Rabid

by T K Kenyon

  “No, I’m here to stop the abuse and counsel the victims. That’s what the Holy Office does now. We stop the abuse.”

  “So that’s what the Inquisition is doing these day? Abused kids?”

  “Pedophile priests. They are sent to a Dominican monastery in Italy.”

  “That’s the official story, anyway.”

  “Yes,” he said. “That’s what we tell people.”

  “I don’t care, and I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Have you ever talked about it with someone?”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “You’re living your life as an untreated survivor of abuse. It’s hurting you.”

  “Was that your problem, too?”

  He exhaled, and his breath sighed through the apartment, around the columns and plaster crown molding, into her bedroom. “No, I was just a callous ass.”

  “I don’t give a shit. Get out.”

  “Tell me who he was, and I can send him to the Dominican brothers in Italy.”

  “I don’t want your help. And you don’t know shit.”

  “You are right. I don’t know. Tell me.”

  “Get out.”

  Footsteps. The footsteps on the wooden floor ricocheted off the walls and moldings, and she knew he was coming at her.

  He wasn’t going to touch her.

  She braced herself.

  She wouldn’t let him touch her.

  “Leila.”

  “Get away from me.” Her hands curled. Her fingertips retreated into her palms like snakes protecting their heads in their coils.

  “I’m counseling children at the parish so they won’t hurt like you do. Memory is, as it were, the belly of the soul,’ and these priests are destroying children’s souls.” His whisper hissed like an ill wind near her shoulder, funneled around her ear’s pinna, slipped inside to her tympanic membrane, vibrated there and activated her cochlea, and traveled as neurotransmitters into her brain and she couldn’t block him out. Dante the priest was in her head, insistent, whispering, “But I don’t know how they feel. They’re too young to tell me, and I worry that I’m doing more damage. Tell me.”

  “Go away.” The first knuckle of her index finger on her left hand cracked.

  He whispered, low and soft, “Tell me what happened to you.”

  His long, black shadow spread on the floor beside her, thrown from the stronger lamps in the living room. The glittering chandelier cut blue snowflakes out of the shadow’s human form, like a shifting demon slithering on her floor and grinning at her, or a black-robed priest lying on her bedroom floor while her oblivious mother slept two rooms down the hall.

  She said, “Get out of my apartment.”

  “Tell me what he did to you.”

  “Get out.”

  The shadow on the wood floor raised its arm, and a black sleeve fluttered on the horizon of Leila’s vision.

  She whipped around, grabbed that extended black-clothed arm, and crammed it against his back, shoving up hard.

  ~~~~~

  Chapter Twenty

  The presses clattered, churning out long sheaves of newsprint.

  Dr. Sloan’s Secret Lover Testifies

  By Kirin Oberoi

  Yesterday, in the Beverly Sloan murder trial, DA George Grossberg and ADA Georgina Pire elicited testimony from prosecution witness and Neuroscience department secretary Peggy Anne Strum that she had been having an affair with Dr. Conroy Sloan, the victim, that continued until his death. Strum also stated that she and the deceased had planned to marry next February after he had divorced his wife, his alleged murderer, Beverly Sloan.

  Divorce is forbidden in the Roman Catholic faith, though widows may remarry in the Church.

  ~~~~~

  Pushed, Dante fell towards the dark bed.

  Crimson silk rushed at him out of the dark like a rogue wave. His arm was free, but his elbow tendons had been stretched to their limits. When his hands touched the bedspread, he sprang back, flipped over, and scrambled backward away from her silhouette in the lit doorframe. “Leila, what are you doing?”

  She grabbed his ankle and hauled him back over the silk coverlet.

  “Leila, stop.”

  She vaulted, hesitated in the air, and collapsed around him, her arms and knees pinning his arms and legs to his sides. Her whisky-rancid mouth grabbed his mouth.

  He twisted, but the friction of her lithe body twined around him sharpened his senses. His body was already lathered from Bev, but he had resisted her, a meager victory.

  “Leila, stop,” he whispered under her mouth.

  “Shhh,” she growled near his throat, and he stretched his neck and closed his eyes. Blood gushed through him and swelled in his chest.

  “I could shout,” he said, but his lungs were waterlogged.

  “No one would believe that a big, bad Roman priest like yourself, one with a track record of seducing so many, many women, didn’t rape the little college student. Besides,” she kicked the door shut with a long lever sweep of her foot, and streetlight glared though the blinds in red slashes on the bed and gilded streaks on the walls, “Six inches of solid plaster are bolted to these walls. No one will hear you.”

  Heat like the Roman sun reflecting off glazed tile baked his chest where her body rested, and it felt so good.

  If he fought her, he would hurt her, and he refused to hurt her, so he didn’t fight.

  “Leila, stop.” He held her shoulders and set her back gently.

  She twisted and slapped his arms off her. Her knuckle drove between his ribs, grinding interstitial cartilage, and he flinched. His head landed on the pillow. His legs splayed everywhere.

  “Leila, you have to stop.” He held his hands defensively in front of his chest. He had provoked her to this. She straddled his waist, and his dick strengthened, filling, and pushed his pants toward her.

  If she leaned forward, her breasts under that black lace blouse would fill his hands. The image raced along his skin.

  Her arms swooped and snagged his wrists, forcing them over his head. The bones in the backs of his hands slapped the heavy ironwork and wood headboard. She held his hands stretched above him and leaned over him, kissing him so hard that she bruised his lips between their teeth.

  Grinding clicks squeezed his wrists.

  “What are you doing?” He thrashed, and she sat back on his hard dick and pelvis. He strained his neck around to look above him.

  Handcuffs shone around his wrists in the intermittent light like steel dashes. “What did you do?”

  “Don’t move,” she shushed.

  “Stop this.” He jerked back, and the short chain between them clinked on the wrought iron interlay in her headboard. “Unlock these!”

  “You want this,” and her hand ran between her own legs and traced the tip of his shivering dick through his pants and his cassock.

  “No, I do not want this.” His skin remembered long, humid nights and nights of this in Roma, though he had been the one outside the handcuffs, whispering you want this and barely touching them, until they arched with want, and then ripping into the women.

  Nights, them, women, his memories were in plural.

  “Don’t say you don’t want this,” Leila whispered beside his ear, everywhere on his body at once. “He never let me to say that I didn’t want it. He got angry if I said no. Angry was worse.”

  “Leila.” His infernal body arched under her legs. Light streaked her lace blouse, and clusters in the lace spotted her torso.

  If that blouse was off of her, he would be able to see her skin, touch her skin. Running away wouldn’t drive these images out of his head. He could conceivably kick his way free of her, break the headboard to free his hands, but he would have to hurt her to get away. “Don’t do this.”

  “You’re just like him, you know.” Her voice was soft and almost kind near his other ear. “Arrogant, because you think you’re different. He was amazingly beautiful, blonde hair and golden skin, an
gelic, even in Los Angeles where everyone cuts off anything that makes them feel bad. Angels and fallen angels all look alike.”

  His body stilled. She was telling him about her abuser. He could rationalize his lack of resistance in a thousand ways: that she only felt safe enough to talk with him restrained, that her story would allow him to empathize with the abused parish children, that this was therapy for her, that he would trade a modicum of his shattered priesthood if it helped her. He had already broken his vow of chastity.

  But he didn’t like being handcuffed. “Leila, take them off. I will leave, or stay, as you want.”

  Her teeth dragged at the skin on his neck, just below his ear, as if her teeth were pointed. “He liked to be in control, too.”

  “I only wanted to talk.” His attention was focused on that small patch of skin, raw from her nip, that her breath scalded. “Stop.”

  “Don’t say that. Say yes.”

  “No.” His throat was tight, and his rasping voice hurt.

  She hovered above him, softly lit on one side by the glowing streetlight streaks. Her hair curtained off her face, leaving darkness. A faceless pagan Norse goddess looked like this, a death goddess. She had looked faceless like this when her hands had covered her face when Conroy died.

  Leila whispered, nearly against his lips, “Say yes.”

  He rationalized again that this might help her, that his celibacy was already gone. “Yes.”

  She whispered near his shoulder. “Have you used handcuffs on women?”

  “Yes.” There was no reason to lie. The cloth on his shoulders loosened as she untied the cincture around his waist, unhooked the long line of hooks and eyes down his cassock, and unbuttoned his shirt. “Leila, I cannot do this. I must not do this to you.”

  “You’ve come here in the middle of the night three times, Dante.” Her fingernail tickled his chest, and he tried to lay still but he inhaled at the faint scratch. “You’ve arrived here drunk. You’ve gotten drunk while you were here. You’re drunk now.”

  “I am not drunk.” But the quick scotch had disconnected his body from his mind, and once she reached his navel with her nails and trailed her way past it, he gasped.

  “You know what kind of woman I am.” She crawled around him, leaning over his stomach. “You know what coming here, at night, drunk, to such a woman, means.”

  Truth, he had only truth. “I wanted to talk to you.”

  “You could have called me on the phone to talk.” She flicked aside his pants button. Her lips touched his stomach. “You could have waited until daylight.” Her breath wafted over the skin on his belly. “Things like this don’t happen in daylight. Things like this only happen at night.”

  “That’s not why I came over here. The first time, I was drunk.”

  “Women use that drunk excuse all the time to explain why they slept with some guy, why they aren’t sluts because they weren’t responsible.” Her cool lips brushed his belly. “So men use that excuse, too, do they?”

  “No, men do not care.”

  “I like that.” Leila wrapped her arm under his waist and lifted his back, and he arched with her arm, complicit. She nipped near his navel.

  “But I am a priest. I cannot do this.”

  She lowered his back to the bed and ran her hands over his pants legs, rubbing his thighs. “You’re not responsible. You’re drunk. You’re tied up.”

  “I am responsible.”

  “You tried to grab me in the Dublin, drag me over to you. Your head was tilted. Your mouth was opening.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way.” He had meant it that way, but he had stopped.

  She was back up near his ear again, whispering, “Say you did.”

  The darkness of the room, the secretiveness, stole into his head. “Yes.”

  “And you waited for me at the Dublin, stalking me, trying to find me.”

  “It wasn’t like that.”

  She breathed on that vulnerable hollow of his throat. “Say yes.”

  He had to say it. “Yes.”

  “And you’ve wanted this ever since you gave me your card with your phone numbers, found out where I live and where I work, started coming over here, trying to get to me, trying to provoke me into this so you wouldn’t feel guilty about it. You didn’t sin if I seduced you.”

  “Leila, I swear to you, I did not think that. I wanted to talk.” And even if he had thought about it, he had planned to only talk to her.

  “Ah, ah. You’re arguing again. It’s no use saying that you’re not like that, that you weren’t thinking that.” Her lips nuzzled his ear. “You like this.” She kissed him.

  “Yes,” he said on her slick lips. His voice dropped because it was true.

  “And you like this.” Her lips dropped to his neck. He turned, ostensibly to crane his neck to look at the handcuffs and see if there was room for his hands to slip out, but his neck elongated to allow room for her to mouth his neck and shoulder. “You like this, don’t you?”

  “Yes.” The tight handcuffs creased his wrists. His hands tingled, falling asleep. He struggled to pull himself closer to the headboard to relieve the pressure.

  “You probably thought earlier that you could fight me off if you wanted to, after all, I’m a small, thin woman.”

  He could hardly breathe.

  She nipped his collarbone. “Silence implies consent. Why didn’t you?”

  “I would have hurt you.”

  “Then it wasn’t because you wanted to fuck me.”

  “No.”

  “How altruistic.” She sounded like she didn’t believe him.

  In the rectory at night, her face had floated over the memories of other women, and he had jacked off to her image dozens of times these last months. Déjà vu surrounded her in the streaked darkness. His skin strained. He had primed his body for this. He was so stupid. “I will not hurt you. You have been hurt enough by priests.”

  “You were afraid you’d hurt me. How childlike. Children are always worried about hurting or disappointing an adult.”

  His drumming heart stumbled. She had cast him in the part of the child, which meant she was playing the part of the abusing priest, acting out her abuse. The pedophile had used her innocence, her sympathy, to manipulate her, until she had none left and could take the role of the demon.

  He said, “And you do not fear hurting anyone anymore.”

  “I’m nothing,” she said. “I’m a mote. I can’t hurt anyone.”

  God had allowed such a man to do this to a child while he wore a Roman collar, and atheism flowed along Dante’s nerves, following the rough scratch of her lace blouse on his chest. He wanted to cradle her, soothe away what that man did to her, but the handcuffs chained his arms above his head. “Leila.”

  She covered his mouth with her soft hand. “Don’t say anything.”

  “Leila.” His voice was husky with testosterone. Her hand trembled on his face. He kissed her palm, which smelled like scotch, flowery hand lotion, and laboratory gloves.

  She jerked away from him and sat up, straddling his waist. Slices of light tiger-striped the left side of her body. “You’re enjoying this.”

  “No.”

  “Bastard.” Her open palm cracked across his face. “Don’t make me angry.” She towered above him on her knees. “Angry is worse.”

  Angry is worse. That pedophile had manipulated her, made her an accomplice by threats. His heart vibrated. She slid up him like a rearing cobra. His body craved hers as if she were pressed together out of nicotine and alcohol and caffeine and cocaine.

  Dante asked, “Did he do this to you? Did he tie you down?”

  She murmured “Dante,” against the skin of his throat and his body jumped as if he had heard his name in a dark alley. “The first time I saw you, when you were saying Mass,” his own fingers holding the communion wafer and lifting his gold-rimmed, gem-studded chalice, the soft vestments on his skin, sunlight beaming in the church full of people looking at him, “I wante
d you,” she said from the darkness. “Even reading about you on your website,” before he had seen her, when she had been somewhere out there, “seeing your picture, I wanted to know you, talk to you, touch you.”

  She had been stalking him before he even knew she was there, and vulnerability darkened the world.

  “Did that priest say such things to you?” but Dante knew that her abuser had stalked her just like this.

  “It was your soul.” She pulled his shirt and long cassock up his arms, past his shoulders, and bunched them around his wrists, restraining him further. The sheet was hot under his back. “I could feel your soul, your pure, beautiful soul, drawing me to you.”

  He knew she wasn’t talking about his damned, rent soul. She was reenacting her abuse, changing his world from innocent to dangerous, showing him how the priest was just innocent background to her, practically foliage, and then, like lightening, un colpo di fulmine, he struck her. “Leila, don’t do this to yourself.”

  “You made me want you.”

  “Leila.”

  She unzipped his fly and, one-handed, pushed down his pants and pulled them off one leg with his shoes wrapped in the cloth.

  “Leila, don’t.”

  She stripped off his underwear. He was naked from his wrists to his knees. His skin was oversensitive as if he had burned off that first layer of callused dermis, leaving him pink and raw. His dick was still so hard it curved back at his belly.

  She said, “God put this desire for you into my heart and my body.”

  “That is wrong. He was wrong. That is heresy.” His skin was frantic for hers.

  “God wants us to be together.”

  “How can you presume to know the mind of God?”

  She shoved her knee between his thighs and cupped his balls. “Don’t argue. Don’t make me angry. Angry is worse.”

  His heart battered his lungs. While she held his testicles, he did not want to say anything to make her angry.