UNTIL LOVE SETS US APART ( JENLISA)

Chapter 2

Jennie POV

I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling, listening to the sounds of the street below, and tried to put myself to sleep. But it didn't work. The adrenalin was still pulsing around my body, and everything in me was telling me that I should still be terrified that they were coming back to get me.

I still didn't really know how I'd ended up in this place. I lifted my head and looked around the room; it was small but well-appointed, like whoever owned this place had money to spare. I hadn't slept anywhere but on that bare mattress on that rusted bed frame in the room that had been my prison for so long that it had started to feel like home.

The women - Lisa? That women has told me her name, but my brain has been in flight mode, and I have been unable to take in anything significant. The women who owned this place, she has given me food and had tired to speak to me, but all I have been able to do was stare back at her and wait for her to stop. I didn't know how to talk with strangers.
I know how to read them, to give them what they wanted with my body. But when it came to actually speak to them, to someone who wasn't trying to use me and dispose of me, I had no idea how that worked

It felt like the life I had before I was taken a million miles away. In reality it was only few years, but everything in me has changed beyond recognition. All that I had was corrupted now, all the hopes and excitement for the future Warped and ruined and turned into a bad dream of servitude and man after man after man after man.

How many times had I gone in my head, and prayed for a chance not to apply for the modelling job that
Brought me there? I had seen it advertisement in the salon one of my aunties has taken me to, someone looking for hair models to shoot for their salon, and she had nudged me towards giving it a go.

" FLASHBACK "

" What have uh got to lose?" She asked, stroking my hair. "You're so beautiful. You should be on billboard somewhere!"

"I don't think it's going to be billboard aunty." I laughed, and she grinned and shrugged. I could still remember exactly how that conversation had gone, the moment when my life has changed forever. I had willed myself, with every fibre in my body, to go back to that moment not to notice that advertisement, for my aunty to not encourage me to go for it to chicken out and focus on where I wanted to go to college. But nothing, not even my deepest,hardest attempts, pulled me back to the start. However, everytime I open my eyes, I always found myself in that place again, the walls creeping rising damp, the same kind that felt as throught it was inching up and corrupting my soul.

I had called the number on the advertisement and they Had invited me in for an audition. I had Deliberately neglected to mention it to my parents, worried they would think I was vain or silly. Maybe if I had told them where I was going that day, when I had skipped out the door carefully made-up and feeling pretty, someone would have come to break me out sooner. Or maybe that was just wishful thinking, and they would have just convinced my family that they were wrong and I must have run away.

By the time I arrived at the interview, I was starting to sense something was off. It was taking place at the Sejong, a part of the city that mother would have raised her eyebrows at.

My heart always gave a jolt and sank every time I thought about my mother. I don't remember since when, but I had lost track of time in that hell-hole. It felt like a lifetime, as though I had lived a whole existence separate from her. An era since we had last seen one an other. That hurt, more than I ever would have cared to admit. I could have seen her again, both my parents, if I wanted - but the thought of looking into their eyes and telling them the truth of what had happened to me was far too painful to consider. I couldn't let them see what I had become. I couldn't hurt them that way, with the truth. What if they thought less of me? What if they never saw me the same way again? What if they saw me as an im possible broken creature, so far removed from their daughter that they no longer knew me? Panic flooded through me again. I couldn't tell them. Not yet. Not even when I was free now...