I was eight months pregnant when my boyfriend decided my body belonged in one of his videos.
He called it an art project, which made the whole thing sound planned, thoughtful, and harmless.
It was none of those things.
The phone was already recording when I noticed the glue gun in his hand.
He had placed the phone on the apartment counter at an angle that included my shoulders, the side of my face, and the curve of my stomach.
I remember that detail because he cared more about the frame than he cared about whether I was afraid.
The glue gun had been warming beside a chipped coffee mug, its orange light glowing while he adjusted the phone.
I asked what he was doing.
He told me to stand still.
There are moments when your mind understands danger before your body is willing to admit it.
I saw the clear glue collecting at the metal tip, and I knew it was hot, but part of me still expected him to laugh and lower the gun.
Instead, he stepped behind me.
The first drop landed near my shoulder.
The pain was immediate, bright, and impossible to mistake, and my whole body jerked forward before I could stop it.
He complained that I had moved out of frame.
I reached behind me, but at eight months pregnant I could not twist far enough to touch the exact place.
He told me not to smear it.
Then he pressed the trigger again.
A second drop landed farther down my upper back.
The smell of hot plastic filled the apartment, mixing with the stale coffee and the warm dust from the heater.
He kept filming.
I asked him to stop.
He said the reaction was the important part.
That sentence told me something I had been avoiding for a long time.
He was not losing control.
He was exercising it.
When I tried to turn away, he moved the phone so it could keep seeing me.
He spoke in the calm, focused voice he used whenever he wanted to sound more reasonable than the person he was hurting.
He said the shapes would heal into something interesting.
Then he told me the scars would look nice in the delivery room.
I stared at him because I could not understand how anyone could say those words to the woman carrying his child.
He watched the phone screen.
The baby shifted hard beneath my ribs, and I placed both hands under my belly as if I could hold the entire future away from him.
He finally lowered the gun when he decided he had enough footage.
He did not ask whether I needed help.
He replayed the video.
On the screen, I saw myself flinch before the first drop landed.
I saw the fear arrive in my face while he stood just outside the frame.
He paused the recording on the moment my knees bent.
He said the image was strong.
I went into the bathroom and locked the door.
The lock was thin, the kind that could be opened with a coin, but hearing it click gave me enough space to breathe.
I pulled my shirt away from my shoulders and tried to look in the mirror.
I could see one raised burn near the top of my shoulder and another farther across my back.
A third mark disappeared under the collar where I could not see it clearly.
I ran cool water over a washcloth and held it against the places I could reach.
Every movement pulled the fabric across my skin.
Outside the door, he asked whether I was going to be dramatic all night.
I did not answer.
My phone was in my pocket.
My sister was the first person I thought of, and not only because she was a detective.
She had known me before I learned to make excuses for him.
She knew how I sounded when I was angry, and she knew how I sounded when I was trying not to let anyone hear that I was scared.
I opened the video he had sent me after filming.
He had sent it as if I should be proud to receive a finished piece.
I forwarded it to my sister.
Then I took pictures of the burns in the mirror and sent those too.
My hands shook so badly that the first picture was blurred.
The second showed enough.
She called almost immediately.
I whispered that I was fine.
She did not waste time telling me I was not fine.
She asked whether he was still in the apartment.
I said yes.
She asked where the glue gun was.
I cracked the bathroom door and looked toward the counter.
It was beside his phone, still plugged into the outlet.
I told her.
She asked whether the original recording was still on his phone.
I said I did not know.
She told me not to touch his device, not to delete my copy, and not to tell him what I had sent.
Her voice stayed controlled, but I could hear the sister beneath the detective.
She wanted to get to me.
I wanted to tell her not to come because I knew what he was like when he believed someone had embarrassed him.
That was how trapped I had become.
I was worried about protecting other people from the man who had just burned me.
My sister asked me to keep my phone close.
Then the call ended.
I put on a loose sweatshirt even though the fabric dragged across the burns.
When I stepped out of the bathroom, my boyfriend was sitting at the counter watching the video again.
He did not look guilty.
He looked dissatisfied.
He said the lighting had been better than he expected, but I had moved too much.
I asked why he had done it.
He told me I had known he was working on a project about pain.
I said I had never agreed to be burned.
He shrugged and said real reactions could not be staged.
The apartment around us looked painfully ordinary.
There was mail near the door, a charger hanging from the outlet, and a mug with a brown ring drying on the counter.
Nothing in the room looked like the place where someone should have to calculate how close they were to an exit.
He made coffee.
He spoke about the recording as if we were discussing a bad take.
At one point he asked whether the delivery-room line had been too much.
He was not asking whether it had hurt me.
He wanted to know whether the line sounded effective.
I said nothing.
He mistook my silence for permission to keep shaping the story.
He told me people would understand the work once they saw the finished version.
He told me I was lucky to be part of something honest.
He told me the marks would fade.
Every explanation moved the responsibility farther from him and placed it somewhere else—on art, on honesty, on my sensitivity, on an imaginary audience that would approve.
The only thing he never said was that he was sorry.
Evening became night.
I kept my phone within reach and waited for some sign from my sister.
My boyfriend moved around the apartment without hurry.
The glue gun stayed on the counter.
Its presence changed the room.
Every time he walked near it, my shoulders tightened.
Every time his hand crossed the counter, I watched his fingers.
I thought about the baby coming soon.
I thought about the delivery room he had mentioned.
Until then, I had imagined labor as frightening because of pain, uncertainty, and the moment when my child would finally have to live outside my body.
Now I imagined him standing nearby, looking at the scars as if they were his signature.
I understood that arrest was not the only thing I needed.
I needed him away from the birth.
I needed the child I was carrying to enter a room where nobody confused love with ownership.
Hours passed.
Then I heard the click.
It was a small plastic sound, easy to miss if I had not already heard it close to my skin.
He had picked up the glue gun.
He plugged it back into the outlet and watched the orange light come on.
I asked what he was doing.
He said the first recording was incomplete.
His phone went back onto the counter.
He adjusted it with both hands, checking the angle.
I moved toward the door.
He stepped between me and the entry.
He did not shout.
He lowered his voice, which frightened me more.
He said I was making everything harder than it needed to be.
The glue gun warmed in his hand.
A clear thread formed at the nozzle when he tested the trigger.
I backed toward the counter, one arm wrapped around my belly.
He told me to turn around.
I said no.
He said the first burns had already ruined the clean version of the shot, so finishing it would not change anything.
That was the logic of someone who believed one act of harm gave him permission for the next.
He stepped closer.
I could smell the hot plastic again.
The phone screen showed a red recording light.
He raised the glue gun toward my shoulder.
The deadbolt shook.
His head turned toward the door.
The second impact drove the lock through the wood.
The apartment door broke inward and hit the wall.
My sister came through first.
Another officer was behind her, but she reached us before he did.
She caught my boyfriend’s wrist and forced the glue gun away from my body while the officer secured his other arm.
A clear bead fell from the nozzle and landed on the floor.
It hardened almost immediately.
My boyfriend started talking.
He said it was art.
He said I had agreed to the video.
He said the marks were temporary.
He said my sister was abusing her authority because she was family.
The phone kept recording him.
My sister did not argue about art.
She looked at the burns visible above my sweatshirt, looked at the heated glue gun, and told the other officer to secure the phone.
My boyfriend twisted toward the counter.
The officer pulled his arms behind him and closed the cuffs.
My sister stayed between us.
Her shoulders were angled toward him, but one hand reached back until it found mine.
That small contact did more for me than any speech could have done.
It told me I was no longer the only person in the room who understood what was happening.
My boyfriend kept insisting the video would prove him right.
My sister said, “I already have the first one.”
He went quiet.
The camera had been his shield.
Now it was a record he could not talk over.
They walked him through the broken doorway with the glue gun collected and the phone still glowing on the counter.
He was arrested mid-drip, before the next bead could touch me.
I stood in the apartment and looked at the damaged door.
For hours, I had thought the deadbolt belonged to him because he controlled who left and who entered.
Now it hung useless from a strip of wood.
My sister picked up the phone.
She asked whether I wanted the recording preserved.
The question sounded strange because preserving it meant preserving the worst minutes of my life.
It also meant refusing to let him rename them.
I told her to keep the tape.
I called it tape even though it was a digital recording, because the word made it feel like evidence with a beginning and an end.
The truth was that what happened in that apartment did not end when the recording stopped.
My shoulders continued to hurt.
The marks did not vanish because he had been taken away.
Fear stayed in ordinary places.
It appeared when an outlet clicked, when hot plastic smelled too close, or when a phone was propped up as if someone were preparing to film.
I had to learn that freedom could begin before fear disappeared.
My boyfriend was in custody when word came that other inmates had attacked him with glue guns.
They left permanent scars across his back.
When I heard, I felt no triumph.
I had wanted him stopped.
I had wanted him held responsible.
I had not wanted another group of people to repeat the same cruelty and call it punishment.
Pain does not become justice simply because it reaches the person who caused pain first.
The news still carried a terrible symmetry.
He had told me scars would look nice in the delivery room.
Now his own back carried a permanent map of what he had once treated as an artistic idea.
I did not visit him.
I did not ask to see the marks.
I did not need an image of his body to prove what he had done to mine.
The video already existed.
So did my scars.
As my due date came closer, I prepared for the hospital without him.
I packed ordinary things.
A clean shirt.
Clothes for the baby.
A charger.
The small items people bring when they expect to return home as someone new.
The burns were healing, but the skin remained tender.
When labor came, I entered the delivery room free of him.
The scars were there, just as he had predicted.
But they did not look the way he had imagined.
They were not decoration.
They were not a signature.
They were evidence that I had survived long enough to leave his frame.
I delivered my child without his voice directing the room.
Nobody told me to hold still for a camera.
Nobody asked whether pain looked convincing.
The first sound that mattered was my baby’s cry.
In the days afterward, I sometimes thought about deleting the video.
I hated knowing a recording existed of me frightened, cornered, and unable to reach the burns on my own back.
Keeping it felt like keeping him near me.
Deleting it felt like helping him erase the thing he had chosen to document.
So I kept the tape.
I did not watch it for comfort.
I did not keep it as revenge.
I kept it because he had built the camera into the cruelty, believing the lens would turn me into an object and him into an artist.
Instead, the recording preserved the truth he could not control.
It showed the glue gun.
It captured his voice.
It held the delivery-room sentence exactly as he said it.
Most of all, it showed that I said stop.
For a long time, I thought strength would mean watching the whole video without shaking.
Eventually I understood that I did not owe the recording my attention.
I only owed myself the truth.
The tape could exist without ruling the room.
The scars could exist without belonging to him.
The broken door could remain part of the story without becoming the only doorway I remembered.
I delivered free, and I kept the tape.
One was the life I chose.
The other was the proof that I had been forced to choose it.
