Jeremiah Quick

by SM Johnson

  She knew it that night, but pretended not to.

  Instead she leaned her head back, his jacket spikes poking hard into the back of her skull, and repeated to herself what he'd said, the whole of it, over and over, until she had the words memorized. They were the nicest words he'd ever said to her. And then she asked, "Why do I have to fit? Why can't I just be here?"

  His sigh was almost aggravated. "How am I supposed to know what to do with you? Should I be grateful you're here? Or should I hide from your light? Or… should I fuck the shit out of you to teach you to stay away from the Dark? Do you think I'm safe, Sunshine? Do you really think you can love me and not be ruined?"

  She had no answer. They were young and he was being dramatic. She pressed her head even harder against his spikes, wishing they'd leave permanent marks, not yet realizing that they already had.

  They never became a "something." Pretty didn't think they even held hands again. She clutched at him, yes, and he let her, but it was only for such a short time.

  They went back to the party and shrugged off the teasing about having disappeared. Chill showed up just in time for the hike to the Homecoming bonfire.

  It was full dark when the group reached the bonfire site. Pretty sat close to Jeremiah, wedged tight against him, because they'd had their little roll-in-the-fall-leaves make-out session, and because he'd told her the secret of the Three, and because she still hoped he might be her next thing.

  At some point Jeremiah reclined on the blanket, on his side, and Pretty leaned against him. Chill was lying at their feet, but then suddenly sat up and pulled Pretty away from Jeremiah, a sharp quick tug that had her falling onto Chill's chest, and he was staring into her face, her eyes, and he said, in a dreamy voice, "You look very pretty by the firelight, Pretty."

  Oh good Christ, are you kidding me?

  This kind of thing never happened to her. Her mask must have been especially sparkling and vivacious that night because she was definitely not her usual self-conscious and reserved self. Maybe it was the alcohol. Maybe it was just that Jeremiah had agreed to join them for an after-school activity, which had never happened before.

  "I love you all," Pretty announced to the crowd in general, to Jeremiah, and tall-man, and missing-eyebrow-boy Chill in particular. "And I have a boyfriend, dorks."

  Ah, shit.

  "Yeah?" Jeremiah said, in his sardonic way, the side of him that was not always nice. "I notice he's not here."

  No, he wasn't. Pretty hadn't wanted the evening ruined by the necessity of explaining every joke to the point it became unfunny. The boyfriend went to a different school and she wasn't in the mood to interpret the general quirkiness of her friends. See, the boyfriend was really cute. He was also pathologically stupid. But oh, he was pretty. He was worth tolerating, just for those few weeks, so she could keep looking at him. Mmmmm.

  She already knew the relationship was near-over, and would be as soon as she could stand to have the conversation with him, and would be doing that, the moment she found the most appropriate visual aids and interpretive help – diagrams and simple line drawings, perhaps, or, at the very least, a pencil drawing of a heart broken in half… just to make sure he could follow along. Yeah, she needed to draw a break-up map, he was that dense. But at least with this one she could say, "You know, it's not me, it's you," for the only time ever, and not even hurt his feelings. What she couldn't say was, "Dude, you know, the clock struck thirteen, and you just had no power over me." That'd be so far above his head, he'd probably scratch his balls trying to figure it out.

  Sophomore year, bonfire night, the night that everybody wanted Pretty. There was no repeat – not any of it, with any of them, ever, but she thought how nice it would be if every girl had that one night.

  It could have been the end of Before.

  Except Jeremiah passed her a tiny scrap of paper with a phone number written in pencil.

  He wasn't done with her yet.

  After the bonfire she dumped stupid boy, and kept buying candy bars.

  Chapter 5

  When Jeremiah came back she almost sobbed with relief. Her knees, her thighs, her buttocks, hell, every damn part of her, was sore from being in the cage. It felt like he'd been gone for days.

  He unlocked the cage door, swung it open, and snapped his fingers. "Out. Remember, no voice."

  She was stiff, and it took her a full minute to stretch herself out of the cage. She smelled, and that embarrassed her. When she got to her feet, her balance was bad, and she swayed to the side until his hand gripped her upper arm and held her steady. He walked her to a white and gleaming bathroom, and stood over her while she peed. Then he directed her into the shower, where he'd placed a plastic chair.

  He washed her as impersonally as he'd watched her pee, as if she weren't naked. As if she weren't important. It was as dehumanizing as the cage, maybe worse.

  She wasn't going back into the cage. Time had been endless. No relief from the bars pressing into her skin, no feasible way to sleep. Number one on her priority list from now on would be staying out of there. She'd earn ten and twenty and a hundred of whatever his punishment was – whatever it took, to not have to go back in there.

  He dried her off, still clinical, still impersonal, then led her back to the main room and to a plain simple table. He leaned her over it at the waist, stretching her hands above her head and pressing her fingers closed, so they curled over the far edge.

  "Close your eyes and hold on," he said, and then, "If you're obedient, you can sleep on the bed when we're done."

  The bed. It sounded so nice. So normal.

  "Ten strikes," he said.

  She held her breath.

  "Don't hold your breath."

  She almost could have laughed, but he hit her with a switch of some sort, a diagonal line across her back, and it took every ounce of self-control she imagined she'd ever have to keep from screaming.

  "One," he said. "Isn't that lovely?"

  Her head was reeling, skin twitching, eyes already burning with tears. And that was only one. How would she cope with ten, silently?

  The next strike came then, quick and hard, no warning, and she managed not to scream, but somewhere in the fight to be silent, she crawled right up onto the table.

  Jeremiah let loose a quiet laugh, and the word, "Two."

  She was on her hands and knees, lips sealed, shaking her head back and forth, all four limbs trembling, barley able to hold herself up.

  "Get down," he said. "Put yourself the way you were."

  She wanted to say she couldn't do it, there was no way. She wanted to say stop and wait and this isn't how it's supposed to be.

  But no. Not only was she not going to speak, she was going to obey, perfectly, and somehow in that stubborn obedience make him proud. Or at least make him stop hating her. Or, at the very, very least – keep herself out of that fucking cage.

  She pushed back with her arms until her legs were off the table and resting on the floor again, her back displayed for the evil instrument he held in his hands.

  "Three," he said, and the pain came, and a noise rose up from her chest, and the effort of withholding it made her gag. It was worse when he spoke first, when there was warning. The number ten had never seemed so far out of reach.

  She was tension from toes to fingertips, breathing heavily through her nose when she wasn't holding her breath, gripping the far edge of the table so hard her hands hurt, too. Not like the fire of her spine, but with fierce cramps that stiffened the joints, her grip on the table's edge bruising the bones of her fingers.

  The next mark drove a scream from her, flaying across her back in the opposite direction, criss-crossing the marks she already imagined were there, and, as if he didn't yet want to acknowledge her voice, the fifth followed immediately. She imagined tic-tac-toe across her back and wondered if she was the X or the O.

  "You just earned ten more." His voice was soft, floating over her, light… happy, even?

  "I can't,
I can't I can't," she cried. "Jeremiah, please."

  "That's thirty earned altogether, five given. Thirty minus five. You're not doing all that well."

  She clamped her lips shut again, pressed her face hard against the table so the wood held her lips tight against her teeth. She held her legs together, clenched the edge of the table harder with her fingers, thinking, He's going to kill me. How could I have not realized that, from the moment I saw him again? He hates me. He always has.

  "More of these are waiting for you," he said. "At my discretion. Don't forget it."

  She heard him moving around, but didn't dare move. And then his fingers were tangled into her hair, and he wrenched her head up, touched her lips with gentle fingers. "Shh," he said, slipping a straw between her lips. "Slow sips."

  She sipped, hoping for water, but it was fire that went down her throat, and she choked a little.

  Two small swallows, and he pulled the straw away, then ran his hands down the length of her back.

  She shuddered, because his hands, cool and sweet though they were, caused a trail of pain.

  "Your skin is beautiful. So clear. Like a canvas."

  Pretty's eyes fluttered closed because it sounded more like a threat than a compliment.

  He lifted her head by the hair again, and she tried to raise her eyes, to focus on his face, and she thought he was staring back at her, but her own eyes skittered away, too vulnerable just now to study him.

  She felt the sting of tears behind her eyelids, the horrid lump in her throat she hadn't felt for years.

  She was ashamed not to be managing her punishment more gracefully.

  Which was insane, wasn’t it? She wanted to apologize, to explain, but she had no voice, not unless she wanted to suffer more and more and more.

  He was petting her hair again, lifting it and letting it slide through his fingers, over and over, talking to her in a low voice. "Poor baby. It hurts. I know it hurts, but it has to. I can't teach you anything about pain if it doesn’t hurt."

  She could tell him about pain. If she were allowed to speak. If a count to ten was an impossible dream, what did that make forty-two hours of laboring to give birth?

  She was intensely sorry she'd gotten into his car. This was her own fault.

  She might have cried for real then, but he was pulling her hair, and she had to raise her head, though she still didn't manage to look at him, instead lowering her eyes toward the floor. It seemed safer, somehow.

  A startling touch to her lips made her jerk her head to the side. He made a tst-tst sound that reminded her of the fucking dog whisperer, and she would have said so, except it would take more than that for her to forget the ban on her voice. And then he was pressing something between her lips.

  She almost rejected it – until the sweetness lighted on her tongue, and the immediate slow melt of chocolate almost made her moan out loud.

  He went back to playing with her hair. She closed her eyes and willed her muscles to relax. There was no point in being tense if he was giving her a break.

  After a minute or so, his hand followed her hair to its end and trailed down her back, and there came the soft, weird pain again, the one that came from his gentleness.

  "Don't move," he whispered.

  The shock of the strike took her breath away, or she would have screamed.

  She was scrambling onto the table top, in a panic, not even on purpose, when his sure, strong hands caught her about the waist, and eased her back into position. His voice broke through her sudden panic."Six."

  Fuuuuck! She screamed it, inside her head; teeth…hands… everything clenched. It would be better to be tied down, better if she couldn't move at all, couldn't escape, and surely his comforting her in the middle of it all made it that much worse, made her almost forget, for a second, that he was the one giving her pain in the first place. Fucker. If she had voice, she'd tell him that, too. In fact, the moment he let her speak, she would call him the worst vile string of obscenities she could think of. So there.

  "Shhh," he said, standing at the side of the table now, one hand tangled into her hair as the other struck her, although maybe not quite as hard, and she reared up, glaring at him, so fucking done with this.

  "Seven," he said. "You're almost there. You can handle this."

  She'd thought she was beyond tears, but no. They seeped from her eyes, and then he was licking her face, her eyes.

  "Ahh, precious tears, from precious Sunshine."

  The words were sweet, the tone biting.

  Pretty was shuddering, still half-crying, when he dropped two fast blows across her back, lined up in the original diagonal, and one last, crosswise again, and then he was pulling her up, turning her so her small breasts pressed against the front of his shirt, her legs hardly able to support her weight. He caught her with an arm around the curve of her lower back, hurting the ends of the strike marks enough that she pushed herself tighter against him, trying to escape the pain.

  She wanted to hit him, but knew if she tried, she'd fall down, so she just stood there and concentrated on breathing and silence and not-hitting him.

  After a few minutes she forgot about not speaking, and sucked in a breath –

  "Shh," he said. "There's still twenty more, you know."

  The horror of this made her bury her face in his shirt for a minute, hitching in fast little breaths, but then she remembered they were his fucking rules. No way would she survive it. And absofuckinglutely no fucking way would she survive it quietly. She took in another breath with the intention of speaking, and he must have been waiting for it, because the next thing she knew he'd spun her around so her whole back was on fire against his shirt, and his hand was clamped over her mouth.

  "No voice," he growled against her ear, and she felt the teeth in his breath and his words. "There have to be rules to so you can fail and be punished. And the punishment has to be awful so you try hard to follow the rules. You always liked that I wanted to teach you things. Your eyes would widen and then light right up when you realized I was fucking right and They were fucking wrong, and that you got it, and then you always wanted to know more. Because you never wanted to be one of Them, and you knew it, since you were a child. I validated the little voice inside of you that wanted to scream about how none of it, ever, made any sense. I gave you understanding. I fucking taught you critical thinking. I deserve a medal, for fuck's sake, for being able to teach something of value to a spoiled little girl named Pretty.

  "Because here's the thing… you knew there was a whole lot of everything about your world that didn't make sense. And yet… you accepted the free car, and accepted the free ride to college, so long as you got home by curfew, and you were mommy and daddy's good little rich girl for far longer than you should have been. And when Chill blew his fucking brains out because he was so fucking lonely, did you give a shit, little Miss-got-it-so-goddamned-fucking-easy? Did you?"

  Pretty heard everything he said, and he was right, he was so right, and she knew she was spoiled and something within her cringed. But it wasn't till he said that about Chill that she managed to react. She jerked her head from side to side, trying to escape the hand still clamped across her face, and when he didn't let go, she bit him. He jumped and swore and did let go then, and she took the opportunity to shove herself away from him, backing up on wobbly legs until she could boost herself onto the table. Her instinct about the letters, Chill so lost and lonely, asking for a friend. That. Just that. She’d ignored him, and worse, thought badly of him for his need. But it wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t. It wasn’t. She couldn’t have saved him, even if she wanted to, right?

  Only maybe she could have. Maybe she was the most spoiled, most self-centered person ever and there could never be redemption.

  She shook her head from side to side, letting her eyes plead with Jeremiah, but it wasn’t enough, she had to speak, despite the consequences. "No. Jeremiah, no. Say it isn’t true. Please."

  His whole face looked hollow for the
next minute, especially his eyes.

  "You'll take ten more, for Chill?"

  "I'll take twenty, if you promise me it isn't true."

  He stared at her.

  And something slipped in his face then, his eyes, something that revealed an even bigger truth that Pretty didn't want to see – an ugliness too terrible for her to even know what to call it. But whatever that ugliness was, it screamed at her that one of them needed saving. But would he save her, or would she save him?

  Because she knew somehow, right then, there would be no saving each other.

  It felt like he stared at her for a hundred years, before he shook his head.

  "Sorry, Sunshine, no can do."

  She sighed, sagged, and let her hand rest on the table behind her, where her fingers bushed against something long and thin, reminiscent of the stripes of pain along her back. She picked it up, pulled it around to look at it. It wasn't a whip. It was more of a… well, a switch, she supposed. Black, synthetic, and slightly flexible, with a handle at the thicker end, and tapering to a sharp flexible tip. She ran her hands over it. It looked less painful than it felt.

  She wondered if her inability to trust Jeremiah Quick made those ten strikes feel more painful than they actually were. But she had no basis for comparison, did she? At least not yet.

  Quick held out his hand, silently asking her to hand the thing to him, and she did.

  He brought it to her lips. "Kiss the switch, Sunshine, and thank me with your eyes."

  She pursed her lips and touched them to the instrument of her pain, then lifted her head a little, keeping her chin down, demure, and raised her eyes just enough to meet his. She blinked slowly, deliberately. Twice.

  "Not bad," he breathed. "For a beginner."

  And his fingers were then at her lips, urging her to open her mouth, and there was the chocolate, rich and sweet, and she didn't even know where he'd been hiding it.

  It flooded not just her mouth and sense of taste, but all of her senses, started a tingle in her belly, a shiver down her spine. Even her pussy contracted.