Scar Flowers (14 page)

He
started to sit up but stopped, fascinated by the sight of a hand. Veins ran along its surface, threaded over the bones under-neath. The fingers moved, intricate and independent. His hand. Suddenly none of it mattered: Karen, Fran, the schedule . . .

It occurred to him to laugh, but he noted the impulse and let it pass. His
gaze traveled up the leg of the table to the tiny red light on his digital camera, still filming.

The watcher and the watched.

Then he did laugh, but his breath came out in sobs. A black pressure compressed his skull. He shut his eyes; not until the ragged noises in his ears slowed into regular pulses did he open them again. The pulses said,
You are alive
.

It was the sound of his own breathing.

Thursday, June 8, 3:13 p.m.

Cast out of
Babylon
.
The thought should have made her smile, her own private joke, but when rain pelted the windows of the airplane during the descent into SeaTac International Airport, Leah reached for a tissue, thinking it was her own tears coursing down the glass. She checked her watch every few minutes, as if it could explain why she could not shake her mood, heavy as jet lag.

Top drop, Delilah would call it. An occupational hazard for dommes. “It happens to our submissives, too
, without rhyme or reason—sometimes months after the original scene that upset them. Re-entry into the real world after a scene can give you emotional rug burn, my dear. We deal with powerful currents in this art.”

I know what you really are.
How cold Simon’s eyes had been.

Yes, that must be the reason for the shame she willed out of her mind,
but it crept back in every time she relaxed. Like swatting mosquitoes.

In the dark
, she had crouched over Simon, who was stretched out naked in his bed. Feeling him breathe and struggle as his heartbeat pulsed against her thighs. His head thrown back, the curve of his throat. Letting her cut him. He pulled against her ropes, but pushed up against her scalpel-blade ring. Body arched against her mouth, the head of his sex nudging the base of her spine, but she had not allowed anything more than that, even as her body mistook him for an instant as an extension of itself, her wrists aching and her limbs stretched taught. Desire to take the welling bead of his blood onto her tongue, the liquor sweetness of it.
Too dangerous with a non-fluid-bonded partner
, a voice droned, but the warning to play safe, the threat of plague, had not stopped her. Iron and sugar and salt, his skin slick under her tongue for that dive into the river of his emotions, the double-helix template of his mind.

Always, she had to know and respect others’ physical and emotional limits
; it was her responsibility to those who submitted to her. But with Simon, she had broken the first and most essential law: consensuality.

Broken the letter of the law but not its spirit. If he didn’t want it, he
would not have cooperated.

Dangerous. Those were words an abuser could say too.

Had she fooled herself as well as him?

Blood
red, that stolen drop. Rubies and fire and love and disease, shimmering in her mouth. Simon had been so open to her, obeyed as she knew he would, and yet outside that single moment when she lost herself, the satisfaction had not come, as if by grasp-ing her goal it had escaped. She had risked too much, lost control. At least she had put only herself in danger of infection, not him.

Barriers. Even before the she cut him, she regretted her trespass into his life. The night she brought the absinthe, her words had touched him when she spoke of Julia. She had not realized she knew half the things she talked about
that night until she said them. Then there was his expression when she had noted the squalor of his living quarters, the overstuffed trash can and the narrow bed heaped with laundry. Defiance mixed with shame, covered over with indifference. He cared how the world judged him. In the midst of his trust, she had photographed him, as if logging a specimen.

But she had been right about him,
had known he would respond to her. There had been clues in his work. In one Mercer film, a father loses his adopted sons when his wife sues for an annulment. In another, a young man wandering in search of a better life is beaten and possibly raped. The female characters were usually distant figures who transformed the men’s lives, and less often were thinly disguised alter egos, corrupt beauties gorgeous in their disintegration. A hint of divine presence glimmered in this cinematic world in the form of unlucky coincidence and chance meetings, as though God were only able or interested enough in humanity to stage occasional jokes of cosmic black humor or watch as the hapless hero was devoured by society. The landscapes and buildings, monumental and often deserted, presided impassive-ly over the story.

Even his features hinted at the truth.
The lower half of his face had the molded fullness celebrated in East Indian art, where the curves of his nose, lips, and chin met in a way that suggested an appetite and weakness for the scent of sex. Wary eyes, from which some imperturbable presence watched. Her chest ached as though a pot of water boiled in it when she remembered his scar. Who had he been when he got it? What had mattered in his life then? How could she be here, never to see him again, when hours ago she had worn his skin and felt his heart pulse in her own body? A connection like that came once in a lifetime.

No. She had only imagined it. She was home, where she should be. She had disrupted Simon’s work and destroyed care
-fy maintained professional boundaries with Paul, whom she had used for her own ends.

Think about something else.

Home. The word was incongruous with the eight-foot-high wooden fence off a narrow alley. That was all she could see from the cab, which stopped outside the heavy oak gate. As the driver stacked her suitcases on the cobblestones, Leah punched in the entry code on a keypad beside the intercom.

The driver grumbled but lugged her bags through the gate and down the brick path, slimy with rain. The house itself was a demure
two-story building, pale green under a gray sky. Nothing here but some dripping trees, a garden hose sloughed in deflated coils on a puddle of Northwest summer mud.

His cheek under her fingertips at the hotel
room. How she had wanted to touch his hair, his mouth.

It’s
a mood. It will pass.

How long had she lived here compared with how much time had passed since
L.A.? Lifetimes. Her father had awarded her the house the day Leah returned from SAB. The sun had slanted across the echoing wood floor to the marble fireplace. The furni-ture was gone already; only a few boxes remained. Her father wore his horn-rimmed glasses perched on top of his head, cuffs buttoned and red damask tie knotted, as he announced that his mother had died and they were moving to Ohio so that he could be executor of the estate. This followed a lecture on how her going away to ballet school in New York had left him with no one to manage the house, with an unspoken theme of
your mother can’t be expected to handle such things.

“If you don’t want to come,
we’ll leave you the house and you can stay here.”

Her mother plucked
at her skirt, the peach one clotted with embroidered cherry blossoms that Leah used to trace with her fingers, the heavy pink threads ridged on the thick silk. Justine said, “Adam, give her time.” But they insisted on getting their answer that day; they were to leave in a week.

She last saw them
on moving day. Leah changed the locks, and with only the utilities and taxes to pay, drifted through jobs and lovers, too stubborn (
too bitter and defeated
) to go back to ballet. The only other contact came after her twenty-first birthday, when she was allowed to touch the trust fund her grandmother left her.

Try
concentrating on something neutral instead. A fact.

Fact: Last night, she had left Simon on the floor of her hotel room to catch a standby flight home. Waiting for hours for LAX to resume service after a security scare
, she had not slept, had not even tried to.

Fact: She had taken his blood into her body, drops stolen with
a blade. It had made her heart ache, the desire to fasten on his wound and drink him in. To be his source, his everything. She belonged to him in this way, and he did not know.

I’m losing my mind
. What would even make me think I belonged to him?

Had her uncertainty been obvious during their scene in the hotel room? Not only had he twice shaken off hypnotic trance in his trailer, but on the cliff top he fixed her with an offhand gaze and pronounced that he knew what she was—as if she were a whore. Anger fired her limbs, then burned itself out.

He’d come around in the end. Confessed to her. His fantasy starred a familiar character in male daydreams: a woman in the driver’s seat. No need for him to initiate or guide. Just exercise a little self-discipline and reap the reward of pleasure.

Few people in
Simon’s place would have the courage to reveal themselves. Could it have been foolhardiness or simple exhibitionism?

To have had that communion with him on the cliff, then be
dismissed like a servant . . .

Why should she want to be accepted by “normal” people—the ones too frightened to challenge the culture’s dictates or to accept the totality of the human soul, in all its darkness and light? So many of them, Simon included, held on to whitewashed images of themselves, when the irony was that repressed truths made them more vulnerable to pain and manipulation, not less.

The cabbie dragged her suitcases inside the gate and drove away as she lingered in the yard.

The wisteria twined along the path to the front door was no longer in bloom, but the Laburnum frothed with chandeliers of clustered yellow flowers. She touched each rose bush, some so old
that she remembered her mother tending them. Her mother, who taught her how to prune the branches and remove the spent blooms while Leah worked in the yard barehanded. (“Oh, Leah Margaret, your hands will be soiled. You’ll ruin your nails.”) She would prick herself, then bring her hand, stained with earth and blood, to her mouth, until her mother insisted that she wear gloves.

“I hoped gardening would teach you patience,” Justine would say. Leah still had a mark on her knuckle from particularly long hooked thorn.
Scar flowers
was her private name for roses. As a girl, she invented personas for most of the plants: cherry blossoms were ballerinas in miniature flounced skirts. Peonies, fragrant and classical, filled the air like piano music. She called fuchsias, gaudy and long-legged,
wasp lilies
. Daisies, simple and open in design, smelled of wet earth:
doggerel
, in her childish bestiary. Leah turned a rose blossom in her fingers. The leaves on most of the plants hung limp from up-thrust branches, coated in dust. Faith had been careless in watering.

Faith.

She had called Angel and Faith from the airport this afternoon to tell them she was coming home early, but Faith had not answered the phone.

In the chain-link run at the side of the house, a white dog stood with ears pricked, its brush
of a tail held out stiff, poised like the flag on a mailbox. At her glance, it ducked its head and lifted a front paw, pale blue eyes trained on her.

“Sasha!” Leah started toward the enclosure, then slowed her steps. In these heels, she might slip on the paving stones. She turned back to her luggage, where she hoisted her carry-on bag to her shoulder and retrieved a paper bag from inside. “This is for you.”

The dog glanced at the rubber doll in Leah’s hand, a crew-cut man in a blue suit with a molded brown briefcase, then stared at her. She squeezed the doll to make it squeak, and tossed it gently over the fence. Sasha put her front paws against the mesh and whined. “I know. But my skirt . . . I’ll change and come back.”

The new toy lay on the hard-packed earth as Leah felt inside her carry-on bag to reassure herself
that the remaining two parcels were still there.

Inside the house, everything looked neat, the books standing in their ordered rows. Muffled drumbeats seeped from bedroom upstairs. Leah hung up her coat, then stepped on something soft as she entered the living room. A man’s plaid shirt. Her throat tightened.
It could be Faith’s. It could be.
Quietly, she ascended the spiral staircase, trying to recall if an old Dodge Charger had been parked outside. She usually surveyed the cars on the street to make sure that her clients followed her instructions to park at least four blocks away. She wanted to give the neighbors no reason to notice the activity at her house or to complain—not that she even knew her neighbors.

Could Faith have invited a friend over? One of her college classmates. Or friends from the periphery of their shared social circle, mostly party girls who had weekend wardrobes of black vinyl but knew nothing of the lifestyle, or Goth girls who dabbled in floggings. Those types rarely mingled with Leah’s acquaintances, who were lifestyle practitioners with day jobs at Microsoft or Boeing. Delilah’s friends.

Interspersed with the throbbing rock music was a chorus of what sounded like
no, no, no
interspersed with wordless cries. The beveled glass knob, its chill quickly turning slick and warm, rotated slowly in Leah’s grasp. The door creaked open by degrees. Male sweat and that scent she would know anywhere—Faith, her Faith, the girl who never drank coffee, “to keep myself sweet.” Ridiculous thing to think of now, with the bedclothes quaking and a strange head of brown hair bobbing over the pillows. Someone else’s clothes strewn on the floor, jeans and men’s work shoes.

She knew
that Faith slept with Drew every time she went to his house—it was a relationship she had agreed to, knowing that to deny the girl would push her away—but everything unfolded like a bad dream.