Tabula Rasa (14 page)

He didn’t have a bunch of knickknacks lying around, or framed art
on the walls. It was just a crisp bare emptiness. Utterly peaceful.
Much like my own room. But I’d expected that much from the guest
room. I wasn’t sure I’d expected it fully from Shannon’s.

The balcony door was oddly unarmed at the moment. So I went outside.
It was the first bit of fresh air I’d gotten in weeks. From here I
could yell and possibly have some hope of someone hearing me. I could
see other houses. They were a bit of a distance off, but technically
in the same neighborhood. Within screaming distance. Surely this
option for escape hadn’t been available to me all this time. Had
it?

As fucked up as it was, I think I’d wanted to stay cocooned in
Shannon’s house. As long as I felt safe, I didn’t want to escape.
And up until this point, despite logic, I’d felt safe. Whatever he
did out in the larger world, I just thought I was in a separate
category somehow. He didn’t skin and cut up his cat, so I thought
he might not do it to me, either.

I’d always thought I’d want to go outside eventually and interact
with the three-dimensional world of people, places, and things, but
I’d been content to remain shielded for a while, secretly hoping my
memory would return first, so when I did venture out, I didn’t feel
like an alien from another planet.

“Thinking of jumping?” Shannon whispered in my ear. He’d been
like a ghost, silent as mist wafting through walls.

“N-no.”

He threaded his fingers through mine and guided me back inside. There
was a coil of rope and a paddle on the bed.

“First I’m going to paddle you for coming downstairs and
interrupting my party. Then I’m going to tie you up and fuck you.”

I wanted to protest, maybe negotiate my way down to a light spanking
and missionary sex with the lights off. Give me the illusion of love
and caring. But the way his face lit up when he spoke and thought
about doing these things to me... I’d never seen him look more like
a real human being before.

There was no coldness in his expression now. It was all warmth like
the sun. It was the closest we’d gotten to that first night when
he’d felt pity for me. At the time that emotion from him had been
awful. In hindsight, knowing more about him, I realized what a rare
gift it was—to make him feel something like that. To make him feel
anything.

He was still aroused, and I couldn’t help the way my eyes continued
to stray over him. But when I finally was able to tear my gaze away
from his erection, I saw that he was equally captivated by me. His
gaze roved over me, soaking in each detail he’d denied himself all
these weeks starting when he’d turned his back on me in the castle
so I could dress.

“If you wanted me, why didn’t you take me at the castle?” I
asked.

“I
did
take you.”

I rolled my eyes. “You know what I mean. Why didn’t you just fuck
me there? Why did you turn around to give me privacy to put clothes
on? You could have done whatever you wanted then.”

“I didn’t know what I wanted.”

“Oh.”

“And if I’d fucked you then, you wouldn’t have wanted it. You
would have been too scared and upset. You were still processing the
death of the man you thought was your husband. You would have
screamed and fought me. No way would I have been able to get you to
come with me peacefully out of the park. I would have had to kill
you.”

It was good to know Shannon wasn’t impulsive. But then, I’d
already known that. Absent necessity, he didn’t do anything without
a plan and probably a thick dossier on whoever the plan involved.

Shannon stepped over to his closet and pulled out a pair of freshly
pressed jeans. Yes, he ironed his jeans. I feel like that should be
in a list of psychopath traits somewhere: doesn’t name his cat,
irons his jeans. He pulled the jeans on and zipped them.

I raised a brow. He fucked with his clothes on?

“I like the power imbalance: you nude and helpless, me at least
partly dressed. I could go outside right now without calling any odd
attention and without putting another stitch of clothing on.” His
gaze moved over me again. “You, not so much.”

He sat at the foot of the bed and dragged the paddle up next to his
thigh. “Elodie?”

I still didn’t know how we’d gotten here, from basic safety and
food and shelter and polite indifference to... this.

“Shannon?”

“Yeah?”

“What if I hadn’t come down to the party? Would this still be
happening?”

“Probably not.”

“So then, aren’t you glad I interrupted your party?” I asked
hopefully, thinking it might buy me some... something.

He smiled, a real smile that made me forget everything he was and
everything he wasn’t. “Yes, I’m glad you interrupted.”

“So why punish me?”

The smile remained on his face, but it twisted somehow as the rest of
his face seemed to fall into shadow. “Try negotiating with me
again, and you’ll get more. Do you want more?”

I shook my head quickly, already certain that I didn’t, even
without any experience to base that feeling upon.

So this was how it was going to be? I’d fantasized about Shannon,
but my fantasies had never been like this. Though realistically, I
didn’t know what kind of sex I expected Shannon to be into. Once
I’d decided he wasn’t into it at all, I could think about any
silly romantic thing I wanted. If it wasn’t happening ever at all
anyway, why worry about what he’d
realistically
do? Who
cared? Realism wasn’t required to come.

I’d been using him to erase Trevor from the first night inside
Shannon’s minimalist sanctuary. Each orgasm brought on by vague
sexual thoughts of him made Trevor fade a little more into the
background, first into a nameless face in a crowd, then into a
shadow, then into a ghost. Until he was mostly gone except for when I
had a bad dream about the park. I didn’t bother Shannon with those.
I was sure he didn’t care about any post traumatic whatever I had
going on.

“Elodie. Now.”

I glanced back at the balcony door, trying to decide if I should run
out there and scream my head off. But I didn’t want to.

“What if you lose control and kill me?”

“I’m not a Halloween monster. I don’t get red tunnel vision and
think
kill kill kill
. I’m always in control of myself. But
this continued discussion is adding to your punishment.”

When it became clear that I couldn’t bring myself to go to him, he
stood, and brought the paddle with him.

“Okay, then.”

With every step forward he took, I took a mirroring step back. Like
some dark tango. When we got close enough to the wall, he grabbed my
wrist and twisted my body to face it.

“Ow, ow, ow.”

“Relax,” he said, as if it were possible with the way he’d
wrenched my arm behind me. Maybe he’d once been a cop. Or military
and cop. Or military police. I could imagine Shannon cuffing a
criminal. Easily.

When I stopped struggling, he released his grip on my wrist. He kept
one hand on the back of my neck, holding me in place against the wall
while the other brought the paddle down across my ass and thighs
several times in quick, hard succession. The sound rang out like a
hollow gong in the echoing empty minimalism of the room.

Tears streamed down my face at the intense burning sting. “Shannon,
please. Please, stop.” It hurt. It
really
hurt. But I think
my fear was that, despite everything he assured me, he would lose
control. I was afraid he’d just beat me to death. I was afraid he
liked this too much.

The paddle came down against my skin once more, even harder, so hard
it briefly knocked the wind out of me. He kept his grip on the back
of my neck.

I pressed my hands flat against the wall on either side of me,
bracing myself, seeking anything to hold onto. I tried to focus on
the texture of the light gray wallpaper rippling beneath my
fingertips in elegant, sophisticated patterns. I took slow, measured
breaths. I did everything I could to live inside those breaths and
nowhere else.

“Beg me again. Beg me not to hurt you.” His voice was low and
guttural, not even human.

“Please, you’re scaring me. Please don’t hurt me.”

“Apologize for your behavior. And be specific.”

“I’m sorry I disobeyed you and went downstairs. I’m sorry I
left my room. Please,” I sobbed.

“If I tell you not to do something again, are you going to go ahead
and do it anyway?” he asked.

“No.”

“No,
Sir
,” he said.

“N-no, Sir.”

When he flung the paddle away, it made a soft thud against the
carpet, such a seemingly harmless sound. Heat rose off my flesh as if
I were burning up from the inside. But despite this fact, and despite
my terror, I felt a hard, steady pulsing throb between my legs, and I
was sure if my hand were to stray to the apex between my thighs, that
I would be very wet. Embarrassingly so.

Shannon pressed himself to my back and cradled me against the wall
for several minutes, his breath and heartbeat keeping time with my
own. I didn’t speak. I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t say
no man had ever done this to me before. Perhaps they had. How could I
know? Trevor hadn’t. Trevor’s tastes had always run strictly
vanilla, without so much as a stray rainbow sprinkle to be found. It
was all lights out and missionary with Trevor—nothing too
threatening.

I had never really gotten off with him, but at times, there had been
a comfort in warm body grinding against warm body, of embraces under
down comforters near a warm roaring fire. I hadn’t wanted to fuck
up the tiny bit of
not terrible
that had defined my life in
the park.

I don’t think I’d ever once thought that I
needed
Trevor
to fuck me—as if he were the only source of water that could put
out my flame. It had never been so dramatic as that. But standing
shoved against the wall with Shannon’s rough jeans pressing against
my heated raw flesh, I thought I would climb out of my own skin if he
didn’t put his dick inside me.

I would never say this out loud. I was still waiting for a man who
wasn’t a monster to bust in and rescue me off to a clean suburban
politeness where everything was safe and smelled like lemons.

And yet every raw nerve ending screamed for Shannon to possess me and
keep me forever, and now that he’d paddled me and I’d reacted as
I had, I suspected in the darkest well of my being that I didn’t
do
polite sex
. I couldn’t say it was Trevor’s sociopathy that
had kept me from being excited by him. Because Shannon was a
sociopath, too.

He sighed against my hair. “It’s exactly what I was afraid of.”

“What?”

But I knew.

“I like your pain and fear.”

I tensed beneath him, but inexplicably the excitement between my legs
didn’t fade away.

Chapter Six

Shannon released me and began to pace, lost somewhere inside his own
head for the moment. I just stood there, except now I was facing him.
I leaned against the wall, memorizing the pattern of the wallpaper
pressed against my bare flesh. I’d lost the will somehow to feel
self-conscious about my nudity. He’d drunk it up like peach tea on
a hot summer day, so it seemed weird to be self-conscious after all
that appreciative ogling. There was no question he was attracted.

Or that I was, no matter how desperately I’d tried to ward those
impulses away.

“Go to your room,” he said, refusing to look me in the eyes.

“Why? I thought...”

He took a long, deep breath as if he were one of those toys that had
to be wound up before it could express itself. “Until very
recently, the only person in the world I cared even a little bit
about was myself. I can fake empathy pretty well under the right
circumstances. Most people don’t notice because most of their
empathy is just as fake. Everybody’s wrapped up in their own shit,
so maybe we’re all just pretending, and it’s not just me.”

He stopped and seemed lost inside that thought for a moment. Finally,
he managed to untangle himself from it to continue. “I don’t
trust myself with you if I like hurting you... given the other things
I like.”

As if he had to spell that out for me. He thought murdering people
was fun. He thought hurting me was fun. He loved it when I cried and
begged him, so exactly how little would it take for him to cross over
to the thrill of killing me?

If I was a smart woman, if I had any brains inside my head at all, I
would have done what he asked. You’d think without memory to take
up much space in my brain that I’d have more room for deeper
cognitive reasoning.

But instead, I went to the bed and picked up the rope, then I went
back to Shannon and pressed it into his hand.
This
was insane.
I was insane. My captivity with Trevor must have broken me. In a
sense I’d been born in captivity. I didn’t remember a time I had
ever been free. Now I needed the ropes and the cage to feel safe—even
when I knew I was anything but.

Shannon’s hand closed over mine and the rope as he looked hard into
my eyes. “If you cross this line with me, we aren’t going back.”

“Is it going to end in my grisly murder?”

“I hope not.”

I believed he meant it. But how could I know? He was so good at
faking everything.

“I thought you weren’t a Halloween monster. I thought you were
always in control.”

“I’m going on past performance. I might be wrong.”

And I might never get my memory back. I might always live in this
gaping void, this endless eternal twilight, this space where lost
souls wandered and moaned in hallways in the dead of night.

He seemed to consider the point we’d reached for a moment, as if he
could rewind the night to before I’d walked in on the orgy, as if
we could go back to the happy roommate illusion we’d been living
in.