Chapter 4 #2
The patio door opened and Corrine walked out.
She stared at us a moment, breath steaming from her nostrils like a medieval beast, and then she made a flicking gesture to Henry, and when he didn’t move, she groaned with impatience that he didn’t understand.
“Your lighter,” she said. “Can I borrow it?”
“Say please,” Henry told her.
Corrine laughed. “I’m not Bear.” She turned to me. “You know he tells her she’s not allowed to eat.”
That was one of the things I had heard, yes.
“That’s weird,” Corrine told me, with an ugly widening of her eyes.
Even if I did think it was weird, which wasn’t what I was thinking, wasn’t the tight feeling wrapping itself around my rib cage, I wouldn’t give Corrine the satisfaction of an alignment.
She was in and out of this house a lot too, on account of dating Campbell, and we’d sat together on the couch for movie night at least ten times since the fall of our freshman year.
This was the most she’d ever spoken to me.
“It’s none of my business,” I said.
“He would handcuff her to things and leave her there. You’ve got to think that’s weird,” Corrine emphasized, like she was giving me one last chance to distinguish myself from the freaks.
I shrugged. Not really. Not at all, actually.
“Okay, then,” Corrine said with one of her more terrifying smiles. “Don’t want to be near this.” She turned and walked back into the house.
“Your teeth are chattering,” Henry said to me.
We went upstairs and into the guest bedroom, where twelve years later I would watch Henry argue with his wife in the garden at dusk. In the en suite bathroom I shimmied out of my stretch jeans, sat down, and peed in front of him like we’d been married for thirty years.
I flushed the toilet and washed my hands in hot water.
Henry was using his thumb and index finger to flick the rocks in whatever substance the local Canandaigua dealer had filched from his laundry room and passed off as a sixty-dollar stimulant.
He came up behind me and floated a small pile under one of my nostrils.
I plugged the other and sniffed, threw my head back the way they do in the movies.
It was an overperformance and I wobbled a little.
Henry caught me around the waist, and for a few moments we stood like a couple at a concert, swaying sweetly to the overtly sexual rap song playing downstairs.
I put my hand on his wrist and stared at the two of us center frame in the glass.
I could see that Henry was nervous, that we were moments away from an escalation, and normally I did not like vulnerability in the men I was with.
I liked to be railroaded, dominated, to feel like I was in brutal and capable hands.
But Henry refined all that. Taught me that nothing made me feel more alive than being degraded by someone who also happened to worship me.
I pushed down on his wrist, squirmed my hips needily. Henry had dipped his head, smelled my hair, pressed his erection into my lower vertebrae. Is that what you like? he asked, and I knew he was referring to the conversation downstairs, to all the things I’d heard he’d done to Bear.
I nodded and Henry looked at me in the mirror and said, Okay, with a quiet kind of resignation I still think about.
He hooked a finger in the strap just barely holding up my little going-out top and removed it from my shoulder, put his lips on my skin.
I had that look on my face, the one that embarrasses me—sleepy, sexed—and I’d closed my eyes so I wouldn’t have to see.
Henry gave my cheek one hard pat. Some girls might have called it a slap.
“Watch,” he said in a new, formidable tone, and then he pressed his thumb into my chin so that I had to see the change come over my face the moment he slipped his hand into my underwear and covered me whole.
He squeezed me, and in the mirror I looked melted, like my eyes and ears might slip off my skin.
I sank down into his fingers, settled in like a cat on the warm engine of a car. We exhaled, hard and in unison.
“Put your hands on the mirror for me?” he said, somewhat politely, and it is the care with which he asked me to humiliate myself that remains one of my most precious souvenirs from our time together.
For him, for Henry, I braced myself on the mirror at the same angle as a strip search, and, less politely, Henry told me to fuck his hand so he could see what I liked, hear what kinds of sounds I made.
He stood behind me, motionless, the palm of his hand curled warmly around my pussy, watching me grunt and rub on him with a manic focus on my face.
It was ugly, desperate work I would lick a public toilet seat to do again.
When I came I bent deeply at the waist, like I was sinking into a curtsy before the queen.
After a while I became aware that I was no longer supporting myself.
Henry was holding me upright, balancing the entirety of my body weight with his fingers still inside of me.
I was making a pitiful noise and he shushed me then.
He told me I was okay. He said he knew what to do to me now and I would never have to do anything like that again. It was a lie. I made sure of it.