by Nancy Madore
At the coffee shop the following morning Jack strolled confidently into line next to her, standing so close that his hand could lightly brush the small of her back without anyone around them noticing. She was shamefully relieved and delighted to see him.
“I can’t stop thinking about you,” he murmured, leaning in so his warm breath touched her ear as he spoke. As improbable as his words seemed to her mind, her heart clung to them fiercely.
“Me, too,” she whispered breathlessly. Her heart pounded. Why me? she kept wondering.
“This afternoon,” he said.
“Oh…I don’t know…” She paused. So soon? The welts still hurt. And while the memories kept her in a constant state of arousal, the thought of actually doing those things again frightened her.
“This afternoon, Pansy,” he repeated more firmly. A thrill shot through the center of her.
“Okay,” she agreed with equal parts exhilaration and apprehension.
She walked around the next few hours in a fog. She could think of nothing but seeing Jack again. She whiled away the hours in a fever, trying to occupy the time in between. One of the things she found to do was to bring her husband and his cronies lunch at the police station.
Pansy’s excitement was palpable when she stepped into the precinct where Tom worked. He had been pleased by her generous offer to bring him lunch, but did not wonder too much over it, taking it in stride as his due. It didn’t even occur to him to wonder if her exuberant smile and starry expression was for anyone other than himself.
Pansy tried to appear unperturbed, but her mind had difficulty staying on what she was doing. Tom and his friends noticed this only so far as the inconvenience they felt that their sandwiches were all mixed up. Pansy merely laughed when they pointed out her mistakes. But in a sudden instant her laughter died and her face went slack. The men around her did not even notice the alteration in her, preoccupied as they were with getting their lunches in order.
Pansy’s gaze landed on a photo lying on Tom’s desk. Jack’s face stared up at her. A strange sense of unreality came over her. Random thoughts flitted through her mind as she struggled to achieve a blank expression. After several moments she attempted to speak.
“Who’s that?” she asked no one in particular, pointing at the picture of Jack.
“That’s him,” Tom replied with his mouth full of food. A clump of something greenish in color flew from his mouth and landed on Jack’s face. “That’s John Foreman, the wife killer.”
“Oh,” Pansy said. Of course it is, she thought. She had a strange urge to throw her head back and laugh hysterically.
“Tried to make it look like an accident, but I have no doubt he killed her,” her husband continued. As she looked at her husband she distracted herself by wondering why he always began a new sentence after taking a huge bite of food. She looked again at the picture of Jack. The green glob on his cheek made him seem rather pitiable. Thoughts raced through her mind. One carried the realization that it was not coincidence that brought her and Jack together. And yet, her heart rejected this.
Still, the more serious issue was that Jack was accused of murder. She wondered why this wasn’t her primary concern. If it were anyone else but Tom accusing Jack perhaps it would bother her more, but knowing Tom as she did, it was hard to give the accusation credence.
She was less than an hour away from her meeting with Jack. What if Tom was actually right for once? What if Jack really was a killer? Was it even safe for her to meet him alone in a hotel room? No one else in the world would know where she was. Thoughts kept pouring through her mind in frantic disarray. Always uppermost among them was the question of why Jack had pursued her to begin with. Had he approached her because she was the wife of his accuser? What did he ultimately want from her? This, more than anything else—even the potential danger she was in—filled her with an overwhelming sense of despair. She sat down in a nearby chair, suddenly weary. All of the energy and happiness of only moments before had vanished.
Tom and his companions had continued talking, oblivious of any change whatsoever in Pansy.
“He’s a clever one,” Tom was saying. “I’ll give him that. Always covers his tracks.”
“You’ll get the bastard,” one of the others chirped in.
Pansy only half listened, concentrating all her efforts on breathing evenly. It was a struggle to remain composed. She tried to soothe herself out of the overwhelming confusion. Why should she care what Jack’s motives were in seeing her anyway? What was he to her? But an all-consuming sense of hopelessness enveloped her. Nothing good ever came to her. Everything was suspect. She looked at Tom with perverse loathing. Everything associated with him brought her anguish, she thought unreasonably. She wished fervently that he was dead. As was her habit during these crucially unhappy moments of her life, she distracted herself by pondering her husband’s existence, finding comfort in conjuring up reasons why Tom might in all likelihood die an early death. It seemed not only probable, but inevitable. There were so many factors in favor of it, and it gave her hope to go over them, methodically and analytically. Why, his very position as a police officer was purported to put his life at risk, although Pansy could not imagine him ever being heroic or anything like that. More likely his arrogant disregard for the rights of others would eventually anger someone enough to provoke violence. But there were many other risks to Tom’s life that she had found to deliberate over. On this occasion, as she watched him practically inhale his sandwich, she found herself wondering how it was possible that Tom’s arteries, which by now had to be lined with numerous residual coagulations from years of habitual ingestion of every sort of saturated fat, never managed to halt the flow of blood and end his miserable life. How much longer could they hold out? Even as she thought these thoughts, she noticed all around his desk evidence of his slovenly eating habits, including several stale donuts and wrappers from fast-food restaurants. And yet, there he stood, ranting and raving like a healthy young toddler; pudgy and dimply and ruddy. His continued good health seemed a personal affront to her.
Pansy glanced at the clock and wondered what she should do. It seemed obvious now that Jack was only using her, but she still wanted to see him. Once again she blamed Tom, who had created in her such a desperate hunger for affection that she would crave the touch of any man who would have her. She couldn’t bring herself to listen to Tom and the other overstuffed peacocks of his precinct for another instant so she abruptly stood up and left the police station.
Although Pansy counted numerous reasons not to, she found herself hastening to get to the hotel room Jack had reserved for them, and when she arrived she was breathless and trembling with desire. In her present state of mind she wondered if she should even mention what she had discovered. She was terrified of losing whatever it was that brought Jack into her life, and suddenly it didn’t matter what it was. She was deeply troubled as she tapped lightly on the hotel-room door, and in the next moment, when she looked into Jack’s dark, troubled eyes she started to cry.
“I was at the police station before I came here,” she blurted out. “My husband is a cop. But you already knew that.” She sobbed miserably as the words spilled impulsively from her lips.
Jack didn’t move or speak. He only smiled. Pansy was taken aback by this at first, but then she felt relieved. She couldn’t have borne it if he had made up an obvious lie. She stopped crying and looked at him. Ruefully she succumbed to the slight pulling sensation at the corners of her mouth and dumbly returned his smile, but she said, “You have nothing to say?”
“What would you like me to say, Pansy?”
She would have liked him to say that he actually liked her in spite of everything else. She would have liked to hear that he had enjoyed being with her the day before and especially that he wanted to be with her again in the future. “Why?” she asked him. She was terribly afraid he would say the wrong thing.
Jack laughed at her. “Would you believe me if I told you that my
dealings with your husband are purely coincidental and have nothing to do with us meeting each other?”
“No,” but she was pleased by the manner in which he asked her this.
He moved closer to her, approaching cautiously. “Would you believe that I saw you with him once and couldn’t get you out of my head?”
“Definitely not,” she replied with outright laughter this time.
He became serious all of a sudden, standing very close to her and looking down into her face. He reached out a hand and lifted a lock of her hair. He held it a moment, seemingly studying it. Pansy was absurdly flattered by the gesture. She waited breathlessly for what he would do or say next.
“Would you believe…” he continued contemplatively as he played with her hair, “that I thought you deserved a little happiness being married to a prick like him?”
“Well, maybe you thought that…but I find it hard to believe that was your reason for…being with me.”
“Does the reason matter so much?”
She paused, afraid to fully expose herself to him. “No,” she sighed. “The reason doesn’t matter. Only that you actually want to be with me, and not just for revenge.”
He dropped her hair suddenly and grasped her hand, placing it firmly over his groin. She quivered when she felt his hardness. “Does that feel like revenge?”
“Because my husband can never find out about us,” she continued.
A small, almost imperceptible change came over Jack’s face when she said this. All the humor left his expression and he looked at Pansy with a mixture of irritation and indifference. The irritation did not bother her half as much as the indifference. She wished they could put this behind them and begin on a different note.
“Look, Jack,” she began.
“What if I told you that your husband is going to find out about us?” he said spitefully. “I mean, what am I supposed to do with the video of us if I can’t show it to your husband?”
Cold steel seemed to close over Pansy’s heart when she heard his words. It was suddenly difficult for her to breathe.
“You’re lying,” she choked out.
“Am I?”
She looked around the room. There was no evidence of a camera anywhere, but she realized it would most likely be hidden. It occurred to her that both hotel rooms had been secured by Jack before she had arrived.
“I’m leaving.” But she couldn’t bring herself to move. Her eyes were wide with fear.
“Pansy, Pansy, Pansy,” Jack said then, all of a sudden smiling again. His anger had abated as quickly as it had appeared and he was once again good-humored and charming. “You’re so much fun to tease,” he said smoothly. “There’s no video of us. I wouldn’t want to be caught in a video like that any more than you would.” He began to laugh wholeheartedly, as if at the absurdity of her believing such a thing. But Pansy was deeply shaken.
“I don’t like that kind of teasing,” she said, upset. Her excitement had been squelched as thoroughly as embers doused with ice water.
“Then you shouldn’t be so naive and trusting,” he said with cheerful finality. The subject was abruptly closed and Jack was determined to move past it. He approached Pansy again and this time he put his hands on either side of her face, holding her just below the jawline in a firm but gentle caress. Her breathing stopped at the intense longing that came over her from this simple contact. She gazed up at him in abject adoration mingled with anguish. He appeared to her as a sumptuous feast, perhaps a poisonous feast; but like an animal, wild and starving, she would devour every last morsel to her gluttonous death. Jack saw the blatant hunger in her eyes and it caused the blood to rush to his groin in a violent surge. He continued to stroke the sides of her face with his thumbs. “Should you?” he whispered huskily.
Pansy was beside herself with a wish to appease him. “No, I guess I shouldn’t,” she whispered back, although she had forgotten the question. She felt weak and somewhat foolish, too. She vaguely wondered if Jack found her lack of self-control contemptible. But at that moment, there was such a look of tender passion in his eyes that it startled her. She looked away from him, saying, “I feel like a fool.”
“You’re no fool,” Jack told her adamantly. He held her face in both his hands and forced her to look at him again. His expression was grave. “No woman has ever revealed her feelings so openly, right there on her face, with me before, Pansy,” he told her. “It’s truly humbling, and I’m the one who acted like a fool.” Pansy was stunned by Jack’s admission and silently waited for his next move, floating helplessly in a deep sea of arousal, and knowing no relief without him.
Jack continued to lightly caress Pansy’s face as he went on talking to her, moving leisurely over his words, meandering in and around the pleasure to come. His voice was low and gentle, like his caresses. “But you shouldn’t look at me like that,” he repeated huskily. “Someone should have taught you never to let a man catch you looking at him like that.” Pansy just kept staring into his eyes and listening to him, hypnotized by his voice and the gentle, steady strokes of his fingers on her face. She watched him with an almost ludicrous devotion. But Jack appeared to find nothing ludicrous in her expression, and he continued speaking to her in the same vein, tantalizing her with his words. His voice was so heavy and laden it seemed to be moving over her, even fondling her. “Perhaps I should teach you why you shouldn’t look at a man the way you’re looking at me now.” He noticed that her eyes widened with anticipation when he said this, and he couldn’t suppress a laugh. “You would like that, wouldn’t you,” he said, amused. “You would enjoy a lesson from Taskmaster Jack?”
Pansy began to shake. His unhurried attentions produced a bounty in her desolate existence that she could not resist. She nodded her head shamelessly to his rhetorical question, as if to assure him that yes, she would indeed welcome any lesson he would care to give. Jack laughed once again, and his desire seemed to increase suddenly in reaction to hers. “Let me see the marks I put on you yesterday,” he said. “No, just turn around and take down your pants. Yes, like that.” He stared at the red and purple welts on her bared buttocks and thighs. Pansy stood quietly trembling with her pants halfway down her legs. The cool air made her more aware of the wetness between them. Jack, as if reading her thoughts, reached down to touch her and with a moan he let his fingers wallow in the silky fluid.
“Christ, Pansy,” he murmured. He moved onto his knees behind her and grasped her hips violently, causing her to cry out. “Bend,” he said simply before pressing his face between her legs and burrowing his tongue into her wetness. Pansy was bent awkwardly at the waist, light-headed from the dizzying pleasure he was giving her. His tongue wriggled and writhed its way into her, first into her front passage and then into the back, repeatedly switching back and forth between the two as he ravished her thoroughly. Pansy struggled to maintain her footing as she basked in the heady sensations that were rushing over her. She positively loved the way he opened her up and exposed her to his every wish as he took and gave pleasure in equal parts. She knew she would let him lead her anywhere, no matter if it brought her pain, shock, embarrassment or anything else. But even before she could fully consider the possibilities of where Jack might lead her, he was already taking her there.
Jack grudgingly pulled himself away from her, pausing to kiss her buttocks on and around the welts. “I won’t spank you again until you heal,” he told her. Pansy captured from this remark the promise that they would be seeing each other more in the future. “I have something else in mind anyway,” he added offhandedly. Pansy thrilled to his words. She noticed that his eyes were fixed on something across the room as he spoke, and she followed his gaze to an odd little statue that she hadn’t noticed before. It sat upon an elaborate footstool next to the bed. The statue was of a vicious-looking gargoyle with a sadistic grin on his hideous face. She wondered suddenly that she hadn’t noticed it. The gargoyle held a sword in its hand, the tip aiming downward and the handle turned outward
and up, so that it was pointing toward Pansy and Jack. Pansy did not fail to notice that the handle of the sword was of a similar shape and size of a man’s penis, perhaps a bit larger. She felt a mixture of dread and longing curling up within her. Jack’s eyes remained fixed on the statue.
“Pansy,” he began slowly and thoughtfully, “take off your clothes.” As she removed her clothing he walked over to where the statue stood. He seemed to be studying it. “Come here,” he said after a minute or two. She shook off the last of her clothing and went to him. He looked her over. There was a lazy smile playing at his lips. “I want to see you ride the gargoyle’s sword handle.” Pansy closed her eyes. It had been exactly what she was thinking, and yet…
“Now,” he demanded, sitting down on the bed. Pansy was uncertain of how to proceed. That she would do it was evident; yet it was extremely awkward. She didn’t know if she should face the gargoyle or put her back to it. There was also the difficulty of getting onto the sword handle in such a way that she would be able to move up and down on it. And all the while she was painfully aware that Jack was watching her. She moved closer to the statue and saw that the object she was about to mount nearly reached her waist in height. It would have been easier had it been slightly lower, for now she would have to accomplish her task on tiptoe. She decided to face the statue so that she could rest her hands on it for leverage. She positioned her feet on either side of the gargoyle and placed her hands tentatively on its repulsive head. Its hideous face seemed to be looking directly at her from this vantage point, and its lips twisted into a lecherous smirk. Very carefully she maneuvered herself over the tip of the handle, easing her body down on it ever so slowly. It was larger than it first appeared and much stiffer than most man-made objects for that purpose. It was as hard and cold as marble, and terribly irregular. She gasped as she struggled to push herself down farther on it. Its solid length was foreign and extremely menacing, although startlingly arousing, too. She was never so well lubricated to take on such an object and she slowly and cautiously inched herself down farther and farther, literally forcing herself lower and lower with each downward thrust. Even with her extreme wetness she could feel the solid edges pulling at her insides. It affected her in the same way that the previous day’s beating had; leaving her weak and confused and craving, and fully unable to reason again until she found a release.