“So you bring all your girls home?” I made no effort to disguise the sarcasm in my voice.
“I spend every Christmas here in the mountains, so yes, I’ve brought a few. And you should know”—he looked, for the first time I could remember, deeply embarrassed—“my parents are very old-fashioned and religious, so you’ll have to sleep in your own room the next couple of nights.”
I burst out laughing. I couldn’t help it. Jeremy Gray, the product of a conservative and religious home.
“What’s so funny?” He shifted with a little more force than necessary.
“It’s just funny. How do you not find it funny?”
“Because it’s my fucking life.”
“Yeah, well, we all have fucked-up lives,” I said. “I just can’t believe you ever set foot in a church, much less were raised by religious people.”
“What? I’m not that evil. No more so than you.”
I snorted. “Whatever.”
“Don’t make me pull the car over. It’s really late.”
I snorted again, which in hindsight was a mistake. He pulled over and yanked me out. He bent me over the trunk of the car so my feet dangled at least two feet above the road.
“What if a car comes?” I asked as he unbuttoned my jeans and pulled them down to my knees, along with my panties.
“I guess they’ll see me beating your ass.” He tugged the belt from his pants and doubled it over. “Don’t bother to count. I’ll stop when I feel like it.”
“Are you mad, Jeremy? Because you always say you don’t want to hurt me in anger—Ouch!”
“I’m not mad,” he said. “I’m irritated, and you’re acting like a brat.”
“Ouch. Ouch! I won’t even be able to sit down at your parents’ house!”
“Yes, that’s what I hope for.”
The chilled metal of the car against my skin froze my front while my backside was absolutely red-hot. I counted up to twenty in my head before I gave up and started to beg.
“Please, please, stop. I’m sorry! My ass is on fire!”
“I said I would stop when I felt like it.”
I buried my face in my arms, trying with all my strength not to reach back and shield myself, or jump off the trunk of the car and run. I’d probably go tumbling down the side of the mountain and be found frozen in a heap at the bottom with my red, bruised ass exposed. Of all the appropriate ways to die…
“Jeremy, you’re killing me!” He finally stopped when I started to cry, but he didn’t let me down, just put his hand on my lower back and held me still while he undid himself.
“You may find my life funny,” he said, thrusting deep inside me, “but you of all people are in no position to judge.”
“I was joking, Jeremy.” I sniffled. “Why have you been so mad all day?”
“Because I get tired of the lies. Of living this farce.”
“Then why don’t you stop lying?” I could barely get the words out as he pummeled me with forceful thrusts.
I grunted as he pulled out of me and pressed his cock against my ass. He entered me all the time this way now, with only the lube from my pussy. I clenched against the pain, then willed myself to subdue the protective impulse. He slapped me lightly.
“Open. I want to fuck your ass.”
“Yes, Jeremy.”
He eased the head of his cock in, then waited for me to relax before thrusting the rest of the way inside. I moaned. I couldn’t help it. It was a little painful, as always, but one hundred percent better than the pain of his belt.
“Jeremy.” I gasped to the rhythm of his fucking. “If you’re tired of the lying, why don’t you just stop?”
“Hush. Let me fuck you. And don’t you come, you little fuck slut. I don’t want you to come.”
Jesus, I’d really ticked him off.
“Yes, Jeremy.”
Yes yes yes, whatever you say.
Not only did he not let me come, but I had to ride the rest of the way up the mountain with my pants around my knees, my bare, sore ass on the scratchy rental-car seat.
Chapter Sixteen
Lies
‡
Nervous, sore, ass-fucked, horny.
It gave me great pleasure to introduce her to my parents that way. It would have been better to have harnessed her under her jeans with dildos in her pussy and her ass, but I hadn’t thought that far ahead.
If I had to lie, if I had to lie about everything, let me lie about her too. Let me make her base and dirty instead of the beautiful, intelligent girl she truly was.
As they greeted her with hugs and exclamations, I wanted to yell, She’s just my whore. I’m too worthless and sick to deserve anything more of her. But I didn’t. I just hugged and exclaimed too. All the other girls had been painfully out of place here, but she was so perfect, it hurt.
It hurt. Nell shifted on the sofa as my mother brought tea and cookies. I watched her. I’d made her hurt.
Lately I wanted to hurt her all the time. Hurt her the way that she hurt me. Hurt her so she would turn on me and I wouldn’t ache anymore over how perfect she was. How much would it take to drive her away from me, far away from me, where she ought to be? Nothing so far had worked, but to take things further, to really hurt her to the point she would leave…it was too difficult. It was a game of chicken I couldn’t and wouldn’t play.
At least not yet.
My hand went to the pocket of my jacket, to the small box there, the box I’d been carrying since a week ago when I’d come up with a ridiculously stupid idea. It had been such a ridiculously stupid idea that I’d called Martin to run my stupidity past him first.
“Martin, about the stalker. Do you think…? I mean… I wonder how it might affect her if I were to get engaged to someone?”
“Engaged? Like, to be married?”
I could already tell by the tone in his voice that he thought it was as ridiculous as I did.
“I mean, it might put her off, don’t you think?”
“Or make her even angrier at Nell,” Martin said. “Leslie Gray thinks she’s your wife.”
“I know, I know. But maybe getting engaged to someone else would make her reconsider that.”
Martin was silent a long time.
“So, you mean…get engaged to Nell.”
“Yes,” I said, my voice tight.
“Well, do you… I mean…are you talking about really getting engaged to Nell, or…?”
“I mean, we would really get engaged. I got a ring.”
“Jeremy, what I’m asking is, would you be getting engaged for appearances, or do you…? Are you…? Do you really intend to make her your wife?”
I snorted. “Do I have to think that far ahead? She probably wouldn’t have me anyway, so no. I mean, you know. I just want to give her a ring. Let her wear it for a while.”
Martin sighed. “Are you sure she would understand a gesture like that? Because I’m not sure it makes sense to me. You have to tread very carefully with things like engagement rings and proposals. You have to honestly explain—”
“Explain what? She works for me. She plays my girlfriend. Now she can play my wife.”
“You mean your fiancée.”
“Right. My fiancée. Whatever.”
He sighed again. I wished I hadn’t said anything to him at all.
“Listen, Jeremy, you need to think this through. Playing a girlfriend is one thing. Wearing someone’s ring is something else altogether. Especially when…”
“When what?”
“When you’re both so emotionally involved already as it is.”
“I’m not… We’re not emotionally involved. I mean, we’ve been keeping things professional.”
“Have you?”
Fucker.
“Yes,” I said. “Actually we have. Anyway, I just thought it might get this crazy stalker lady off my back.”
“I don’t know. I think it might inflame her more. We should talk to the case worker at the police department first,
get his opinion. He would probably know better what might play out from a situation like this. You certainly don’t want to endanger Nell even further—”
“No, of course I don’t want to fucking endanger Nell!”
He fell silent. Now I was the one who sighed. Martin cleared his throat.
“Jeremy. Listen. I’ve known you for a long time. I’ve known a lot of your girls. I’m not exactly sure where you’re taking this. I can’t tell where your mind’s at. Perhaps worse, I’m not sure you know where your mind’s at. So until you know, I’m advising you not to do anything extreme. Don’t do anything without thinking things through and without being brutally honest with yourself first. If you don’t know why you’re doing this, or what outcome you want, it would be better to just—”
“God, it was just an idea. Don’t flip out and go all mental-health counselor on me.”
Fuck Martin anyway, and fuck the little fuck at the police department who called me a couple of days later to insist it was a very bad idea.
If I wanted to propose to my fake girlfriend on Christmas morning in front of my whole family, then I fucking would. Hell, my parents would be beside themselves with happiness. Even now they were both beaming at her like she was the Madonna herself. I guess since she was the first girl I’d ever brought home who might remotely be considered wife material.
Wife material. I really didn’t want her for my wife. I just thought it might be a good idea for the stalker thing. And anyway, it would be fun to pretend to be engaged to her.
My parents were grilling her about her hometown, her parents, her career.
“I’m a personal assistant,” she said with a straight face over her plate of cookies. She didn’t eat one of them. “I like to help people, I guess.”
“She’s helped me on this trip, that’s for sure,” I chimed in with a subtle wink that had her blushing and glaring at me.
“And were you raised with a religion, dear?” my mother asked with a hopeful note in her voice.
“Nell studies mythology,” I said. “She’s too polite to tell you this, but she actually believes the Bible is just another book of myths.”
She shot me a glare and dropped her gaze into her lap. My mother looked depressed, like she always did when confronted by my godless ways.
“She knows hundreds of stories,” I continued. “Mythology from every continent and every era in time. Mythology about how the world began, what people used to believe—”
“The nice thing about being human,” Nell said softly, “is that you can determine the reality of the world for yourself. People have always done that throughout time, and mythology can reveal to us what those creative beliefs were. If you believe that God created the universe and everything in it, you’re certainly not alone.”
Creative beliefs. I had those sometimes. If I could write a mythology, the reality of the world for myself, it would involve me, Nell, a bedroom, and forever after.
“It’s late, Mom. Nell’s tired, if the inquisition is over.”
“Oh, of course you must be exhausted, dear,” she said. “She’ll be staying in the smaller guest room, Jeremy. Everyone else will be arriving tomorrow, along with all the kids. Do you like kids, Nell?”
She nodded. “I do, but I haven’t been around them much.”
“Will you want a big family someday? You know, Jeremy is an uncle fourteen times over.”
“Mom!” I said. “It’s late, do you mind?”
I led Nell down the hall to the guest room after the awkward leave-takings and good nights.
“Fourteen?” Nell whispered. “You have fourteen nieces and nephews?”
“My brothers and sisters are all breeders. Lots of kids.”
“How many brothers and sisters do you have?”
“Five. Two sisters, three brothers.”
“Wow.”
It seemed strange that she didn’t know things about me like how many siblings I had. Why had I told her so little about myself? Why did I know so little about her? I thought on the flight back to Portugal I would ask her hundreds of questions. I wanted to know it all.
“Let me guess.” She smiled. “You’re the baby of the family.”
I slapped her ass. “Why do you say that? Because I’m so immature and self-involved? Actually I was one of the ones in the middle. What about you?”
“I have a big family too. But they’re all fucked up.”
“You’ll find everyone in my family is perfect,” I said. “Except me.”
“Why did you say that about the Bible? You made me feel totally stupid.”
“Well, that’s what you believe. We talked about it a long time one night.”
“Still, if your parents believe in the Bible, why go out of your way to rub my opinions in their faces?”
“Why hide who you are, just to keep some strangers happy?”
“They’re not strangers. They’re your parents. Anyway, follow your own advice. Why hide who you are?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why not just tell them what I am to you, if you’re so against hiding the truth?”
“Because some truths they just couldn’t handle.”
“Because you only reveal the truths that make me look bad, not you.”
I sighed and glared at her. “It’s Christmas Eve tomorrow. Why don’t you try to summon up some small inkling of holiday spirit and stop acting like such a bitch?”
She rolled her eyes and started into the bedroom. I stopped her for one long, deep, passionate kiss to replace the sex I couldn’t have that I so desperately wanted. I could have tried for a quickie, I suppose, but something about being in my parents’ house ruined me for sex.
Later, in my own childhood room, I pulled the box out of my jacket and looked at the ring. She would love it. Girls loved rings, didn’t they? This one was big but not too outrageous, a brilliant cut, a rare and exceptionally pure diamond. Just like her.
*
In the morning the parade of arrivals started. By noon the house was crawling with my annoying siblings and their hyperactive kids. Nell was a champ. No one played the innocent, adoring girlfriend better than her. I loved to watch her and picture her as only I knew her. Dressed in corsets or garters, bound, clamped, tortured, fucked, and in the throes of an orgasm. None of my vanilla siblings could ever understand. None of them would ever have what Nell gave me. I watched her mingle with the other women, all wives and mothers. Somehow she fit in.
Well, I suppose she was a woman after all. She had the genes to be a wife and mother. She hadn’t been born a sex toy, and she certainly wouldn’t die a sex toy. Someday she would become something more. A student, a mythology expert. A girlfriend, a real one. A wife. She would be somebody’s wife someday, wouldn’t she? She was almost thirty. She would want to settle down soon.
She held the children and interacted with them differently than I did. Instead of looking at them as nuisances or oddities, she treated them like little people. It was very entertaining to watch. And thought-provoking. When she quieted the colicky baby no one else could quiet, I caught myself wondering what a baby of ours might look like.
Anyway, it didn’t matter. She wasn’t cut out for the movie-star life, and I wasn’t settling down into marriage and parenthood anytime soon.
“Jeremy, Nell is spectacular.” My squeaky-clean brother-in-law Ed sidled up to me. “She’s great with the babies too,” he added, poking me in the side and nearly getting punched in the face for it.
She’s great in a lot of ways you would never understand. I was absolutely certain Ed fucked my sister missionary-style every time, if they even had sex anymore after three kids.
“She is great,” I agreed, moving out of poking range.
“How long have you been together?”
“Long enough. In my line of work, even a month or two is a golden anniversary.”
Ed looked at me with pity. I wanted to punch him again.
“Well, don’t let this one get away like
the other ones.”
I was hard-pressed not to snort at the idea of the other ones “getting away.” If he only knew. If all of them only knew, I’d be driven out of the house into the cold and thrown off the side of the mountain. Nell too.
By nightfall, the same conversation had been repeated twenty times, including at least four times by my mother. This one’s a keeper. She’s so great. Don’t let her get away.
I turned the ring around and around in my pocket. I waited until the end of Mom’s interminable Christmas Eve dinner, then stood, pretending I didn’t hear my mother’s small gasp of joy.
The value of family, the magic of love, the blessing of finding the one you’re meant to be with, blah-blah-blah… I looked around the table at the smiling faces of my mother and father, my many brothers and sisters and their husbands and wives. I went on and on in the way someone who’s done countless press junkets and interviews learns to do, and it sounded good. It sounded like something from a romantic script. Maybe it was from some script I’d read. Whatever. I couldn’t repeat it again, because the entire time I was thinking of the ring in my pocket and thinking about giving it to Nell. By the time I went to her and knelt down, everyone knew what was coming—hell, my mother was bawling openly.
Only Nell stared at me in disbelief.
No, not disbelief. Fear, loathing, outrage. Don’t do this. Don’t make a mockery of me.
“Nell,” I said quietly. “I want you to wear my ring.”
I emphasized the words I want and purposely declined to ask, Will you marry me? I shoved the ring on her finger before she could pull her hand away.
*
We left soon after. I used work as an excuse and paid an extra twenty-five hundred dollars to fly us out of Charlotte on Christmas Eve.
“It’s just a ring,” I said in the car on the way to the airport. “It’s just for—”
“For show. I know. It was a wonderful performance. I just wish you had let me in on it in advance.”
“Well, these kinds of things are better when they’re a surprise.”
Make Me: Twelve Tales of Dark Desire Page 179