Enslaved

I couldn’t believe what was happening. I really did have to choose between the streets and staying with this woman I once had a crush on for reasons I could no longer fathom. Yes, she was still attractive for her age, but she sure seemed to have a lot of hate, anger, greed and ugliness underneath any outer beauty.

 

But I wasn’t stupid either. Of course I wasn’t going to choose the cold unforgiving streets even if it was in my own country with my own language over the bitch from hell.

 

I tried not to think of how long it would take me to save enough to get out of there. I realized that buying an old mobile home in a park once back home or even on a cheaper piece of land was out of the question. The best I would be able to do if I didn’t want to spend the better part of the rest of my life with Emilie was to aim for the cheapest, dumpiest studio apartment I could get.

 

I just couldn’t imagine Emilie putting up with me for that long. Was the extra money really worth my presence to her? If I was supposed to be someone she had come to loathe, then she had to be pretty desperate or planned something evil in the end. I just didn’t see how this could end very well. Figuring she was still going to kick me out soon enough, I knew that all I could do was delay the inevitable. The longer I kept my ass off the streets, foreign or not, the better. So I would do whatever I could to please the woman until then.

 

The deal was that when she got home from work I could go in my room, take a shower, and basically do what I wanted as long as I stayed away from her and gave her space. Once a week we would go out to the grocery store together. Weekends were when I cleaned the apartment and did the laundry.

 

Every Friday she would have me transfer her money online. I was always sure to delete my history and never store account and login information that she might find while I was sleeping or in the shower.

 

She installed a webcam in the kitchen and I was ordered to remain seated at the kitchen table the entire time she was at work and wasn’t allowed to get up unless I had to use the bathroom or get a glass of water or something like that. Since I still had my laptop and my phone, that was my entertainment for those long boring workdays.

 

Emilie didn’t care for me to cook for her. She was content to do her own cooking. She even cooked for me. Every night before bed she would prepare a casserole and that was to feed me for the entire day the following day. She would insist that I save my money at the grocery store toward moving and not get much other than some weekend treats, but I got the feeling for some strange reason that it was all about my weight. I was a few pounds overweight and although I was far from obese, I knew Emilie was big on thinness. I wasn’t sure why it mattered to her. It was my body the extra weight was on and it wasn’t like she was interested in me intimately. Yet she controlled every aspect of my life from the groceries I bought to what I did with my time and when I did it.

 

I shivered and pulled my sweater around me tightly as I sat in the kitchen. Then I rose from my feet and jogged in place. Not just to warm me up but because my butt was getting sore from sitting so much. I faced the window but all I could see were the bare branches at the treetops. I jogged the few feet over to the window and looked down below at the snow-covered landscape. The sky was depressingly gray. The building was silent, and I didn’t see anybody milling about down below. Couldn’t see much from where I was anyway other than the parking lot and part of a road in the distance beyond it. I felt lonely, alone, depressed, helpless and hopeless. Despair settled in the pit of my stomach and I tried to staunch the flow of tears to no avail.

 

After a good cry, I wiped the tears away with my fingers and wondered if the webcam Emilie placed in the corner by the ceiling actually worked. Had she witnessed my tears at work?

 

I wasn’t about to test the camera and find out by wandering into other rooms to snoop into anything I could hence it be for real and I ended up kicked out and onto the streets.