The rules

He ended up in the hospital for an injury. While visiting him, he found out that I was pregnant. I was on painkillers for my leg, they couldn’t do anything else for me in the ER without knowing how far along I was.

His family showed up while I was sleeping a pill off in the corner of the room and talked me into a wheelchair. When I woke up, I was in a room piled floor to ceiling with junk. I’m talking hoarders r us junk. It took several moments for me to feel the collar around my neck. 

They had chained me to a large metal hook in the floor. His mother was sitting in the room watching tv and crunching her fried chicken. As soon as I opened my eyes she had watched me and when I tried to get the collar of she laughed. She began talking about how excited everyone was to have a baby in the family. They wanted a girl. I had better deliver.

He came back from the hospital a few days later. That is when he laid down the rules.

No speaking                                                                      

No eye contact

No clothing                                                                        

No freedom of movement

I must always comply with his needs.

I would clean the house and service as needed

I fought. I fought with everything the army and a decade of martial arts taught me. I bit and hit and kicked and tried to scream when all else failed. He broke my arm and the bones in my foot. He gagged me and beat me senseless. He drugged me and raped me daily. He passed me around and displayed me for his friends. I cleaned and was suspended by my limbs while he did what he wanted with me.

I learned to separate myself from what was going on around me. Its only my body. He could hurt me and he could kill me if he wanted to but it was never ME. He couldn’t reach me anymore. Some of it was being strong-willed, more of it was probably the drugs. He hated the passiveness I adopted. It was my only defense, and I grew good at it.

                

How it all came to be

“Beauty provokes harassment, the law says, but it looks through men's eyes when deciding what provokes it.”

I was young. I had a successful job, made more than I had any right to right out of the gate. I lived in a huge house, half of which no one ever used. I was independent and excited about my life. I didn’t know how lucky I was. How innocent and carefree I was. I was fresh out of the military, I thought I had my whole life ahead of me. I was serious about travelling to Europe. I love the history, the art.

Now? Well let’s just say I lost it all. And in doing so I found something much more important. I found out what I am made from. And let me tell you: It’s been forged in my own personal Hell.

I went to dinner with him. He was charming. He made me laugh and made me blush. Not in an overly sexual way, by holding my chair and being the perfect gentleman. I should have known right then that the red flags were flying. Flapping in tornado strength winds, actually.

He took me out to eat several more times, we went to the movies. Nothing he ever did even hinted, even breathed, at what he was thinking. No, that would come later.

He took me somewhere, somewhere I won’t disclose, and what happened that night I can’t truly attest to. I know he drugged me, and I have brief flashes of memory. Crystal clear fragments mired in a murky haze. Him pushing me out of my chair. Ripping my shirt. Hitting me when I pushed him. Cutting my jeans, a sharp pain in my leg. My head knocked to the side, staring at the American flag. Tugs and jerks, and a stabbing pain where no one had touched before. Confusion, and pain. He kept holding me down and talking nonsense. Then peace when the drugs and his blows put me under.

I woke up at home. He told me I didn’t hold my liquor and passed out. I cut my leg on my beer bottle when I fell. I felt so thick headed and dizzy I didn’t question his soft words and concerned face. I let him make me breakfast.

Then came the week I hurt my leg and went to the er. My life tipped onto its ear when I heard the scariest words of my life. “I have to tell you that you are pregnant. You need to make an ob apt.”

OH GOD