by Tabitha King
He muttered a curse and went into the bathroom. She heard him rummaging in the medicine cabinet and drawers. She peeked over the edge of the towel and saw him in the mirror. He was staring at the top shelf of the medicine cabinet. Studying the pattern of rings left in the dust by all the little bottles that weren’t there anymore.
She groped frantically in one sock, and hooked out the first thing she felt, a biggish tablet—a Percodan, she thought—and got it into her mouth and swallowed it, along with tiny shards of broken teeth, real and ceramic. She buried her mouth in the hand towel.
He came back, tugging a foil-wrapped package from his sleeve. When he ripped the foil away, she saw it was a baggie two-thirds full of white powder. The coke he had been talking about.
“Open your mouth,” he ordered.
She shrank away from him. He snatched the towel from her, flung it away, and made a grab for her chin. She rolled away from him. He took the baggie between his teeth to free both his hands and tackled her. The bed rocked with his weight as he threw himself across it and pinned her, first with his body, and then with one hand by the neck. He simply choked her until her vision darkened and she stopped struggling. Then he straddled her on his knees and took the baggie out of his mouth. He tipped a small quantity of coke into the palm of one hand and thrust the fingers of the other hand into her mouth over her split lips to spread the powder roughly over her torn gums and broken teeth. The immediate sensation of numbness from the cocaine stilled in her any desire to resist, had she the strength to do so.
“Ouch,” he said, and pulled his fingers out. “Fuck, cut my finger on something.” His fingers were smeared with blood from her lips, and pink-tinged spittle. “Open up,” he ordered. He stared into her mouth. “Nasty. Jagged ends.”
Rand dipped his fingertips in his palm and powdered her lips.
“There,” he said. He snorted the rest of the powder. He rolled off her and lay next to her. “Ahh, that’s good shit.”
Liv was a little dizzy. The pain in her mouth was still there, glazed with the numbness of the coke. The strange sensation of the coke combined with the Percodan, perhaps, just now going to work, was loosening her focus on the here and now. This is an interesting thing that is happening to me, she thought. On the outside, she was just the same: Liv, naked inside her clothes, clay-stained fingers, sore jaw and aching mouth, bleeding slowly onto the handmade quilt that covered her bed, but she could feel the ends of each and every hair on her head, and see the insides of her eyelids and feel her tongue swollen and numb in her mouth. There was a bitter, chalky taste at the back of her throat. When she opened her eyes, they would not focus. She closed them again.
“Sorry about that,” he said. It was not an apology; he felt not the slightest remorse for the damage he had done her. His only regret was the damage he had done to the completion of his own fantasies about the woman’s mouth. “You know, you’re your own worst enemy.”
“Huh,” Liv responded. She knew who her worst enemy was all right. It was just too much trouble to make her bruised throat and jaw say so.
“You oughta have a toot,” Rand said. The bed shifted as he sat up. She heard him opening the baggie again and inhaling. Then he hovered over her again, getting an arm under her head, lifting her up. She opened her eyes and glared at him and tried to make herself heavy. He shoved his palm into her face and yanked her head back. Some of the coke simply wafted over her face, and she felt it as numbing little prickles on her skin. But most of it was drawn into her nasal passages by her own instinctive inhalation. The bitter chalky taste was in the back of her throat again. She gagged a little, and then sneezed.
Rand laughed and released her.
“Feel better?” he asked.
She did. She felt distinctly weird, but she also felt quite a lot better. She was suddenly very conscious of the snow pattering against the windows and the house creaking against a raging wind. I’m all alone, she thought. There’s no escape. Panic flared hotly under her breastbone, and died away quickly. Everything was all perfectly clear and real.
She watched Rand get up and go into the bathroom again. He came out with paper cups from the bathroom dispenser and tipped wine from the jug into them.
“No,” she said, and raised a weak hand to fend off the cup he offered her.
“Suit yourself,” he said.
He climbed back onto the bed and sat cross-legged. “Now where’s the stuff that was in the medicine cabinet?”
Liv laughed. “What stuff?” she said.
Rand emptied the tiny cup and reached for the jug again. “You know. The stuff you hid.”
Liv opened her eyes wide. She shook her head. “Didn’t hide an’thin’,” she said slowly. Talking hurt. Her lips were swollen. She pretended to think about it. “Maybe he,” with a wave toward the living room to indicate Ricky, “kep’ it.”
Rand glared. “The dirty little bastard,” he muttered. “He might have.” He looked at her. “He won’t for long. What the fuck was it?”
Liv furrowed her brow. “Don’ know,” she said. “Din’ know about it.”
“Yeah,” said Rand, “but I’ll bet you did.”
Liv tried to smile but it hurt too much. “No.”
Rand scratched behind his ear. She hoped he would decide to confront Ricky right away. She might have a chance to get the pills out of her socks and hide them again before he was sure Ricky didn’t have them. It would be okay with her if they killed each other over it. Just so long as they didn’t wake Travis up.
But Rand had other things on his mind. He reached over and fingered the collar of her shirt.
“I can take care of my punk brother anytime,” Rand said. “Right now I feel like a little loving.”
She wriggled away from him.
He laughed and emptied his paper cup again. “That’s right. Skitter away. Only one thing I like better than chasing. Just remember when I decide I’m done chasing, you’re done skittering.”
She drew a deep breath and propped herself up on her elbows. “No,” she protested furiously. She made a further effort, though it hurt like hell. “Can’t get no through your dope-stewed head?”
Rand laughed again. “I ain’t the only dope-stewed head around here.” He took out the baggie and waved it under her nose. “ ‘Nother toot, O-liv-i-a?”
She turned her face away. “No.”
“More for me,” Rand said, and put a pinch in one nostril, as if he were taking snuff. He resealed the baggie and tucked it up his sleeve again. Then he leaned over and took her by the throat and slammed her flat on the mattress.
The force of his hand cut her off in mid-scream. She thrashed upward, and was driven down again, with one brutal thrust of Rand’s arm.
“Now listen, O-liv-i-a,” he said, as she lay there gasping, “you’re gonna move your ass. This is gonna be the best I ever had, or I’ll put that kid of yours out into the storm tonight. He’ll go real well out there in his cute little Doctor Dentons, with a skinful of tranks, won’t he?”
With that he let her go and rolled off the bed.
She needed to breathe deeply, but every breath she took shook and sobbed, revealing how badly he had succeeded in frightening her. Fear and humiliation provoked hate, and a violent rush of adrenaline that only made the trembling worse. She hated him for threatening Travis, for using her child against her, with the bitter recognition that it was always and ever so. Women could always be trapped simply by trapping their children. He had defeated her. And in defeat, in fear and hate and anger, Liv found, or so she thought, the strength of the loser. She would teach Rand Nighswander the power of the slave. He wanted her to move her ass, give him the best he ever had. She didn’t think it would be hard to be the best this backwoods barbarian, coupling with drunken teenage girls and bar bags, had ever had. He wanted fucking. She would fuck him silly, if she couldn’t fuck him to death.
Rand removed the baggie of coke and his cigarettes and matches from one sleeve of his sweater, and put the
m on the nightstand. He took the gun and the box of ammunition from the other sleeve and considered them. He put them in his jeans pocket. He hauled the sweater over his head, and tossed it onto the floor. Then he went into the bathroom.
Liv heard him unzip his pants, and the sound of his making water. He flushed the toilet and came back, with his jeans still unzipped.
“My little brother,” Rand said, “ain’t house-broke, you know. You oughta be glad it ain’t him. He’d be pissing on you.”
Liv turned her face away, pretending to be disgusted. She didn’t want Rand to see that the Percodan or the coke or both were getting to her. She felt like she was falling, like a dead leaf from a tree, floating randomly on currents of air. She felt a flutter of panic; she didn’t want to lose control.
He went back into the bathroom, rummaged in a drawer again.
“Turn over,” he said, when he came back. He had a roll of white adhesive in one hand, the gun in the other.
Liv was too paralyzed by drug-induced confusion to respond. While she struggled to anchor her senses, Rand misread her hesitation as fear.
He grinned. “Christ, you got a dirty mind, O-liv-i-a. Your old man must be a real freak. Well, I ain’t. That back door stuff makes a man feeble-minded.”
Finally, it sank in. He was telling her he wasn’t going to sodomize her. She was immediately light-headed again, partly from the dope, but also from real relief, and unexpected amusement that he was reassuring her of his righteousness on the subject of anal rape. Not that she wasn’t thankful. She was, she’d be an idiot not to be. Rape was rape, but its variations hardly more bearable. Carefully, she rolled over.
“Turn your face away and put your head down,” Rand said.
She did as she was told.
She heard the thunk of the gun against wood. The frame of the bed, she thought. Rand ripped tape from the roll. He grunted over his task.
“Okay,” he said.
When she looked up, he no longer had the gun or ammo. He dropped the tape on the nightstand. He had taped the weapon to the bed frame, beyond her immediate reach or sight.
“Not that I don’t trust you, O-liv-i-a,” he said. “I don’t.”
Rand began to strip. She turned her face away again and listened to the rattle of his jeans, the soft wump as they met the carpet.
She felt rather than saw his nakedness as he climbed onto the bed and touched her arm.
“Look at me,” he said.
Seeing him naked she realized what had always seemed familiar about him. The narcissistic quality of the male model. One of those stunning square-jawed, muscled young men in the glossy ads for Strohs, or Pall Malls, or Paco Rabanne. In the world of ads, the muscle had something to do with hard hats, cowboy hats, or a toga of tangled sheets in an arty-looking loft in some big city. It was an implicitly and sometimes explicitly heterosexual world, though she always felt, looking at them, that the models were more than likely in love with their gym instructors or themselves. Real construction workers had beer guts, real cowboys had skin like leather and lungs to match and cowshit or horseshit on the heels of their boots, and the missing tagline of the cozy sexy conversation between the handsome Mr. Goodbar in the fucked-over bed and last night’s pickup on the phone was Hot Shot telling Hot Pants that she might have his Paco Rabanne, but she had also his herpes.
It was easy to imagine Rand Nighswander lifting weights in front of a mirror. He was hairy for a blond man, his chest matted with curly reddish hair, and his armpits and groin heavily tufted. His penis, already half-erect, was large and uncircumcised. Idly, unconsciously, his hand drifted to it and tugged it.
She noted all of that, and felt sick to her stomach. It was not that he smelled of old sweat, or that there was that disturbing narcissism, though she was repelled by those factors. It came down to an utter absence of desire for him, and that made the thought of sex with him nauseating. Pat had been her sole lover for all the years of their marriage. Intimacy with this man, forced or not, devalued her intimacy with Pat in a way that she felt physically. It was an invasion that made her understand for the first time what that word meant.
He fumbled at the buttons on her shirt. She pushed his hand away.
“Undress myself,” she said. “Bathroom, firs’.”
He settled back. “Yeah.” He reached for his cigarettes. “Leave the door open.”
She pushed herself past him and stumbled off the bed. He clenched his teeth around the butt in his mouth and laughed. She caught herself and groped her way into the bathroom.
Not fighting the combination of drugs permitted her to be clumsy in untangling herself from her clothes. Making a certain amount of noise and staggering around the bathroom at convenient points, she was able to keep the pills inside her socks as she slipped them off, and rolled them together. It seemed like a good idea to pop another pill while she had the opportunity, and she was too befuddled and in too much haste to be bothered figuring out just what it was she swallowed. She tucked the socks into the pocket of the terry cloth bathrobe she had left hanging on the hook on the back of the door.
Once naked she was immediately cold. Shivering, she hugged herself once, held her head up and her spine straight, and left the shelter of the bathroom.
Rand looked her over calmly and grunted. He patted the bed on the other side of him.
She approached the bed with all the dignity she could muster and managed not to stumble or weave once. Then she realized she was going to be forced to crawl over him, that he had deliberately not moved over to make room for her. She blushed violently and started around the bed, to get onto it from the other side. Rand grabbed her by the elbow and jerked her back.
“Just climb over me,” he said.
She glared at him, but, of course, she didn’t have any choice anymore. She put a knee to the edge of the mattress and bent over Rand, reaching for the bed beyond him.
He waited until her butt was over him and slapped it. “Hooraw!”
Liv yelped and jumped, tumbling over him.
He lay back, grinning, and took a last draw on his cigarette. He dropped it in the paper cup of wine that Liv had refused. It sizzled, and the air was briefly perfumed with the smell of hot cheap wine. He passed a hand over the arc of his penis and rolled over her, grinding himself into her belly. His breath in her face stank of the cigarette.
She turned her face away and gritted her back teeth. Placing her hands on the small of his back, she traced the swell of his butt. Her touch seemed to electrify him. He stopped grinding against her.
“Relax,” she said into his left ear. It was dirty.
He pulled back and stared at her.
She passed the ball of one thumb over his left nipple, then rolled the nipple between thumb and forefinger.
He gasped. “Yeah,” he said. “Do that again.”
She wondered sardonically what he thought male nipples were for—symmetry? She pinched both nipples very hard. He loved it. His penis against her thigh went prodigiously hard and he moaned. He shoved his hand between her thighs and separated them, and immediately drove his penis into her. It hurt.
She cried out and tried to lift herself away from him, pushing down on his shoulders, and twisting her body, trying to get out from under him. He pinned her by the shoulders and continued to force himself into her, though he was abrading his own organ against her resisting flesh. He would not really feel the damage he was doing himself until after, when his nerve ends were no longer deadened by his own tumescence. Liv’s flailing hands found the hair of his head; she yanked a handful of it hard enough to make him yelp. He hauled back and slapped her once, hard enough to nearly knock her out. Then he heaved back and drove into her again, releasing her shoulders long enough to seize her wrists and pin them to the pillows.
“Move your ass, cunt,” Rand shouted at her.
For an instant, Liv could do nothing. He was hurting her, he was inside her, fucking her, tearing her. He was raping her. Nothing she had ever read or hear
d or imagined had prepared her in any way for the reality of rape. Beyond the physical sensations, she felt nothing, she was paralyzed. Terror, anger, and the strength of her own muscles drained out of her. The nothing that was left was despair. At that instant, the idea of fucking him to death was an unbearable joke on her. He was shouting at her, shouting filthy degrading things about what he was going to do to her, what a terrible fuck she was. She felt the trickle of hot tears dripping over her cheeks before she knew she was crying.
Then she was terribly dizzy again, and she thought she was fainting, but she did not. Her perceptions suddenly cleared and became sharper. She could see the skylight over his shoulder. When the house was heated, the glass stayed warm enough so snow falling on it melted and trickled away. Even when the house was unheated or it stormed hard enough to allow the snow to accumulate, as soon as the sun shone again, the heat of the sun, intensified by passing through the crystals of snow, warmed the glass, so the melting plaque of snow slipped off it and onto the roof, sometimes suddenly, and all at once, sometimes in large pieces. But tonight, the window glass was like the glass in a framed picture of snow, not falling snow, but snow packed and solid as if in a wall, a slice into a snowbank. The lights in the bedroom twinkled off the crystals of snow on the other side of the glass, gleaming like the satin lining in a coffin. But there was blackness beyond it. It was the negative of the sunny day. The cold of the night multiplied through the layered crystal snow and chilled the glass. She felt cold and naked then, and curiously calm, as if she had already died.
Rand’s weight was on her. She was intensely aware of his body, the fresh sweat over old sweat over old tobacco smell of it, the texture of hair and skin, his panting. She concentrated on feeling him inside her.
You asked for it, she thought. You bastard.
And then she tightened her vaginal muscles.
He hesitated. She squeezed again. He stopped.
“You doing that on purpose?” he asked.
She kept her face turned away from him, and squeezed again, setting up a rhythm. “Movin’,” she said. “You wan’ed it.”