But Not Quite...

It goes without saying that if there is a reason you have left somebody behind, you should keep them left behind. However, some people are lonely. Some people are naïve. Some just don't feel like they have what they need. And some people just want to be hurt. Lana was all of those at once, or so she felt. She should have known that opening up that door would be too much...she should have known that after he told her he loved her. After he used his strange power of words to convince her to let her guard down...

However, she felt powerless at the same time she felt so truly and utterly in love.

How the hell did this happen to her? Just a few weeks prior, she was sorting out the details of a quarantine meetup with her girlfriend of over a year...waiting until they could finally see each other again. But here she was, having agreed to go with her sister to Colorado for the summer. Her sister that seemed to hate her, seemed to want nothing more than to twist her thoughts against her. But Lana thought she was strong. Was she really strong?

Her phone buzzed in her hand as she thought about the events of the night before. She had...let him...go back to his ways, the same way they were when they split. She had been told his family didn't approve of her, and that they had to break up. It seemed that everything would have gone back to normal after she changed schools. It should have been the end. Her family was fine with the choice, despite him being 3 years her senior, but told her to respect his family's wishes...which she tried to do.

At the time, she didn't regret a thing. She was too focused on getting him to "love" her, keeping him and his boyfriend interested in her. She loved them...she loved them. A voice clip was what greeted her, probably a good morning message and something...darker. Lana took a deep breath and pressed play, hearing his voice confirming her suspicions. Her heart raced as she looked around, unwilling to be caught in such a place, in such a messed-up state. Maybe she did regret it...but it more than likely excited her.

Her "strong, helpful, and rational" self seemed to fall away, instead being replaced with the human equivalent of a voice assistant. She had become something unlike anything before...she was subservient now, needing to be controlled. She wanted to be alone, wanted to be alone with him. There were plans...if she could find a way to get there. She was due home in late July...she could make it work, she could make it work. She wasn't needed to do anything here, so she began to speak into the phone, expressing her submission and her actions through her soft voice and her text messages. She needed to feel the rush of him and his boyfriend...

She wanted to be something with her life...wanted to give herself to the person who made her feel whole. She wanted to be with them, give them her future. Both of the men needed her future. But...didn't somebody else have that promised to her? She could make it end...she could make it end. But what was she making end? What even needed to end? Herself? No, not that. Her feeling of this...dark and submissive energy. However, she wasn't going to change herself. This energy was her energy. This seemed to be all that she was capable of being, with only a little longer until she could leave and embrace it and be taken care of as she founds ways to better herself.

She would be out of the hell that her mind had put her through. Lana knew that much. She would run as soon as she got back to familiar territory, she would find at least him. His boyfriend could be on video chat, but she could live her life with him. She could escape to the world she wanted to live.

She continued to type out her increasingly steamy replies, as she had given herself away to him piece by piece, letting his shadow overtake her as he pulled away the exposed pieces and showed the bare pieces that would take spreading and prodding to see. Only he had seen them...him and his boyfriend...they had her in the palms of their hands. She was nothing but ready to prostrate herself at their feet...but she couldn't yet...

Her dirty deeds had taken the whole day, on and off, while there was work to be done. While she took as many opportunities to slip away as possible, slip alone or into a bathroom or the room she changed in so as to not be heard or seen while she did increasingly dark things...

It all came crashing down on her that night. She had taken a shower, sending a promise for more of herself afterwards, whilst her family kept reaching out to her, calling and texting her as well as calling her sister up until she had come out of the shower and had been walked into her room.

What followed was a haze of shame and tears as Lana heard her mother reading her most intimate conversations aloud, her continuing to talk about how she was ashamed in her, disappointed, how she hurt everyone, how she was a liar who could never be trusted...or that's how she saw it. Lana ruined his life...his and his married boyfriend's lives...they were going to be charged or beaten...she didn't care about her own life anymore. She cared about the lives she had destroyed, but not hers. She knew she wouldn't have much of a life anymore, but there wasn't much worth living for.

She had to put up with the scathing emotion of her older sister, who would obviously rant to her church friends about the slut she lived with, the problem she could never solve...

Lana didn't think she could fall any further down. She was quite wrong. An urge that she had kept repressed would always resurface, she would never stop thinking about them...but another dangerous urge took hold. It had been a couple of weeks after the event when Lana got it in her head to light a match. There was no intent besides lighting the match, but still she was reckless. It was the middle of the summer in one of the hottest years in history, in one of the driest places. She clearly had it out for someone. She was clearly crying out for attention. Why couldn't she just behave for once? Did she like hurting people?

It seemed like the other way around. Everyone had it out for her, nobody wanted to admit what they were doing. They were forcing her to admit just how dark she was, just how irredeemable she was...they were forcing her to hurt her mind for the sake of their twisted amusement, all while framing it as her wanting them to hurt...

Or so she believed.

That poor girl couldn't even begin to fathom how much they (or at least, some of them) loved her.