Anything but Typical

Chapter 23

I woke up with a start. My face was covered with sweat and possibly tears. Is it even possible to cry while you're asleep? I tried to calm myself down. I could barely remember bits and pieces of my dream. Whatever it was, must have been really bad. The only detail I could clearly pick out of that was Jess.

Jess. Oh no. What if I'm too late? What if my dream was an omen? What am I going to do?

Drew, snap the fuck out of it. It is literally 3 in the morning. Whatever it is, it can wait until morning.

Who even asked your opinion?

You did. I'm your conscious, ya dumbass.

No matter what I did, I could not not fall back asleep. I was wide awake and if you hadn't realized already, me being alone with my thoughts was a recipe for disaster. I would always jump to conclusions too fast. That's basically me. Literally I could be doing parkour when I'm jumping from one conclusion to the next.

Giving up on sleep, I got out of bed and put on my glasses. It felt like I was relying on them a lot more recently. The only problem was that part of the lens was cracked so I could only see out of my right eye. Groaning internally, I took them back off and set them down on the table.

I tried stretching a bit. That got boring incredibly quickly. I went ahead and got ready. At the first sign of sunlight, I would be gone. What I didn't anticipate, was that I would fall asleep right before sunrise. I don't even remember how long I slept.

*Jess point of view*

Cold. Everything was so so cold. It must have been a month since they took me. A month since they kidnapped me. A month since I last saw Drew. A month since it began.

At first, they tried to use my body. The first time they even attempted that, I kneed the guy in the balls. I smiled, in remembrance of that memory. When they realized that wasn't going to happen, they took to other methods.

The first few times, I was able to bear through it, the beatings, the bruises. It was only much later that it had gotten so much worse. They cut me, the burned me, the pain was unbearable sometimes. They claimed they wanted to 'get a reaction out of me' and then hurt me even worse when i yelled out in pain. A small noise from the door interrupted my thoughts. I craned my neck in an attempt to see who it was, and almost yelled out in pain.

The last night came back to me in bits and pieces. One of my torturers, as I liked to call them, had come back insanely drunk and thought it would be a good idea to try to strangle me because 'my appearance was pissing him off'. Ugh. Douchebag. His fingers had left bruises on my neck, I was sure of it.

Before you take me as some damsel in distress looking for her knight in shining armour, let me explain a thing or two to you. The fact that my family or even Drew hadn't come to get me by now, led me to believe that they had stopped looking. I honestly couldn't blame them. I knew that wherever I was, was a long way from home.

But that didn't stop me from having hope. I knew Drew better than he knew himself and I knew that he would have used his brain and figured out a way to find me. I just hoped that he could come and find me before I had to use my own escape plan. I wasn't too keen on it.

It involved killing all 5 of the men that held me captive here. I wasn't even sure if I would be able to stand steadily once I got out of the bindings they kept me in. They were so restricting it felt like I was going to pass out from lack of airflow to my brain at any given moment.

The thought of that terrified me. I had to keep fighting. If not for my sake, then for Drew. I had figured out that he was depressed when I met him. He thought I didn't see it. But I caught the tiny things. The way he rubbed his left wrist, the small subtle self deprecating jokes, the way he wore long sleeve shirts when it was 80 degrees out. But slowly and surely, he got better. He learned to smile, he learned to be happy, and he learned to love himself. And then the big accident happened. If I left him too, I don't know what he would do.