chapter 15: hands around her throat

A pain in her wrist woke her.

August's eyes snapped open as she looked up to see that her hand was handcuffed to the bedpost.

"What the fuck?!" she exclaimed, immediately waking up and violently tugging her pained wrists against the handcuffs, struggling to get loose. Her breathing quickened as she confusedly looked around the empty room. "Willow?!"

But the woman was nowhere to be found. She tried to lean over as far as she could to peer into the living room to see if the woman was watching TV or something of such. "Willow?!" she yelled louder but was only met with her echoes through the hotel room.

A thumping sounded out in her chest, the rabbit's foot hitting her ribcage repeatedly. She was so confused and was going into a psychotic breakdown at the fact that she had woken up completely alone and handcuffed. Willow had told her the previous night that she wouldn't handcuff her, and she never remembered the woman changing her mind before they both fell asleep.

Trying to stable her breathing, August glanced over as a white piece of paper laying on the nightstand beside her caught her eyes. Leaning forward, she grabbed the note with her shaky hand and brought it up to her face, reading the wide and curly letters scrawled across the paper.

"Had to take care of some urgent business. Will be back around lunch, I left one of your hands free so you could have some fun in your alone time," August read the note aloud, her voice raspy. Her cheeks tinged at the woman's words that caused her embarrassment even when written in ink. She stared at the winky face sitting at the end of the sentence, and she imagined the woman and the way she had winked at the waitress at the diner in Colorado.

She crumpled up the paper as much as she could with one hand and tossed it to the ground, scoffing in anger as she threw her head back, closing her eyes as she laid there in distress. As she raised her head up to look at the clock on the wall, she saw that it was 10 o'clock. She could have been facing two or more hours of being handcuffed to that bed.

She had to get out of those metal chains.

Her eyes darted between the space around her, looking for anything in arm's reach that she could use to unlock the cuff on her wrist. The only thing she could reach was the nightstand beside her that contained one drawer.

Leaning over the side of the bed, August extended her arm as far as she possibly could until she reached the bronze latch of the drawer, pulling it open only to be greeted by a completely empty drawer.

"Fuck," she hissed, slamming the drawer closed as hard as she could and wondering why the woman had a completely empty drawer until she remembered that the place was just a hotel and not where the woman permanently lived. As the drawer came to a harsh and loud close, her angry thoughts were interrupted by the light sound of something metal moving inside the drawer. The sound was nearly inaudible.

Her left eyebrow raised as her eyes glanced at the drawer that she thought she had found empty. Quickly reaching over and pulling the drawer open again, she was still met with an empty drawer. But as her eyes further scrutinized the wooden drawer, she realized that even with the drawer pulled out as far as possible, there was still a bit of space left in the very back that wasn't visible from where she was laying.

She hastily reached her hand inside the depth of the drawer, fingers tapping along the surface to try to find the key she swore she heard, when they came across something too thin to be a key. Disappointed but still slightly hopeful, she took the slender object between her fingers and brought it out, seeing that it was a black bobby pin. "Out of all things..." she muttered, staring at the pin with squinted eyes as if it were mocking her.

Then a light bulb lit up above her head. Her mind flashed back to when she had first ever come face to face with Willow in her dorm, as she was pressed against the frame of her twin-sized bed, and she asked her how she got in there. She remembered the woman telling her that she had picked the lock.

The bobby pin was between August's teeth in no time as she used her fingers and teeth to spread the pin apart until it was a nearly straight line. She then poked the pin into the keyhole of the handcuff, not wanting to get her hopes up but too desperate not to. She moved and wobbled the bobby pin throughout the keyhole, but nothing would happen. Her face flushed red with determination as she kept poking and prodding the bobby pin inside the hole, until finally she felt the handcuffs pop open.

"Yes!" she breathed out, dropping the bobby pin onto the floor and letting the cuff fall from her wrist.

She took her sore wrist into her hand, hating the way it had been through so much handcuffing in the past two days.

She jumped up, stretching her arms and yawning. She knew the woman would be mad when she returned to the room to find August roaming about freely, but the girl didn't care. She was elated by her ability to escape those blasted handcuffs, and relieved by her release from them.

Walking over to her suitcase, the girl rummaged through it to find some clothes to put on. Her hand suddenly brushed against something leather. She momentarily froze before pushing all the clothes aside to find the familiar leather texture.

There it was—her journal. A breath escaped her lips as she hugged the worn book tight against her chest as if she were hugging an old, reunited friend. The book wasn't just a diary or daily journal to her—it was her mind in physical form. It was where she released her inner thoughts and the content of her brain onto paper whether by poetry or prose or just a simple entry about her day, for the times she was suffering a writer's block.

She imagined the night Willow had kidnapped her. The woman must have gone through the girl's desk because she always kept it in the very back of her desk to keep it away from Peyton. Willow must have remembered seeing it on the rooftop that one night and found some reason within her to decide to pack it in August's suitcase.

The rooftop. She suddenly yearned the feeling of being on top of and away from the world, as she always felt when she sat on the rooftop of her college dorm. It was the only thing she needed at that moment.

Hotels usually have rooftops, she thought to herself. Another light bulb lit up inside her mind.

But the light bulb dimmed as she glanced to the door, remembering that she was locked away inside the room like a princess locked away in a castle.

The light bulb suddenly brightened yet again. She remembered how the previous day when they left for breakfast, Willow told her that the door didn't lock from the outside.

Her feet padded against the carpet in the bedroom and then against the wooden floor in the living room as she made her way to the door. The air caught in her throat as she placed a timid hand on the cold doorknob, slowly turning it and hoping with everything in her that it was unlocked.

It was. She peeked the door open just wide enough that she could see the empty hallway outside.

She could escape. Willow was not anywhere near to stop her, to throw her against the wall or press the metal barrel of a gun to her head. She could keep her head low and walk out just like that.

But for some reason, she didn't. Maybe it was because she was too afraid or because Jerry stayed beside the front door of the lobby or because one of Willow's gangster friends would probably recognize her and not have such a merciful hand as Willow's. Or maybe it was because she wouldn't even know what to do if she made it outside the hotel doors. She was all the way in Utah, far from her dorm in New York or her dad in Texas. She was stuck in an obscure hotel in the middle of a Midwestern desert. She wouldn't know what to do beyond the confinements of the woman's hold. But she decided it wouldn't hurt to explore those particular confinements.

Closing the door, she quickly changed into the same jeans she wore the previous day and a tight maroon turtleneck, over-spritzing her French vanilla perfume on her neck and applying Carmex to her cupid lips as she slipped into her Vans. Slipping on her thin black jacket for an extra layer against the December cold that she was soon to feel, she grabbed her journal and found a pen sitting on top of the table in the living room.

She stopped right at the door, taking a deep inhale. She would only be gone for just an hour at most, she told herself. She would come back and change back into her pajamas and re-cuff herself before Willow got back and it would be like nothing ever happened, like she had been laying miserably cuffed to the bed all morning and waiting for Willow's return.

Slowly opening the door, she took the first vitalizing step outside the hotel room. She froze, listening for any footsteps or voices. After hearing none, she closed the door and slowly walked to the elevator, keeping the journal and pen pressed tightly against her stomach. She pressed the up button beside the elevator, praying to God that no one would be in there.

It was out of sheer luck that no one was. Now all she had to do was go up the very highest floor without anyone getting in. She looked at the keypad and saw that the highest floor was level 6. She sighed, relieved at the fact that she only had to get through two floors.

She nervously tucked a strand of her curly brown hair behind her ear, heart beating fast as the elevator lifted her up two floors. After it reached the sixth floor and the doors slid open, August took a small step outside the elevator, her head turning both ways to peer down the long hallway. Listening for any voices and being met with only silence, August began slowly walking, deciding to take a left. She nearly jumped as the elevator doors closed behind her.

The hallway was completely empty, which August assumed was either because everyone was still asleep even in those late hours of the morning, or they were all in the lobby drinking and laughing as they always seemed to do.

Looking at every door she passed, all she was met with were numbers. Sighing, she began to think that maybe there was no roof access in the building, meaning she took such a leap of bravery for nothing.

Then she turned a corner and saw a door that had four letters spelling out "ROOF" on it. Grinning, August skipped to the metal door and swung it open, being met with a spiral staircase that she immediately began running up, the sounds of her hard shoes hitting the metal echoing throughout the damp, concrete room that held the staircase.

Her excitement grew as she neared a door, and she sucked in a breath of freedom as she pushed the door open, being met with the cold but fresh outside air and sunlight. Stepping out and letting the door swing shut behind her, her breath hitched as she stared across the tops of the trees that eventually waned and revealed the red Utah desert. She even could see the rock formation that she and Willow had visited the previous day. She wished she could see the small spring from there, but she remembered how thin that trail of water was.

She turned in circles, taking in all the sights and adoring the feeling of cold air nipping at her nose. The breaths she drew in were the clearest ones she'd taken in a while. She was finally completely alone and not handcuffed to the bed in the windowless hotel room. The view on that hotel rooftop that she let her eyes soak up was one much more magnificent than the one of her college campus.

Walking over towards the ledge but keeping her distance, August sat down with her back facing the door, the coldness of the concrete roof almost hurting her butt. But she enjoyed the cold feeling, the wind picking up and causing her hair to fall from behind her ear. She thanked herself for wearing a turtleneck and deciding to put on the black jacket even if it was thin.

Chewing on her lower lip, August's cold and nimble fingers paged through her journal to the first empty page, and her right hand brought the pen against the coarse paper.

So much had happened in her life since the last time she wrote which was probably four or five days ago, she assumed. It had only taken a matter of days for her entire world to be turned upside and shaken about. She should have had so much to write about, and so many different ideas popped into her head; but for some reason there was one specific thing that pestered her mind as she tried to think of a topic. The thing wouldn't leave her alone, and that's how she knew that she had to write about it. That's how she usually decided a topic—if something was eating at her mind and she felt like she shouldn't be writing about it, she would write about that thing just to get it out of her head.

So ink met paper as she began writing, taking pauses to find the right words to describe all the images and phrases fleetingly passing throughout her mind. She had to grab them while she could and hold onto them, letting them out onto the paper before they would vanish from her mind. Her hand ached at the force with which she wrote, but she loved it.

But her journal fell out of her hand as she jumped at the sound of the door behind her being thrown open, and the pen fell from her open palm as two hands wrapped themselves around her throat.