Page 232 of Deep Cover

25

Annie

Something was wrong.

Something was wrong with Cole. That was obvious. Before Vincent had come into the routine in the compound, before he forced his way through that spring morning and took me, I'd rarely paid attention to Cole beyond judging his immediate mood and how that would impact on my own mood, or worse yet, on my anatomy.

Outside our relationship or whatever our arrangement would be called, Cole existed in the world in a big way. I came to understand that Vincent Geddes had as well and that his disappearance was not going unobserved. People were looking for him. In my experience, bodies usually show up sooner or later.

I hoped it would be later.

Insanely, I was concerned about Cole, worried about how he was handling what had happened. Less crazily, I was worried about myself if something happened to Cole. It could be a one-person accident. The kind of thing that makes people shake their heads if they don't understand the concept of suicide by "accident." I needed Cole.

Plain and simple and self-serving if I had to look at it that way, but true. There was no one on the planet who would understand what I had just gone through and the night terrors and intrusive thoughts, the flashbacks, PTSD symptoms were all taking hold with a vengeance.

With everything else I'd gone through in the past, it was the savagery of his sadism that brought me down. The fact that whatever I experienced with Cole, however twisted he was, at the core he was decent.

At the core, he was taking care of me.

Vincent had been inhuman. Sometimes the look on his face right before he'd hurt me was inexplicably awful, so terrible and terrifying I'd honestly wonder if he was possessed. If I believed in devils rather than the evil men do, I would have wondered. Because he taxed my ability to believe that men could do that much evil.

Cole was transparent in what he was doing. Not that he was saying outright he was trying to clean me inside and out, because that would have been very un-Cole-like. But that it seemed as obvious as a shrink asking So how do you feel about that? Or, Can you sit with that for a minute?

I was sitting with it for a lot of minutes, sometimes with my bottom flaming inside and out and so far, no, I couldn't sit with it. I had been damaged.

I needed Cole and I was afraid he wouldn't be there much longer.

Which might have something to do with what happened one morning as April got underway. Cole – no surprise here – liked my body smooth and hairless. Toward that end I had a personal electric thingy like a man's shaver, and it did a much better job of removing hair I'd never really thought about removing before Cole St. Martin entered my confusing life.

But there were some things that just worked better with a disposable razor and not even Cole had stopped to think I could be dangerous with one.

But the fact is if you stick a table knife under the double blades and leverage it up, the thin cheap strips of what I think is aluminum pop free easily. They're tricky to hold, because they're omnidirectional – every fucking thing about them is sharp. And weirdly they're sharper than, say, the single-edged razor blades sold in hardware stores. Maybe because those have a beveled edge and the strips from disposable razors really are just strips: No hand grip because you're not expected to handle them.

One week after Cole brought me back to the southern Nevada desert, he left me to clean up after the morning routine and the breakfast hell of fucking fish and fruit. If I ever graduated from Cole's care, I was going to live on a diet of pizza and cheesecake.

Except what with all the running and lifting and eating right I'd be in such good shape I'd be loathe to give it up.

Life sucks.

I smiled to myself at that and then contemplated the metal strips. Just having them in my hand I was taking deeper breaths than I had since Paris. There's something about giving up control that Cole believes is cathartic and important to healing and certainly is important to him because that's his whole thing.

But to me, holding a blade against my skin and deciding how deep to cut, how fast, how much pressure, how much pain if any - because usually there was none - deciding where on my body and how long to bleed before I staunched the flow. Even sometimes cutting in the exact same channel, following the line of a previous cut and seeing the new blood and feeling no pain. Only power. Only control over myself. That was freeing. That was relief. That was a long, deep breath after something strenuous and awful.

Because I had no desire to permanently injure myself. My friends who knew I sometimes cut thought it hurt.

It didn't. I could never feel it. Instead it just redirected my thoughts and emotions and above anything else, I had to be there. It was the cult of mindfulness carried to the extreme. When I was cutting, I had to be present in the body I didn't always like and the mind I didn't always think was completely sane.

It had to be somewhere he wouldn't notice it. Very inner thigh at the top, maybe. Though that carried a risk of infection no matter how clean I remained. Inner ankle was my second choice. It often bled like a son of a bitch but it wouldn't stop me from running.

Even at that moment I didn't want to give up our morning runs. It was one of the few times I saw bits of Cole surface.

I sat down on the edge of the tub in the spacious bathroom, a roll of paper towel beside me. I'd go straight from my own version of self-care into the shower. Twenty minutes from now I'd be taking plenty of deep, far less anxious breaths and all the evidence would be washed away.

I don't know why it works. Other than the control, the mindfulness, but there are other areas of control and mindfulness in my life and they don't have the release cutting does.

I brought my left foot up across my right knee, exposing the underside of my ankle where some thin white scars already existed. For a second I just considered it, waiting to see if I really needed to do this or if there was an alternative. Left alone I'd opt instantly to cut. Left alone somewhere others couldn’t come any time without asking and I was a little more sacrosanct.

In the end, I drew the blade over the skin just above the ankle bone where calf meets ankle. The first pass was thin, beading up with thick fat drops of purple blood, but not the smooth, solid line I wanted.

Concentrating, I drew the blade down again, feeling only the sharp bite at the beginning before pain disappeared and there was only whatever it was that made this work. Endorphins maybe. Or just that this was a version of self-care. Some kind of therapy, played out on the canvas of my skin. As in: Yes, things are bad. I acknowledge that. But here as opposed to whatever violence I could do myself, I will focus on being safe, on only opening up this much for this long.

Some days, it was longer than others. This second cut welled up with deep purple blood before I finished the two inch cut. I sat watching the blood fill in the grooves in the flesh, then carefully put my foot out over the paper towel, letting the blood stream down in rivulets, seven or eight streams of it curling down across my foot, dropping into the paper towel and staining them a heavily wet purplish red.

It was a good cut. Not deep enough to damage. Not shallow enough I only got dots. But deep enough to bleed copiously. Enough to focus all my concentration on me and not on my circumstances, or my fear at having not seen Kie's body, or at having killed a powerful billionaire, which could clearly have complications.

The blood was starting to turn sticky, the streams of it drying on my skin even as thicker blood ran over top. The blood was tacky, no longer running. Time to blot my foot so I could stand and get into the shower, then clean up the paper towel and bandage what would, in reality, be a small cut of no consequence.

Or it would have been.

If just then Cole hadn't said from the doorway, "Annie. Oh my god."

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