Chapter 6: Awakening Amidst the Rubble

Élianor

The night swallowed me. After fleeing the town hall, the laughter stuck to my skin like a burn, I didn't have the strength to go home. Face Liora's gaze, my parents' hushed questions? Impossible. My body was nothing but an empty shell, vibrating with shame.

I found myself in front of a seedy bar on the outskirts of town, a place where the light was dim and glances indifferent. I pushed open the door. The smell of stale beer and cold tobacco greeted me. It was perfect.

I settled at the counter and ordered a drink. Then another. The alcohol burned my throat, but it was a simple, clean pain, drowning out the other one, the devastating one of Raphaël's betrayal. Each gulp was a poisoned balm that erased a little more of the memory of his smile, his sweet words, his lies.

The bar lights became blurry. Voices turned into a distant hum. I no longer thought. I no longer felt. I was a shipwreck letting itself sink, drunk on pain and cheap whiskey. Silhouettes came to talk to me. Coarse laughter. Hands that brushed my shoulder. It was blurry, distant. I don't remember a particular face. Just a male presence, a deep voice saying things I didn't listen to. I clung to that anonymous presence like a lifebuoy in my sea of distress. It was preferable to solitude, to the frightful emptiness.

Then, nothing. A black hole.

Daylight pierces my eyelids like a blade. A dull pain pulses at my temples, and an acrid nausea twists in my stomach. I am lying down. This is not my bed.

The smell is the first thing that strikes me. It's not the smell of my room. It's a smell of man, of sweat, of stale air, of cold tobacco. An unknown smell.

I open my eyes, slowly, my head heavy. The ceiling is low, cracked. The room is small, messy. Dirty clothes are strewn on a chair. An empty beer bottle sits on the nightstand.

And I am naked.

An icy cold, far more terrible than the hangover, suddenly seizes me. I sit up with a start, my heart pounding fit to burst, the sheet pulled up to my chin. The movement awakens a throbbing, diffuse pain between my thighs. A pain I had never known.

My panicked gaze sweeps the room. There is no one.

But on the pillow next to me, a trace. The imprint of a head. The pillow is crumpled. And on the sheet, a stain. A small, brownish, rust-colored stain, that looks like dried blood.

The blood.

Reality hits me full force, violent, obscene.

I never went home. I got drunk. A man brought me here. And this pain... this stain...

I am no longer a virgin.

I gasp for breath. The room starts spinning. Nausea rises, uncontrollable, and I lean over the bed, vomiting a mixture of alcohol and bile onto the dirty floor. My whole body trembles, shaken by silent, hiccupping sobs.

It was supposed to be beautiful. It was supposed to be a gift, an act of love. Not this. Not in an alcoholic blackout, with a stranger whose face I don't even remember, in a sordid bed. I was stripped of that too. My first time was stolen from me, just like my dignity.

I get up, staggering, wrapped in the soiled sheet. I gather my clothes scattered on the floor. My dress, the one I had put on for "my surprise," is crumpled, stained. Every gesture is an agony. Every breath reminds me of the smell of this room, the smell of this man, the smell of my own downfall.

I dress hastily, my fingers trembling. I don't want to stay another second here. I leave the room, cross a small, seedy living room, and find myself in the street, in broad daylight. The sunlight is cruel, indecent.

I walk, legs wobbling, body aching, soul in tatters. The shame of the previous day, Raphaël's betrayal, is now covered, crushed by a deeper shame, more intimate, dirtier.

I sneak back home. Fortunately, no one is there. I go straight to the bathroom, I look at myself in the mirror. My eyes are hollow, my face swollen from tears and alcohol. I undress and slip under the scorching shower. I scrub, I scrub until my skin is red, raw, as if to tear off the stain, the smell, the memory of that night.

But it doesn't go away. The pain between my thighs is a constant reminder. The stain on the sheet is seared into my memory like a brand.

I thought I was at the bottom of the well after Raphaël's betrayal. I was wrong. He had only pushed me to the edge. That night, in that unknown bed, I hit rock bottom. A muddy, icy bottom, where nothing matters anymore. Where you are nothing anymore.

I collapse at the bottom of the bathtub, hot water streaming over my body that is no longer quite mine. And in the roar of the water, a new oath is forged, darker, more definitive than all the others. An oath of silence, of survival. And of vengeance.

This town, these people, took everything from me. My dignity, my innocence, my hope.

One day, I will return. And I will take everything from them in return.