As They Slip Away (Across the Universe 2.50)

I am hyperaware of the situation. I can feel each heavy thud of my heart growing stronger and faster. I can feel each of his fingers around my throat, each pressing into my skin. He’s not choking me; he’s just making sure I know that he could.

Unbidden and unwanted, an image of his sculpture comes into my mind: a perfect body with its head squeezed off.

My eyes burn. “Don’t, ” I whisper, afraid to say more. The word has to fight its way up my throat to my mouth.

“I could,” he says. “I could. I can do whatever I want. ”

“ Don’t, ” I plead.

“You sing. You become someone else when you sing—more beautiful, more perfect. ”

His index finger strokes the front of my throat, where my vocal chords are.

“ Don’t sing for anyone else,” he orders.

I nod my head—anything to make him go away.

His grip tightens around my neck, pushing me further into my mattress. He lifts his right leg, and, without removing his hands from my throat, he climbs over me so that he’s straddling me in my own bed.

His full weight presses down against me.

Tears leak from my eyes, dripping into my hair.

“You’re mine, ” he whispers.

It is a very long time before he leaves, but when he finally does, a part of me has already died. My back is uncomfortably straight in the blue plastic chair across from Doc’s desk in his office. He steeples his fingers as he looks at me. “But, ” he says in a carefully controlled voice, “he didn’t actually do anything?”

For answer, I remove the scarf around my neck. Ten long fingerprint-shaped bruises decorate my throat.

“ But—nothing else?” Doc shifts uncomfortably. “ He threatened you, yes, I understand that, but he didn’t actually . . . ?”

“ Would it matter if he did?” I ask. My voice is raspy, a mixture of the gasping sobs that raked through my throat in the shower this morning and the pressure Luthor exerted on my vocal chords as he—

Doc leans forward. “This is very serious, ” he says. “I think perhaps I should give Luthor some hormone suppressants, at least until the Season. . . . ”

“ Pills? You’re just going to give him pills?”

“ His, er, desire for you isn’t entirely natural. We can tamp down that desire, at least for a few years, until the Season. ”

“I ’m not just worried about his desire. ”

Doc’s eyes drift lower, to the bruises on my neck.

“I could bring Eldest into this,” he mutters, half to himself. “But the thing is . . . ”

“ What?” My feeble voice cracks. “What is it? Why are you trying to nicely say that Luthor won’t be punished for what he’s done to me?”

“ But if he didn’t actually do anything—”

“ What do you want me to say?” I stand up, my voice straining against my desire to shout.

“That he held me down on the bed, even when I begged him to get up? That he crushed my throat until I couldn’t make a sound? That he laughed at me as I struggled against him?” That he did things to me that I’m too disgusted to even describe with words.

Doc won’t meet my eyes.

“Luthor is skilled in tactile and kinetic studies,” he tells his neatly ordered desk. “He may be focused on creating sculptures now, but his skills could lead to an advancement in modular studies of the ship’s engines, or help increase efficiency in the City or through the floppy network. . . . ”

“And all I can do is sing,” I croak.