Chapter Twenty-Five - ROOK

After Ronin leaves I change into a pair of shorts and a t-shirt and slip into a long peaceful sleep. In fact, when I wake up in the morning I feel rested and at peace with my situation for the first time in like… forever. Even going all the way back to my childhood, before my mom overdosed and I went into foster care. She was a mess. Your typical teen mom. Broke, craving attention, no clue how to take care of a kid.

And my life was never peaceful. It was nothing but chaos. In fact, now that I think about it, my life has been one long chaotic episode after another.

When I first decided to put some thought into getting the hell away from my ex, Jon, I would go to the library and use their computer so I didn't have to worry about my browsing history being detected. I could never trust that anything I looked at on our home computer wasn't being traced because that was Jon's job. Computer forensics. He wasn't a cop but he worked with them all the time.

Scary shit if you're his ex-girlfriend trying to make a clean getaway.

Anyway, the library had all kinds of material on domestic abuse. It took me several visits to finally accept that was the situation I was in. Domestic abuse just sounded so clinical. I just knew he hit me, mostly for no reason, but sometimes I defied him on purpose just to make him do it and get it over with.

It turns out that men who abuse their partners go through a cycle—it starts out fine, then the tension builds and builds, he snaps and gets violent, and then the make-up stage is the only time he's reasonable.

So even though I didn't really understand this before reading that pamphlet, I could feel these phase changes. I could feel the anger and the tension building to a peak. And it drove me insane, how I had to just wait for him to release it. On me, of course. So sometimes I'd do something on purpose just to get to the make-up stage where I could relax for a few weeks.

Except there's just one problem with that rationale. After a period of time the abuse gets worse and worse and the make-up stage gets shorter and shorter until it fades away entirely. Then there's only tension and violence.

That's the stage Jon and I were in.

Twenty-four-hour tension and violence. If he wasn't hitting me he was yelling at me or calling me names. He especially liked 'whore,' even though he knew damn well he was the only man I'd ever been with. And the last time was the end of the line for me.

After that I knew he was going to kill me next time. Of course I could've called the police and stayed in Chicago, letting the system work it out. But the statistics were not in my favor. Most women went back and even if they did get a restraining order, the guys almost never respected it. There was even a pamphlet on the different methods the men would use to get the women back after incarceration or legal action.

I might still be pretty weak right now, but I am a hundred times stronger than I was back then. I know for sure—I'd have been one of those dumb girls who went back. I would've. So the only way out for me was escape to somewhere else.

I sigh and let all this bad stuff out with the air.

It's over now, so I can let it go. It's been months, he gave up, he's moved on and found someone else to beat, or maybe he got himself thrown in jail for hitting the wrong person. Whatever happened after I left, it didn't happen to me.

I smile at this even though I sorta feel guilty that I didn't put him away so he couldn't hurt anyone else. I am only one girl. And even now I'm not strong—just stronger—back then it was incomprehensible that I could do anything to stop him. Maybe someday I'll have it in me to fight back like that if it ever happens again, but right now I'm fragile.

But I'll take fragile. It's a hell of a lot better than broken.

And that's what I was back in Chicago. A mess of shattered emotions and irrational feelings that had no hope of understanding that what he did to me was not love.

That's the one thing I accepted pretty quick when I started to realize what was happening to me internally—the way I justified his acts and allowed him to keep me there in the house after his abuse. I was just as sick as him, but in a different way. I had a psychological disorder that grew over the years until I was incapable of understanding what a healthy relationship was.

I was sick. The abuse had conditioned me into some strange state of acceptance and I can remember every detail of the day it all became clear. I was sitting at a computer in the library and I suddenly looked around.

And asked myself an honest question.

Is this all there is for me?

I mean, I was a kid once. I had dreams. I had plans. But there I was. In a public library looking up facts about domestic violence when I had a state-of-the-art computer at home in my living room that I was afraid to use.

I was broken, beaten, and scared of pretty much everything.

And it hit me.

If I wanted to change my life then I'd have to do it myself. Because no one was coming to protect me, or save me, or heal me.

There was just me.

There is no such thing as heroes, no such thing as being rescued, and if I had a domestic violence problem, then I better be able to figure it out myself because if I didn't, I was going to end up dead.

And while Ronin seems like a good guy, he has triggered a lot of red flags that keep me guessing. And guessing about my safety isn't something I can afford to do right now. Because in the end there is still only me.

I need to keep this in mind as I make choices about what I will and won't do while I'm here living in Antoine Chaput's erotic photography studio.