by Gabi Moore
“Gosh, how romantic,” I said.
“You’re awfully opinionated for a paintbrush, you know that?” he said, and when he smiled, the twinkle in his eye did something to me. Not just to my body but …deeper inside. All at once, I thought of Jackson Fucking Pollock. The fateful night with Leah. The night I Went Too Far. It wasn’t like a Jackson Pollock painting at all. It was just disgusting. And I was disgusting. I couldn’t smile anymore.
“Hey what’s wrong?” he said and leaned into my ear to kiss it.
I tried to answer but choked on my own words. I was disgusting. A wave of anger and humiliation washed over me. This was stupid. I was stupid.
“Get off me, I think I want to get up,” I said.
He was by my side in a heartbeat, his hand reaching out for my chin. The bitterness was rising in my throat. Something was wrong.
“We can stop if you want to, only look at what an awesome painting we were making.”
I looked.
To my amazement, it wasn’t half bad.
Lying underneath our red-streaked bodies was a giant, red-and-white abstract painting, part Rorschach blot and part finger painting. It actually looked …nice.
I reached down and touched the red. The color looked so thrilling on my skin, so vibrant and scary and loud. I lifted my fingertips to examine it closely, then stroked lines down the front of my chest.
“I think …wouldn’t this make a cool scene for the play? Just this right here?” I looked at him, hair disheveled and skin doused in glorious lashings of red.
He smiled and raised his eyebrows. “A murder scene? A virginal bed?”
“Both,” I said, and gave him a strange smile.
He embraced me.
“I like the way you think,” he said. “Now if you don’t mind, I think it’s my turn to be the paintbrush.”
I couldn’t help but break into a smile. It was impossible to feel sad with him looking at me the way he was. We hugged and tumbled and soon he was on the bottom, and the ache was back in full force, and my hips clasped for dear life round his hard body, his cock pressing firm against the slit between my legs.
“Now so help me Nyx, if you get paint on my bits, I’m going to be--”
“Shh! That’s quite enough out of you, Mr. paintbrush, you just lie there and do your job, OK?” I said, and pressed a finger to his lips.
He smiled.
Holding his gaze with hungry eyes, I reached for him, placing the hot knot of his dick at the entrance to my body, savoring that sweet moment of inevitability, pushing myself to feel just how delicious it felt to want him so much it came in pangs. I eased over the wide lump of him and settled noiselessly onto his body, a little flicker of recognition passing over his face as both our bodies took a moment to remember how exquisitely they fit together.
I took the next inch slowly, so slowly it took me several breaths, but my greedy body was way ahead of me, squeezing onto his and sending warm, deep flutters of pleasure all through me. His hands rose to my hips and held me there. Frozen except for the sweet, tentative movements linking us together, we sunk into one another, all heat and wetness and bright, zinging bliss buzzing through us both.
It was heaven.
What happened next? Well, I remember it only vaguely. We made love, of course. But it was unlike anything else I had done with Adam ever before. It’s as though the memories of that evening themselves were burnt out, my neurons stroked to frazzling and then simply blacking out with pleasure.
We must have kissed. He must have held me gently as he stroked pump after pump of ecstasy into my body, waiting for me to absorb every last ripple he had given me before pulling back and lunging into another. And another. He must have squeezed me and pressed hard on my skin – if the finished painting was anything to go by. And if the finished pattern of bruises and scratches on my arms and thighs and belly were anything to go by, he must have done …other stuff too.
In our red and white haze, in the middle of our swirling, slashing, exploding red masterpiece, I remember him poised behind me, his strong body delivering aggressive thrusts into that swollen cleft, his arms wrapped tight all around me as I whimpered and felt myself slip further and further into that deep, delicious void.
“You like that don’t you? Hm?”
I could only respond by groaning and writhing under him.
“You fucking like that? You like being a little slut for me?”
I could feel something delicious rattling all through my legs, making them shake and shudder.
“Good, be my little slut then… good girl …I want your legs wider,” he growled, and pressed me open.
It was too much. Too intense. Too deep.
I remember his breath in my ear as I came, came so hard I felt my heart nearly stop, felt my eyes squeeze so tight all the colors wrung out, felt every muscle pull and snap as I convulsed with orgasm.
And after I had stopped screaming, after my body had stopped jerking and bucking on that ruined white sheet, I remember coming to consciousness again, his muscular arms still round me, and as I opened my eyes I saw the red on white. The skin on skin.
We lay there together till the paint started to go tacky. I peeled off him with a crackle and gave him an astonished, happy smile. How did he always know how to do that to me? How could he always tell just what I needed? It had grown so dark I couldn’t see the painting clearly. I reached over to him and touched his lips, his chin. It was a still, magical moment. He looked down at his lap and then back at me.
“OK, keep giving me that look and you’re going to start something again.” He gave me a playful smack on the knee. “And we’ve got work to do for heaven’s sake. You really are a bad influence on me, you know?”
He stood and offered me a hand and we both got to our feet, still giddy. We must have looked insane, the pair of us. Like serial killers. Like we had spent the evening stomping wine grapes, but naked.
We held hands and looked down at the painting. It really was perfect.
“I can’t believe we just did that,” I said at last.
“And I can’t believe you’re actually going to give this to Tamara,” was his response.
Yes, why not? She didn’t have to know how it was made. In fact, it would be perfect, just as it was. A little secret mini play inside a play. A red and white talisman.
Art.
Chapter Nineteen
“Boulotte doesn’t get saved?” she said. “But that’s …that’s kind of the whole point of the story.”
I hadn’t worked too closely with the writers up till this point, but Tamara had shoved us all in a room and was now insisting that we wouldn’t leave until we had given poor Boulotte what she deserved, i.e. a grittier take than we had done with her character so far. Lynn, one of the writers, look alarmed at what I was saying.
“She’s right,” said a weedy guy in the corner, one whose name I always forgot. “Boulotte needs to be saved. There’s no narrative tension if shit just gets worse and worse for her.”
I drummed the back end of my pencil on the table and tried to think. I knew that when they looked at me, they saw someone who was a little young, a little stupid, perhaps. But I was onto something, I knew it. Boulotte was boring. Innocent was boring. We needed to come out with something that was truly wicked. The victim had to want it. It seemed so obvious to me now.
“No,” I said carefully, contemplating the wood grain on the desk. “I really feel like we need to get rid of that completely. No brother coming to rescue her. No father. Nobody saves her.”
“Then what?” the weedy guy said. “She goes into the chamber like, laughing or something?”
I shot him a dark look.
“I’ve got it. Bluebeard is not so much a murderer. He’s just kinky,” I said.
Both of the writers groaned, but I had Tamara’s attention.
“Picture this,” I said. “He wants to initiate her into …we don’t even go into it. But something dark and sexy, definitely taboo. This roo
m, right? This bloody chamber? It’s like right on the edge of things, right on the precipice between scary and sexy. So sure, it’s whips and chains and things, but it’s more than that. He’s a magician, right? We’re already hinting heavily at the sex element, why not just come out and say it? Just run with it? And Boulotte is saved, but she’s saved because she isn’t afraid of what’s in the chamber …in fact, she’s curious.”
Silence.
“Michael’s going to shit himself when he finds out there isn’t a brother role. Seriously, Tamara, to change the whole story now, this late in the game?” whined the skinny guy. But Tamara was deep in thought, as though she was listening to a very quiet voice only she could hear.
“So, help me understand this Nyx. I think that Boulotte still needs to feel …sacrificial somehow,” she said.
“Oh and she will, don’t worry. But it’s only her innocence that’s murdered. We could make her become the first successful wife of Bluebeard. A woman to actually match his depravity.”
The two writers exchanged worried glances with one another, but Tamara was smiling.
“Yes, yes I can see that. It’s crazy though,” she said and looked me straight in the eye.
“Maybe,” I said and smiled easily.
The weedy guy looked a bit put out, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care that there were rumors about me on this production, that people had thought I had been given preference just because of my last name, or that Tamara had lost her mind in giving me such free run with everything – right up to deciding to completely change the final scene with only two weeks to opening night. I didn’t care. It was a good idea, and it felt good speaking it out loud.
“Sooo… Bluebeard is actually into BDSM and little Boulotte is not so innocent after all?” Lynn said, not bothering much to hide her sarcasm.
“No. Bluebeard’s not into BDSM. It’s so much scarier than that. Think more like …he’s sold his soul to the devil himself. He’s almost pure evil. Dark sided.”
I trilled my pencil faster, images and ides bubbling up into my mind quicker than I could hold onto them. It was as though Boulotte herself were there somehow.
“So, the idea is that thematically, Boulotte discovers that her husband’s good-looking appearance actually covers over some shocking truths. It’s a fairy tale about not looking too closely at the dark masculine, about rooms you shouldn’t be looking into. The punishment for looking is death …but what if you can handle what you see? If you’re OK with it somehow? What if Boulotte looks at Bluebeard, evil as he is, and still loves him?”
Lynn scoffed.
“I’m sorry but that’s ridiculous,” she said. “It sounds so cheap and obvious, Nyx, honestly. I just think it’s a bad idea.”
“It’s actually a stronger arc than what we had before. She goes from completely naïve to fully initiated. She overcomes everything, she’s completely transformed. It’s sweet really, a bit of an allegory for discovering sexuality in general, don’t you think?” I asked.
I knew they knew about me and Adam. I knew that every last forest nymph and maid in waiting would have given her left arm to have a go at Adam. Well, as far as I was concerned, they could all have him. I shoved the thought out of my mind.
Tamara chuckled to herself and made some notes on her notepad.
“What happens, then, from the moment Boulotte discovers the chamber? We have the bloody key, now what? Writers, I need you to work on this and have something for me within the next few days.”
“But …but what about…” the weedy guy said.
“If you have any questions, ask Nyx,” Tamara said.
I felt ten feet tall.
“Sure,” the weedy guy said.
“I like the direction this is going,” Tamara said. “It’s late, I know. We’re going to have to backtrack a little and make sure the ending is still cohesive. But I think it’s worth the risk. We’ve been playing a little safe, it’s true. We’ve been too …too…”
“Too Disney,” I said, and stopped drumming pencil on the table.
She smiled at me.
“Yes, exactly.”
Chapter Twenty
If you’ve never experienced the static electricity that snaps and hums in the air on the opening night of any new play, it’s impossible to describe. Like a strange, wobbly machine, the crew and actors and organizers behind the scenes hurry about and boot up slowly, everything coming to life in pieces.
And as the set is prepped and the players all breathe and quickly whip through their lines just one more time before the big moment, nothing is allowed to be insignificant. Every little item becomes a prop, every little word needs to be delivered properly, and at the right time. Costumes are checked and double checked. Forest nymphs tighten their dance shoes.
I loved every second of it. It was almost a play in itself, watching everyone bustle around and get ready. I had rehearsed so much it felt like Boulotte was just another version of me. Slowly, it took no effort to be her. Slowly, I spoke her words each rehearsal as though they were my own, as though they were simply what needed to be said with each unfolding moment.
And if I let myself get carried away with it, I could release myself into the flow of that strange machine, and after a while, the script spoke me, and Boulotte came alive and moved me as a puppet, and we all whirled and glided over those boards, every movement choreographed, but done for the first time new somehow, with new players, in front of new eyes.
It was a completely full house – something even Tamara had been impressed by – and the curtains were set to raise in just five minutes. I had peeked and seen the usually empty hall bustling with dimly lit people. I closed the curtain again and took a deep breath. I was wearing Boulotte’s tattered rags for the opening scene. The first scene would have me sitting with my sisters at our sputtering hearth and dreaming of a new life, and in would bluster mighty Bluebeard, ready to seduce us all away with promises of a life of luxury and maybe, a little dark magic.
“You’re going to be amazing.”
I turned to see Tamara smiling at me, and instantly gave her a big hug.
“Oh god I’m so nervous!”
“Nah, don’t be,” she laughed, and looked deeply into my eyes.
Something about that look brought a small, hot tear to my eye. I felt my chest tighten.
“Nyx? You’re going to be amazing. I know it’s been a weird few months for you. But you have this sorted,” she said and grinned again at me.
I thought of my father. I had tried hard all morning not to, but I couldn’t resist anymore and his face burst into my mind, every painful fold and line of his face, every stinging memory, every picture that made my heart feel scraped out and empty.
“Did you ever watch him? Did you ever see him perform?” I said quickly, the atmosphere behind stage felt as though it was suddenly dissolving all filters, all manners. A strange place between worlds. But she seemed to know exactly whom I was talking about.
“Luckily for me, I did. He was something, wasn’t he? You have his talent, no question.”
She hugged me again.
“Really? As good as him?”
The other eye had its own tear now, too. I left it there.
“As good as him? Oh no…” she said, and took a quick peek toward the crowd. “Oh no Nyx, not as good. Much, much better,” she said and winked at me, looking over my costume to see that everything was in order.
My cheeks burned hot. I heard the crowd buzz behind the heavy velvet of the curtain. I nodded back and smeared away the tears with the back of my hand. Some of the white on my face came off on the skin of my hand. I looked down at it, eyes bleary. It was beautiful. It wasn’t exactly a trance I went into at that moment. But maybe it was.
The stage crew hushed and took their places. The lights in the hall dimmed even further and the crowd stilled. We were all waiting. Waiting for the magic to unfold. The stage was cleared and waiting. The lights looked down in anticipation for it all to begin. The people
in the crowd pleated their programs and held them crumpled in their laps, stopped chattering and all looked forward.
It was time to start.
“Where the fuck is Adam?” I heard Tamara hiss. I closed my eyes and tried to center myself. Adam was always late. Always. But he’d be here. I knew he would. This moment was simply too important. A few flustered crew members in black burst quickly along the side of my vision, hastily fretting over a tall figure, walking so fast you’d think he could clear the stage in three strides. Adam. My Adam. There he was. I smiled to myself and tried to steady my nerves.
I’d know him anywhere. Even without the elaborate neck frills and buckled shoes of a French aristocrat, even without the wig and immodest cake makeup, he was larger than life. Bigger than any person here, so big that I knew the moment he erupted in on the domestic scene with me and my peasant sisters, everything would change for us forever. I peered over to see him clumsily tying on black ribbons over his stockings, and smiled. He straightened and immediately caught my gaze. Through the bustle, we locked eyes.
While the backstage flurry blurred away, he came into sharp, high def focus. He smiled at me as if in slow motion. The tiny black heart painted on his cheek crinkled slightly as he looked at me smiling, eating me up. A moment before he had been clumsy, goofy Adam. Larger than life, outrageous, irreverent Adam.
But as he straightened and pierced me with this new, different gaze, he became The Beast. The Murderous Magician. Bluebeard himself. The effect was so swift it nearly took my breath away. He was a vision of perfectly coiffed cruelty. Civilized, urbane. A gentleman with tastes his traumatized house servants called ‘unconventional’. A man with dark eyes and a dark heart. A man with a secret chamber, filled with the bodies of women just like me.
“Places everyone! Places!”
Through a flurry of whispers and clumsy activity, I tore my eyes away and found my spot. The curtains were about to open. With a beautiful roll and click, the great scarlet curtains heaved themselves up and opened, one world meeting the other.