Unbandaged

Chapter 3: The Choice in the Dark

The buzz was insistent. A hard, angry vibration against the floorboards where his jeans lay in a damp heap.

Cade felt it through the mattress. A dull, persistent thrum that matched the headache pulsing behind his eyes. Rhett was asleep, her breathing finally deep and even, her body a warm, heavy line against his side. One of his arms was numb under her neck. He didn’t dare move.

The phone buzzed again. And again. Not a call. A rapid-fire seizure of texts.

He could see the glow from the screen on the floor, painting the dust bunnies under her bed a sickly blue. With his free hand, he slowly, meticulously, began to extract his pinned arm. He moved in millimeters, holding his breath as she murmured, her brow furrowing. She settled, nuzzling unconsciously into the space his shoulder had left.

He slid out from under her, the cool air hitting his skin. He knelt on the carpet, the fibers rough against his knees. He picked up his jeans, heavy with dried chlorine water, and fished the phone from the pocket.

The screen was a riot of notification bubbles. Sutton. Seven messages. The previews were fragments of fury.

…you pathetic…

…think you can just…

…everyone knows…

…she’s a joke and now you’re…

The last one was fully visible. You’re dead to me. And so is your little pet. The video’s already up. Enjoy the comments.

The light from the screen lit his face from below, casting deep shadows under his eyes. He felt nothing. Not anger, not fear. A clean, hollow silence. He looked from the glowing device to Rhett on the bed. In the faint streetlight, the bruise on her temple was a smudge of charcoal. The line of her neck was vulnerable, the tendon stretched tight even in sleep.

He thumbed the screen on. Went to his contacts. Found Sutton’s name. He hit edit. He deleted the number. The action was clinical, deliberate.

Then he opened the text thread. He selected all. He deleted the entire history. Years of mundane plans, stupid inside jokes, flirtations that now tasted like ash. Gone with a tap.

He navigated to the video. It was still in his recently deleted folder. He opened it. The preview frame was Rhett, on the bleachers, her eyes wide and desperate above the silver tape. He didn’t press play. He just looked at that frozen image of her horror, a horror he had witnessed and allowed.

He permanently deleted it.

Then he stood. He walked to her desk, cluttered with notebooks and dried-up pens. He picked up a heavy, glass paperweight she’d stolen from a thrift store—a cloudy orb with a dandelion suspended inside.

He placed his phone on the wooden surface. He hefted the paperweight in his hand, feeling its solid, promising weight.

He didn’t hesitate. He brought it down, not with a wild slam, but with a precise, focused force.

The crunch was satisfying. A brittle symphony of collapsing glass and splintering plastic. The screen went black, a spiderweb of fractures radiating from the point of impact. He hit it again. And again. Until the phone was just a collection of components, a tiny tech carcass spilling its wires.

He stopped, breathing heavily. The silence after the violence was absolute. Rhett hadn’t stirred.

He scooped the wreckage into his hand, carried it to the small trash can by her desk, and let the pieces fall. They made a soft, final sound against the crumpled sketches he saw inside—drawings of his own face, his own smile, now discarded.

He returned to the bed. The space where he’d been was still warm. He slid back in, his body aligning with hers as if magnetized. She sighed in her sleep, her hand flopping out to rest on his chest, over his heart. Her fingers twitched.

He stared at the ceiling, one hand behind his head. The numbness receded, replaced by a cold, clear understanding. He had just burned a bridge, blown it up and salted the earth. Sutton. Beckett. Jonah. The entire ecosystem of his old life. It was gone. That phone was the tether. Now it was junk in her trash.

All he had was the girl sleeping beside him, who flinched when he moved too fast.

Sunlight, sharp and accusing, sliced through the gap in her curtains. It landed directly on Rhett’s face.

She woke by degrees. First, an awareness of pain—a symphony of aches in specific, mapped locations. Her temple. Her ribs. The burns on her ankles. Then, warmth. A solid heat along her back. Then, weight. An arm slung possessively over her waist.

Memory returned, not as a flood, but as a vile, creeping tide. The bleachers. The tape. The laughter. The shower. The unlocked door.

Cade.

She didn’t open her eyes. She listened to his breathing, slow and deep behind her. She felt the faint stutter of his heartbeat under her palm. She had apparently rolled over in the night.

This was real. He was here. In her bed. And they were going to Lincoln. Together.

A bizarre, domestic surreality washed over her. She needed to pee. Her mouth tasted like old blood and regret. The normalcy of those needs felt grotesque.

She carefully lifted his arm. It was heavy, dead weight. He didn’t wake. She slid out from under it and padded to the bathroom, her body stiff.

In the mirror, she looked ruined. The cut on her head was an angry red line. The bruise on her thigh had purpled, edges blooming into greens and yellows like a sickening galaxy. The rope burns were raised, vicious welts. She brushed her teeth, the mint a shocking contrast to the inner decay.

When she came back, he was awake. He was sitting up against her headboard, the comforter pooled around his waist. He watched her walk in, his eyes tracking her with a focus that felt like a physical touch.

“Your phone is in my trash,” she said, her voice raspy with sleep.

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“It was buzzing.”

She leaned against the doorframe, crossing her arms. It pulled the skin at her wrists. “Sutton?”

“Yeah.”

“What did she say?”

He met her gaze, unflinching. “That the video’s up. That we’re both dead to her.” He paused. “I deleted it from my phone. Before I broke it.”

A flicker, small and cold, sparked in her chest. It wasn’t gratitude. It was an acknowledgement of a correct move in a game she didn’t want to play. “You can’t delete it from the internet.”

“I know.”

“People will have seen it.”

“I know.”

“They’ll talk. At Lincoln too. It’ll leak.”

“I know.” He pushed the comforter back. He was still in his jeans and t-shirt from last night, now wrinkled and creased. He stood, unfolding his tall frame in her small room. “Let them talk.”

He walked to her, stopping a foot away. He didn’t touch her. “I’ll be there. They can talk to me.”

She almost laughed. It was a pathetic, grand gesture. Her own personal guard dog, offered by the one who’d sicced the other dogs on her. “You’ll what? Fight everyone who looks at me wrong?”

“If that’s what you want.”

“I don’t know what I want,” she snapped, the veneer of calm cracking. “I want to not feel like my skin is on inside out. I want to not see that fucking video every time I close my eyes. I want to go back to last week and never have gone to that party.”

His face tightened. He had no answer for that. There was no answer for that. He just nodded, a sharp dip of his chin. “Okay.”

He moved past her, into the hallway. “I’m going to shower. Then I’ll make you something to eat.”

She heard the bathroom door shut, the lock click. The shower start. She stood in the center of her room, surrounded by the artifacts of her life before. The trophy for a short story competition. A photo of her and Cade at the lake when they were fifteen, his arm around her shoulders, both of them sun-bleached and grinning.

She took the photo down and placed it face-down in a drawer.

The next few days passed in a strange, suspended animation. Her parents returned from Florida, tanned and laden with souvenirs. They were oblivious, cheerfully accepting Cade’s presence as a given. “Oh, you two are joined at the hip again!” her mom laughed, handing him a bag of key lime cookies. Rhett forced a smile that felt like a crack in plaster.

Cade was everywhere. He was a ghost, but a solid, useful one. He drove her to Lincoln for their registration and orientation, a silent chaperone. He stood slightly behind her, intercepting questions from counselors with a smooth, practiced ease that felt alien to her. He handled everything. She just had to sign where he pointed.

He cooked bland, easy-to-swallow food—oatmeal, toast, scrambled eggs—and set it in front of her. He washed the dishes. He did her laundry, folding her clothes with a frightening concentration. He applied the antibiotic ointment to her burns each night, his touch impersonal, his eyes fixed on the task.

He slept in her bed. Not as a lover, but as a sentinel. Always on top of the comforter. Always leaving that careful inch until she, in the irrational dark, would shift backwards into his heat. He would then fold around her, his breath on her neck, his arm a bar across her ribs. They never spoke about it in the light.

He was proving it. Every silent, servile action was a brick in the wall of his penance.

She let him. She used his guilt like a blanket. It was toxic and warm.

The night before their first real day, she sat at her desk. A new, empty notebook was open. She picked up a pen. She willed herself to write. To do the one thing that had always made sense.

Her hand hovered. Nothing came. The words were trapped behind a pane of glass, swimming in the mess of her head. All she could see was the script of a text message, the preview fragments on a shattered screen.

…your little pet…

She slammed the notebook shut.

Cade was sitting on the floor, his back against her bed, scrolling on a cheap burner phone he’d bought. His old life was truly gone. This one had no contacts, no social media. It was a tool for weather and maps.

“What happens tomorrow?” she asked, her voice loud in the quiet room.

He looked up. “We go to school. We go to our classes. We come home.”

“What if someone says something?”

“Then I’ll handle it.”

“How?” she pressed, a sharp edge in her tone. “You’ll use your famous charm? The charm that worked so well on Sutton?”

He flinched. It was the first time she’d directly weaponized it. A direct hit. Good.

He put the phone down. “I’ll do whatever you need. If you want me to stand next to you and say nothing, I will. If you want me to tell them to go to hell, I will. If you want me to walk away so you can do it yourself, I will.” He held her gaze. “You’re in charge,

He held her gaze. “You’re in charge, Rhett. It’s the only thing that makes any sense anymore.”

The first week at Lincoln was a study in silence. They moved through the halls like ghosts attached by a short, taut string. Whispers did follow, a low hum she felt against her skin. A few people from their old town had cousins here; the video had rippled outward. Cade absorbed every pointed glance, every stifled laugh, with a blank, impenetrable stare. He’d shift his body, positioning himself as a wall between her and the sound.

He was good at it. This new role of silent guardian. It was the only thing he seemed to know how to do now.

Rhett hated how much she needed it. She hated the hollow relief that filled her when he stepped closer, his shoulder brushing hers. She ate her lunch in the corner of the library, and he sat across from her, reading a textbook he never seemed to turn the pages of. His presence was a cage she’d asked for. The lock was her own voice saying come with me.

Two weeks in, the geography of their exile became routine. Tuesday afternoons, she had a late session with her writing mentor. Cade always waited by his truck in the student lot. That Tuesday, her mentor cancelled last minute. Rhett texted Cade’s burner phone. No answer. She walked out into the grey drizzle of early evening, the lot nearly empty.

His truck wasn’t there.

A cold, sharp feeling, like a sliver of glass, slid between her ribs. He was always there. He was a monument to his own guilt; monuments didn’t move. She stood under the awning, the damp air seeping through her sweater. She called. It rang through to voicemail, the generic robotic greeting.

She started walking. The route home took her past the old Miller development, a stalled construction site of half-built luxury homes that had bankrupted the developer. It was a skeleton of plywood and concrete, open to the elements. A shortcut they’d used as kids.

The chain-link fence was cut, always had been. She ducked through, the metal snagging her backpack. The rain was softening the ground, turning dirt to mud, pooling in the foundations. She heard the sound before she saw the source—a sharp, high exhale of anger.

Then she saw the sleek, black coupe parked crookedly near a mountain of gravel. Sutton’s car.

Rhett stopped. Her blood went thick and slow. She should turn. Run. Her feet were concrete. From behind a pallet of bricks, she heard Sutton’s voice, a venomous whip.

“You ignore me? You destroy your phone? You think you can just vanish with that worthless little project of yours?”

Cade’s voice, low and steady. “There’s nothing to say, Sutton. Go home.”

“You made a fool of me! You humiliated me in front of everyone! For her?” A wet sound, a shove. “Look at me when I’m talking to you!”

Rhett took a step, then another, peering around the pallet. Cade stood, back to a concrete pillar, hands at his sides. Sutton was in front of him, pristine in a cream-colored trench coat, her face a mask of elegant rage. She shoved his chest again. He didn’t move.

“You loved me,” Sutton seethed.

“I never loved you,” Cade said, the words flat and final. “It was a game. I was bored. You were popular. It was that simple.”

The slap cracked through the damp air. Rhett flinched. Cade’s head snapped to the side. He slowly brought a hand up, touched his reddening cheek. He smiled then, a small, terrible thing. “Feel better?”

Sutton screamed, a raw sound of pure frustration. She turned, as if to strike his truck with her purse. Her eyes scanned the site, wild, and landed directly on Rhett.

Time congealed.

Sutton’s expression shifted, fury crystallizing into a predatory focus. “Well,” she breathed, a horrifying calm smoothing her voice. “Look what the cat dragged in.”

Cade spun around. “Rhett, go. Now.”

But Sutton was already moving, her heels sinking in the mud as she closed the distance. Rhett’s legs wouldn’t obey. Sutton’s manicured hand shot out, fingers tangling violently in Rhett’s hair, right at the crown, where the cut had just scabbed over.

A white-hot lance of pain lit up Rhett’s scalp. She cried out.

“Sutton, let her the fuck go!” Cade roared, lunging forward.

“Stay back!” Sutton shrieked, yanking Rhett’s head back so far her throat stretched taut. She began dragging her, stumbling, towards a freshly poured concrete pad, slick with rain. “You want your broken doll? You can have what’s left of her!”

Rhett’s hands flew up, clawing at Sutton’s wrist, her nails digging in. It was useless. The pain was blinding, her vision blurring at the edges. Sutton’s strength was fueled by a hysteria Rhett couldn’t match.

With a final, grunting heave, Sutton swung her. Rhett’s world tipped. The grey sky swapped places with the wet, gravel-strewn ground.

Sutton slammed Rhett’s face down into the wet concrete.

The impact was a dull, shocking crunch. Cold, gritty slurry filled her mouth, her nose. The pain was immense and localized—a nova exploding across her cheekbone, her lips. She couldn’t breathe. The weight on the back of her head was immense.

Sutton leaned down, her breath hot in Rhett’s ear. “You ruined everything,” she hissed, the words dripping with a personal, intimate hatred.

Then the weight was gone. Rhett rolled onto her side, gagging, spitting out a mouthful of concrete mud and blood. She pushed herself up on trembling arms. Cade was there, grappling with Sutton, pulling her away, his face a rictus of violence.

Rhett spat again, a red-black glob landing on the grey slab. A strange sensation bubbled up through the pain, through the terror. It fizzed in her chest, light and poisonous. It burst from her mangled lips as a wet, gurgling laugh.

Sutton and Cade froze, their struggle halting.

Rhett looked up at Sutton, whose beautiful face was flushed, a strand of blonde hair stuck to her glossed lip. Rhett smiled, her teeth painted red. “He’ll never love someone who hurts what he can’t fix,” she crooned, blood dribbling down her chin.

The words landed with perfect, brutal precision.

Sutton’s face contorted. The elegant mask shattered, revealing something primal and vicious beneath. It was pure, unadulterated ugliness—the jealousy, the understanding that Rhett was right, that Cade’s pathology was now tied to Rhett’s brokenness in a way Sutton could never compete with. She screamed, wordless, animal.

Cade shoved Sutton back, hard. She fell into the mud, her coat soiling instantly. He didn’t look at her again. He dropped to his knees in front of Rhett. His hands hovered, unsure where to touch her ruined face. “Jesus. Jesus Christ, Rhett.”

Rhett blinked, her eye already swelling shut. The laughter was gone, leaving a crystalline clarity. She looked past him, at Sutton sobbing in the mud, and felt nothing. A hollow victory.

“Take me home,” Rhett said, the words slurred by her thickening lip.

He helped her stand. He led her away, leaving Sutton behind. They didn’t speak in the truck. Rhett held a fast-food napkin to her face, watching the blood bloom through the thin paper. The concrete grit ground between her teeth.

At home, her parents were at a work dinner. The house was dark. Cade guided her to the bathroom, his hands steady now, clinical. He turned on the light. She faced the mirror.

It was worse than last time. A large, raw abrasion covered her right cheekbone and temple, embedded with fine gravel. Her lip was split deeply, swollen to twice its size. One eye was a narrow slit in a pillow of puffiness. She looked monstrous.

He wet a clean washcloth. He began the familiar ritual, picking the gravel out with tweezers, his breath held. She didn’t flinch. She watched him in the mirror. His concentration was absolute, his touch feather-light. His own cheek bore the red mark of Sutton’s slap.

When he was done, her face was clean and angry-looking, anointed with antiseptic that stung like fire. He didn’t suggest the hospital. They were past that.

She walked into her bedroom. He followed, a half-step behind. She stopped in the center of the room. The silence was different tonight. It wasn’t filled with the ghost of the bleachers. It was filled with the phantom scent of wet concrete and Sutton’s perfume.

She turned to face him. He stood waiting, poised for the next instruction, the next punishment.

The hollow in her chest wasn’t fear anymore. It was a vast, empty space, and it demanded to be filled with something real, something that proved she was still alive under the bruises. She wanted to feel something other than pain or numbness. She wanted to twist the key in the lock he’d given her.

“You said I’m in charge,” she said, her voice mangled but clear.

“Yes.”

She reached for the hem of her sweater and pulled it over her head. It caught on her chin, tugged at the wounds on her face. She didn’t care. She let it drop to the floor. She unhooked her bra, let it fall. The cool air hit her skin, pebbling her nipples.

Cade’s breath audibly hitched. His eyes darkened, but he didn’t move. He was waiting for the command.

“Take your clothes off,” she said.

He obeyed without hesitation. His shirt, his jeans, his boxers. They joined her clothes on the floor. He stood before her, tense, fully erect, his body a map of lean muscle and pent-up obligation. He was beautiful. It made her hate him more.

“Lie down,” she told him. “On the bed.”

He lay back on her comforter. She climbed over him, her knees straddling his hips. She could feel the heat of him, the hard length of his cock pressing against her inner thigh. She looked down at his face. He was watching her, his expression unreadable, a mixture of awe and dread.

She didn’t kiss him. She wouldn’t. Her mouth was a wound. Instead, she reached between her own legs, fingers sliding through her folds. She was dry, untouched. The friction was sharp, almost painful. She didn’t stop.

She positioned him at her entrance. She looked him straight in the eyes, her one good eye holding his two.

“This is what you wanted, isn’t it?” she whispered, her split lip pulling. “Before it all went wrong? This is what the fight was about. Your pride. Your possession.”

He swallowed. “Rhett…”

“Shut up.” She sank down onto him.

It was a brutal, tearing invasion. A burn that ripped through her dryness, a fullness that bordered on violence. She gasped, her body seizing around him. A tear leaked from her good eye, tracing through the antiseptic on her cheek.

Cade groaned, a deep, pained sound from his gut. His hands flew to her hips, fingers digging in. “You’re hurting yourself,” he choked out.

“I know,” she spat. She began to move. Not for pleasure, but for execution. Each rise and fall was a grim, grinding assertion. Her body screamed in protest. She used him like a tool, a blunt instrument to scar herself from the inside out. The wet, filthy sound of their joining filled the room.

She leaned forward, putting her hands on his chest for leverage. Her hair fell around their faces. “You’re mine,” she grunted, driving down harder. “You said it. Now you feel it.”

“Fuck,” he breathed, his hips bucking up to meet her punishing rhythm. His control was fraying. His eyes were glazed, lost in a storm of guilt and base, unwelcome pleasure. “Rhett… god…”

“You don’t get to say my name,” she said, riding him faster, the pain transmuting into a blinding, white-hot sensation that bordered on something else. “You’re just a thing I own. A thing that fucked up. This is what you’re for now.”

Her words broke him. His hands gripped her ass, pulling her down onto him with a force that made her cry out. He thrust up into her, deep and relentless. The bed frame slammed against the wall in a brutal, rhythmic drumming.

“I’m yours,” he panted, the confession torn from him. “I’m yours, I’m yours, I’m yours…” It became a mantra, synced with each piston-like drive of his hips.

The raw friction built into a terrifying wave. It wasn’t pleasure. It was annihilation. Rhett’s vision spotted. A sharp, shocking climax ripped through her, wracking her sore body, a convulsion that felt like dying. She screamed, a raw, torn sound.

It triggered his own release. He shouted, his back arching off the bed as he emptied himself into her, his grip on her fierce, almost painful.

Silence. Heavy, broken only by their ragged, heaving breaths. She collapsed onto his chest, spent, the ache between her legs a profound, throbbing reality. She could feel his heart hammering against her ear, his come leaking out of her, onto his stomach and the comforter.

He didn’t move to hold her. He lay utterly still, as if waiting to be dismissed.

After a long time, Rhett pushed herself up. She dismounted from him, wincing at the sore, stretched feeling. She stood on shaky legs and walked to the bathroom without a word. She cleaned herself, watching the evidence of him swirl down the drain.

When she returned, he was still on the bed, staring at the ceiling. She got in under the covers, turning her back to him.

His voice was a scratch in the dark. “What does this make me?”

She closed her good eye. The metallic taste of blood was still in her mouth. The memory of concrete was in her skin. The feeling of him was inside her, a permanent, claiming burn.

“Mine,” she said.