Mercy (20 page)

Chapter Nine: Dinner

I walked home from
Pietro’s
studio bawling my eyes out. Blocks and blocks along city sidewalks, but no one stopped me to ask if I was all right, which was just as well, because I’m not sure how I could have explained to them. When I got home, I crawled into bed.

I pulled myself together for work the next afternoon. I didn’t tell
Grégoire
what had happened, though he worried about me when he saw my swollen eyes. Maybe he thought I’d finally broken things off with Matthew, which would have been a great relief to him. But no, I pulled myself together to see Matthew too, climbed into the back seat of his car that his new driver, Kevin, held open for me outside the stage door.

If Matthew noticed my red eyes and listless sadness, he made no comment, and if anything, used me harder than he usually did. I needed that pain though, desperately needed it, if only to feel something other than shame. I didn’t tell him either about
Pietro
, although seeing the paintings up in his room made my eyes blur again with tears.

It was December by then, a couple weeks before Christmas. Like most dance companies, we’d added extra holiday shows and rehearsals, and my body ached from the strain. I would be twenty nine in early January, and I could feel my ability to dance slowly ebbing away. My hips and knees screamed in protest when I leaped and kicked, and my ankles gave me constant needling pain.

So, during this time just before Christmas, I started to feel like my life was falling apart. My joints ached, my best friend judged me harshly for my choice to keep seeing Matthew, and an artist who once found me beautiful now found me stupid instead.

Only Matthew remained unchanged and consistent in his actions towards me. He treated me with the same affectionate scorn, the same rigid horniness as he always had. I fought as hard as ever against the impulse to love him in this time when I felt so needy and bereft, because if I lost him too, I thought that probably would have finished me off.

In the week leading up to Christmas, though, I was unable to see him. I had extra shows to dance and Matthew had obligations to keep. But on Christmas Eve morning, he called and asked if I could come to dinner with him that night, when the show was over, and I said yes, I could. He told me to wear a little black dress and no panties, and he promised to meet me at the stage door at 10:45.

After the show that night, while everyone else gave each other warm Christmas wishes, shared plans and made arrangements to meet places, I showered and dressed to meet the tyrannical lover who ruled my world. I dried my wavy hair and drew it up into a loose chignon because I knew he loved to look at the back of my neck. I put on my smooth, pale porcelain-doll makeup, and applied the nutmeg lipstick carefully to my full lips. I put on black thigh high stockings with wide lace tops, and as he required, I wore no panties. I slipped into some patent leather
mary
jane
pumps with high block heels, and I hoped desperately that I wouldn’t humiliate myself.

Dinner with Matthew. We had never actually gone out to dinner together, not once in two and a half months. We ate at his house when we played, formal meals in his dining room and breakfasts in the kitchen. I’m sure he thought, like me, that dinner out would be too risky, would feel too much to the wistful romantic in me like a date. And he was right, I was really afraid that it would feel like a date to me, that I would fantasize, and he’d know it, and that he’d punish me for it. Maybe that was the whole point of this Christmas Eve exercise, to make me act stupid so he could torture and humiliate me.
’Tis
the season
, I thought wryly. But it was my eternal goal to do what he wanted, so if that’s what he wanted, that’s exactly what I would do.

I walked out the stage door and there he stood in the cold air, in a heavy wool coat that made him look ridiculously handsome. He smiled, hugged and kissed me, and I’m sure to any person passing by we seemed like any other couple, a boyfriend and girlfriend, even a husband and wife, from the tender and familiar way we embraced. He led me to his car and held open the door for me, and I climbed in the front seat instead of the back seat I used with the driver. He kissed me again with his hand up my dress, and thrust his fingers inside me, which I accepted with a moan.

He smiled at me and licked off his fingers, then slammed the door and got in on the other side. He hummed some familiar Christmas carol to himself under his breath. What was wrong with the both of us, I wondered, that on Christmas Eve we were not with family or friends? No, we were both of us with our perverse, sadomasochistic lover, and neither of us thought that it was strange or sad. I had no family left aside from
Grégoire
, and he had Georges to sit with in front of a holiday fire. And Matthew, I assume he had no family either, because he never mentioned them, and I never asked.

He drove me to a dark and expensive restaurant, the type of restaurant with no prices on the menu. He ordered wine and food for both of us in French and I resigned quietly that I would eat whatever arrived. Of course, it was delicious, whatever it was. Of course Matthew would know the most wonderful things to eat. We both ate slowly, and for a long time we didn’t talk, which was fine with me.

I didn’t talk because I was afraid of saying something stupid, afraid of sounding too familiar and loving during this meal that felt like a date. He didn’t talk because he was too busy just staring at me, staring at me with eyes that made me burn. I was half afraid he’d turn me over the table right there and fuck me, lift my skirt and thrust inside while the other patrons looked on. His eyes were so alive with smoldering lust, I had no idea why he hadn’t just taken me straight to his home. It had been nearly a week then since we’d been together, and we both felt that strain.

“I’ve missed you,” he said when the waiter brought dessert. I stirred my coffee, too nervous to reply. I remembered that night long ago at the coffee house, when I’d first drunk coffee with him and he’d told me what he wanted from me.

“I’ve missed you too, Matthew.” It was a safe, inane thing to say. Then he reached over and picked up the rectangular box he’d carried in, and handed it over to me.

It was wrapped in heavy, elegant paper, a stylized holiday print of berries and holly leaves. There was a bow on top, perfect and crimson.

“I didn’t get you anything, Matthew,” I said, running my fingers over the gorgeous wrappings.

“Good. I didn’t want you to.”

“Whatever you want, I’ll do it for you later. Anything at all.”

He rolled his eyes. “Don’t be a dweeb. We both know you’ll do what I want anyway. Just open it up. I wanted to get you a present, and now I fucking want you to see what’s inside.”

I smiled. He was so ridiculously charming, even when he called me a dweeb and ordered me around. I carefully undid the paper, not wanting to wrinkle it, and honestly, not really wanting the moment to end.

“Rip the fucking paper off it, Lucy. Open it up or I’ll break it over your ass.”

I smiled wider and looked up at him from under my lashes. I ripped off the rest of the paper and lifted the lid. I had expected something typically appropriate between us. Some new lingerie, or a paddle or a plug, but there was nothing sexual or kinky inside that box. There was a beautifully framed piece of parchment covered in spidery calligraphy and decorated at the top with a painting of a Grecian urn.

He’d gifted me with a framed copy of the Keats poem I’d quoted to him, the one about truth and beauty, and it made my breath catch in my throat.
Ode on a Grecian Urn
, it was called, five stanzas long. I stared down the poem while he sat and watched without a word. The first two lines drew me in with their strange, appropriate sentiment:

Thou still
unravish’d
bride of quietness,

thou foster-child of silence and slow time...

Silence. Slow time. I thought of our hours in the basement when he only sat and stared. He’d found this for me, or perhaps, knowing him, had it crafted by some artist to his exact specifications.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter...

Thou canst not leave thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;

Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss.

As I read, it seemed every single line spoke of our strange relationship. Matthew and I were frozen in time just like the pastoral scenes on the urn that Keats described. We were frozen in a scene where we reached for one another, but would never actually touch.

More happy love! more happy, happy love!

For ever warm and still to be
enjoy’d
,

For ever panting, and
for ever
young;

All breathing human passion far above...

For us, it would always just be passion. He would love me while I was young and perfect, his unchanging ideal. And then what? Someday, the urn would be broken, would crumble to pieces, capitulate to the ravages of time. The poem was so appropriate to us that I shivered, and for a long time, I couldn’t look up into his eyes.

At the end, the famous and well known words we’d discussed so long ago...

Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

The simple words that exemplified Matthew’s view of the world, all Matthew desired.
You’re beautiful to me. There will be only truth between us.

I looked over at Matthew and wondered what it meant. If it was a declaration of some kind, I didn’t understand it. Perhaps it had no significance at all. Maybe it was a
mindfuck
, a way to hurt or mock me. Maybe simply a gift to a lover with whom he’d spent so much time.

“Thank you, Matthew,” was all I dared say in the end.

“Do you like it?”

“Yes. I love it. It’s beautiful.”

He stared at me, long and hard, but I gave him nothing, no emotional reaction. I felt suddenly we were both teetering on the edge of a cliff.

“I love everything you give me,” I said as an afterthought, and thankfully, he left it at that.

He took me back to his house afterward, and when I turned towards the basement, he pulled me instead up the stairs. “Not on Christmas Eve. I won’t beat on you tonight.”

“You can if you want.”

“No.”

Up in his room, he took off my dress as I kicked off my shoes. “Go stand against the wall,” he said, stripping out of his clothes. He pushed me over to the broad white wall, the one without the paintings, and I stood there in my black stockings with my hands at my sides. He sat on the bed, looking at me, stroking his cock which was already huge and hard.

“Play with yourself. Stroke your
clitty
, pinch your tits.”

I did what he asked, trying to look sexy. He didn’t like that at all.

“Fucking submissive. Harder.
Touch
yourself.” He stood up and strode over to me.

I moaned as he pinched my nipples, then twisted them mercilessly hard. He reached between my legs and found my swollen clit and pinched that too until I danced under his touch.

“You little cum whore,” he breathed. “Come on. Come for me, let me watch you.”

I reached out to him and squeezed his shoulder hard, and he let me, so I kept squeezing, just as he squeezed and worked my sodden clit. “Come on, you little slut,” he prompted me again, then he pressed himself against me, pressed me to the wall and kissed me hard and violently, with more feeling than he ever had before. He hauled me over to the bed and pushed me onto my hands and knees and drove into me standing up from behind. He came just moments later, driving hard, then collapsed on top of me, his lips against my neck.