20. Love and Loathing in Los Angeles #2
I had shifted around to face him by then. I slid my legs to either side of his hips and accidentally nudged the needle he’d used to administer my “vitamins,” whatever those were, with my knee. I lowered myself carefully so that every curve of me brushed every frozen inch of him.
And when I felt his breath catch, I leaned in close, my lips to his lips, and repeated it one more time: “I’ll survive it.”
“Oh my god, Anya,” he said hoarsely. Then he kissed me hard, one hand rising up to grip a handful of my hair.
The shock of thrill still hadn’t left me.
It soared up through the places we were touching, all the places he hadn’t yet touched.
The kiss itself was hasty, like any moment we could both wake from a dream, and reality, the darkness of a room in ruins, bled into fantasy with the taste of ash.
A hot gasp of fire season that danced on both our tongues.
“You have to promise you won’t come back,” he muttered. One hand was on my cheek, the other still tangled in my hair. He’d tightened his fingers so hard it hurt, a sharp sting of pain, a wrench of my neck. “You can’t come back.”
I didn’t say anything. I rolled my hips and dipped my head lower, or tried to. The hand around my cheek slipped until it caught me by the jaw.
“Listen to me.”
His grip was unmercifully tight, an obvious form of punishment. “Let go of me, Jude.”
“This isn’t funny. Do not come back here.”
My heart raced, and not with desire this time. I looked in the monster’s eyes and dared him to test me, to try me. To defy me.
My breathing had gotten shorter, more ragged.
I brought one hand lower, finding the button of his jeans and flicking it open.
I watched his lips part as I slid my thumb under the waistband of his boxers, adjusting our positions until I held him in my hand.
He watched me, I could feel him waiting, the terms of our détente unknown.
Then I dragged a nail down the underside of his cock and he released my throat with a spasm of submission, or something close enough to it. He said my name with an air of reprimand, more of a snarl than anything, and jerked my head back again, this time to run his teeth along my neck.
I gave a little punitive twist of my hips, a slip of a bitter sigh. “Stop telling me what to do.”
“I could kill you.” His hand had shifted, his palm fitting around the back of my head. Cradling it. “I could do it, and no one would stop me.”
“Then do it.” I pulled away, just far enough that there was opportunity in the space between us. For what, though, neither of us seemed completely sure. “If that’s the end you see for us, then do it.”
I watched him watch me. I saw his eyes falling carefully on all my vitals—the visible thudding of my chest, the pulse at my neck.
I wondered what he saw when he looked at me, whether it was something to be put to use, to be made to obey.
Could it be love if it was rotten, if it was twisted from the start?
He could hurt me, I knew he could. I wouldn’t have followed him all the way down if I hadn’t suspected there was danger lurking somewhere shallow, alongside the version of him that toed the edge of death.
But he wouldn’t. A stupid thing to trust, the idea that he could want me like something precious—until he leaned forward, falling into me.
Until he rested his lips on the slats of my ribs and turned his head like he could hear it.
Like he could put his ear directly to the chorus of desire in my heart.
I pulled away and slipped off my jeans. I left them crumpled on the floor, then stood and waited.
Jude shifted around until he faced me on his knees.
With his head hung low he could have been prayerful, or just purely at my mercy.
He nudged me backward until my hips collided with something, a half-charred table that had been covered with a thick, scratchy canvas, like a drop cloth used for painting.
He bent his head to my stomach and sighed into the fabric of my underwear, a warmth that shot directly through me.
He kissed me, then ran the flat of his tongue along the fraying lace.
I thought of all the mundanity I’d known before I met him.
All the things I’d considered a waste of time except for the ways that they could serve me.
The characters I’d written for myself, all with the same primary colors, the universal feminine base.
The good girl, the moral girl, the logical girl.
The girl who saw the devil coming and turned sensibly away.
The flat of his tongue pressed against me and I shivered, that thrill of cold finding me in all my darkest places, rancid rot and decaying ash, like stepping deeper into hell each time I let my demon hold me.
Could I Survive It? The game had warped so far beyond recognition since I first played it, to the point where all the questions I used to ask no longer had answers, and I no longer cared.
Why must I be defined by the metrics of goodness, just because some invisible direction made demands?
Because the context by which I lived had given me so few roles to play?
Had I mistakenly equated barbarity with ugliness, when really carnality was sensuality, when everything important was felt bodily, experienced somewhere intestinally, that new-old twist of hate and rage and fear and love?
He shifted me, played with me, arranged me, and I thought again of the unnatural positions of the Santa Ana women, the corpses whose bodies had been mutilated and displayed.
I knew then, sharply, inescapably, and with Jude’s mouth on the slick heat of my cunt, that he hadn’t done it for his own pleasure.
The way those bodies were arranged had been designed for pain, they were left in positions of torment, they were reviled and displayed as if to finally reveal their ugliness, the truth of their littleness, indignity itself.
Bent by some invisible hand of mastery, someone’s broken toy.
But as Jude contorted me, bent me, twisted me, I saw through his eyes nothing but beauty, the sheer terror of belonging and sex.
The desire to be closer, to divest the concept of a single, solitary self.
I tasted me on his tongue and understood those contortions of death were depictions of control, of someone else’s hatred—not of sex, not even hateful sex.
This monster could love, and he fucked me accordingly.
He lost himself in me like he could leave it there, bury it inside me, for no one else to find.
The ugliness rendered divine by shared ownership; by the things I could, and did, look in the eye.
There was a monster in this house. But if it was the thing that lived in Jude, then I could master it.
I could bend it to my will. He was mine, mine, mine.
I felt the rhythm of him filling me, driving me to madness—specific madness, the oldest kind.
Devotion that underwrote vengeance, longing that lived in every form of grief.
Capitulation in the sacrament of joining, baseness that predetermined every sin.
I’d wanted to fuck the demon and so I did.
Pleasure was inseverable from agony, from anguish.
I thought of all the sinners in every painting, the way the faces of torment looked like the throes of ecstasy, the way true angels looked like monsters—impossible to look upon without the presence of horror, staring unworthily into the face of divine.
When we parted, I knew it was just beginning—that it was pain I wanted after all.
I wanted him to hurt me, to ruin me, to rewrite me so completely that I was unrecognizable as the woman I’d been at the start.
I hadn’t known a character to feel this way, and so it was one of my own making, my singular deliverance.
I craved this feeling of peril, impalement on my own inevitability.
Something I couldn’t outsmart or outrun.
What I wanted was to feel so deeply I couldn’t be defined without it. I wanted to suffer like the saints, to find ferocity inside of me for something. To know that rapture on this earth existed for me, which I’d gladly face death rather than live without.
He gave me that.
“Don’t come back.” He said it to me while I cried out in his mouth, another kind of prayer.
But he must have known I wasn’t listening—that I wouldn’t listen.
That he would have to caution me some other way.
Getting me out of the house unseen wasn’t an issue.
The villa was large and full of squirreled away holes, crumbling foundations.
A palace built on the wreckage that predated it, a palimpsest of what money could buy.
I didn’t ask myself until later why it had been so easy, why nothing had stood in my way—at the time it felt secretive, clever, covert.
With Jude’s help, under the cover of darkness, we pushed my car as far from the house as we could in neutral and then I snuck out like a thief in the night.
The danger wasn’t in the escaping. It came after I kissed his raw mouth and made my way home. When I woke in the indigo hours of morning to find Tita Linda standing over me, one finger on my lips.
In the courtyard of our building, resting on the fountain, was the body of Emmanuelle de Witt. Her eyes were open and glassy, her lips parted as if to relay a message. The slash across her neck left stains behind, cascading, a death that was decorative, ornate.
Inside her bisected torso, someone had covered her organs in what looked to be some kind of festering black ash until we later realized what it was.
Mold.
Even from afar, I felt a shiver. A fever flush that carried on the wind.