Jeremiah Quick (10 page)

Sometimes thinking such words made her
cringe in shame, wondering what was wrong with her, why being dirty
felt so delicious. But mostly those words, and others like them,
made her want to touch herself more.

She couldn't even guess how old she was the
first time she masturbated, only that she was young enough that
there were few landmarks in her memory to indicate the time or
circumstance.

She remembered standing on the flat surface
of her vanity table. It was the sort of little girl's vanity with a
large mirror attached by ribs of one-by-two pieces of wood screwed
or bolted to the back of the dresser itself.

When she stood on the vanity, she was tall
enough to curl her hands around the top edge of the mirror. If she
stood on it naked, she could walk her bare feet, which were mildly
sweaty with the fear of being caught, up the mirror, as if she were
a climber scaling a wall, and then, for as long as the strength of
her arms held out, she could stare at her own parts.

She was a small child, tiny and birdlike,
but couldn't have been more than four or five or the weight of her
body hanging from the mirror would have brought her, and it,
crashing to the floor in a pile of nakedness and broken glass. But
this never happened.

Later that same year, Santa Claus or some
beaming-but-still-cloying adult, gave her a delightful accessory
kit called a "vanity set", that contained a brush, a comb, and a
mirror with a handle. She held the kit in its box, staring
wondrously at the mirror through the clear cellophane window. It
was the best gift ever. She could look at herself while lying in
her bed, or, because the bed springs were squeaky, while lying on
the floor. She could explore what she saw with her fingers.

Which she did, obsessively.

Eventually she touched herself with objects.
The bristles of the hairbrush were almost too intense, but the
tines from the comb not enough. A necklace chain could be settled
deep between her buttocks, then pulled slowly or quickly from back
to front. The scrape of it against those mysterious folds caused a
tingle all the way to her toes. Made them curl, in fact, and
brought her hips off the floor in a desperate straining for
something she was too young to name. The smell of her fingers,
afterward, was another pleasure; a secret naughtiness she could
indulge in even in front of other people.

No one talked about these things, and she
somehow knew it was a secret. She was torn between thinking she was
the only one who touched her private parts when she was alone, or
that everyone did, and it was just one more item on the list of
Things We Don't Talk About. Like her father's drinking, and her
mother's unpredictable and very often irrational rages.

What would the neighbors think?

Indeed.

At some point she found a chain of linked
balls. She remembered it very clearly – it was the sort of chain
she'd seen attached to not-so-lucky-for-rabbits-feet, but this one
was oversized. The chain itself must have been eighteen or twenty
inches long, the steel balls nearer in size to her mother's pearls
than her brother's BBs.

When she floated them over her folds, the
end few spheres disappeared.

That had never happened before.

She was lying on the floor on her back,
knees tucked to her chest. She could see what her hands were doing,
but only sort of, and it was awkward to hold her neck up for very
many minutes at a time.

She watched her hand lower the strand until
all but the one she was holding between thumb and index finger were
out of sight.

They weren't hiding between her butt cheeks.
She checked.

Wherever they went, they weren’t hurting
her, and she didn't think they went into the place where pee came
out. She stretched her free hand under the bed and felt around for
the hand mirror. The mirror showed the chain, and a small dark
opening into which most of the chain had fallen. Well, that was
curious.

She pulled the chain out. The opening was
still there. She dropped the chain back in, still holding on to the
end because she was afraid of losing the whole thing.

She removed the chain and poked the opening
with her finger. It opened more and her finger went in, and nothing
hurt. She hadn't been able to feel the chain in there, but when she
moved her finger, it felt like a feathery brush inside of her, like
the feeling of butterflies in her stomach, but gentler and more
private.

She was delighted. This opening in her body
promised to be great fun, and it was
hers
. No one else would
ever have to know.

Later in childhood, someone's older brother
had to be taken to the emergency room because he'd poked a bobby
pin into his butt and somehow misplaced it there.

Pretty had found many interesting things to
put into her vagina, but it had never occurred to her to poke
anything
there
. Especially bobby pins. So that bit of
gossip, intended to further the glee little girls feel over the
humiliation of an older brother, sent her into a whole new
direction of exploration.

She knew the particular press of muscle
that, combined with the acceptance of inevitable submission, would
allow her to open for Jeremiah Quick.

The humiliating ache of subjugation lived in
that barely there place between the object and her flesh. The fact
that Jeremiah already filled her cunt was part of it.

His tone lost that soothing quality and took
on command, and he said, "Come on, Sunshine Girl, take it."

A strangled cry wrested out of her throat
and she pushed back, opened.

It was… too large and too hard, and not
round, but had indentations for fingers to grip, the odd shape of
it impossible. Uncomfortable.

It was inside her, now, and so was he, and
Pretty forgot how to breathe.

Her breath was coming in choking gags,
gasping sounds, and some sort of keening noise that was forbidden
but rising in the room anyway. Coming out of her, this sound,
against her will.

She didn't hear his voice at first. One of
his hands rested on her upper back, holding her down, the other
manipulated the awful thing inside of her. The stretch and the
burn, and... trying to be quiet, but it was all hurt hurt HURT, and
it took a few minutes before she could make out his words.

His was talking to her. "Ah, there. You feel
me. It's… ahh, it's perfect, like I belong."

Pretty was gritting her teeth, the taste of
blood in her mouth, crying. He pulled her by the hair. "Stop
crying. Your tears are mine. Save them for me."

But she couldn’t stop.

There came a wrenching loss, emptiness, the
loss of his cock from her cunt, and he was standing in front of the
table, leaning to eat her tears again, tongue tracing her cheeks,
poking at her eyes.

This she hated. It felt like he was stealing
from her.

Her anus contracted, fighting the thing he'd
left inside of her, wanting it out, wanting it gone.

"You’ve earned at least another ten. But
that can wait, for now."

Eating her tears made him softer.

"Perhaps next time I'll tie you down and
listen to you scream," he mused out loud, more to himself than to
her.

If his purpose was to frighten her, it
worked. She had no doubt now that he was capable of doing such a
thing, and, based on everything she could see in this room, he
would enjoy it.

He leaned a hip against the table and
stroked her back with one hand. "In my plan, I tucked you into the
cage every night, from now until the end.”

She glanced back at him, then looked where
he was looking, following the turn of his head with her gaze around
this… dungeon, or play room, whatever he called it, to the hated
cage. She shook her head, at first slowly, and then with a violence
that bordered on frenzy.

She didn't want to sleep there ever
again.

The bed was on the other side of the room,
just a shit-brown plastic mattress on a frame. She was so tired
that it almost looked comfortable.

Jeremiah’s eyes flicked to the ceiling.

Pretty still followed his gaze, now upward,
to where hooks were set into the rafters, some of them holding
chains, some rope. And a frayed scrap of black fabric, there,
too.

This seemed to be where his eyes settled,
and his eyebrows drew down, his lips tightened, and that muscle in
his jaw twitched.

But just before that hardened look was a
lost look, sad and desperate, there and gone in an instant. Had she
been allowed to speak, she would have said something sweet. If she
had chocolate, she would have fed him some.

His eyes returned to Pretty, and softened as
if he knew what she was thinking.

He touched the top of her head, then let his
hand drop to cup her cheek, with an unexpected measure of
gentleness.

Then he walked around the table, fingers
traveling on the wood surface, as if tracing a chalk outline around
her.

When he was out of sight, she felt his
fingers between her ass cheeks, bumping against the switch handle,
grasping it. He gave it a little tug that sent shocks up her spine
and down her legs. "Come on, Sunshine, let it go."

It took almost as much concentrated effort
to release the thing as it had to accept it, and again there was
that rush of humiliation, that here she was unbound, obedient to
his hurt. The next time he tugged with purpose, and she managed to
relax the muscle enough to let it go. After he put it wherever he
put it, he touched her lips again, placed the sweet chocolate on
her tongue, and said, "That's a good girl."

She savored the sweet explosion, the
chocolate melting in her mouth, and it almost made her cry
again.

He patted her cheek, then coaxed her off the
table, and dressed her, piece by piece, back into her clothes. Even
socks. Everything but jacket and shoes.

Then he walked her to the bed with one arm
around her shoulders, holding her half-turned with her face against
his chest. He smelled good. He smelled like Jeremiah, a faint
strain of the familiar, the Jeremiah she'd known, of the nervous
fingers and quick, economical, spike-filled hugs. There was also a
heavier and darker weight to his scent – not his pain, but removed
from his pain, newer. Something like his purpose. It jolted her
nerves, activated her adrenaline, and not in a bad way. It felt
primal, as if this coupling was planned, far, far in advance of
their recent meeting.

Unfinished business.

There were cuff restraints with straps
waiting on a table near the bed. "Find a position you can sleep in,
and I'll arrange the cuffs."

Fucker.

She laid on her side, and he enclosed her
wrists and ankles in the cuffs, and fastened them to the bed.

He dropped a blanket over her, then moved
the cage to clean up her mess. When he was done, he left her in the
dark.

Chapter 8

S
he.

She was exactly as I expected she would
be.

Still sweet, still lost, still easy to shock
into silence.

When had I ever been shocked into
silence?

Never, that's when. I had often been silent
because I knew better than to say what I was thinking, but I'd
never, ever been struck dumb because someone told me not to
speak.

The differences between Sunshine and I are
still enormous. Probably too enormous to overcome, but I have to
try. She's the last of the Three, and that has to count for
something.

I wonder if she's crying, alone out there in
the dungeon, and have a little argument with myself about leaving
her alone, or not leaving her alone.

Perhaps we both need quiet time in the
Dark.

I close my eyes and a memory comes.

It's not a memory I want, but that doesn't
seem to matter. Magick does what it does.

I am... maybe six years old, knowing mostly
that everything in the world is much bigger than I am, but still
not very savvy, when I first notice people are like ants; tiny and
focused and zigzagging this way and that, but all going in
basically the same direction, busy, busy, busy appeasing the Queen,
never question, never fail, and if the one in front of you does
happen to fail, well, just climb over the corpse and get on with
the program.

Adults are drones scavenging the earth of
everything useful, blinders on, ignoring the grass and the sky and
art and anything else that was aesthetically pleasing.

Every so often a gleaming beetle, one of
those with the shining iridescent shell, captures the attention of
a drone, and the drone will follow for a while, then lose the
route, get turned around, and die trying to find its way back.
Maybe even trying to find its way forward. It’s hard to tell
sometimes.

I know that I feel sorry for the ants, all
working so hard to please a queen who doesn't care about them,
who's incapable of seeing them as individuals. Who will
eat
them
if resources run low, eat them to maintain her ability to
reproduce and make more of them.

Would the world suffer without the ants? I
don't know, really, but somehow I doubt it.

I tell myself that my mother is gone because
she followed an impressive beetle, one so glittery-shiny-pretty to
look at that it was like the music of the pied piper, and she was
so captured by its beauty she couldn’t force herself to escape. She
knew she ought to resume her role among the drones, but she
couldn't. She'd die if she did. That's the story I tell myself, and
I try hard not to listen when my dad waxes angry-poetic about his
miserable life raising this freak boy without any help, and if my
mother had one bloody fingernail's worth of love for me, she'd be
here right now, right now, RIGHT NOW. Or she'd come and take me
away. Or, at the very least, send a check once in a while.