Together, we go into the house designed for someone else, that exists, and that I feel safe inside. He closes the door.
“Do you trust me?” He unbuttons my jacket and slides it off my shoulders.
“Yes.” I shouldn’t answer so quickly, but the heart doesn’t hesitate.
“How much?”
“Why?”
“Because what I’m going to do to you, it’s going to hurt at first.”
When I inhale, the air is fire in my lungs, igniting a kindling in my belly. “I trust you.”
Pensively, he runs his fingers down my shirt, circling the nipples. “Go up to our bedroom. Take your clothes off and wait for me.”
I do as I’m told, and when I get to the bedroom, my breath isn’t short from the run up the stairs. My hands aren’t shaking as I undress because I’m scared. The flush in my cheeks isn’t from heat, and the tightness of my nipples isn’t from a chill.
It’s the promise of hurt. His hurt.
He’s still fully dressed when he comes in. He takes off his scarf. “Turn around.”
I turn my back to him, and he covers my eyes with the scarf.
“Now.” He spanks my bottom. “Walk to the bathroom.”
“But I can’t see.”
He spanks me again. “Go anyway, or I’ll tie your hands behind your back and send you on your knees.”
I want to make him proud. Prove myself. I know where the bathroom is, so I reach out for the wall, taking unsure steps. I’m in control of my thoughts and movements. Right or left? The choices are mine to make. But I’m hobbled without my sight, and I run into the corner of the bed.
“Right direction.” His voice echoes as if he’s already in the bathroom. “This way.”
Am I in control? Do I want to be, as long as Dario can wield power over me?
“Can I take this off?” My arms wave in front of me like a kid playing pin the tail on the donkey. I take another step.
“No.” The tub faucet goes on at full blast, sounding as though it’s coming from every direction and making his voice hard to follow. “A couple more steps.”
“Can you talk again?”
“I love seeing you find your own way to me.”
My foot touches cold tile. I smile.
“I made it!” I put my arms out for him, but he’s not in range. I step forward. No Dario. When I reach for the scarf’s knot, he grabs my hand from behind and places it on top of my head.
“You made it.” He puts the other hand over the first. “I knew you would.”
He touches me from neck, to breasts, to belly. I can’t decide if he’s behind me or in front, because it feels as though he’s everywhere. His hands push my feet apart, and it feels like he’s kneeling in front of me. His lips brush against my shoulders, and it feels as if he’s ten feet above me. No part of me is beneath his attention. My ankles, inside my elbow, the expanse of my back—they all turn incandescent at his touch.
When I’m glittering with sensation, he takes my hands off my head.
“I’m going to make this good for you.”
“I trust you.” My arms droop to my sides, completely relaxed.
“I know you can take it, but if it’s too much, you say so. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
He pushes me forward, and though I’m convinced my legs are too loose to walk, I take a step.
“Lift your right leg.”
I’m not sure I can command my knees to bend, but they obey what my brain cannot. He guides me into the tub, on my knees, and bends me forward like a doll, putting my palms on the tile of the wall. He shuts off the faucet. The steam is wet on my face.
The hot water flows from a pitcher, warming the parts of me that are exposed to the air. From behind, his warm hands take my breasts before one drifts between my legs and pulls me back into him.
“Do you want to see?” he whispers. “I can take the scarf off.”
“Can we leave it? I know it’s getting wet.”
“Leave it.” He circles my clit, holding me tightly. “Open your legs.”
When I do, the hot water laps against me.
“This is mine.” He slides two fingers inside me.
“Yes.”
“Lean back.” He puts his hand back between my legs, but this time, he settles on my tighter opening and circling it. “Is this all right?”
“I can’t believe how good it feels.”
“Believe it.” Slowly, he pushes in his finger. “Do what I tell you, and you’ll feel so good. Next time, you’ll beg me to take your ass.”
Deeper. I feel as if he’s discovered a part of me I didn’t know existed. With a second finger, I’m dissolving into his arms and the embrace of the hot water. With his other hand, he circles my clit. I gasp with the intensity of the feeling.
“When I put my cock in your ass, it may hurt. But it’s better if I get you close to coming and keep you close.”
I feel the cock he’s talking about against my lower back. It’s a battering ram. It’s going to tear me apart.
“Okay.”
He speeds up the stimulation of my clit. “You’re so tight back here.” He buries two fingers in my ass. “So hot. It’s going to feel so good to fuck this little virgin hole. Show me how much you want it. Spread your ass apart.”
I reach down and spread my cheeks apart, and he gets his fingers in even deeper. “Do you want to come?”
“Yes.”
“Will you?”
“No.”
“Good girl.”
He removes the two fingers and the hand that was on my nub. I gasp with the loss of them. Behind me, a cap snaps open, and he shifts me away from him.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“Getting ready.”
I take off the blindfold and look behind me. A tube of lotion floats in the hot water. He’s leaning back, wet from the chest down, fisting his dick. At this point, it looks bigger than it felt against my back.
“Hands and knees, beautiful. Show me your ass.”
“Now?”
He pushes me forward and I land with my hands on the tub wall. Then he pulls up my hips and squirts warmed lotion on my tailbone before smearing it down to my waiting ass with his two glorious fingers. It’s not long before I forget the thought of that monster in my bottom.
He takes away his hands. “Ready for my cock?”
“I don’t know.”
“What don’t you know?” He flicks my clit, and I groan.
“It’s so big.”
“Yes, it is. And you can put it in as slow as you want.” He leans back, pulling me with him, and wedges his cock between my cheeks. “Just relax. Breathe.”
I feel it hard against my anus, demanding and predatory. Waiting until the right moment to break down the door.
“You’re not breathing.”
“Right.”
“Let me see it. Breathe.”
I inhale slowly and deeply. He pushes. Gets nowhere.
“Good,” he says as if we were successful. “Again. You this time.”
I breathe again and push myself down. My ass opens a little, and I squeal. He pulls back.
“Again.”
“I’m scared.”
“Are you telling me to stop?”
“Would you, if I was?”
“Yes. Without hesitation, I’d stop.”
I’m curious enough to want to keep going. I trust him when he says he’ll stop, when he says he’ll make it good for me, and when he says it will hurt. I trust all of it.
“Then do it. Take it. Make me love it when you fuck me there.”
“God, you’re so fucking hot.”
He puts four flattened fingers between my legs, circling gently, using the promise of pleasure to encourage me. I lower myself little by little, until his head is in. I cringe, biting back a scream of pain because his groan of pleasure makes it all okay. He likes it. I’m giving him myself.
“Slow, now.”
“Okay.” The shape of the pain has a dozen points, like a stamp on a certificate or a volatile star. The pleasure is rounded, yielding, curved, and sloped like an approaching tidal wave.
Another inch. Stretching me, unlocking a door to fill a place I didn’t know was empty. The pain dulls, becoming a constant ache as his cock slides in, inch by inch. Then something changes and the points turn to petals.
“Oh, God. That’s…” My body buckles when he pulls out and slides back in.
Am I crying because of the pain, or because I’ve been reduced to shapes with edges that roll and vibrate?
“That’s what? Does it hurt?”
“Yes. No. Please. Let me finish.”
“Good girl.”
We take it so slowly that when I try to go faster, he redirects my every move with gentle sureness, as if it’s all about me.
Then he groans, sucks in a breath. “I need to feel…”
He doesn’t define it. He just increases his movements on my clit and the tidal wave becomes a circle, bigger and bigger, even after I’m sure nothing inside me is that big, and I’ll never be able to contain it. Like a balloon filling with heat way past just enough. Past what it should reasonably hold. The rubber holds together, thinner and thinner.
“I can’t!” I sob.
“You can.” He grunts, shoving deep.
And I do. The balloon gives up and finally breaks. Splatters in a wordless scream. He puts both hands on my hips and moves me up and down on him.
He pulls me into him as his crescendo comes in a rumbling breath. We lie like that in the cooling water, my back to his front as if I’m a skin’s-width ahead.
I am broken, and filthy, and at peace.
That night, I’m alone. Dario is somewhere being a man no one’s ever learned to control. To counter the emptiness of the house, I turn on a game show.
“I’ll take Friends of Alice for 400.”
“This substance, often used in haberdashery, is said to be responsible for making many a hatter mad.”
My phone makes a noise.
“What is mercury?”
When I look at it, I expect to see a call from Dario, but it’s a message from Massimo’s number. Holding my breath, I open it.
—I know your voice,
even with one word—
Did I say one word?
Wait.
—Tell me where you are
and I’ll come get you—
No.
Never come get me.
If I leave a message, he’ll send something back. I shut it off. If I ignore him, maybe he’ll go away and leave me alone.
“According to Shakespeare, nature teaches even beasts to recognize these.”
Before I admit to myself that I don’t know, one of the contestants beeps in and says, “What are friends?”
“That is correct.”
They move on to the next box, but the question lingers.
What are friends?
Friends laugh. They joke. Share secrets.
Friends embroider diaper covers and clean the apartment when your husband gets mad and lays you up in bed.
Friends tell you he’s not that bad. That you can redeem him. One day, he’ll stop.
Has Marco found the video? Or just the phone?
I take out my phone, turn it back on, and let muscle memory dial the shape of Denise’s home number. Four in the corner. Diagonal. Up twice. Middle. Corner again. Middle. Zero.
It rings. What will I say to her?
She’ll ask about me first. I’ll say I’m fine. She won’t offer to come and get me, that’s for sure.
Ring.
I’ll ask her how she is.
She’ll say she’s fine.
Ring. Ring. Ring.
I’ll listen to what she says and what she doesn’t.
Ring. Ring. Ring.
“Come on.”
I don’t hear Marco’s voice telling me to talk after the beep.
I know they have a machine, but it doesn’t pick up. It just rings and rings.
This is worse than her swearing she’s all right.