The building looked black and deserted. Mick opened Susan’s door.
3.
The common understanding is that once the stimulus overstays its welcome, it stops being effective. The pain lasts until the numbness kicks in. For instance, try hitting yourself in the eye, repeatedly. Sure, at first, you’re in agony but over time, the whole area turns numb and the hits don’t really produce any result any more. Right?
Well, it depends on how you define result. Keep hitting yourself, and you’ll poke your eye out. Keep scratching that itch and you’ll draw blood eventually, then strip the flesh off the bone. The point is – numbness itself doesn’t really help. The damage keeps getting done. [URL=https://judymerylkaplan.com/]judymerylkaplan.com[/URL] You can pretend you don’t care, but you’ll care in the end. You will.
This was approximately what Susan was thinking about as they walked her across the sidewalk, through the door and up the stairs. With a lot less reliance on clumsy metaphors, of course. Her heels clicked and produced dull echoes that had something mean and ominous about them. She knew that the things were getting worse. Being forced to orally satisfy a man in a car is humiliating, scary and horrible. But being taken into an ugly, decrepit building, her arm under Shane’s, cold metal of his knife touching the small of her back, that promised a whole new area of ugliness. Susan was shivering. This could not be happening. Not to her. Not to her. What has she done? What has she done to deserve this? How could this be true?