by R. Lee Smith
Somehow.
And one day, lying there pretending to be asleep while he got up and quietly left her, she decided things had to change and it had to be her that did it. She made her way stiffly into the washroom, voided for an eternity, washed her face and upper body, wet her towel in the cold running water and pressed it to her sex, thinking of ways to try to bring the two of them back together. When she took the towel away, there were dark stains upon it.
Her first baffled thought was that she must have missed some gash and gotten it infected, an idea that in these circumstances surely meant a horrible, horrible death. Already breathing hard, biting back panic, she probed inside herself and inspected the blood that coated her finger.
It took another thirty seconds for the meaning of this to sink in.
“Oh ugh, now what?” she muttered and glared around the small washroom as though a box of tampons would appear by magic. Of course, it didn’t. She had always been a private person when it came to the unmentionable workings of her body; she had thought nothing could be worse than begging for a place to pee, but now she was going to have to have her damn period right out in the open.
She stood there in the middle of the room and cried for a while, then cried harder because she didn’t know if she could sit down and cry without leaking all over. She thought of home for the first time in what seemed like a long time, and then cried even harder because she realized it couldn’t possibly still be home, not after all this time. Her handy box of tampons would not be sitting under her bathroom sink anymore, but would be packed away with all her other personal effects in a storage unit somewhere, or in her parents’ garage, or maybe in an evidence locker, but it wouldn’t be at home. This was home.
And she was just going to have to cope.
Olivia cleaned herself as best she could and went back to the sleeping pit. There, she ripped a number of wide, long strips from a canvas army tent mixed in with the bedding and fashioned a sort of sanitary belt to which she tied some wadded up rags. When she had paced the room long enough to work all the kinks out of the fitting of the belt and be sure it wouldn’t untie itself or drop a rag, she dried her uselessly leaking eyes and got dressed. There was a noticeable bulge where the rags were tied up, an even bigger bulge between her thighs.
There would be no hiding this.
Olivia got one of her sleeping bags out of the pit and wrapped herself up in it. She went to her alcove and sat down there, miserable and alone and too hot in the quilted folds of sleeping bag. Her eye fell on the little triangular gameboard, sent flying all those days ago when he had attacked her. She could only find five of the stones. She put what she could find back into the cooler. There was a chance she would eventually recover the whole game. It wasn’t as though there were a couch the stones could roll under, after all…and there were plenty of hours in the lonely night to look for them.
That thought made her future stretch out interminably in front of her. Olivia turned her back on it, on everything.
She was still there, staring without thought into empty space, when her captor came home. Seeing her in the alcove with her sleeping bag seemed to throw him. He stood for a long time on the other side of the pit, then finally showed her the backpack he carried.
“Food?” Olivia guessed.
“Yes.”
He didn’t bring it to her, just stood there and held it out. His eyes, even in the demon-glow of the firelight, were pained.
This couldn’t go on. It just couldn’t.
“Share? With me?” She wasn’t as certain of those words.
But he didn’t correct her. He took two steps forward, set the backpack on the floor, and retreated to the other side of the pit. He looked at the bedding, his face tight with shame, then up at the markings on the wall. He waited.
The pack was too far away to just lean out and get. She huddled in the security of her sleeping bag instead.
The food sat there, unopened.
He stood up suddenly, keeping his eyes averted, and left her.
Olivia ate alone. In addition to the bread and bottled tea, the pack contained a flannel shirt, heavily patched and threadbare but cleaner than her t-shirt, and a leather belt to go with her leather skirt. The belt’s buckle was a ring of what she ultimately decided was indeed solid gold. It touched her. She supposed it shouldn’t. Why would these creatures attach any special value to gold, after all? Then again…she didn’t really need a belt. And what could make a more romantic gift than a shiny, frivolous ornament?
He was trying.
After she ate, she had nothing to do but wander around and wait for the creature that imprisoned her to come home, which according to her watch was around midnight these days. So at half-past eleven, she washed out her rags, scrubbed herself raw from the navel down to her ankles, bound herself back up and got into the pit, trying to look as though she had fallen asleep fully clothed.
He did not appear for another hour and when he did, he only stood in the doorway and watched her for a long time. Very quietly, as though fearing to wake her, he moved about the cave, laying in fuel for the next day’s fire, gathering up her discarded t-shirt, and replacing empty bottles of tea with full ones. He had more food with him too, a lot more, and she watched from under her lashes as he unpacked bread, dried meat, and other things more difficult to identify at this distance onto his empty shelves. Then he came back to undress while she listened, breathing deep, I’m-asleep breaths, and finally he lay down in the pit beside her. He did not touch her, made no effort to wake her, and soon his own breathing evened and deepened.
When she dared to roll over and look at him, she found his eyes darting beneath their lids in dream-sleep. Satisfied, she eased out of their shared bed, snuck into the washroom to check her rags, then crawled back into the pit. She wrapped herself in her sleeping bag, took a breath for a soft sigh of relief, and heard him say, “Olivia.”
She stiffened. She couldn’t help it. Was he going to want her? She couldn’t hide it if he did. She’d have to lie there…leaking, and just let him do it.
The quiet was stifling. His hand came up to her hip, just touching at first, ultimately settling. She said nothing, did nothing, waited.
He took his hand away. “I cannot make this easy,” he said.
She rolled over and looked at him, uncomfortably taken aback.
“I should have prepared you. You were—” That word again. He spoke it twice, shook his head, and clenched his hand into an empty fist.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I won’t do it again.”
He flinched and looked at her, then pushed himself suddenly up and out of the pit. “Do you think that I would punish you that way?” he asked, his deep voice pulled thin by pain. “You were…ready. It was your…time! It was your…” He gestured awkwardly towards his nose, then snarled something in his language and stalked away from her. He reached the fire, scraped his talons across the hearth, and then leaned against the wall and just breathed for a while.
“It’s all right,” Olivia said softly. “You didn’t…didn’t mean it.”
“I did. And it will happen again,” he said. He didn’t look at her.
Her heart sank a little. Only a little. She said, “I’m yours.” And heard herself laugh. “I’ll cope.”
She saw the glint of one eye as he glanced at her. He shook his head and stared at the symbols on the wall over the fireplace.
“I just need some time, okay? A few days. Please.” Her thighs tightened around her ungainly menstrual belt. “Please.”
“I will give time,” he said. He turned away from the markings on the wall as he would from accusing eyes and came back to her. He lay down as far from her as the confines of the pit allowed and did not look at her. It was hard to look at him, harder still to look away. “But it will happen again. I will try to…give you words. I will try to make you ready. It will happen again and I…will hurt you again.”
“I don’t hate you,” she blurted, and was a little surpri
sed to realize she meant it.
He opened his eyes and looked at her for a long time without expression. Then something in him seemed to let go; he did not soften, exactly, but something about him relaxed, the way that exhaustion can slump a man’s shoulders or a good old-fashioned crying jag can loosen up a lady’s proud back. It wasn’t a good look. In many ways, it was the worst, worse even than waking up in her bed and seeing him leaning over her for the first time. It was his own, ‘Horror is,’ and his own hopelessness. It was naked and awful and she supposed she was as responsible for putting it there as he was for her own.
CHAPTER FOUR
PEOPLE
1
Olivia’s watch battery died a few weeks later. She wasn’t sure exactly when. She had looked at it once while waiting for lunch, and it had been just after two a.m. When she’d looked at it again shortly after her captor (still nameless after all this time) came home, its digital face was empty and dark.
“Oh damn!” she cried in utter dismay.
The hulking figure of her captor looked up sharply, realized she was not addressing him, and returned to the task at hand—laying out the last meal before bed. “Olivia,” he said disapprovingly. “Speak in a civilized fashion, please.”
By civilized, he meant to speak in his language, not hers. English had become one of those things, like television and sunrises, that belonged to the past. He would allow a brief relapse now and then, but his tolerance was thin and she really didn’t want to know what he’d do if he decided he had to punish her. No, he’d never laid a hand on her (unless one counted the day of the attack, which Olivia tried not to think about at all), and he’d never raised his voice at her, but there was a hardness in him and not too deeply buried, a coldness in his eye when he sat and stared into the embers at the close of his day. Maybe it was the Stockholm’s talking, but she’d come to think of him as someone who might possibly be a good man…just a good man who wouldn’t hesitate to put her in a hard gag if she persisted in speaking English.
But it helped. Even on the most frustrating days, she had to admit that not having any alternatives sure sped up the process of speaking bat-ese. His patience was tireless when it came to helping her find names for things, and it seemed that nothing embarrassed him (although she was certainly seven shades of mortified when he’d followed her into the bathroom and turned that into a language lesson), but he had so far refused to teach her any swears, so she didn’t have much of a choice when it came to repeating her mild but heartfelt expletive.
“It’s not important,” she said instead, her standard catchall phrase for things too impolite to repeat. And it was true, wasn’t it? Time was like English; it belonged to her old life and may as well be dead.
“Then come and eat,” he instructed.
She came and sat on the other side of the bench. Dinner was bread, mushrooms, and rubbery strips of boiled meat that came from a beast her captor had called rua—a great beast, he’d said, as heavy as two men, with horns as long as a man’s arms and hooves as large as an open hand, which sounded very fierce right up until he imitated the sound of its calls and she realized he’d been describing a common cow. And why not? Many of the farmers in the foothills released their cattle to free-range, leaving them to their own devices until it came time either to calve or slaughter them. Her captor had remarked once that they didn’t prey too heavily on the cattle, even though it made an easy hunt, because the only thing more dangerous than a drunk human was a suspicious one.
He was usually full of interesting asides like that. Knowing how lonely she was wont to become during her empty hours, he always made an effort to engage her during their few moments together, and he seemed to think there was no better way to immerse her in his language than to lecture her on whatever she happened to be looking at or touching at the time. But not tonight. He stayed subdued throughout the meal, heavy in thought, intently studying her as she ate.
“Is something wrong?” she asked at last.
“Olivia,” he said, then frowned and did not continue.
She waited, her meal consumed, her hands folded in her lap.
At last, he shook his head, and said, “Wash yourself, please, and come to the pit.”
The words rang in her mind, but not with the same impact they once had. All the while she had been menstruating, she had slept fully dressed and he had accepted that, lying close beside her and making no demands. But she sensed a watchfulness in him and when she was through bleeding, she had gone to the pit naked and did not resist him when he rose over her. When he was done, he had touched his brow to hers (his short-faced snout pressing uncomfortably against her and the tips of his horns scraping on the rim of the pit behind her) in a gesture that was almost an apology, except for the hard, cold look in his eyes when he did it. And then he’d rolled off and lay there like he always did, with his hand on her hip and his wing blanketing them both.
“I did not want to hurt you,” he’d said.
“I know.”
“You don’t know,” he’d argued, sounding faintly irritated with her. “But it is true. It was your time.”
She’d known a few more of his words then, but his meaning still eluded her. He must have seen her confusion, because he’d growled under his breath and got up.
“It’s okay,” she’d said again, a little timidly. “You don’t have to—”
“I must explain this! It will happen again!” He paced away from the pit to the fire, stared into its dying light, and then swung suddenly back to face her. “Your moon was new,” he said, just like that meant anything, and he said a few more words she couldn’t grasp. He paced, growled, then cupped air in his hands and brought it to his face, breathing in deeply, loudly. “You were ready. You made me ready.”
She got it then, much as she tried not to. She’d gone into season, in heat like a dumb bitch-dog, and he, this inhuman beast-faced thing, had smelled it. Smelled it and reacted. Rutted with her.
His triumph at seeing her understanding was short-lived as soon as he also saw her horror. He took half a step back, head cocked, uncertain how to respond. “It will happen again,” he said finally.
Yes. Once a month, in fact. Once a month for the rest of her life.
“But do you have to—” Tears cracked in her throat, forcing him back another half-step. She ground her palm into her eyes, pushing all that useless girly hysteria back inside where it could do no harm and tried again. “Do you have to be there? Do you have to—”
“Yes,” he said.
“Can’t you leave me alone then?” she pleaded, louder. “Just for then! I’ll do whatever you want—”
That hardness, shining out of his eyes, and nothing more. He folded his arms across his chest and watched her, the way the gods watch mortals scrabbling over the distant Earth, unmoved.
“Damn you, it hurt!” she’d shouted, only very vaguely aware that shouting was not a good idea with this man in any mood, this mood least of all. “Didn’t you see what you did to me?”
“Yes.” His voice did not rise. His gaze did not soften.
And she’d cried, with him standing over her and watching her do it, but that was his final word on the subject. She’d tried to bring it up once or twice since, and had succeeded only in bringing out that hardness where she had to see it, appeal to it, and feel its cold and pitiless light burning back at her. She couldn’t live with that. With everything else, yes, but not with that. So she let it go and went naked to his bed every night and told herself that she was coping.
Now Olivia stood in the washroom, mentally and physically bracing herself for the act of endurance that awaited her in the next room. She no longer dreaded it, only regarded it with a faint, tired sort of resentment, the way she’d once felt about doing housework. Oh, he could make her cum once in a while, but she didn’t attach much significance to that. It wasn’t like he was trying.
When she came back to the sleeping room, he was standing naked in front of his hearth, red light outlinin
g every muscle, the point of each talon, the curve of his horns. Nerving himself up, she supposed, for his own housework.
She undressed, stepped into the pit, and lay down to wait for him.
It was a surprisingly long wait, and when he finally joined her, all he did was rest one hand on her stomach. She couldn’t see his face, but she could feel his breath on her cheek and knew that he was looking at her. Staring at her.
“Olivia,” he began at last, “You speak very well now.”
“Thank you,” she said, puzzled. He never spoke to her during sex. Afterwards, sometimes, but never during. Even the night he’d spent teaching her all the right words for what he did, what he used to do it, and where he put it when he did, he’d waited until after. She braced herself for bad news.
“I want to bring you before the others soon.”
Others. Did that mean others of his kind or of hers?
“How soon?”
“Tomorrow, perhaps.” He hummed distractedly, moving his hand a little lower, but then stopped. “Are you happy with me, Olivia?” he asked.
She was too stunned even to laugh. Was he serious? He wanted her to be happy? What was she supposed to say? He told stories, and taught her riddles and other little plays on words in his language, had even sung to her once or twice in a self-conscious way. She supposed if laughter was happiness, then she had been happy. Still, the horror of that first night had a way of coming back during all the hours she spent alone with nothing to think about except whether or not her parents believed she was dead yet. It was there when he moved inside her, his hot breath coming in grunts and growls against her cheek, while she thought in despair of her next season and how it would be when he was roaring and clawing and battering at her. It was there when she thought that she was all of twenty-four years old…with all the rest of her life ahead of her.
“I’m not unhappy,” she said at last. “You are patient with me.”