Scar Flowers (24 page)

He had thought he could endure this.
He had thought it would only be pain—like the cuts he had inflicted on himself for
Poppies—
not this amplified, prolonged loss of control. More bits of memory replayed themselves, things he thought he had forgot-ten: a girl’s face, the makeshift blindfold on it unable to hide the hope and expectancy of pleasing, her naked body surrounded by people he knew, their comments and his contempt. A note he never should have read, the last thing that its author ever wrote. His throat contracted in a cramp, so strong he thought he would gag. A heartbeat pulse gripped his throat, and behind it pushed the ache of tears. Though he tried to hold them back, the blindfold grew damp.

“Are you mine?” Leah whispered. “Do you want to be? You’re open now.”

She pressed her fingers into his mouth. She was salt and perfume and mingled sweat, his and her own. He was an open mouth, a creature made of want. Leah sighed and leaned her hip against his groin.

“Not everyone gets to know what it is to be open. Especially men. Are you afraid? Shall I stop?” She touched his face, pressed her lips to his neck again and said something else, but he couldn’t be sure:
Oh, but you’re beautiful. You
should
be mine.

Pause. More sounds: buckles being fastened?
Then a grating of wood against wood, two footsteps and a creak, as of some-one walking on stairs. An arm slid around his waist, a gloved finger traced his collar. Her weight pressed warm against his back, though now she was taller, her lips level with his ear. Leah’s words: “You’ve already given me permission, by putting this on.” It was a honeyed voice, hot with insinuation. Something hard, cold, and slick brushed against his hip.
Everyone leaves us,
she said
. We live our lives alone. But I am indelible. You will carry me with you always.

There came the leathery feel of the glove followed by cold wetness, a sudden invasion as one, then two, of her fingers slid into him. Her voice was low in his ear as she told him what she was about to do—a string of words with the syllables
to fuck you
in the center of it. She withdrew her fingers and gripped his shoulder with her teeth as she slowly pushed whatever the object was inside him. It went for miles just on the edge of pain or maybe the gripping edge of fear. At times she stopped and whispered to him
relax and breathe
, and then it was in. She murmured in his ear until he nodded, then started a slow rhythm of movement, repeated penetrations.

He had felt this before, this kind of
entering,
but from the other side, had wondered what it was like for his lovers when he did it to them. An idle thought he never expected to get the answer to. Panic roused in him. What would he be if he let her do this? But the more he tried to resist her, the more he was trapped, like an insect wriggling on the end of a pin: fatally pierced, the frantic movements of its limbs only hastening its defeat. In the midst was a new sensation, the tickling of pressure and held-back release, filled with shame and pleasure, metallic cold that absorbed the heat of his body. Each time she moved or breathed he felt her, could not help but feel her, every nuance magnified a hundred times. Far-away, her nails dug into his chest, her breath sweated against his back. A rush of heat swelled as she gripped him in her hand, and he was wracked with spasms as a groan formed in his throat.

Leah made a sound, a muffled, half-spoken word. They stood breathing together like a drunken couple at the end of a dance, until she stepped away. His skin grew cold where she had been pressed against it. Buckles clinked, straps slid and swung, as she walked out
. The air tasted like salt and bitterness, as if she were crying.

The padding sound of bare feet approached. Faith. She
released him from the rack, untied his blindfold, and led him to a small chamber off the main room, where he sank to the floor with his forehead pressed to the varnished boards. She padlocked a lead to his collar and tied the free end to a ring set in the floor. He was an envelope sliced open, the contents ripped and scattered, melted in rainwater so that his edges blurred. A slow euphoria bubbled in his blood, intoxication edged with exhaustion.

Leah came in, followed by the dog, and sat in a chair facing him. She set her hands on her thighs, palms down, her face white.

“This is your turn,” she said. “Before you go. If you have anything to say.”

He tried to focus, to gather himself, but the ink ran and the lines smeared. Anything to say? He could no longer contain any
-thing, so she would hear any words he had to say as soon as his mind conceived them.

He followed the line of her boots up to where her legs joined in a junction of shadow. If he pressed his face into the warm
th of her lap, he would breathe in tanned hide, his blood, her perfume, her flesh.

Only after she answered him did he realize he had spoken.

I want to taste you
, he had said. Once the words were released, it freed him to look at her face.

Her features moved, blurred. Like a record skipping, a pulse of emotion that she concealed from him.

“Do you desire me?” she asked. Coolly, as if it were of academic interest. “You tempt me. But if I were to give you that, it would be as a domination. Completely on my terms. Is that what you want?”

Want?
She might as well have said:
I’m not for you
.

He drifted again, saw sky overhead, a burning white sky with no sun. The sensation of having her inside his mind faded, to peel apart and release a burst of anger. He had not wanted to let her in, and now she thought she could dismiss him. He could feel that she’d taken the top layer of him by the shoulders and shaken, so that he floated and stretched out, to settle back slowly down again on a cushion of air. His bottom layer sank into the earth, and he looked up from darkness out of a grave-shaped opening. Leah sat by the edge and looked down at him. Concerned, or sad. A mourner at his funeral.

“What did you see just now?” she asked and reached one hand down for him.

He started to describe it for her, to say
the dead past
, but nothing came out. Her features, much softer now, came into focus as his two halves sought each other. When they joined, he knew that the part that had lain deep in the grave was him, and the part that had wafted toward the ceiling and settled back down was a blanket she’d spread over him. Yes, that was it; he had been cold, shivering.

He lay on his back on the floor. Leah’s palm covered his forehead, her other hand closed around his, and she leaned over him, as if he had fallen ill. Warm hands, small and narrow. There was a folded blanket under his head, and the collar was gone.

“It’s normal to be disoriented. Don’t try to get up yet.” Her fingers smoothed his hair. She looked at something above and behind him. “I subjected you to too much today without warning or proper . . . It was dangerous, and I can’t . . . I’m sorry. It would be best if you didn’t come here again.”

She spoke not to him but to someone she had to answer to or obey. Serious, as though something important had been broken.

Leah stood and walked out.

Wednesday, September 13, 6:07 p.m.

Pink smears marked the floor where Simon had lain. When he opened the door
, Faith was there to put ointment and a layer of gauze on his cuts—just scratches after all—and lead him to the foyer where his clothes were. Then she left and locked the gate.

Time burned by. He emerged from it to find himself half-dressed and pulling his shirt over his head. He put his camera back on.

The door to the confessional stood ajar, the varnished interior heavy with the smell of wood. Behind the metal grill, the curtain hung three-quarters drawn.

Simon knelt to peer through the curtains. Light filtered in around the edges of the closed blinds in Leah’s office. The video monitor above her desk displayed security-camera views of the front porch, the tiled shower room, and two small bedrooms.

Leah entered the office and locked the door behind her. Shoulders slumped, she leaned against the door and rubbed her forehead. She stared, eyes unfocused, then raised one hand to cover a smile, a slow curve of the lips that spoke of some satisfy-ing memory. Suddenly she shook with a laugh or a sob, features twisted, clapped a hand over her mouth and shut her eyes. When she recovered, she was ashen.

Leah ran her fingers across the spines of a bookshelf full of report folders, selected one. She tilted a calendar toward herself to read the date, then began to write.

His knees ached but he did not move, too caught up in the angle of her head and the movements of her free hand, which slid under her hair to trace the rim of her collar, then rub the back of her neck. Her pen slowed, then stopped, as she rested her forehead against her hand. She drew a breath as though she were about to speak, but instead she tore the pages she had written out of the folder and dropped them—in a trash can, he supposed, but then came the grinding whine of a paper shredder. Leah switched off the video monitor and the ringer on the telephone and turned to look directly at him.

He realized, when her expression did not change, that he had been holding his breath. She did not see him crouched in the darkness behind the curtain. Leah closed her eyes and pressed two fingers to her neck just under her jaw, as though some secret rhythm had caught her ear. The
backward tilt of her head reminded him of someone standing in the warm spray of a shower. She touched her face, her mouth, then twined her hair around her fist and pulled, her lips pressed to the inside of her wrist. She seemed to breathe in some absorbing scent. Above her, in a fish-eye view sketched in gray, the blank face of the video monitor reflected the curtain that concealed him. The folder she had written in dangled off the edge of the desk. A breeze riffled the blinds.

Leah pushed herself away from the desk with her hip
and sat in an overstuffed easy chair facing away from him, so that all but the back of her head disappeared. With a rustle and a thump, she removed her boots and tossed them on the carpet, followed by what sounded like a ring of keys or a pocketful of change. He stared at the back of the chair, waiting and willing for something more to happen, then her bare arm appeared and dropped a piece of black leather clothing after the boots, then another.

From
the dimness came a hiss or a sigh. A bare leg draped itself over the arm of the chair. The sound came again, a bitten-off hum halfway between a noise of effort and one of pleasure. A hand appeared over the top of the chair, a sheaf of copper hair gripped in its fingers. Her foot braced against the wall, to push and arch as the leg tensed, and her hand gripped the back of the chair.

A faraway sound like waves roaring filled his ears. The bare leg and pale arm continued to stir, and more sounds floated by. Breath hissing between teeth, low murmurings. The foot would lift or relax, the toes spread wide, and the hand would withdraw and reappear, at first languid and then seeking, grasping. It all formed music in his head. He let his eyes begin to close and lose focus as he tried to picture her, feel her, from where he knelt.

She could be thinking of him right now—that, or she had had someone else on her mind the whole time they were together. The smell of leather and Leah’s perfume came back to him, along with the view that he had had of her when he had lain on the floor at her feet while the dog loomed over him, panting its canine grin: her chin and cheekbones, as glimpsed from between her knees. He ached to touch her.

Simon reimagined the scene as he would stage it: sun slanting through the blinds in stark stripes across her body, filmed from a high angle behind the chair, to catch her face. Handheld shot, moving in slowly, close as a lover. Constellations of tawny spots on her skin, her hands flowing like water, seeking her source.

Then there was his private dream, which was simpler. The wrought-iron gate and her office door would be unlocked. To the soundtrack of a heartbeat, he gazed on her as she lay open to the air. Green eyes, ivory hipbones. She would not stop even when he knelt over her, though her fingers reached for his, to show him how. Slow thump of blood moving in his veins, fuzzy pressure in his ears, everything muffled except the texture of her skin, from the smooth grip of her thighs to the hidden tang and salt warmth of her sex—his goal, his home, the center of his dwindling universe.

Leah’s cry jolted him. Her legs draped over one chair arm, and her head hung over the other, hands covering her face. Her hair swung down and she remained still while the world filtered back in—birds chirping, the rumble of a plane flying overhead. If he had not seen everything that had led up to this, he might think from her pose that she was crying, but no sound reached him except the faraway trill of a telephone.

What was he now? A guest? He had gone beyond that. He had witnessed something not meant for his eyes but was justified, in the same way she had done things to him against his will, and yet not. The urge to reveal his presence rose in him, but he remained a camera. The room shimmered, remote. Whether he was a victim or a thief, he knew that this was not the end of it.

8:47 p.m.

“Where’ve you been?”

Simon caught the phone on the fourth ring. He stood in the living room of his cottage, formerly the caretaker’s quarters for the mansion next-door, in the alcove at the foot of the stairs. An unplugged lamp and a pile of water-stained cardboard boxes stood nearby, next to an orange sofa left by the previous tenants. Rhodo-dendrons pressed against the picture window, the glass sticky with their sap.

“Who is this?” he asked.

“Stay away from her.” The man’s voice sounded familiar. “Just stick to your job, and go home when it’s over. I’m watching you.”

“Why don’t you take a flying fuck,” said Simon.

“
Babylon
’s history if you don’t listen to me. StarBorn’s being sold. Bigger players than you are making the decisions now.”

“Everyone’s heard the StarBorn rumor
. So what?”

“It’s no rumor. It’s the end of your film unless you follow my advice.”

“I don’t listen to crackpots who threaten me. How do I know you can do what you say?”

“You’ll just have to believe me.”

Who had this phone number? His agent. His family. Tom. The studio.

The studio.

“Is this Fran’s idea? I’ll sue her ass off.” Silence. “Come on, you have to be with StarBorn to be able to threaten
Babylon
, to have even gotten this number.”

“Fran has nothing to do with it. This is my idea.” The caller lowered his voice.

“Is this Jonas?”

“I’m watching you, Mercer. Don’t think I won’t do it.” He hung up.

Paul Jonas. It had to be.