by P. J. Fox
“Where is Piers?” It hadn’t been the first question she’d meant to ask, but she was suddenly afraid that he, too, would be emerging from the bathroom.
“In his room. He left right after we finished last night, although I don’t think you remember much of that.”
Belle studied her coffee, embarrassed.
Ash slid a finger under her chin, tilting her head up. “What?” he asked. “Are you alright?”
“I….” How could she tell him? That she was horrified at herself. That letting him tie her up and hurt her was bad enough, and enjoying it was worse, but there were things that good girls simply did not do. He’d watched her writhe in ecstasy in the arms of another man; what if he now found her repellent?
She didn’t say these things—couldn’t—but he seemed to understand.
“Belle,” he said, “watching you last night…was incredible. Seeing you shed your inhibitions, seeing your self confidence rise, knowing how beautiful you were like that, how much we both wanted you…the sight of you as such a goddess, as my goddess made me proud.”
She frowned. “Really?”
“Yes. Of you, and of myself.”
“Oh.”
“You have nothing to be ashamed of. You did what I asked you to and you enjoyed it. There’s nothing wrong with either of those things.”
He took her cup from her and, putting it down on the bed table, leaned forward and kissed her. After a minute, she kissed him back. Gently, very gently, he pressed her back down onto the bed and then pulled the covers over them. The room was cold and it felt nice to be inside this warm cocoon. His lips and hands explored her, with none of the passion-fueled rage he’d exhibited last night but with a warm, loving interest.
She yielded herself up to him.
“Tell me how good it felt,” he murmured, “having his cock inside you.”
“It felt…so good.”
He kissed her lips, her cheek, behind her ear, as he entered her and began to move. Still slowly, carefully. “Coming repeatedly around it, soaking his balls in your juices.”
“Yes,” she breathed.
“But you’re mine.”
“Yes.”
“Tell me again.”
“I’m yours.”
“And again.” His breathing was becoming ragged, his voice hoarse.
“I’m yours…I’m yours! I’m yours!”
She arched her back as the unexpected jolt of pleasure shot through her. Seconds later, she felt him spasm deep inside. He pulled her to him and, without a word, settled deep into the covers. Into their nest, their refuge from the outside world. She let her eyes drift closed again. He wanted her. He didn’t find her disgusting, hadn’t turned from her because she was a sexual being. Terms like good girl and bad girl didn’t exist for him. He instructed her on how to suck another man’s cock and then called her angel.
She drifted in and out of sleep for awhile before realizing that she desperately needed to pee. Disentangling herself from the covers, she dashed to the bathroom. After she was done, she poured herself another cup of coffee—she’d somehow managed to drink the first one without even realizing that she’d done so—and returned to the bed.
“Sharing you is…hard for me,” he said. He’d propped himself up on one elbow and was watching her drink her coffee, a slight smile playing about his lips. As though she were doing something particularly charming. “And I don’t think I’ll make a habit of doing so…except perhaps, again, with Piers. At some point. That is, if you consent.”
She nodded.
“But seeing you like that…fulfills my ultimate desire, which is control.”
She nodded again. She understood that.
He studied her for a long time. Finally, he spoke again. “I would never want you to think that there was anything you could do, which would make you less beautiful to me. Or that you have any competition for what heart I possess. You don’t.”
She smiled. More genuinely this time.
“Seeing you submit…only makes you more beautiful to me.”
He thought she was beautiful. No one else had ever thought her beautiful. She was just useless, too-smart, stork-like Belle who never had any fun.
Ash rolled over, staring up at the ceiling. “It’s true, too, what Piers said.”
This was an abrupt change of topic.
“Pari did hold Anish’s hand in the fire. And burned him. Not severely, but there were blisters.” He shook his head slightly. But he seemed amused. “I believe that Pari’s fondest wish is to bend Anish over the bed and pound him with a strap-on until he screams, and then make him suck her off. The really unfortunate thing is that I’m also fairly certain that this is Anish’s fondest wish as well.
“Unfortunately for him, he’ll never allow himself to admit as much. It wouldn’t be proper. Sex, for him, like a proper aristocrat, has remained a taboo subject. Even in his own bedroom.”
“Really?”
“Lie back and think of the empire.”
“But people don’t—don’t actually do that, do they?” Despite Belle’s growing conviction that that was, in fact, what many people did do. Almost certainly including her own mother.
“Oh, yes. The Victorian view is still alive and well, that couples—and only married couples, mind you—are to absolutely never discuss sex, even with each other, while having as much of it as possible behind closed doors. To produce an heir and a spare, you see.”
Belle’s eyes widened.
“If one isn’t an, ah, conforming wife, to use my father’s term, then one’s husband might be driven to excessive masturbation. An affliction, which has been linked over time to everything from blindness to insanity. To, indeed, one’s member withering and falling off.”
Belle laughed outright.
“This is still taught,” Ash said seriously. “I come from a country where people refuse to install toilets properly, when their astrologers tell them not to. Which their astrologers, who are very often also toilet salesmen, do all the time. Counseling them to instead save for a more expensive toilet, which they themselves will naturally provide.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“In the meantime, the simple lack of facilities leaves women open to attack. Last month, in Uttar Pradesh, two girls disappeared into thin air after leaving their parents’ house to relieve themselves. They were found the next morning, hanging next to each other. From a tree. They’d both been assaulted—and brutally—before being killed.
“The perpetrators were from a powerful caste and the police assigned to the case, who were from the same caste, protected them.”
“That’s horrible.”
“Too much focus on outdated morality leads to blindly aping one’s supposed betters without any real understanding of why such rules were ever followed in the first place. As a result, nothing changes. Nothing evolves. Men continue to practice rituals that make no sense, while all around them children die. Forty-five out of every hundred children in India have their growth stunted in some fashion by exposure in infancy to water-borne excreta. And I can assure you that those are not the children of high caste citizens.
“Men like Anish call me immoral. Anish, who’d never engage in a sex act that his great-grandmother might disapprove of but who’s never lifted his finger to feed a starving child.”
Ash was obviously upset. “You’re a good man,” Belle said.
Ash turned. “Do you truly think so?”
“Yes. I truly think so.”
“Then the Gods have truly blessed me.”
Belle had heard Ash talk about his native country before. About how less than half of India’s population even had access to a toilet, astrologer or no. He quite obviously grieved for India, for the invisible poor lined up behind that flashy and westernized set, which had made a name for itself. The true India, she’d learned from Ash, wasn’t a place of call centers and elephants but of constant and constantly evolving contradictions.
Forty percent of Mumb
ai’s population squatted illegally in a variety of cobbled together shacks that the World Health Organization described as “unfit for human habitation,” and yet many of them had cell phones. They rigged up elaborate, mostly illegal—and often extremely dangerous—systems for bringing in electricity.
They voted. They worked. And in the rural areas, where most of India’s population still lived, they didn’t educate their children. The country’s southern region was still dotted with villages where there simply was no access to electricity. By any means. Some had never heard of it. While others lived in conditions that would seem familiar to the average resident of Beverly Hills. And Ash…where did he fit in?
Where did any of India’s royals fit in?
She couldn’t blame him for leaving, or for his bitterness at how he was apparently viewed. If not by others, then at least by his own family. A man who was good, but who needed things that didn’t fit into his family’s rigid notion of what good was supposed to be. Or his caste’s, or his community’s.
A man who’d done more good for more people than Anish could ever dream of doing, and yet who was as much of a pariah in his brother’s eyes as if he’d been killing people rather than giving them jobs.
Killing and eating them, just like the man Piers had caught.
And on that disturbing note, she fell asleep.
EIGHTY-FIVE
Piers found her in her studio, working on a vase that transformed at its top into the ruffled petals of an orchid. Paper thin, the specially mixed porcelain captured and held the light. She planned to use very little glaze, only the faintest blush of crimson at its edges, letting the sculpture speak for itself.
She looked up, smiling. She was glad of the company, and needed a break besides. Her clay needed to harden, draining both moisture and the heat from her hands, before she could work on the piece again. Which would probably be tomorrow, or the next day.
“I’m here for my tour,” Piers said.
“Would you like a cup of coffee, first?” Despite having slept well and then taken a nap, Belle was still exhausted.
At Piers’ agreement, she rang for Luna.
Luna returned a short time later. Belle thanked her. Luna smiled warmly.
“You have a lovely space, here.”
“I know. The light is perfect.” Belle gestured. “And there’s good air circulation, as well, which is important for what I do. Important for any art, really, but particularly for clay. Clay needs to breathe. And for the glazes, too….”
Piers sipped his coffee. “And a lovely home here, too, with Ash.”
“Yes.”
“He loves you, and I can see that you love him.”
It was strange, hearing that description from someone else. Did Ash love her? She hoped so, but she didn’t know. She did know, however—had come to know—that she loved him. She couldn’t pinpoint a moment where she’d suddenly known that that was true; it had been more of a gradual realization. Looking back over their months together, she couldn’t say for certain that there had been a time when she didn’t love him.
“Which,” Piers continued in his usual, indefatigable way, “is a good thing. As I was fully prepared to come here and find that the woman Ash had described in such glowing terms was nothing more than a money-hungry harlot who’d managed to ensorcel him somehow. Although to be honest,” he continued, “I did—and do—have a hard time imagining Ash taking leave of his senses. To any degree, let alone that one.
“So imagine my delight when, instead, I met what is undoubtedly one of the fairer, sweeter, more accomplished women on the planet after my own Grace.”
“He—he mentioned me?”
Once again, Piers seemed surprised. “Did, and does. All the time. His emails are full of praise for your artistic talents and nonsense about how you’re the most beautiful woman in the world. Which isn’t, as it turns out, such nonsense after all.”
There was nothing of a come-on in his compliment; he was merely being kind. She smiled in spite of herself. Ash—really?
“He’s been a bit vague about how you met, though. Which leads me to believe that it was at some sort of fetish club. He knows I’m not…entirely approving of all of his activities.”
Belle blushed. For what seemed like the thousandth time in the past twenty-four hours. “Yes. Something like that.”
“And you were in school, yes?”
She nodded.
“Did you graduate?”
“No. And,” she added, sipping her coffee, “I’m not sorry. Although my mother would be horrified to hear that.”
“Ah, yes. The wrong response. That perennial parental favorite.”
“She wants me to get a high-paying job so she can live in the nicest nursing home in Maine.”
“She doesn’t approve of your being supported by a man?”
“She doesn’t know.”
Piers’ eyebrows shot up. “Oh.” Although Belle got the sense that he wasn’t entirely surprised.
“You’re not planning a trip back to the old homestead, then?”
“I don’t think Ash would like to go.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that.”
“Where I’m from…I’m from one of those one stoplight towns. There’s not much honest work around to do, apart from fishing, so people turn to other things. Like selling drugs.
“There used to be paper mills, but those closed. And in America…when the local industry goes belly-up, you do, too. Everyone’s on some sort of assistance, be it welfare or social security. Or they sell things on eBay. The more entrepreneurial ones cook meth instead of just selling it. I hadn’t ever met anyone whose family actually hired people to mow their lawn until I arrived at college. Even in Scarborough, where I lived when I was a teenager…we didn’t mingle. There were the historically rich kids, and there were the historically poor kids. What your family did pretty much determined your destiny.”
“You and Ash have a lot in common.”
“What?”
“You’re both from backgrounds that present very little in the way of options. So you’ve both forged your own.”
“I suppose.” She’d never really thought about their relationship in those terms.
“You never would have met him, however you’d met, if you hadn’t at some point made the decision to leave Maine.”
“This is true.”
“And you both have some level of desire to be alone. To forge your own world, a world with its own rules. Where you can rule, together, in your own fashion.”
She nodded slowly.
Hearing her life described in these terms, it sounded so romantic. And wasn’t it, really? Beauty and the Beast, together in their castle. Wasn’t it possible that Beauty, entranced by the dark, animal magnetism of the Beast, had chosen to stay? Might have even made her way to the castle, under the cover of night, by herself?
Offered herself to him?
They finished their coffee, and Belle gave Piers his tour. He asked a number of pertinent questions, and expressed nothing but the most supreme admiration for her work. He seemed to have no awkwardness at all about the previous night’s events and, further, no expectation that he should now be able to take liberties. Rather, he treated their time together as what it was: a time out of time, to be treated with respect but left in its place.
All of which Belle found tremendously relieving.
She enjoyed Piers’ company, and could see why he and Ash were friends. Piers was charming, no doubt, and a great deal of fun, but he was also stolid. Refreshingly normal, and predictable. He told her funny stories about his children, to whom he was obviously devoted. As he was obviously devoted to his wife.
By the time their tour was over and Diana had arrived to announce a light supper, Belle was glad that she and Piers, too, were friends.
EIGHTY-SIX
When Belle was about ten, her neighbor hung herself.
Neighbor was a relative term in Julia Cove; the woman lived some ways down the roa
d in a ramshackle old farmhouse. Like most Mainers, she’d decorated her front lawn with a rusted out Farmall. Red or green wasn’t just a question in the country and anyone who couldn’t answer immediately, to use her father’s most damning insult, wasn’t country.
But Elaine Rogers decorated with more than just tractors. Every Halloween, she pulled out all the stops: jack-o’-lanterns, a graveyard and, finally, her own corpse. Belle was with her father when she pointed out the window and asked him, wasn’t that a dead body hanging from the old oak near Mrs. Rogers’ front door? Wasn’t that Mrs. Rogers’ body?
No, her father replied, without looking, it was a Halloween decoration.
And soon the spectacle was past.
No one noticed that it actually was a body, let alone Mrs. Rogers’ body, until the following morning. And how long she’d been up there was anyone’s guess. People called her Mrs. Rogers but in truth there was no evidence to support that she’d ever been married. Nor did she appear to have any friends. Belle had approached her door once, to sell her cookies, and been forcibly repelled with a shotgun.
Eventually though she’d started to smell. A different neighbor had discovered that while out exercising his hound. And so she’d been cut down and buried and that was that.
The year before that, her father had taken her to see the worm woman.
The worm woman was an august personage in Julia Cove. She operated a business out of what amounted to little more than a hole in the ground and there were rumors, not wholly unsubstantiated, that she practiced the dark arts. But she also sold the best nightcrawlers around.
Going to see the worm woman had become something of an outing for local families, although Belle had never gone. Her parents, even then, had had other things on their minds. She used to ride her bike up and down the half-paved roads, sometimes miles from home, and no one ever commented. Or if they did, she never heard about it. Part of her wanted her parents to notice she was missing, and care. To drive around searching for her and then scold her. But they never did.