Scar Flowers (13 page)

“Desire,” she reminded him. “Show me.”

He reached for a refusal, but no words came.

“You want to show me. It’s that simple,” she said. “It pleases you to please me.”

His throat and stomach burned in the path of the alcohol. That voice inside his head still repeated a single syllable, almost clear now.

She said, “Take off your shirt.”

Simon unfastened three buttons and stopped. She would see the hidden camera and fiber optic cable. But he deserved to be caught, with his lies to Karen still fresh.

“The fact is that you didn’t leave when you had the chance. We’re going to find out why.” She sat forward in her chair, her back straight. “Keep going.”

Her voice settled on him like a misting of perfume, soft and inescapable.

“Whatever happens stays inside this room, and you’ll never see me again. And right now I want you
. You have something for me, and you want to give it to me.”

So reasonable, what she was saying. It lulled him like sleep.

“Have you ever wondered what it’s like, to be on the other side of power? I know you have. So show me what it is you do when you’re alone and no one can see you.”

H
e could finally hear it, the whispered word repeated by the voice in his head, to declare what he was—
whore
—with every button he unfastened. He had fooled no one.

She
would also be able to see what he felt—the erection his hands could not conceal forever. That badge of adolescent shame.

He lifted his shirt tail to unfasten the last button.

“What is that wire?” she asked. “Under your shirt.”

He touched his right side where he had taped the fiber optic cable to his skin.

“A camera.”

She tapped her index finger twice on the armrest, then felt the edge of each fingernail with the pad of her thumb, like an animal taking stock of its claws. Something moved behind her eyes, but nothing else in her expression changed.

“Is it on now? Are you filming me?”

“Yes.” Unexpectedly, the admission freed him, so that he did not feel as naked. The world shrank to this room, this moment.

“Have you filmed me before like this?”

“Yes.”

“Take off your shirt. Set the camera down there, facing me. Leave it running.”

The tape burned as he ripped it off: one piece at his ribs and one at the back of his neck. He shrugged off his shirt and placed the camera on the coffee table.

“Look at me,” she said. “I want you to look at me while you touch yourself.”

He did
not move.

“I’m waiting. You came here to show me something, film something. Now you know what it is. Look at me.”

He raised his eyes. All coverings burned away, vaporized. Not just being watched but being
seen
. Her gaze held no judgment or surprise, nothing to catch himself on, just an invitation to sink deeper.

“They are beautiful eyes,” she assured him. “Don’t try to hide them. Stand up.”

He stood. Her gaze swept over his face, his chest, then down.

“Off. Take them off. I want to see you.”

Belt buckle, button, zipper, slow hipslide of fabric. He freed his feet from his jeans and kicked them aside.

“That’s very good,” she said. “Kneel. Here by me.
Turn the camera so it faces you.”

His legs didn’t want to hold him anyway.
He knelt by her chair and adjusted the camera; the lens would only catch his shoulders and face in profile this way, the rest of him hidden below the coffee table. Simon tried to think of something else, to stop the momentum, but there was nothing except his own breath and heart-beat.

“Why are you waiting? Do you have something else to confess?” Her legs
were not crossed. Her toenails were painted red.

“I hired a detective,” he said. “To find out who you were.”

“Because you were thinking about me. While you were with Karen, even.”

He wanted to say,
No,
because after you hypnotized me, everything started to fall apart
. But when he opened his mouth, what came out was “Yes.”

The burn from pulling off the tape had expanded across his back and chest, as though his skin anticipated something. A blow or a caress.

“Your scar—” She said the words as if they were a line of poetry, then paused to clear her throat. “How’d you get it?”

She hovered the tip of one finger at his side, then pulled her hand back, so quickly that her elbow struck the side of the chair. The spell wavered, a glimpse behind the queen’s mask to a Leah he had not seen before.

“Outboard motor. Waterskiing. I was—”

“Touch yourself,” she whispered. “Please. Show me what you like.”

On the television, an antelope rolled its eyes and kicked, ridden to the ground by a leopard. Leah put her hand to his face. It burned and felt cool at the same time, a light pressure that overrode every other sensation, as though she had reached inside his skin.

Her words reached him through the fog: “Take me with you. Tell me what you imagine, a fantasy of yours.”

He said nothing.

“Have you ever wondered what would happen to this ener-gy if you didn’t release it as sex?” Leah’s voice vibrated in his sternum, poured down into his belly like whiskey. “Where would it go? What could it become?”

He had felt this when she crouched over him in the trailer in the dead of night: his body incandescent, stretched
like a fila-ment between two poles. Denied release, desire lighting his nerves as it tried to burn its way out, amplified as an electric shock.

She had lied to him, yes, but not about the work, the story. Never about that.

He said, “I’m hitchhiking on a road in the middle of nowhere, and this sports car screams by, then fishtails to a stop in front of me. It’s a woman driving.”

You’re not hypnotized—you don’t have to tell her. Remember that teenage fan and that stalker. How they’d love to hear something like this.

If Leah had any idea of the conflict in his head, she gave no sign. She remained focused on him, the candle-cast shadows of her lashes flickering across her cheek.

“
What does she look like?” she asked.

The simplicity of the question, the note of interest in her tone, anchored him.

The woman appeared for the instant it took him to blink: corn-silk blonde with high cheekbones, pointed canines, and a scar on her shoulder. So real that he could not try to hide her existence; surely Leah could see her too. He said,
“In some versions, she’s blonde, other times she’s black. Long legs and short hair.”

Something in him burst open; lines of heat snaked through his limbs, infiltrating and enclosing a field of energy that crackled and sparked. As if he could feel every vein in his body and the pulsing rhythm, with its electronic hum, that moved
information through them. His breath roared through him in controlled explosions of oxidation, expanding like fire.

“
And then what?” Leah was apparently not able to see into his thoughts far enough to know that he did not need this fantasy now. He had not thought of it at all until she asked him to supply one.

The woman in the car reached over to open the passenger-side door, blue eyes just visible over the top of her sunglasses, while Leah watched him from the side of the road. The roar of the engine hit him seconds after the acceleration pressed him against the seat.

“We’re going maybe eighty, and her skirt rides up as she shifts gears with the wind blowing in. She has on white underwear.”

“
Does she know you’re looking at her?”

“She knows. She laughs and asks if a cat’s caught my tongue, then says, ‘If you don’t talk to me
, I’ll have to cover myself up again.’ We’re going so fast I can feel it in my stomach each time we hit a dip in the road.”

“You’re doing so well; don’t stop.
Show me what you do when you’re alone and dreaming this. There. Yes, like that. Tell me what happens next.” Her voice had grown soft, a whisper.

Plunged in the current of sensation, the sureness of his own grip and the backdrop of his private dream, he considered not telling her. But the face of the woman driving merged with Leah’s, the tanned arms at the wheel of the car turning pale, a jade ring on one hand. Her copper hair streamed over the back of the seat, whipping out the window. She was there in both realities
, riding the same desire.

Simon fought the urge to close his eyes. “
She’s teasing me. Rubbing herself through her panties, but when I reach for her she says, ‘Don’t.’ Says that we’re doing ninety and she has to concentrate or we’ll crash.”

“
Is she enjoying this?”

“
Yes. She’s laughing. She’s beautiful.”

The Leah at the wheel smiled and shifted gears. A tendril of hair trailed across her forehead. She had kicked her shoes off.

“That’s very good. Keep telling me, but slow yourself down. I want you to last all the way to the end. Take your hand away if you have to, but keep talking.”

At times he forgot he was speaking, even that he was kneeling on the floor. Leah merged into his mind to act with him, her hand in his as he stroked himself. She drove the red car, lifted
herself off the driver’s seat to push her panties down to her knees, exposing a triangle of auburn hair. When he moved toward her, her smile faded. She spoke the words of the long-legged blonde:
I’m going to ask you to do something for me, but do only exactly what I tell you. Take my underwear off, but that’s all—otherwise we might both end up dead.
The wind of their speed huffed and whined at the passenger seat window, open just a crack. He slid her underwear down over her feet, his face so close to her lap he could smell her. The car seat under her narrow thighs was dark red, stitched in pillowed rows. She cocked one leg to show herself off but would not let him touch her, not until the Leah in the hotel room told him they were nearing the end. With a wrench of the wheel, the redheaded driver pulled the car onto a side road and skidded to a stop in a cloud of dust.

“
—and then?” asked Leah.

“
She takes off her dress and lies down on the grass. I bury my face in her, and she grabs my hair and holds on until I make her come. I can hardly breathe, all I can taste is her.”

“
Is that the end of the story?”

“
No. She wraps her legs around me, and we fuck until she comes again, and then I do.”

She
might have said something else then, but he did not hear. His eyes had to screw shut at last, his fist moving, until he doubled over with teeth gritted. She coiled inside him, a new presence in his thoughts, his limbs. When he came, it surprised him to feel the warmth and wetness on his hands, his thighs. As if he had been asleep until then.

He had no idea how long he
lay there. He thought he felt a hand smooth his hair away from his forehead, a light touch.

Leah’s skirt swished against her stockings as she stood and walked away. The light in the bathroom flicked on and then off, followed by the soft ripping sounds of zippers being closed. The air in the room cooled, no longer a viscous conductor of heat but an empty gas in which objects and bodies existed in separate realities. His limbs lay heavy as melted iron, yet he could not feel the floor underneath him, as though it were soft as a featherbed.

When Simon raised his head, Leah had her coat and boots on, her suitcases at her feet, and one hand on the doorknob. She knotted the belt of the coat around her waist, then lifted her hair from underneath the collar with both hands.

“When I was a ballet student
, we had an instructor who covered the mirrors in class. She said we couldn’t watch ourselves and be performers too. The paradox of the watcher and the watched.” She hesitated, as if considering her words. “I regret that my entering your film the way I did disrupted it. But I had to know. About you. I hope . . .”

From the hallway came the faint chime of an elevator. Leah
started to open the door and paused. She tucked a strand of hair behind one ear and added, “Well. It looks like I did have an apology for you after all.”

For a moment neither
one moved, then she turned and left.

The door hissed shut behind her, a vague sound like metal clanking underwater. The smell of the rug, sweet with carpet freshener, filled his skull, and its
fibers chafed him. A tag on the underside of the coffee table announced the name of its manufac-turer. A wad of chewing gum hung next to it.

A flood of voices returned to fill his head, voices that had been silent under the bright light of Leah’s attention. The chattering tide brought the guilt he should feel, the shame at his weakness. He let them talk until they began to fade.

Chemical messages ran in his blood: She had done some-thing to him. He floated somewhere above his body, which tingled with satiety. Warmth traveled up his spine. In the hall, voices passed by, but he was invisible, safe, in her dimly lit room.