch flipped.
Susanna remained awake.
The adrenaline bled away, leaving a hollow, aching clarity. The phantom weight of the bracelet was now a real, warm pressure on her wrist, fused to her skin. Lisa’s arm across her stomach was an iron bar. She stared at the water stain on the ceiling, shaped like a lopsided continent.
The echo of Lisa’s words warred with the calm, reasonable tone of Dr. Wick. “Do you feel you have agency in this relationship, Susanna?” In the dark, she flexed the fingers of her trapped hand. The silver chain bit gently into her flesh.
A faint click from the hallway. The old refrigerator cycling on. A car alarm blaring somewhere in the distance, then falling silent.
She thought of the locked door down the hall, the jingling keychain. She thought of the bloodstain on the car seat, now hidden in darkness. She thought of the words on her wrist, invisible now but permanently etched into the metal.
Lisa mumbled in her sleep, a incoherent protest, and her arm tightened convulsively. Susanna held her breath until the grip relaxed. She didn’t try to move. She just lay there, in the warm, perfumed cage of their bed, calculating the inches to the edge of the mattress, the steps to the door, the miles to a life where her own thoughts weren’t a form of treason. The numbers were too large. Exhaustion, thicker than any arm, pinned her more effectively than Lisa ever could.
Outside, the first faint hint of dawn began to bleed into the yellow of the streetlights, turning the room a sickly gray. Susanna watched it come, her eyes dry and open, a prisoner meticulously memorizing the layout of her cell.