The Kidnapper Who Bathed Me in Darkness
The sound of the engine jerked me out of my torpor. My cheek was sunk into that soft, freezing mattress, and the moment I breathed I got that smell of mold back in my nose—the one I had never managed to tolerate. As the days went by, I stopped noticing the filth on my clothes and on my own skin, but the mattress still stank the same as on that first night, when my hooded head touched it for the first time.
You don’t understand the power of the senses until one of them is taken from you. I spent my hours in darkness, and when they took the hood off I squeezed my eyelids shut with all my strength.
That slap was still booming in my skull. An open hand, but with a force I had never felt in my body. A dull ringing that grew and grew until it dug into my eardrum and drilled into my brain. He lifted me off the floor at once and felt my face to check whether he’d broken anything. I was moaning, though he was trying to be gentle. The metallic taste of blood flooded my mouth, and little by little his distant voice began to overpower the pain.
—Close your fucking eyes! —he growled.
—I’m sorry —I muttered.
—I told you to keep them closed. We had a deal.
It was true. I had broken my end of it. The temptation to see his face had been stronger than my caution. He pulled me upright, and as he held me I noticed the hardness of his muscles, the veins standing out in his forearms, the softness of his thick body hair.
He wasn’t like the other one. He took care of me. At first he only left me food and took away the bucket where I did my business. As the days passed, he began to change. He became kind. He started tying my hands in front of me, though his partner kept insisting he should do it behind my back and much tighter. The best moment of the day came when, after making sure the other one wasn’t coming back, he came in and freed my wrists. The rough rope that had opened up my skin loosened, and he stroked my wounds. He touched them slowly, while I felt the blood beginning to flow back into my hands.
His calloused, broad fingers gave me an almost pleasurable pain. A tingling that climbed up to my fingertips. Sometimes he brought them close to my face to look at them up close, lingering over them, and I felt his warm breath soothing the sting.
I don’t know how much time passed before I dared ask him for a shower. I suppose it was a lot, because he didn’t refuse. Time becomes slippery when darkness and boredom fill you up until you lose hope. You go from wanting to live to wanting to die, and in the end you want nothing at all. You breathe, smell, eat, obey. There are no feelings left, except at certain moments. Like when, all of a sudden, you need a shower to feel human again.
He took me to the bathroom without a word. We hardly ever spoke, only enough to give me some order or other. Sometimes he forced his voice, made it deeper, I suppose so I wouldn’t recognize him. Other times he forgot, and then I heard a clean, masculine tone that didn’t crack. My mother would have said he had a radio announcer’s voice. He took my hand and walked one step ahead of me, always ahead, to warn me about each stair so I wouldn’t trip.
I heard the steps creak, felt the cold tiles under my bare feet, smelled dry air with no dampness, no mold. I drew a deep breath, like when I go back to my village after months shut away in the city.
In the bathroom the temperature was pleasant. I could guess where the radiator was, its heat brushing against my skin as he uncovered it while taking my clothes off. He untied my hands to pull off my sweatshirt, but before removing my hood he hesitated.
—Your hands or the hood? —he let me choose.
—The hood —I said without thinking. I needed to feel the water on my face.
—You have to close your eyes.
I nodded. And you already know that I didn’t keep my promise that time either. Luckily, he didn’t put it back on me. He tied my wrists and put me in the bathtub. He turned on the tap, and the cold water raised goosebumps on my skin while he apologized to me in a low voice. And we smiled. I couldn’t see it, but I want to believe he smiled too. The water gradually warmed and began running over my body. How can something so simple give so much pleasure? I heard him take his clothes off and felt his nearness.
—There’s no sponge —he said when I felt his hands against my back.
He rubbed me down all over, vigorously. I felt again the hardness of those calloused palms, but I didn’t care anymore. He washed my hair twice, just like my mother used to, and rinsed me carefully, making sure no trace of dirt was left behind.
—Make room for me —he said naturally. As if we were two brothers sharing the shower.
He grabbed me by the waist to move me aside. And then I felt his hard erection brushing my buttocks. For a second I felt the soft tip of his cock resting between them, and I also felt him hesitate. His breath hit the back of my neck, his breathing quickened, and I felt him growing against me. I didn’t move. I did nothing, frozen between panic and the terrible desire for that man to take my body for the first time.
My stillness made him pull back. He gently pushed me aside. I heard him shower, wash his face, and I could almost see him sigh and let the water wash his guilt away. I regretted not having moved even a single centimeter. Not having brought my body closer to his in a way so slight it would have been almost imperceptible, just enough for him to understand that I was burning to feel him too.
His shower didn’t last long. I didn’t open my eyes at any point. I felt him turn the tap until the icy water killed his arousal. I waited for him to start drying me with a rough towel. He did it again brusquely, as if I were his pet after a bath. He left my wrists for last. He untied the ropes carefully, dried me tenderly, trying not to hurt me any more. If that was even possible.
He brought my hands close to his face, breathing over them. His breath came out warmer than before, his breathing more uneven. He pressed his lips to my wounds, briefly. The next time he lingered longer. He had soft, full lips. He licked them before each kiss, tasting my broken skin. My erection knocked against his, and he smiled with his mouth pressed against me.
The sound of his partner’s car engine broke the moment. He dressed me in a hurry in the same stinking clothes and tied my wrists behind my back, quickly. The damp rope burned my skin, and the force of his rush tore a groan of pain from me. He said nothing. He pulled on his clothes in jerks and dragged me by the arm, with no trace of the tenderness from a minute earlier. I went back to my pit, stumbling and slipping on the steps. He threw me onto the mattress and I landed face-first, feeling the mold and dampness invade everything all over again.
***
That shower was never repeated. Police sirens woke me a few days later. Blows, shouts, several gunshots. I sat up, disoriented, terrified because I couldn’t understand, in my darkness, what the hell was going on. When they ripped the hood off me I saw several officers in balaclavas and assault rifles. They asked me my name, I don’t know if as procedure or because my emaciated appearance made them fail to recognize me. I muttered it, and they spoke to me to calm me down, but I wasn’t listening to their words. I was only watching the way one of those uniformed men was taking the rope off my wrists. Wrists that had been tied in front of me.
When I came out of the basement, the light blinded me for a few seconds. I barely managed to glimpse an inert body on the floor, and I shut my eyes with all my strength. Like I had promised him. In the ambulance I felt my tears start to flow, the ones I had believed had run out long ago.
***
I remember all this while some guy fucks me in a damp basement. My wrists, bound with rope, take the weight of my pained gasps, but that pain doesn’t extinguish the desire that was awakened in that bathroom, in that hidden house. I never told anyone what I lived through there. I listened to my wife talking to her friends, telling them I wasn’t the same anymore, that I didn’t even come near her. That she would see me go down to the basement of our house in the middle of the night, and then find me asleep on the floor with my hands tied.
I understood her desperation, but I couldn’t tell anyone about mine. Something had awakened inside me that none of the masters I looked for, and even paid for, managed to calm completely. Close your eyes, I tell myself every time one of them ties me up. And for an instant, in the darkness, I feel those calloused hands washing me tenderly again, and I can almost believe it’s him who has come back to look for me.
