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You squeeze your knees so tightly your muscles ache, but it doesn’t ground you, it only makes your breath shake harder. Your skin feels too tight, too wrong, like it doesn’t fit you anymore. Every time you inhale, the ghost of Britain’s touch crawls up under your clothes, phantom fingers brushing places you can still feel even though she is gone. It should be over. It should be done. But your body doesn’t understand “gone.” Your body only understands memory.
A wave of nausea rolls through you, sudden and violent. It twists up your throat, leaving a bitter taste you can’t swallow down. You curl in on yourself even more, like folding smaller might make the memory disappear, like maybe if you make yourself tiny enough, the memory won’t be able to sit beside you, won’t be able to climb back onto your skin. But there it is, lingering like smoke after a fire, choking you even when the flames are gone.
You look down at yourself again, at your legs pulled close, at the rumpled fabric of your clothes, at the way your body curls inward like it is trying to hide from itself. Your breathing is shallow, terrified, as though the air might hurt you if you take too much of it in.
You try not to look. God, you try. You promise yourself you won’t. You squeeze your eyes shut. You look at the walls, the floor, the corner of the room, anywhere else. But your eyes drift downward anyway (you were always too curious for your own good), past your legs, your thighs, toward the place where everything happened. The fabric bunched sharply over it is enough to make your stomach twist, your breath stuttering, your chest tightening. Even without seeing anything directly, the sight hits you like a punch, and something inside you curls painfully.
Your breath catches in your throat, sharp and cutting, like a blade hooking under your ribs. The room tilts for a second, too bright and too dark at the same time. Even without seeing anything directly, the way the fabric lies over you makes your breath shatter. It’s like evidence. Like proof. Like the universe knows.
A horrible realization crawls up your spine, cold and merciless.
You’ll never be clean again. Not really. Not after this. Not after what she took. Not after what she left behind.
You can’t stop asking yourself why. Why her. Why you. What did you do to deserve this? Was it something in the way you looked at her, the way you trusted her, the way you didn’t fight fast enough? Or was it nothing at all, just the cruel randomness of someone’s power, someone’s whim, someone who could take without care, without reason? The thought makes your stomach knot tighter. There is no answer that fits, no explanation that makes sense. And that makes it worse. Because if there is no reason, if it wasn’t anything you did, then it wasn’t just your body that’s been violated, it’s the fragile belief that the world is fair, that people can be trusted, that comfort can exist without fear.
The shame hits you all at once, sharp and suffocating.
Disgust clings to you like oil. You feel filthy. Rotten. Tainted. Like something inside you has been stained permanently, something deep, something you can’t wash off or shake out or scream away. A part of you that had been quietly holding on all these years has snapped, leaving you raw and exposed.
Your fingers curl into the fabric of your sleeves, knuckles whitening as you pull at them like you could peel your own “impure” skin away if you tugged hard enough. If you could just scrape off the places she touched, to feel clean once again. If you could just tear away everything that feels wrong, contaminated, ruined. If you could just stop remembering.
A tear splashes onto your knee before you realize you are crying again. Your throat aches, tight from holding back sobs you don’t want to release, sobs you don’t think you deserve to release. You don’t deserve comfort, not when you let this happen, not when you froze instead of fighting, not when part of you still shakes in fear instead of fury.
Your voice cracks as a thought tears through you, not spoken, but felt, raw and painful:
I’m disgusting.
The words echo in your mind, pounding with your heartbeat, sinking deeper and deeper until it hurts just to exist inside your own body. Your chest rises and falls too quickly, your fingers tremble uncontrollably.
I’m disgusting… I let this happen… I should’ve stopped her… why didn’t I stop her?
Your entire body tenses at the thought. A tremor runs through you, small at first, then stronger, shaking you like a leaf in the winter wind. You press your palms to your eyes, desperate to stop the thoughts, the memories, the sensation of her hands that still feel etched into your skin like bruises you can’t see.
But the panic only rises, suffocating and relentless.
Your body doesn’t feel like your own. It feels violated, contaminated, wrong in the worst ways you could think of.
You keep trying to breathe, but every breath feels like swallowing glass. Every inhale stings. Every exhale feels too loud in the quiet room. Your own heartbeat feels like an intruder in your chest, pounding against you instead of for you.
Every inch of you feels unsafe, unfamiliar, like you are trapped inside a shell that no longer belongs to you. Like you have been pushed out of yourself and are only now realizing you have nowhere to go.
The crawling sensation intensifies, spreading across your thighs, up your torso, ghostly and horrifyingly vivid. You choke on a sob, trying to rub the feeling away, pressing harder, harder, until your skin stings under your clothes. You scrub at yourself through fabric, as though pressure alone might erase the memory. But it doesn't stop, and never will after this horrible day.
The more you try to wipe it away, the more you feel it. The phantom touch grows more real with every panicked movement. A memory paints over your nerves until you can’t tell what is real and what isn’t.
Another tremor shakes you, and you curl even tighter, as if you could fold yourself into nothingness. If you could make yourself small enough, maybe the world would stop pressing against you. Maybe the guilt would loosen its grip. Maybe the suffocating filth coating every corner of your mind and body would finally let you breathe.
You think of Khaled again: the warmth he always gives, the safety, the way you always feel clean around him, steady around him, human around him. Khaled has always been a quiet anchor, a steady pulse of comfort in the background of your chaos. A place you run to without thinking, without fear.
And the shame deepens. How could you ever tell Khaled any of this, what would you even say, and what would he think if he saw you like this? He'd definitely look down on you and you can imagine the sickened expression on his face while scolding you. The thought alone twists inside you. You feel exposed, unworthy, not clean enough, not strong enough, not okay enough to deserve comfort. Not tonight. Not after everything.
Not when all you can feel is this horrible, suffocating filth clinging to you, inside and out.
And then another shame piles onto the rest, smaller but cutting just as deep. You think about how often you go to him, how often you talk and rant and spill everything you’re feeling, how you cling to him like he’s the only safe place left. You hate how whiny that must make you seem, how annoying, how exhausting. You hate that you always run to him with your messes, like he doesn’t have enough of his own. The thought makes your stomach twist. You don’t want to be a burden. You don’t want to be the person who needs too much. And yet he is the only one you want right now. The only one you need.
A strangled breath escapes you, thin and trembling. Your chest feels crushed under a weight you don’t know how to carry. You shouldn’t feel like this. You’re too young, too innocent to be experiencing this. You should be thinking about normal things, not trying to scrub off someone else’s hands.
You press your forehead to the floor tiles now, the cold biting into your skin, grounding you just enough to keep you from sobbing outright. The chill spreads through your skin, shocking, almost painful, but real, and real is better than the memory snapping at your heels.
You stay there, shaking, breathing in shallow gasps. Your tears drip onto the tiles, disappearing as quickly as they fall. But nothing can quiet the thought that keeps returning, vicious and unrelenting:
I’m disgusting.
I’m filthy.
I’ll never get this off me.
You squeeze your eyes shut, but darkness doesn’t help. If anything, it makes it worse. Whenever you close your eyes, you can see flashes of it again. Britain’s hand. The room. The feeling of powerlessness that swallowed you whole. You swallow hard, but it doesn’t clear your throat. The block remains, thick and painful. Your hands drift to your stomach, clutching the fabric of your shirt in white-knuckled fists, as though holding yourself together physically might keep you from breaking apart.
You try to breathe normally.
You can’t.
You try to stop shaking.
You can’t.
You try to stop remembering.
You can’t.
You can’t seem to do anything right now. It's the only thing you don't blame yourself for, somewhat.
And somewhere beneath all of that, beneath the panic, the filth, the choking guilt, there is a softer breaking point, a tiny voice cracking open inside you. A plea.
Barely audible, barely formed, but so terribly, heartbreakingly sincere:
Khaled… please… I don’t know what to do…
You don’t say it out loud.
You don’t need to, he’ll hear, maybe, hopefully.
If he wasn’t busy with whatever he has going on.
The room feels too quiet now, almost cruelly so, like the walls themselves are waiting for you to break completely. Your skin itches, your muscles burn from tensing for so long, and still, the memory lingers. You imagine trying to scrub it out, trying to pull the filth from under your nails, from your hair, from your body, but it is stuck to you like glue. Stubborn. Permanent. You will always carry it. You will always feel it.
You curl smaller, rocking back and forth, clinging to yourself, to the floor, to anything solid. The room is too bright, too cold, too heavy with your own breathing. You wish you could disappear entirely, fold yourself out of the world like origami, vanish into nothing and leave this world, the phantom touches, the shame, and the memory behind.
But you can’t. Because you are still here, crying, trembling and unfortunately for you, still breathing.
And you have never felt further from the person you once were.
Nor more desperately in need of the one person who has always made you feel whole.