by Hayley White
“No. I couldn’t.”
“Well, if it’s only lunch...”
Ever glanced up, her lips pursed.
Brooke’s eyes were dancing with satire. “Secretive little mouse.”
After dinner, they set off in the car again. Ever didn’t know where he was taking her, but it wasn’t home. At least, not her home.
He left the busy boulevard and headed into the residential area beyond. The lighting thinned out along tree canopied streets, the houses became grander. These were the Knolls.
At one point, Brooke turned into a side street, an alley, actually, lined with trash cans. The trash of the rich. He slowed the car, then suddenly pulled over and killed the engine, the headlights.
Ever glanced across at him. The high planes of his profile were dimly illuminated by a street light at the end of the alley. The only sound was the soft ticking of the cooling engine.
“I don’t imagine you get over to this side of town much, do you?” he asked in a low voice.
“No,” Ever admitted.
Brooke glanced out his window at the house they’d parked behind. Lights were on in two second story windows. “Nice people, living a sweet dream,” he said in that same low voice. “Kids doing their homework...”
His gaze turned to Ever and, although she couldn’t see him well, she felt the burn of his electric eyes. She hoped the shadows concealed the uncertainty she was feeling.
“Come here,” he said and his hands were moving. “Come here...”
The sound of his opening zipper was muffled in the closed car. His hand cupped around the back of her neck, drawing her head into his lap. “Do it, mouse. Do it now...”
Ever was shocked and somewhat mortified, but she closed her mouth around Brooke’s hardened penis with a sense of deferential duty and unexpected excitement.
“That’s it,” he murmured as she worked him. “Oh yeah. That’s it...”
Although victimized by the fear of failure that routinely seized her when Brooke made this demand, Ever performed with the expectation the act would be completed. But a few minutes later, Brooke pulled her up. “Alright,” he whispered. “That’s enough.”
He zipped his pants and started the engine.
Ever was perplexed by Brooke’s mood and the situation as he continued wending his way through the darkened community. The dashboard clock read five past eight.
Eventually he swung into a circular driveway and pulled up to the front of another two story house. Here, no lights were burning in any of the windows. Brooke got out immediately, rounded the front of the car and opened Ever’s door.
“Come on, mouse.”
“Oh, look, it’s getting late—”
“Come on,” he said with a note of impatience, reaching in to unfasten her seat belt. “No. Leave your bags there.”
Taking Ever’s arm, Brooke directed her up to the massive double doors and keyed open the lock. Once inside, he switched on a light, illuminating a large foyer and a staircase dead ahead. It was a comfortable family home, fully furnished, but Ever, a veteran apartment hunter, at once recognized the static atmosphere of an uninhabited residence.
Brooke propelled her directly up the stairs. He switched on the upstairs hall light and pulled her through the first doorway on the right, where he hesitated in momentary indecision, before hauling her out of that room to a larger one down the hall. He didn’t bother with a light in this room, which was apparently brightened enough for his purposes by the hallway light and a lamp from the street outside.
He stood a moment, staring at the large four poster bed, still clutching Ever’s arm, which was beginning to ache. As if suddenly aware of his bruising grip on her, he turned and looked upon Ever’s cramped features. He abruptly released her arm and, just as abruptly, pulled off her coat and tossed it back onto a chair behind her.
Ever stood motionless, by now a little frightened. He stepped away from her, looking again at the bed, then quickly removed his own coat. His eyes came back to her.
“Take off your pants.”
“Brooke, it’s rather cold in here—”
“Take them off.”
Ever balanced on one shaky leg as she bent to remove her shoe. She shed both shoes, her knee high hose and her trousers, leaving them in a scatter on the floor.
“The panties, too.”
Ever slowly slid her panties off.
In one dramatic sweep, Brooke stripped the bedclothes back and shifted the pillows away from the headboard.
“Get on the bed.”
Ever crossed to the bed, feeling plainly weird, still half clad in her sweater and brassiere. Brooke left the room and during his absence, Ever realized she had started to shake. She jumped when he returned and dropped a cardboard box on the floor at the foot of the bed.
Moving with almost maniacal energy, Brooke flipped Ever onto her stomach, the two pillows artfully arranged to bolster her rump into the air. With rope he took from the box, he swiftly bound her wrists to the middle strut of the headboard and her ankles to the corner posts at the foot. He then took extra time to contrive a binding that crooked her knees out to near right angles.
Ever was wondering where he’d found so much rope at such short notice and finally decided he must have brought it to the house beforehand. He must have planned this.
When he’d completed this exercise in contortion, he paused to admire his handiwork.
“Ah yes. The mistress Ever, looking about as vulnerable as we’ve ever seen her.”
Ever was in near panic, but escape was impossible from knots placed so deliberately beyond reach. The bed rocked slightly as he took a seat beside her. His hand cupped the curve of her buttock, then played gently over the tops of her thighs – so close, yet not quite contacting the part he’d so ingeniously laid open.
“Pretty little mouse,” he cooed. “All trussed up and ripe for the taking.”
Ever’s tremors were now so conspicuous they reverberated through the bed. Brooke’s hand rested on her buttock again.
“The mouse is trembling.”
Ever whimpered.
“Afraid I’m going to rape you? Or afraid I won’t?” He chuckled softly.
“Please don’t hurt me,” Ever begged.
“I see. Just afraid, generally.”
“Please, Brooke.”
His hand finally found her unprotected vagina and he stabbed into the sleek, moist opening. Ever gasped.
“You won’t be hurt. You’re a well oiled machine. A finely tuned servant to man.”
He played the opening roughly for a minute or two then, using the secretions he’d robbed from it, slid upwards and forced two fingers into her tight anus. Ever gasped louder and set up a low keening of inarticulate resistance. Brooke drove deeper and gripped on tightly.
“You’re afraid I’m going to rape your ass,” he said, as though just figuring it out.
He went on driving her, alternating between the two passages, until Ever felt thoroughly used in both. With his final swift withdrawal, Ever dropped her head to the mattress with a sigh of exhaustion.
The bed rocked again as Brooke stood up and Ever craned her neck around to look as light suddenly flooded across the room. They were apparently in the master bedroom of the house, for Brooke was now standing beyond the doorway of an adjoining bathroom, searching through drawers and cupboards. She heard him curse softly under his breath before he abandoned the search and paused momentarily in the doorway, staring across at her. A nasty animalistic snarl twisted his lip before he strode back into the bedroom and disappeared around the foot of the bed.
She heard him kick off his shoes and unzip his trousers. Two tears spilled onto the flowered contoured sheet as the bed lurched again under his weight. He didn’t attempt to penetrate her ass but the juices he’d extracted with his digital assault and the ensuing pause had effectively evaporated all the external moisture, making the abrupt, insensitive assault on her vagina a brutal and harrowing experience.
Ever’s arched back was already beginning to ache and each frantic thrust jarred her up to the base of her skull. Although it was true he’d been in a rare mood all evening, it wasn’t a mood Ever would have characterized as anger. Now, though, he seemed to drive her with the force of fury, a force so intense at times Ever thought she might faint. She hung on grimly, sure that the worst was yet to come, afraid that maybe this time... this time things had really gone too far.
Brooke came fast and hard, and the episode was ended before Ever could formulate a dying prayer. He’d left her ass alone and, as he peeled his weight off at last, Ever suddenly understood the source of his inexplicable fury. He’d remembered the ropes but not the lubricating gel.
Chapter Eighteen
The residue exhaustion from Ever’s engagement with Brooke persisted until Thursday closing, which was the moment her employer chose to deliver the final insult.
Ever dragged home, too numb to think. She didn’t bother with grocery shopping but made due with decaf and a toasted peanut butter sandwich. It was only fifteen minutes into her favorite lawyer program when she picked up the phone and dialed Stroud’s number. She spoke the moment he picked up.
“I can’t come this week-end,” she told him, which was not at all what she’d intended to say.
There was a pause at Stroud’s end. “You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
Another pause. A movement on the line. “Then I’ll see you on the twenty-first?”
“Yes.”
“Alright,” he said.
***
Ever slept through most of Friday, thinking things would not look so bleak if she could only catch up on some rest. But things looked no better come sundown and the long, inactive week-end was spent in a state of near catatonia, underpinned by a condition of rising panic.
Come Sunday, she dutifully went out and purchased the newspaper. On Monday she conscientiously made the prerequisite calls. On Tuesday she got up early, dressed and attended an interview. She even made it to the grocery store but only for the barest essentials. On Wednesday she was called and informed the week’s single opportunity had been awarded to another candidate. At which point she decided to take the healthiest, most intelligent course of action. She grabbed her purse and keys and headed to the liquor store for a liter of wine and cigarettes.
Marta was the closest life raft there was. Marta was sanity. She was love. Marta was REAL.
And that’s when reality struck - or departed.
Marta’s arm was in a sling. Her gentle features were bruised black and contorted with swelling. Yet she smiled, although with somewhat tainted conviction.
Ever listened in muted horror to Marta’s tale of the neighborhood robber who walked in, toting the baseball bat that broke her arm and sent her sweet face crashing into the cash register, from which he stole her daily living. The heroic little woman coaxed an order from Ever’s closing throat and walked her over to the cold unit to fetch a bottle of the wine she knew Ever favored.
It was all so quiet. So understated. The unspoken understanding between them that this was the underside of the society they lived in... Ever’s cigarettes on the counter beside the chilled wine bottle... The silent agreement and underlying acceptance of what was probably an inevitable occurrence... Ever’s exact change on the counter in trade for the brown paper bag that packaged her precarious mental health... The pathetic commiseration and shared assurances that the arm would soon heal...
And once Ever had quickly traversed the dark street and was again safely behind her own front door, she slid slowly to the floor, the bag, wine and cigs going with her. There was a long moment of nothing and then the tears came.
Sobs racked her, churning up from the bottom of her broken heart, the bowels of her wounded soul. Reason failed her as she sat there, clawing the cheap shag pile, recounting every anguish that had touched her for the past decade.
When the demand for tissues became the prime imperative, she staggered to her feet, still clutching the bag, and reeled off two or three feet of toilet paper, which she promptly reduced to gobs of doughy pulp in the bathroom wastebasket. Restocking with dry paper and a healthy dose of rage, she lurched into the kitchen where the hapless brown bag, only seconds before a sacred receptacle, became trash on the kitchen floor. Ever ripped at the seal on the bottle and, in one savage lunge, thrust the cork down the neck.
A full tumbler of ruby red wine and the cigarettes accompanied her as she strode back to the living room. She froze in her angry tracks, staring ahead, then over at the door. Her throat once again began to swell and ache with the panic she’d battled for the past week. She gulped from the tumbler and wept, alternately, unable to control either impulse as the maelstrom in her head expanded until it equalized the pressure of the walls closing in around her.
She wouldn’t be in this predicament if Mark had not left her. She’d been slowly declining since the separation and from here the final descent would be swift indeed. She was a desperate individual, imprisoned in a heartless hell where atrocities were perpetuated on angels like Marta. She wouldn’t even be in this town if she hadn’t met and bonded with Mark. And where was he now? Her husband, lover, confidant and protector. Moved on, leaving her to perish. Moved on to another nice, NORMAL relationship? Had he? While she didn’t even have a soul in the world to talk to!
There was Stroud, of course. And Brooke. Brooke, who came and went like the tameless wind. Brooke, the user, whose phone number she didn’t even have. Brooke, a friend? Hardly. And what of Stroud? She’d meant to tell Stroud – then hadn’t. Couldn’t. Stroud, in his sweet, safe existence. Stroud the imperious, the impervious. How on earth could she tell him? How could he be expected to understand? Stroud, her master.
The pair of them. Taking and taking, until she was too exhausted to think. For weeks they’d been bleeding her dry and she’d been too blind to see it. But she saw now. She surely did.
Well, she couldn’t do it anymore. Shouldn’t. Wouldn’t.
They had her wrong. She was not the woman for them. Not the woman for Stroud. Her life was in chaos. She was an emotional basket case and they were not helping. And why should they? She was not their responsibility. She was their party animal. Their toy. Their first class society was no place for her second class baggage.
She was disposable. Replaceable. They didn’t need her and she didn’t need the strain of their demands on her. She could not handle another week-end under their influence. Could not do it.
Ever pitched into bed near dawn. She woke up past noon on Thursday, wrung and stupefied. There were dried wine spills and trails of ash in the living room. The paper bag was still on the kitchen floor. She left it, as well as the empty liter bottle on the counter. In the bedroom wastebasket was Stroud’s rose, crushed and discarded.
Ever sat on the couch, staring at the vulgar offerings of the latest daytime talk show host thinking of the rose. Aching over it, yet unable to make any more sense of it all than she could the night before. Silent tears tracked down her cheeks as she raised the lighter Stroud had given her to her cigarette.
***
On Thursday night, when she called, Stroud realized immediately something was terribly wrong.
“Ever, what is it?”
“I don’t really want to get into it...”
“I will be seeing you tomorrow night?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“You’re refusing to come?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I can’t really tell you why.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I don’t know how to explain.”
He paused. “You want to sever the relationship.”
“Possibly.”
“But you’re not sure.”
Ever was unresponsive.
Stroud sensed the crisis. The danger.
“Is it Brooke?”
“Not specifically.”
Stroud heaved a mental sigh. But, if
not Brooke, then what? It was evident the answers would not come over the phone.
“You’re refusal is unacceptable,” he said suddenly.
“Stroud—”
“You don’t refuse me two weeks in a row with no explanation.” For some reason she was on the verge of slipping away and that was intolerable. “I’ve made plans,” he said, although they were only now forming in his mind. Before she could reply he said, “I will see you tomorrow, as usual. You’ll be ready?”
Silence.
“You’ll be ready.”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“I’ll be there at six.”
Chapter Nineteen
Ever awaited Stroud’s arrival in a sort of daze, too indecisive to do anything in the way of preparation. It was just as well he’d set the pick up time an hour earlier than usual because all Ever felt even half ready to do was flee the apartment and hide out somewhere he could not find her.
Stroud took the initiative, packing the few things Ever would need for the week-end into a bag somewhat larger than usual. He took her arm and guided her to the car, but he did not drive her to his place. He took off in an entirely different direction – out of the city.
Stroud was in a low grade panic, but he didn’t press Ever to speak. He merely played soothing CD’s, while Ever gazed out the window at the changing landscape. He was afraid he knew what was happening but he had to be sure. So he was taking the only action he could think of, hoping against hope it would be sufficient to keep Ever from leaving him. Dear God, he could not bear it if she left him.
About an hour into the drive she said, “Where are we going?”
“To the mountains.”
Ever responded with only a single nod.
It was nearly ten when they reached the lodge. Since they’d eaten on the road, Stroud got them checked in immediately and carried their bags directly to the room. He ordered tea for Ever while she bathed and, when she’d done, he bundled her into bed in a flannel nightgown and switched off the light.
***
The next day, they took a late brunch at the lodge restaurant. It was clear, so Stroud suggested a walk along one of the scenic paths. There was still a tang to the late-March air but the sun was warm and pleasant.