“Or maybe I just have this really uncontrollable sex drive.”
“And she’s back.” He grinned broadly.
She made a face.
“Like I do around you. I could go for hours,” he said.
“I was going to say something about that. I don’t get it. You sure have a hell of a capacity, if you know what I mean.”
“This is my flow experience, if you know what
I
mean. I live for this. I could stay hard for days.”
“You need a doctor.”
He looked at her. Her hair was stringy now with sweat, and her face was still pale, bruised and swollen, even though her chest was flushed. Her eyelids were puffy, and her eyes were red.
He felt a swelling inside him.
He put his lips on hers and began to kiss her.
“Oh, God,” she groaned in misery against his mouth.
She didn’t kiss him back. At first he kissed her gently on the lips, then he tried to open her mouth with his jaw. She fought him this time, and he enjoyed that for a while, before he instructed her to open her mouth and kiss him back.
“I know I said I would, but I just don’t think I can.”
“Much more personal, isn’t it?” he noted.
“Please,” she said in a small voice.
“Kiss me.”
“Oh, fuck,” she said. And she opened her mouth and let him push her tongue around.
He pulled his head back for a moment. “No, no, no,” he said. “Not ‘let me kiss you.’ You kiss me back, with tongue. The whole bit. Eyes open.”
“I don’t kiss anybody with my eyes open.”
“Really. Well.” He thought for a moment. “If you do it well, then I won’t mind.”
She sighed again, a deep one. And then he brought his head back down to hers. And she did everything he ordered her to. Emotionlessly, like a robot. Her eyes stayed closed.
This went on for a while, until he was hard again and he raped her again.
“You’re wet,” he said. “And not from me.”
“No, I’m not.”
“You know, I’m beginning to really believe that you’re actually enjoying this. And really, how could you not? I’m good, and you’ve probably never felt more wanted.”
She wished she could have stayed like she’d been just a short time before, defeated and silent. But she couldn’t. “You’re right!” she said. “I do enjoy this. It’s the opposite of torture. You’re really wasting your time.”
He grinned at her. “You want to be flip about this, go ahead. But you did get wet. Kissing me got you wet.”
“Kissing anybody like that will get a person wet. It’s purely physiological. Geez, is that what you’ve been telling yourself all these years? What a cliché! That they really wanted it?”
“No,” he replied, just a tiny bit sharply. “Nobody else has been so good at cooperating as you have. Not nearly as good. So you’re either an unearthly level of rational, or you do like this.”
“Now, you’re just trying to get me mad. Thank God, I don’t need to depend on you for my good opinion of myself.”
“But you do. Or you will. That’s what will happen here. Like I said. You will act to please me and pretend to please me, until you’re really trying to please me. Until you need me. That’s how it works. Can you do that?” He moved his face back in front of hers, but he was wearing a supercilious look. “Do you think you can survive doing that?” he hissed.
There was nothing else she could think of to do. She grabbed the back of his head with her cuffed hands and brought his lips to hers. And she kissed him. The way she would kiss a lover she hadn’t seen for months.
“Is that what you want?” she whispered. “That
is
what you really want, isn’t it? Someone to kiss you like that just because they want to, because they love you? Something you will never, ever, ever get?”
He shook himself loose from her embrace and moved over on the bed away from her with a strange half-grin on his face. “You take my breath away, “ he said. He looked just a trifle dazed, and he was panting a little. “I really think they made a big mistake here,” he added.
“You made the mistake.” Her voice was breathy and strangely deep.
“Maybe,” he conceded.
“What if you fail?” she asked.
“Fail?” His mouth stayed open. “I don’t know. We get married?”
“Funny.”
“Seriously. I’m thinking new thoughts and feeling new feelings. I don’t know what comes next. But I know I’m not going to fail. Because you’re good. Really, really good. But I don’t think you can keep this up. And I can.”
“Come here, loverboy. ‘Show me,’” she paused for effect, “‘what you’re made of.’” He didn’t get the reference.
He leaped back over to her and began to lick and kiss her entire sweat-soaked, goose-pimpled body. And he watched as she let herself enjoy it. Her nipples got hard as he played with them and kissed them. She writhed around on the bed as he touched her and caressed her. And she let herself move with him every time he entered her and thrust against her.
“This is what consensual sex feels like,” she breathed into his ear at one point. “Enjoy it while you can. You’ll never feel it again.”
He growled at her when she said this, but he didn’t stop.
He couldn’t.
And after all that, it took only a kiss. Only a kiss.
Damn! Who was she now? Someone she had never been. Someone she had always been. A badass, that was for sure. All the her-ness had been skinned off, and this was what was underneath. The one who couldn’t let somebody else win, no matter what the cost. The one who was as ruthless as he was, even at the betrayal of her own body or her own soul. The one who didn’t care what someone would think if someone was looking, seeing what she had done. What she was doing. Maybe this was something like what he felt inside. She was loving herself and loathing herself at the same time. She didn’t know if what she was doing was right or wrong; those concepts seemed to have been left far behind, kidnapped and shoved, head-first, into a car trunk perhaps. Right and wrong, ha! There was only sex and war, and they were the same thing. He’d wanted to fuck her, and then he’d wanted her to fuck him. Well, now, with every depraved thing she let him do to her, every vile thing she did to him, she was winning. It might not last, but it was definitely a game-changer.
Nothing would ever be the same. How overused that expression was. But this time, it was true.
Through all that followed, she couldn’t let go of that moment, that stroke of genius, borne of desperation, the memory of that kiss, kissing him like none of his victims ever had and stunning the shit out of him. And there was more.
Because when she kissed him that way, the unmistakable message traveled from his soul, such as it was, through his lips to her lips and onward to her brain of how very, very much he wanted it. So incredibly much more than she didn’t. It was what he’d wanted all along, an impossible desire, for the victim of his brutality to express a wanting or a need for him. To like him. He wanted it, yet he did everything he could to prevent it from ever happening. Until she came along and gave it to him. The impossible. He would never really be able to get enough of her after this. But it was worth it because for the moment this put her in control.
She also couldn’t help realizing that she was finally experiencing what she had long sought as well. Sex with someone she didn’t have to care about one bit. No more love, no more loss. No more brain feelings, only body ones. Sex with a machine that could do everything a human could, including things most people wouldn’t. And she didn’t for one moment have to pretend that she liked him. Sex that was a completely, purely, totally selfish experience. Sex with the enemy. Maybe he was an unsung genius for inventing it. No. He hadn’t invented it. He had merely created the circumstances. Like Rosalind Franklin with the answers right there in her crystallography, but it was Watson and Crick who’d taken that crazy leap to see the structure of DNA. There weren’t really two parties the way
he
did it, just him. But as soon as she’d made her leap, then there were two. Both of them having sex, having each other, neither one being done to, or maybe both. It was perfection of a sort. But nothing she would ever want to repeat. Nothing she ever could. But something amazing to experience. Beyond guilt, beyond shame, beyond morality. They were playing on a level neither one of them had ever reached before.
In a way, she just wanted to stay there. No thinking, no judgment, no yesterday, no tomorrow.
It. Felt. Good.
As usual, he’d brought some toys with him. They were in his satchel, so at one point, when he could tear himself away, he cuffed her hands to the bed and went and got them. When he returned, he left her cuffed and started in on her with the toys. She seemed to have abandoned herself entirely to pleasure now. There was not the slightest indication of struggle. When he inserted vibrators in various orifices, she merely writhed and moaned and climaxed some more. He’d be thrusting inside one hole, with a vibrator inside another and their moans and cries formed a seemingly happy chorus of delight. If he had thought for one minute that she was truly enjoying this, he would have gone soft in an instant. And he knew that was what she wanted. So he didn’t. But he also knew that, paradoxically, she wasn’t faking. It was hard for him to find a word to describe it, and, for the most part, he didn’t feel like devoting the time or energy to that effort. He was having too much fun.
They got into the habit of saying things, unpleasant things, to each other, even as they gave each other more and more physical pleasure. Because she was no longer just letting him do things to her. She was actively taking part, kissing him, sucking him, riding him.
He would say nasty things, like, “You can’t thread a moving needle.” And “I guess this was exactly what you needed.”
And she would whisper back things like “Too bad no one will ever volunteer to do this to you.” And “I think I’m reaching a new level of sexual freedom and power, thanks to you.”
At one point, deep inside her, he said, “You realize, of course, if you do win, I can’t afford to let you live.”
“Oh, honey,” was her reply, “if I win, you won’t be able to imagine living without me.”
“You know that you will never be able to think about sex without thinking about me. About this,” he said at another point.
“And neither will you,” was her perfect and true reply.
He laughed, and so did she. And they kept on fucking, each waiting for the other one to give up first.
PART 2
“Have you been watching this trial?” she asked in as casual a voice as she could muster, given that she was hogtied, hands and feet behind her back, trying to keep her face out of the bedclothes. The TV in the bedroom was on; he had set her up so that she was facing it, while he lay back exhausted on the bed. For him, it was a lull.
“I don’t watch that sort of thing.”
“Well, actually, neither do I. But my mother does. She keeps me updated when she calls me. But I couldn’t help myself. When the verdict came in, and then his parents were speaking to the press. Unbelievable.” She had to bite off her words to get them out, but it didn’t stop her.
“Which one was this?” He was playing with her toes and admiring his knot-tying ability, as well as her nerve.
“The guy who shot his wife and baby, then flew to England. Then claimed his wife had shot herself and the kid, and I guess he was so distraught that he covered them up with a bunch of blankets and fled. They got him and tried him here. That was it. There was barely a pretense of a defense.”