Secret Girl

by Terri Elliot

  I lather the body wash into my loofa. I hear a sound from the first floor. The door shuts, the ding of the security system echoes up to the second floor and I can hear its single beep beneath the music. Henry is back. I hurry to finish, I want to apologize for my comment. But the bathroom door opens. He steps inside.

  “Henry?” I call out to him.

  I listen to his shoes slip from his heels and drop to the floor. Then a zipper. Then his pants, his shirt. Through the steamed glass of the sliding doors, Henry’s body appears like mine in the mirror; he’s a sand colored form standing in a cloud, though his is much larger, more angular than mine. Without a face, he could be anyone. The size of his body could belong to a beast as much as a man, his naked form the most natural. Though naked is our most natural.

  The door slides to the left and I see him, in spite of the swirling fog that spirals between us. I stammer back a step, I’m not sure why. I’m not necessarily afraid, and yet something in my legs acts out of instinct. My eyes plummet along his front, until they arrive at his midsection and there they find his erection.

  “Henry,” I softly whisper.

  His feet rise and fall, and suddenly he’s inside the shower with me and I feel my own nudity as a vulnerability. His feels like a strength, and as his hands wrap around my waist, I feel at his mercy. My back presses against the black tiles on the wall behind me, his arms press me against it. I stare into his green eyes. He stares back into mine. I don’t think he sees anything else. I see the world around us. I take a breath, shut my eyes, and tell myself when they open again, I’ll see only him.

  Before I can, I feel him press himself between my legs. My eyes open as his hands slide along the backs of my legs and lift them to hold me up by my buttocks. I lock my ankles around his back. Alright, I think, and make quick work of ensuring my limbs, hands, feet are positioned for this. I slap my hands against his back and my nails curl into his flesh. I squeeze my thighs against his lower body to hold myself against him. Then I push my forehead against his and make sure he sees me before he enters.

  When he does, his eyes peer downward. I push my forehead against his to upturn his face. His eyes come into view again. He sees me. I moan softly as he pumps. It’s uncomfortable without foreplay, but I’ve grown used to such attempts. I push myself down to take it all and finish the awkward beginning. Then I slam my lips against his.

  But he doesn’t kiss me. He just pants. His breaths blow water against my face and into my nose and eyes and I feel him shrink.

  Henry grunts, hoists my body and pushes me harder against the wall. It doesn’t work. He loses it and lowers me. I can feel his desire to run and wallow. I close my arms around his neck and keep him with me. He bends his neck to keep our foreheads together.

  “It’s okay,” I tell him. The water pours over my lips, into my mouth.

  He sighs. “Don’t say that.” He takes advantage of a momentary loosening of my grip and pulls away. As he exits the shower, he speaks into the room away from me, “Makes it worse.”

  The water feels cold against my skin. The fog escapes through the open door, clearing the space. Gooseflesh rises along my arms and legs.

  Now I don’t feel hot or cold. I feel numb. I twist the knob into the red until it stops, and I wait for the steam to emanate out from the cascading water. When I see the heat, I step into it. The temperature melts through the numbness to scald the flesh of my shoulders, my breasts, my nose, and chin.

  In my imagination, I see her youthful form conducting itself to an erotic bass heavy beat and I watch Henry step into her. I step completely beneath the water, but he still wraps his hand around her body. I scream in pain to the heat burning my skin and reach out to twist the shower off.

  4.

  February 13, 2009.

  After rereading my previous entry, I see how a reader might misconstrue our sexual relationship. I don’t know who might read this beyond myself, but I suppose the point of this diary is to put down the truth regardless, so I want to be clear. It’s not like how it was anymore. The exhilaration of a fresh romance has faded, just as it always does, I guess. Though I’ve never experienced anything like I have with Henry, I suppose if you were to scale up my previous escapades, they would follow along a similar path. You meet, you’re special, you fuck, and fuck again, and everything mellows. The human heart is a vampire, its insatiable appetite for fresh blood keeps you churning through connections on an endless journey to kill your hunger for romance. Maybe it’s youth. I don’t feel young. But maybe it’s like that. You lose it as you age, and after a while, you’re alright with it. You accept that you can never have what your body tells you to seek. It’s never again like it was the first time. Or can it be?

  I guess this is where I explain what we’ve done. And what it is we plan to do.

  The idea came up while we were eating lunch one day, al fresco style at a local bistro in Los Feliz. It was unusually warm for a winter day, and we decided to take advantage. The spot obliged us by setting up a cheap round table and two folding chairs so we could enjoy the sun. He and I sat there at the corner of two streets, watching while the cars past, neglected breakfast resting on plates between us. Every fifth was something gaudy and expensive, belonging more to the west side, more at home in Santa Monica, Brentwood, or Venice than here in Los Feliz. The windows more often than not were tinted, but when they weren’t, we observed the drivers with harsh judgments. Most were old, white men. We joked about studio executives and talent agents making their daily coke runs. Henry said it’s a sign of the neighborhood changing. I wondered about that, if the city’s rich are sprawling out where they don’t belong. It gave me a sense of meaning sitting outside, sneering at their cars as they passed. They were all ugly, balding, fat, or otherwise out of shape in some unfortunate way.

  “They don’t deserve what they have,” I remember Henry saying under his breath.

  I turned to him, seizing upon what he’d said. “Then let’s take it.”

  A massive grin sat plastered upon my face awaiting his eyes. They focused on the still, black surface of his cup of coffee. Then they blinked, and lifted until they met mine. It was an idle threat in my voice, but the idea, taken up in Henry’s wicked mind, might turn into an adventure. Or so I thought. I don’t know what I thought. I just wanted to excite him again, I guess I wanted to show him I could be surprising, be dangerous. The way I felt about him when I looked into his eyes.

  His pretty lips parted and I heard the words returned to me, with less of a question hiding behind them, more resolute. “Let’s take it.”

  At first, the plans seemed more like daydreaming. Fantasies. The way we would lie in bed following afternoon sex and muse about life, people, shit. It was harmless. Until it wasn’t. I’m not entirely sure when that switch happened, but it’s certainly not harmless anymore. What we’ve done, I don’t think they’d let us out if they ever locked us up. And every passing day, I feel like that’s more and more inevitable. Jesus, but it’s so exhilarating.

  When I’m out in public, I want to stop people, grab them by the collar and ask if they know what it feels like to scare a man worth ten million dollars so hard he pisses his pants. I want to ask them if they’d have the balls to pass by a house in the middle of the night, one with the lights on so you can see all the beautiful, expensive things they have on display inside, look through their floor to ceiling windows like portraits of another life, and follow the impulse to step into that painting and take from it whatever you like, to destroy its perfect image. I want to ask them if they’ve ever fucked in front of a hog-tied man on his own bed in masks before robbing him of his soiled duvet.

  It’s not like it was. It’s better. Henry has a reinvigorated attraction to me. When I wear the mask, and strip down in someone else’s home, it’s like fucking for the first time all over again. Except better. Sometimes he ties me up, too, like the homeowners if they’re unlucky enough to be around when we descend upon their house. The rope burns my flesh, digs
into my wrists, my ankles. Sometimes, when he’s creative, around my thighs, my waist, even my neck. I have marks on my body from last week as I write this. My perfect, young skin, tainted. That’s what he says about the marks, with a devilish grin on his face. Signs of my wicked ways. People stare. I don’t care. Actually, I enjoy it. I enjoy all of this. And that terrifies me. But I don’t think I can stop, this high has me hooked without mercy. Henry and I are destined for the Bonnie and Clyde treatment if we can’t wean ourselves from this criminal addiction.

  We’ve already gotten ourselves into trouble. There’s a man who knows us, who found out. He’s blackmailing us. Now, after breaking, entering, stealing, assaulting, and property destruction, we’re going to add another crime to our rap sheets, one you can’t walk back. Murder.

  5.

  I’ve secreted my husband’s dead ex’s journal in a corner in the attic, wedged between a never opened box of dishes and the wall. I only visit it when I know he won’t interrupt. But I don’t read it. I can’t bring myself to continue scratching this itch. So I do the most embarrassing thing. I hold it, gently, let it rest in my open palms while I stare into its worn cover, as though asking permission from a tome that will never speak in return. I fear this foolish ritual will inevitably lead me to open the book again, read the next entry, read on until I find out exactly what happened. What I truly fear is learning something I shouldn’t know. Or learning that there even is something I shouldn’t know.

  Murder.

  The girl wrote murder.

  Could she be telling the truth?

  I remember the day I had the conversation about Henry’s ex-girlfriend Casey Simpson. We’d been dating for six months, it was late 2011, eight years and a lifetime ago. He prefaced the story in the strangest way, though looking back, I’m not sure how you explain matters of such a delicate nature to a significant other.

  I received flowers at the office, a special delivery to “the world’s most beautiful assistant.” For a moment, I thought they were from my boss, until I read the signature. It was followed by a text, the prospect of a special date. We’d spoken of marriage, I had an inkling this might be it, but didn’t fixate. I’d learned how wretched the disappointment of that can be.

  He picked me up from work promptly at five o’clock, opened the door for me, and whisked me away to our date, a five star restaurant in downtown, a high rise overlooking downtown. I was impressed, and showed as much, but I withheld my excitement in the face of his thinly veiled dour mood. We had a fine meal, but I could sense in him a reservation. Now I think he was arguing internally as to whether or not it mattered to tell me.

  He drove me back to his place in Silver Lake and we settled down into the living room with a bottle of champagne and a few soft kisses before he broke the mood with a look. I can see it now inches from my face, the twisted anguish of his features, like an expression one makes of a sour taste, the preamble to vomit. Everything was ruined. The dinner, the drinks, the surprise of it all spoiled by the conclusion.

  “Baby,” he whispered to me, pulling his hand away from my cheek. His body recoiled to arm’s length, situated into the edge of the couch.

  “What is it?” I nearly demanded. Frustration mounted as I realized the preceding date had been nothing but the sugar with which to swallow the pill.

  His eyes fell to his hands, rubbing one another between his knees. “I have to tell you something.”

  I wanted to salvage something of the romance of the night, and so I reached across to him and placed my hands between his, forcing them around my fingers. “It’s okay,” I told him, forcing back my anger in favor of grace. “Whatever it is, you can tell me.”

  His eyes followed from my wrist along my arm until they arrive somewhere beneath my eyes, not quite matching my gaze, almost peering through me. “We’ve been together now for long enough that you should know something about my past.”

  The pit of my stomach formed a black hole through which all my joys and carefree disposition slipped into. Henry had been a delight, a no nonsense, no drama man, the type I really felt like I could settle down with and enter adulthood. He felt like a man, instead of the boys that had chased me about from college into my early twenties. I struggled to imagine how sinister his history could be, what demons would require airing in my company. I couldn’t think, or perhaps didn’t want to imagine them. The pause between words was torture, but when his lips parted to inhale in preparation for the admission, I wanted nothing more than to shut them, plant my hands over them and force him to swallow whatever he had to say.

  “I need to tell you about my ex,” he said.

  Oh god, I thought. He has a crazy ex-girlfriend. One of those women who clings to youth with a veracity that seeks to prove their value, their vibrance, but in the end only demonstrates their callowness.

  “She killed herself.” It tumbled from his lips like a waterfall, spilling out and splashing between us with little care for its effect. Instead of further explanation, he finally peered into my eyes as if seeking reaction. I was speechless. In the immediate moment, I felt nothing. Then, like a swell of blood rushing to the surface, I felt angry. I thought to myself, how dare he throw this at me? How dare he be the perfect man, and when I feel inclined to commit, have a dark past? How could he, and leave me in silence, the filthy wake of his admission?

  The pieces slowly collected into the obviousness of his motive that evening. To lure me in, he laid a trap constructed out of romance, seduction, warmth, even love. I followed him into it, and when it was clear I was too deep in the ruse to return from it, he laid the facts on me. Her name was Casey Simpson. She had been eight years his junior. She was a few more now, given she was no longer aging. That was a morbid thought that shot through my thoughts in the moment. Her choice of exit was a blade along her arm’s veins and a warm bath. She left nothing of a reason, and he failed to anticipate her suicide. He said she was troubled, at one point, as I pestered him with questions trying to make sense of the situation. He grew flustered with the rekindled memory of the girl and called her crazy under his breath. I took it to be frustration for having left him the way she did. I didn’t judge.

  I asked questions as if the answers would arrive at some bottom, where I could move past the history. Knowledge removed mystery, mystery was haunting, knowledge was just facts, knowledge could make things bloodless. And I wanted to get back on track with what I thought Henry and I had going. I wanted to square away the death of his ex-girlfriend to go on being his current, living one without the threat of an abnormal history lurking in his closet, soon to become my own.

  He called her crazy. So that’s what she became. Crazy Casey Simpson. The girl that seduced Henry with her passion, but whose character was unstable. An unfortunate story, that was all it was for Henry. A sad event in his past, which was were it lied. I decided I felt sorry for him. My next action, as his loving girlfriend, was to absolve him of his pain. We made love then, on the couch, and while he was inside me, I feared he thought of her. I decided he was, and so I went about fucking the thought of Crazy Casey Simpson out of his mind once and for all.

  Now she lives in mine.

  6.

  He sulks over his side of the bed, the white of the moonlight casts a line draped along his upper back, over his shoulders. They rise and fall with each heavy breath, a sequence of sighs. He rests his forearms over his legs at the knees, and his head is bent so far down he appears headless from where I lay on the bed’s other side, the sheet draped casually over my naked body. It tingles, slightly, but mostly I don’t think of it, my sex. Christ, who refers to it in such terms anymore? My vagina. His spit has grown cold on my right nipple.

  I think to reach over and rub his back. Instead, I have an urge I haven’t felt in decades. I want the sensation of a cigarette pinched between my two fingers. I don’t know if I even want to smoke it, but I want it lit before me so I can watch the red eat away at the tobacco and paper and produce smoke that rises between my eyes and th
e rest of the world.

  It’s okay, I think to say, but I sigh instead. I’m too tired. I try to perceive the analog clock that hangs opposite the bed, the one I purchased for the living room but Henry insisted we hang in here. It doesn’t match, but he says the subtle noise of its second hand shivering on each motion helps him get to sleep. I don’t hear it mostly. When I do, it keeps me up. On those nights, I used to watch him, peaceful beside me. Now I stare instead of watch. Anyway, I can’t tell the time right now, it’s too dark to see it.

  I roll over and lay with my back facing Henry. He’s still sulking. He’ll be at it until he believes I’ve gone to sleep so he doesn’t have to face me. No matter how many times I tell him I don’t mind, he’ll never believe me. I think it’s made the whole thing worse.

  I listen to his breathing until my ears start to close out the room, my eyelids fall over my vision, and my body sinks into the mattress.

  All around me, it’s dark and quiet. I enjoy this. I think perhaps it sounds depressing to say, but the absence of everything often comforts me, like a haven from the burdens of living. I’m not suicidal. I don’t think I’m even depressed. I just think I think more than most people.

  Life isn’t easy. Not poor, not with money. One narrows your scope of perspective to your struggle. The other widens it to a varied field of responsibilities. Neither see you free.

  I see a small cat. She lurks about in the darkness before me. Her tail sways in rhythm to her strutting gait. Her shoulder blades catch an unknown light source as she plants each paw down in front of her, rotating them. Narrow slits engulfed in yellow draw my sight to its eyes, locking with its stare. It holds mine, too, with unwavering devotion. Its direction is towards me, where I lay, in the dark quiet, alone.

  She leaps into the air and plummets upon my chest, holding me down. I want to bat her away, but my body is rigid. She hunkers down atop my breasts, nestled into the cleavage, pressing her immense weight against my breastplate.