One Life With Him

by CD Reiss

  “You can’t write it down,” I stopped her in the hallway before she could go further. “And you can’t say you’re going to. Not out loud. Not ever again.”

  “But…no. I’m sorry. I mean like…as fiction!”

  She was so sunny and bright that I hated her and craved her company at the same time.

  “Listen.” I held my hands up, whispering urgently in the stone hallway. “You even think of doing that and you’re going to be in big trouble.”

  Her expression was all question marks. I didn’t know how to be any clearer with her. She was one of us—and safe because of it—but she was also walking across a minefield in clown shoes.

  “And get pants until you’re married,” I said. “You’re not supposed to be accessible.”

  “Pants won’t keep a man from thinking or doing anything.”

  “That’s not the point. It’s tradition. Please. I don’t want you to end up in the Palace.”

  Her face fell, and I hated that I did that to her and loved knowing I’d saved her at the same time. I could have predicted our relationship would be one of contradictions on day one.

  “You have those here?” she asked. “Palaces?”

  With tight lips and crossed arms, I exhaled. How was I supposed to explain that we didn’t consign women to communal sexual servitude any more, but that the threat of it was as real as it was before we stopped the practice? I couldn’t even explain this particular bogeyman to myself, but I believed in it just the same.

  “Just follow my lead on everything,” I said. “Until you’ve got your feet under you. Okay? Wear what I wear. Clip your nails. And please…write regency romance or something. Don’t borrow from real life.”

  She nodded, casting her eyes down, and I thought I’d done a good thing.

  I thought I’d fixed her in time.

  ***

  I don’t need to be fixed. This isn’t my fault. My father saw everything. He knows it wasn’t my choice.

  When this ends, I will still be a worthy bride. I’ll need more time to sew another gown. The intricate beading on this one is pulled. Its silk fabric stained with dirt and tears. And it’s stained with invisible memories that will never wash out.

  Besides, after this, I’m going to eat like a pig for a year. It won’t fit around the ham and soft cheese.

  Coffee.

  I want coffee.

  And sausages. Miles of them.

  Lèige waffles drowned in chocolate, like when I was a kid, but no limits. I’ll need a gown ten times the size, but I’ll definitely still need a gown, because I’m still pure, and worthy, and desirable.

  Water.

  Gallons and gallons of water.

  I have not been tainted, not by a man’s body, and not by Outside. I cling to that as the endless hours unfold.

  This wasn’t my choice, and I can still belong to only one man.

  But every time I try to reassure myself with this thought, another set of memories comes rushing in: half-remembered snatches of gossip, tales of women who had queaned themselves, as if our bodies didn’t belong to everyone. As if the treasure is theirs to spend.

  They are not banished. No one is ever banished.

  Sometimes, though, they are gone. Just gone. Not for wearing a skirt before marriage or anything like that. But when a woman willfully—and without permission— associates herself with Outside People, she’s never the same, even if she stays.

  The sun slips below the horizon and in the night’s darkness I try to sleep. Rest is fitful, uneven, and my dreams are all nightmares: the horrors of Reconditioning*, or what I’ve heard of it, anyway, chasing me through my sleep. The worst Colony criminals are imprisoned underground in our tunnels, passages built by our brewers long before Manhattan was a city, and just before dawn breaks I am trapped in a feverish delusion of being stuck down there, punishing darkness enclosing me, surrounded by the skittering sounds of criminals and madmen.

  I’m half-mad myself by the time the sun is overhead again, shimmering down brilliantly at me from the cold blue sky. It’s lower than where it was when I woke the day before, which means I’ve now been missing for more than a day. I clutch the sharp piece of pottery under my glove. It’s a safety blanket. A choice I can make in a situation where my decisions are meaningless.

  Hovering in half-consciousness, my eyes are closed when the door bangs open again, and Darius enters, carrying a tall glass of water. He sets it on a dirty counter in front of me and then leans against the table, crossing one long leg over the other.

  I get to my feet and approach the glass, wary but unable to stay away from its promise. I’ve never been this thirsty in my life; my eyeballs burn and my tongue’s made of layers of cardboard.

  Darius watches me silently, but then, as I reach out to take the glass, he slaps my hand away. I am already weak and dizzy, and the force of the blow makes me stumble and spin.

  “Please!” I cry. I realize I am on my knees. I had intended to be strong, to refuse to let him see me suffer any more, but I am so, so thirsty.

  “Take that stupid dress off.”

  I shake my head. I’m past caring about modesty. I care about the dress. It’s ruined, but it’s mine. I worked on it for months, my fingers numb from stitching, my eyes and back aching as I worked into the night. It may be the only piece of the Colony left to me besides my own body and I will not take it off.

  He shrugs and picks up the glass of water.

  I remain defiant.

  He turns to go.

  And I think, with blinding clarity: I cannot die here.

  “Okay,” I say.

  He stops, turns around, but does not take another step.

  I slip the dress off slowly, regretfully, because as awful as it looks, the fabric is still fine, soft and sweet, a reminder of who I was and what I expected just yesterday. The gloves stay and so do the undergarments I’d worn to please Kyle, because Darius just said to take off the dress, and I’m weak but not dead. I’m not giving him anything he didn’t ask for.

  He places the cup back on the table. Then he sweeps a hand through the dust and dirt on its surface and sprinkles them into the water. I watch helplessly as it clouds with gray.

  “Down to the skin,” he says. “Show me every inch.”

  The suggestion in his command floods my dry veins with resistance.

  “No. You said the dress.” I hold out my left hand, the bare one without the distorting piece of pottery under the glove. “Give it to me.”

  This time, he takes a discarded nursery container and pinches out white-flecked potting soil. He drops it in like a chef seasoning too heavily.

  “It’s going to be mud soon,” he says. “If you aren’t naked.”

  “Where’s my father?” I squeak without spit. “Did he give you the names?”

  “Haven’t spoken to him since the car, when he told me to do what I wanted with you.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “We tried. He won’t negotiate with outsiders…so. Take your fucking clothes off.”

  I do everything I can not to cry as I lower my underpants and slip out of my matching bra, my hands shaking the entire time. I leave the glove for last, hoping its beside the point.

  “I know what you’re hiding in your glove. You’re not going to kill me with a broken flowerpot.”

  “It wasn’t for you.”

  He nods, then flicks his finger at me. I peel the glove off. The shard clatters to the floor.

  I am finally bare before him, exposed as I have never been before a man.

  My breath skips, and I cry, but I don’t make tears or snot over this destroyed moment—the first time a man’s eyes see my skin, my nipples, my utter vulnerability and power.

  This was supposed to be one of the most beautiful moments of my life. Instead, it is a violation.

  He isn’t satisfied yet though.

  “Stay still,” he commands.

  He walks behind me, hovering for a moment before grabbing my h
air and yanking it back, so that I’m gazing up into the camera’s merciless eye.

  “Can you imagine how good it will feel,” he murmurs, his breath hot against my neck, “when I let you drink? That cold, sweet water, sliding down your throat?”

  I’m barely holding myself upright. I nodded helplessly, swallowing a lump of garden pebbles.

  “Even with a little dirt, a little dust, you’ll take it all down, won’t you? And then you’ll beg for more.”

  “I’ll beg,” I agree. “I’ll do it.”

  “You need it,” he says, and I can feel the cruelty of the smile in his voice.

  “Please,” I whisper. “Please—please—”

  “Say it for the camera.”

  Who’s on the other side? His boss? His partners? The entire Outside?

  “Please give it to me.”

  “Let me swallow it,” he whispers thickly.

  “Let…let me swallow it all.”

  “I know what your body needs. And what you’ll do to get it.” And then, just as abruptly as he’d grabbed me, he spins me around so that I’m facing him, and then he lets me go.

  I sink to my knees, dropping my face to hide my fury and shame.

  “Okay,” he says after a moment. He’s bored again, casual. “You can drink now.”

  I do. I am shameless and desperate, and I savor every drop in the glass, dirt and all.

  He leaves before I finish, apparently not interested in watching me debase myself any further.

  I lie naked where he left me, legs in the letter K, bare skin on cold tile, the empty glass a few inches from my hand, watching the clouds form in the grid above me.

  There door clicks and whooshes open. The room spins when I bolt to a sitting position. A tray of food, accompanied by a whole pitcher of water, is pushed across the threshold.

  The door claps shut again and the deadbolt is smacked home.

  I glance at the camera. He’s watching. He has to be.

  I should stand up and walk like a human, but by the time I finish making that decision, I’m already crawling on my hands and knees like an animal.

  We eat hearty food, but the tray contains food I’ve never eaten: a plastic clamshell with a sandwich inside—pink meat spills from a circle of bread split into a pocket.

  Taking it slow, I peek into the pocket and find cheese and the familiarity of mayonnaise. A pink container of yogurt that proudly proclaims—next to a bulbous strawberry—that it has REAL FRUIT inside.

  I rip it open, ready to suck it down, but I stop.

  Kylah had confessed to me that she’d tried Outsider food once. She’d snuck out and gone to a restaurant where they served things she’d never heard of, raw fish on rice with salty, spicy dipping sauces. “It was disgusting,” she’d said, giggling. “But… kind of fun, too.” Some girls thought it fun to flirt with the Outside, to get a taste of what the men in our community were protecting us from, just to see, but I had never had such impulses, because I am Sarah Antoine.

  I am the Colony, and I live for the good of all.

  I stand up carefully, my head still swimming from the heat, my hunger and thirst and poor night’s sleep. I walk over to my discarded pile of garments first, though, and put them on again: the underwear and bra, the ruined dress, my shoes. I leave the glove and shard.

  Then I put the tray onto the counter, right a white plastic chair that matches the one on the roof, and—dressed in silk garments that had once been a hopeful symbol of my purity and were now nothing more than a painful, ridiculous reminder of everything I have lost—I nourish myself, dreaming of the day I murder my husband.

  Take Me is the first of three, and it’ll release on 1/12.

  GET TAKE ME

  Subsequent releases — Make Me and Break Me will release with four to six weeks between. I’ll get preorders up as soon as I can.

  TAKE ME - 1/12

  MAKE ME - 2/16

  BREAK ME - 3/23

  For the time being, these books will be wide. I reserve the right to change my mind for any reason including, but not limited to laziness.

  The Edge Series

  Sample Chapter

  The Edge Series is four books of hot, dark, mindfuckery that will take you places you’ve never been before.

  He's her husband, but he's not the man she married.

  Caden and Greyson come home from deployment to build a life together. Everything is perfect, until Caden starts changing into a different man---one with a savage edge that's as dangerous as it is sexy.

  Who is her husband?

  What has he become?

  And why?

  Caden takes part in an experimental treatment, one that intensifies the break between who he was and who he's becoming, while Greyson hunts down answers, putting together pieces of a puzzle that begins in Iraq and ends in their bedroom.

  The cure may be worse than the disease, and as Caden's roughness hits new heights, so does Greyson's pleasure. She's falling in love with a man she never married---a man whose very existence is a mystery, and one she's hell-bent on destroying.

  With time running out and forces bigger than their marriage working against them, Greyson needs to put together the pieces before Caden takes it all too far…

  GET THE EDGE

  Copyright © 2018 Flip City Media Inc. All rights reserved.

  No part of these chapters may be reproduced by any electronic or mechanical means without permission, except for brief quotations in a book review.

  This story came out of the author’s head. Any similarities to persons living or dead makes you a sick puppy in good company.

  Chapter 1

  Greyson - september, 2006

  The sky in Iraq was the bluest blue I’d ever seen. It had a flat depth, as if thin layers of glass, each a slightly different shade, were stacked together. Sometimes I’d dream about that sky. Either I’d be floating in it, blue everywhere, above and below, at each side and pressure point, squeezing the breath out of me, or I’d be falling from it, from blue into blue, no Earth barreling into greater and greater detail. Just a single direction in the never-ending cerulean sky.

  Caden and I had been separated by an ocean and a war for ten months. We’d married while I was on leave and spoke when our schedules matched and the wind blew the wi-fi signal in the right direction. I thought I hadn’t known him long enough to miss him, but I did.

  Painfully. Tenderly. Thoroughly. Our separation stretched the bond between us to a thin, translucent strand, but did not break it.

  Caden’s eyes had the color and layered depth of the Iraqi sky.

  When I missed him, I looked up. When I wrapped his T-shirt around my neck, my dreams of the blue sky lost their nightmarish edge, and the bond became a little less taut.

  Jenn and I flew to New York in our uniforms. She remained on active duty and had a job waiting at the VA Hospital in Newark. I had a husband and no job.

  “You want to put on some makeup or something?” she asked.

  “Why? You afraid they’re all looking at me?”

  The crew had moved us to first class. I craned my neck to see a jowly businessman sleeping with his mouth open. A mid-level rap star with cornrows and a name I couldn’t recall was reading a book to his daughter, and two middle-aged women chatted in the row across. No one was giving my lashes the side-eye.

  “Hell, no. But maybe you want to look nice for your husband?” She rooted around a quilted pink bag and found a black stick. “Here. Lip gloss.”

  “It’s only going to wind up on his dick.”

  She burst out laughing and replaced the lip gloss with mascara. “Here. Doll it up just a little. You’re a civilian now.”

  I took the mascara, and she handed me a compact with a mirror. I flipped it open and looked at myself in circular sections.

  I was a civilian now.

  I had no idea how to be that.

  As the only girl in a military family, enlisting wasn’t encouraged. It wasn’t unexpected either. It made
them proud. And disappointed. And worried. A mixed bag of emotions that probably had nothing to do with either parent and everything with how I felt at every time I wondered what they thought.

  I would have stayed in the army my entire life, but Caden happened, and he saw the army as his duty to the country. A debt to pay, not a way of life.

  At the gate, a little girl of about six ran up and gave Jenn and me flowers. “Thank you for your service,” she said.

  This wasn’t uncommon. I’d learned people were in awe of my career choice and the risks it involved.

  I kneeled and took the flowers. “Thank you for the flowers. And thank you for appreciating us. That means a lot.”

  Suddenly shy, she curtsied and ran away to her mother, who waved at me. I gave her a thumbs-up.

  “Is it wrong to wish she was a single, six foot-tall black man with a nice bank account?” Jenn asked quietly, sniffing the flowers.

  “Her mother might be a little surprised.”

  Jenn chuckled and pointed at the sign above. “Baggage claim, this way.”

  We didn’t get two steps before I saw Caden waiting for me. He had flowers tied with stars and stripes printed on the ribbon, a grey suit, and smile that told me he saw me the way I saw him—with a certain amount of surprise at the easy familiarity, and another bit of gratitude at the fulfilled expectations. It was as if we were seeing each other for the first time, and coming back to something very familiar.

  I dropped my bag and ran into his arms. We clung to each other, connected in a kiss that held nothing back. Cocooned, shielded by love and commitment, the airport terminal fell behind the wall of our attention to the kiss.

  He jerked me away with a sucking sound and a drawn breath, but kept his nose astride mine. “Welcome to New York, Major.”