Did she have any skin left? Had it all been rubbed off by the rug? She felt his skin on hers, sometimes cold, sometimes sweating, the weight of it, the smell of it, folding over her and covering her up, becoming her only reality.
One thought popped into her head. If she died, she would become his favorite story; how happily he would regale his employers with his eidetic recitation of everything that had happened between them. And he would use this cherished tale to frighten some other woman or man, some future victim. And maybe, in the middle of some other, less thrilling torment he was inflicting, he’d even distract himself for a moment, remembering how satisfying it had been to have finally fucked her to death.
But that was the thing. She wouldn’t die from this. Behind all the pain, she knew that. He wasn’t doing anything that would actually kill her. It just made her
want
to die. And it did. It made her want to die. She was never all that far from that state anyway. This was more than enough to get her there. But he wouldn’t let her die. No, not yet. Not until she cracked.
And now, for the first time, she wasn’t sure that she wouldn’t. She didn’t know what would happen, but she felt a pressure building up in her brain, a storm building. Strange colors and patterns and a roaring inside her head. Something that would make her ears pop, and then smoke would come out of them. She was beginning to become hysterical. She’d known she would have to go through this to get beyond it, but she’d never really believed this was what she would have to go through. That anything could be as bad as this. How was it that there could be so many different kinds of awful? You could never in your life say: I’ve seen the worst.
Was that her making those sounds? Screaming? Wailing?
They’re all gone, a voice inside her head shouted. What the hell are you fighting for?
She was losing it. She’d lost so many things. How could it be that she was still afraid of losing?
If only she could just go to sleep, just go now. To sleep perchance to dream. That was Hamlet. Who was she now, Ophelia? What the fuck had happened to
her
? Nothing to compare to this. Hamlet lost his father. Could hers save her? Now, maybe for the first time? The first betrayal. The first betrayal was the best.
Jesus. She hadn’t even realized that she was begging for help. From whom? From God? From him? Who? There was nobody, nobody who could help her. Nobody who could make it stop. Nobody except —.
There was one thing. She tried to hold onto the thought. She tried to remember who. She tried to remember what. Now he was on top of her again, inside her again, excruciating pain and yet a relief after the endless two-pronged assault before this. And then he kissed her.
And fleetingly, through her mind, rushed the memory of all those who had kissed her and all those she had kissed. The abomination of his lips on hers cast all those past kisses in a kind of golden light. And she thought of Sleeping Beauty, whom the Prince had kissed and awoken. And the pain eased, just for an instant, and her brain woke up, just for an instant.
PART 4
“
Daddy?
”
“Yes, baby.” He didn’t miss a beat. This was what he’d been waiting for.
“Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,” she begged in a wisp of a little-girl voice. “Please, Daddy. Please make it stop.”
The man above her was smiling again now. He brushed a few strands of hair off of her forehead and looked into her eyes. In them, he saw the girl she’d been more than three decades ago. Just a little girl, helpless and lost, at the mercy of another man. In her eyes, now, that man was him.
“Daddy?”
He kept going.
“You love me, Daddy, right?”
“Of course, I love you, baby. You’re Daddy’s girl, aren’t you?”
“Oh, Daddy, why?”
“Because I love you, baby. Because I love you. You know that.”
She was sobbing again now.
“Baby,” he said. “Daddy loves you. You’re very special. And Daddy loves you in a very special way.” He was just about to orgasm. “You’re such a good girl,” he added, his voice very intense. “My good, good girl.” And he pulled her to him as he came so powerfully his head felt almost as if it would explode.
He looked her over carefully after he recovered himself. He couldn’t tell from her eyes where she was now, maybe in the past still, or in the deadness of the future. He didn’t know whether she would be able to understand what he was about to tell her. He unpinned her from the floor and dragged her over to the sofa. He sat down on it and positioned her, once again, on her knees between his legs. She stayed in the position he put her in; there didn’t seem to be any more fight in her, but time would tell. There was no flash in her eyes, as he pulled her head forward and stuck his penis in her mouth.
“Do Daddy a favor, ok, baby? Just suck on Daddy’s cock nice and slow and smooth, ok? Make it nice and hard again. Daddy loves that, and only his baby can do it right.”
She looked up at him for just a moment, her eyebrows tilted down from the middle of her forehead, truly, like a little kid searching for approval. He nodded at her, and she began to do as he instructed.
“That’s it,” he said, with pleasure. “And Daddy will tell you a story while you do that.”
And he did.
“If this hadn’t worked,” he told her. “I might have had to switch to straight torture.” He checked, but there was no reaction. She wasn’t crying, just sucking. “Although I wouldn’t have been entirely satisfied with that. That’s not what I meant to do. It’s a different kind of breaking, too.”
He stopped talking for a few moments, just savoring the blow job.
“I mean, you’re broken, sure. But not the way I was meant to break you. There are different levels of broken. I mean, sure, if I torture you enough, you will break. It will take you years before you’ll be able to look at the world without fear again. If you don’t kill yourself. But
my
way, not only will you fear the world, you’ll no longer trust yourself. You’ll question what you did and did not have to do. What you might have done differently. How you could have done the things you did. Pure physical torture doesn’t give you any of the pain of choice. My way does.”
Her eyes were closed, as they often were when she had to do this. He reached forward and lifted her head slightly and thumbed one of her eyelids open. She opened the other one as well and gazed up at him. Her eyes were still empty, possibly just a little bit sad. He moved one hand to the back of her head for a few moments, gently guiding her in and out, but not pushing her too far in. She let her eyes close again. He’d cuffed her hands behind her back. She was entirely at his mercy, not even struggling, no longer fighting it, on any level.
“You know what?” he said, leaning back again. “I left something out when we were talking earlier about what destroys a person. I mentioned powerlessness, but that’s not all. It’s hope. Crushed hope is the final ingredient in this magnificent cocktail.”
“Everything you’ve been doing,” he continued. “Everything you’ve done was in the hope that you would get through this. If my plan really were to kill you anyway, think of all the misery you would have saved yourself by fighting and dying right at the beginning.”
She continued working on him without comment.
“Ummm.” He breathed in happily. “And I know that you know that that’s probably what I’m really here to do, even though I told you I wasn’t. You don’t know for certain. You have hope. And it won’t let you give up. Because no one really believes they’re going to die.”
She just kept going.
“Oh,” he added with a smile. “And you carefully haven’t mentioned this, but I know that I don’t have all the time in the world here. You can’t be incommunicado for that long. Eventually someone would notice. But Daddy has figured out how to deal with our time issue. It may not take that much longer from the looks of things, but just in case, since I have to be sure, Daddy has decided that we don’t have to stay here. I can take you with me somewhere else. In fact, Daddy can keep you with him forever. No one will have a clue where you’ve gone. No one else will get hurt. That should make you feel better. But I can just keep you, you know, in a basement or something like that, forever.”
This was overkill, but that was the point. If she took it like she was taking everything else now, then it was nearly over. If there was even a spark of fight left in her, she wouldn’t be able to hide it. Not from him.
He looked at her face as he spoke. Her mouth was full. So were her eyes. Her tears were about to spill over. He smiled at her kindly.
“Wouldn’t you like that? You’d never have to be alone again. You’d be with me. With Daddy. I even think you might learn to like it. I know I would.”
She was moving more slowly now because she seemed to be having some difficulty breathing.
“And if my employers in this instance present a problem if I do that because they had their hearts set on another outcome, well, it might just be worth it to me to kill them. And forgo the second half of the fee.”
He looked at her for a moment.
“That’s how much you mean to me,” he said in a very quiet voice.
He wound his fingers in her hair and finally pulled her head away from his penis. Then he let go. She dropped to the floor and began to sob uncontrollably.
He picked her up like the doll she now was and switched the cuffs on her limp arms over to the front. Then he pulled her hands over his head and her body onto his lap. He cuddled her in his arms. She sobbed even more loudly.
“You’ve been great,” he said. “Cooperative. Fierce. Surprising. Fun. Really. But you don’t have to struggle any more. No more choices. You’ll just belong to me. So go ahead and cry. Let it all out.” He held her close. Inside him, there was an additional burst of pleasure at the thought that he might actually even do it. Keep her forever.
She continued to sob, but he just patted her shoulder and held her even more tightly. And whispered one word into her ear.
“Checkmate,” was what he said.
It was so quiet now. Quiet in here. Inside her brain, which was her heart, which was her soul. So quiet now that she had forgiven herself.
When, exactly, did that happen? It would be hard to say. Maybe the moment she realized that she was the one who had punished herself for things beyond her control. Maybe when she, under this man’s most un-gentle ministrations, realized that she had been punished about as much as she could ever hope to be. Or maybe it was something that grew up out of the watering she was giving herself, sobbing almost non-stop for the last, endless hours of this torture, something that grew up from soil that had been so very, very dry until now.
It’s not a question of saying it, not even to oneself. It’s just a feeling of lightness and of cohesion when a person accepts who she is, flaws and all, mistakes and all. Something this man could never do.
And the tranquility that resulted could allow a person to float, away from the horrors of the present, through time, through memory, through all the selves she once had been, to find what was required, to do what was necessary, to let any or all of those selves go, to let any or all of those selves back, if that’s what it took.
To him, she’d said the words she’d needed to say. Become what he’d expected her to become. Made him believe what he’d needed to believe.
And then there was nothing she had to say. Nothing she had to prove. All she had to do was to endure on the inside, in the new peacefulness she had been granted or had granted herself, and give up on the outside, which felt just as easy to do. Just listen to the last, terrible things he said and do the last, awful things he made her do. And cry all the tears she hadn’t shed in seven years, the ones he thought were for him. From him.
It would be easy for him to mistake relief for defeat. In his line of work, he’d never seen the former before. And he’d seen the latter too often.
She didn’t know how this would turn out. She didn’t feel that she
needed
to win anymore. She simply hoped to. She thought how lovely it would be to experience the sensation of a good man touching her with gentleness. There must be one out there somewhere. She’d like to find him. Feel what it was like to live again. To be with someone again.