Scar Flowers (26 page)

I want to know what it feels like.
For you.

Leah’s footsteps echoed against the high ceiling as she turned and left.

Tuesday, September 19,
1:00 p.m.

Leah stabbed a trowel into the flowerbed along the front walk and turned over a clod of earth.
A tray of pansies sat beside her, and a few feet away, Sasha chewed a bone. Planting flowers reminded her of summer, so she saved this job for the waning days of sun to make them seem to last longer.

She took her gloves off to scratch her nose and pull her wide-brimmed straw hat more firmly onto her head. A bumblebee landed
on a dahlia and dragged it down with its weight. Back when her family lived here, she and her mother would sometimes do the planting together. Justine sent her to the store with the direction to “get me a few of everything pretty.” Some years they would have a picnic on the lawn with the transistor radio on, admiring her choices as they set them in the ground, and her mother would pour her a tomato juice over ice and decorate it with a celery stalk—“a Virgin Bloody.” Other years Leah would be scolded. “What possessed you to get these awful things?” Justine once tossed a tray of marigolds in the garbage and went to play bridge instead.

Leah put her gloves back on. At one time
, she had been the perfect little house slave, bringing Justine drinks without needing to be asked. Sitting on the floor outside her mother’s bedroom door when she had her migraines, waiting to be asked to fetch some-thing, until one day Justine said, “You don’t have to be miserable just because I’m suffering. For God’s sake, why do you think you’re an extension of me?”

So absorbed was she in recalling that afternoon, down to the rose-and-peony wallpaper and sculptured green carpet of the hallway, both long since replaced, that she did not notice the man in her yard until Sasha dropped her bone and got to her feet, ears pricked. There just inside the gate, hand shading his eyes, stood a man with a tangle of black hair on his forehead. He wore
a ripped pair of black jeans and snug red T-shirt emblazoned with the Sitka Wolves baseball team’s logo.

Simon.

He stepped closer, out of the patch of sunlight, and dropped his hand. Her thoughts darted wildly—how had he got inside?

The hose. She had left the gate unlatched and the water turned low in the planter outside the fence.

She wasn’t ready to see him. Heart pounding, she closed the front door and turned the bolt. Something that felt like hope or elation jumped in her chest, and she had to stop herself from pacing, from turning the knob to open the door. She would not look out; why should she? In the yard, Sasha barked twice. The birds sang a few liquid notes that rose in an arc and fell in a warbled phrase that sounded like
trans-plan-teer!
The doorbell rang.

Changing the rules on her, that was what he wanted. The way her mother wanted Leah to able to read her mind and then would ridicule her for it or get angry that she wasn’t better at it. She cared about him, did she? Paul was wrong about that.

The bell rang again. When she looked out the peephole, Simon was gone.

9:01 p.m.

Angel waited, chained to her bed. She said his name and he sat up, muscles moving under his skin, eyes
so dark. She leaned down to kiss his mouth, then whispered that he could advance however he liked tonight. His reward, and her sudden, inexplicable desire. To feel his strength without controlling it.

The night they had both been waiting for for what seemed like years. Yet the question flitted through her mind
:
Is this what it would be like to give myself to Simon?
Terrifying and intoxicating. Angel was so conflicted about his own power. She felt it in his limbs as he pushed her down that he could crush her, force her, and yet he struggled not to. It was his nobility but also his weakness, a way to get inside him. As long as he still wanted to feel the restriction of it as both pain and ecstasy. The same fascination in ballet: the repression. Every impulse and desire fit into a form cruel to the human body. Freedom came in striving against those limits.

Angel’
s kiss was so sweet. It almost made her forget. She should not do this, should not lead him here and then leave him without boundaries.

He wanted her on her back, held her arms down over her head while his mouth roamed. Let him be a little selfish tonight. She ought to give up control sometimes, so as not to lose empathy for what he and Faith felt. Angel's body covered hers and rocked them both, as if they were underwater, caught in a tide. He was not patient tonight, did not take the time she always forced him to take, that he would normally want to take. She could slow him down to make it last, but it was too good, too close to oblivion and dark
-ness. Not like with Luis, who had seemed to toil alone as if climb-ing a mountain, trying to carry them both to the summit. She had touched his face once in the middle of it, caught his gaze and tried to hold it. Smiled to find him there with her, breathed encourage-ment.
Fuck me. Look at me.
He looked away and resumed his solo journey. “Slut language,” he said later. “Staring at me like you want a reward for it.”

She closed her eyes against Angel. Stop. She did not want this. Hard struggle, pinned. No air. His weight on her, sweat slick against her skin. He moved like a machine.

She fought until everything shattered. Gasping, eyelids fused.

She lay like seaweed on a rock. Don’t look. She should be there with Angel, who kissed her face, said sweet things. Romantic things. But she could not open her eyes.

Wednesday,
September 20, 5:10 p.m.

Why does he keep returning?
A surge of anger danced through her, followed by a flash of giddiness, as if her stomach were full of helium. Leah leaned back in her office chair. The security camera at the front door showed Simon waiting on the porch, face in profile. No, she was not angry, but she could not define what she felt.

It’s his choice
; why not let him in? Why not give him more than he can stomach?

“Angel.” Lean nodded up at the video monitor, then looked back at the boy, who stood in the doorway, naked except for his padlocked chain collar, the silver rings in his ears and nipples. His broad-shouldered frame stooped in the shape of a question mark and a burn blistered his arm: a brand, in the shape of a two inter
-locking circles. She looked away, struck silent with a childish jealousy—it was not one of her marks. He had paid some girl at a tattoo parlor to do it.

They had been about to start a session when the front buzzer rang
.
Isn’t that why I didn’t begin earlier—in case Simon showed up?
She would risk letting Simon in. If Angel asked, she would admit that he was a client. A friend of Paul’s.

“Remember when I said I had a test for you? There he is. Do you still want to find out what I have in mind for you?”

“For you”—liar!

Angel rubbed at the healing brand on his biceps. She stared at his hand until he lowered it.

“Come here,” she said.

He knelt at her feet
, and she touched his cheek and the shaved sides of his skull. She kissed the top of his head and kept her mouth there as she spoke: “I believe in you. You’ll be with me, in my thoughts. Remember what we did last week?”

What they did last week—dressed him in platform boots and velvet opera gloves, painted his face with cosmetics. She made him confess to stealing her makeup to wear when she went to
L.A. How he cried out when she took him afterward, pushed him face-first onto the bed. He who was usually silent. A pang of tenderness flared in her belly.

Angel reached for her wrist
, and she let him have her hand to kiss. She should never have let herself get distracted from him, treasure that he was.

“Say you will. Say yes.” Delilah’s voice reminded her not to coerce or push, and she silenced it. She glanced at the video screen. Simon was still there, minutes ticked by.

“Yes.” Something burned behind the boy’s assent, a vein of misery or anger.

“Are you sure?” She raised his chin.

“Yes.” Had her boy always looked at her like this, depths of obedience with a hard pit in the center, an opaque cache of reserve?

She pushed the buzzer to open the front door, mind racing. Could she do this, have a session with Simon, Angel, and Faith?

The real question was not could she but should she. No, she shouldn’t. But she had lain awake nights choreographing it. Whole landscapes of Simon’s psyche begged for exploration, countries she wanted to introduce Angel to as well. The boy’s dress-up sessions were just the beginning. How well it suited him. His lean body had the grace and strength of beauty beyond gender. A corruptible vulnerability and exotic remoteness.

What a liar I
’m becoming
,
justifying my fantasies as considered plans.

The surveillance camera in the
gallery bathroom
showed Faith leading Simon to the shower stall, where she fastened thin plastic cuffs around his wrists and hooked them into metal clips set in the wall. Simon was not wearing the mask she had left him. No collar, either: She almost lost him last time over that.

Shadows hid his eyes and under
scored the muscles in his stomach. Male skin, at least on the young and fit, was so articulate. Such poetry in that sudden breath taken in effort or fear, the torso contracting so that muscle and bone stood out, an x-ray of emotion. She counted three of these spasm-breaths during the session with Simon; one when he tested his bonds and found that they would not allow him to move and two in response to her scalpel rings. The events after that she stored away, tried not to remember. Her lapse into depravity and violation.

But it had not felt like violation then. When she entered him
, she heard a noise, not with her ears but through her mouth, her teeth pressed against his skin: so quiet, deep in his throat, and it was not from pain. Timed to the rhythm of her movements. It had not been about hurting him. Not when he had her so completely that she felt she had been doing his will, following his deepest secret wish.

She led Angel through the gallery to the tiled room, which swirled with steam and rushed with the sound of falling water.

Simon turned his head as they entered. Beneath the wet hair plastered to his forehead, his eyes were like Faith’s sometimes got to be: unfathomable, deep, drawing her to come fill them with something, pleasure or pain. The girl herself, pressed against Simon under the warm rain of the shower, blinked slowly, her mouth curved as though in anticipation of something sweet.

Leah took a breath of humid air to loosen the knot in her stomach, then addressed Simon. “I told you not to come back.”

She paused outside the shower stall, where she took the washcloth from Faith and draped it from a hook. A jet of spray glanced off Simon’s shoulder and soaked her silk top. She had not had time to change out of her long, velvet fishtail skirt and emerald camisole into something waterproof.

“You said it would be better for me if I didn’t. Not that I shouldn’t.” He lowered his gaze to take in the spreading stain of water on her clothes.

“It’s too late for you to leave now in any case.” The wet fabric cooled as it clung to her breasts, raising gooseflesh. Leah fought the urge to cross her arms to cover herself. Instead she smoothed one of Faith’s fine eyebrows and stroked the girl’s cheek with the back of her hand. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she? She gives me a great gift. She gives me her beauty.” Behind her, Leah sensed Angel brooding. He might be too shy for this or too jealous of sharing her attention. She would have to keep him near. “Faith, would you share some of that beauty with our guest?”

Our guest.
If she did not address Simon by name, she might avoid arousing the boy’s suspicions. Leah reached out to take Angel’s hand. Behind her back, so that no one else would be distracted by it.

Admit it: so that Simon doesn’t see it.

“Her beauty is rare.” Faith’s shoulders relaxed as if Leah’s words had wrapped themselves around her. Knowing Faith, her body language could be genuine, or it could be designed for Simon—her version of an enthralled slave girl. “Rare because you can’t make it happen. Those marvelous eyes of hers grow so dull when she’s unhappy.”

She was far from unhappy now. Faith slid her hands down Simon’s body, sinking into a crouch as she pressed her cheek to his hipbone, lips grazing his skin. Leah
laid her hand on his forehead as the girl’s tongue and hands caressed him below. She could see it in his eyes, the moment when Faith took him in her mouth, his pupils dilating in sudden response. A groan, so soft it only regis-tered as warm breath on her wrist, escaped his mouth.

Leah felt the urge to push the girl away as a cold trickle down the inside of her chest. Fear, perhaps. Faith could be clumsy
. If she pinched him with her nails or scraped him with her teeth, she would ruin the mood. Leah rested one hand on the girl’s head as it bobbed and dipped. During his last visit, she had had her own chance to take possession of him; she did not need to look at or touch Simon now. It would confuse him as to her feelings. Dark as he was, his body hair was sparse and fine, with none at all on his hands or feet. When she had had him blindfolded and bound last time, in the gallery, she had traced with her finger the faint feather-ing trail, gossamer black, from his navel to his sex.