Total pages in book: 86
Estimated words: 83040 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 415(@200wpm)___ 332(@250wpm)___ 277(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 83040 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 415(@200wpm)___ 332(@250wpm)___ 277(@300wpm)
And with these words comes the control.
I do not let myself release. Not yet.
He stands up, pets my head, and leans in and kisses my lips. “Good,” he says, whispering the word into my mouth. “You’re such a good girl. I’m so proud of you and so is everyone else. And when we get home, Olive, I’m going to fuck you blind.”
I smile as I gaze up at him, picturing what that might mean. “Do anything you want to me. I will not disappoint you.”
If he can tantalize me to the extreme and I can hold out—oh, God, he loves that. He gets off on it so hard. “Challenge accepted, puppet.”
And then he kneels back down, pushes my panties aside, flicks his fingertips against my sweet spot, and pushes them deep inside me. He rips my blouse open, grabbing at my breast, eagerly doing his best to make me fail.
But I am strong and I have my mantra.
He thinks for me, I act for him.
He thinks for me, I act for him.
He thinks for me, I act for him.
2 - Shep
When I was discharged from CORE, the releasing officer handed me a booklet called Do’s and Don’ts: An Easy Transition into the New Life of You.
It was a fictional scenario in the vein of a second-person narrative of a man who I was supposed to identify with, getting discharged and what he experienced in his first two weeks of life on the outside.
The story revolves around a character called ‘You’.
And this is where the BS starts because second-person point of view is a trick. It’s a whole bunch of ‘you did this’ and ‘you did that’. Like it was really me in that story.
It’s a PSYOP mind fuck. Because everything about CORE is a PSYOP mind fuck.
But they made me read it before they let me go and I have to say, it did end up being pretty accurate.
You go to the store, hungry for food you’ve never eaten.
You choose many things, eager for a taste of what you’ve been missing, and then realize you don’t have any money and must make a choice:
Do you, a) Rob the store and take the food?
Or, b) Put it all back?
This was a literal multiple-choice question. I chose to put it all back, of course, because it’s the textbook answer.
There were about twenty of these questions that needed to be answered before I was allowed to leave and I ticked all the right boxes.
But it’s one thing to be fictional ‘You’ in your first two weeks on the outside and quite another to be literal ‘Me’.
Most of the time when I went into the store, I did pay for it. I worked a few jobs to make ends meet, as they say. I played the game. But it’s all so rigged. I don’t understand how these people on the outside do it. I really, really don’t. It’s so obvious that all the rules and laws are enacted for one reason only: to keep a man down.
Or a woman. Or hell, even a child.
It’s all rigged.
So fuck it. I stopped paying.
Of course, ‘You’ predicted this. There was a whole chapter in that booklet about the court system and what to expect when ‘You’ go to prison.
Also very helpful, actually. Because I did go to prison.
For five years.
And I’m only out now because Charlie Beaufort made it happen.
Take a day for yourself. You look like you need one.
I’m not sure if I should be flattered that he’s taken notice or if Collin Creed telling me to fuck off my first full day at Edge Security as a new recruit is a bad omen of dark things to come, but either way, it doesn’t matter because I need this day off.
I’m sure his directive has more to do with the fact that he wasn’t expecting me to show up at nine o’clock last night, which means he doesn’t know what to do with me this morning, and less to do with my lack of sleep and disheveled appearance after getting a surprise early release from prison three days ago and my subsequent multi-day motorcycle ride across the country to the outskirts of Disciple, West Virginia.
Either way, it’s not good. But none of this is in my control, so I chant the words of wisdom passed on to me by ‘You’ in Do’s and Don’ts: Control the chaos, control yourself.
Of course, it didn’t help me before and that’s why I was in prison. But I’ve grown over the years. I’ve matured. I’ve learned how to live with these outside people, even if it was mostly from the inside of one of their prisons. And I figure, what the fuck? It can’t hurt. Maybe ‘You’ was on to something?
Controlling the chaos inside my head is pretty much the only superpower I have at the moment, so I blow out a breath as I ride into Revenant, slowing down so I can look at the storefronts, and try to absorb the hopeful energy of a fresh start.