Running Out of Time

He sat across the empty room, cap pulled over his head, hooding his eyes like a Sith lord, though he held a very different power than the force. All that was visible was his crooked smile and the blinking red recording light coming from his phone. It was pointed at me. As I sat on his couch the black lights hung around his room casted my body in dim glow. The room was minimally decorated, raunchy posters scattered across the walls and besides the couch and armchair that we were respectively sitting on, the apartment was empty. I ran my palms against my bare legs, spreading the sweat that had accumulated there from stress, I knew I was running out of time.

“Three minutes,” a calm voice across the room mused, and despite how I couldn’t see his eyes I knew they were baring into me.

“Why are you doing this to me? Isn’t there anything else I can do?” I gently pleaded with him, hoping that anything I could say would make a difference, but his only response was a wider smile and the unsettling knowledge of having only two minutes.

I asked again, more desperate this time. “Why are you doing this to me?”

“I told you, I’m Satan.”

We sat there in silence. I could hear my heartbeat as it reacted to the cigarette he had forced me to finish earlier. He had promised to give me the information I wanted if I could finish it, but once again I had run out of time missed my chance on his game of manipulation roulette.

“One more minute...” his statement hung in the air as I was forced to reevaluate my worth, dignity and my price. I slowly stood up and walked toward him pausing one last time to breath in the toxic air the surrounded me and to nudge a tossed beer can with my foot. The distance between us seemed endless, like a desert where each movement was the choice between life and death.

“Well?” he said, removing the hood from his head and cocking his eyebrow to remind me that the sand in my hourglass had slipped a little to far for his liking. I finished my walk and stood before him knowing what I had to do, and hating myself for getting pushed this far.

I got on my knees and watched as the blinking recording light flicked on then off. 50 shades of grey? more like 50 shades of Hell...