“I don’t know about that,” he demurred.
“Well, nobody does, really. But when you were a child, someone either loved you in a horrible, fucked-up way or they didn’t love you at all. My point is that the problem of the serial killer is of being disconnected from humanity, unloving and unloved.”
“You seem to have given this an awful lot of thought.”
“I couldn’t help it. With all the movies and the books, and they all focus on his ingenious deeds, only occasionally on what makes him who he is. I mean with Hannibal Lecter, in
The Silence of the Lambs
– forget about the later book – you know there’s a back story, you know something very interesting happened to him to make him the way he was. But then you have the Kevin Spacey guy in
Seven
; he’s not real at all, there is no back story because he’s a theoretical killer, a metaphor, not one driven by inner urges of his own. And they all kind of vary between those two poles.”
“Is there a point here?”
“The suffering of the serial killer that makes him a serial killer has to do with love and connection. Which leads to my problem with this book.”
“I was hoping we’d get around to that.”
She ignored him as she ignored the stress position he’d put her in. Even though she was beginning to lose all feeling in her hands. She set her jaw. “They fall in love and decide to kill together. I guess I just always had a problem with that. I’m not saying they’d stop being killers, necessarily. But finding love, finding connection, how could that not change them on some level? And it never does. They don’t change. But for such people, even more than ordinary people, if they can feel love, then finding love and understanding would have to change them somehow, and that was where I wanted to see that book go. But it didn’t.”
He looked at her. “I had you pegged all wrong,” was all he said.
She waited.
He smiled wanly. “I thought you were the epitome of pragmatism. Given your behavior.” He gestured toward the disheveled sheets beneath her. “But you’re a romantic, aren’t you? You believe in love. You believe in change. Maybe this is some exaggerated version of marrying the bad boy because the love of a good woman will change him. Is that what you see happening here?”
She just shook her head back and forth slowly. Her body followed the movements of her head, twisting back and forth, as well.
“Well, do ya?”
“I do believe in love. And I do believe in change. But I have no reason to believe in either of those things with respect to you,” she finally said. “You would have to
be
loved before you could be changed by it,” she added. “And I hate to disappoint you, but I don’t love you.”
“You’re breaking my heart.”
“Not that it isn’t an interesting thought. If anything could possibly affect you. I don’t know. What would happen if someone did love you? I think you’d reject them; in fact, I think you’d punish them for their naivete. I don’t think you’d let somebody love you, even if that were possible.”
“I think we both know, nobody is ever going to love me.”
She nodded. “Although you know, there are always deluded women out there. You know, the ones that marry jailed felons and stuff. Bondage nuts. Maybe one of them.”
“Whatever else, I have standards.”
“Right,” she tried to laugh. “No crazy, trailer-park gals for you.”
“No,” he said. Eyes on hers, he climbed onto the bed, reached up, and released her hands from the rope that had been twisted around them and threaded through the hook. He let go of her, and she dropped like a stone, down onto the bed. He let himself fall to his knees next to her then straddled her body. “I like the ones that are far smarter than is good for them, the ones that think too much, the ones who think they can out-think me.”
She gulped. “Whoever could you mean?”
“Little old you,” he said.
He hooked her still-cuffed hands around his head and slid his penis inside her. “Tell me that you love me,” he instructed her. “Over and over. I want to hear you say it.”
“Especially since I don’t.”
“But you do, now that I’ve told you to. You’re the Method actor. Whisper it, shout it. I want to see you say it.”
“Everything I say, everything I do, you use against me. You have a genius for that.”
“Now,” he said, in a very firm voice.
“I love you,” she said quietly.
“Louder.”
She looked away and then back at him.
“I love you so much, it hurts sometimes.”
He smiled and kept pumping.
She pulled him closer and whispered it into his ears. “I love you.” She kissed him and said it against his lips. “I love you.” He licked her nipples and played with her clit. And as her excitement increased, she repeated it with greater and greater emphasis. Finally, as she found herself coming, she shouted it to the world at large. “I LOVE YOU. I LOVE YOU. I LOVE YOU.” He let himself come after that, listening to her saying those words and feeling her clamping down on his cock. Spent, he let himself rest on top of her body.
“I love you, too, baby,” he said, into her ear. He neither laughed nor smiled when he said it.
“It’s more believable when I say it,” she said a few minutes later. He was lying down resting. He’d kicked her off the bed, and now she was standing next to the bed, bent over, cuffed hands holding onto her ankles, with her ass facing him. He felt like having her in a humiliating posture. He was also anticipating the future.
“How do you know I didn’t mean it?” he asked.
“I’m not sure even I can have a conversation from this position. The blood is rushing to my head.”
“Sure you can. How do you know?”
“Aside from having a little insight into your character? It’s because ‘love’ is not a synonym for ‘own’ or ‘possess.’”
“It’s not?”
“No.”
“A lot of people have it wrong then.”
“Yes. They do. I won’t argue with you about that.”
“If I say, ‘I love you,’ doesn’t that mean, ‘I want you, I want to be with you?’”
“I don’t know what it means when
you
say it. But it does mean partly that. It also means: I want what’s best for you, what will make you happy.”
“Bullshit.”
“No, really.”
“And I’m calling bullshit on that.”
“That’s what a healthy parent means by love. That’s what any healthy person means by love.”
“Then there’s maybe two healthy people on earth.”
“So cynical,” she said.
“I love talking to your ass this way. We have such intelligent conversations, it and I.”
“That’s so funny.” She shifted position slightly. “I’m beginning to get a cramp in my leg.”
“That’s too bad,” he said. “I’m transfixed by your behind.”
“You’re just making me do this because something affected you emotionally when we just fucked.”
“Oh, really?”
“Never mind.”
“No. Do tell.”
“You thought you were just making me suffer, but you can’t hear those words and not feel something.”
“Love, you mean?”
“No,” she said softly. “Despair.”
He jumped off the bed and grabbed one of her belts from a rack behind the bedroom door. He took hold of her by the hair, twisting her around and bending her so that her face was hidden in the bedclothes and her ass stuck out over the edge of the bed. Then he brought the belt down on her ass. Repeatedly. She screamed. He hit her several times this way, the first few times, one right after another. Then he slowed down and left spaces in between.
“Now, crawl over to me,” he told his sobbing victim after letting go of her, “and apologize for trying to make me feel bad when you love me so much.”
She picked herself up off of the bed where she had collapsed and slowly got down on her knees. Cuffed hands in front of her, she crawled across the room and, head down, put her hands around his calves, and said, “I’m sorry I tried to hurt your feelings. I love you. I’ll try never to hurt you again.” The effect was actually enhanced by the hiccupping that accompanied the last of her sobs.
“You keep having to apologize, and I keep having to forgive you,” he said harshly. “Why should I bother?”
“Because I love you,” she said. “I love you, and I’m a very flawed person. But I love you.”
Her head remained down as she said these words. He reached down and pulled her hair so that she was forced to look up at him.
“It’s funny,” he said calmly. “Listening to your words, I don’t feel anything even remotely like despair.”
“It was wrong of me to say that,” she said.
“Yes. You went out of character there,” he agreed.
“People in love sometimes say stupid, hurtful things,” she said.
He smiled cruelly. “And that still qualifies as love?”
“Yes.”
“Say it again.”
“I love you.”
“Fuck me,” he prompted.
“Fuck me,” she whispered.
“In the ass where you punished me,” he said.
“In the ass where you punished me,” she repeated.
“Please.”
“Please.”
“Ok. If you insist.”
Hitting her always made him rock-hard. He bent her over the bed, grabbed the lubricant, for which she was grateful, and plowed his way into her.
“You know what it is that I really do love?” he asked, through gritted teeth as he pounded his way in and out, his hands hard on the flesh of her back. She didn’t answer, but he continued anyway.
“The way you can keep this up,” he said. “I’d never be able to do what you’re doing. You know that? Never. And you just. Keep. It. Up.” He was panting now. “I love that,” he said. And still he pounded away, with no intention of coming, just enjoying the physical and the psychological sensation of what he was doing.
He couldn’t see her face, but if he had, he might have seen what despair looked like.
As unusual a person as she had been before, when she finally came down from that extraordinary sexual high, helped along by a severe beating with her own damn belt, she was no longer that person. Now it was she that was the machine. It was as if a surgeon had taken a very sharp scalpel and carefully but completely disconnected all the feelings that would normally result from subsequent events. There was no longer any association between how she behaved and how she felt, and a little part of her inside wondered where this had been all her life. But it had come when she needed it. She could talk calmly or angrily, look happy, sad, eager, tired, even despairing. None of it was real; she was just intellect and acting now. She didn’t know how long this would last, but she would make the most of it.
She sat at his feet on the floor because he felt she’d been getting a little too big for her britches. Occasionally, he’d give her a bite. Her hands were cuffed in front of her again. He could see where the skin was being rubbed off.