Chapter 8: One time only.

I really wasn't expecting to be slapped. Satsuki hadn't done that ever before, and I never had seen her as a threat of physical harm. Two seconds after slapping me, she retracted —somehow pretending that nothing had happened. I started crying silently, inwards.

As shocked as I was in the minutes after, I wouldn't have called it abuse: I knew there weren't going to be more instances of that —as long as I didn't cross her tight boundaries again. I knew that it was an anomaly, and that she would not get anything good out of it: no drunken sense of superiority from violence, as her addiction to control worked at a different level.

Only a faint sense of regret. If at all.

I walked out of that room, a wall of trauma blocking whatever I had read. I walked out and went to the backyard to cuddle with Shadows. Satsuki prepared dinner without requesting any help, then she called me to the table. Her tone being one of the softest I remember from her.

The dinner was silent, without eye contact.

After, she told me to go to sleep. She'd clean the dishes.

We never talked about that day, and I never entered her room again.