by P. J. Fox
“Orgies are terrible,” he said mildly. “Don’t ever go to one.”
“What?” Belle asked, surprised.
Every square of her body ached and those parts of her that before had experienced so much pleasure now felt like a nerve that had been rubbed raw. She’d never been so aware of herself, or so exhausted. Strangely enough, too, neither of them seemed to mind the mess that surrounded them. She was content, as was he, to sit still and do nothing and think—about real things, at least—as little as possible.
How strange that they should be allies in this, now of all times.
“The theory is just, unimaginable sexual pleasure in a state of total disinhibition,” he said. “The reality is…somewhat different.” He smiled briefly. “Before attending my first orgy, my only experience with group sex had been via the internet and once, after an exam, a drunken coupling with three other students that I barely remembered.
“That had been furtive, had taken place in total darkness, and had moreover been a terrible mistake. Whereas the term orgy connotes a certain deliberation. You are, with knowledge aforethought, purposefully and intentionally committing to acts of group sex.
“So naturally, on arriving, I was expecting something quite thrilling. I had visions of scantily clad women performing acts that the writers of the Kama Sutra had only dreamed of. Whereas in fact, I arrived to find a room of people who looked to be having about as much fun as the average dental patient. And, indeed, the scene reminded me of nothing so much as a waiting room: nervous people, flirting awkwardly.
“Now, this was university so no one was really used to approaching a total stranger for sex. Some of us never would and others of us, like me, would eventually find that approaching strangers for sex was the only viable option. Eventually though, people began to disappear in twos and threes and mores, down the halls and into the various side rooms. It turns out that having sex with multiple people is still much easier than having sex in front of an audience.”
Belle laughed. She couldn’t believe she was having this conversation. “So?” she asked.
“So what?”
“Did you?”
“Join in!”
“No.” That lazy smile was back, briefly. He finished his drink. “I couldn’t have been less aroused if I’d walked in and found fifteen clones of my grandmother. I ditched my friends, took a cab to Margate—we were in Kent, I can’t remember why—and went to a pub. Where I ordered a pint and proceeded to have the most dull, sexless night of my life.”
THIRTY-FOUR
Over the next few days, life settled into a routine.
Belle was continually astonished, when she paused to ponder the situation, to find herself acclimatizing. But mostly she was too busy—well, acclimatizing. When it came to life at her new home, everything was a shock. The people, the food, the schedules—hers and theirs—the expectations. Ash had vanished every morning by the time she woke up and rarely sent for her before full dark. And as the year waned, full dark came earlier and earlier. In only a week, Belle swore she noticed a difference. The quality of the air was changing, too, becoming sharper.
She began running in the mornings. The wind assaulted her nostrils, the richness of decaying leaves mixed with the acrid tang of wood smoke and the smell that was just oncoming winter. She wondered, vaguely, how much it snowed in Romania.
The story she’d told Ash, about the orgy, had been a dark one. Now that she had time to think—and in the middle of the day, she had nothing to do but think—she grew to believe that her teenaged years had on the whole been darker than she’d realized. Her own parents were alright; they were flawed human beings, but all parents were. Still, she knew she shouldn’t complain. Her mother was a difficult woman, battling her own demons, but she hadn’t beaten Belle or made her feel worthless. Not like Sarah’s parents had.
But everyone grew up shaped by their environment, and all of Belle’s home towns had been, to quote Thoreau, masses of men leading lives of quiet desperation. She hadn’t seen much of the country, or much of the world, but she’d come to the conclusion that most places probably were. Cyril Connolly had observed that “slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.” Belle had first heard those words at a freshman seminar and had immediately recognized them as the perfect description of life in Scarborough.
Life in the north was different.
People romanticized desperation, particularly in posh places like Cambridge. Statesman Benjamin Disraeli, whose family had enjoyed both wealthy and powerful since the middle ages, referred to desperation as “as powerful an inspiration as genius” and self-styled prophet Tony Robbins called it a necessary ingredient to success.
Neither of them had grown up in communities where the average house was a mishmash of stolen trailer parts and tar paper or where people routinely froze to death or starved to death during the first snow. People worked together because they had to, but they hated each other. And hatreds ran deep; some went back lifetimes, and some went back generations. Survival was a serious business and no one knew that better than the denizens of the north. The people that time had forgotten, that the rest of America never even knew existed. Their lives were like those of the pioneers, and they fought each other bitterly for every resource even as they scorned help from the federal government.
Belle might appear slight, and frail, on the outside, but she was neither of those things where it counted. Not in her heart. She’d survived poverty, disillusionment, and her parents’ divorce. Moving from what felt like one world to another, even though she’d only crossed the length of a state. From TUD to what could almost have passed for medieval Romania was nothing compared to the economic and cultural divide between Julia Cove and Scarborough.
Belle ran down one of the straight paths that bisected the woods around the castle, her footfalls regular on the crushed stone and the crisp air burning in her lungs. It hurt, but it felt good. She needed to get back into shape, and running gave her an outlet for the jumble of conflicting feelings inside. Feelings she didn’t know how to express any other way.
She pushed herself, and she pushed herself. When she couldn’t run, she walked. She felt genuinely hungry, genuinely thirsty, just genuine in a way she hadn’t in a long time. There was a difference between thinking, I’m bored, it’s mealtime, I think I’d like to eat and thinking, I just ran ten miles, I’m ravenous. She came back to the castle every day feeling hollowed out—and strangely at peace.
But today she’d only just started her run. She knew that the feeling of being alone was just that—a feeling. An illusion. There were guards all around and she saw them sometimes, patrolling. Ash maintained what amounted to an armed compound, and in the beginning she’d needed permission to go outside the castle walls.
She ran a few different routes, all of them long, but none of them long enough to take her anywhere near the borders of the estate. Which were fenced, roll after roll of electrified concertina wire hidden in the trees. She hadn’t seen this for herself, but Luna had told her about it. Luna was bragging, really; she’d become friendly with one of the guards and lately everything about the inner workings of the compound had left her quite impressed.
A brief smile flickered across Belle’s lips. Poor Luna. Losing her heart to some thug with a heart of gold and the mind of a carrot.
She breathed in, and out, pacing herself. A dull ache had begun to develop in one of her calves. She hadn’t run like this in a long time.
Sarah had been a lifelong resident of Scarborough, unlike Belle. The night she’d picked Sarah up from the orgy had been the first time Belle seriously considered the claim made by feminist and writer Marilyn French, that “in their relations with women, all men are rapists, and that’s all they are.”
Sarah had gone off happy enough and had come home with a bruise marring her cheek and sobbing uncontrollably. She’d never admitted to the full details of what had happened that night but the boy
she’d had a crush on, the one who’d invited her and whom she’d wanted so badly to impress—badly enough to go to an orgy—had never spoken to her again and that Monday Sarah’s locker had been marked with the word slut. A few choice phrases had appeared in the girls’ bathrooms, too.
After that, Sarah hadn’t been the same. And Belle’s decision to not attend either that first orgy, or the orgies that followed, had been a growing divide between them. But most of all, Belle thought, what had ended their friendship was her seeing Sarah that night.
The fact that she knew.
Sarah had embraced her moniker, becoming the slut that some pundit had claimed her to be.
Belle had absorbed the lesson well, better than she’d realized at the time: her most powerful, if not her first, lesson on the potentially destructive power of sex. Her first had been her parents’ divorce. Her mother had married her father because she was pregnant. With Belle.
And Belle had determined to wait, until she met someone she could trust. A man who was honest. Who wouldn’t lure her to an orgy or leave her for a bottle, who’d keep the trust she’d placed in him. She wondered, briefly, where her parents were right now and what they might be doing. If they wondered where she was. She wasn’t in the habit of talking to them often but, she realized with something like wonder, the school—either TUD or Harvard—probably would have contacted them by now.
She’d been missing for almost two weeks, a fact that in and of itself felt unreal. She’d had a hard enough time tracking the days, even with a calendar. Without one, she might as well have been here one day or three years. Time had no meaning in a place where she had no responsibilities and nothing changed.
Ash had told her that her time was her own…but to do what?
They had dinner. They talked, about different things. He took her up to his room and bedded her. She still didn’t think of the cavernous space as her room; it wasn’t her room. She slept there, but it was his space. His things. His imprint. His castle, and his rules.
The strange intimacy they’d experienced the night she’d thought he was going to kill her hadn’t disappeared entirely but hadn’t deepened, either. Instead, Belle felt like she’d been left in a sort of strange limbo: half the forgotten hotel guest, roaming about grounds long abandoned by the other tourists and half Scheherazade, the captive princess of legend.
The time she spent with Ash each night might be brief, comparatively, but as time wore on Belle found that she could think of little else. The knowledge that she would see him, and that he would do whatever he felt like doing, wore on her. Wore her down. She thought of things to talk about. Anticipated what he might want to talk about, or what he might do to her next. He was…creative in the bedroom, sometimes in ways that didn’t bother her so much and sometimes in ways she dreaded. But the actual act wasn’t even what bothered her—it was the anticipation.
The not knowing.
Had Scheherazade felt closer to the sultan, as she wooed him with her stories? He fell in love with her; the legend was clear on that. But strangely silent on what feelings she may—or may not—have had for him. Presumably, her clearest feeling was one of relief at finally being spared. Had she lived in terror those thousand and one nights, or had the threat of decapitation waned as they grew closer? Had she known, long before she was officially “pardoned,” that he cared for her and would never hurt her?
Or had her prize, at the end, been to live out her natural life in fear?
What no interpretation of the legend mentioned was how desperate Scheherazade must have been each day to come up with a new story. How she must have practiced her storytelling skills in the mirror, hoping against hope that once more she could keep his interest. A capricious man who thought nothing of bedding a woman and then killing her, ending her young life before it had even begun.
A thousand times.
What kinds of stories might captivate this man? Entertaining someone you knew was hard enough; figuring out how to entertain a complete stranger must have been nigh on impossible. Most of the stories contained in the traditional compilation were about adventure: Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, the voyages of Sinbad the Pirate Captain, and of course Aladdin and his wonderful lamp. But intermingled in these homages to male courage was love, lust, and intrigue. The sultan, it seemed, was a closet romantic.
Belle had gone to church as a child, and couldn’t get the images she’d seen there out of her head: the chewed up stick of gum. The licked cupcake. All metaphors for the girl who loses her virtue, and is thus worthless. Who wants a pre-chewed stick of gum, all its flavor gone? And who wants to eat a cupcake that every other boy in class has already licked?
When Ash had told her she wasn’t a victim, at the time she’d felt empowered by his words. And almost comfortable with him as she sat there, on the floor. They’d talked late into the night that night, about everything and nothing. Almost like friends.
But in the cold light of morning, she couldn’t help but hear those same words as a condemnation: an assertion that she’d been complicit in her own demise and could no more claim back her virtue than a chewed up stick of gum could be made new again. She hadn’t fought him; she’d laughed with him.
She ran on.
THIRTY-FIVE
When she felt like his prisoner, it was bad.
When she felt like his equal, it was worse.
Belle only knew that she was very, very confused.
She had her birth control shots. She had her medications. She had a computer, if no internet, and people to keep her company, and food she liked, and whatever clothing and accessories she wanted. Sometimes, she really did feel like she was living in a hotel. She might feel trapped, but in truth she had more freedom here than she’d had at school.
At school, she’d had the dubious freedom to move between class buildings, and to and from her dorm room. To eat various bad cafeteria meals. She could choose to do her homework in the library, or sitting on an uncomfortable bed with a plastic mattress. She could choose whether to stay in on Saturday night, or to go out. She’d perceived these things as freedom, she supposed, because society had told her do. Going off to college was supposed to be liberating.
She’d had a mug, back in Scarborough, that she’d picked up at a flea market. Underneath a cartoon of a rat in a jogging suit was the caption: the problem with the rat race is, even if you win, you’re still a rat. A sentiment she’d grown to appreciate more and more, as time went on.
Perhaps she felt trapped, now, simply because she didn’t know what to do with herself. There were no more rules, no more guidelines. No more society telling her how to follow these six easy steps to be liberated—financially, emotionally, sexually.
For the first time, captive or no, she was on her own.
There was no rulebook.
Ash poured her more wine. She’d developed a taste for the crisp white, as well as for the trout en papillote that Diana had served them. She’d grown up eating plenty of lobster, because lobster was cheaper per pound in northern Maine than hot dogs, but she’d never really had trout. And certainly not cooked inside a folded paper pouch.
“I’m traveling, soon,” Ash said.
“Oh.” Belle studied her fish.
She didn’t know how she was supposed to respond, or what this announcement meant. Was this his way of telling her that he’d finally tired of her? That he was, despite his oblique suggestions that he might keep her here forever, about to dump her out into the hedgerows? She’d thought, long and hard, about what would happen if—when—she left here. Daily, now, she fought the growing sense of complacency. Of thinking of this place, this prison, as home. Of not feeling quite as much like a prisoner as she should. She’d catch herself thinking, on her runs, about turning around and going back home for breakfast. Home? This wasn’t home.
She had to be ready. To leave, whether by escape or by the simple expedient of her captor growing bored with their games. Even so, as much as she’d been expecting some sort of anno
uncement, she was sickened by the realization that it had caught her off guard.
“So you want me to….” She trailed off, uncertain of how to proceed.
He paused. “I thought you might come with me,” he said.
“Oh.” And then, “oh.”
“What?”
“I thought….”
“Yes?”
She chewed her lip, thinking, and then just decided to come right out and tell him the truth. What could she lose? She was already his prisoner, a virtual slave to a man terrifying enough that he’d made her wet herself. Without even really trying. Whatever dynamic was developing between them, it was one marked by a consciousness on both their sides that he was in control and if she had a choice to be anywhere else she would be.
“I thought….” She steeled herself. “I thought you were going to find another girl, and replace me.”
Maybe he still was. It would be just like him to expect her to come along. He, with the mysterious invisible harem. She had no idea when he visited them, or where in the castle they were—or how many of them there were. He’d been with her every night. After two weeks, she’d grown almost accustomed to sharing a bed.
Carefully, he put down his fork. His gaze was dark as he watched her. For a long time, neither of them said a word.
“I had thought,” he said, equally carefully, “hoped, I suppose, that you’d have come to know me better in the time we’ve been together.” He paused, and the silence returned. Stretched. His expression was impossible to read. But she detected anger there, she thought. Anger, and something else. “I believe I’ve made it perfectly clear that I have no intention of releasing you back into the wild. And while I accept that it is, perhaps, far too soon to form an opinion of my character I’d expect you to realize, by now, that I am a man of my word. For good and for ill.”