Scar Flowers (23 page)

The snick of the padlock shutting next to his throat still echoed
. The finality of the sound must have woken him from his reverie. The collar’s pressure at his throat was not something he could ignore. What a joke—standing here naked with a leash on. He unhooked the leash, but Leah intercepted it. Without releasing his gaze, she pleated the lead into symmetrical folds secured by a loop and tuck, then held it out for Faith. The girl took it with a glance at Simon that conveyed both sympathy and warning.

“I can see you didn’t understand what I told you.” Leah touched his collar. “You put this on of your own will. Do you know what it means?”

“No, tell me. That day at the cliff you said you knew everything. You even offered to enlighten me.”

“A collar means that in my house you belong to me, and you are here for my pleasure. It means you’ll do what I tell you or what I have Faith direct you to do.” She leaned in and spoke just for him. “We’re going to explore the things you came here for. But first you’ll learn to listen. Step forward toward and hold out your arms.”

It was all only a game, one he couldn’t picture himself playing:
Do as I Say
. He reached up to pull her fingers away from his neck.

The next thing he knew
, his arm jerked up behind his back under the force of her weight and his own momentum, so that he had to kneel to keep the joints from snapping. At least that was what it felt like—a gust of pain that shot through his shoulder into the pit of his stomach. Something jabbed his neck, and he heard the bark of his own exhaled breath. It was the move she had used on the set when she took Ricky down to the mat.

With his forehead pressed to the ground all he could see, upside
down, were her boots. Set in a relaxed stance with toes angled outward, high heels arched up off the floor, immovable and impassive.

“When you stand, hold out your arms.”

The pain throbbed in decreasing waves. He moved slowly, fighting nausea. Then he was standing again, arms stretched out and wrist cuffs fastened to the frame. Leah said something to Faith, who buckled a pair cuffs around his ankles, linked by a short chain.

He had not realized he was panting until Leah
’s hands touched his face. They brushed his skin, like leaves or snowflakes settling on him as he stared up at the sky. The bellows of his breath labored far away. She brought something down over his mask that darkened everything. Blindfold. She withdrew, and after a click, a piano played softly nearby. Classical. He was in a black cocoon, strung up to dangle from a tree limb.

Leah
returned. It must be her—as she moved, leather creaked. Fingers ran over his skin and paused here or there to press or rub. Unable to anticipate or fend her off, he flinched. She burrowed a finger under his wrist restraints, then ran her hands over his.

“Have you taken any aspirin in the last eight hours? Are you allergic to iodine?”

Her words did not register at first. Aspirin and iodine? He shook his head.

“
If your hands tingle or go numb, tell me. Can you nod to show me you’re all right?”

Simon
nodded. He tried to pull his hands back to his sides. There was no response to his effort, not even a creak from the wooden frame; he could move his feet slightly but not his arms. If he chose not to move at all, he did not feel the restriction, could try to pretend it was not there.

Footsteps circled him until out of black weightlessness a
body pressed against his back: nose, chin, breasts. Then her hips and legs closed in, and her hands gripped his waist. He had not felt naked until now, with this wall of leather breathing against him.

“
Let’s get to know each other, hmm?” she said, so quietly that Faith would not be able to hear. Her voice hummed against his ribs, and he heard something new in it, a quavering of suppressed excitement, as she slid her hands to his hips and pressed him back against her, her fingernails lightly pinching. Tingling heat crept up from the soles of his feet, and he tried again to move, to touch her. Leah stepped away.

R
ustlings and small thuds, like drawers being opened and closed. The music flowed past. The tension of waiting rose to his skin, the only thing he had left to sense with—as if he could taste the air, see with his nerve endings in patterns of heat and cold. He caught a trace of her perfume on his tongue, through his palms—the same scent from when they went over the cliff together. Sweet and soft, with a sharp hint of alcohol.

A
whisper of conversation, a soft laugh, and footsteps: Leah’s boots. He knew from the way she displaced the air, the heat of her skin.

She
ran her fingers lightly down his side, not quite touching him, then up again, this time skimming with her fingernails, a firmer touch with each pass, becoming a caress, a stroke, a strong grasp, then fingernails digging in. Her breath whispered in his ear. She rested her hands on his shoulders or touched her lips and the tip of her tongue to his back and waited, listened for him to come out, to catch up with her. The urge to curl up and protect himself when she touched him without warning in what should be innoc-uous places—underarms, stomach—overcame him, but all he could do was note its passage. More rustlings and a scrape, then the cool, soft stroke of what must be fur, its tickling caress growing warm. A clatter and drip nearby, followed by the wet sting of ice on his back. Then her tongue, her teeth, a laughing exhalation of her breath. His skin hummed like the surface of a drum. Leah’s fingers settled on his lips, gripped his jaw and forced his head back as her lips touched his throat. Air roared in his nostrils as the world tipped. She released him and trailed the backs of her hands against the insides of his thighs, then her palms on his belly.

B
lood rushed to his belly. As she walked around to face him, her tongue traced a trail of warmth and chill across his chest, then her teeth closed on his nipple, gentle at first, then with a sharp pressure that fired the nerve all the way to his guts. The shock from the intimacy of her mouth on him still echoed as her hand descended between his legs, a feathering touch.

Opposite poles of sensation built a tension that took him along with it. A stroke from the hand below, smooth and glowing with warmth, was followed by a pinch and a twist from the hand
at his chest. He jerked his head back with a snort of pain, a burst of fear like boiling mud splattered on his face. She stroked his cheek and cooed something, the same way she might soothe a spooked horse.

“
Are you ready to go further?” Her voice filled his ear like down, a muffled tickling. “There’s much more we can do than this.”

Maybe he nodded then.
He saw Kim’s face, but it turned into the black-haired woman who had left him in the desert rain. Kyra, her hair plaited in a braid down her back. The way she had looked at him once in bed. The memory crushed his chest as he braced himself for the ache of the loss, a constant hurt, he realized now, that had been there for years in the background, like hunger or thirst or a radio playing. But the pain never came. Maybe because Leah was inside him, to guide him past the memory. The image vanished as the blindfold came off.

Leah’s
features coalesced: pale lashes, eyebrows glinting copper against white skin, a deep red gash for a mouth. Mineral green eyes with black centers.

“
Yes. I’m still here. Are you with me?” She waited until he nodded. “Good. You’re doing very well.”

She
retrieved a small wheeled table set with a tray of implements, and slid a pair of latex gloves on her hands. The spray bottle she picked up must have been filled with rubbing alcohol; the mist that settled on his back froze like sleet. She swabbed his back with something that smelled mineral and dark.

The table held
a glass container half-filled with liquid; she fished out a number of small metal objects with forceps. They were rings with scalpel blades on them, and she slid them onto the fingertips of her left hand, over the membrane of her glove.

He could not think, could only see a pale
, cruel face, grace-ful limbs, leather-clad thighs moving as she came toward him. She pressed a cylinder of rubber between his teeth and said something about making it easier, that if he dropped the cylinder, she would stop. She disappeared behind him. Her hand was on him again, the ringless right one, cupped between his legs in a cradling hold. With the pads of her fingers, she captured a fold of his skin there, increasing the pressure until he had to gasp like a fish to stay on top of the pain. It was pain and it wasn’t; it meant something different than what was usually inflicted in anger or fear. A con-trolled exercising of her possession of him: if he tried to move, he risked far worse excruciation.

“
Good,” she whispered and ran the backs of her metal-clawed fingers over his back. “Do you remember these?”

She moved her fingers
, made the rings clink and chime. He became aware of his spine, gripped down either side in a furrow of muscle and threaded with nerves. It grew warm, ready to carry messages to his brain.

“
Do you?” she asked again. Her lips pressed against his shoulder, one, two, three, four, five kisses. “There will be five cuts,” Leah said, “if you are strong enough. Here is the first.”

It started as a stinging scratch, so gradual that he could feel his skin part and the sear contact of air and metal on exposed tissue.
First came the drag of the blade, and after an interval of heartbeats came the sting, increasing in volume. Her lips moved against his ear to tell him something, and he must have nodded again. There came another slice, and another. A touch of fire, a nettle scratch, a trick of the nerves. They came in regular intervals, preceded each time by a light touch from the back of her wrist. He was an animal, wracked by burning, buzzing, tingling pain-but-not-pain.

A long razor
-length of time began, cuts that opened his back from shoulder to waist, a vise-like grip that held the rest of him so that he was almost sick. Spinning and lost, like the first time he’d been drunk. His mother, who had given him the plastic cup of beer, “since you’re so curious,” had laughed at the kitchen table, hair swung across her face, the cigarette perched in her fingers tipped with a cylinder of ash. The only time he had ever seen her drink, hours after she fought with his father about whether she were “raising Simon to be as fucked up as the rest of your family.” Even knowing this—or perhaps because of it—he had not refused the chance to try the bitter, foaming liquid.

Simon
bit the rubber gag, drooling. Was it sweat or blood that trickled down? He caught a glimpse of Faith, who hugged her arms with her lips pressed inward.

The scene that stared up at him when he closed his eyes was from his
grandfather’s house when he was nine years old, on the day before his brother’s sixth birthday, when the family’s goat gave birth to a deformed kid. The summer his parents fought over who would watch him and Sean. Grandfather, his father’s father, told Simon to go in the woods and bury the kid.
Before your brother sees it.

The animal had been alive as he carried it into the woods on a shovel.
Tiny, perfectly formed head and front legs, and pale, glistening internal organs that bloomed where its hindquarters should have been. An embryonic explosion, looking up at him with its rectangular pupil. Bury it; dig a hole. A splinter from the fissured shovel handle lodged in the web of his hand as he walked.

He could
not look into that eye again, because it was like breathing his own breath under the covers at night, or watching his face in the mirror for too long, until the image distorted into meaninglessness.

It had to be dead to be buried. He raised the shovel. How many blows would it take? It was impossibly alive; maybe it would not die. Its blood
ran, its legs twitched, teeth bared in silent agony, even after he caved its skull in and scraped the last of its brains, sprinkled with pine needles, into the hole along with its corpse.

Years later he mentioned it to the vet, who gave it a name: fetal anomaly. The goat demon of his nightmares was mortal after all. Not a message from God about his own weak, allergic child
’s body. He grew up to learn that most of society’s demons turned out to be the same—shrieking scarecrows.

Back in the present, the cutting stopped. A haze of
sensa-tion swirled over him. A hand touched his mouth, removed the gag. Soft clink of the metal rings dropping in the glass container, four ghost trails of red in the clear liquid, and Leah said something to the girl, told her to leave. Was it over? He drifted again.

Mon
. . . imon . . . Simon.
His name.

“Look at me.” Leah stood in front of him. Her eyes had new depth to them, a heat that swirled under the cool green surface. Her hand had strayed between his legs, and she murmured something, to find out where he was, if he were ready for more. More. It wasn’t up to him; he merely existed.

She reached around behind him with something in her free hand, and a sheet of fire ran down his back, dripping. He was flayed, laid open. The leather cuffs creaked as he curled and unclenched his hands. Saltwater, iodine. Or something worse. He pictured his shredded skin hanging in ribbons. Something shook; it was his limbs trembling. The movement of her body through space mingled with his as though he were inside her. It was and was not erotic: intimate promise, frustrated longing. He twisted his hands against their bonds, longing to quench the fire on his back, as she lowered the blindfold over his eyes again.