Jeremiah Quick (29 page)

The boy smiled and shook his head. "He loves
you," he said. "Needs you."

Somehow that made sense.

"Me too. Love him, I mean."

The boy looked sad, then. "I hope you love
him enough. But I'm sorry if you do."

That didn't make any sense.

The boy faded away before her eyes, and she
looked helplessly at Jeremiah. "He's gone. You'll have to tell me
the story alone now."

Chapter 33

S
he.

She's fading in and out now, flinching away
from the knife, flinching into it – there's no real pattern to how
she reacts, and I don't think she's particularly connected to her
physical self anymore, just nerves jumping or recoiling, not at all
conscious.

She's listening for the story.

"…And the boy was a naughty, kinky boy, who
had appetites and desires that no one had ever been willing to
satisfy.

I found him ten years after I started
looking, and every day in between was one more day I survived with
my heart broken.

I was half a person all those years, half
alive with hope, half dead with fear that I would never find him,
never hold him, never fuck him until he was screaming into the
mattress.

In the meantime, there were people, like
Sunshine Girl, hopelessly naïve and led to think like lemmings,
allowing society and media to drive their every thought and
therefore every action. I did what I could to teach them Non
Serviam and Cui bono? Encouraged them to
Think
, do the
research, use their own brains. Eat the apple for fuck's sake –
stop following and
lead
.

There are many, many good people in this
world, many Dark people with beautiful hearts. Some of them are
afraid to admit it, afraid to let the darkness in, but once they
do, once they start to see, really see, it all comes clear. And it
can't be unseen. They know the difference between right and wrong.
They know, because their hearts tell them, and – if they don't
forget – (and here I raise my eyebrows at Sunshine) – they can
change the world.

I'm outlining her ribs now, carving numbers
and symbols, the meanings of which she'll probably never
understand, and she flinches away, lets out a hiss of breath.

I move from one side to the other, trying to
distribute the pain.

"I know it hurts, baby. It has to."

As I continue cutting, she strains against
the few restraints left, fighting this, fighting me and what I have
to do.

All I can do is stop for a minute, give her
a chance to recover, to breathe.

I ease myself off the bed, scooting
carefully backward between her legs, her feet. I pick up a clean
rag and dip it into the bucket.

She watches me, eyes narrowed, her breaths
becoming sobbing pleas.

She's cut now from collarbones to sternum,
including breasts and ribs on both sides.

She will have to handle it. She has no
choice in this.

I know the burn. I scarred myself as a test,
to make sure I had the right ingredients to turn clean cuts into
fine white lines. It works. The scars will probably fade, but not
for a long time.

She will endure, because I won't offer any
other choice.

"Give in to it," I tell her, giving her some
slight mercy and dropping the cloth back into the bucket, for the
moment ignoring the most recent cuts and patterns. "There is no
escape, only submission."

I want her to embrace that concept, give in
to it, to me, to everything.

She bites the inside of her lip, holds her
breath.

"Come on, Sunshine Girl, give me tears. I'm
thirsty for them."

She lets out the breath, and at the end of
it comes a sob, a broken sort of noise as she hiccups another
breath in, then lets it out as a keening wail.

That's better.

Tears then, and I move closer to her head,
and stroke her hair as I bend to take them with my tongue. "Very
nice," I murmur, petting her.

She shudders and sobs, and I trace my
fingers through the blood on her chest, delighted that she can
anticipate how the burn will build, the agonizing fire that seals
the wounds while keeping them open, so she'll stay wounded until
she literally grows new skin.

She's getting tired, her blinks growing into
moments of rest. This is not to be tolerated.

I go back to my position kneeling between
her thighs, now that she's letting the pain have her, and the fear
of waiting for me to lay the cloth over her chest. I decide to let
her worry about that for awhile.

Her noises make me hard, but I'm a
considerate lover. I lay the scalpel on the bed, just at the curve
of her waist, and gently rest each hand at the top of each thigh
and stroke the crease of her groin with my thumbs.

I draw circles there until she notices,
until I feel her staring at me, and then look up to meet her
gaze.

"Does it hurt?"

She nods, chewing her lip again, I suppose
in some silly strategy to hurt less or distract herself.

"I'd tell you I'm sorry, but I'm not, so
instead I'll make you come."

Her eyes open wider, and she shakes her
head.

She doesn't think I can do it. This is
delicious.

"Wanna bet?" I ask, but she doesn't answer,
just closes her eyes. She's limp in her bonds now, almost relaxed.
Submissive.

I stroke her slit, my touch featherlight.
Difficult for her to feel, I imagine, in the midst of her burning
legs and still-bleeding chest.

How I loved cutting symbols into her
collarbones, the way they stand in sharp bony contrast to the soft
swell of her breasts. The bone just… right there, the knife carving
delicate careful swirls, small infinity signs times four –
never
forget, never forget, never forget, never forget
.

Softly, softly I stroke her, and after just
a short while she starts to strain against the strap across her
hips. Just a little, but I can feel the muscles of her thighs
tense, release, tense again.

And then her slit opens itself as her labia
thickens, and I feel moisture on my fingertips.

Her face is flushed, lips slightly parted,
eyelids at half-mast.

"Bastard," she says, when she catches me
looking, and I almost laugh.

I continue with the softest of strokes,
until she's making a mewling sound, and then I plunge two fingers
into her. She's warm and wet and inviting me in.

The fingers of my other hand find her clit,
and trace gentle circles until her mewling gets louder.

Her nerves are so sensitized that all I have
to do is play gently until she begs for something more, and then I
win.

Chapter 34

H
er legs were on
fire, her torso a riveting hurt, and the look on Jeremiah's face
told Pretty he was enjoying this.
It was
like he had two distinct and separate personalities, one good and
gracious and filled with love, and then this one – this person who
reveled in her pain, who knew he was hurting her, and on the one
hand believed she deserved it, and on the other didn't care if she
did or not, only cared that he liked doing it.

When he urged her to give in to the pain,
she cried, and he took her tears the same as he'd been doing all
along.

There was no escape, and he wasn't the least
bit sorry. He was having fun.

She didn't know how long it took her to
notice that he was stroking her intimately, encouraging arousal,
but she'd seen his groin bulging when he ate her tears, so maybe it
had been quite a few minutes.

No, she would not allow this. No.

But there came a sudden tickle beneath the
burn.

Just… that. And after she noticed that, the
tickle grew, and she found herself straining against the straps
that held her down, trying to get him to press more firmly and in a
different place. She could feel how slippery she was getting,
despite her predicament, despite the hurt.

When his fingers slid into her, she was a
mass of incongruence – angry with him because she hurt, grateful
that he was distracting her and giving her pleasure, sad that he'd
never loved her like this, before.

He ran fingers over her clit in maddening
slow circles, teasing, making her tense and release all her muscles
at once.

Seriously, Jeremiah?

Her flesh was on fire, and he was building a
fire inside of her now, too. It wasn't fair.

The wave started building, and she made more
noise, thrashing her head from side to side, tension strumming her
nerves like a wire of molten… something. She was having trouble
thinking in words, shitty romance terminology creeping into her
brain and scrabbling around, like bugs needing extermination.

"Fuck," she gasped at some point, and opened
her eyes to see him smiling.

"Yes," he answered.

"What are you doing?" she asked, and for
some reason that made him laugh.

It wasn't a nice laugh.

"Rewiring you."

"Shit, shit, shit," she was almost howling
as she came hard against his hand, still straining, still hardly
able to move.

Somehow, using just one hand, he released
the strap that held her hips immobile, and then he was mounting
her, thrusting himself into her hard, hard, hard – and then,
unfathomably, he dropped his upper body on top of her and cradled
her head between his hands.

"Mmm," he said, sliding a little from side
to side, smearing her blood into his own skin.

"Please," Pretty said, and "Don't," but her
pleas had no effect. He pressed deep into her, as deep as he could
go, and captured her mouth with his.

The groan came from low in his throat, and
he whispered, "Oh, Sunshine Girl – you're
alllll
dirty now,
my love," and she groaned, too, against his weight, against this
rape – surely it was rape?

And then he murmured, as if in response to
her thought, "Don't worry, baby, I'll be your sacrifice," and
Pretty had no idea what he was talking about.

He held her for several minutes, his cock
still at home inside of her but softening until it felt almost like
a retraction. Then he pulled himself away, eased off the bed, and
scooped a cloth out of the bucket.

Pretty was too surprised to beg him not
to.

The smell of citrus hurt the inside of her
nose, and then he was covering her with this wet white sheet, and
she tried to be prepared, but there was no preparation. All of her
was suddenly burning all at once, and if she'd been blindfolded,
she would have thought he'd lit her on fire. It was unbearable. He
hadn't strapped her hips down again, and she writhed on the bed,
pulling hard at the wrist restraints, fighting against the ones at
her ankles. The burning consumed her, consumed his next words,
surely a repetition of all his words about Jamie so far, because
she couldn't hear them, but she knew them, she knew them.

"Once there was a beautiful boy, the most
beautiful boy in all the world, and he lived here, and he asked for
a dungeon..."

Chapter 35

S
he.

She's here.

But at the same time she's far, far
away.

I have to tell her, she has to understand
that this was no ordinary love affair. I hope she's not too far
away to hear.

"… and I… I couldn't say no to this
beautiful, depraved boy. I could never say no to him. Everything
you see here, is here because he asked for more. I have re-ordered
time, turned the world upside down, and I did it all for him. And I
was never, not even once, exhausted from living up to his
expectations of me."

In fact, Jamie stopped outlining his dirty
little fantasies, because, in the end, my appetite outgrew his
imagination.

The cage she glared at the very first day,
spent a few hours in, and hated so much she freaked out at the very
idea that I'd put her back into it? I kept him in it for a
month.

Gave him leave to pee on trees morning and
night, walked him around the property on a leash and made him shit
squatting in the yard. And then made him pick it up with a plastic
bag that he carried in his mouth to the trash can. It took only a
few days of isolation to have him greeting me in the fashion of an
adoring pup, with yips and yelps and happy whining, wagging the
tail I plugged into his ass with unabashed joy. My Master's home,
my Master's home. He ate and drank from dog dishes on the floor,
allowed to use his hands only to scoop up his waste with the
plastic baggies.

How pathetic and sad he was when I locked
him in the kennel to leave him. How happy he was at my every
return.

The bottoms of his feet grew soft as his
knees grew callused.

I petted him, brushed him, bathed him like a
pet. Treated him as if he had no more intelligence than a Labrador.
Mounted him often, as if he were a bitch in heat.

I fed him treats from my hand when he
performed tricks for me, and sometimes the treats were a cruel
surprise, pieces of raw pepper and onion, actual dog kibbles. And
if he refused to eat them, I smacked him with a length of pipe
rolled in newspaper until he did.

She was right, I was a bastard.

Sometimes I left him alone so long he had no
choice but to soil the kennel, and then I got to punish him, push
his face into his mess and smack him with the pipe, and he'd
apologize with his whole body and beg forgiveness with his eyes,
pleading from head to toes for praise.

I ended that form of play abruptly, asking
him, "What are you doing in there? You're a man, not a ridiculous
dog, and we have an important dinner tonight."

I took his tail away and dressed him in a
proper suit with horrible fancy shoes that were not comfortable,
and I took him out to a restaurant.

He was beside himself trying to remember how
to be a man, and in public, no less.