Torment Me (Rough Love Part One) (6 page)

Even if, most days, I felt like a piece of shit.

W couldn’t have known any of this. Even if he snooped through my bag, even if he downloaded everything on my phone, he couldn’t have known about that evening Simon pulled me into his studio and showed me that painting with a huge smile on his angelic face.

How happy W would be if he knew how much that snippet of poem messed with me, how long it had taken me to stop sobbing in the Viceroy hotel room. Fuck, fuck, fuck him.

I finally pulled myself together and headed home, red-eyed and exhausted. Simon wasn’t at the loft, which was probably a blessing, since I didn’t think I could have looked at him tonight without dying of grief. How had things changed so much between us? Why was he strung out on drugs now, and struggling to make art? Why wasn’t I enough for him? What had happened, where had I fucked up?

I went to our bedroom and knelt beside the bed, and pulled out the decoupaged box from underneath.
The Chorus Girl
was in there, amongst the other sad, lingering detritus of our relationship. Simon had handwritten the whole poem for me in his arching, spidery hand, so different from W’s square, bold lettering. There were pictures from our trip to Paris, and other trips we’d taken. Dried flowers. Show tickets. Invitations to weddings we’d attended, although the subject of marriage never came up between us, even after ten years.

I closed the box and leaned my head on the edge of the bed. Fuck. There was no love between the two of us anymore, only co-dependency. I needed to be in a relationship to prove I wasn’t a piece of shit, and Simon... Simon needed a caretaker. He needed monitoring and money. He barely made art anymore, and drugs cost a lot. A fortune. An entire world.

I heard the hum of the elevator, heard Simon come in and bang the door shut. There was a time I would have run out there and flung myself into his arms. He would have kissed my temple and my hair and my lips. He would have said, “Hello, gorgeous,” and looked at me with his artist’s eyes that were always bright and curious, and approving. He used to adore me. Now he adored the drugs more, and his artist’s eyes were hazy and unfocused.

He puttered in the kitchen for a while and then retreated to his studio. I shoved the box back under the bed and stayed where I was, feeling too heavy to stand. Even after the thirty-minute shower, even after I put on my softest pair of yoga pants, my ass cheeks still hurt and I could still feel W on me. I wondered if he ever used drugs. I tried to imagine him slurring his words and twitching the way Simon did when he was really high. No. I couldn’t imagine W giving up control in that way. Or maybe I didn’t want to think about W not being in control.

I didn’t like that W was so much in my thoughts, especially when he gave me nothing in return.

Oh, he gives you something
, my conscience whispered.
Just not the something you want.

I tried not to want anything from clients, except money. I tried not to get involved, but W made me feel involved. Since he wouldn’t tell me his name, or let me see how he looked, I desperately wanted to know his name, and I was dying to see how he looked.

And the worst part of it was, he knew I felt that way. He enjoyed fucking with me. I didn’t believe that he would eventually reveal himself to me, but part of me still wanted to meet him again just in case he did. Because never knowing the name and face of this man—that seemed an impossible burden to bear.

Speaking of impossible burdens to bear...

“Chere!” That was Simon’s angry voice. He came into the bedroom, his hair disheveled, his shirt undone, revealing his chest but not his arms. He never let me see his arms. “Chere, I need money.”

“For what?”

“For life,” he spat back. “I know you just got back from a date. Don’t be a bitch.”

I drew back a little on the bed. “I don’t get that money right away. Henry has it.”

Henry had a lot of my money now, and deposited it in a secret account for me. It was his suggestion, since he knew about Simon’s “problem.”

“I won’t get the money for this date until tomorrow,” I said. “I only have sixty bucks.”

“Well, I need it.”

“Where’s your money? When are you going to sell something?”

He was purposely tuning me out, looking around for my purse. “You went on a date two days ago. You have money.”

“I need that money for rent. Jesus, Simon, you’ve got to stop this—”

He charged at me. I flinched. He saw my bag by the nightstand and grabbed it, and dug for my wallet like the junkie he was.

“I need to eat,” I yelled. I pulled at the purse straps like an old lady being mugged. “You need to eat too. Let’s go to dinner.”

“I don’t want fucking dinner. I need to work, I need to paint something.”

“You need drugs.”

He took my sixty dollars and threw the bag back at me. It was okay. I had money hidden everywhere. That’s what the significant others of drug addicts did. They hid money. They maintained. They walked on eggshells.

“I need to work,” he said, glaring at me. He didn’t look like an angel anymore. He looked like a devil in withdrawal. “I’m going to get off the drugs, so you can stop looking at me that way. But it doesn’t just happen like that.” He snapped his fingers in my face, a sharp, bony click. “I need to build up some work first, so I can take a break and go into treatment. I need to have one more show, to make money, to keep the momentum going while I get clean. I have a career to think about. Why can’t you understand that? Why don’t you fucking give me some time to organize my shit?”

Because your career is dead in the water, and you’re going to die if I give you any more time...

“I’m going to leave you,” I said.

He laughed, knowing me for a liar. “Not if I leave you first.”

He took my money and disappeared. The elevator hummed again. I wasn’t invited anymore when he went out to do whatever he did. Party. Mingle. Sleep with other women. When I confronted him about his clinging art groupies, he silenced my complaints by pointing out that I slept with other men. Sometimes, in his rages, he called me a whore, and I thought,
I am a whore. Even if I’m classy and high-priced, and pretty on the outside, I’m still a whore.

And he was a drug addict and a user, so I guess we deserved each other, for better or worse.

I went back again for more, in the same fucking amber-beige dress. The Park Hyatt this time, across from Carnegie Hall, because I needed the money and W tipped twice as much as my other dates.

It was fine, I told myself. I could use this as an exercise to be hard and unreachable. I wouldn’t let him get in my head or my heart this time. I would use him for money, turn the trick, and get out. I didn’t even mind strapping on the damned black leather eye mask because I didn’t want to know what he looked like. I didn’t care anymore. Who fucking cared?

I knocked on the door and let him pull me inside. I held my bag against my chest as he kissed me, remembering his betrayal of trust last time. I hadn’t brought anything this time, just extra clothes and some emergency money, and my phone, which was now locked with a passcode. He tugged it away from me in order to zip-tie my hands behind my back.

I let him bind me once again, because that was what he liked to do, and I was the prostitute he’d hired. I smelled his familiar smell, the cologne I knew by heart. If not for that smell, it could be anyone kissing me. I hardened my lips and my body. He could kiss me, but I wasn’t kissing him back.

As soon as I stopped responding to him, he stopped pawing me and led me across the room. He turned me around and sat me on the bed.

“How did you like the poem?” he asked.

“What poem? The two lines you wrote last week?”

“You didn’t plug them into a search engine?” he said acidly.

“I didn’t have to, Mr. Cumming,” I replied just as acidly. “Although I have to admit, it’s the first time a client’s ever written poetry for me.”

“I’ve made it my mission to bring a little poetry back to the world.” I flinched as his hand touched my cheek. “Back to your world anyway.”

“Whatever floats your boat. I don’t have much use for poetry in my line of work.”

“Oh, you loved it. You memorized it by the second day. Repeat them, the words I wrote for you.”

I wasn’t in the mood for games. “You didn’t write them for me,” I said. “E.E. Cummings wrote them for some chorus girl he liked, and poetry memorization isn’t one of the services I offer.”

He opened my legs. I felt him stand between them, right against my front. “You’ll do whatever I tell you to do, you fucking whore.” He stuck his thumbs in my mouth, pried it open. “Speak.”

I jerked my head away. “Fuck you. I’d rather suck you off.”

“I don’t want you to suck me off. I want you to repeat the words I wrote for you.”

“I can’t. I don’t remember,” I lied. “I didn’t memorize them.”

“Yes, you did. You still have the piece of paper under your pillow, or in some fucking scrapbook, don’t you? You read it every day.”

I hated his hubris, and the fact that he was right. I had looked at that piece of paper daily. “I only know the words because I knew that poem. I knew it before.”

“No, you didn’t. It’s obscure, one of his earliest works.”

I knew the whole damn poem by heart, and to irritate him, I recited it, word for word, up until the last two lines he’d written out for me. I wished I could have seen his face. Was he smiling? Did he find it funny? Was he irritated? Angry?

“That poem means something to you,” he finally said.

I didn’t answer. I refused to even acknowledge his speculative musing. If he wouldn’t give me his name, he wasn’t getting my story about that poem. Some hurts were best kept locked up in your heart.

“So, I’m pissed today,” he went on, when my response wasn’t forthcoming. “I wanted to see you two days ago, but you had an appointment with some other asshole.”

“You’re not the only client I see. Sorry.”

He grasped my shoulders and shoved me back on the bed. He pulled off one of my shoes, then the other, and pushed up my skirt. I’d put on an old fashioned garter belt and beige stockings to match his classy beige dress. He ran his hands up the back seams.

“Trying to seduce me?” he asked.

I wasn’t. It was only that I needed the power of feeling pretty. I needed to feel sleek and sexy like Miss Kitty.

So much for that. He had the clasps popped in a heartbeat, and the stockings down over my feet. Once he had them off, he knotted one around my ankle. I kicked at him, but not hard enough. He tied my ankle to the bottom of the hotel bed frame, and no matter how hard I pulled, I couldn’t break away. I rolled across the bed, but he only grabbed my other ankle, knotted it with the other stocking, and bound it too. I flailed helplessly, and then I stopped because I figured I was only turning him on.

I stared into nothingness. It was utterly black behind my eye mask. For a while he didn’t move and he didn’t touch me. He could have been taking video. He could have left the room. I didn’t know.

Then I felt the bed dip and felt his hands on my face. He put something into my mouth, a hard ball gag that depressed my tongue. I shook my head, making urgent, muffled noises that went unheeded. He hurt my hair when he fastened it behind my head. I didn’t know what was worse, my hair pinched in the buckle, or my inability to shriek the way I wanted to.

“Sorry for the gag. Like I said, I’m feeling pissed today.”

I couldn’t respond to that statement even if I wanted to. He left and came back, and I heard the scissors,
snip, snip, snip
. The amber-beige dress was no more, cut to shreds, and I felt satisfied by that, because he’d bought it. The garter belt was snipped away too, though he could have easily unhooked it. But whatever. I had a drawer full of them. I didn’t even like this one that much.

Then he started playing with my nipples, and I thought,
oh no
.
The clamps.
I mewled behind the gag, like that might help. My legs jerked, trying to break free, but the pain came anyway, the piercing, terrifying bite of his satanic nipple clamps. I pictured them, black and evil looking, my tender pink nipples smashed within their grip. When I struggled, the clamps hurt worse, so I lay still, panting. I shook my head in silent protest.
No, no, why are you doing this?

I heard the clink of a buckle and the whisper of his belt being pulled from his pant loops. A second later, I felt the hot pain of leather, heard the whap of impact along my inner thigh. I jumped, the clamps jingled and tugged, my nipples screamed. I screamed. I gnawed on the gag and tried to pull my legs together, but the stockings bound me tight. I wasn’t afraid of being killed anymore. He wasn’t a killer, he was a sadist. I was afraid of being hurt, and hurt, and hurt, and not being able to stop him, or scream loud enough for anyone to hear.

“I have a proposition for you,” he said, and then he whapped me on my other thigh. It wasn’t unbearable pain, but it still felt awful. My nipples throbbed, my thighs burned. He placed the belt between my tied-open thighs, over my exposed and vulnerable pussy. “I know you can’t talk right at this moment, but I want you to think about it. I want to pay you a weekly rate, and for that rate, I want you to stop seeing your other clients.”

I shook my head. He brought the belt down against my pussy lips.
Whap.
I jerked my legs and surged up on the bed, only to be pressed back down again.

“You’re not thinking about it,” he said. “You’re just thinking about the pain, which is okay. It’s what I want you to think about right now.”

He slapped my pussy with the belt again, the leather licking my sensitive lips. Then he moved back to my thighs, punishing me with the belt up and down the sensitive inner skin. When I was screaming behind the gag, when my legs trembled uncontrollably from the pain and heat, he moved back to slapping my pussy. It probably didn’t sound that loud in the room. You probably couldn’t have heard the impact from the hallway, but each blow made my whole body shake. The belt must have been worn, supple. It seemed to mold itself against my skin to hurt me more.