Scar Flowers (33 page)

She laid the side of her face against his to rest, a few strands of her hair sticking to his skin when she finally straightened to build the interrupted cadence back up again. He did not care, must not care, it was far too late in any case, the ache in
-side melting into a strange form of satisfied possession that at this moment she was his Leah no matter who she was, collapsing again because he cared if it was her whether he wanted to or not. But why did he have to lose control and say her name, a pitiful groan that he had not realized would be audible.

Maybe she had not heard. She was nearing the end, fingernails pinching his scalp as she grasped his hair, breath hissing as one foot hooked around his leg. The recognition that it was Faith after all was not enough to keep him from crashing into her just as violently, his back arching off the couch.

5:17
p.m.

Outside the red room with Faith, Leah took a deep breath. Such frustration, to have Simon back, so close, and yet not to be alone with him. To touch him, and yet he was blind and bound, unable to respond. That had never
troubled her before. He had started off closed and cold but grew warm under their hands; she tasted sweat on his skin, that essence of desire expressed in bio-logical code. Hormones, heart rate, and sense receptors, the organ-ic mathematics of sex. But of course it could be Faith whom he wanted.

Before they had left the room, Leah had
given Faith the signal to stop. But she had continued to caress him, so Leah sig-naled again. The girl shook her head, gave a pleading look, and mouthed
More
.

At the memory of
her defiance, it was not anger but cold fear that rushed through Leah at the images that rose in her mind. Faith with Leah’s hands around her neck, her face dark with pain. Faith lying broken and lifeless at the bottom of a well.

Now that they were alone in the hall, she said, “Go back to your room.”

Faith stared in that bovine way she sometimes had.
Clever girl, hoping to make me lose my temper with Simon here.
Leah waited until Faith shifted her weight and looked away.

Faith turned to leave
, and Leah followed her down the spiral staircase and through the living room into the kitchen, staring at the silk-clad shoulders in front of her. Somewhere under-neath the fabric the girl had scars, ornament and evidence of a time when she had counted Faith as her lover. Now she could no longer remember how the marks had gotten there or why, just that they used to mean something.

At last the door to the basement closed behind Faith. Leah stood beside it for a moment to listen for the creak of the stairs, but everything was still. The girl was waiting on the other side, on the top step. Leah locked the door
and rested her forehead against it. It came as a relief that everything had started to fall apart, not just her.

When she returned to the velvet room with Simon
, she locked that door too. Not that she needed to; she had dragged Faith upstairs to play dress-up as soon as she got home from school, and the girl’s backpack and house keys still sat on the kitchen counter. No one could get in now.

No windows, no blank white walls in this room, just safe red space, intimate as the chamber of a heart. Shadows moved un
-der Simon’s ribs as he breathed; such a small thing made so much sense, made her calm again.

This was goodbye, and she would not waste it. For all that she had taken from him, this time she would give. Leah undressed again, her hands trembling. Simon was tense, either apprehensive or angry. A slight movement of his shoulder: He twisted the arm farthest from her to test the strength of the restraints. Soon he would close himself off again, resist, and that would be it—their last hour together, locked in mutual distrust.

Leah knelt beside the chaise, leaned against his hand so that he would know she was there. She almost pulled back, not wanting him to feel that she was naked, shivering. False hope often came to her at times like these, the feeling that things could be simple, that she could confess, fix everything. She could not tell him it was her, not Faith, with him now. Her mouth would not open to form the words.

With Luis
, she had had been able to absorb barriers, to free them both. To memorize the shape and texture of his body, feel through its reactions what it was that he felt of her. That Leah was gone. But perhaps she could call her back one last time. She pressed her cheek to Simon’s stomach. His vitality centered there, a swirl of contradictory impulses. In response to her touch, his muscles tightened, as though in anticipation of pain.

The scar on his side and her
three secret marks over his heart told her that they knew each other. In the hollow where his jaw met his neck, a pulse ticked. In the center of his forehead hid the focused eye that recorded everything, and at his throat glowed a diamond of light. His chest boiled with swirling red fog, a few tough scars like tree roots buried deep within. Old wounds, cold hurt, and yet he was here with her, despite everything. Inside her own chest sat a frozen ball of iron, a string of razor wire. Dust and bare wooden boards.

Leah got up on the chaise.
She withdrew a condom from the silk pouch on its cord around her neck. Safe contact, his body clothed below the waist, no skin-to-skin, no possibility of trans-mitting disease: if she forced this on him, she must not put him at risk. She popped the buttons on his jeans, and her fingers closed around his sex, that mysterious iron bar sheathed in tender skin. She took him in, that part of him made of will and need, meant to fit with her. Here was the caress that she could give, to fill him. All this time she had not realized that that was what it should mean. She had been taught that this was shame and debasement, when it was like breathing through her pores or reading emotions.

That was what she wanted to believe. All she felt was a dull ache between her legs as she gripped and shifted h
er hips. She was dead inside. It had been too long; she had forgotten how to step outside her rules and reach someone. The only way to do this was to be someone else. To try to be the woman who was with Angel on their first night together, or even to be the one that hid inside Faith.

On Simon’s face
, below the blindfold, appeared a flash of how he saw himself, a layer of bitter, ugly awkwardness over his features that marked him as the outsider, the weak one, the mongrel. That must be how he thought the world perceived him, unaware of how he drew everyone in—into the worlds that he created, of such fragile and brutal visions. She would take that cloud from him if she could, dispel it.

His hands clenched as he tried to
break free. She wanted to be present, not watch from somewhere high above while her body choreographed and her brain noted every move. She would show herself, not slink away under cover of darkness. Leah reached for his blindfold.

Simon said her name, and she froze.
Don’t call Leah back. I don’t know what rage is still in her.
But she knew Faith, who was free of that fear: that was who she would be for him now. Faith, who held on hand and foot. She mimicked the girl’s response, though she felt nothing herself. She just wanted this lie, this fail-ure, to end.

The world hung suspended. She could still do it, take off his blindfold. But something in Simon changed, his anger returned. How foolish, to think
that she knew his mind, could do anything but drive people away. She had made this sordid and fake.

Leah reached for him, but he turned his face away. She stood, erased all traces of her presence, and left the room.

5:56
p.m.

The door closed, and Simon was alone. His thoughts knotted around themselves: which woman had been with him?

Faith? It lacked the recklessness from that night in his house, but there was a possessiveness that could be hers. Of course—and Leah must have watched through a spy hole. To see him squirm under a pain he had invented himself.

Simon touched the blade in his mouth with the side of his tongue and took some satisfaction
in the fact that this would all be over soon. There wasn’t much more Leah could do to him in the time she had left.

Wednesday, September 27, 6:12 p.m.

Someone, probably Faith, came in and released him. Simon was still blindfolded when she trussed him into leather cuffs chained to a belt around his waist, then led him to a closet-sized room—the same one
that he had ended up in after his second visit. She padlocked his lead to a ring in the floor, then loosened the blindfold just enough so that he could slide it off by pressing his face against his arm.

When she left, he spit the blade onto the floor and cut through the
thin leather leash. He left a strand in place, one that should break at the slightest pressure. The chain that linked his wrist cuffs together was anchored to the middle of his belt with a leather loop; he started to saw through it and sliced his finger. He managed to cut most of the way through before Leah’s high heels rapped in the hall. Without dropping the blade, he crawled forward and lay facedown on top of the cut in the leash, eyes closed and hands tucked under his waist, poised to resume sawing at the leather loop. Now that he had reached this point his anger was forgotten, erased by adrenaline and the knowledge that certain key things must be accomplished in a particular order.

The dog followed her in. Simon risked a glance through his eyelashes as Leah sat and waited for him to speak. Her face was pale, her movements slow. Only the taste of blood where the smuggled blade had nicked his tongue broke the surreal peace.

“Simon.” The syllables wavered like soap bubbles in a draft. As if Leah were shivering. He wanted to hear what she had to say, but the chance that she was finally going to reveal anything, after all the times she had refused to, was remote. He had to act before she noticed the ruined leash and his cut finger.

Simon wheezed and forced a coughing fit. His body remembered asthma so well that his
chest seized with a familiar colicky ache, squeezing the air out of his lungs, until he was not sure it was an act anymore. As he sawed at the last bit of the loop at his belt he bit into the capsule of fake blood, let it run out of his mouth, syrupy and stale.

He could only guess at what she must think. It did not matter, to a point. As long as she believed he was in some kind of distress, it should take her off
guard.

Leah came toward him, and her knees met the floorboards near his head. He moved the second she stood up, jerk
ed his wrist chain free from the belt so that he could raise it over her head and catch her neck. If she had already reached out for him, it would be too late; her hands would be in his way. He did not stop to find out but rolled, pulling her down with the chain, until they crashed together on the floor. The dog growled.

The click of the animal’s nails as it scrabbled toward him recalled an Unktomi spider story of his mother’s. Two young men were out walking and
boasting about women when they heard a clicking in the grass: It was Spider, making flint arrowheads. One of the young men insulted Spider and struck him, but he soon fell into a coughing fit and fell dead on the ground, pierced by an arrowhead so small as to be invisible. His friend returned home unhurt. “If you hear a ticking in the grass, make a wide circle around it, so as not to disturb Unktomi at his work”—the sort of superstition that Simon usually ignored. Now, though, it hinted at the downfall of arrogance: those who blunder into what they do not understand.

As he rolled, the movement pulled on his collar, strangling him. That last thread in his lead—why hadn’t it broken?
His cut finger throbbed. A reproduction of
Blue Boy
looked down from its gilt frame, all cherry lips and high forehead, scornful brown eyes. As though, posed in his borrowed antique costume, the youth recognized in Simon a fellow impostor. The feather in Blue Boy’s hat appeared to ruffle in the breeze, out there on the moor, with a storm brewing behind his shoulder.
Smug little bastard; he probably beat his servants.

Claws scraped wood as the dog lunged at Simon’s ankle and missed, its back legs sliding sideways. He saw red, lungs collapsing without air, then with a jerk his head hit the floor. He was free.

The dog seized his arm in its teeth. Simon rolled to a crouch to hold Leah down, then yelled for her to call the animal off. Though he did not hear her, she must have told it to retreat, because the pressure eased.

The dog’s growls cut through everything but the sound of Leah’s labored breathing. Simon loosened the chain. Her hair lay across her eyes, and a thumbprint smear of blood glistened on her jaw. He wiped his mouth on his arm.

“Tell her to lie down and shut up,” he said.

“Sasha, rest.” Her voice shook. The dog stopped growling and lay down, its ears flat against its skull.

“I’m going to stand up and take you with me, and you’re going to unlock the cuffs.” Simple; life had become simple again—a matter of reflex and concentration.

He drew Leah to her feet and moved behind her, the chain still around her neck. She reached for her pocket but he stopped her with his free hand, which he slid inside to find a small iron ring bristling with keys. He had her unlock the cuff on his right wrist, then took the ring from her and opened the one on his left.

“Before we get started, I want you to know that if you lie to me, you’ll be sorry.”

She nodded gravely, as though he knew what he was doing and must be listened to. The pulse in her throat tapped the back of his hand. “Where are Faith and Angel?”

“She’s downstairs in the basement. He’s at school.”

“Can she come up here?”

“She’s locked out of the upstairs, but she can leave through a basement door. Go into the yard.”

“Is there anyone else in the house?”

“No.” Her voice was calm, but her heart pounded. Of course; she didn’t know what he might do next. A predatory strength moved in him, one that he had been too busy wearing a leash the last few months to remember he had.

This would not
last long. Just long enough to let her know that he was serious. In five minutes, maybe ten, he would let her go, after she had had a taste of how it felt to be the one without a choice. She who had a home, a place, a tribe.

“Get undressed.” He stood behind her, gripped her makeshift collar. When she was naked, he kicked her clothes to one side. A small knife concealed inside her dress skittered across the floor. Simon could only see the back of her head and her shoulders and feel her body, curved and hard, against him. Like the first time he caught a fish, pulled it slapping and dancing from the water—his surprise at how something so smooth could be made of hard scales and solid muscle. She drew deep breaths within the circle of his arm, which pinned her hands to her sides. Some sort of exercise to calm herself. His own chest seized in sympathy, but he forced himself away from that weakness. That’s where everyone wanted him: feeble and quiet, locked in obscurity.

“You’re going to take me to where you keep the restraints,” he said into her hair. The sweetness of her helplessness and pos
-sible fear filled his veins. The warmth of his own blood seeping out, sticky on both their skins.

Why am I standing here bleeding
when she and Paul were the ones playing games with
Babylon
?

No; he would not go down that path. This was not meant to be revenge.

Leah went into the hall, and he closed the dog in behind them.

He started to lead her, but she grasped his wrist as she leaned or collapsed against the wall. Fainting? No; her eyes were on him, sleepy, sliding from his face to his belly, her mouth open. Pale nipples like spikes, freckled white skin, chiseled collarbone. She sank to her knees, her hands on his thighs, climbing higher,
a gleam on the inside of her lower lip. He looked down at the part in her hair as she drew near and tugged at the buttons of his jeans with one hand while the other, the one with the long red nails, pressed against the inside of his thigh.

Another surprise, his impulse to pull away from her in shock—
how could she? It’s not like her.
Even though he had craved this very thing. The ground had shifted out from under him: how had the prisoner become the master, the seducer?

Simon raised her up by her arm. This was not part of his plan to get her to talk
, to explain why she had destroyed his life. Leah hung limp in his grasp, like a kitten seized by the scruff.

“I’m sure you’re very good at performing that particular service, but I didn’t ask for it.” His words came out even, almost calm.

She had distracted him already with such a simple thing, into thinking about her mouth and about what he could do with her now. Myriad voices and whispered laughter in his head, mocking depravity:
What
are
you going to do with her?

Talk. Just talk. Plenty of time later for other things.
Liar. You’re afraid.

“Let’s go.” He made her lead him. If she was disappointed that her tactic hadn’t worked, she gave no sign.

“Here.” Leah halted outside a set of double doors. “Use the square silver key.”

The closet held ropes, chains, cuffs, and all manner of gags and
other implements, all neatly placed on hooks and shelves. He chose two sets of cuffs and a belt for her and locked them on. She stood with eyes downcast, expressionless.

He had waited a long time to look at her, and here she was. Milky skin, constellations of freckles everywhere but on her face and neck, where she covered them with makeup. Her small breasts came to a point on top, rounded underneath,
and an auburn flag of curls silhouetted her sex. Limbs all highlight and shadow.

The mystery of her
had been laid bare at his request, but it did not feel like a reward—beauty as a fact, a statistic.

S
he wore a small silk pouch around her neck. He caught it between his fingers. “What’s this?”

She answered after a pause. “Something to remember a friend by. Take it.”

“Just like that, I can take it?”

He slid the cord around to bring the knot to the front. She stared into space, waiting for him to finish, as if it really were just a trinket. But when he pulled the necklace free
, she swept her gaze down and away. Inside the pouch he found a key.

“What is it really? What does it unlock?”

“Angel’s collar.” A pause, and then in a smaller voice: “Please don’t lose it.”

The
pouch went in his pocket. Simon asked about the rest of his clothes, and she led him to the outer room. He ripped a piece of his T-shirt off and tied it around his arm, which still bled, then put the remains of the garment back on.

“I want the dog out of here.”

“If I put a collar on her and hand her leash over, she’ll obey you,” said Leah.

The dog lay where they had left it and growled at seeing him again. Leah fastened its collar on, folded and smoothed the animal’s ears in farewell before giving him the leash.

“Her run is in the backyard.” Her voice caught as she spoke.

“
She can stay here for now.” Simon’s arm throbbed. The strip of torn T-shirt had soaked through. “I need a first aid kit.”

“Over there.”

Awkward, this leading of the captive. He had to slow down so that the ankle chain did not make her lose footing.

Leah took him to a white examination room at the other end of the gallery. A leather dentist’s chair,
its seat split into two adjustable leg rests with straps and buckles, took most of the space. Two large metal light fixtures hung from the ceiling, and a wheeled metal tray with medical implements stood ready. The counter held boxes of latex gloves, glass jars full of cotton balls and tongue depressors; the medicine cabinet concealed rows of bottles. He picked one up and read the label.

“Where’d you get this?”

“One of my clients is a surgeon.”

“What is it?”

“A tranquilizer.”

“Have you ever used it on anyone?”

“Once. At his request.” She looked at his arm and nodded over at the counter, lined with antiseptic, gauze, and a small appliance that looked like a pressure cooker.
Autoclave?
For sterilizing . . . what? “Everything’s over there.”

Simon took a bandage from a box on the counter and put it on the finger he had sliced with the smuggled
Exacto blade. Then he sat on the medieval-looking chair, crosswise so as not to recline into the straps and buckles, and held out his arm. Leah reached for the scissors, but he got to them first.

She withdrew her hand
. “That bandage has to come off.”

“I’ll do it.” He cut through the strip of T-shirt around his arm.

Leah inverted an iodine bottle into a gauze pad, lips pressed together. Maybe she was realizing that she had lost control. If he were directing this scene, he would urge the actor playing his part to press his advantage, follow up on the hint of her defenses weakening.

Simon flinched as she examined his arm. In the movies, dog bites didn’t hurt so much, and the characters had foolproof plans.

“Some of these are deep. You need stitches.” She eased her hands into latex gloves and picked up a needle and thread. The wrist cuffs hampered her movements. As she reached for him, he caught her arm.