Jeremiah Quick (8 page)

She had no answer. They were young and he
was being dramatic. She pressed her head even harder against his
spikes, wishing they'd leave permanent marks, not yet realizing
that they already had.

They never became a "something." Pretty
didn't think they even held hands again. She clutched at him, yes,
and he let her, but it was only for such a short time.

They went back to the party and shrugged off
the teasing about having disappeared. Chill showed up just in time
for the hike to the Homecoming bonfire.

It was full dark when the group reached the
bonfire site. Pretty sat close to Jeremiah, wedged tight against
him, because they'd had their little roll-in-the-fall-leaves
make-out session, and because he'd told her the secret of the
Three, and because she still hoped he might be her next thing.

At some point Jeremiah reclined on the
blanket, on his side, and Pretty leaned against him. Chill was
lying at their feet, but then suddenly sat up and pulled Pretty
away from Jeremiah, a sharp quick tug that had her falling onto
Chill's chest, and he was staring into her face, her eyes, and he
said, in a dreamy voice, "You look very pretty by the firelight,
Pretty."

Oh good Christ, are you kidding me?

This kind of thing never happened to her.
Her mask must have been especially sparkling and vivacious that
night because she was definitely not her usual self-conscious and
reserved self. Maybe it was the alcohol. Maybe it was just that
Jeremiah had agreed to join them for an after-school activity,
which had never happened before.

"I love you all," Pretty announced to the
crowd in general, to Jeremiah, and tall-man, and
missing-eyebrow-boy Chill in particular. "And I have a boyfriend,
dorks."

Ah, shit.

"Yeah?" Jeremiah said, in his sardonic way,
the side of him that was not always nice. "I notice he's not
here."

No, he wasn't. Pretty hadn't wanted the
evening ruined by the necessity of explaining every joke to the
point it became unfunny. The boyfriend went to a different school
and she wasn't in the mood to interpret the general quirkiness of
her friends. See, the boyfriend was really cute. He was also
pathologically stupid. But oh, he was pretty. He was worth
tolerating, just for those few weeks, so she could keep looking at
him. Mmmmm.

She already knew the relationship was
near-over, and would be as soon as she could stand to have the
conversation with him, and would be doing that, the moment she
found the most appropriate visual aids and interpretive help –
diagrams and simple line drawings, perhaps, or, at the very least,
a pencil drawing of a heart broken in half… just to make sure he
could follow along. Yeah, she needed to draw a break-up map, he was
that dense. But at least with this one she could say, "You know,
it's not me, it's you," for the only time ever, and not even hurt
his feelings. What she couldn't say was, "Dude, you know, the clock
struck thirteen, and you just had no power over me." That'd be so
far above his head, he'd probably scratch his balls trying to
figure it out.

Sophomore year, bonfire night, the night
that everybody wanted Pretty. There was no repeat – not any of it,
with any of them, ever, but she thought how nice it would be if
every girl had that one night.

It could have been the end of Before.

Except Jeremiah passed her a tiny scrap of
paper with a phone number written in pencil.

He wasn't done with her yet.

After the bonfire she dumped stupid boy, and
kept buying candy bars.

Chapter 5

W
hen Jeremiah came
back she almost sobbed with relief. Her knees, her thighs, her
buttocks, hell, every damn part of her, was sore from being in the
cage. It felt like he'd been gone for days.

He unlocked the cage door, swung it open,
and snapped his fingers. "Out. Remember, no voice."

She was stiff, and it took her a full minute
to stretch herself out of the cage. She smelled, and that
embarrassed her. When she got to her feet, her balance was bad, and
she swayed to the side until his hand gripped her upper arm and
held her steady. He walked her to a white and gleaming bathroom,
and stood over her while she peed. Then he directed her into the
shower, where he'd placed a plastic chair.

He washed her as impersonally as he'd
watched her pee, as if she weren't naked. As if she weren't
important. It was as dehumanizing as the cage, maybe worse.

She wasn't going back into the cage. Time
had been endless. No relief from the bars pressing into her skin,
no feasible way to sleep. Number one on her priority list from now
on would be staying out of there. She'd earn ten and twenty and a
hundred of whatever his punishment was – whatever it took, to not
have to go back in there.

He dried her off, still clinical, still
impersonal, then led her back to the main room and to a plain
simple table. He leaned her over it at the waist, stretching her
hands above her head and pressing her fingers closed, so they
curled over the far edge.

"Close your eyes and hold on," he said, and
then, "If you're obedient, you can sleep on the bed when we're
done."

The bed. It sounded so nice. So normal.

"Ten strikes," he said.

She held her breath.

"Don't hold your breath."

She almost could have laughed, but he hit
her with a switch of some sort, a diagonal line across her back,
and it took every ounce of self-control she imagined she'd ever
have to keep from screaming.

"One," he said. "Isn't that lovely?"

Her head was reeling, skin twitching, eyes
already burning with tears. And that was only one. How would she
cope with ten, silently?

The next strike came then, quick and hard,
no warning, and she managed not to scream, but somewhere in the
fight to be silent, she crawled right up onto the table.

Jeremiah let loose a quiet laugh, and the
word, "Two."

She was on her hands and knees, lips sealed,
shaking her head back and forth, all four limbs trembling, barley
able to hold herself up.

"Get down," he said. "Put yourself the way
you were."

She wanted to say she couldn't do it, there
was no way. She wanted to say
stop
and
wait
and
this isn't how it's supposed to be
.

But no. Not only was she not going to speak,
she was going to obey, perfectly, and somehow in that stubborn
obedience make him proud. Or at least make him stop hating her. Or,
at the very, very least – keep herself out of that fucking
cage.

She pushed back with her arms until her legs
were off the table and resting on the floor again, her back
displayed for the evil instrument he held in his hands.

"Three," he said, and the pain came, and a
noise rose up from her chest, and the effort of withholding it made
her gag. It was worse when he spoke first, when there was warning.
The number ten had never seemed so far out of reach.

She was tension from toes to fingertips,
breathing heavily through her nose when she wasn't holding her
breath, gripping the far edge of the table so hard her hands hurt,
too. Not like the fire of her spine, but with fierce cramps that
stiffened the joints, her grip on the table's edge bruising the
bones of her fingers.

The next mark drove a scream from her,
flaying across her back in the opposite direction, criss-crossing
the marks she already imagined were there, and, as if he didn't yet
want to acknowledge her voice, the fifth followed immediately. She
imagined tic-tac-toe across her back and wondered if she was the X
or the O.

"You just earned ten more." His voice was
soft, floating over her, light… happy, even?

"I can't, I can't I can't," she cried.
"Jeremiah, please."

"That's thirty earned altogether, five
given. Thirty minus five. You're not doing all that well."

She clamped her lips shut again, pressed her
face hard against the table so the wood held her lips tight against
her teeth. She held her legs together, clenched the edge of the
table harder with her fingers, thinking,
He's going to kill me.
How could I have not realized that, from the moment I saw him
again? He hates me. He always has
.

"More of these are waiting for you," he
said. "At my discretion. Don't forget it."

She heard him moving around, but didn't dare
move. And then his fingers were tangled into her hair, and he
wrenched her head up, touched her lips with gentle fingers. "Shh,"
he said, slipping a straw between her lips. "Slow sips."

She sipped, hoping for water, but it was
fire that went down her throat, and she choked a little.

Two small swallows, and he pulled the straw
away, then ran his hands down the length of her back.

She shuddered, because his hands, cool and
sweet though they were, caused a trail of pain.

"Your skin is beautiful. So clear. Like a
canvas."

Pretty's eyes fluttered closed because it
sounded more like a threat than a compliment.

He lifted her head by the hair again, and
she tried to raise her eyes, to focus on his face, and she thought
he was staring back at her, but her own eyes skittered away, too
vulnerable just now to study him.

She felt the sting of tears behind her
eyelids, the horrid lump in her throat she hadn't felt for
years.

She was ashamed not to be managing her
punishment more gracefully.

Which was insane, wasn’t it? She wanted to
apologize, to explain, but she had no voice, not unless she wanted
to suffer more and more and more.

He was petting her hair again, lifting it
and letting it slide through his fingers, over and over, talking to
her in a low voice. "Poor baby. It hurts. I know it hurts, but it
has to. I can't teach you anything about pain if it doesn’t
hurt."

She could tell him about pain. If she were
allowed to speak. If a count to ten was an impossible dream, what
did that make forty-two hours of laboring to give birth?

She was intensely sorry she'd gotten into
his car. This was her own fault.

She might have cried for real then, but he
was pulling her hair, and she had to raise her head, though she
still didn't manage to look at him, instead lowering her eyes
toward the floor. It seemed safer, somehow.

A startling touch to her lips made her jerk
her head to the side. He made a tst-tst sound that reminded her of
the fucking dog whisperer, and she would have said so, except it
would take more than that for her to forget the ban on her voice.
And then he was pressing something between her lips.

She almost rejected it – until the sweetness
lighted on her tongue, and the immediate slow melt of chocolate
almost made her moan out loud.

He went back to playing with her hair. She
closed her eyes and willed her muscles to relax. There was no point
in being tense if he was giving her a break.

After a minute or so, his hand followed her
hair to its end and trailed down her back, and there came the soft,
weird pain again, the one that came from his gentleness.

"Don't move," he whispered.

The shock of the strike took her breath
away, or she would have screamed.

She was scrambling onto the table top, in a
panic, not even on purpose, when his sure, strong hands caught her
about the waist, and eased her back into position. His voice broke
through her sudden panic."Six."

Fuuuuck! She screamed it, inside her head;
teeth…hands… everything clenched. It would be better to be tied
down, better if she couldn't move at all, couldn't escape, and
surely his comforting her in the middle of it all made it that much
worse, made her almost forget, for a second, that he was the one
giving her pain in the first place. Fucker. If she had voice, she'd
tell him that, too. In fact, the moment he let her speak, she would
call him the worst vile string of obscenities she could think of.
So there.

"Shhh," he said, standing at the side of the
table now, one hand tangled into her hair as the other struck her,
although maybe not quite as hard, and she reared up, glaring at
him, so fucking done with this.

"Seven," he said. "You're almost there. You
can handle this."

She'd thought she was beyond tears, but no.
They seeped from her eyes, and then he was licking her face, her
eyes.

"Ahh, precious tears, from precious
Sunshine."

The words were sweet, the tone biting.

Pretty was shuddering, still half-crying,
when he dropped two fast blows across her back, lined up in the
original diagonal, and one last, crosswise again, and then he was
pulling her up, turning her so her small breasts pressed against
the front of his shirt, her legs hardly able to support her weight.
He caught her with an arm around the curve of her lower back,
hurting the ends of the strike marks enough that she pushed herself
tighter against him, trying to escape the pain.

She wanted to hit him, but knew if she
tried, she'd fall down, so she just stood there and concentrated on
breathing and silence and not-hitting him.

After a few minutes she forgot about not
speaking, and sucked in a breath –

"Shh," he said. "There's still twenty more,
you know."

The horror of this made her bury her face in
his shirt for a minute, hitching in fast little breaths, but then
she remembered they were
his
fucking rules. No way would she
survive it. And absofuckinglutely no fucking way would she survive
it quietly. She took in another breath with the intention of
speaking, and he must have been waiting for it, because the next
thing she knew he'd spun her around so her whole back was on fire
against his shirt, and his hand was clamped over her mouth.

"No voice," he growled against her ear, and
she felt the teeth in his breath and his words. "There have to be
rules to so you can fail and be punished. And the punishment has to
be awful so you try hard to follow the rules. You always liked that
I wanted to teach you things. Your eyes would widen and then light
right up when you realized I was fucking right and They were
fucking wrong, and that
you got it
, and then you always
wanted to know more. Because you never wanted to be one of Them,
and you knew it, since you were a child. I validated the little
voice inside of you that wanted to scream about how none of it,
ever, made any sense. I gave you understanding. I fucking taught
you critical thinking. I deserve a medal, for fuck's sake, for
being able to teach something of value to a spoiled little girl
named Pretty.