Riyaadh's Story

Chapter 17

He didn't know how many days had passed since she told him but it was all the same. Riyaadh could barely even look at her, much less be in the same room with Saudah and had taken to sleeping on the couch- passing out after hours and hours of the same thought plaguing him.

He wasn't rid of her.

The thin metal rail indented itself into his palm as his knuckles tightened around it. His breath was staggered, and his lungs ached with the smoke that he had been forcing into them. Pain so consuming suffocated him and all he wanted to do was scream into the darkness to let it out.

Instead, he brought his cigarette to his lips, inhaling deeper than he was able to, before exhaling the smoke to be carried away by the heavy breeze.

His hands began to shake. Subtly at first but increasing rapidly as uncalled adrenalin coursed through his veins. From there, shivers ran through his arms, then his shoulders... then his whole body began to tremble as deep-seeded fear boiled in his memories.

He didn't want her to know. He didn't want her to see how weak he was. He didn't want Saudah to know that he had allowed someone to hurt him as much as Farhana had. She had broken him and he had allowed it because he was stupid enough to believe that she loved him.

He thought it was okay because she would apologise and then she did it again and again until she had twisted him into the most warped version of himself. She had ripped him up into someone he couldn't even recognise, and he had let her do it.

Every single time he accepted her apology and made love to her after she bruised and burnt him was his way of allowing it. And who would ever believe him? Who could ever believe that a woman could abuse him as she had done?

He didn't even know if he was a man if he had allowed that to happen to him. He was a coward and a loser and everything was his fault. How could he have ever thought that he could move on? How could Saudah ever love him if she really knew just how scared he was? She would want him to protect her, but could he when he didn't even know how to protect himself?

All he could picture was cowering on the floor and covering his face as she threw plate after plate at him when he came home late. Or screaming as she dragged her little nail file deeper and deeper into his skin. He couldn't even push her off him because she had laid over him and wouldn't let him up. How could he be a man if he couldn't even stop a woman from hurting him?

Saudah was too strong and too brave for him.

He wasn't worth shit anymore.

Not after Farhana. Not after she made him realise just how pathetic he was.

He was nothing.

He didn't want to know what she thought of him after she had seen all the marks.

Why did she have to look? Why did she have to know who he really was? She should never have looked.

It wasn't her business. It was his problem and she should have never involved herself in it. how dare she? How dare she pry into his past the way she did?

Saudah was just another person who tried to take what little control he had just because she thought she could. She should never have looked.

He lifted his right sleeve and ran his finger along all the little dots and scars along it. The marks would have disappeared but she had pressed the stubs so deep into his skin that it would never fade away.

Farhana still wielded power over him. He wasn't free of her. He would never be free of her.

Never.