by Gabi Moore
And that fucking creepy mask. I couldn’t even sleep in the same room with it. Todd hadn’t come home at nine. In fact, I slinked off to bed early myself and prayed I wouldn’t bump into him. And now it was morning and he was nowhere to be seen and I was left alone, again, with my thoughts. Chewing round and round and round in my head.
I took a deep breath and stepped into the car. As usual, the driver had already been told where to take me. As usual, all that was required of me was to pitch up and take whatever he threw my way. Though I was nervous enough to be shaking, I tried to still my mind as we drove on.
Porn. Fine. I could handle it, couldn’t I? I mean, after all the things he’d already made me do, it was a strange thing to be hesitant about. Would he make me perform in a film? Surely not. Our social crowd is pretty forgiving on these matters, but how on earth would that go down for him, professionally, to have a wife who had done porn? It would be an embarrassment for him. It didn’t make any sense.
We wound our way through the streets and hit some traffic. I stared out the window. Admired my manicure. All at once I decided: I wasn’t having fun anymore. All the guessing. The games. I was done. Maybe I should just pitch up and tell him that it’s been great, but I’m out. I had only ever cheated because he wasn’t available. I never intended for any of this, for it all to get so out of control.
We finally reached our destination, and I got out and watched the driver leave and merge back into the traffic. It was a nondescript building, a little like a courthouse or traffic department. Ugh. I went inside and frowned, looking for the next ‘clue’. He was there. That was a little startling. By now, I was used to dealing only with his proxies. Maids. Ushers. People who swanned around and did his bidding. But here he was, dressed sharply as usual and fresh faced, extending his hand to me. The building was deserted inside.
“Natasha,” he said simply.
I gave him my hand and he kissed it.
“Where are we?” I asked him.
He smiled and looked around.
“Believe it or not, this is Red Star’s headquarters.”
“Red Star? The porn company?” It was a little surprising. They were so huge even I had heard of them and this is where they were based?
“Come upstairs with me.”
I followed him into the elevator. God I felt tired. Possibly too tired for any of this. I had stayed up all night stressing about his stupid diary. We stepped out and made our way past some plain looking rooms. He took my hand gently and led me this way and that way, and we arrived at a room on the far corner, labelled “studio 4” on the door.
I saw this and stopped dead. My heels pressed silently into the spongy carpet. He turned to look at me.
“Todd, what are we doing?” I asked. His face was expressionless.
“Come with me,” he said again.
“No but, why? Where are we going? What are you going to make me do?” I said. I felt the panic rising in my throat again, not least because it was clear now and I knew he could see it. He relaxed and dropped my hand.
“You’ll soon see, if you just come inside with me,” he said calmly.
“But I’m scared Todd. I don’t want to do any of this anymore.”
He took a step back.
“Then leave. I always told you that you could.”
My heart beat fiercely in my throat. He was right, as fucking usual. I couldn’t leave. Not when I was so desperate to know what was on the other side of that door.
“Todd, I won’t do porn. You know how I feel about that. You know I hate it. Please don’t make me do something like that” I said, getting upset.
“Again, nobody is making anyone do anything” he said.”
“Is it porn? Behind the door? A porn set?”
He shrugged and smiled wickedly.
“Again, there’s only one way to find out.”
The more upset I was getting, the more relaxed he seemed. In fact, he seemed to be enjoying it. I tried to think hard about some logic puzzle he had once described to me. About opening doors? About the chances of finding a goat behind one of them or something? It was all a psychological trick. That’s it. He was trying to mess with my mind.
“It doesn’t matter, even if it is a porn set. If it is, I’m just walking straight back out again,” I said, decisively.
He kept smiling.
“Sure, why not?” he said, a little too mockingly.
The hairs on the back of my neck prickled. Was he going to …restrain me? I mean, obviously he had restrained me many, many times already but was this …was this for real? Oh my god, maybe he would murder me.
“So, what’s it going to be? Or are we going to stand here in the passageway all evening?”
I clutched hold of my handbag and tried to think. Why the fuck was it so hard for me to just walk away right now? Just forget this whole stupid mess. He was a wreck of a human being, and I wasn’t much better, and though we deserved each other, wasn’t enough enough already? I was no longer having fun. That much was clear. I straightened my posture and cleared my voice.
“To be honest, I don’t trust you,” I said.
His face lit up and he began to laugh.
“There! That’s it right there. God, you are predictable, that’s for sure. I knew you’d say that. But now that you have, don’t you think it’s a little …hypocritical?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, it’s laughable, really. That you wouldn’t trust me, isn’t it?”
I hadn’t technically had sex with Todd for more than a year. I had fucked in front of him, sure. He had barked orders at others, who did his bidding. But one painful, suddenly very relevant fact came blaring into my mind: we still hadn’t had sex ourselves. Not even once. No matter how much I begged.
“I apologized to you, Todd. Over and over again. I was wrong. I didn’t want any of those men. I only ever wanted –”
He raised his hand to silence me.
“We’ve played this game before, Natasha, and I can tell we’re both tired of it. So I’ve been thinking. What do I really want from you? Really, at the end of the day? Do you think I care that you fuck other men? Do you honestly think that matters at all to me?”
I stared at him a little dumbfounded. Yes. That was exactly what I thought.
“Well, I don’t care. Not really. Pussy is pussy. And you’re hot but, no offense, there are a million hot girls just like you crawling around this town. You see what I’m getting at?”
I gulped. My head was beginning to spin.
“So, what was I to do, with the fact that I had a wife who was just as cheap and disposable as every other woman, just as disloyal? As disrespectful?”
“I never disrespected you –”
“Just as careless? Well, I thought that I would be satisfied ‘punishing’ you. Fuck, it was good while it lasted. Men are pigs. You’re a pig. It was fun to watch you, to watch how far you’d go…”
My jaw dropped.
“I did all of that for you, Todd,” I said quietly. It seemed like the simplest, clearest description of the situation I could muster. It was true. It was all for him. Everything.
“Yes, well, see that’s where it gets difficult. Did you? You enjoyed it. Obviously, you enjoyed it. I don’t care. I liked seeing it. But something still wasn’t right. You still hadn’t been punished. Not really. Things were still unresolved between us. And I just found that I couldn’t forgive you. Not even a little.”
“You don’t forgive me?”
It seemed like a dumb idea, now that it was stated so plainly. That with enough out-in-the-open debauchery I could cancel out the secret debauchery. Well, I hadn’t gotten to have my cake and eat it after all. In fact, I wasn’t even sure we were talking about the same cake anymore.
“No. I don’t. And honestly, it was never about me absolving you. I thought that I could control it. Control you. I thought that if you just did enough, then we could move on somehow.”
“Todd, I did everythi
ng I could. Everything you wanted me to do…”
“I know,” he said coldly. “And yet it wasn’t enough.”
We stood there, looking at one another. The building was eerily quiet.
“Todd, what’s in that room?” I asked again.
“Come with me and see.”
“I can’t.”
“Then leave.”
“I… I can’t do that either,” I said, and looked down at my feet.
“We don’t need to keep going over this again and again. You’re my wife. I made a vow to you. But there’s only so much I can take. So today, we resolve it once and for all.”
I stared at him hard. He was my husband. I knew his face, although it was a little far from me now, and the features seemed so detached. Like he was just a sepia photograph of himself, or not himself at all, just a man who resembled him, a distant relation from long ago. A ghost. Something painful panged deep inside me. I missed him. I missed him so much.
“Do you trust me? Come inside,” he said.
So I stepped inside.
Chapter Twenty - Todd
The room was bare, and mostly filled with darkness.
It was a featureless cube, without windows, the tracks of overhead lighting turned off. There were three tall standing lamps in the middle of the room, like eerie robots with bright, empty faces, looking down at a clearing like they were examining it. In the clearing was a fold out table, also bare, with two glasses, both containing clear liquid.
It was deathly quiet, and I paused, allowing her eyes to adjust to the strange lighting inside, and for her to think, and look over her shoulder. I closed the door behind us. It was just me and her. After all the fucking drama, all the fights, all the parties and threats of divorce and nasty words …after all of it, we were alone. My eyes prickled hot.
“There are no cameras,” she said, the relief evident in her voice.
“No,” I said, and stepped closer into the light. “Only I can see you in here.”
“Why here? Why in a porn studio?”
“Why not? I wanted to see the look on your face. It cost me a lot. But it was worth it.”
I could see the tension drop a little from her elegant shoulders, but her face was still in knots, and she frowned, looking intently around the room as though she was sure some bogeyman would leap out at her at any moment. Of course there were no cameras. Why the fuck would there be? Wasn’t that her worst nightmare? And hadn’t I done everything in my power to make her whole life a complete dream?
She went to the table and peered down at the glasses.
“What’s this?” she asked. Of course she asked that. I knew everything she was going to say. I knew her inside out. And I had planned out this moment in painstaking detail. I stepped up behind her, close but not touching, and looked at them with her.
“I’m glad you asked. One of those glasses contains simple water. Nothing fancy.”
“And the other one?”
I pulled up a chair from the ring of darkness around us and gestured for her to sit. What can I say, I love a little drama. What’s the point of money, if you can’t have taste, or indulge in the theatrical sometimes?
“Well, the other contains a deadly poison. A very deadly poison. I had to work very hard to get my hands on this substance. It’s illegal for me to even own, but I had to have it. One sip of this tasteless, colorless liquid and within seconds you’re dead. It’s powerful, but metabolizes quickly and so is perfectly undetectable in any autopsy. The cause of death for such a person would be cardiac arrest.”
I spoke slowly, making sure she held onto each and every word. It was all important. Today, we would resolve things, once and for all.
“Which is which?” she said, because of course she would say that next.
“The interesting thing is, you don’t know, Natasha. You don’t know which one is which.”
She shot me a look.
“Do you?”
I nodded.
“Of course I do. I set all of this up. I know which glass will kill you stone dead, and which will be nothing more than a harmless sip of water.”
“Will kill me stone dead?” she asked.
“Yes, you’ll be the one taking a sip. You’ll have to take one sip from one of these glasses, yes.”
She stared at the glasses and then at me. She scowled and quickly stood up from her seat, but I pinned her back down.
“Natasha, so help me, you can walk away now, but I mean it: walk away and you will never see me again. You will be divorced before close of business tomorrow and I will make it so that you never even existed in this town. You can leave. But know that once you turn around and go through that door, there is no going back.”
She laughed out loud. An ugly laugh.
“So, I have to take a fifty-fifty chance on landing up dead, or divorce you? Just how great do you think you are?” she sneered. Christ, she looked hot when she got a little bothered like this. But I reminded myself to stay focused. This was no place or time for sex.
I smiled down at her.
“Quiet down. There’s no need to get excited. It’s not a fifty-fifty chance, exactly. If you stay in this room with me, you have to take one sip, that’s the rule. But I know which glass you should choose from.”
“So are you going to tell me then?” She was getting exasperated.
“Oh of course I’ll tell you. The poison is in the glass on the right. Drink from the left and you’ll get nothing but water, and we can leave here and go and have a picnic” I said breezily.
Her eyes narrowed.
“But how do I know you’re telling the truth?” she asked. Beautiful. Just the question I wanted her to ask.
“Well, Natasha, you don’t. And therein lies the rub.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, that’s the problem between you and I, isn’t it?”
“That you’re a creepy asshole who’s trying to poison me?” she spat.
I laughed.
“No. That there is no trust. I make my living solving highly sophisticated problems Natasha. All day long I solve puzzles of complexity you can’t even begin to imagine. And yet this was really tricky for me. How do you get trust back, once it’s broken?”
She sat in silence, her anger fizzling off a little as she considered what I was saying.
“You don’t trust me,” she said plainly.
“Oh, I trust you. I trusted you when I threw you out there to get fucked by whoever I liked. Jesus, I couldn’t find men fast enough for you to fuck! Oh no, that’s not the problem. I trust you Natty. And I know you. But you don’t trust me.”
She lifted her eyes to mine, and in the dim light I saw them wobble along the bottom with fresh tears.
“And that’s clear to see. The poison is on the right,” I said.
“But I don’t know that for sure,” she replied quietly.
“So, you see the problem. The sex was never the problem. The pool boys, the stupid diaries. I don’t care, Natty, honestly. But I’ve at last found a way to solve this once and for all.”
“How?”
“Drink. Take a sip, or get out. You could assume I’m lying and take a sip from the glass on the right. I can have your body cremated. Or you could trust me and drink what I tell you to drink.”
She frowned at the glasses, and I could almost hear her thinking. She looked so beautiful, even now. Especially now, even, all unguarded and wild and raw like this. I fucking loved this woman, and nobody could prove otherwise. I would do anything for her. And that’s why I had to test her like this.
She had come here, probably expecting some sordid sex thing, and why wouldn’t she? But that was too easy. She knew how to do that. Alone here in a room with her, with both of us fully clothed, it honestly felt like the most intimate thing we had ever done. Fuck the whips and the chains. This was scary.
She looked over her shoulder and considered the door and her third option of running away and leaving me forever. But her gaze c
ame quickly back to the table. She lifted a slender, shaking arm and wrapped cautious fingers around the glass on the right. As though she just wanted to touch it.
“It would kill me instantly?”
“Instantly.”
She pulled her hand away and rested it on the glass on the left instead.
“What’s in this glass Todd?” she asked, her eyes closed, as though we were both rehearsing lines from a play.
“It’s water, my darling.”
“Is it water? Is it really?”
“It is.”
“Can I trust you? Can I believe you?” she said. They were words said for their own sake. She wasn’t saying them to get an answer from me. She was saying them to herself, to see if she could believe them.
“I would never lie to you, my love. I’ve only ever wanted the best for you. Drink from the left glass and we can leave here, and forget all this.”
Her hand wavered on the cool surface. I was sweating bullets. I knew Natasha. I was betting on how well I knew her. But she had a violent, unpredictable streak too. It was a risk I had taken: that she would take a spiteful gulp from the glass on the right and I’d have to watch her fall over and die within seconds. It would kill me, of course. It would kill me. But at least then I would know, once and for all.
Money is worthless. Youth and beauty are worthless. I don’t give a damn about paltry things like fidelity. All I wanted from her was her trust. For her to believe me, and believe in me. And if she couldn’t do that now, if she couldn’t prove that I had that special place in her heart, then she was better dead to me anyway. Like I said, I have a flair for drama, so sue me.
I suppose you want to know what happened next? Which glass she chose? Well, I understand. It was the single most painfully anxious moment of my life, that I can say. I stopped breathing. But all at once, she lifted the glass on the left, brought it to her lips and without hesitating, gulped down the water, all of it, till there was not a single drop left. She banged the glass down on the table and stared straight ahead.
“I trust you, Todd,” she said.