Shame A Novel Novels & Stories

Instead they just sat in my chest now, hollow, because the truth was I didn’t understand what I was anymore. I wasn’t Ella, not here. I wasn’t fully Chloe either, not in any way that felt real. I was some third thing, invented out of necessity, wearing a stranger’s name over a body that was quietly, secretly, becoming someone else’s future. By the time I reached my room, the anger had burned itself down to something colder and far more useful. Shame, I’d learned a long time ago, could be survived. It could even be used, if a person was patient enough and cruel enough to herself in the right ways.

Then softly: “How do you feel?” Elena thought about it honestly. Then smiled faintly. “Okay.” God. That answer mattered more than it sounded. Years ago, being publicly perceived triggered fear, pressure, performance. Now? Now she simply felt okay. Safe. Adrian studied her quietly. “You know what I realized reading that article?” “What?” “I don’t feel ashamed of our story anymore.” God. Her chest tightened softly. Because shame absolutely haunted both of them once. The mistakes. The separation. The emotional damage.

It was embarrassing enough that my first day at work was horrible,now this. I ran out of the restaurant in my muimui heels and headed to my apartment. I locked the door behind like I was being chased by a pack of blood feasting zombies and ran into the bathroom. I searched the cupboard for some pads or tampons. And rushed into the shower. I pounded in my mind on deconstructing the shame that society had put on my biological process but I couldn't get past the fact that Asher had seen my bloody pants. I could careless about if the whole New York City see a map of blood on my pants but why was I conscious about what Asher thought of me?

Friendly overtures, attempts to prove she was not a crazy sex fiend. She had nothing to be ashamed of, she told herself. Just because her relationship did not look like most everyone else’s did not make it bad. Compared to some so-called normal relationships, hers was far healthier for everyone involved. But stuck in her head was the image from a movie she had once seen where a crowd of scandalized people had hissed and pointed at the heroine: Shame! Shame on you! Shame! “Why are we stopping?” Alexei was immediately alert, sliding along the seats to the driver’s window and pulling it open. “What is up?”

She smiled, adjusted her scarf, and shuffled away. Sienna’s words came back to me then, ringing clearly in my head. It always does. My past, my shame, my humiliatio n, it had followed me here like a shadow. What was I even doing, thinking that coming to a new town would erase my past and who I was?

The air ripples. Suddenly, the environment shifts. We aren't in the void anymore. We are back in the hotel room from Chapter 63. I see myself on my hands and knees. I see Alex behind me. I hear him calling me a whore. It’s the recording. The degradation. She’s weaponizing our shame. "Look at you," Evelyn sneers, her giant face filling the sky. "Pathetic. Broken. Do you really think you are heroes? You are livestock." The shame hits me like a physical blow—a cold, slimy wave trying to drown me. My knees buckle.

Not quite as hard as the first time I'd seen it, but still heavy, frightening, impossible not to stare at. Shame swept through me, mixing with an ache so fierce it almost hurt. My thighs pressed together tightly under my dress, a desperate, useless attempt to hold back the wetness slipping between them. “Tell me the honest truth,” he murmured, stepping closer, voice cruel in its softness. “Do you like what you see?”

It is a question I already know the answer to. “Because I was ordered to.” The conversation ends there and he goes back to his book and I am left once more wondering who it is that I am married to. I craft a book in my mind and I dig out the tunnels of thought that I am trapped within. I give faces to the emotions that live within me. Shame is a vile man with dark eyes, and he lives in my mind. Melancholy has hair the color of snow and lips tainted blue. She lives in my heart. My eyes, my eyes are fear. I am a map of emotions and tunnels. I do not find a face for happiness. It is not a character I have met yet.

“It changed fast. After the first day, I stopped caring about you. I stopped thinking about you at all. I just cared about being there with him.” I still didn’t look at Shawn. I couldn’t. “I’m embarrassed about a lot of things,” I said quietly. “That I went that far. That I went to learn sex from a man just to satisfy another man. It sounds ridiculous when I say it out loud. I was ridiculous.” Shame burned through me, old and familiar. “I’m ashamed of my actions,” I continued. “Of every single one of them.” I closed my eyes for a moment, then finally forced myself to look at Shawn.

I turned on my heel and climbed the stairs, each step heavier than the last, my body moving sluggishly as if through water. The second the door snapped shut behind me, my knees buckled. I slid along the floor, back to the wood, panting in my throat. My fingers clutched hard in my lap as if holding on was going to prevent the rest of me from falling apart. My throat burned with uncried tears, and for what seemed like forever, I sat there in that muffled hurricane of emotion, just shaking. Shame weighed heavily in my chest. Not because of the picture. Not even because of Eleanor's toxic accusations. But because for one brief, shameful moment, when Adrian said to his grandmother he loved me, my