by Patricio
(11/24/04)
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Chapter 12
He wants Violet to move her bed to the soundproof room, but she just can't. Well, the double bed will hardly fit in there, if she could somehow drag it through the doorway there wouldn't be room for anything else, after all, the place was only ever intended as a spare room before he came and nailed a wooden blind over the window and a full-length mirror to the wall and installed the metal swing in the midst of the room where he has brought her to screaming ecstasy.
She'll never sleep. It'll drive her mad, if she has to sleep in there. In the room where she's begged him to hurt her more even though she's already at the end of her tether. Don't make me do this.
He doesn't. Not quite. But there's a day or two, when she returns from her work, that she smells new smells on the air, from within the locked soundproof room. He has been drilling, perhaps.
That night he e-mails her to leave a certain window open in the kitchen.
Why does he want that, if he has the keys?
He's a thief, that's why. He wants to steal in like a thief, because he's trying to steal her reason.
He's rigged up new spotlights, in the soundproof room.
It's something a.m., and she lies on her back, on a single futon, in the soundproof room. She's nude, her wrists and ankles tethered to four rings that he's set into the floor of the soundproof room, so that she's spreadeagled, staring up at the metal swing. He has pushed something made of rubber into her vagina. His fingers are playing at her clitoris, restlessly. "Remember," he keeps saying, then summons up another memory, of her suspension, of how he beat her, of how she asked him for more, of how finally he had to refuse her for the sake of her body and her sanity.
She can't stop crying.
"Remember," he keeps saying, and now these don't seem to be real memories, "Remember how I burnt your navel," and no, he didn't, did he? But her cunt tries to rise to his fingers, as he says, "Remember, remember how you heard the dog barking in the next room..."
She wakes and he's watching her from a maroon chair that didn't used to be here in the soundproof room. Unbound, she crawls over to him. She rests her head on his blue-jeaned thighs. "Please don't make me crazy," she says softly.
"I'm sorry." His hands stroke her hair. "I won't..."
He doesn't finish. Don't try and make me believe things happened that didn't really happen. That's too much for me. She doesn't say. Can't bring herself to say. It's his diffidence. That she's caught, like an illness. Isn't it? "Please hurt me," she says.
Soon she lies on her back on the futon, cuffed to the four rings set in the floor, spreadeagled, and with one hand he tips hot wax from a violet candle on to her breasts, while with the other his fingers play with her cunt.
"Will you do anything for me?"
"Anything," she says. "Anything."
"Anything?"
"Anything." And then her voice spirals into a scream that isn't quite her own.
But she won't. Do anything for him. Her limit is a surprise, even to her. They are sipping coffee together downtown at lunchtime, which he has never done with her before. He wears a genial smile, and asks her if she'd like to take a week's vacation with him at Christmas. It's impossible, of course. She already has prior commitments, how can she conceivably let her family down, quite apart from...?
"Yes," she says. "Where are we going?"
He places a forefinger on her lips. "Somewhere special. I've booked you in to be pierced this evening, OK?"
The room might, she thinks to herself giddily, be in a boat. Is that why it's suddenly lurching so much? "OK?" he's repeating. "Only, I'd like them to be healed before Christmas."
The piercer is a big woman with Celtic tattooes on her bare forearms, and multiple rings in her face. The three of them are in some sort of ante-room, amidst a smell that reminds Violet of the dentist's. The piercer squats, her self-consciously ripped jeans showing glimpses of a tattoo on her right knee. Violet holds the Englishman's thin right hand in her left and knows she is going to have to say no.
"She wants six piercings," he is saying to the woman. "One for each letter of her name."
The piercer isn't suspicious, exactly. But she's fastidious. She won't allow the man to speak for the woman. She looks Violet in the eyes. "And where would you like the six piercings?"
Violet dislikes herself for looking up to him to indicate he'll reply. It isn't how she would act in her daily life, it isn't her instinct, but she knows he must have six locations in mind. "Each nipple," he says, "each labia, the clitoris hood, and the septum of the nose."
Part of her is melting. But part of her --
"You're happy with that?" The woman hasn't taken her eyes off Violet's. It's not a challenge to him, but it's an assurance.
"No," says Violet, her mouth suddenly dry, squeezing his hand as she speaks. "Not the septum of the nose."
"Not the...?"
Now the woman is looking to him. He isn't sulking, or even seeming to react, his hand still holds hers. "Whatever she says," he says.
Is he angry, though?
The piercings themselves are sweet agony. Her body, nude on a hard medical bed, unbound, rises into the pain. Each nipple hurts and hurts and thanks her for submitting to the hurt. Her labia scream at her, then are quickly silenced, when she lifts her head to look down at the silver rings there. Her clitoris hood --
There is no explaining how this feels. As soon as it's done, with no more than a sharp jabbing, the end of the barbell is pressing at the base of her clitoris.
Forever, she says to herself. I will feel this forever.
When he smiles, she turns, lifts herself, wants to fold into him, cling against him. He strokes her back. He hugs her tight.
But is there something withheld, something she has placed between them, with her refusal of the sixth piercing?
