She felt calm inside. Not shut down. Calm. It was something she had never felt before. Now she was ready to calmly watch and see – how she could win or how she would lose.
There was a bit more unpleasantness ahead. That, she knew. Then, one way or the other, it would be over.
She was done. There wasn’t anything left. He could see that.
He’d thrown her onto the dining room table where he’d fucked her one last, brutal time, standing up, looking down at her, spread-eagled before him, finally completely his. When he’d slapped her, she hadn’t even recoiled. There was no need for the plastic around her wrists anymore. It just distracted from the perfection of the image he had succeeded in creating. Her, broken. Under him.
When he was finished, he slapped her again, and she slid off, amidst a clatter of dishes, and onto the floor nearby. She sat there with her head drooping, tears intermittently falling, her hands, lifeless, at her side. He was going to miss her.
He walked over toward the living room where his satchel was. One last thing. The gun. But he heard a small sound, and he turned around before he got there. She was on her knees with her hands reaching out toward him.
“Hold me?” she begged, in that soft, hopeless, child-like voice. “Please hold me. Please.”
It was exactly as he had predicted. How pathetic. He shook his head to himself, almost sad to have been so right, but then he was always right. He walked over to her and knelt opposite her. He took her in his arms. She had, indeed, been special. It made winning, always a foregone conclusion, that much more special. And now it was all over.
And he realized her prediction had come true as well. He really was going to miss her. He didn’t know if he
would
be able to stop thinking about her. He wanted this, too, to hold her one last time. This body that had given him so much pleasure. This was the last time he would feel her breasts against his chest, the mound of her vagina against his groin. Her flesh, her scent. He inhaled it.
And closed his eyes.
It was only for an instant. Like any man would, upon saying goodbye forever to someone who had meant something to him.
Someone who had meant as much as anyone
could
mean to him. Just that once. An instant of feeling, of forgetting.
So he didn’t see the knife. What he felt was a quick, rough, tearing sensation. He hadn’t bothered to put the mayonnaise knife away; it wasn’t even that sharp, but she’d wielded it savagely, just the right spot, across the carotid, like a pro. He told his arms to grab her, but she’d already ducked away, one flailing leg hitting him in the side as she struggled to put space between them, knocking him down and onto his back. And his hands went instinctively to his throat anyway, to try to stop the blood, as his feet pushed against the floor, in an instinctive attempt to scramble away, to escape whatever came next. He looked up at her. From several feet away, she gazed back. He noticed she wasn’t smiling in her victory. He would have been.
He managed to speak. “You know, you never asked who they were. Or why they wanted to hurt you.”
“I know who, and I know why,” she said. “You’re the one who doesn’t.”
“What are you?”
“You should have asked that question sooner.”
Still holding the knife, she calmly watched him exsanguinate for a few seconds. She did not approach. “When I woke up to find you inside me that way, I knew exactly what was going to happen. And I knew I was never going to beat you on strength. So I knew what I had to do. A lot of it depended on you.” She paused briefly then continued in the same mild tone. “You wonder if I’m human. Of course, I am. So are you. That’s what being human is, isn’t it? That we can be like us.”
“I was supposed to kill you when I was done,” he whispered.
“I know,” she said, nodding her head. “That’s why I did the things I did. Was the way I was. I needed you to care – if only for a second.”
“Just think,” he murmured with what was left of his voice, that imperturbable voice. “We understand each other perfectly.” There was a lot of blood around him now, a pool that would never quite be cleaned up. “How many couples can say that?”
He was laughing softly as he died.
She took a few moments and savored one of his cigarettes, sitting at the dining room table, not far from the body. She found a drill in his satchel, and used it to remove the lock he had placed on the back door. She threw open the door and walked out of the house.
She was aware, in a vague sort of way, that she was still as naked as the day she was born. She knew without having glanced into a mirror that she must look like hell, but despite that, she felt cloaked in a strange sense of serenity. Gingerly, at first, she stepped out onto the wooden deck that gave off of the back of the house. The boards beneath her feet were warm. The sun had been shining at some point not long before; it was daylight out. She hadn’t known. Moving more swiftly, more surely, she passed down the steps to the backyard and on up to the water’s edge.
It was a day that anybody else might have called ordinary, the sky now overcast and gray, but with striations of blue and white giving depth and variation to the cloud cover. Somewhere behind all of that the sun now hid. The air was warm, but she could feel the humidity in the atmosphere as it enveloped her skin, dewy and slightly cool. Little pinpricks of the rain that was about to fall began to hit against her as she stood gazing out at the inlet and the houses scattered on the other side, some half-hidden by the approaching mist that was beginning to shroud this little section of the earth. Giant seagulls circled above her, occasionally diving down close to the wooden dock that stretched out in front of her, then coming in for a landing and a short bath, not terribly far from where she stood watching them.
It was a pleasurable kind of pain that she felt as she balanced, barefoot, on the sharp, little stones that covered the sand by the water. She walked forward a little on them and felt the pebbles shift and give way under her feet. Then her toes touched the damp sand, and her heels sank into it. She knelt and touched the water; it was cold and a bit sticky. A pink-and-white starfish lay under the surface a few inches in front of her, just marking the time until he was taken by one of the squealing gulls. There was nothing she could do to save him. She stood up again, noting the concrete steps, cracked and broken, that edged the property down to the waterline on either side of her, the water lapping up against the foremost ones, miniature waves crashing against the cement and sending a miniature spray splashing off of it. Tiny bits of brush and twigs had gathered to form a circle underneath the dock, just out of reach of the water. A bright red straw and a plastic Dr. Pepper bottle had fallen off a boat that had passed by at some point and washed up along the high-tide mark, just below a patch of wildflowers that bloomed green, blue, and white amongst the rushes, the fullness of their primary colors slightly washed out in the grayness of the day. She lingered there for a while, entranced, as the rain magically held off. For that space of time, she could imagine herself as just another one of the enduring features of the seascape that surrounded her.
She’d be leaving this house today for good. Its location had been compromised. Obviously. But she finally felt its beauty, saw and felt the grace and loveliness of this spot as she never had before, not even on the day she had first sought refuge here.
She had never killed anyone before either. His blood was still on her, along with some of her own, dried now. Soon she would have new skin where all the wounds were. New skin all over. She held up her hands against the darkening sky and stretched her somehow-no-longer-aching body. She felt reborn. Forgiven. Free.
It was some time before she went back into the house to find her phone. Only then did she make the call. Not to the police. Her people would take care of this.
It was time for her to move on. She still had a whole half of a lifetime to go.
She was driving down a highway.
One thing she did like a lot these days – craved, in fact – was the freedom of the road. Driving fast with the top down and the engine pulsing around and beneath her. She could taste the air again. She could feel it on her body, in her hair, on her face as she smiled. It felt good.
And as usual, as she drove, she thought of him.