by Cole McCade
She didn’t know it was on her until it was already there—until she buried inside him and that bulb shifted and hit just right, and as if it had pulled the seams holding her together she came unraveled. She arched and twisted atop him, gasping out and clawing at the sheets as her body became both liquid and steel, molten and yet drawn so taut she could only snap. And she wanted—needed—to bring him with her, and even as the convulsions took her she wrapped both her hands around his cock, pressed him between her breasts, touched him in any way she could with fever and fire and desperate need.
Her last gasp was his first cry, and as she melted into bonelessness she watched through dazed eyes as he tossed his head back against the pillows, lifted his entire body, his stomach drawing taut and sucking in. She felt it coming: the swell, the throb, the pulse against her flesh, and then he was snarling out in throaty pleasure and her hands and breasts were wet, glistening, warm with the liquid runnels spilling over her skin. He collapsed beneath her and she collapsed atop him, panting and overheated, her body slicked in sweat and his damp beneath her. She couldn’t move. Not yet. Not when her world had tilted on its axis, and she was a stranger waking up somewhere new with no recollection of who she was or how she’d gotten here.
“What are you doing to me?” she whispered. “What am I turning into?”
Priest shifted underneath her, lazy, only to hiss as the toy moved inside both of them, a mirror flinch passing from him to her. “Someone who knows her own desires.” In his voice was silk and sand, the sounds of someone sated and content. Yet if he was content, her thoughts were a tempest, turmoil and ache brewing into a violent storm.
“I don’t…I don’t want to be this.” She pushed herself up on shaking arms, looking down at him. “I don’t want to become some kind of monster.”
“You think feeling pleasure makes you a monster?”
“I don’t know.” Then again, choked, those fucking tears rising because she was confused, so confused. “I don’t know.”
“Firefly.” Even with his wrists bound he found a way to hold her, capturing her with his gaze. With the promise, the certainty, the assurance in golden eyes so warm she wondered how they could have ever gone so cold. “Never,” he breathed. “You could never be a monster.”
“You…you don’t think so?”
“I know it,” he said, and made of those words a promise. “If you have faith in me for nothing else…have faith in me for that.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know how.”
But she was starting to hope she could try.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
WHEN SHE WAS TEN SHE did something she wasn’t supposed to do, and became a monster.
Dad didn’t like Willow on the internet. Not alone, at least. They didn’t even have internet at their house, and not only because they couldn’t afford it; Dad didn’t like it and if he needed to send an email or look something up or search for a new job they went to the library, where Willow played jewel games under his watchful eye and looked up fanart of Sailor Moon. There were perverts on the internet, Dad said. And when he was working short-term disability jobs to make ends meet and couldn’t be there to watch over her, he didn’t like the idea of her online by herself. It was as if, he said, he’d turned his back while she took her clothes off and walked naked into a room full of grown men. Most of the men would be bothered, would look away, would try to shelter and protect her.
But all it would take was that one. And he couldn’t leave her alone with that one.
So she wasn’t supposed to be online. But she needed to know something, and she couldn’t ask Dad. It wasn’t the kind of thing she could ask Dad when sometimes girl things made him flustered and at times he only looked at her helplessly, like he didn’t know what to do. His hands would open and close and he’d get this look on his face, this sad confused look, and she didn’t want to see that look again over something this embarrassing. Embarrassing, and terrifying.
She thought she might be dying.
More likely she was starting her dot—that was what she’d heard girls call it, their d-o-t, giggling to each other about who’d start theirs first and how mortifying it was when their Moms sat them down and had the talk, a talk that was more of a warning, those encounters at the beginnings of horror movies that told you something bad was coming but the people in the movies never listened. The dot was a strange and disturbing thing, she’d heard. A rite of passage. And when it started she wasn’t a little girl anymore; she was a woman, and that meant mysterious and awful and frightening things with her body bursting out of control and men wanting to do things to touch her dirty thing and put things inside and make her pregnant. She knew about sex ed, about biology and how babies were made, but the idea of sex to make a baby was very different from the strange cloying stickiness of the pictures some of the boys snuck into school, cut out of dirty magazines and making her think of her mother hanging upside down on the swing set with her skirt up around her waist and her thing burning like fire.
She’d almost rather be dying. And yesterday Erin-the-Girl, mean Erin, sneering Erin who now wore her blonde hair in a perfect little bob that cupped her round, angelic face, had kicked her right between the legs. Flat, flat, flat, she’d mocked. Looks like a boy. Nevermind that all the girls in the fifth grade were flat with little nubbins, except tall skinny Suzi Eckermeyer, who wore loose shirts and folded her arms over her chest so people wouldn’t stare. Erin liked to pick on Willow for her bony stick-thin body and knobby knees and hand-me-down-pick-me-up mish-mash of boys’ and girls’ clothing from Goodwill, called her Will and said she was a boy. Look like a boy, maybe you got a boy’s thing.
So she’d kicked her to find out.
And Willow had curled on the ground and cupped her hand between her legs and hurt, a dull deep red bruising pulse of pain that went deep up into her belly, but she didn’t cry. Not until she got home, and finished her homework, and tucked her notebooks and textbooks away neatly in her bag. She’d taken a bath and put on her nightgown, brushed her teeth and combed out her hair, waited for Daddy to come kiss her goodnight and close the door. Then she’d buried her face in her pillow and sobbed—until her pillow was wet and clammy and stuck to her cheek, until her nose filled with plugs of snot and she had to sniffle to be able to breathe. She’d cried until she’d worn herself out and couldn’t keep her eyes open any longer, and it had been a mercy to fall asleep.
The following morning, the bleeding started.
Just little spots. Little dark spots in her underwear, rusty and smeared, and she’d panicked because maybe Erin ruptured something inside her, burst her up inside and all her organs were falling out through her dirty thing, but maybe not. Maybe she was having her d-o-t, maybe she’d be the first one in class but instead of making her more popular than when Erin was the first to get an MP3 player or Katie Ng was the first to get her own cellphone, it would make Willow a pariah and a freak, a monster and a beast, shunned and mocked as dirty, dirty, a dirty dirty woman-thing.
She didn’t want to be a woman. Women did things that made their voices sound like Mama’s voice, and Willow didn’t want to sound like that.
So she’d wiped herself with wet toilet paper, scrubbing over and over and crying in the bathroom and locking the door so her father wouldn’t catch her. She’d hidden the dirty underwear under her pillow so he wouldn’t find it in the laundry, then balled up paper towels and stuffed them in her clean panties and spent the next day at school with an embarrassing bulge in her jeans, hoping the bleeding would stop.
It didn’t.
It had only gotten worse, until she was stuffing a roll of paper towels in her backpack and excusing herself to the bathroom every other period to cry and wash herself furiously and try not to clog the toilet with the paper towels. She’d learned that at home, where the plumbing was old and cheap and sometimes one extra square of toilet paper led to a wet bathroom and that mossy damp smell and Dad sighing and tired but smiling and promising it was ok
ay when the set of his shoulders said it wasn’t.
Erin-the-Girl catcalled her every time she scurried from the class into the halls, called her Willy the Bed-Wetter. That was what Erin had decided when she’d noticed the bathroom trips, and Willow had learned as early as kindergarten that what Erin decided about someone became enough truth in her mind to become truth for the entirety of the school. Erin’s truths were why half the school called her Willy and said she was a boy, even though she didn’t think she looked anything like a boy even if she was a bit skinny and rawboned. Then they said she wasn’t a boy, just a lesbian, with her rough hands and the way she liked to tinker with things and take them apart and put them back together; it confused her when she didn’t like girls or boys and never wanted to think about that day when she would and one or the other would want to touch her. But she guessed tinkering and scarred hands were boy things. So if she liked boy things, Erin said Willow had to be a boy or she must like girls like a boy, when all she wanted was to build things and be left alone.
But Erin wouldn’t leave her alone, and on the third day of bleeding she followed Willow into the bathroom and rattled the door. Willow nearly dropped her roll of paper towels in the toilet, and when she let out a little breathless scream, Erin laughed her nasty laugh.
“Did I make you piss yourself, Willy-boy? You gonna pee all down your leg? Nasty Willy-boy.”
“Leave me alone,” she’d called over the bathroom door, trembling with every word.
“You want another kick, Willy? Huh? You want me to kick you in your little boy junk?”
Willow had checked the lock on the stall door, clutched her paper towels closer, swallowed back her heart and the scream in her throat, and said nothing at all.
Erin had stayed, calling “Willy, Willy” tauntingly over the top of the stall until the bell had rung and she’d had to leave. Willow had been late for class and she’d gotten her very first detention, but at least she hadn’t shown up with a big dark angry red spot right between her legs where everyone could see.
And detention had let her use the computers in the school library, after swearing to the librarian she needed to get online to look something up for her English composition paper. She hadn’t taken typing class yet, so she had to peck and tap and look at the keyboard with every word, but she slowly pecked out h-o-w-o-l-d-f-i-r-s-t-p-e-r-i-o-d one letter at a time, then hit Enter and waited with her breaths tasting like the sour-milk flavor of sheer and absolute terror.
Too many search results. A terrifying wealth of choices, and she stared at the titles of the articles, her fingers sweaty on the grubby, marker-stained mouse. She clicked the first, but the school firewall blocked access. And the second and the third and more, until she was clicking over and over only to hit up against that page with its big red X the same red as the blood that scared her, like that X was saying sorry, sorry, you’re gonna die.
She finally managed to get a page called Knowing Your Menses: Your Daughter and You, and a lot of it didn’t make sense and it was hard to read with the pink tiny text against a teal-blue background and she didn’t know what menses meant at first until it explained that was the technical term for the d-o-t. But it said girls could start their periods as young as nine and as late as sixteen, but nine was rare. So ten would be rare, too. And rare was for special people. Willow wasn’t special. Her mother had made that clear; so had Erin, and everyone else who looked right through her while telling her she was something she wasn’t. Though she didn’t think it was that special to be scared and bleeding and so gross everyone must be able to see, and they’d look at her when she walked past like she was Josh the Booger-Eater in sixth period.
So she searched b-l-e-e-d-i-n-g-f-r-o-m-v-a-g-i-n-a too, though she must have done something wrong by typing that word. Most of the results that came up were blocked, but on an online doctor site she learned about internal fissures and STDs and something horrifying called an air embolism that terrified her because what was stopping the air she walked around in and breathed every day from getting inside there and making her die?
She was scared. She was scared and she didn’t know any more now than she had forty-five minutes ago if she was going to die or becoming a woman, and she should ask her Dad in case she needed a doctor. But Dad was a boy, and she’d rather die than talk to a boy about her v-a-g-i-n-a. She could call Uncle Wally, but he was a boy too, even if he was a strange, different kind of boy who wasn’t like other boys. And she was running out of time; her detention was only for an hour, and she’d already had to call and tell her Dad why she’d be missing the bus and Uncle Wally would be coming to walk her home. He’d demand an explanation when she got home, when he wasn’t at work and somewhere where other people could hear and guess from the exhausted, exasperated tone in his voice.
The websites all talked about talking to daughters about their d-o-t, but Mama had never talked to Willow about this. She’d never talked to Willow about much of anything but being dreamy and beautiful, and the men she used to know. Men like the one who’d come to the house that day in the long, low green car; dashing men in suits; men who tasted like candy and men who tasted like wine. She’d never talked to Willow about what to do if she wanted to look pretty or what to do when people told her the things she liked weren’t girl things when they were so girl things because they were her things. Mama had liked to talk about being pretty, yes, but it was always about how pretty she’d been when she was younger, before she’d had to give up the adoration of the crowds; before men had stopped bringing her jeweled earrings and flowers; before Willow had ruined her body and time had ruined her face, even though Willow had thought her mother was prettier than anyone, pretty in a way that was dangerous and strange and at once enticing and repellent.
She’d never talked to Willow about what to do if she liked a boy. Or a girl. Or even the possibility that she could. She’d never talked to her about growing up, about not being a girl anymore; she’d never talked to her about sex, when the last time Willow had seen her, she’d been eight and Mama had been standing on the doorstep with a little boy’s hand in hers, demanding to know if Willow wanted to come while Willow stood between her parents in a tug of war, the sidewalk the rope and two different lives on either end.
She’d certainly never talked to her about periods, or how her body would turn into this mutant thing doing things she hadn’t told it to do.
She didn’t want to grow up. Not like that. Right now her body did everything she told it to. It ran with a strong, sweet energy; it rocketed from the ground to the branches of a tree, climbing and jumping like gravity didn’t mean a thing to her. It felt everything with a glorious intensity, until sometimes she just needed to sit on the grass and rest her hands against the cool crisp blades and feel them poking up through her fingers with the loamy moistness of the earth all springy and soft underneath. It ate and ate—all the good things, sweet crisp apples and peanut butter, raisins and big thick sandwiches with yellow plastic slabs of government cheese with its weird but good creamy taste—and all the food disappeared into her rumbling tummy and never really appeared on her body anywhere else, like she was a steam engine burning everything away into smoke.
She liked that idea, being a steam engine, a powerful locomotive churning and charging on, this amazing machine with pistons and rails and a screaming smokestack. She raced like a locomotive, played like a locomotive, and at night went quiet with her books on how the insides of engines worked and the difference between steam and diesel and hydraulics, all the things her father knew and that followed her into the quiet, perfect dreams of a girl who’d earned her sleep with wild, free running and homework and building backyard catapults to fight the ice dragon that had escaped her Uncle Wally’s shop.
If she called her mother, if her mother said she was becoming a woman, then all of that would go away—and wouldn’t her mother know, when she was everything woman Willow knew, more than any of her teachers or the checkout lady at the grocery or the lady who came to s
ee them to make sure Dad was raising her right? If Mama said, Willow would be expected to let go of little girl things and start wearing skirts and painting her blunt, chipped fingernails, and she’d have to play in adult girl ways instead of rolling in the dirt like a puppy and digging in the scrap piles for the parts to her latest invention. She’d have to sit like a lady and move in just such a way, with a grace she wasn’t sure she had.
She didn’t even have her mother’s number, but she could find it. She wasn’t supposed to know where her mother was, but once they’d gotten an envelope that said Miriam West instead of Miriam Armitage in the sender space, and the logo and letterhead had said West Hotels. She’d heard about them; the West family owned all the biggest, most expensive hotels in Crow City, the places Willow and her Dad couldn’t even afford to walk into, let alone stay. Her Mama liked nice things, and she liked men who gave her nice things, and then Willow had seen on the TV on one of those local gossip shows about how the President of West Holdings and Development, Marcus West, had remarried. And there her mother was in a luxurious white fur coat, smiling and waving with her face so made up she looked like a doll, hanging on the arm of a beautiful man with the most gorgeous lips she’d ever seen and skin like a breathless dark sunset, with the same perfect gritty sheen of desert sand in the sun after a long, hard rain.
She remembered there’d been a check in the envelope, and her father had torn it to pieces and thrown it away. She remembered, too, how much her chest had hurt, watching her mother on the arm of that beautiful man, looking around as if she’d seen the world and the world she’d seen didn’t include Willow.
But Willow thought she knew how to find her, too, and she looked up the website for West Hotels. The Contact Us page had too many emails, too many phone numbers. Her mother’s name was there. Miriam West, Head of Public Relations & Media Outreach. But no email, no phone number. She picked the one for the corporate office and wrote it down in her History notebook, and then stared at it and wondered if she’d really call.