Desire

by Mariella Frostrup

  Jeg elsker dig.

  She heard Søren’s voice through the mist.

  With one thrust, he pushed inside her.

  Pain like she’d never imagined rent her in half. Rent her in half, split her in two, burned her like fire, tore her like paper.

  Beneath Søren she struggled and cried, her face buried against his chest. He cradled the back of her head as she wept tears of agony and surrender. He didn’t pull out of her, didn’t apologize. He held himself still, but inside her he pulsed as her vagina stretched and strained to take all of him into her. This was the price she had to pay for the kiss that couldn’t be unkissed, for the apple that couldn’t be unbitten, for the road she had taken. They had gone too far now. They could no longer go back.

  She never wanted to go back.

  The pain suffused her entire body. It burned like the hottest fire and if she had the use of her arms she would have tried to push him off her. One word could stop her suffering. She said nothing.

  Slowly she emerged from the haze of pain and heard Søren’s ragged breathing in her ear, the slightest catch of his breath, the subtlest moan in the back of his throat. Had there ever been a more beautiful sound than this – the sound of the pleasure he took inside her?

  Instinct told her to shrink from him, to pull away. But she fought that urge and instead raised her hips again into his. He penetrated her until it seemed as if his entire body filled hers to the breaking point. Each slow, controlled thrust stretched her open wide, tearing the gate that would keep him out of her. She wanted it gone, wanted everything between them gone forever. His hand found her hand and he locked their fingers together as he rose up and pushed in again. She braced for pain but instead felt a deep stab of pleasure. Her eyes flew open at the shock of it, so carnal, so animal. With a cry she pushed her hips into his again and again. A rush of fluid between her thighs eased his passage even more. Blood, perhaps? Her own wetness? It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he impaled her, invaded her, took ownership of her with every controlled yet merciless thrust.

  She focused on his face, on the long dark eyelashes resting on his cheeks, on his partly open lips, on his blond hair that she ached to run her fingers through, on the sheen of sweat that covered his forehead, his shoulders and the vein that pulsed visibly in his neck. It must have taken all his strength to hold back and not lose himself inside her. Sixteen years since he’d last done this. His self-control could shatter at any moment. She wanted it to shatter.

  Raising her head off the sheets, she kissed his shoulder. She whispered, “You own me.”

  Søren opened his eyes and gazed down at her.

  He thrust so hard into her she stopped breathing. He thrust again just as hard and she exhaled once more. It had to be like this, it had to be brutal. It wasn’t enough to take her virginity – he had to obliterate it.

  For an eternity she could do nothing but breathe through the pain, breathe it into her and breathe it back out again. But as he moved in her, the pain waned and something else took its place. Something... desire, hunger, greed for more of him. Søren slid a hand between their bodies and kneaded her clitoris, stroking it as she ground her pelvis into his hand. A deep and primal need overtook her. She writhed underneath him, writhed and thrashed. Her inner walls throbbed against him. He pulled out and pushed in again as he teased her clitoris, dragging her close to a climax again.

  The moment she saw him the first time all those years ago, she’d felt as if a golden cord had encircled her at the sight of him and tightened with each step toward him. Now she felt the cord again tight around her hips and her heart. As he pressed deeper and deeper into her, she felt the cord lifting her, carrying her higher and higher until her heart scraped the sky. The cord broke at its apex and she crashed to earth. She came apart, crying out as her climax crashed through her. This was it, the moment she had lived for and longed for since she’d first seen him. Communion was theirs at last.

  Søren pushed faster against her and with a final thrust that left her gasping, he came inside her, driving into her, pouring into her endlessly as she shuddered around him and shattered beneath him. He lingered inside her after coming, devouring her mouth with his. At last he pulled out and blood and semen rushed out, pooling underneath her.

  Once more Søren knelt between her thighs. He lapped at her sore inner lips, at her still throbbing clitoris. She rose up again and crashed once more. When Søren kissed her this time, she tasted blood.

  He pushed his fingers into her tender opening. Soon he mounted her again, entered her again, fucked her again. Their first time might have had pretensions of lovemaking. The second time he didn’t bother with any of the niceties of civilized sex. He fucked her brutally, unapologetically, fucked her like he would never have another chance to fuck her again this side of heaven and hell, and he would make the most of it even if it killed them both.

  After he came a second time inside her, he pulled out and stared down at her naked, bleeding body. Welts and bruises scored her back. Cuts covered her feet. Her vagina felt lacerated from his thrusts. She’d come four times tonight and knew one thing for certain from the look in his eyes.

  He’d only begun to hurt her tonight.

  The cane came out again. Then the flogger. He unlocked her from the bonds and brought her to her hands and knees and entered her still bleeding body as she steadied herself with one hand on the headboard, one hand digging into the sheets. His hands roamed over her bruised back, her thighs and hips. He grasped her by the back of the neck and held her still as he rammed into her from behind. She felt like property in his hands, owned, possessed and enslaved.

  She lost herself in the night, ceased to be Eleanor, ceased to be a person with a mind or a will of her own. She was His and His became her only identity. If someone asked her who she was, “I’m His” would be the answer. He pushed four fingers into her, more than she’d ever dreamed she could take. And yet she took them and then him again because he gave her no choice in the matter.

  “How much more can you take?” he asked as he pushed her down to her stomach.

  “I can take anything you want to give me,” she said. The sex and the beatings had sent her into a near-ecstatic state of peace and bliss. The pain had anesthetized her. She barely felt her body anymore. It was as if she floated above the bed. The hardest strikes of the flogger only tickled. The most vicious blow of the cane barely stung. Søren put her on her stomach and pushed into her again. For sixteen years he’d abstained from sex. He seemed determined to make up for lost time all in one night. Let him. Let him fuck her until neither one of them could move anymore. She begged to drink from this cup. She would drink until she choked on the wine of his body and his sadism. She would drink until she drowned in it.

  Søren fucked her a fourth time, pausing every few minutes to bite her back and shoulders. Then he knelt on her thighs and struck her with a thin reed cane that left a line of fire on her skin wherever it landed. Never had she dreamed he would beat her while inside her. She should never have doubted his sadism. She would never doubt it again. As he rode her with long, hard thrusts, he spoke to her and told her how proud he was to own her, how she was his most precious possession, how she pleased him more than she could imagine, how he would love her always and never let her go.

  By dawn she could take no more from him. By dawn he could give no more to her. He gathered her body, bruised from shoulder to knee, front and back, and held her in his arms.

  They didn’t speak of what had happened between them. What could they have said to each other? He had shown her his soul. She had given him her heart. They had joined their bodies and an immutable bond now sealed them together. And nothing could break them apart because nothing could break them.

  When she awoke the next morning, the sun had joined them in bed.

  Eleanor flinched as she stretched against the sheets. The bottoms of her feet throbbed. No doubt she still had shards of glass embedded in her skin. Her shoulders and back ach
ed as if she’d been stretched on a rack. Her breasts and nipples were sore and swollen. Inside she was bruised and raw. She couldn’t recall ever being in this much pain.

  It was the best morning of her life.

  Søren opened his eyes and gazed at her like he was trying to remember where he’d seen her before. She kissed him. He kissed her back.

  “So now what?” she asked.

  Søren smiled and something in that smile told her she was in the biggest trouble of her life.

  “Everything.”

  ROSE MADDER AND THE SILKEN ROBE

  Jo Mazelis

  Jo Mazelis is a novelist, short story writer, poet and essayist. Her collection of stories, Diving Girls (Parthian, 2002), was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Best First Book, and Welsh Book of the Year. Her second book, Circle Games (Parthian, 2005), was longlisted for Welsh Book of the Year. She was born in Swansea, where she currently lives. Originally trained at Art School, she worked for many years in magazine publishing in London, as a freelance photographer, designer and illustrator, before receiving an MA in English Literature. Her novel Significance (Seren, 2014) won the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize in 2015. Her latest book, a collection of short stories, is Ritual, 1969.

  The classroom is modern and large, a rectangle of concrete and smooth featureless plaster bounded on two sides by glass windows. There is a long counter along one wall with locked storage cabinets under it, and at one end a sink that is usually splashed and stained with rose madder, Payne’s grey, burnt sienna and yellow ochre; the surprising palette that when skilfully applied to paper make up a body’s flesh and heft and shadows.

  Tessa notices this only in passing, she hasn’t used the sink; hasn’t stood there rinsing out brushes or filling a container with fresh water. She only sees the vibrant daubs on the white porcelain out of the corner of her eye, as she heads for the screen at the back of the room. She sees the sink week after week and it seems that each time is noticing it for the first time. The crimson splashed on the white lip of the sink always particularly affects her and she wants to grab a cloth and scrub it clean, but knows she mustn’t.

  Instead she slips behind the screen and begins undressing.

  It is ten minutes to eight on a Wednesday night. Philip dropped her off outside the main gates a few minutes ago, but he can’t be there to collect her. Not tonight, as he’s going to a stag do. Justin’s stag do and tomorrow is Justin’s wedding.

  Tessa puts her shoes on the floor and puts her socks in a rolled-up ball in one of the shoes. Then she unzips her combat trousers, slides them from her body and folds them, before laying them over the shoes. Next she pulls off her sweater, then her t shirt, and adds these to the pile. Finally she takes off her bra and knickers and slips these under the t shirt. According to her method of undressing and dressing, the bra and pants should go on top, but that seems indecent in some weird and undefined way; too exposed, too obvious. As if by concealing these last two small scraps of lace-trimmed cotton, she might yet conceal her nakedness.

  Beyond the screen she hears the voices of the students as they greet one another. They all seem to know each other so well, enquiring about planned trips to Monet’s garden at Giverny or to the Tate, or asking after husbands and wives or children. Chairs and stools and desks and easels are scraped over floors, the tap at the stained sink is turned on, water gushes and gurgles, the pipes rattle, then silence begins to gather. It is not the silence of an empty room, but one of expectation.

  “Tessa?” she hears Christopher say. “Are you ready?”

  This is her cue. She takes a breath and steps from behind the cover of the screen, walks to the centre of the room. Hardly anyone looks at her. Indeed they almost strain not to look; there is always something terribly important to be found inside a pencil case, or a bulldog clip to be adjusted on a drawing board or a date to be pencilled in at the top of a fresh sketchbook page.

  Most colleges supply a dressing gown for this transitional stage in the process; a means of covering the locomotive nude between here and there. But the last model took a fancy to the silk gown that Christopher had supplied and stole it. No one noticed it had gone until the first night Tessa worked here and she had only discovered its absence after Christopher had directed her to the screen and promised that there was a robe she could slip on back there.

  “I can’t see a robe,” she’d said.

  “It should be there,” Christopher had called back. “Maybe it’s fallen. Is it on the floor?”

  When it became clear that there was no robe, she was offered Mr Logan’s mackintosh, a damp, grubby at the collar coat with a tartan lining, and there had been awkwardness and embarrassment when she’d refused it.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she had to say loudly, seemingly addressing the entire room. “Honestly. It’s fine!”

  She’d stopped the mutters of protest and concern and apology then, by stepping out and brazenly, if a little briskly, crossing the room to the place where a bare mattress was laid out on the floor like some inexplicable example of fly tipping.

  Christopher had promised to bring in another robe, but kept forgetting. Tessa didn’t even own a dressing gown, though sometimes she’d see a fairly nice one in a charity shop, but always resented paying the three or four or five pounds they were asking. Besides which she always thought the robe was worn for the benefit of the students and the teacher, not for her, and now that they had seen her parading around naked for six weeks, it would be absurd to get all pernickety about it now.

  Sometimes she thought about the robe the other model had stolen. She’d overheard two of the ladies in the class discussing it; it had been pure silk, antique, no doubt valuable, with exquisite embroidery and vibrant colours, ultramarine and magenta. Indeed the robe was so beloved that the dishonest model had been asked to pose wearing it and when Mrs Taylor exhibited her watercolours at the craft fair, it was only the two paintings of the model wearing the robe which sold, which just went to show didn’t it?

  The other model’s name was Laura. Laura had longer legs, smaller breasts; her nipples were pinker than Tessa’s. Tessa knows this because Miss Finch who studied at the Slade just before the war explains aloud how she has to mix a little burnt umber with her rose madder in order to get the correct shade for Laura’s nipples.

  The students love to talk about technique, to discuss the benefits of real sable as opposed to synthetic brushes, to name drop with surprising familiarity Cézanne, Picasso, Bonnard, Matisse and Degas.

  Miss Finch is the best draftswoman among them and is treated with reverence and awe, but she despairs at her failing eyesight, her poor memory and the tremor that sometimes afflicts her pale bony hands.

  Mr James favours the surrealists, de Chirico in particular, and despite Christopher’s protests, likes to paint imaginary streets in the background of his nudes, grey vistas with geometrically uncertain colonnades and brooding, storm-ridden skies.

  Tessa stands, or sits, or reclines amongst them, the invisible focus of all their attention. Invisible because she is nude; because she is a wash of Payne’s grey shadow, a dry brush of raw sienna pubic hair, the almost perfect triangle of space between her bent arm and her back. Or she is the foreshortened example of contorted anatomy in Hans Baldung’s woodcut Bewitched Groom or so she hears Christopher inform William Burnside who has positioned himself at a low donkey easel just south of her outstretched feet. Mr Burnside claims he enjoys the challenge of the difficult angle but Tessa suspects he’s hoping for a glimpse of her cunt. She could take pity on him and let her legs drop open when she’s told it’s time for a rest, but modesty, or rather what remains of her modesty, prevents her.

  As she poses the conversation dies away leaving only the sounds of pencil or charcoal on paper, or the vigorous splash of a fat brush head being shaken in a jam jar of water, and then Tessa begins to think of the world beyond this room.

  She remembers Philip at the wheel of the car, distorting his face into a scowl at the mention
of the stag do.

  “It’s just not my thing,” he said. “It’ll just be a drink with the boys, that’s all. Might go for an Indian after.”

  She pictured herself entering the house they shared, its interior darker than the street, the awful black silence of the hallway and the stairs reaching up into an even more impenetrable darkness.

  And Philip still hadn’t got around to changing the light bulb in the hall so she’d have to grope her way to the middle room, all the way imagining terrible things lying in wait for her; the cruel and calculating predator of the movies. The fear would unsettle her for hours, she knew; the mere thought of it made her shudder.

  “Are you cold, dear?” said the red-haired woman whose name she always forgets.

  “No, no. I’m fine.”

  “Oh, she’s cold.”

  “What’s that?” Christopher asked.

  “She’s cold.”

  “Oh, you should have said, Tessa.” And with that he gets an old-fashioned two-bar electric fire, aims it at her and plugs it in.

  The heat radiates toward one flank of her body, making the other feel colder in comparison.

  She could call at a friend’s; Michelle’s, or Judy’s place down by the harbour, or she could go to the pub on her own. Or the cinema, though she has no idea what is showing.

  Curiously she realises that if she had been at home and Philip had gone out she wouldn’t feel afraid to be there; as if his presence carried over, extended itself, as if he had marked his space, left his scent on the house, on her, on the front path and the garden gate, and this would see off any intruders. But once the house had been left cold and empty, when the TV was off and the radio in the kitchen was silenced and there was no music, whether CD, cassette or record to be heard. When all the lights were off and the washing machine wasn’t running and the toilet wasn’t being flushed, and no one answered the phone, then his protective scent went cold.

  Which was nonsense of course, she was no more vulnerable when he had been gone minutes or hours or even days. And darkness and silence were just darkness and silence. Risk was arbitrary; it was fear that was selective.