Scar Flowers (15 page)

In my house. In our bed.

Leah’s mouth opened and words came out. Maybe even a yell. The shape under the covers froze and the head turned. A thin, hollow-cheeked face, hair plastered to its forehead and temples. An unlikely figure to be playing King Henry VIII in her four-poster antique monstrosity with its wooden canopy and red silk curtains. What had she been thinking, to buy such a thing and have it crated in pieces across half the world to her home? Faith, with her dark eyes and shaved scalp, appeared a second later, and the young woman slipped out of bed to guide Leah back out into the hall. Naked, her chest flushed and mottled.

In my house. In
our
bed.

Out in the hall with the door closed, the girl crossed her arms over her chest.

She could be a dancer.
Leah thought this each time Faith entered a room. Even now she could not help thinking it. The girl’s shaved head only made her features seem more delicate, her eyes larger and darker.

“Not in my bed, Faith. Never in my bed. I don’t want him in this house.” The words forced themselves out from between her teeth. White noise buzzed in her brain, behind a line of reasons why she should not be upset:
it’s over now
,
this is only what you knew Faith was already doing
, and
don’t give her the satisfaction of seeing you upset.

The girl stared at her big toe as she dug it into the carpet. Leah waited, but the only thing to come from Faith
was tears, silent and hidden under the girl’s brows until they were halfway down her cheeks. She pressed her back against the bedroom door.

“Are you protecting him or me?”
A bad question. The girl shrugged, a tear hanging from the end of her nose. Slender arms and delicate collarbone, but her hips and thighs were round and lush, like a painting of Venus.

“Faith. I’m going to make a cup of tea. When I’m done, I want everything back in order and the both of you gone.”

The girl’s mouth hung open.

“You can come back tonight and use your basement room. And Faith—” The girl paused. “Use the spiral staircase, not the clients’ stairs. I’ll be in the gallery, and I don’t want to see either of you.”

Faith shut the bedroom door behind her and Leah descended the spiral staircase to the living room.

I need
a man, too, not just you.
Maybe Faith’s note all those months ago was the only reason why Leah had brought Angel into the household. As a counter-move in their year-long relationship. Had she become someone who would do that?

Angel. Another thing to manage. But that was what she knew how to do best.

Leah sighed as she boiled water and made up a tray. Her eyes stung, and she rubbed the bridge of her nose. This was nothing to be upset about, as the girl’s behavior was not such a surprise. So no tears. She gripped the bamboo handle of the teapot and willed her pulse to slow. A bright blue cup, painted with a watercolor flower inside, shivered as she lifted the tray.

Think of something else.
Leah passed through the living room and library to the front foyer, where a fountain rippled and sang: a gift from her boy, Angel, from their first month together. Maybe she shouldn’t think of him as a boy, but as her submissive, it was his title and role, just as Faith was her girl. The fountain stood six feet tall, a white wall of raised relief castings of mouths. Water swirled over questing tongues and trickled from parted lips. He had rendered them in shades of pink, some thin-lipped and pale, some full and slack. Enough light seeped through the glass bricks at the top of the foyer to bathe the gurgling water in a faint glow. In the lower right corner, instead of his signature, he had etched the words
For Leah
. He had knelt at her feet to tell her his desire to pay homage to her with his mouth. Inspiration for the fountain, an element that added to its yearning quality, the disem-bodied sighs continually bathed but ever thirsting for a different elixir.

Had she satisfied his request? Once or twice, as a reward. Certainly it was the only lover’s privilege she had granted him after that first night, besides a few kisses.

She had broken her own rules with Angel too, on their first night. Given herself to him like a green girl, lost in the heat of it. Though first she’d sent him down to the pitch-black guest room while Delilah was still upstairs, left him with a single candle and pocketed the matches before returning to her friend. Told him a fuse had blown. Two hours later when she knocked on his door, she had not spoken—technically, he could not have known for certain which woman had been with him in the darkness.

She had not fooled him, but they never spoke of it. Leah admired the fountain—the most passionate testament she had ever received. She thought of the cameo Paul had given her.
Paul and Angel and their timid gifts, their passivity.
Knowing this thought was unfair did not stop her from thinking it.

That left Faith. The girl
could radiate pleasure, vibrate it like a purr, and yet at times to blush and be silent. A creature seemingly mute and fragile. But what started out sweet during one of their rare instances of lovemaking had turned relentless. Tiny nibbling kisses on Leah’s neck, a playful gesture to wear down the distance between them after an argument. Aroused, Faith coiled like a snake, slippery smooth and strong. How many times Leah had had to bite Faith’s mouth, her thighs, just to get away and breathe. The girl acted as if she did not feel it, so she had not thought about the marks she left—bruises that the girl took to her next visit to Drew. Drew, whom she had known only a few weeks at the time, and who she complained did not notice her.

Days after Faith unveiled her bruises for him, the girl let Leah know
that she had become Drew’s favorite, that she intrigued him with her sullied-blossom appeal.

Faith and her games. She had provoked the argument that had started it all.

Leah climbed the clients’ staircase to the gallery waiting room, where she set her tray on a small table next to an antique Chinese jewelry box. The only other furnishings were two chairs and a glass case that held a pair of laced black toe-shoe boots with seven-inch heels. On the walls hung her black-and-white fetish photography collection: a woman arched on her back with her arms crossed on her chest, wearing only black latex gloves and patent leather high heels; the profile of a man in a ball gag and blindfold, grimacing as though at the limits of his pride and endurance, a tear welling at the corner of his eye. Joelle and Marcus. Both former paramours, and even the mixed-media knife-and-barbed-wire photo frames were Marcus’ work.

Leah opened the jewelry box. Inside she found a narrow bank-note envelope with a trio of crisp hundred-dollar bills tucked inside. “A tribute” was scrawled across the front in black ink, followed by a set of initials. One of her clients. He would pay many times that amount for the merest glimpse of her naked skin if he thought she would grant it, but clients got far less of her than lovers did. Her key ring, another tribute from years ago, also lay inside: an iron dragon with its tail in its mouth, the keys on it bristling like spikes on its back.

Surrounded by frozen depictions of desire, all given as gifts. Normally she drew strength from them, but today all she could see were glimpses of something she might have lost forever: Faith kissing the tip of a riding crop, then rubbing her face against the shaft like a cat. The glint of Simon’s eyes between half-closed lids as he lay in his bed.

Leah’s keys clinked as she
unlocked the wrought iron gate that led to the gallery. The light that filtered through the glass bricks in the gallery’s east wall dimmed and then brightened, skim-ming across the wooden floor. A cloud had passed over the sun, perhaps, or a bare tree branch, slick with rain, swayed in the wind. She had renovated this room to be a canvas for every shift and nuance of light, and spent years acquiring the equipment to furnish it: the padded bench with its straps and buckles, fashioned in the shape of a crouched nude—Seth’s work—and the St. Andrews cross with its built-in cuffs and carved scenes from
Venus in Furs
, crafted by another ex-beau. But most clients wanted a dim dungeon, which necessitated installing drapes.

Leah reached up to touch one of the shackles from the dragon cage that hung overhead. Forged in the shape of talons, one set dangled from the roof of the cage and one from its floor. The top and bottom of the cage were sculpted like the dragon’s jaws, so that any occupant would appear
to be caught in the beast’s mouth, ankles and wrists trapped in its claws. Vincent? Van? She no longer knew his name but still recalled his craving for verbal abuse and mock crucifixions.

Angel had painted t
he Garden of Tears mural beneath the cage, a scene filled with devils and naked humans. A capering boar played pan pipes, its bristled body grotesquely human, its forked and double-headed sex bouncing jauntily. An owl-headed woman with three legs gazed at the boar. In the center of her eye was a hole, just large enough to peer through; on the other side of a hidden spring-catch door in the mural was Leah’s bedroom, where she could use this spy hole to watch any gallery visitors. Leah traced the line of the owl-demon’s leg, down to where a naked girl who looked remarkably like Faith struggled to escape a pair of drooling canine demons—her eyes glazed with what could be shock or delirious pleasure, her grasping hands either seeking to beat off her attackers or pull them closer.

Conspicuously absent from this gallery was a contribution by Faith, who had never shown an artistic bent. Her gifts were purely sensual.

As for the lovers represented in this gallery
, technically she could not give most of these former friends that title. The most delicious part was always the hunt, the surrender of their art and their selves, not the mingling of body parts.
Her
art was to mold unsatisfied desire into a transformational force. The tease and slow burn that revealed her partners’ depths: few appreciated its lick of divine fire on the soul, as few had the self-discipline to resist quenching their wants immediately. She touched the carving on an antique wall clock. A tribute from Paul. His idea of a reproach for only being allowed to see her during scheduled appointments. Until L.A., that is.

Paul was a client, not a love interest. Clients were appointment-only, not objects of desire. She should never have compromised her relationship with Paul. Asking favors of him had destroyed her shield of professionalism and misled him as to his status.

Leah sat in her wooden throne chair, the only seat in the room. Everything was as she had left it, even the television she had brought from downstairs to study Simon’s films. She clicked the set on. Light beamed forth and bathed her face: the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, exhibited to the crowd before a line of archers.

On
-screen, Simon looked up as his sentence was pronounced. A tiny gesture, but it stabbed her chest in a rush of recognition, as if someone had called her name. She knew him—or did she? Under his tangle of dark hair, the swoop and curve of his profile made her want to redraw it to flatter him more. An abbrev-iation here, an extended line there, so that he would come into focus as who she knew him to be. More handsome, more aware of her. Leah kicked off her shoes, unbuttoned her blouse, and pressed one hand to her solar plexus to massage away a sudden ache.

High above the
execution courtyard, under a crimson banner, the emperor looked down. Recognition flashed across Simon’s features, then something crumpled in him. The same galvanic current in a submissive’s skin that carried the knowledge of pain in the sting of a whip. She had heard the saint’s legend at Our Lady of Fatima, along with her schoolmates’ whispers that Emperor Diocletian and Sebastian had been more than friends. Simon must feel it now, what it is to be pierced by betrayal; to pull the barb out would be just as damaging as to plunge it deeper. Leah felt her ribs, how delicately they caged her lungs. She flinched as the first arrow buried itself in Simon.

On her, it would be right there, under her left breast.
Simon gasped as the third arrow found him. A sound so faint that she might have imagined it. His eyebrows drew together, and a muscle bulged in his jaw. A trickle of blood snaked down. Ruby heat, dense with his life. It soaked into his rags, an accent of color in the chiaroscuro composition of courtyard, wounded man, and darken-ing sky.

The room had grown cold. She withdrew her hand but did not refasten her clothes. Simon, the dying saint, cried aloud to his god, ripping the air. A lover’s
groan. The hair on the back of her neck stood up.

“Who are you?” she murmured to the image on the screen.

This was not the rapturous Saint Sebastian with upturned gaze as painted by Reni, not a serene and bloodless divine communion. As a girl, Leah used to stare at the crucifix during Mass, in a haze of longing. Could pain and fear be transcended as holy ecstasy? Could such ecstasy come in the form of a human lover? Intoxicating if true, that beauty and strength could unite against darkness.

“How can you think you know someone just from looking at them?” her father used to say. “What about love at first sight?”
she would counter, but he dismissed that argument as hypersensi-tive delusion. People loved to believe they were indecipherable, but Paul had revealed himself the first time she met him, through his mannerisms, his speech: he used
I feel
far more often than
I see
or
it sounds like
. A kinesthetic/emotional processor of the physical world, like Simon. But unlike Simon, Paul mumbled, played with the change in his pockets, worried his gold medallion on its chain. His energy was scattered, weak; he needed to feel his body more, to be gathered and contained. Hooded, wrapped, and suspended from her bondage frame, he had shed tears of relief to feel the peace that so often eluded him.
Does not like pain
, she had record-ed in Paul’s client file afterward.
Bondage, role-playing okay; not claustrophobic
.