“I know,” she says, shivering closer to his heat, “I’ll be very afraid. I’m afraid now.”
“Good,” he says. He is very hard now. His erection presses against her thigh.
“After we get home,” he says, “I’ll throw you down across the bed. I’ll fuck you till you can’t remember that you’ve ever been with any man but me. I’ll make you plead for my forgiveness. I’ll make you love me.”
She can feel her flesh melting into his, merging with his body, at these images. Her clitoris is pulsing as if it will erupt into flame.
“I already love you,” she says. Her sigh sounds like blood seeping out of a wound. “I love you, and I want to marry you.”
“Oh, you will.” He says it like a death threat, and it is. He kisses her, turn her around and mounts her from behind. He yanks her head back by her hair and puts the other hand across her mouth, riding her wildly and brutally, transforming her into something as bright and beautiful and lifeless as the paintings she no longer paints, suffocating her will down to embers and ash.
She has never been sure what he does with his days. For a while, she fancied that he had a secret life, perhaps some enterprise outside the law, perhaps another lover. She almost hoped he did. Now she believes he simply stays at home and naps and watches rented videos, does a 12-Step meeting now and then, meets friends for tennis. Idleness becomes him. He’s like a great, sleek lounging Tom who stirs himself only to yowl and feed and copulate. He’s like a force of nature. He need only be.
As for her own ambitions, she gave up the idea of Art in Aspen long ago. She lacks the time, the drive, the will. Making art requires energy and freedom, both of which are forfeit to her obsession. So she works at an office job and congratulates herself on her practicality and how well she manages to support them both.
At work, she is a model employee, concise and punctual, dependable. Only now and then, distracted, seeming almost dazed, she makes careless mistakes, receives a reprimand. She always takes it well. She is so prompt, so malleable, so docile.
A few of her co-workers have tried to be friends. She smiles and offers a facsimile of friendship, but in truth she is too ashamed to let them know her as she is, a one-time artist, now merely a part of him that goes out into the world, that plays a part. She cannot let them know she is addicted to his flesh, that she is a suicide in progress.
“When we get married,” she whispers, “I want the ceremony to include the words love, honor, and obey.”
“Oh they will,” he assures her. He stops fucking her and grinds his cock inside her, grips her wrists. Impaled and pinned, she can feel her mind entering that red trance of sex-bliss, that small death from which she knows that she may not emerge. “You will always obey me. You must.”
“I want you to own me,” she says, hating herself as she says the words. Hating the words. Not knowing where they come from, but hating the self-loathing that inspires them.
Hating him.
“I already own you,” he says. His dark face hovers above her. He is handsome, almost beautiful, a terrifying angel with black brows and the subdued snarl of the gentleman rapist in his voice.
She feels herself become more willing, more daring as she teeters on the edge of the void. Surely no aerialist ever practiced so thrilling a maneuver on the high wire. She is drunk with danger, half swooning from her sense of self-destruction, her seeming inability to save herself.
“I want to marry you,” she says, knowing what she really wants is not to want him. But he is the one that the witches sang about. He is her destiny.
He knows very well what she wants. He is inhumanly hard now.
“You are already wed to me,” he says. “You are already owned.”
She arches against him. She wants to feel the tip of his cock draw blood from her heart. She feels like she is ageing in reverse. She is that little girl again that the witches loved as their own and hated as their rival, and every kiss upon her face is poison and every touch re-opens unseen scars. In her folly, she thinks that her lover is healing the wounds, that he is filling her with him.
God, she loves Him.
One night they watch a movie where a woman kills a man to avenge her lover’s death. He seems to relish this. Rewinds the tape to watch the scene again.
“Would you kill for me?” he asks.
No.
“Yes, I’d kill for you,” she says in that whispery, on-the-edge-of-orgasm voice.
“I don’t believe you.”
“I would.”
When she falls asleep with her face pressed to the black pelt on his chest, she is a child again and she is loved – she has only to please him always, do whatever he says – and she will be loved forever.
Earning his love is a full-time job. A career choice. A commitment.
She hones her acting skills. She knows he senses the slightest rebellion in her heart, the smallest cache of secrets. He has nothing to do with his days but focus on her, meditate upon each nuance of her speech and body language. Is her love diminishing? Does she talk too much on the phone, take extra minutes getting home? Is she being subtly neglectful of his vast and mounting needs? Is she such a fool that she might plot to leave him?
When he grows bored, he amuses himself by finding fault with her. At other times, he gazes at her with the pride of one who’s just retouched a museum masterpiece, brought it back to its former splendor, improved it, and when she questions the intensity of that look, he says, “Just thinking of all the plans I have for the rest of your life.”
She had plans, too – once. If she could just remember what they were…
He finds her sketchbook one day, and his derision of her drawings if so surgically adroit that she feels naked as a peeled persimmon. Later, when he sees her tears, he soothes her with his skillful tongue and nurtures her with semen.
Sometimes she contemplates his Smith and Wesson as one would study a map of some exotic land. She parts herself with the cool, hard barrel and thinks that she should let the gun become her lover, that this must be the ultimate fuck. Even hotter and harder than him.
Nonsense, she tells herself. She can walk away from him when she gets ready. She can quit at any time. She gave up alcohol, didn’t she? Almost five years without a buzz. No counting the high she gets from sucking cocktails from their original container. She knows he isn’t good for her – she devours self-help books like bonbons. She’ll quit this, too, and get on with her real life – it’s just that she’s not ready.
Yet.
She knows the game is aging her. Grey half-moons smudge her eyes. Her face has a haggard, refugee quality, but her body still throbs in sync with his. The athletic and aesthetic quality of her erotic performance is undulled. She can mimic dying with a hot, uncanny sensuality, as though she’s done it many times. In the quiet of the night, she fancies she can hear her soul unraveling.
“I want to marry you.”
Sometimes she says the words alone, to herself, marveling at how they sound, at the unnaturalness of them. What started as a game, a tease, is becoming real.
Love, honor, and obey.
She loves him not at all and honors him only when she must, but obey she will. She must. For doesn’t she deserve to die? She’s a bad girl, isn’t she? For craving his flesh in her mouth, in her cunt, for aching to eat him like some ripe and rotting fruit, the sweet center spewing into her mouth and seeping down her throat as she bites and sucks and hungers more for having sucked his poison.
“I’d kill for you,” she whispers.
She almost means it now. The ledge on which she walks is getting narrower. The abyss at the bottom of her lover’s eyes croons to her and bids her jump.