Stolen: A letter to my captor, alt ending

After the Nightmare

I awoke to the sound of you placing a mug on the small wooden unit besides the bed, I was still in your room. "Thanks" I said as I nodded towards the hot tea whilst pulling myself up, your little bed really was awfully uncomfortable, the springs stuck out and dug into you. I hadn't looked up at you yet, I felt shy, really shy, the shyest I'd ever felt around you. Normally, I prided myself on being brave and confident around you, I didn't want to be scared or intimidated by you, but this was different, I wasn't either of those things, I was embarrassed and I didn't like it. You sat down on the edge of the bed making the springs creak. You waited before saying anything and I could feel your gaze on me, I picked up the mug and took a long sip before I put it back down and finally looked up at you.

"How you feeling?"

"Fine."

You looked at me sympathetically with your lips pressed together, not knowing what to say next.

"Must have been a really bad dream. You were pretty shaken up." I flushed with embarrassment a little and dragged my gaze away from you. I didn't know what to say so I just nodded whilst looking down at my hands.

"Do you wanna tell me what happened in it?" I thought about that and decided not to reveal to you the true horror in my dream, I didn't want you to know that it had made me scared of leaving here, scared of leaving you.

"It was stupid really, I got bit by a snake."

You looked a little relieved, probably glad to hear I wasn't having nightmares about you chopping me up into tiny pieces. "Gem, that's not going to happen, you don't need to be scared of that." I met your gaze again and your eyes softened. "I won't let it."

You left me alone to finish my tea then and I went straight for a shower, needing to clear my head and like how last night I'd craved being close to you, this morning I craved being far away. I didn't spend any time with you for the rest of the day, wanting my distance from you desperately. As the day had gone on, I'd started to resent myself for how I'd acted so pathetic the night before, I was disgusted in myself. I repressed the harrowing visions of the nightmare and tried to concentrate again on hating you but after a while my mind subconsciously kept coming up with arguments for why you weren't just an evil mentally ill piece of shit and so I gave up in frustration.

You knocked on my door at some point to let me know you'd made me some food but luckily when I wandered out to the kitchen to eat, only my plate of some weird ricey/bean thing sat on the table, there was no sign of you. As I lay in the darkness again that night, I couldn't get the images of my nightmare out of my brain, I could see me with my parents, reunited, but still feeling so empty and angry that I'd also lost this life. My life. Whether I like it or not, at this stage that seems irrelevant. It felt like hours I'd been lying there, not being able to sleep at all. Before that dream, I'd had fond memories of home, and what it would be like to return, now all I could see and think when I thought of home, London, Mum and Dad, Anna, was why it was now ruined, and why it wouldn't at all be the same if I ever went back.

Then I started to think about what had happened after the dream, and for the first time all day, I let myself admit that it was nice sleeping next to you. That you comforted me when I needed you, and that you gave me space today and didn't ask too many questions or make me feel like I'd fallen given into you and your fairytale of us living here. And just like that, before the usual loathing that always followed when I thought of you, could kick in, I found myself swinging my legs off of the bed and onto the cold wooden floor, and once again I traced the wall with my fingers to guide me down the corridor and to your room. You were sleeping on your side with your back against the wall. I don't know why I did, but I didn't care about that, I just gently, so as not to wake you, lifted up the covers and I climbed in next to you with my back pressed up against you. You must have woken up but all you did was move back a little giving me more room, and snaked one arm loosely around my waist. You were warm, and you smelled good, and once again, just like that, I lulled off to sleep next to you, your lips pressed into my hair, neither of us saying a word, neither of us needing to.