This time, I couldn’t will myself awake in time. I had to relive the whole fucked-up thing. Somehow the worst of it wasn’t the too-hard whipping that exceeded anything I’d previously experienced. The worst part of the memory/dream was his voice and the awful words he said, blaming me over and over again for what he was doing as he made sure I knew what a filthy, disgusting little whore I was. Without that, I might have been able to pretend it was someone else, anyone else. I jolted awake and scrambled to sit up. It was too quiet in the house without Shannon, and I knew the white cat wouldn’t comfort me. She hated me. That feeling was mutual. I’d moved all my bags from my shopping excursion into the bedroom except the snacks, which were in the kitchen. I turned on every light in the house as I made my way there now. I opened the dark chocolate drizzled kettle corn and took a bottle of water from the fridge and sat at the kitchen table with it. Shannon might kill me if he ever found out I’d been drinking red wine in the tub.
