Olivia (7 page)

She hadn’t thought to bring a candle and after a moment’s tentative exploration of her body, she thought that best.  She had no desire to catch even a  glimpse of herself in the surface of the running water.  She ran her fingers over herself and felt raised welts, slashes, and the rubbery crust of dried semen nearly everywhere she touched.  It was as vivid a picture as she ever wanted to see.

Olivia found her little towel in the dark and wet it.  She scrubbed her face and that felt good.  She lifted her hair to wipe at the back of her neck, and that felt good too.  Beginning to cry, quietly and without tears, she wet it again and pressed it to her throbbing sex.

Her sobs became a terrible moan, one she knew he’d have to hear and still she could not contain it. She could not bear to rub, even a little, but just held it there, bleeding agony into its coolness until it had no more comfort to give her.  How long had she been unconscious beneath him?  How many times had he forced his way back inside her while she lay limp and bleeding on the floor?  She didn’t want to think about it, but the thoughts were there and so was the dark, and between the two of them, Olivia wept and wept.

After a long time, she finally wet her rags again, found the soap, and tried to wash up, hunting out sticky clots of semen by touch and scrubbing them away. 
How many times
was a drumbeat in her mind, but in due course even that lost its meaning.  She’d live, wouldn’t she?  As bad as it was…she’d live.  Eventually, she become conscious of the fact that she was still wearing the legs of her slacks in pools around her ankles, so she stepped out of them and stooped to scrub at the dried patches of blood and cum that had trickled down her legs.

Then she realized that she had seen the remains of her slacks because there was light in the washroom.  She turned and saw him standing in the doorway with a candle in both hands.

She thought she could be brave, but at the sight of him, her eyes welled up again and she blurted, “Why did you
do
that?”

He did not answer.

“I would have…I would have…”  She broke off and hid from him behind her hands, braying hoarse and ugly sobs.

He set the candle on the ground in the doorway and left her.

4

He was gone more than ten hours, and when he returned with his ancient canvas backpack, she was hunched in her alcove, wrapped in a sleeping bag.  He inched towards her as if fearing she would try to flee from him, but she only watched him come with glazed, pain-dulled eyes.  He set the backpack on the stone ground before her and retreated to the doorway, where he hunkered down and looked at her with helpless remorse.

Olivia stared at the backpack expressionlessly.

The fire hissed and snapped.

She saw one of her hands reaching out to unzip the pack.  There was a skirt in there, a stiffish leather skirt to replace her office slacks, and under that, a good-sized bundle of food:  Bread, mushrooms, a haunch of something that might be rabbit or dog or whatever came little and blunt-legged like that, a handful of smushy blackberries, and an unopened bottle of apple juice.  Real apple juice.  Treetop, even. 

She peeled back the plastic tie that kept it safety-sealed for her protection, unscrewed the top, and sniffed it.  Smelled applely.  She took a sip.  Sweetness burst in her mouth; tartness stung it.  She held the juice in her mouth, closing her eyes to savor it.  Swallowed.  Capped the juice and looked back at her captor.  She could see the whites around his eyes.

She looked down at the food again, selected the haunch of meat, thought a moment, and held it out to him.

His face clouded in wretchedness.  He crept towards her, still hunkered low to the ground, low enough that his folded wings dragged behind him.  He stopped just beyond her arm’s reach, tentatively stretched out and took her offering.  Then he just sat, holding it in his hands and gazing at her unhappily.

“Food,” Olivia said, in his language.

He closed his eyes as if in pain.

“Meat,” she amplified.  “For eating.”

He said something she did not know; it sounded like he pulled it from his throat with razors.

Olivia looked up, watched their shadows flicker over the ceiling, and then looked back at him.  He hadn’t moved.  She said, “Are you hurt?”

He groaned, twisted his face away, said nothing.

“I’m sorry,” she said, her breath beginning to catch in her chest.  “For… whatever…I did.”

“Please, stop.”  He breathed raggedly for a long time.  “You did nothing.  You were—”  And he said something else she did not know.

She shook her head, too tired to puzzle out the meaning of it.

“I am sorry,” he said heavily.  “I am very sorry.”

Olivia picked up a berry and ate it.  Sweet and just a little tart, very juicy.  She did not know how to tell him that she thought she was all right.  She did not know the words for forgiving.  She didn’t know if it was true, but she knew she couldn’t live here with him with all this awful hurt and unhappiness between them.  When she finished her blackberries, she ate a few mushrooms.  When she was done with that, she started in on the bread.  Halfway through that, he also began to eat. 

They finished the meal in silence and Olivia stood up.

He flinched back, as though expecting her to strike at him, but she just moved past him and took a candle to the washroom.  She washed her hands, her face, the blood-scabbed marks he had left on her flesh, and dabbed again at the aching bruise of her vagina just for the gratification of the cool, damp rag on that place of pain.

He was still crouched by her alcove, looking at his hands, when she returned to the pit room.  She contemplated the black outline of his body, backlit by the dying embers and tried to feel something for him that she could live with for the rest of her life.  At last she went to him and touched his back between his great, spreading wings.

He glanced at her and she stepped around him to touch his arm, tug him gently towards the pit.  He resisted minutely, then gave in with a sigh and followed her to the pit.  She faced him, holding his gaze, trying to tell him with her eyes alone that she didn’t understand, but she could cope, and that was all right.  Slowly, deliberately, she removed her shirt and stood naked.

They looked at each other in the firelight. 

Olivia lay down and turned on her side.  She heard him remove his loincloth, felt the bedding shift as he lay awkwardly beside her.  She looked at her watch, counted out thirteen minutes before his hand brushed lightly over the claw marks on her hip. 

She lay her hand over his, sighed, and placed his arm around her waist. 

He pulled her slowly back against him and draped his wing around her.

He owned her.  She was his.  It wasn’t horror anymore.

It was despair.

5

How long did it take to come back from that to some semblance of normalcy?  For days, Olivia stayed in the pit and indulged her sore muscles and self-pity.  Her captor brought some thick, white paste wrapped in leather to daub onto the worst of her wounds and they healed up okay.  The mental hurts took longer, but what were her options?  She couldn’t be just be afraid all the time, not of the only other person she ever saw.

So she lived with him.  She came naked to his bed at the end of the day, not easily or happily, but she went there.  They were back to that first night in both their minds, to that same nervous, untrusting truce.  They lay beside each other without speaking, without touching, and the days somehow passed.

Somehow.

And one day, lying there pretending to be asleep while he got up and quietly left her, she decided things had to change and it had to be her that did it.  She made her way stiffly into the washroom, voided for an eternity, washed her face and upper body, wet her towel in the cold running water and pressed it to her sex, thinking of ways to try to bring the two of them back together.  When she took the towel away, there were dark stains upon it. 

Her first baffled thought was that she must have missed some gash and gotten it infected, an idea that in these circumstances surely meant a horrible, horrible death.  Already breathing hard, biting back panic, she probed inside herself and inspected the blood that coated her finger. 

It took another thirty seconds for the meaning of this to sink in.

“Oh ugh, now what?” she muttered and glared around the small washroom as though a box of tampons would appear by magic.  Of course, it didn’t.  She had always been a private person when it came to the unmentionable workings of her body; she had thought nothing could be worse than begging for a place to pee, but now she was going to have to have her damn period right out in the open. 

She stood there in the middle of the room and cried for a while, then cried harder because she didn’t know if she could sit down and cry without leaking all over.  She thought of home for the first time in what seemed like a long time, and then cried even harder because she realized it couldn’t possibly still be home, not after all this time.  Her handy box of tampons would not be sitting under her bathroom sink anymore, but would be packed away with all her other personal effects in a storage unit somewhere, or in her parents’ garage, or maybe in an evidence locker, but it wouldn’t be at home.  This was home.

And she was just going to have to cope.

Olivia cleaned herself as best she could and went back to the sleeping pit.  There, she ripped a number of wide, long strips from a canvas army tent mixed in with the bedding and fashioned a sort of sanitary belt to which she tied some wadded up rags.  When she had paced the room long enough to work all the kinks out of the fitting of the belt and be sure it wouldn’t untie itself or drop a rag, she dried her uselessly leaking eyes and got dressed.  There was a noticeable bulge where the rags were tied up, an even bigger bulge between her thighs. 

There would be no hiding this.

Olivia got one of her sleeping bags out of the pit and wrapped herself up in it.  She went to her alcove and sat down there, miserable and alone and too hot in the quilted folds of sleeping bag.  Her eye fell on the little triangular gameboard, sent flying all those days ago when he had attacked her.  She could only find five of the stones.  She put what she could find back into the cooler.  There was a chance she would eventually recover the whole game.  It wasn’t as though there were a couch the stones could roll under, after all…and there were plenty of hours in the lonely night to look for them. 

That thought made her future stretch out interminably in front of her.  Olivia turned her back on it, on everything.

She was still there, staring without thought into empty space, when her captor came home.  Seeing her in the alcove with her sleeping bag seemed to throw him.  He stood for a long time on the other side of the pit, then finally showed her the backpack he carried. 

“Food?” Olivia guessed.

“Yes.”

He didn’t bring it to her, just stood there and held it out.  His eyes, even in the demon-glow of the firelight, were pained.

This couldn’t go on.  It just couldn’t.

“Share?  With me?”  She wasn’t as certain of those words.

But he didn’t correct her.  He took two steps forward, set the backpack on the floor, and retreated to the other side of the pit.  He looked at the bedding, his face tight with shame, then up at the markings on the wall.  He waited.

The pack was too far away to just lean out and get.  She huddled in the security of her sleeping bag instead.

The food sat there, unopened.

He stood up suddenly, keeping his eyes averted, and left her.

Olivia ate alone.  In addition to the bread and bottled tea, the pack contained a flannel shirt, heavily patched and threadbare but cleaner than her t-shirt, and a leather belt to go with her leather skirt.  The belt’s buckle was a ring of what she ultimately decided was indeed solid gold.  It touched her.  She supposed it shouldn’t.  Why would these creatures attach any special value to gold, after all?  Then again…she didn’t really need a belt.  And what could make a more romantic gift than a shiny, frivolous ornament?

He was trying.

After she ate, she had nothing to do but wander around and wait for the creature that imprisoned her to come home, which according to her watch was around midnight these days.  So at half-past eleven, she washed out her rags, scrubbed herself raw from the navel down to her ankles, bound herself back up and got into the pit, trying to look as though she had fallen asleep fully clothed.

He did not appear for another hour and when he did, he only stood in the doorway and watched her for a long time.  Very quietly, as though fearing to wake her, he moved about the cave, laying in fuel for the next day’s fire, gathering up her discarded t-shirt, and replacing empty bottles of tea with full ones.  He had more food with him too, a lot more, and she watched from under her lashes as he unpacked bread, dried meat, and other things more difficult to identify at this distance onto his empty shelves.  Then he came back to undress while she listened, breathing deep, I’m-asleep breaths, and finally he lay down in the pit beside her.  He did not touch her, made no effort to wake her, and soon his own breathing evened and deepened.

When she dared to roll over and look at him, she found his eyes darting beneath their lids in dream-sleep.  Satisfied, she eased out of their shared bed, snuck into the washroom to check her rags, then crawled back into the pit.  She wrapped herself in her sleeping bag, took a breath for a soft sigh of relief, and heard him say, “Olivia.”

She stiffened.  She couldn’t help it.  Was he going to want her?  She couldn’t hide it if he did.  She’d have to lie there…
leaking
, and just let him do it.

The quiet was stifling.  His hand came up to her hip, just touching at first, ultimately settling.  She said nothing, did nothing, waited.

He took his hand away.  “I cannot make this easy,” he said.

She rolled over and looked at him, uncomfortably taken aback.

“I should have prepared you.  You were—”  That word again.  He spoke it twice, shook his head, and clenched his hand into an empty fist.