Killing Mila (wildfire: rewritten)

7. Doctor's Office

One night slowly bleeds into another, and another, and another, but my stranger doesn't come back. I spend the first week mostly holed up in the house, flinching at every loud noise and creak on the stairs, and imagining the soft trod of footsteps out in the hallway. I wake in the middle of the night wondering if this is it; if today is the day someone will realise I'm still alive, and return to finish the job.

I barely sleep, eventually retreating downstairs to lie on my lumpy sofa within earshot of the front door, my fist curled tightly around a baseball bat for protection.

But no one ever comes.

And as another week slowly slips by, the knot of fear in the pit of my stomach loosens. The patchwork of bruises and contusions on my skin start to fade, and my throat stops feeling like I've swallowed a glassful of razorblades. Outwardly, my world returns to the way it always was, like nothing ever touched it.

Only this time, it hurts.

Especially when I finally manage to fall asleep, and all I dream about is him. His body stretched out over mine on the stairs, so solid and warm. One fist gripping my hair while the other palm inches down over my chest. That first, brutal thrust inside me, and the shock of pain. Then the devastating need.

Sometimes, I wake up with the heel of my palm pressed between my legs, desperate to assuage the violent ache pulsing there, but my own useless fumbling beneath the blanket barely scratches the surface once my orgasm breaks over me. My body wants him. Needs him. And I don't even know his name.

Is this what desire is supposed to feel like? This obsessive and destructive thing? It doesn't feel normal. It feels dark and scary in those moments before dawn, when the sky is still inky black and my heart is still racing from another fruitless climax. And three weeks after that night, it's still happening.

Somehow, I contrived to fall asleep in my own bed this time, but the room feels different now. Unfamiliar, almost. I blink up at the cracked ceiling, panting a little, the cool night air chilling my sweat-soaked skin. The duvet is bunched and twisted around my legs, and untangling it zaps what little energy I have left. I manage to drag it up over my shoulders and huddle under it, shivering.

Tears of frustration burn my eyes. It almost feels like when my dad left all over again. Like there's a part of me waiting for him to walk back through the front door at any moment. I used to torture myself at night, thinking about all the places he could be. What he might be doing. Starting over with a new family, getting married, having another child. Slowly but surely replacing me. Forgetting about me. Moving on.

And now I'm doing it all over again, except this time I'm torturing myself with thoughts of him. Wondering if I'm just one in a long line of one night stands and if he follows a girl home every night of the damn week. If even now he's lying in some other girl's bed, staring up at her freshly painted ceiling, his body sated and relaxed. Only with her, he can linger in bed, untroubled by the need to murder her afterwards, because this girl doesn't wander into places she shouldn't.

The more I think about it, the worse I feel. I remember how he never wore a condom, and I start to wonder if he makes a habit of that, too. While the risk of pregnancy is non-existent for me given the chemotherapy and treatment my body has been through, but he didn't know that. And there's still the threat of catching an STD. Did he skip the condom because he planned to kill me or he is always this reckless with the girls he fucks? I don't even know if my compromised immune system can handle an infection like that.

The thought of getting sick again – with anything – makes the tears finally spill over, and I struggle to hold it together, curling into a ball in my cold and lonely bed. I cry and cry until I exhaust myself, then fall back into a dreamless sleep.