Poor Girl
Source: Unsplash/FFP
By R.J.F.
Can you run when you need to?
“You want one?” It had been almost two years since she’d smoked a cigarette, and he caught her at just the right time. She’d had a shitty week that left her feeling defeated. Her conference call with the corporate office had gone south, her landlord was going to raise the rent, and her ex had thought it would be a good time to announce his engagement all over social media. Why she still followed all of his accounts is anyone’s guess. Stress always made her crave a smoke, so she decided to go for it.
As she picked the last cigarette out of his pack, she felt a little guilty. Guilty because it was his last smoke, but more guilty because she was going to break her streak. “Sure,” she responded and delicately pulled the cigarette from the pack. He liked to smoke from soft packs, so the last cigarette in there was slightly damaged, but it didn’t deter her.
Guilt was the main driving force that made her stop smoking in the first place. Every time she would light up, all she could think about was getting cancer, so she had decided to stop. Every now and again she thought about walking to the liquor store down the street to buy a pack, but she had resisted.
But here, now, on this empty street corner with him, she made a choice.
She noticed how clean his nails were as he lit her cigarette. She had always liked how it looked when someone lit a cigarette for her, cupping their free hand over the lighter and cigarette even if there wasn’t a breeze; it was so intimate to almost be holding hands.
It only took a few drags for that cigarette high to kick in, that lightheadedness she used to get when it had been awhile since her last smoke. Funny, she used to like this feeling when she was younger, but now she didn’t trust it because it had always gotten her in trouble.
Usually, the lightheaded feeling would subside as the cherry progressed to eat up the cigarette, but this wasn’t happening. “You feeling okay over there,” he asked with a grin on his face.
There was something in that grin that made her feel uneasy, a glint that wasn’t teasing, but rather, predatory. Then, nothing, blackness.
“You trust people too easily.” She was struggling to open her eyes. It was taking a lot of effort to support her own head, as well. What was that statistic about the average weight of a human head? It took a couple of moments for her to see clearly and not strain to stay upright. She looked down at her body and was relieved to see she was still clothed. She wasn’t tied to the chair she was in, she wasn’t in any pain, so she assumed that nothing terrible had happened to her while she was blacked out.
“What the fuck?! Did you lace that cigarette or something? Where are we?” He could sense a panic in her voice and he liked that, but he didn’t want her to try and fight him, or worse, run; it’s never good when they try to run.
“No, it wasn’t laced. At least, I don’t think it was.” Again, that unnerving grin stretched across his face. At one point in the past, before this incident, she had found him handsome. God, why was she so stupid when it came to men?
“Well, then, what happened?”
“What do you think happened?”
She was puzzled as to why he wasn’t answering her questions. She had always believed him to be a friendly acquaintance, but was now getting a gnawing feeling in her gut that she was wrong. “I don’t fucking know what happened!”
“Like I said, you’re too trusting. Didn’t you quit smoking like a year ago? I’m surprised you accepted my offer for a cigarette, but I guess a moment of weakness is a moment of weakness.”
She furrowed her brow at this statement and gave him a nasty look.
“Are you going to tell me what happened or not?”
His back was turned on her now, but she heard his heavy sigh and saw his shoulders slump down a little. “I don’t know. As you can see, you’re not tied down or anything, you can get up and leave if you want.” He was taking a risk in telling her she was free to go. The last time this happened, he hadn’t mentioned this fact and things had ended messily.
Yet, she continued to sit there. Part of her wanted to run, part of her was scared to try and run only to find out she couldn’t, and part of her wanted answers.
“I don’t get you. Is this an anti-smoking thing or something? And again, like you didn’t hear me before, did you lace that cigarette you gave me?” Now she was getting angry. She could feel the rage starting to build in her lower back and knew it would burst forward at any moment. It had been like this since she was a kid. Any time she got angry, a tingling sensation would start in her lower back and creep up her spine until she couldn’t control herself.
He turned around and it took all of her self control to not jump up and start pummeling him, but his grin killed the anger.
“I think you and I are very similar,” he said calmly. “We trust people too much, we are weak in the face of temptation, and we don’t know how to walk away when we should.”
“Fuck you. You don’t know me half as well as you think you do.”
“I know you well enough to know that you’ve thought about running out the door, but you can’t seem to do it. What does it matter if the cigarette was laced or not? You’re here now, you’re angry and frightened, yet powerless to your own agenda of finding out the truth.” With this statement, he shrugged and took a step forward.
She sat there half stunned, half infuriated. “Fine, I’ll leave,” she said, but made no attempt to move.
“An empty threat from an empty girl.” He took another step forward.
“Don’t come closer,” she warned. And yet, she wasn’t moving to get away from him. She quickly realized that she couldn’t do it, she couldn’t get up and walk out. She knew she should, she knew the situation was getting dangerous, but she couldn’t force herself to stand up and walk out the door.
He made a tsk tsk sound and took another step in her direction. “See, you can’t leave. I’ve told you that you can, and yet…”, his voice trailed off, another step. He was directly in front of her now, peering down at her petrified face. “Poor girl, you just don’t know what’s good for you.”