“Let’s never stop, ok?” he proposed.
“That’s my nightmare – I mean, my dream,” she gasped.
“This is one hell of a rope-a-dope you’re trying to pull off here,” he said, a few minutes later.
“At a minimum, I’m going to ruin you for straightforward rape,” she taunted him. “You may actually become addicted to the pleasures of consensual sex. Ha. Ha.”
“Ha. Ha,” he agreed, then slapped her across her still-swollen face. She flinched back and caught her breath. But she didn’t take the bait; she clamped her mouth shut and acted as if it had not happened. He just smiled and nuzzled his head against her neck then, in post-orgasmic affection.
“Keep dreaming, angel. If you keep being such a good girl, I’ll let you suck my cock again,” he murmured, and held her tight.
Suck my cock. Three little words. How many times had she been thrilled to hear those short, harsh syllables, sometimes in a tone of faux-brutal command, other times softly, even pleadingly. Those had been the sounds of love. Back in the real world. The lost world. She could still remember. The authoritative tone in her husband’s voice, underlain with just a hint of desperation. He needed her to do it. It was an order, but he was ordering something only she could provide. Proof of her love.
What made the difference between pleasure and pain? Choice. Will. Said by the wrong person, they became words of hate. Ugly words.
All the things that he was doing to her had been bliss once. Long ago.
Rape was the strangest crime of all. All the fundamental acts that make for a rape (not the threatening or the beating that may surround it), if carried out under other circumstances, would be a pleasure, not a pain. There is no other crime like that. If someone takes your money or your car, or shoots you or stabs you, it’s not a question of the circumstances that makes what happened a net negative. Was that what gave rape its reputation as the fate worse than death, as the most fearsome of crimes? Because people could somehow confuse the act with
your
intentions? Or was it that there was something about someone going
inside
you, against your will, invading not just your house or your car, but your most private, secret, personal place, that was so different?
Was it because it was your body? A body that the rapist, by possessing you despite what you wanted, had, in the most fundamental way possible, taken from you. Tearing from you that which you once owned more than you could ever own any mere, external … item.
The body. The body that was once hers as much as her own. Her son. Gone. She couldn’t touch him anymore. Think of the thousands of times she had laid her hands upon him. Torn away from her body. Leaving a world bled dry of all color, of all meaning, of all consequence. She had always been able to reach out and touch him. Maybe not always. Maybe there had been a before-time, before him. But she didn’t remember it. Now all there was was the after. When she couldn’t touch him anymore. Couldn’t snuggle, cuddle, rub, hold, caress, pinch, grab, or stroke. The lingua franca of mother and child. What did it matter what touched her now? She couldn’t feel it. Not really. On some superficial level, perhaps. But not inside, not where it mattered.
We own nothing, she knew now. Nothing that we can keep.
“How do you keep from feeling ashamed?” he asked sometime later.
He was throwing some of the grapes he’d found in her refrigerator toward her mouth in hopes that she would catch them, like a seal. He would not allow her to use her hands, which he had cuffed behind her for a while. He liked watching her breasts bounce as she jumped up a little each time in her efforts to catch the grapes in her mouth. They bounced nicely even when she missed, which was most of the time.
“Didn’t you ever do this with nuts and stuff when you were a child?” he asked.
“No. I never played with my food,” she replied, trying to concentrate on the tiny, flying fruit. “And it’s a choking hazard.”
“That would be an ignominious way to go after all this, wouldn’t it?” He laughed and tossed her another one.
She had managed to avoid his first question, so he asked it again.
“Embarrassment, humiliation, degradation? These are not physical pains,” she said, ducking her head to avoid the grape fusillade for a moment. “They only exist in the mind, right? And only if you accept their legitimacy.”
“Maybe,” he said, cautiously.
“I know a woman,” she said, “with autism. And you know what? She cannot be embarrassed. It doesn’t exist for her.”
“But you’re not autistic.”
“I know, but isn’t that fascinating? She never feels embarrassed. She does feel plenty of other things that are unpleasant, but not that. Embarrassment is a pact between a group that says some things are shameful and that if you do them, you should be ashamed and if you don’t, then you don’t have to feel that feeling. But she made me realize that you don’t have to (or in some cases can’t) accept the pact. If you’re doing something to me that I can’t control, why would I feel anything but anger?”
“Because people don’t operate on that level only.”
She shook her head.
“No, they don’t,” he said. “You act as though if you think something, you can make it apply to you. But things like shame and guilt are injected into you long before you’re capable of analyzing them.”
“I didn’t say they weren’t. But once you know better, you can train yourself not to feel those things.”
“Can you?”
“I think you can,” she said. He threw another grape, and she caught it. “Ah-hah!” she said, in victory. He reached over and pulled the grape out of her mouth.
“No fair,” she said, with a frown.
“No, it isn’t,” he said. And put it in his own.
He stroked his chin to indicate thinking was going on.
“So you’re saying nothing I do can degrade you. No matter how disgusting.”
“Not as long as I focus on the fact that it’s beyond my control.”
“And what about when you describe these things to the police?”
“Am I supposed to recite every single thing you’ve done, in this hypothetical police interview?”
“Yes, that’s what a statement consists of. Everything. You’d be totally comfortable with that?”
“Sure.”
“Honestly? Take a minute.”
She did. “I think they’d be embarrassed when I was telling it to them. And, to be fair, they’d probably think there was something terribly wrong with me if I was totally matter-of-fact about it, and then they wouldn’t be as sympathetic as I’d like. So I guess I would pretend to be at least a little upset and embarrassed. But I wouldn’t really be.”
He leaned back and looked at her. “You’re still in the midst of trying to psych me out, and you’re already planning how you’re going to manipulate the police?”
She smiled. “You’re the one who brought the subject up. You made me think about it. I can’t help figuring out what I’d do to get what I want. Which, of course, would be you in prison. How amusing would that be?”
“It is funny to think about because I know that will never happen,” he said with a smirk.
“Really? How?”
“Jail I could do, briefly, if I needed to. But if I ever was sentenced to prison for something, I’d never go.”
“I didn’t know it was up to you.”
“Like you, with your murderous child, I also believe there are certain situations where suicide is appropriate. If I couldn’t successfully flee.”
“But this is all purely academic.”
“Of course.”
“So, you’re not tough enough for prison,” she said nastily.
This time he punched her. In the stomach. Not as hard as he could have, but not softly either. She bent over, gagging.
“That’s not it,” he answered, ignoring her distress. “And you know that. For me, life is for enjoying, not enduring, not surviving. What’s the point, if I’m not having fun? And anyway, I’d either have to kill or be killed the first day because I wouldn’t take anybody’s shit.”
She couldn’t let him see her fear, how every time he hit her, she lost a little confidence in her ability to play this game, to pretend he couldn’t change the rules on her, to avoid acknowledging that bad as this was, there were so many ways it could be worse, perhaps beyond what she could take.
She managed to speak, if hoarsely. “You would find it, what, embarrassing, maybe humiliating, to be raped, to be butt-fucked in prison?”
“Hey,” he said, undisturbed. “You don’t know what I do for fun when I’m not doing this.”
“Yeah, right. I doubt that.” She was still breathing heavily from the trauma. “Or why don’t you let me do it to you, with one of your toys?”
He couldn’t help smiling at her efforts. “I actually think that sounds entertaining. But it will never happen. Because I’d never turn my back on you.”
“I’m cuffed. What could I do?”
“I’m not interested in finding out.”
“I can’t believe you don’t trust me after what I’ve done for you.” She couldn’t wipe the tears from her eyes, so she ignored them.
He chuckled. “You do know how to make me laugh. You really do.”
“Well then my life has not been in vain.”
He smiled at her, took her breasts in his hands and kissed them.
“I’m curious about this humiliation thing,” he said. “You really wouldn’t mind doing any of the things I could force you to do?”
“I didn’t say that. If those things are icky, I’ll hate them. But I won’t accept that I’ve been humiliated.”
“Hmmm. Let’s see.”
She groaned. He frowned. “Damn,” he said. “I can’t really think of anything we haven’t already done. Outside of the realm of shit–which just isn’t my cup of tea, not being German. Although,” he paused. “This isn’t really gross, but you haven’t done it for me, and I’d like to see you do it.”
“What?”
“Masturbate yourself for me.”
She looked distressed for a moment. He raised an eyebrow.
“No?”
“No,” she said. “I’d love to.” She was determinedly cheerful.
“Use this,” he suggested, handing her a tiny vibrator, after switching her cuffs from behind her to in front.
“Now?” she asked.
“Now,” he said, calling her bluff.
She pressed the tiny buzzing cylinder all over the front of her body, keeping her eyes closed. He leaned back and watched with pleasure as she held it against her clit.
“Take your time,” he said.
She nodded slightly and moved it back and forth slowly. It actually did take her a while. He wasn’t sure if it was in fact, harder for her to do than she claimed, if she was still feeling too much pain in her gut, or if she just didn’t come so easily this way. But she did ultimately. Not a very big one. But definitive. He stuck his finger inside her as she did to be sure it was real. His other hand was on himself.
He looked like he was about to head into her, when she shook her head and said, “Now you.”
He raised an eyebrow again. “Really? You’d like to see that?”
“Yes,” she said.
“As you wish.” He kept one finger in her while he jerked himself off with his other hand. It didn’t take him long at all. He ejaculated all over her breasts when he was finished.