Please Don't Go (28 page)

Almost invisible through the thick void of the square room (that could have passed for a large closet in any other home) was a stout wooden table. Atop it, coming to life and disappearing again in the undulating candlelight, was a typewriter. Zephyr presumed it was the one Rattup wrote his stories upon. He had claimed not to have published anything in a long time, but still had declared that he wrote on a daily basis. Being that he was not of the computer-literate world, it now became apparent that Rattup had spoken of his fleeting fingers upon the classical black typewriter.

Y
ou’re awake.

“
I wish I wasn’t,” he mumbled, the reality of his invisible captor crashing back into his brain, regretful that he had not escaped. Even that failed evacuation felt as if it had occurred a lifetime ago, on another planet, in a different dimensional plane. The drugs or psychological control that she was exerting upon him had started to take their toll and his invisible moments were blurring at their overlapping edges. “Is this my new bedroom? Is that what you’ve decided for me?” he asked with a sneer. He lifted his arm to display his middle finger for her, but found himself once again bound in place. Torn bits of fabric were tied around his wrists, bound to something sturdy between the matress and wall, that which he could not see.

It’s been so very long for me, since I’ve shared a bed. Rattup was less of a man than I would like to admit to you, for I know he was your friend. You’ve no idea how he diminished in these last years. I’d say you’re a fitting replacement. I miss him already, but I feel like we’re making progress, you and I. Rattup was a runner, and a plotter. Just like you. See how I broke him? Can’t you see that? There was a tear in his eye when he left me. That’ll be you one day. Doesn’t that make your heart ache some, to know the passion you will come to suckle upon?

“
Somebody will come for me. I have a girlfriend who’ll be looking for me. She knows about this place,” Zephyr threatened. It was true. He had disclosed everything to Jackie during his blossoming relationship with Rattup and he was thankful for that fact now.

Oh yes. Jackie, right? She best stay away if she knows what’s good for her.

“
Is that a threat?” he spat back, pushing his chest out. He fidgeted with his bindings for a moment, but found them to be knotted and unforgiving.

I don’t make threats, lover. I make promises. You’ve promised that you love me, and I’ve done the same for you. And
now
I’m promising that our love will grow in spite of all that has led up to this point. I promise that our hearts will swell with what we’ve found in each other. Doesn’t it make you tremble? I think about the future all the time. Sometimes I get so very emotional. I cannot contain those emotions.

He could picture her in his mind, weeping and dabbing away the wetness from her eyelids, embarrassed by her exposure; a dolt without control of her emotional baggage. “I’ve noticed.”

Consider this our wedding night.

“
I’ll do no such thing.”

We’ve pledged our love, so it only makes sense that we would pledge our bodies. Rattup was a man of considerable means in this regard. In his younger days, he pleasured me until I screamed with ecstasy. Don’t fight back against it like he did. Enjoy the experience and it’ll become easier for you, on the whole.

Her hand ran up his thigh and for the first time Zephyr felt the human side of her form pressing with gentle vibrations against his whole body, that there was a real structure to her vaporous existence. It sent shivers through his own body and he fought back against the touch that had strangled and attacked him several times thus far. “Get away from me, bitch.” A slap crashed across his face and he fought back tears. If he showed her any sign of weakness, it would only rile her emotions into action. “Get away.”

I think that’s the same thing Rattup said our first time. Please don’t become a bore like he did. My heart couldn’t take it. Kiss me. Kiss me and love me.

A cold dead fish pressed against his lips and Zephyr squinted his eyes in disbelieving disgust. He turned his head as far as he could, but could not escape that frigid numbness. It tickled, but not in a delightful way. She slipped her hand along his chest now, through the curled chest hairs beneath his tee-shirt. Pulling up on the fabric, she moved her dead lips to his stomach, kissing his navel and giggling into the air. “You make me sick,” he said, which did not agree with her and so she grabbed a hunk of flesh at his belly, twisting it into a painful throbbing welt that blossomed in an instant.

Quiet now, lover. This time is for me, not you.

She ran her horrid hand down his stomach, tucking beneath his belt and unlatching it, pulling back on it from his jean’s loops in a snapping noise, much like a father would in threatening his children with
the belt
. Zephyr clutched his eyes shut, wanting to holler in revolt. He tested his wrist lashings again, only to find them still stubborn. She unzipped his jeans and he wiggled his hips to escape her. Pulling back on his boxer shorts, he felt her presence around his pubic hair and he resorted to picturing himself in a hot shower, scrubbing her residue away from that area, terrified that his tufts would become haunted themselves, demonized by the fiery bitch who had pinned him to this saggy lumpy mattress in the heart of nowhere, away from everything that was good and true in his life.

Well, this is unexpected. MORE than I would have guessed. Rattup was a flaccid sort of man most of the time. He pleasured me in the early days, but even then he was far along in his years, past his prime. You, on the other hand,
she whispered in his ear, nibbling at his fleshy earlobe as she spoke,
are at the height of your sexuality. There’s nothing that turns me on more than youth. That, and a bit of pain. Take me back to the Garden, lover. Take me beneath the sycamore tree.

She twisted one of his exposed nipples and he yelped. “Back the fuck up!” Zephyr sounded off, trying his best to sound intimidating, but failing in his inborn pacifist inclinations. He had always respected women and showed little need to assert himself, but she was neither girl nor woman. She was a succubus, a piece of garbage inhabiting the rotting space that encircled him. She seemed to crawl everywhere at once, over his skin like a child’s playground, perusing the landscape for places to play or harm. He wrenched in pain when she decided that he was out of order, and kissed him softly with her dead fish face when he showed even an ounce of accidental enjoyment, dragging his head space into a form of acceptance that he would not allow.

As she took him inside of her, he fought back with thoughts of naked British biddies with bad teeth, drinking tea and discussing the Olympics... of being anywhere but the ratty stained bed that she had once taken the geezer Rattup to whenever she so desired, before she had laid her devilish eyes upon his own young flesh.
Don’t think of anybody but me. Think only of how much I love you,
she coaxed him, jostling back and forth on his lap, pinching his chin with her fangs. Beads of blood formed along his lips and chin as she experimented with her mouth, nibbling at the skin to demonstrate the tensile strength of a three-dimensional human’s outer shell.
Stay still and just love me. If I’m forceful, it’s only because I need to keep your interests in check.

She slapped at his face.
You’re not thinking of me. Think of me, lover. THINK OF ME!

In reality, he could not help but think of Jackie. This beast was tainting him, and he could only project himself elsewhere for so long. The true nature of things always came rumbling back when you found that deadened void at the back of your skull. And so he thought of Jackie as his see-through possessor took his body and tossed it about like a garden salad—in her icy mouth, in her warm and sticky spots, in her boiling heart. She groaned with every thrash of her body and Zephyr substituted the sweet soft groan that he had come to expect from his one and only true love, Jackie, the woman he would one day marry when he escaped this hellish nightmare. He pictured himself in their bed, Jackie grinning and teasing him with her trim but curvy body, taking off one sock at a time to imply that the process would take several hours instead of mere minutes, as it often did. He could see Jackie laughing and proclaiming that he needed to, “slow down, stallion!”

Come back to me. You’re not here. Come back to me, you snake.

He projected further, biting his lip and shaking his head that
this was not happening to him
, this was not happening to him,
this was not happening to him
. Rape is a cruel beast and Zephyr felt that sudden unexplainable emptiness, that he had been taken against his will, no matter how hard she tried to make it enjoyable for both of them, or so she claimed.
Come back to me and see what I’ve given you. If you don’t like it, then you’ll learn to like it. Come back to me before I rip your dick off. I’ll shove it up your ass. Look at me. Smell me.
She dug her fingernails into his throat, using her opposite hand to pry open his eyelids.
Look at me.
He looked at her, and saw nothing but a mist that danced about the top of his chest, grinding her invisible nether regions into his own. She grunted and barked like a mongrel dog, right into his eardrums.
That’s better. Watch the way I do this. Watch what I’ve learned and I’ll teach it to you in turn, lover. I’ve been doing this a long time and you’re but a puppy.

Zephyr was stricken by shame as it started to become less tormenting. That he found even an iota of enjoyment in her physical abuse and rape of him was more than troubling. He was even more confounded when she insisted to him at the end of their romp:
See—I knew you’d come around, lover. I can smell you falling in love with me. I’ve missed that smell so very much.

4.

Jackie thudded her balled fist against the door, repeating the gesture until the meat of her palm throbbed. “Anybody home?” she asked of the inanimate Rattup house, an address obtained from Mr. Richter after an almost bloody battle of jagged unforgiving words. He had insisted upon some inflated bullshit “customer confidentiality” that existed between he and his customer Rattup. Jackie had called his bluff, grabbing the meat of Richter’s ruddy cheek and informing him that his ball hairs would be the next victim of her scorn. Like the spineless skeleton that she had figured him to be from the very first glance, he forfeited the delivery address of his most loyal patron without further physical or mental grief. As soon as she had vacated the premises with her head held high, Mr. Richter had retreated to his standard gutless activities once again, dialing up the police and informing them of Jackie’s assault. Her aggression, he told the switchboard attendant, would not stand, for he was a well-known member of the Chamber of Commerce and a man of dignity. The switchboard operator held back her laughter at the man on the other end of the line, yet had dispatched a uniformed officer to take a report anyway.

She thudded on the door a second time, calling out Zephyr’s name.

There had been no sign of his car in the driveway, but cars could be parked anywhere out of sight. There was no trace of a car owned by Charles Rattup either, but he was a recluse. The last time she had checked, the clandestine hermits of the world had very little need for reliable transportation. “Hello?” she called into the chilled night air, stepping back from the door with a huff of exhaustion, examining the pitch black facade of the house.

The crickets chirped in harmonious rhythm, taunting her.

Not a single ray of light emanated from inside, neither from lamp or candle or warming hearth. It was as though the house had been abandoned. A flash of cognitive worry plummeted through her brain stem, questioning her unnerved gut as to whether it was possible that Rattup was a homosexual, and that her doting boyfriend had been likewise gay, and that they were sailing on a skiff in the tropics, drinking strawberry daiquiris and speaking on the boldness of Truman Capote. She shook the thought away, knowing deep in her stomach that Zephyr was a lover of the woman’s touch, and that he could not be shaken free from that sometimes troublesome tree. He loved the female form, both the good and the bad that came with that perilous lifestyle.

Inside the house, Zephyr had only just awoken to find his captor straddling his body. She was insisting her passion upon him. As he tried to imagine Jackie, he would have found great irony in the fact that the true object of his desires was within shouting distance, only through the back hallway and out the front door. It was unfortunate for him that he could not hear his future wife banging at the door, as he had submerged his psyche into a place of lost memories, of total disregard for the here-and-now of the third dimension. Had he been more attuned to that dimension, he may have gained assistance in his escape.

“
What the fuck,” Jackie said to herself, wallowing in a defeat that she had not expected when she first set out on her recovery mission. What had began with a feeling of “he’ll walk through the door any minute... any minute... any minute... any minute... any FUCKING minute” had transformed itself into an unraveling ball of panic. It seemed possible, only two days into their baffling and unexpected separation, that she may never lay her eyes upon him again, that he would be a distant memory in her future life, mentioning to her eventual husband, “I wonder whatever happened to
that guy
,” always curious if he had been
the one
. Even now, she wondered that, even with his obtuse hobbling around the prospect of their marriage. He had the ring, of course, but had not yet found the gall to slide it across the table at her, or to deliver the more traditional, “Will you marry me?” upon bended knee while Jon Secada sings from a miniature boombox and rose petals arbitrarily fall from the ceiling.