Cramped Quarters - Love Under Lockdown

There was a long pause after the door slammed. The silence was pregnant with potential. I half expected to see her running past the window, making a break for it. It came as quite a relief when she didn’t.

There was some thumping from her bedroom I didn’t like the sound of, but I did my best to ignore it and focus on my book. It wasn't the first time I’d read it, but it was the first time I’d almost gotten all the way through, and I figured that being forced into quarantine was the perfect excuse to finally finish it.

I couldn’t stop thinking about Rachel long enough to dive back into the book, though.

There was obviously something very wrong.

Who bursts into tears at the sight of someone who never hurt them?

Granted, I was in her apartment at the time and that might have been shocking, but I was also doing my very best to explain my presence, in the most calm and logical terms. I even had visual aids, trying to hold up my keys and my student badge from my wallet to explain the circumstances.

And I knew she must have gotten the campus-wide alert on her phone stating what was going on. So, it was rather crazy of her to run away like that.

To be fair, I should have known there was something different about her, possibly in the way that there was something different about me, when I saw the burns on her body as she was only wearing her towel. Especially the cross.

Not that I was one to judge, with my tattoos, and the not insubstantially sized pentacle scarred into my back. The main difference, so far as I could tell, was that my markings were all completely inspired by things that formed my worldview and I didn’t regret a single one of them. In my admittedly limited experience, regret was generally reserved for those who cared what other people thought, and I never did.

I didn’t know what it was, but I got the feeling that Rachel’s marks had been forced on her. Something to do with the location and the slight waviness of the lines. Like she had been struggling at the time.

Shit, she was probably only eighteen years old and just barely legal enough to get such alterations now, and the ones she had looked older than that. The healing was far too deep. Meaning she had been even younger when they were done, probably in no position to legally consent even if she wanted to, which somehow, I doubted.

I just couldn’t let it go. Particularly if there was potential child abuse going on. My own religion got a lot of shit about such crap, even though there had yet to be a single verified case of it happening anywhere, ever. Which was a hell of a lot more than could be said other religions.

Slapping on my sleuth cap, in the metaphorical sense, of course, I got out my laptop and held my breath in preparation to do some deep diving.

There tended to be an assumption that because I didn’t grow up in the middle class, my childhood must have somehow been deprived. We didn’t have everything. That was for damn sure. It was also to be expected with five kids in the house and my dad working construction.

It got a bit better when my brother, and then I, became old enough to work as well. We were able to put more money in the family pot at that point. It was part of why I almost thought of Amelia more as my daughter than my sister—I had been helping to take care of her financially for a long time.

While we didn’t have everything, we still had enough and certainly always had what we needed. My parents always believed that should include computers like the laptop I was using now. They were almost always hand-me-downs, straddling the line of what the companies swore up and down was bordering on ‘obsolescence,’ but we had them.

I didn’t have skills in a whole lot of areas, which I would be the first to tell you. The one thing I always seemed to be wonderful at, though, was research. Which was how I made the grades to let me get into a top university. Money was a different matter, but we managed to work it out, thanks to a generous scholarship.

Rachel wasn’t an exceedingly rare name, so it was going to take some doing to track down this particular Rachel. For all its drawbacks, and there were many, one thing Facebook had going for it was a streamlined search process.

I looked for Rachels in our state, assuming we were children of the same generation, who had grown up with the fact that having a Facebook account seemed as essential as having a warm sweater in the fall months. There were still way too many Rachels that came up. To narrow things down a bit, I added the university as a factor, getting the number of results down to an even forty, which was much more manageable.