I should have known. Maybe I did know. I didn’t move around with constant paranoia for the fun of it, after all. I knew what he was capable of. That leaving me alone only meant that he, personally, wouldn’t come and get me. He never said anything about not messing with me indirectly. Fuck.

“To sum things up. You would go to him, ask him to not lock you up, and we would work together to send him behind bars. Once he’s there, I will make sure he doesn’t have time to mess with you. You will be free to find a job, and he won’t be able to interfere with you keeping it. While he is kept busy, I’ll even help you move to another country, if you want, so he will never find you again even if he does get out. As I know I’m asking you for a lot, I will also throw in money enough for you to live comfortably until you are able to settle down. Is there anything I missed?”

“Only the part about me not having agreed.” I spat out. The plan sounded sound enough, yet an uneasy feeling crept around me. Was it really that easy to send someone to jail?

“What if I’m discovered in planting evidence? What if I end up in jail? I can’t… I can’t get locked up.”

“Do you really think he would ever let that happen? If everything fails, he will be the one to lock you up, and clean up after you so nobody will know.” His words shivered through me. It sounded like an even bigger risk, when he put it like that.

If worst came to worst, ‘he’ would lock me up, until the end of my life. And I would never, ever, be able to escape him. He would make sure of that. It was the very thing I had been running from with all my might.

But if it didn’t come to that. If I managed to pull it off. If…

Too many if’s.

“Let me think about it for a while.” I said and made to leave. Barrie didn’t stop me, but instead took his phone, tapped on it a bit, and looked at me once more.

“Take a few days and think it over. As promised, I just sent the other half of the money. Go out and buy some good food. You look like you haven’t eaten in days. Get a new jacket or a suit. Go watch a movie. Enjoy what true freedom is like for a bit, and then get back to me. If you really won’t do it, I can’t force you.” And there it was. The free money was indeed not free, never had been.

They wanted to lure me in. Show me what I would never be able to get as I was now. Enough money to breathe easy for just a little while.

What sweet poison I was drinking. The price would be far too expensive.

And yet, I took the money. Likewise, did I take the business card Olyvar gave me when he drove me home, telling me to call.

I took Barrie’s advice and bought a new jacket. Not freezing while being out in the cold was a new and weird feeling.

The answer had been staring me in the face all along.

No, I couldn’t escape him. Yes, I would go back to him of my own free will.

But what neither of us had thought about, was that I also had the choice to fight.

***

I didn’t sleep well that night. The name I had so desperately tried to forget was playing on repeat, along with old memories. Barrie had a habit of overusing names to the point of irritation. I once asked why he did that, and he told me it ‘inspired trust’. People liked hearing their own names. I called bullshit, but he seemed to believe it was true.

I had met ‘him’ before I met Barrie. We had worked together at the local specialty grocery store. Why he had chosen to work at all, I never understood. He, Sean, was from a wealthy family. Unlike me, who had nobody to lean on, he didn’t have to worry about his next meal. Not that I had known that from the start. We worked side by side for months, earning minimum wage and pretending like we owned the place when the actual owner was out.

We became good friends, or rather, I thought we did, and decided to choose a college together. Because of my economic situation, I went with a free option, and he followed. That’s where we met Barrie.

On the first day of college, he and Barrie were at each other’s throats. I didn’t know why, neither did I know what happened. Nobody would tell me, and nobody saw. I asked Sean multiple times, since the conflict lasted on through the years, with a few violent endings. Neither seemed to want to let up.

And yet, somehow, I still ended up getting along with Barrie in a purely classmate kind of way. We ended up in group projects here and there, and worked rather well together. A single time I made the mistake of trying to get them to make amends and ended up in a group project with the three of us. It ended up with both Barrie and Sean in the hospital, and a failing grade.

Just thinking about it made me want to build a time machine solely so I could go back and punch the me of the past. Didn’t he know how important our grades were? It was the only thing that could make me stand just a tiny bit apart. I never tried getting involved again, after that. Weirdly enough Sean didn’t try to stop me from getting along with Barrie. Something that I didn’t find weird at the time but have wondered about after everything that happened between us later. Maybe it was just as he said all along, though. He is good at being patient. Especially when it has to do with me.

That was also around the time I noticed that Sean actually had money. I knew he and his family weren’t poor, but I hadn’t figured out just how wealthy they were. He had bought me a meal here and there, but nothing out of the ordinary for someone with parents, I had assumed. After all, he had a part-time job and he didn’t need to pay rent, nor for his own food. He had also given me a lot of small inexpensive gifts. A piece of chocolate or a sandwich here, a ballpen when my old one broke there. But the new gifts were clearly expensive. A suit for formal interviews, he said. A better phone, since my current one only worked half the time. A computer so I didn’t have to use the ones at the library or school for my assignments. I hadn’t thought it weird at the time. I just enjoyed the attention. The help. The relief that I didn’t have to spend money on those things, myself. It was things I had worried about, things he knew I was worrying about. I simply took it as him caring, and though a small part of me told me I shouldn’t accept, I didn’t have any actual reason to decline.

And then he began to give me money. With a smile on his face, he one day told me that he “Couldn’t always know what I was missing, or what design I wanted, so it would be easier if I just bought it myself.”

And much to my shame, I took it. The small urge to resist was completely drowned out by a weird sense of power I had never felt before. Material gifts were one thing, but just being given money for no reason was weird. It was harder to make excuses I could keep telling myself, that would make me take them without a second thought.

But… He gave the money to me, without asking anything in return. He told me he just wanted to see me with fewer worries, and if money could help with that, he was happy.

I should have known… I should have known there was no such thing as ‘free money’. There would always be a price. I was drunk on his attention, on the money, on the things he could give me. I was drunk on him, and I didn’t notice a thing before it was too late. I didn’t want to notice.

I woke up feeling like I hadn’t slept for days. Re-living the past in such a short amount of time made me more exhausted than I had been for a while, despite of the odd hours and weird shifts I had had to do to make enough money to get by.