After (53 page)

Before you're gone.”

Later that night she asked him, “Where's you dad, now?”

Artel gave her a sad smile. “Dead. Not long after that day he dragged me to that branding party, he killed himself.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

She found him in his room, lying on his back, staring toward the ceiling, arms folded behind his head. Even though he must have heard her, even seen her coming in, he didn't speak or turn his head. Even when she sat on the edge of his bed.

“I'm sorry.”

It wasn't as hard to say as she'd thought. He turned to look at her.

“So sorry, Gareth.”

She didn't even mind that she was starting to cry.

He just stayed still, looking at her, waiting.

“In my entire life, since I was a little girl, you're the only man—practically the only person—who hasn't been vicious with me. I've never been ashamed before, of what I've done. I hate that I've been cruel with you.”

“It's alright. I told you; I understand why you did it.”

They were quiet for a while, him lying there on his back, her perched on the edge of the bed. If he would reach across, pull her down with him, weigh her down with his body, open her mouth, open her legs, everything would be simple again. Fight, or give in.

“Nix?”

She waited.

“I want to ask you something. Maybe you won't want to answer.”

Again, she waited.

“I'd like to know your story.”

“Why? It's the same as everyone's.”

“In the resistance,” he said, “you've known people. Been close.”

She thought of Jan. So like her. All fight. And Char, young and still hoping. She shrugged.

“Except for my dad, I've never really known anyone. We moved around all the time when I was a kid. And since he died, I guess I've just kept moving.” He laughed.

“So, the only people I've ever known, really, are the people in the books I've read. And my dad. But he was full of secrets, so really, I never knew him, either. So, I'd like to know you a little.”

She didn't like talking about herself. Or, no. She'd just never done it. It was an unspoken code among the women she knew. They didn't ask each other questions. If someone whispered or screamed out what had happened to her that week or ten years earlier, the others would listen. Hold her, if she'd let them. But no one went looking to open old wounds.

“I won't push, though, if you don't want to,” he said.

“What do you want to know?”

“You grew up in one of the orphanages,” he prompted.

“You were born after the plague. You never knew your mother?” she asked him.

“No.”

“I was born before. I remember my mom and dad. Together. I have memories, images like photographs, of them laughing together. Holding hands. Lying in bed together. When I was five, before the plague, my dad died. Then, less than two years later, the lights went out and the cars stopped and the plague came, and my mom died.

“They put me in an orphanage. Not like now. There were boys and girls together.

Maybe twenty little boys, and three of us girls. When I was twelve, the segregation started, and I was moved into a girls' facility, and when I was of age, I was given to a husband.”

She pulled air into her lungs and let it out, not sure why she was telling this untold story. Thinking of that time, so long ago, it was almost like imagining someone else's life. That girl, Nicolette, Nikki, was a different person. Soft and hopeful. A delicate alien.

“You must have been scared,” he said quietly.

“I wasn't as innocent as most first-brides these days,” she told him. “I'd seen things between my parents. I had an idea what sex was. I was terrified at the thought of being given to someone I didn't know, but I understood that things worked that way. I had this idea that maybe we could be like my mom and dad. So I went quietly. Like your girl in the hotel.”

Gareth was quiet, patient and still, as Nix slipped under a wave of memories.

* * * *

When she'd been led before him, she'd felt suddenly small. From the oldest girl at the facility, surrounded by smaller girls, watched over by women no bigger than she, to that. At least a foot taller than her, and twice as wide. All of him a strange, washed-out color, indifferent. Like sand.

She'd thought he'd talk to her a little. That there would be some kind of ceremony. For some reason, she'd pictured them sitting at a small table beside a large window, or outside on a patio, surrounded by trees and flowers, drinking tea.

But he was not a man for anticipation. For savoring. That afternoon, before he took her to bed, she watched him eat a steak, sliced efficiently into six large pieces and devoured perfunctorily, without relish, and later thought that was how he'd devoured her.

As soon as the custodians from the orphanage left, he took her into her bedroom, and with no sign of joy or even hunger, started to undress her. He didn't kiss her. Hardly even looked at her: her unusual black eyes, her glossy black hair which, with her intuitive understanding that the degree to which this stranger valued her was vital to her well-being, she'd hoped would make up for her lack of full breasts and hips. As if he were unwrapping a parcel, he unbuttoned her dress, pulled it from her shoulders, dropped it to the floor.

His indifference had hurt her feelings; knowing she'd be a wife before she'd have a chance to love, she'd comforted herself with fantasies of being cherished, if not for any exceptional beauty or grace, at least for her rarity. Women were scarce enough, but a virgin youth—only a fortunate few men would ever have that chance.

So, when he cupped her breasts in his hands, even though she'd sworn to herself she wouldn't, she started to cry. She kept silent as tears blurred her vision and tickled down her cheeks.

Finally, then, he spoke to say, “Hey, now. No need for that. There's nothing to be scared about. I'm not going to hurt you.”

Then he laid her down on the bed and climbed over her, and she could feel how his body strained as he shifted his weight onto one elbow so he could squeeze a breast in his free hand, and bend down to lick and suck her nipple. That feeling, the warm wet of his tongue, the rubbing, then sucking, startled. Sudden pleasure tickled along her nerves, feathering over her skin, chilling and heating at once.

But looking at him, she had the feeling she wasn't there with him. Even though she could feel everything he did to her, it was like looking through a window into another room. He never saw her face, her seeking eyes. Only her nipples, her belly lifting and falling, her sex.

He sat up on his knees and pulled her underwear off, then pushed her thighs open. Even when she whimpered, he didn't look up from his hand, her sex. Once, he brushed his fingers through her dark curls, then started rubbing between her thighs.

There was something like pleasure, but then he worked his finger inside, and it was scary and uncomfortable.

He pulled his finger out, and she watched as he undid his fly. The thing he had there looked wrong. Not like the penises of the little boys at the orphanage.

She knew. He'd push it inside her. It was supposed to be smaller. Not all hard and red and swollen and veined like that.

She closed her eyes tight, then, and tried to keep quiet as he drove that thing into her, then as he lay down on top of her and started flexing and grunting, tearing into her, ramming his hardness in and out of her, panting, straining, slow and even at first, then faster, shaking her whole body, until he groaned and his stiff, straining body went limp on top of her.

No appreciation, but great appetite. With that man, that husband, it was the same in all things. Sex. Food. Things, the vast and swelling mass of treasures pilfered from whatever corners of the country his stubby fingers penetrated, first-hand or by proxy.

Vases and paintings and sculptures, platters and tureens and pitchers, tapestries and rugs, ornately carved articles of furniture, all dark and heavy and brightly polished. He collected everything, and cherished nothing.

And he drank rare bottles of aged scotch, fine champagnes and wines the way the guards she encountered later drank beer—by the liter, and without much thought for the palate.

Half the time, he went to her too drunk to fuck. Those times, he'd coax her, with his usual lack of brutality or sensitivity, to use her mouth on him, and after the first few of these encounters, she knew to expect that he would be unconscious, snoring, before she'd made him come. Sometimes before she'd even managed to get him hard.

* * * *

To Artel, Nix just said, “It didn't feel like it, then, but I was lucky. The man they sold me to wasn't cruel. He never hurt me on purpose. He just came to me to sate his need once or twice a day, and the rest of the time, mostly, he left me alone. But I wasn't with him for long.”

“You were accused. Branded,” he prompted her.

* * * *

Once, locked in her room while he had company, she'd lain down on the burgundy carpet and put her ear to the vent and listened to the voices of her husband and the four or five men drinking with him downstairs in the study.

“So, this wife of yours, what's she called?”

“Nikki. And she's not my wife. My wife's dead.”

In the silence wafting up to her through the vent, she heard the truth of her lot.

Husband. Wife. They were just words they used to make it seem okay. She wasn't his wife. She was just a thing, like the Harley David that he kept perfectly polished but couldn't even ride because there was no fuel for it.

“Well, is she pretty?” one of them asked, then.

Her owner sighed. “Eh. She's more strange looking than anything. Not as pretty as half the whores at the hotel.”

There was a time when that would have hurt her. But not now.

“Why don't you bring her down. Let her serve us our drinks, or something, so we can get a look at her?”

“Nah. She's shy. You lot'll just scare her.”

After the men left and he came up to her, while she was working her tongue and lips over his reluctantly stiffening cock, she'd felt a strange sort of gratitude.

It was a regular thing, that crowd coming over. Sometimes all five of them.

Sometimes just two or three. And she'd always lie down on the floor with her ear over the vent, because their drunken banter was the closest she ever came to a social life, except for the visits from her owner, who never really talked to her.

One night, when it was just two visitors, and the party dragged on hour after hour, round after round after round of scotch, she fell asleep, her cheek resting on the vent. It was the silence that woke her up. The sudden absence of the low drone of masculine voices. Behind her, a key clicked and scratched in the lock and she scurried to the bed, not wanting to be caught at the vent, afraid even that bit of contact with the world would be taken from her.

In the dark, she thought she saw the silhouettes of two figures. Her heart stopped. What was he doing?

The shadows closed in, and she braced herself for this next betrayal. But the light beside her bed clicked on, the dark figures filled in their shapes and colors. Her husband wasn't there.

Before she could scream, one of them had his hand over her mouth.

“If I was you, sweetheart, I wouldn't scream,” the other one said. “I wouldn't make a sound. Because if your husband comes up here and finds you with us, do you know what happens?”

The dark-haired one still had his hand over her mouth.

“Do you?” the blond demanded.

She shook her head.

“You get branded a whore, and sent to work in the sex hotel,” the one with his hand over her mouth whispered in her ear. “Five guys a night. Minimum. Every night.

You want that?”

“Nah,” the other said. “You don't want that. So be quiet. And be nice. And we'll be nice, too. We know damn well you're not having any fun with your Roger. I can tell, just by the way he talks about you, he doesn't appreciate you the way he should.”

The clamping pressure over her mouth lessened, little by little, both of them watching her. She stayed quiet.

“That's a good girl,” the leaner, dark-haired one breathed right against her mouth, all sweetly fumy, like her husband after a few hits of scotch.

“Please. Please go,” she whispered. “He'll come up. He always does. Every night.”

“Don't worry about Roger, little Nikki. He's out cold.” The dark-haired one smiled, holding her gaze, and something tilted in her brain. This one saw her. “I'm Jack. And this is Arnie. Say 'hello.'”

“Hello, Jack,” she breathed, doing her best not to cry. “Hello, Arnie.”

Jack smiled again, his teeth looking strangely white against the dark stubble around his wide mouth.

“Good girl,” he sighed.

He touched her face, tracing over her features. It was strange, being touched that way. With the tip of a finger he parted her lips, then put his mouth over the bottom one, and the feeling of his tongue, warm and wet, brushing over it made her suck in her breath. He groaned and sank both hands into her hair and pulled her into a deep, penetrating kiss that made her feel more invaded, more possessed than being fucked by her husband ever had.

When he released her from that kiss, Jack murmured, “Good girl,” again, then slid around behind her and snaked his arm around her belly, holding her against him while Arnie came in for his kiss. Arnie tasted like something sour and burnt—cigarettes, she understood later—and his kiss was shallow and dry. While he licked her mouth and tongue, Jack's fingers slid under her nightgown and strummed over her nipple. When he pinched and tugged and all that feeling flowed down into her belly and her sex and she whimpered, he growled and said, “Yeah. You like that, don't you, little Nikky?”

“Here, now, take this off,” Arnie said, tugging at the silk nightie.

“Please. Please, you've got to go,” she whispered, starting to cry, fear wearing her down.

“Shhh,” Jack hushed her, pulling her hair aside, kissing the nape of her neck.

“We're not gonna be rough with you. And if you're quiet, we'll be quick. Roger will never know.”

She eyed the lamp, pictured cracking it over their heads. Getting the key.