Abduction (71 page)

Vaughn was expecting Devan. Five hours earlier she'd left him for campus, promising to come back to him when her classes finished. Usually when he heard the door he would rush to open it, even though she had a key, but this time he was in the back room, half-dreaming as he picked at the strings of his guitar, and he hadn't heard her. She appeared in the doorway, smiling, and when he set the instrument down she came to him, so warm and eager that his body went taut, humming with sudden, violent pressure the moment he touched her.

He loved undressing her. Making her naked skin appear where he unzipped, unbuttoned, pulled away the fabric that had been hiding her, feeling the smooth warmth of her bare body. But especially how happy and urgent she was under his hands. Her trust, her excitement, her pleasure.

And, again and again, he caught himself smiling at the anticipation, the joy he read in her face as she undressed him, still, after all these weeks together, half their time together spent naked and kissing and touching and writhing, her expression one of undisguised wonder at having this man. Her lover.

Today was different. Her need was almost fierce. She was like a little demon, writhing and crying, clawing and biting. Her ferocity startled him, then spurred him. After, panting, they held each other, tender as ever as they caressed and kissed and 646

whispered where they were huddled on the floor, and his face went hot and his stomach dropped a little with each recollected image of their brutal encounter.

"What came over us?" he laughed softly, and with his fingertip he touched her bottom lip, vivid and swollen.

"All afternoon, in my lectures, even in my little discussion group, when I was supposed to be dissecting this passage from "Anna Karenina," I just kept thinking of you. Getting these images of us, times we've been together. Things we've done." She laughed. "I wonder, sometimes, can people tell when someone's aroused, when it's so out of context like that? I feel like those thoughts must be written all over my face, but nobody acted like I seemed strange to them."

Fuck, what a turn-on, the thought of her sitting there, looking calm and studious, when she was thinking of him, his mouth on her, her hands on him, wrapped around each other's bodies.

"I love that," he laughed silently, amused at how low and husky his voice came out as he told her, "that you fantasize about me when we're apart."

"And a little bit when we're together, too," she confessed in a teasing voice, looking up at him coyly from under her lashes. She was becoming an adorable flirt. "Do you ever? Fantasize about me?"

Now she was blushing in earnest.

"Yes."

It seemed to him she'd been about to ask him something else, but changed her mind.

“What?” he teased.

“I love us, Vaughn. How we are together.”

“So do I.”

“Sometimes, though,” she stopped and turned away from him to search space for the right phrase.

“What Dev?” he coaxed.

“I get the feeling, when we're...together, that you...hold back.”

“Hold back?”

He laughed and ran his finger over the red mark he'd left on her forearm a few minutes earlier.

“Today was different. But even today. I feel like you keep a part of yourself locked up.”

He closed his mouth. He was used to lying to himself, but he wouldn't lie to her.

“Maybe. You're right.”

"Sometimes," she said in her lover's whisper, the low, slow voice she used with him in bed, "I think about your touches from the last time we made love, the bend and flex of your body from some particular moment. Sometimes I wonder how we'll be together next—how it will start, the things you might say, how we touch each other. And sometimes," she was watching his face, and seemed to hesitate. Then she went on, "I think about...things from before." And finally, after a pause and a breath, "Back at the cabin."

Vaughn felt a thump in his chest.

"Do you?" he asked, careful not to discourage. He could see she was unsure of him, on this topic.

"Yes."

"Like what?" he willed his voice to stay smooth. Easy.

"The night by the fire. I think of how it might have gone, if I hadn't said anything. If I'd swallowed my fear and given myself to you that night. Sometimes I imagine how it would have been if I'd kept hidden how inexperienced I was. And then I imagine how it might have been, if I'd told you I was a virgin, and you showed me, in your gentle, patient way, how to do everything."

"What else?"

"Sometimes I think about those days when we were strangers. Neither of us understood. You thought I was someone else. I think about that day you had me against that big pine, and I was so sure you were going to, and there was nothing I could do. I imagine how you might have taken me, if you hadn't stopped."

"And you feel excited? Thinking about that?" It was a warm whisper.

"Yes."

Through the beaten-down exhaustion of their war-like sex session he was getting aroused.

"And sometimes," she resumed tentatively, "I think about the other stuff. You chasing and catching me out in the mud and rain after you found me in your house. The day you thought I'd read your journal. I think about that. You dragging me into the house and putting me on that bed."

Her breathing had changed, and her throat and chest were pink.

"You fantasize about me raping you?”

"Yes." Then, after a pause, “Do you?”

“No,” he answered, barely audibly.

“Because it doesn't excite you? Or because you won't let yourself?”

“Dev,” he paused to kiss her cheek, compelled by her nearness, by how fragile and determined she seemed to him in that moment, letting his lips linger a moment, drifting over the smooth curve of her cheekbone. “I couldn't get pleasure from the thought of hurting you.”

“No. I know,” she said quietly. “It's not the same, I know. Fantasizing the role of the victim, fantasizing the role of the rapist.” She was quiet for a long time before she went on. Quiet. Slow. Careful. "I trust you, Vaughn. I think you'll understand me. This part of me. I just don't know if you'll like it. It's so close to what you don't like in yourself.

But I want to tell you. I've wanted to tell you for a long time."

"Yes," he sighed with a reassuring smile, “tell me."

It was like jumping from a bridge, trying to believe the harness and ropes will save. Her head was light, her gut lunging even before she let herself fall.

"I want," she began, but started again, trying her best for the words closest to her truth, "I think I need...a certain amount of fear."

She watched, waiting for the set of his mouth, the flicker of his eyes to warn her he was receding. But he went on holding her close in his gaze.

"There's something, for me, in being confronted by my lack of control. Of feeling that I'm at the mercy of another. Another's will, another's wants. Not because I want to feel...used. Or objectified. It's more like..." It was hard to put into words, no matter how many times she'd worked it out in her head. "...like going beyond myself. My own impulses, my desires, my limits, and finding something beyond."

"I don't want to interrupt you, to interject," Vaughn said when she felt silent and gave him a questioning look, "but I'm listening."

"I'm not a masochist. I don't want to be hurt. Or injured. Just...pushed. I want that sort of...effacement, I guess...where my rationality is dissolved by sensation, emotion, adrenaline, all that. Like when you bike or run, and you think you've hit the wall and have to stop because your lungs don't seem to be able to suck in enough air, your heart is pounding so hard it hurts, and your legs feel soft, like you're just going to fall down.

But you keep going, and after a while, it's almost like floating. Like you're apart from your body, but at the same time you feel, hear, see everything with this unfamiliar intensity. Or when you eat too much chili pepper or wasabe, and you feel your body respond, it's not a thought process. Your veins throb, you sweat, there's a weird euphoria. And there's pain, too. You can't stop it. You just have to wait for it to pass, and while you do, you, your reality is subsumed in the...transcendence of the pain. I don't know. I'm not explaining it very well."

"No. You are. I get that. I do, Dev."

He widened his smile and stroked the bare skin at the back of her arm, tickling warmth.

"And it's like," she went on hurriedly, excited that he was getting it. Her. "when you were a kid and you went too fast down a hill on your bike or skateboard. Out of control, terrified, just trying to hang on, ride it out. And at the end, you felt you'd been through something, and made it."

"Yes."

"That surrender, or maybe loss--loss is closer--of control, of safety seems like a risk, a gamble of harm. Or death. But it's also a way of touching, feeling life."

She laughed at herself.

"I'm getting corny."

"Corny?" he teased. "What generation are you again?"

"Sorry. I'm getting cheesy. Is that better?"

"Dev. You're not getting cheesy. And you're not scaring me." But he'd started to look scared. Uneasy, at least. "Do you think you can get that from me? From someone you're intimate with, I mean?"

"I don't know."

His reassuring smile wilted, he nodded his head.

"Is it even something you want?" she asked.

"Dev, there are a thousand reasons why I adore you. And beyond those thousand little concrete things I love about you, there's the big thing, this feeling that swallows me every time I see you, feel you, even think about you."

He went quiet for a few seconds and the way he was looking at her, his fingers seeking and weaving into her hand, shook her with the feeling that his love was too big for her.

"It amazes me," he went on, "to suddenly feel, at this point in my life, after so many years, and having loved before, this different, devouring love. But the thing that surprises me more is the thought that with you...with you I can discover myself, become myself. There's something in me that I've been afraid of. All my life. And you, you want that part of me, I think."

"Yes."

"Everything you said a minute ago is like an echo of that part of me. Your fear of relinquishing control is like my fear of having it. Taking it. But, I think, taking control is relinquishing, too. Letting the beast inside off the leash, leaving behind the rational man who, to some degree, thinks his way through every encounter.

Then he held her face before him, between his two palms. Their eyes locked.

This was important. She had to understand. To accept, if things were going to go forward. Vaughn pulled air into his lungs until they ached,

“I'll never be like him, Dev.”

“No,” she said gravely. “I know that.”

Vaughn seemed strange to her that evening. Still. Quiet. Watchful.

Almost manic, Devan’s insides, her fingers, her limbs quivered faintly with nervous excitement in Vaughn’s presence, like an espresso O.D. He answered all her embarrassed smiles with his calm, steady look, then went on watching her as she flitted from dresser to trunk to armoire, filling her overnight bag. Then, as she dashed by him, on her way to get her brush from the bathroom, he caught her arm in his hand, and drew her to a halt before him. Something in his look made her resist her impulse to sink down into his arms, press herself against him, kiss him.

His strong fingers slipped from her wrist, down, then up, under the hem of her skirt. Warm, smooth, his hands slid over the backs, then the fronts of her thighs as he watched her blush. It still startled, him touching her that way, no embrace, no kiss, just watching her. When he touched her sex through her panties she heard her breath 653

catch, and he smiled. As if it had been caught and drawn in by that smile, her hand reached out to touch his face, but he caught her wrist and held it tight as he went on caressing her with other hand, making her throb and swell as her chest banged with some feeling akin to aroused fear.

“All that time at the cabin, all those times I had you, you never gave yourself to me. Not fully. Until that last day.”

He had to smile when he saw that she was already breathing a little heavily, and his involuntary smile at that made him think for a second of Conrad.

“Now, since we've been together, you've given yourself to me again and again.

You're always eager for me, aren't you?”

“Yes,” she said, and he knew she meant it even though she looked timid.

“But you keep something back.”

She opened her mouth—to protest, he imagined—but closed it again, as if she'd realized.

“Do you mean to keep anything from me, Dev?”

“No,” she whispered, her eyes lifted to his, wondering.

She wasn’t afraid of Vaughn. She wasn’t. But something had her nearly frightened. Even before he dropped her wrist and with both hands yanked her panties down below her knees.

Before he touched her naked sex he fixed his flinting eyes on her, and watched.

For what? Her fear? To know if he should stop? Still watching, he touched her. Opened her. Entered her. Watched her as she gasped and whimpered, watched her as she blushed after.

When he stood, so near and so suddenly that she might have lost her balance if he hadn’t caught her arms in his hands, her panties fell to her feet. He walked her out of them, backwards-stepping, toward the bed. Then she was on her back and he was on her, spreading her legs with his, unzipping, shoving his jeans down. Panting, startled, Devan felt her helplessness as he pressed her wrists to the mattress above her head.

Again he waited, watching. Panting and quivering with want and adrenaline she waited. To feel him. To feel what he was doing to her, taking her this way.

Without a kiss, without a word, he entered her, so hard, so sudden and deep, she cried out. Not pain. Not exactly.

She thought at first that he was only playing; his grip on her wrists was so lax, she sensed she could slip free, just to caress him, to feel her take part as more than a passive...