Page 100 of The Wrong Man

The shower is on. I can hear the water running through the pipes. It feels significant somehow. Dylan is in my bathroom, naked and wet, washing away the evidence of last night.

I should not be thinking about that. I should not be picturing the water running down his skin, tracing the same paths my hands traced hours ago. I should not be remembering the sounds he made, the way he looked at me, the devastating vulnerability in his eyes when he came apart.

I push away from the table and stand up abruptly. I need to do something. Anything. Something to occupy my hands and my mind before I drive myself insane.

The dishes. I can do the dishes.

It is a mundane task, almost laughably domestic given who I am and what I do. But there is something grounding about it. The hot water. The soap. The simple act of making something clean.

I gather the plates from the table and carry them to the sink. Turn on the tap. Reach for the dish liquid.

The sound comes from the bathroom. A heavy thud, like a body hitting tile. And then a noise that makes my blood turn to ice.

A strangled, animal sound of pure terror.

Dylan.

I am moving before I consciously decide to move. My feet carry me down the hallway at a dead sprint, my heart pounding against my ribs, every worst case scenario flashing through my mind in rapid succession.

The bathroom door is locked. Of course it is. Dylan always locks the door, a habit born of the few scraps of privacy I have allowed him.

I don’t hesitate. I slam my shoulder into the wood with all the force I can muster.

The door splinters. The lock gives way. Bits of the frame fly everywhere, scattering across the bathroom floor like shrapnel.

And there is Dylan.

Pressed into the far corner of the bathroom, as far from the shower as he can possibly get. Naked and dripping wet, his skin pale and covered in goosebumps. His eyes are wide and glassy, staring at the shower with an expression of absolute horror.

He is not seeing me. He is not seeing anything in this room.

He is somewhere else entirely. Somewhere terrible.

The shower is still running. I look at it, trying to understand what happened, and details click into place. The steam that should be fogging the mirror is absent. The water hitting the tiles sounds different, sharper somehow.

The water is cold.

Ice cold, from the looks of Dylan’s shivering body.

And suddenly I understand.

My plumbing is shit. I have known this for years, but it has never mattered because I live alone. When I run the hot tap in the kitchen, it pulls hot water away from the rest of the flat. I never really noticed before because there has never been anyone else using the water at the same time as me.

Dylan was standing under the spray, probably lost in thought, probably trying not to think about last night, and suddenly the water turned to ice.

Just like it did in my studio.

When I hosed him down with freezing water. When I placed the chair he was tied to under the cold spray. When I used the shock of the temperature to keep him disoriented, to break down his resistance, to make him more pliable for what came next. When I cruelly washed away the evidence of him pissing himself from the horror of watching me work.

Then I left him there, in his cold, wet clothes, long enough to get hypothermia. Long enough to then develop pneumonia. I nearly killed him with cold water. Twice.

The guilt hits me like a sucker punch to the gut. It doubles me over, makes me grip the doorframe for support, and steals the air from my lungs.

I thought he was doing well.

I thought, stupidly, naively, that maybe the pneumonia had blurred the worst of his memories. That the fever dreams had somehow softened the edges of what I did to him. That he was recovering, healing, moving past the trauma I inflicted.

I was wrong. I was so desperately, pathetically wrong.