“It’s the most beautiful portrait I’ve ever seen.”
He blushed. One of his curls had broken loose again, a corkscrew of energy, like Andrew’s soul. I smoothed it back behind his ear.
“You’re too nice to me,” he said. “Why are you so nice to me?”
I looked into his eyes and didn’t answer. We’d been hanging out a lot since we struck up our unlikely friendship at the fetish club. We’d grown really close, even though we were different in so many ways. I was a decade older than him, and hetero, and an ex-prostitute, although I hadn’t been brave enough to reveal that to him yet.
I sat on the edge of his carrel, a rolling workstation that doubled as an art pedestal. The music had changed to a quieter, more contemplative song, and I thought how fortunate I was to have Andrew in my life. Before him, I’d pretty much forgotten how to feel things. Or maybe I’d decided not to feel things. Now a bunch of feelings caught me by surprise. Hope, wonder, maybe...happiness? The kind of happiness that felt sad at the same time.
Andrew lay back across the platform, knocking over a can of brushes. We scooped them up together, and he placed the can on a nearby desk. By the time he returned, I was lying back on the platform too. I could see gray clouds through the skylights, and the looming shadows of nearby buildings.
“I come here for the peace,” he murmured. “It’s very peaceful, to be in a place full of art. Maybe you don’t feel that way, after Simon…”
He touched my side. It was a friendly touch, a comforting touch. That was the nice thing about gay friends. You didn’t have to worry about them making some kind of uncomfortable move during an emotional moment.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry if being here is bringing back bad memories, and I’m sorry your ex was an abusive prick. Why isn’t he in prison or something? With the drugs, and the stuff he did to you?”
“I guess because he’s good at surrounding himself with enablers. I stayed with him for years, and explained away all his shit. Somehow I turned ‘He’s abusing me’ into ‘He needs me.’ How sick is that?”
I stared up at the sky, like it might have answers. Even Andrew didn’t have answers.
“I want to meet someone well-adjusted,” he said. “Someone nice. I want to love someone.”
“I don’t have the Y-chromosome you need, or I’d beg you to fall in love with me. You’re handsome and kind, and you have beautiful hair.”
“Aw, Chere.”
“You’ll find someone. You’re the easiest person in the world to talk to. You’re considerate. You’re vivacious.”
“I’m anxious. I’m obsessive. I’m clingy in relationships. I put up with total bullshit just to spend the night with someone. Most of the time, I’m like a starving stray dog, grateful for scraps.”
That was my cue to say something reassuring and uplifting, but I had nothing. I’d lost faith in happily ever afters long ago. “The problem with love is that there’s only a one in a hundred chance it’ll work out,” I said. “I mean, that’s just science.”
“Really? That’s been scientifically proven?” Andrew wasn’t buying it. He formed his fingers into the shape of a heart and held it above us. “I believe in love. I just have to find it. That’s your one-in-a-hundred chance: not just finding that person the universe has set aside for you, but recognizing that he’s the one. I understand your issues since you got burned so bad in your last relationship, but there’s someone out there for you.”
“I don’t want anyone.”
He made an impatient noise and let his fingers drop. Our heads touched as we stared up at the same patch of wispy clouds. The music swirled around us, wistful, slow, melodious, as complex as our feelings and the general screwiness of life.
Don’t think about him.
Not Simon. It wasn’t Simon haunting me.
I’d rather have the want of you, the rich, elusive taunt of you...
“You know what I want?” said Andrew, breaking into my thoughts.
“What do you want?” I replied in a soft voice.
“I want someone to love me for me. With all my faults and shortcomings, with my skinny body, my personality flaws. I’m tired of trying to be someone better, someone worthy. I just want to be me. I want someone I can be honest with, someone who’ll accept me as I am.”
Tears gathered in my eyes at the tortured longing in his voice. He was so innocent, so sweet, so sure that his true love was out there. It made me sad.
“The thing is, people are so shitty,” I said, my voice trembling. “No one loves. No one cares. No one is faithful. Everyone is cruel and fucking awful.”
The song changed to a rock anthem. My face ached with the effort not to cry, but some tears squeezed out anyway. Andrew scooted closer to me, until his head rested against my shoulder. His hair tickled my cheek but I didn’t move my head. I realized he was crying too. The music was rough and hypnotic, twanging guitars and words I couldn’t understand. Maybe the paint fumes were making both of us a little high. I stared at the black night through the windows as Andrew lay beside me, my partner in misery, my stalwart friend.
“I’m sorry I’m so down on love,” I said. “It’s just difficult for me. I could tell you things about my past...”
“What kind of things?”
“Nothing. Stupid things I want to forget. I’m sorry I made you cry.”
“I’m crying because you’re crying.” He wiped my eyes with the edge of his sleeve, a gesture that was so gentle and normal it made me start bawling again. “No one should be down on love, Chere. Our purpose in life is to love.”
Was it? Maybe that was why my heart felt so black and dead and decrepit, and so numb. I felt so numb I thought I might disappear completely, without touching anyone or anything. That was disappearance, pure and simple, the opposite of being alive. Which meant I was dead.
His hand touched mine and I gathered my courage, and closed my fingers around his. In the dim fluorescent light, with our shoulders touching, I decided to tell him everything.
“You want to know a secret about me? I used to be a prostitute,” I said. “A high-class escort. I used to see three or four clients a week.” I paused for him to freak out, but he didn’t. The lack of reaction gave me the fortitude to forge ahead. “And just before I got out of the business, there was this guy...”
When I first met Chere, I was pissed. I’d told her pimp—excuse me, her
agent
—that I wanted a beautiful, natural blonde. Chere was beautiful, yes, but as far from a natural blonde as you could get. Her hair was fake on purpose, the kind of sex-kitten, Marilyn-Monroe blonde that broadcast “I’m a sex object.” Beneath her fake-blonde hair and Lanvin suit, she was pure guttersnipe, with old New Orleans features, dusky skin and freckles. Her body was strong, not elegant. She wasn’t what I wanted at all.
I almost sent her away, but there was something about the tilt of her chin that compelled me. I’d bound her instead, with cheap hardware-store zip ties. I did everything bad to her that first session. I insulted her, I called her a bitch. I slapped her face and made her call me Sir. Worst of all, I didn’t let her see me or know my name. All these awful things were done to her by a nameless, faceless stranger who had complete control.
She was hysterical and fake that day, but something clicked for me by the end of our date, clicked as it had never clicked before. I wanted to fuck her so hard and so rough by the end that I probably could have fuck-killed her if I was that kind of guy. But I wasn’t. I didn’t harbor any psychopathic desires to maim or kill women. I only wanted to feel something honest, and there was nothing more honest than a woman going batshit crazy because of the shit you were doing to her. I throat-fucked her—hard—and I pussy-fucked her—hard—and she submitted to it with such delicious ambivalence. She didn’t want it, but she
did
.
I can’t explain my fetishes...why I need women to want it and not want it. I can’t pinpoint where my force-driven fantasies came from, or recall the moment sex and suffering crystallized, for me, as a necessary combination. I’ll only say this: I never met a woman who wanted it and didn’t want it with the same intensity as Chere Rouzier. The second time I slapped her, the hardest time I slapped her, it triggered a monumental orgasm for her.
I almost let her go
, I thought as I watched her tremble through the climax.
I almost let this one go.
I’d been rough with a lot of women through the years. I sought out self-identified masochists so as not to waste anyone’s time, and when I slapped them during sex, I got two responses. They either liked it too much, which I hated, or they pretended to like it, which I also hated. But Chere neither liked it nor pretended to like it. She hated it, and came anyway like a fucking madwoman.
I’d gazed down at her on the bed, watched her squirm, blindfolded, shivering, so overcome by my sexual demands that she couldn’t speak. Her nipples had been red and sore, and her hands had been bound behind her, and I thought,
this is the most fulfilling intimate encounter I’ve ever had.
I’d grabbed her face and kissed her, overwhelmed in my own way. I felt angry that it had taken so long to find this amazing partner, and crazed that I’d almost rejected her, and anxious that she wouldn’t see me again.
The first thing she said to me after she came was
Please let me look at you
. And I knew I would let her look at me eventually, which was really unsettling. I knew if she kept giving herself to me with so much spirit and so much fight, and so much goddamned intensity, things would get out of hand. It didn’t take long for things to get batshit crazy, although I suppose it was worth it.
Every time I saw her, I thought,
I want to hurt you. I have to hurt you. Please let me hurt you.
And she let me. Every single time.
Fall semester wound down, dreary winter days in the dreary metals lab. Andrew was right, the labs were awful, but metals were my thing. I loved the shine, I loved the solidity. This lab was my second home, and I was probably one of the more obsessive students. I maintained a prickly, love-hate relationship with my metals professor, a hawk-nosed hardass named Martin Cantor.
From first year onward, Cantor picked on me more than anyone else. It was irritating, but it also meant he paid more attention to me, so I put up with his constant criticisms. I figured maybe it was because I was older, or because he wasn’t able to ruffle me the way he ruffled some of the other female students. When Andrew dropped by the labs once, he decided Professor Cantor was in love with me, and renamed him Professor Predator.
“This is your last semester before your internships,” Cantor said as he dispersed us to our various stations. “You may think your vision is everything, that you know enough, that you’re prepared to get out there and do spectacular things, but I have news for you. You’re not.”
Some of my classmates shifted uncomfortably. His gaze landed on each of us in turn, judging, measuring. When his eyes fell on me, I stared back.
His gaze lingered, betraying a hint of irritation before moving on. It reminded me a little of W, that gaze. I wondered if the man was secretly into rough, perverted sex, if he choked his wife every night after he finished preparing his lesson plans. I knew he was married—he wore an obtrusively large, ornate gold wedding ring that he’d doubtless designed himself.
Once the threatening lecture was over, we moved to our sections around the room. I knew everyone in the class, even if we weren’t close friends. They were my metal peeps, drawn to the same tools, the blowtorches and solders, hammers, punches, bits, and picks. Most of us were in our final year, and would soon be paired with some successful Norton graduate in the field.
The professor moved around the room as we worked, asking students what they hoped to accomplish during their upcoming internships. When he arrived at my workspace, I kept my eyes on my project, a miniature silver-plated spoon with filigree of my own design.
“Tableware,” he scoffed. “How original.”
“Everyone uses it. There’s a market for it.” I straightened and met his eyes. Depending on the light—and his mood—they were either dark brown or satanic black.
“Is that important to you?” he asked. “Creating for a market?”
“I don’t usually make silverware, Dr. Cantor. It was just something to try.”
“Trying things is good. Catering to the market is bad. That’s not artistry, Chere. It smacks of cowardice.”
“I’m not a coward.” It came out too loud, too defensive.
He studied me. “Have I touched on a nerve?”
I turned my electric engraver over in my hand. I didn’t like the low, taunting way he said it, like he knew me or something. No one knew me. I worked hard to keep it that way.
“What did you do before?” he asked.
“Before?”
“Before you came to Norton. Did you have another career?”
A flush burned over my cheeks. Did he
know
? I studied his face, but there was no hint of lurid insinuation in his gaze.
“Shall I guess?” he said when I didn’t answer. His eyes flicked to my tiny silver spoon. “Food service, perhaps?”
He still wore that underdeveloped, insincere smile. A lot of the students here found him attractive, but to me, he was Professor Predator through and through. “I was in the customer service industry,” I finally said.
“Ah, service.”
He said “service” like it was something sexy. Ugh.
Eww.
Dom, I thought. He had to be a Dom. Maybe he’d noticed me in one of my numerous forays to Manhattan’s BDSM clubs. Maybe he’d stared at me from some hidden corner. I remembered, with a sudden, intense prickling on the back of my neck, all those times that I’d felt watched, not that I ever did anything besides skulk in the corner.
“Why is it so small?” he asked. He picked up my spoon, squinting at the half-finished etching. “The design’s nicely wrought, if a little pedestrian.” He turned to my case, looking over some of my recent work. He studied the rings and earrings and chains, the simple pins and streamlined hair clips.
“You make such delicate things,” he said, touching a pair of very tiny, very spare hoop earrings. “Why do you make everything so small and simple?”