by SM Johnson
She missed her husband. He was the person who knew her the best, who never judged her, never made her feel like she had to pretend about anything. If she had some way to call him, she would, and she'd tell him about Jeremiah Quick. She probably wouldn't mention right away about the weird sex, but it wasn't something she'd keep secret from him, either. They didn't have secrets or lies or masks. She was the vessel, always reaching, stretching outward, giving herself away, and he was the source, always filling her up. His love was consistent, stabilizing. He helped her be more than she could have been otherwise. He let her grow, and never seemed afraid of the growing.
He'd found her, pursued her, convinced her, and she was lucky for that.
And the truth was – he was the one who simply let her be herself. He never ridiculed her, almost always agreed with her. He gave her space to figure out who she was, whether she was Pretty or Letty or someone else entirely.
He made her feel safe without any masks at all.
He loved her basic, internal self.
And that was the part of her that would change only through experience, life, love, and loss.
Before this detour with Jeremiah Quick, she'd been looking forward to a quiet weekend all by herself. Alone weekends happened so rarely that her mind was free-falling before she even got home. She’d been looking forward to the silent house for a month, and decided to stop for the groceries now so the chore wouldn't be hanging over her. She hoped the boys placed in their tournament, and would stay another night to compete in final events. That would be just… bliss. Her daughter, Sarah, was furious with her about something or other, and would stay gone for as long as allowed. Pretty kept hoping Sarah would get easier, but at fourteen, no luck yet.
There were days when Pretty wondered how she'd come to this, this quiet existence where what she looked forward to the most was time alone in the house to take a long bath, to masturbate for an hour – with toys, no less – to read or write without constant interruption.
Most of the time, between kids, dog, and electronics, she could hardly hear herself think.
And yet… when she could think, what she thought was how boring her life must look, from the outside, although she never felt bored.
Her vivid imagination and rich inner fantasy life made its way into books, and her usual state of mind was waiting in aggravated anticipation to get back to writing the stories.
They were alright, her little family. There was enough money to pay the bills, and Pretty had a part-time job that forced her out of the house a few times a week. Every year the kids got more grown-up and more independent. Before long, Pretty and her husband would be back where they started – just the two of them, letting each other go, then breathing each other back in again.
Sometimes she remembered a time when she'd hoped to change the world.
At this point she didn't see that happening, and decided she'd have to look to Sarah to do that. And Sarah would. That girl was a force.
And how lucky was Pretty, to have stumbled into all of this? A husband who loved her beyond all others, who consistently provided for them so well she worried about almost nothing. Healthy kids to raise up and try like hell to make sure they knew what was important in the world.
Perhaps she suffered from restless boredom, but the seasons changed and the kids were off school for the summer, and it was all late nights, sleepovers, bonfires, and mom's taxi service. And when she couldn't bear it for another minute, school would start again. She dreaded the oncoming winter, but adored the time alone. She was always melancholy in the fall, but the time was good for writing novels, even if she suffered a minor depression each year, dreading the appearance of those first sharp white flakes of winter.
And maybe she was wrong, to be so accepting of her easy life. Maybe she needed to find some injustice to fight, some cause to stand for, to keep looking for her chance to change the world.
Maybe that's why she was here, now, with Jeremiah Quick. To find the fire, to re-ignite her passion for bigger things. Maybe there was a purpose much bigger, much higher, than her family or herself.
It was time for paying attention, time for change.
Jeremiah would surely start the changing.
She couldn't bear to think or remember more. She ran song lyrics through her head to stop the mess of noise and memory. The Who… no one knows what it's like to be the bad man. And Lifehouse… how long have I been in this storm? Guns-N-Roses' Patience. And she waited for Jeremiah, wide awake, staring into the dark.
The silence was deafening, so pronounced she started imagining sounds, a click, a rustle, a ringing in her ears.
The darkness was as total as the silence, and she stared up at the rafters where she knew chains were hanging and… the scrap of black materiel swayed in the dark, she knew it did, black in the dark, swinging back and forth, black on black, impossible to see, and yet she saw.
Her mind started playing tricks on her, imagination running wild from too much dark, too much silence, too many questions in her head.
She thought she heard a muffled sob.
It startled her to attention, the way a noise interrupts a dream, and she strained to hear more, to hear a real sound past the silence, but there was only ringing in her ears, and nothing else, and time dragged by until she thought maybe it hadn't been a real sound at all. But as soon as she gave up listening on purpose, she thought she heard it again, and a minute later thought she heard her name.
And this time, the more she listened, the more she heard. Murmurs and mutters that were barely audible, unintelligible, although there was a cadence to the sounds that she could almost imagine were sentences and words. Sometimes she thought she was hearing a chant: Jeremiah Quick, Jeremiah Quick, Jeremiah Quick.
Then again, sometimes her brain took up that chant all on its own, so she couldn't be sure if it was internal or external.
It had to be internal.
Of course it did.
She didn't hear voices, didn't believe in ghosts.
She didn't hear crying or feel the room pulsing with any regret other than her own.
Chapter 10
She.
She has a family.
I know this of course, but for some reason it didn't occur to me they would look for her.
It was somewhat startling to remember that normal families don't just let people disappear.
I'm browsing a news site, and somehow the video, an interview with her husband, startles me with its very existence, and threatens to make me feel terrible. Maybe even guilty. I want to promise him I won't hurt her, but it's much too late for that.
I can't watch more than a few seconds of that video. It's one thing to know they're looking, wholly another to see the husband's baffled face and hear his quiet, steady plea - "Come home, Letty. Please come home."
There is no one else who can do what I need her to do.
It needs to be here, and it needs to be right, and it needs to be HER.
No one else.
I looked and looked for someone else, trying not to disrupt her life.
I don't want to hurt or destroy her, but fate or magick led me to her now, and the fact that I'd known her in the past, already hold high regard for her – is no coincidence.
It's a command that originates from beyond myself.
It's magick.
And there is a price to be paid for denying magick, same as there is a price to be paid for creating and using it.
I am stuck.
She.
She's the other half of this spell, whether she wants to be or not.
There is nothing for it but to forge ahead.
I close the browser and turn off the computer.
Try to decide what comes next.
It's hard to leave her alone in the dark. I want to play with her, like one plays with a new kitten, dangle and snatch, learn her more, get to know who she is now. Find out what makes her extend claws, what makes her purr.
She needs to trust me, for
real, a bond deeper than shared chocolate.
I have to be in charge.
In control.
And, for now, I have to leave her alone in the dark.
Chapter 11
In the morning, if it was morning - Jeremiah was silent. He clicked on the dim light from the switch by the door, and when he loomed over her, she almost screamed.
His face was so much a mask in makeup that in another circumstance she wouldn't have recognized him. His eyes were lined in smooth thick black, lids a combination of bright blue and smoky gray, the gray smudged under his lower lashes. His lips were also outlined in black, the soft surface flesh stained a similar blue.
He didn't look feminine so much as foreign.
He released her from her bonds and walked her through the playroom space to the bathroom. She stumbled and needed him to steady her more than once, a combination of her body clumsily stiff and her head swiveling to stare at his face. She was wearing yesterday's clothes and felt grimy and unattractive. He motioned to the toilet, and turned away only after she gave him a steady glare.
When she was done, he grabbed her hands and stopped her from fastening her pants. Tugged her back into the playroom, back to the bed with the ugly brown plastic mattress. He kept her on her feet next to it, positioning her with sharp movements, motions and pats, and stripped her of her clothing.
She shivered, not from cold, but because she was so vulnerable, so bare, in contrast to his black t-shirt and jeans, and still the boots clear up to his knees. The makeup changed his face to that of a stranger. She didn't know this Jeremiah. She'd never known this Jeremiah.
She didn't like the silence and wanted to hear his voice, but clearly he'd changed the rules.
A gesture and a stern look commanded her to stay where she was while he toured the room with a slow pace that eventually led to a small refrigerator. The moment Pretty noticed it, she found herself with a desperate hope he would bring water.
He did.
He tilted her chin and set the bottle to her lips, and allowed a few small sips. When he took the bottle away, she lifted her hands to clutch at it (always clutching), but he shook his head, and if there was any expression she could read in his painted mask, it was patience. He moved her hands back down, one at a time, so they hung at her sides, and shook his head at her, a gentle admonishment.
Was he torturing her with silence on purpose?
She sighed and let her shoulders relax, looked into his eyes, and waited.
Friendly eyes, today, despite the makeup that made them even more dramatic. So pretty. So unlike the Jeremiah of her memory. Yet she felt like she was seeing more of his real self than she'd ever seen before.
She wondered about his past, his hurts, why he needed to be the one so much in control. Not that it mattered - it was easier this way, because there was something in her, something timid that refused to be demanding, had always refused to be demanding. Some part of her that whispered, Don't need anything. He won't like you anymore, if you have needs. Always this whisper, this little voice that quelled her, made her scared, made her give up emotional power.
And she suffered. Always grasping, clutching, begging inside her head please love me, please don't leave.
And Jeremiah himself, silent, as if he knew exactly how to make her suffer most.
He fed her sips of water every few minutes, and in between looked at her, touched her, and turned her to smooth fingers down her back. Perhaps the switch marks were already faded, because there was no pain for her to flinch away from.
When the water was gone, he coaxed her with firm hands to lie on the bed, facedown, and cuffed her wrists and ankles to the four corners of the bed.
She started to cry, and tried to hide it. You can't have these tears. You won't even know about them, so you can't eat them.
But she was wrong. Maybe her breath hitched, maybe she inadvertently released an almost too-small-to-hear sob, because he did know. He pulled her head up by her hair – this becoming so familiar it was almost a comfort - and his lips were hot against her cheek, parted just enough to kiss a tear into his mouth, and then his tongue traced first one eye and then the other, poking hard into each tear duct, and this, this still revolted her on some level, and stopped her from crying. She wondered if it always would have that effect, or if even that particular weirdness would become something familiar, something normal.
He let her go, and she rested her damp cheek against the sticky plastic mattress, and waited for whatever would be next.
She waited through a silence so tense that the whistle and the searing hot pain across the backs of both upper thighs was a relief, even as it shocked a scream out of her.
She counted on her fingers the strikes to the backs of her thighs, and there were ten – her ten from last night's wail. Except for the first startled scream, she managed to stay silent through number eight, but then a loud groan came out of her on nine, and an actual shriek on ten.
Damn it. It wasn't fair that she took ten and earned thirty. If he kept the rule of silence, he'd be punishing her forever.
His hands smoothed something cool and wonderful over the welts he'd just created and Pretty felt tears forming again, the lump in her throat almost choking her. He came around the bed and squatted, taking her chin between finger and thumb and turning her head this way and that, staring at her. The stare went on and on, but her tears didn't fall.
He waited a few seconds, then his black-lined blue mouth smiled into her eyes, and his fingers brushed her cheek. It was... as sweet as he'd ever been, maybe sweeter, and Pretty tilted her face into his palm and no longer felt like crying at all.
As if to prove his sweetness, his fingers teased her lips open and placed a square of chocolate on her tongue. After the dark-silence-pain, the smooth rich taste filled her mouth felt like a reward. She didn't think there was any accident in that.
A last little pat to her cheek, and he moved out of her sight for a minute, returning to cover her with a blanket before he left.
All this, and never a word.
Privacy and chocolate. An odd combination of comfort.
She kept herself still on the bed and listened to silence with no way to judge how long he was gone. She tried to count one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand… up to sixty, then one-twenty, one-eighty… but counting was infinitely more boring than thinking of nothing. Except for the part where she found it impossible to be still and think of nothing, in silence. There was a cramp in her foot and her stomach felt both full and hollow. The sheen of sweat between her skin and the plastic mattress prickled her skin and made it itch.
She hated the silence more than the dark, and was tempted to talk to herself or hum. Sound. Noise. Company.
The stupid barn or garage or whatever it was didn't even sway or creak or settle, or have mice, as near as she could tell. Which was crazy – right? All structures have some sort of sound. And then she tried to turn off that train of thought, remembering that this structure did have sounds. Muttering and sobbing and whispers of Jeremiah Quick. It was no sound that came from the physical world, which really was crazy, and even though she hated the silence, she thought she preferred even that over creepy ghost whispers and crying.
She wished Jeremiah would stay, turn on music, and teach her with words. She wasn't sure what she was supposed to be learning like this, because when it was too dark and too quiet, she could count or sing or hum or talk... and her mind would still find a way to examine her regrets.
Like Drew.
Once Jeremiah rode away on his motorcycle, there was no way to contact or keep track of him, only mourn that he wasn't here, and hope he found what he was looking for. Pretty didn't even know what that was, beyond his tossing out the phrase Punk Underground.
He didn't even say goodbye, at least not to her. He was just… gone.
She heard from Chill once in awhile, by letter, but he wasn't hearing from Jeremiah with any regularity, either. His reports weren't much more than, "Last I heard h
e was in Arkansas," or "He made it to California."
Pretty didn't know what Jeremiah hoped to find in either place, or if Chill made it all up, just to have an excuse to write her a letter.
Nothing. Nothing. Sometimes it was hard to remember he was ever here at all, hard to remember he was real.
And then from the corner of her memory she'd see a shadow of him, leaning against the red brick wall of the school building, smoking, and using the pinkies of each hand to hook the edges of his hair behind his ears, the rising smoke from his cigarette reflected in his sunglasses, his expression somber by way of his straight serious mouth.
Her breath would hitch, and her fingers almost go numb with hurt and longing, and she hated being trapped in high school with all of these people, but without him.
She could have asked the bohemian girlfriend, she knew that. The knowledge was right there, teasing her. The girlfriend probably wouldn't diss her.
But Pretty never approached the other girl. Not out of shyness, but because of some sense of humiliation that Jeremiah had given the bohemian so much more of himself than he'd ever given to Pretty, and asking her, begging for whatever scraps she was willing to share, felt too much like sniffing under the dining room table for crumbs.
It was bad enough that she'd almost stolen the photograph. Bad enough that she wished she had stolen it.
It was on the dry line in the art room, eight by ten, black and white, hair smooth along the sides of his unsmiling face, tenderly vulnerable. She wanted to steal it, but supposed it belonged to his bohemian girlfriend, and Pretty hoped it was important to her – she who'd had so much more of him than Pretty ever had.
Still.
It probably got thrown away.
Jeremiah was right. She had been naïve, and in too many ways.
The photograph remained in her mind, and in full-color, even, so it belonged to her in a way no one could ever take from her.
Pretty had her own pride.