That’s when I heard his voice.

“Good. You’re finally awake. I was beginning to think you’d been seriously injured.” My body froze at the sound of a male voice. Suddenly, I had to instruct myself to breathe. The voice was eerily gentle, concerned…familiar? The accent, what I could comprehend over the sound of the ringing in my head was American and yet, there was something off about it.

I should have screamed, afraid as I was, but I just froze. He had been sitting in the room; he had been watching me panic.

After a few moments, my voice trembled, “Who are you?” No response. “Where am I?” My words and voice seemed to be on some sort of delay, almost sluggish, like I was drunk.

Silence. The creak of a chair. Footsteps. My heart hammering in my chest.

“I am your master.” A cold hand pressed against my sweat-slick forehead. Again, a nagging sense of familiarity. But it was stupid. I didn’t know anyone with an accent. “You are where I want you to be.”

“Do I know you?” My voice was raw, stripped of anything but my emotion.

“Not yet.”

Behind my eyelids the world exploded into violent streams of red; my dark vision drowned in adrenaline. Acid fear ate down my synapses carrying Danger. Danger. Run. Run!to my limbs. My mind howled for every muscle fiber to contract. I willed everything to fight all of the constraints: I twitched.

I gave way to fits of hysterical crying. “Please…let me go,” I whimpered. “I promise I won’t tell anyone. I just want to go home.”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that.” Just like that a sea of despair dragged me under its crushing waves. His voice was devoid of so many things: compassion, inflection, emotion, but there was one thing that wasn’t missing and that was certainty. I couldn’t accept it, his certainty.

He smoothed my hair back from my forehead, an intimate gesture that filled me with foreboding. Was he attempting to soothe me? Why?

“Please,” I cried as he continued petting me. I felt his weight on the bed, and my heart stuttered.

“I can’t,” he whispered, “and more than that…I don’t want to.”

For a moment, only my crying and deep, anguished sobs punctuated the silence that followed his statement. The darkness made it all the more unbearable.

His breathing, my breathing, together, in empty space.

“Tell you what I will do, I’ll untie you and get these bumps and bruises cleaned up. I didn’t want you to wake up in a pool of water. I’m really sorry about the hit to the face,” he stroked his fingers across my cheekbone, “but that’s what happens when you fight without thinking of the consequences.”

“A pool of water?” I jittered. “I don’t want to get in any water. Please,” I begged, “just let me go.” His voice was too calm, too refined, too matter-of-fact, and too… reminiscent of Hannibal Lector in The Silence of the Lambs.

“You need a bath pet.” Was his terrifying response. Hello Clarice….

All I could do was cry as he untied me. My arms and legs were stiff and numb: they felt too large, too heavy, too far away to be a part of me. Was my entire body asleep? Again I tried to move, I tried to hit him, to kick him. And again my efforts reflected in twitching, jerky movements. Frustrated, I lay inert. I wanted to wake up. I wanted to run away. I wanted to fight. I wanted to hurt him. And I couldn’t.

He kept the blindfold on and lifted me off the bed, carefully. I felt myself rise and become suspended within the dark. My heavy head draped over his arm. I could feel his arms. Feel his clothes against my skin.

“Why can’t I move?” I sobbed.

“I gave you a little something. Don’t worry, it’ll wear off.” Scared, blind in the dark, his limbs wrapped around mine, his voice took on texture, shape.

He shifted my weight in his arms until my head lolled against the fabric of his shirt.

“Stop struggling.” There was amusement on the surface of his voice.

Halting my struggle, I tried to focus on details about him. He was perceptibly strong and he hoisted my weight without so much as a strained breath. Beneath my cheek I could feel the hard expanse of his chest. He smelled faintly of soap, perhaps a light sweat too, a masculine scent that was both distinct, but only distantly familiar.

We didn’t walk far, only a few steps, but for me each moment seemed like an eternity in an alternate universe, one where I inhabited someone else’s body. But my own reality came crashing back to me the moment he set me down inside something smooth and cold.

Panic gripped me. “What the hell are you doing?”

There was a pause, then his amused voice. “I told you, getting you cleaned up.”

I opened my mouth to speak when the initial burst of cold water hit my feet. Startled, I let out a skittish yelp. As I pathetically attempted to crawl out of the tub by rolling my body toward the edge, the water turned warmer and my captor hoisted me back against the tub.

“I don’t want to take a bath. Let me go.” I tried to remove the blindfold, repeatedly smacking my own face as my lethargic arms countered my purpose. My captor did a horrible job of stifling his laugh.

“I don’t care if you want one, you need one.”

I felt his hands on my shoulders and mustered my strength to attack. My arms flew back haphazardly landing somewhere, I think, on his face or neck. His fingers speared through my hair to force my head back at an odd angle.

“Do you want me to play rough too?” he growled against my ear. When I didn’t answer he squeezed his fingers tight enough to make my scalp tingle. “Answer my question.”

“No.” I whispered on a frightened sob.

Without delay he loosened his grip. Before removing his fingers from my hair, his fingers massaged my scalp. I shivered at the utter creepiness of it.

“I’m going to cut your clothes off with some scissors,” he said flatly. “Don’t be alarmed.” The rush of the water and the beat of my heart thundered in my ears as I thought about him stripping me down and drowning me.

“Why?” I let out frantically.

His fingers caressed the column of my tense throat. I shivered in my fear. I hated not being able to see what was happening, it forced me to feel everything.

His lips were suddenly at my ear, soft, full, and unwelcome. He nuzzled in further when I attempted to bend my neck and twist away. “I could strip you slowly, take my time, but this is simply more efficient.”

“Stay away from me you asshole!” Was that my voice? This ballsy version of me really needed to shut up. She was going to get me killed.

I braced for some act of revenge, but it never came. Instead, I heard a small burst of sound, like he was laughing. Creepy son of a bitch.

He cut my shirt off slowly, carefully, and it made me wonder if he was savoring my panic. The thought took me places in my mind I willed myself not to go. Next, he removed my skirt. Though I struggled, my attempts were pathetic. If my arms were in the way, he held them away with little effort. If I lifted my knees, he simply pressed them back down.

He hadn’t put the drain stop into the tub yet, the water hadn’t been rising. Cold overwhelmed me as I sat there in my underwear. He reached for my bra and I stopped breathing, just shaking uncontrollably.

“Relax,” he said soothingly.

“Please,” I managed to say through sobs. “Please—whatever it is you think you need to do, you don’t. Please, just let me go and I won’t tell, I swear…I swear it.”

He didn’t answer me. He pressed the scissors up between my breasts and cut my bra open. I felt my breasts slide out and I started another fit of crying.

“No-no, don’t touch me!” Immediately he grabbed my nipples and pinched them. I screamed in shock and surprise, sensations flooding me.

He leaned in close to my ear and whispered, “You want me to let go?”

I nodded, unable to form words.