My heart thumped wildly for one moment as all the things my terrified imagination had conjured didn't happen. Nothing but an empty, dingy, slightly dirty motel bathroom. A shower with a questionably yellowed shower curtain, a sink, a toilet. No beasts or monsters in sight. No scary men with ill intent.
I spared a glance for the room, now lit faintly by the spill of light from the bathroom. The bed was made, my bag still sitting on top, gaping open from where I had pulled the dress out earlier. The table and chair sat in the empty space between the bed and the wall, obtrusive for the blind and clumsy like me.
I was freaking myself out with this. No, he had done that. The man at the diner with his too-knowing gaze. Well, he was pushy and inappropriate, and I was done being scared of strangers.
The tile was cool against my bare feet. I undressed quickly, finding relief in the warm water that rained on my skin. I even used the bitter-smelling soap wrapped up in paper, comforted by the intensity, feeling cleansed of the man's presence and safe again. More importantly, I was free. Independent. Exactly what I had always longed to be—though I had little experience with it. Maybe that was what made me so jumpy. Maybe he was a normal man, a nice one, and I had jumped to conclusions.
I had always considered myself self-reliant. I'd had to be with my mother. I cooked for myself when my mom was on a binge. I got dressed for school and took the bus, otherwise a child-protective-services woman would come around and we’d all get in trouble. As soon as I was able, I took the part-time job at the photography studio.
All that self-sufficiency, but it wasn't the same as being truly alone. My mom had always been around the house. Even when I’d desperately wished for privacy, for a brief respite from her clinging, cloying fear, I’d never gotten it. Now I was on my own and I’d have to get used to that, somehow. That was what I wanted…wasn’t it?
The thin motel towel turned soggy after a couple swipes at my skin. I examined myself in the mirror. Pale blonde hair that looked golden when wet. Light brown eyes that looked hazel in a certain light. I thought those were my best feature but my one boyfriend from high school had thought it was my lips. Kissable, he'd said.
Then the other man, later, had been less diplomatic, more succinct. Fuckable. I had flinched, instinctively knowing what he meant even though I shouldn’t have. My mother’s lists of abducted girls had never been specific about what had happened to them. Sex was a vague concept for someone who had only ever been kissed after homeroom. But then she had dated Allen, and he had said my lips were made for kissing a place other than his lips, lower down, and he'd taught me how to do it, again and again.
At first I had gone along with it, too afraid of setting my mother off with a confession. But then he’d gotten rougher, more forceful and scary and also tingly hot in ways I didn't fully understand. One evening when he wasn’t there, I had tried to tell my mother what was happening.
I’d expected her to help me. After all, she’d always told me something like that could happen at any time. But she hadn’t believed me. She’d said I was making up stories, that I wanted the attention those girls on the news had gotten. That I was jealous of the time she spent with Allen and that must be why I had made up such lies.
I cried into my pillow and let Allen do his business that night. But the light had turned on, a flood of painful light, and my mother had seen. After that, she’d apologized for not believing me.
She’d been kind, understanding. Too understanding, and that had been the final straw. She’d quit her job, claiming she needed to stay home and watch me, that the world was too dangerous for either of us. Especially me.
She said I attracted them, the very worst kind of men. And maybe she was right to a point. There was something there, something large and scary lurking under the water. Every once in a while it would surface with a flip of my stomach, like when a man would speak to me with a certain authority, give me an order—or a certain look, like the one in the diner.
I didn't like it, or maybe I liked it too much, but I couldn't stand being like my mother. I wouldn't end up like her, broken and lonely and so desperate for any man that I’d put up with someone like Allen. That was why I'd had to leave home, why I insisted on getting a college education. This was my ticket away from a life of subservience and fear.
Well then, why did I feel so afraid? But the wide-eyed girl in the mirror didn't have an answer.
With the towel still wrapped around my body, I stepped out of the bathroom onto the coarse carpet of the motel room. Immediately I knew something was horribly wrong. The air felt... shared.
"Nice to meet you, Evie," said a deep voice.