Chapter 25 #4
The silence is a roar and the shapes behind my eyes are malevolent, and worse, worst , is the air around me, all over me, because I no longer even have the floor to define myself against.
And there is nothing else—no sight, no sound, no scent nor touch—there is nothing else except for me.
I’m the only one here, and I’m alone.
I try to talk over the shriek of fear. I try to remember that Mark and the others are close by and that this is only going to last an hour.
But I have no idea how much time has passed, and maybe it’s only been five minutes since the headphones were put on, maybe only a minute since I was hoisted up in the air.
I might only be at the beginning…I might have an eternity left to go. An eternity alone.
This is hell , I think suddenly, with an accompanying inhale so jagged that it sends lines of fresh pain along the ropes of my chest harness. This is hell, to be alone, with only your own mind and your own memories, knowing that most of them hold horrors incompatible with sanity.
And that’s what loneliness really, really is.
It’s being alone inside yourself, alone even from yourself, because if your own mind is haunted even for you, how will anyone else ever join you there?
How could you ever trust them to understand?
How could you ever even try? Mark had carefully tugged me to shore after he found me in the garden, but it’s still there, that dark and endless sea, and I’m helpless to fight the tide.
My shredded inhales and half-choked exhales strain the harness, and each one sends pain—deep and also bright, pushing and also sparkling—burning along the lines of the ropes pressing into my back and shoulders.
It’s as if the ropes are soaked in gasoline and every breath is a match brought to the dripping end.
It’s fire and it’s also a bruising crush, the kiss of gravity as the ropes dig into my skin, and it’s fear, and it’s the endless sea all around me and inside me where no one can ever get to me and no one wants to anyway.
I don’t realize I’m crying until the tears start sliding free and catching in the blindfold where it lays against my temples.
The silk grows wet within the span of only a handful of breaths, making it sticky and cold and unbearable, and I can’t rip it off.
I can’t wipe my face. I can’t do anything . I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.
There’s no way I’m not making noises now.
There’s no way that the sawn-off breaths can’t be mistaken for anything other than sobs.
I’m so nerve-scrapingly conscious of the soaked blindfold and the ugly, quivering shapes of my chin.
Of how I must look like an insect caught in a web, helpless and wriggling and pathetic.
But don’t they know the truth too? Don’t they know that no one can come, no one can drive the shadows back, there’s no escape from it?
It’s truly getting hard to breathe now through the tears, and I’m shaking so hard that I’ve started to sway a little, with a queasy rhythm that makes the open air around me seem even more vacant.
All those people I killed…all those bodies I left cooling in alleys or floating down rivers or burning in structure fires…
Mark wasn’t wrong when he said that the world was better off without most of them, but that’s not actually the point, is it?
Because who gets to decide what better off means and for whom?
The Church? The CIA? My husband, driven as he is by a years-long quest for a revenge that only he understands?
Me, who was willing to follow a lie all the way to the end, all the way to a grave I wouldn’t have seen coming?
I sinned against sinners and somehow sinned against myself too, and now I have nothing to hold on to.
My belief in my own righteousness has turned out to be a child’s fantasy; my capacity for love has been spiked all the way through by my gift of annihilation.
I cannot claim to be good. I cannot claim to be faithful. I have nothing left.
But—
But something’s different from the last time I felt this. From the last night of Saturnalia or the garden. Because the loneliness isn’t just an idea, not just a vacancy slowly stealing all light and warmth from my mind.
It has a shape tonight; it has a presence. It’s segmented into unforgiving lengths of red rope. It’s clinging to my face as wet silk. It’s the chilly void of unoccupied air around me.
It’s the crawl of dizziness as I dangle, the silence, the silk. It’s real, and it’s here, and it’s touching me, interacting with me. Holding me even, cradling me as I weep in front of hundreds of people who think the worst thing I’ve ever done is run away with a bodyguard.
Mark has shaped a vessel for the loneliness tonight. He wove it out of rope and covered it in silk and washed it in cool air. He gave it a shape and a feeling, knots and tucks, counterpressure and pain to answer the numb indifference.
How lonely am I? Just look at my skin, at the impressions left behind by the twisted fibers. You can measure it in inches. You can trace it from my feet all the way up to my heart.
You are not allowed to slip through your own fingers, much less mine.
I won’t have it, sweetheart.
How lonely am I? Only as lonely as the person who tied these knots will let me be.
How can I be alone when someone will make the shape of loneliness itself for me, twist and hitch it so that I can put my fingers in its wounds and know that it is real, know that its effects can be felt, know that if it has shape and form, then those shapes and forms can be changed? Diminished? Destroyed?
An answering flood of turbulent but indelible joy.
You are not allowed .
I won’t have it .
It’s that easy. Because somehow Mark has found me in the dark and endless sea. He’s swam from his own and survived. He knows my sins and he knows what those sins feel like to carry, and he still believes in a mustard seed nestled safely under curled fingers.
From this moment on, no more .
I take my first real breath in seven weeks of years, a shock of oxygen to my tormented system, and then somehow manage to take another. And then—a tug. A movement that’s not the micro oscillation of suspension but something more, something deliberate.
Warm hands bend my leg back so that my heel touches my backside, and they are Mark’s hands; I’d know them anywhere.
Long-fingered and lightly calloused, nimble and certain and arrogant.
I pull in a shuddering breath at his touch, so desperate to see and to hear him, and that very same deprivation makes the sensation of his touch almost dire in its intensity.
Quick movements of wraps and knots bind my calf to my thigh, frog-like, and then the same thing happens to my other leg, my weight shifting and moving as the lines are rerun through the hooks.
He threads rope under the place where the harness stretches from hip to hip.
One more adjustment to my chest, and then I become aware that the slow tilt to the side I’ve been feeling has indeed left me sideways in the air.
Pain blooms anew along one side of my ribs and one hip, and endorphins quickly follow, adding to the sparkles, the dizziness.
A hand slides to my waist and holds me as his other finds my breast.
I’m still crying, if more gently now, but the tears don’t stop the arousal rippling out from his touch.
My nipple stiffens, and the soft, private place between my legs—now open to the full view of the club—begins to ache.
I whimper helplessly when I feel him step between my legs, aching to get closer to him and utterly unable to do so.
Hands move to my knees and slide up my thighs, then the same from my waist to my shoulders.
He’s running his palms all over me, everywhere that there’s rope, as if enjoying his handiwork, and after an eon without touch, the sudden glut of it is intoxicating.
I think I might be making noises worse than whimpering—I might be mewling like a kitten—and I dazedly wonder if he’s teasing me for it in that wicked voice of his while I can’t hear anything.
I wonder if he’s talking to the crowd, showing them the mess of miserable, tearful lust I’ve become.
When I feel his thumbs trace the rope running along the crease of my thigh, following the path it makes along the curve of my ass and along the outside of my labia, I’m almost certain he’s talking to the hall.
That he’s showing them the pink haven outlined in red rope, asking them if they can see how slick it is.
He presses a thumb to the swollen point at the top of my cunt, and pleasure zips everywhere, moving as easily through my body as a current through water. I keen.
He tests me with a cursory finger, checking to see if I’m wet enough to take him. There’s some movement; he’s stripping off his vest and shirt, maybe, unfastening his pants. And then at long last, a big hand curls around the harness at my hip and something blunt and hot presses at my waiting hole.
Without sight or sound, I have no warning—and then he plunges straight into me like he’s got an appointment to keep.
The invasion spreads me open and stretches me wide, intent on stealing the precious breath right out of my lungs.
The tendrils of an impending orgasm snake up from my sex to my belly…
already, this soon, with nothing more than two thick strokes.
I must be the perfect height for Mark to fuck, because he grabs the harness around my hips with each hand and begins to pull me into him, meeting me with a searing thrust every time our bodies collide with hard, sparking smacks.
I can’t hear it, but I can feel it: the strength of his arms as he yanks me onto his cock, the glittering slap of his body against my clit.
It’s as if he’s adding his own body to the chalice of loneliness he’s built with rope and silk.
Caging the loneliness in, containing it.
There on my clitoris—the hands curled over my hips—there inside me—both driving back the loneliness and also saying it’s real, it’s real, you didn’t make it up, I see it too, we’ll see it together .
My breathing is matched to the movements of his hands and hips; every slide into my body is more delicious than the last until I wonder how I’ve gone so long without this, why I didn’t walk into Lyonesse three weeks ago, crawl right onto his lap, and help myself.
His fingers find my clitoris again, and he works it with an expert, bossy touch until I’m on the precipice, until every muscle is quivering and every bright line of pain is fused around this one single ache.
Until the entire bruised, slick, trembling, and lonely sum of my existence is a single spark quivering under the demanding strokes of his fingers.
And then right as I’m poised to fall, he reaches up to push off my headphones, which tumble with a clatter below, and he unknots my blindfold.
Without it, I am truly blind under the stage lights for a moment or two, so it’s the sounds that announce themselves first—my own low whimpers, the slippery, smacking noise of penetration, and the cheers and yells of the crowd.
My sight returns in slices of impression, glazed with tears: ocean eyes, golden hair.
A face like a king’s as he cuts down the last of a retreating army on a smoking battlefield—determination, cruelty, triumph.
“I want it, sweetheart.” His bare chest and throat are misted with sweat, and his pants are low around his hips. The black and silver ring flashes on his hand over and over as he pulls me into him. “I want to feel it. Show me that you’re ready to be my little wife once more.”
Oh, the crowd loves that, and I do too, and I can tell myself it’s because I’m dazed and drunk on endorphins and possibly barely conscious, but I know I’d love it wide awake and sober too, and he slams into me just that much harder, caresses my clit just that much faster, and I cease to exist.
The release tears me into pieces and sends me flying in every imaginable direction, racing outward at the speed of light to some unknown destiny.
I can hear screaming, as high and pure as a choir’s, and then I feel unconsciousness swooping down on me with dazzling scintillas and tingling lips and everything but the soul-destroying pleasure of this release disappearing from the world.
My cunt contracts around him, my belly seizing in fierce clenches of ecstasy, and Mark groans too, impaling me with a viciousness that draws my climax on and on, even as my tears spatter on the mat below like rain.
He throws his head back, throat working, shoulders tense, and with a sudden, jerking pulse, he ejaculates, using the harness to keep himself buried as he gives me everything, days and weeks of it, in heavy surges.
It keeps coming, his body still unloading, and the crowd is roaring and the world is shimmering and I’m completely limp save for the aftershocks of my orgasm and then…
His mouth on mine, but barely?—
His erection still hard and slick as he fastens his pants?—
The shush of the ropes as I’m lowered gently?—
Mark’s hands patiently unraveling the rope.
Dinah speaking to the guests, asking them if they liked it, if they approve, if I was indeed found worthy.
The din of approbation, the cheers as Dinah slyly asks them what they thought of Mark, the thrum of music and the shifting of the lights as the hall begins to dissolve into hedonism as we all whirl closer to the new year.
The curtains close as Mark slides the last of the rope from my limbs. He massages my wrists and arms, helps me straighten my legs. Methodically checks my fingers and toes for feeling. I murmur that I can feel everything and then close my eyes for just a moment, just for the next breath or two…
When I open them, we’re in a playroom, one of the ones on the top floor with an interior window overlooking the hall. We’re in an armchair, and I’m curled in Mark’s arms. A soft, soft blanket is tucked around me. Mark’s lips are in my hair.
“You did so well, Mrs. Trevena,” he’s murmuring. His hands echo his praise, soothing my shoulders and back and legs. “You were so brave, so good. Such a sweet little penitent.”
There’s a knock, Mark saying come in , and then hesitant footsteps as the door swings shut again.
“You shouldn’t be up here,” my husband says calmly.
“I couldn’t stay away,” Tristan replies.
Mark’s arms tighten around me as he draws a quivering, gut-deep breath. “Good.”