Warmed and Bound: A Velvet Anthology (9 page)

The killer in his rubber mask has just hacked a cellar door to splinters when the front door’s kicked open and I jump so hard I spill bourbon down my shirt. Stephanie stomps into the house dressed in the black smock and white apron from work. She sets her waitress pad in its place next to the oven and dumps her coat on the kitchen table. The door creaks to a stop, short of closing. She curses to herself and walks back to close it, pushing it slowly closed with one finger held forward like she’s miming a gun. She comes back to the kitchen and looks over at the television, to me, and back at the television. She very nearly smiles and goes to the bedroom.

I wipe ineffectually at the bourbon on my shirt and succeed only in spreading it around. The woman onscreen comes to a bad-omen gas station with dark windows and Stephanie slinks back in. I almost don’t hear her footsteps. Her skin’s blue in the light from the screen. She’s changed clothes, something black, now, and not much of it, which means she’s probably ready to talk.

I run my thumb around the rim of my glass. 

“Hey you.”

She walks toward me, slow, one foot in front of the other so heel touches toe. It has a distracting effect on her hips. 

“Hello.”

We exchange pleasantries and I find myself somehow blindfolded with silk, being led to the bedroom with a demented fervor that’s still charming. Hell, she looks like a teenage babysitter when she puts her hair up, but it doesn’t do for a blindfolded man to get too lost in thought. I focus on not tripping. There are no stairs, thank heaven, and I manage my way to face-up on the bed without embarrassing myself.

I know before I hear the clink of metal that she’s going for the handcuffs, because of course that’s how it would happen. I think I’m about to have a problem with this but she fastens my wrists to the headboard and puts one hand flat against my chest and I forget to.

We’re well underway and I’m still cuffed and blindfolded, which is unusual. Most times she wants my hands free. She’s having fun, blowing off steam. My head is clear. I’m picturing her face, thinking that I can imagine her expression and not thinking much else. She’s all fingernails and teeth for the moment. 

She bites down hard on my collarbone and my whole body jerks. The cuffs dig into my wrists. My voice catches in my throat. The silk over my eyes smells suddenly of dust and spilled coffee and the blood in my head is the faint whine of a power drill and I’m slipping, slipping. Long, jagged breath. I’m writhing around, slippery with sweat. Stephanie gets the cuffs and blindfold off one-handed. My eyes are confused. The first thing I make out is her smile as she pulls me over on top of her. She thinks my ragged breathing is a good sign, and maybe it is, I can’t tell anymore, but I would have no idea where to start to explain and so I go with it. My mouth has gone dry but we’re not exactly kissing.

Some time later her face is lit by the end of her cigarette. She’s got the smile on her face that means she knows she’s doing the Hays Code pose for me, smoking so the audience gets it without the director actually showing sex. Her body goes gradually limper and I can feel her drifting to sleep. 

The bedroom is a sauna but I can’t stop shivering.

I nudge her with my foot. “Stephanie.”

“Mmm.”

Deep breath, Jim. “You remember saying we should move?”

———

We pull together what little money we have saved and pile boxes into Stephanie’s Pontiac. The landlord grumbles a bit about the late notice but mostly doesn’t care; we were usually late with the rent anyway. Stephanie points the car west and it seems as good an idea as any. I’m trying to be dramatic about it, looking for new-beginnings sunshine or a symbolic rainstorm, but it’s a boringly pleasant day. Partly cloudy, a little breeze. It’s an un-cinematic move but it’s a move, and I can fairly feel Stephanie trembling and grinning as we blow past the city-limits sign. She flicks her cigarette out the window at it, hits it, too, but suddenly looks a bit bashful about wasting half a smoke. I reach under her arm and snake one out of the pack when she flips it open, like somehow she won’t notice. Seems I’ve un-quit since my intimate evening with Andy. There’s probably something to that, but I don’t have to think about that anymore, try to make sense of it. I pop out the car’s lighter and hold it to her cigarette, meeting her very curious look with a rough approximation of a charming smile.

We trade off driving until we hit the desert and check into a sexy little motel, all peeling paint and mysterious stains. Stephanie flips the comforter off the bed with a sneer and sniffs at the sheets. She raises her eyebrows and shrugs, which I gather means approval.

She pulls the handcuffs from her overnight bag and closes them around the top of the headboard. “There. Home away from.”

I think she’s embracing kicking her uniform for the moment, in a too-big rag of a flannel shirt and incongruous combat boots. She turns the thermostat all the way down and flops in the chair and shakes her hair so it falls in front of her face. The hair is defiantly without ponytail and I start to relax for the first time in days.

We lounge about to network television a while until Stephanie sits up straighter and gets a serious look on her face. “Hey, Jim. I want to tell you something.” She brushes the hair out of her face.

I shrug.

She looks down. It gets my attention. “You remember the other night, yeah? When . . .” She motions to the fading bruises under her eyes.

My stomach turns to ice and I focus on keeping my face still. I thought we’d agreed on this. I thought we’d agreed without speaking that we weren’t going to go back there. No, Jim, no, that was just you.

I nod. “Yeah. Not real easy to forget.”

She maybe blushes. I can’t tell in the television light. “Yeah, well. It wasn’t the door at work. Though they never did fix it.”

I nod.

She hesitates a bit. “I went by Andy’s after work.”

“Oh.” I think she hears something in my voice because she looks over, but lets it go.

 “Yeah. He was pissed about, well, doesn’t really matter. He tried to . . .” She snorts, a smile threatening the corners of her mouth. “You know how he thinks he’s a hardass.” She looks up and the smile spreads. “Anyway, I figured I’d let him stew for a bit, cut off contact. I can just see how his face’ll look when he hears we split.”

No. No, she can’t. 

I just want to get this over with but don’t want to push too hard. Speak slowly. “I’m not sure I—”

“No, no, not anything like that. It’s just, I needed to vent a little, yeah?” She shakes her head. “Went by a bar after. Rock show, right? Dark inside.” She pantomimes with her elbow. “Caught one in the eye.” 

My mind jerks forward in little starts. I look over to the wall, fighting down the muscles in my face and some truly stupid urges to run from the room, scream, something. I breathe deep as I can. Easy, Jim. Easy. I swallow hard and look back to her.

She shrugs. “I was embarrassed about it.”

Standing still is too much. I feel like pacing, fast, but lean against the headboard instead, slumping down until I’m lying on the bed. The floor has become unreliable.

——————————

This Will All End Well

by
Nik Korpon

The bum won’t take no for an answer, and when I finally push him aside, he stumbles on his blanket and a cabbie swerves around him, falling on the horn like it’s his mattress after a twelve-hour shift. I pop the collar of my peacoat up over my neck as the wind shoves a stained diaper through the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot. Half the boards in the windows have been torn away, taken to fashion lean-tos, reinforce squatters’ doors. Broken glass glitters under the streetlamp, a thousand green eyes tracking me, hiding between the spikes of grass spearing through concrete. Behind me on Boston Street, an ambulance screams past, tossing red and blue all over the place. Maybe the cabbie wasn’t as quick as I’d thought. Maybe the bum should’ve found a job instead of relying on charity. There’s a limited amount to go round these days, and I don’t fancy wasting it on him.

Adele made Thai last night, but I could really go for it again. Something that makes me sweat when I eat it. If not Thai, at least talk her into throwing together some curry, coconut naan or something. Mom would’ve taken to her nicely, Adele being a kitchen alchemist and all. Mom never was one for culinary experimentation but if anyone could’ve done it, Adele’d be the lady.

She’s a good one. By no means perfect—and with a penchant for creating situations I have to remedy—but she’s a real good one. I should make her honest, one day.

The empty street slumbers. Sneakers pendulum on the phone lines. The chain fence slinking around our building is curled at the corners. Adele said it reminded her of flapper hair, probably trying to turn the place into something classy. Feigned elegance. I told her it was the humidity that did it, but that was just because my skull had been blanched after our window unit gave up the ghost. Can’t blame her for ignoring me. With my knife, I cut two flowers from the vines clinging to the brick, twist the stems together.

Inside the hallway, sound is nothing but a memory. They marketed the building as a new artists’ haven, but there’s a high price tag on culture in this neighborhood, and WIC doesn’t cover the esoteric. A few months after we moved in, there were still only a handful of tenants in four stories of studios and the landlord had become a ghost. The privacy is nice, but I figure it won’t be too much longer till BGE turns the place dark.

A hint of Tom Waits slithers under the crack of the door. I imagine pale moonlight, a velvet rug and skin of sateen. Silk restraints and a leather flog hanging from the wrought-iron bed frame. I cinch my knife inside my pocket, drop a few dead petals to the floor and open the door.

Adele lies naked on the bed, bound by the wrists, with a silk kerchief over her eyes. Two dozen candles rimming the studio throw jagged shadows, make the slight line of pubic hair dance like a flame. She’s biting her bottom lip, writhing against the restraints. Her ribs press against her flesh like a fish waiting to be gutted.

The light in the bathroom turns off.

A man enters the room. He unbuttons his sleeves and wears no pants. Black socks. Garters. He’s laughing to himself, doesn’t realize I’m standing here.

‘What the fuck?’

He drops a cufflink. It skitters across the hardwood floor, under the bed.

Adele stops moving.

‘Who the fuck are you?’

His shoulders pitch back. Chest out. Trying to stand tall. ‘Now wait a minute. This isn’t what it looks like.’

I peel off my jacket, drop it at the door. ‘It’s not.’

‘This is just a big misunderstanding. Sherry, tell him.’

‘So I’m not walking in on you fucking my wife, then?’

He looks genuinely confused. A bit horrified, too. ‘Your wife?’

I smack my hand against the wall. ‘You can’t see the fucking ring?’ I glance over at Adele, at her hands on the bed frame. ‘Oh, Jesus, babe. Where the hell is your goddamn ring?’

The man backs up as I step towards him. ‘We can deal with this like men. There’s no need to get violent.’

‘Motherfucker, you haven’t seen violent.’ The click of my knife makes him shudder. A smile creeps over my face, though I’m not sure whether it tastes blood or finds his southern-plantation accent amusing.

His wallet’s out, bills falling like dead leaves in a storm. Adele’s tiny hands ball into fists, stretch out. Working blood back to her fingertips.

‘Let’s be civil about this.’ His voice is loyal, barely trembling or betraying himself. ‘I didn’t know she—I had no idea she was married. Sherry, you didn’t tell me.’ The candlelight glances off my blade, catching his eye and for a man who was just caught with a married woman—and an underage one at that—he is surprisingly composed. I suppose you need composure like that to make a living in politics.

He corrals the money with his socked feet, tries to shove it towards me.

‘Now she’s a whore? You can just buy me? We’re just trash and you can do whatever the fuck you want and let your wallet take care of it? I’d cram that money up your dick hole before letting you pay us off.’

‘You’re misunderstanding me. This was just—’

‘And now I’m a retard? A whore-fucking retard? You need to draw pictures so I can understand?’ To my surprise, it’s my voice that shakes first. The throbbing in my temple makes the room shiver. Stay focused, man. Focus.

‘No, come on now. Don’t be—’

His hands barely reach shoulder-height before I’m on him, smashing the butt of my knife into his temple. He collapses, a foot snaring the lamp cord and yanking it to the ground beside him. The bulb shatters with a dull pop. His right foot, twitching slightly. No urine in his pants.

I turn to my right, kneel on the mattress. Cool sheets beneath my sweating palms, fingers cradling my knife. Adele’s breath falls heavy, ribs breaching, nostrils flaring when she exhales. A few beads of sweat along the ridge of her brow. Climbing across the bed to her, she might be carved in marble for how little she moves.

Lips to her ear, I trace her lobe with my tongue, whisper, ‘You should’ve listened to me.’

Between quick breaths, she asks what I mean.

‘Because I was right.’

‘How?’

Hands behind her head, I untie the knotted kerchief. ‘I told you it would work.’

She blinks away the darkness. ‘You did.’

‘The little girl thing?’ I gesture with my hands like a French chef. ‘You were perfect.’

‘I look sixteen, fifteen tops. Nowhere near thirteen and I told you this was a bad idea.’

‘Tell it to me in Miami or Memphis or wherever you wanted to go, belle. We’re but two days from there. Two days and you’re far away from this. Besides, I wish you could’ve seen his face when I said we were married.’

She crinkles her fingers, hands tinted purple. ‘I asked you not to use that anymore.’

‘I was in the moment, I forgot.’ I lean down, run my tongue along the side of her ribs, over the scythe of her hip. She presses her skin against my face.

‘And I don’t like you saying retard, either.’

I flip my hand, slide my lips and breathe across the apex of her legs. ‘My apologies.’

Her chest rises hard, hesitant. A flash of stars when her pubic bone cracks against my nose. ‘How much was in his wallet?’

Saying ‘a thousand or so’ makes her gasp, so I count up by fifties, telling her that with the pliers, lye and the videotape, he’ll be more than willing to negotiate our relocation costs. An underage girl will precipitate the end of a politician, the beginning of a TV talk show host. I slide the blade of my knife along the inside of her thigh, create a tableau of lechery in thin dripping lines of red. She comes three times, and for a moment I almost stop, afraid I’ll pierce the femoral artery.

When my face is damp and fingers stick to my cheeks, I inch away from her legs, letting the knife amble over the crest of her stomach, through the valley of her breasts. A thin red line and I’ll know how to find my way home. She looks like she’s been drinking wine, lips a deep shade. I straddle her settling chest, her skin radiating heat I can feel through my jeans, and set my face beside hers. A fleck of saliva lands in the corner of my eye.

‘You did good, belle. You did real good.’

The bump in her throat falls, rises. I slice through the restraint around her right wrist, hand falling to the bed like a shooting star. Blush red pours into it, the circulation coming back. Free her left, then set the knife on the wooden apple carton beside the bed, sit up and stretch out my arms.

‘Tell me again,’ she says. Her voice is fragile enough to break with a harsh look.

‘I love you, Adele. Vous, je aime te.’ My pronunciation is awful. I need to practice more often, for her.

‘Not that.’

I lean down again, press my forehead against hers, as if proximity had some direct relationship with certainty.

‘We’ll find a town that’s made of circles, belle, one that’s light all the time. No shadows, no black eyes. You’re not going back. You can’t and won’t.’ Her eyelids flutter beneath my lips. ‘I won’t let you.’

‘Please, just—’

‘This will all end well.’

She closes her eyes like fists, inhales hard to dry the tears. Nods a few times and inhales again.

‘Now you say it.’

‘This will all end well.’

‘Again.’

‘This will all end well.’

‘Do you believe it?’ I smooth her hair back against her head.

‘I believe you.’

I can’t help but smile and I unfold myself, dismount her chest. A pair of candles in the kitchenette burns out, first one then the other a few seconds later. The light on the coffee pot glows like a distant red planet. Three frying pans stacked on the two-burner stove, the sides turned black with scorched coconut milk and chili. I get a glass of water from the tap, watch the sediment swirl while Adele lies in bed, staring at the light show on the water-stained ceiling.

‘Can you bring me some?’

‘We’ll get cleaned up first.’ I cross the studio with her water, stand next to the bed while she drinks. ‘Get ourselves together before we wake him.’

Her eyes open wide, lips contorted, water spilling over her bare chest.

I open my mouth to speak and all I see is static, swirling snow outside a frozen window. The sound of Adele’s scream trickles through the haze, filling my skull. My hands land on something soft and cool—I can only assume the bed—and find a cold cylinder. Like it’s a developing picture, I see the lamp that sat next to our bed, now jagged at the top and rimmed with blood. Furious breathing behind me. I slide my hand over, ready to grab the base of the lamp and impale the fucker, and when I spin I taste metal in my mouth, hot copper and bile. Once, twice.

The fucker’s face is flushed with murder, his arm extended towards me. He’s shaking hands, he’s pushing me away. Gnashing bugs swarm through my stomach. I look down at the knife bobbing in my gut, look up at the floor hurtling towards me.

Adele screams and then there’s a wet thump. She holds her mouth, blood streaming through her fingers. The room turns strobe, slivers reassembling in random order. He looms above me, foot raised and ready to stomp, then he’s barking into the phone. His arm is cocked back to hit her again, then he’s dragging me towards the door. My head hits the hardwood floor, sends shockwaves through my vision. His silhouette in the doorway, saying he’ll be back in ten minutes with his people.

Warmth spreads through my cheek. Adele, her breath enveloping me. But when I open my eyes I see the dozen candles he swept from the counter lying sideways on the ground, spilling fire across the floor.

She yanks on a pair of velour pants, a hooded sweatshirt with a streak of wine down the center. I reach out to her, feel the cold handle of the knife kiss the back of my hand. Rustling around my head. Her hands wedged in my armpits, shattered French whispers, heels dragging along the carpet. Acrid smoke, her whole box of incense, cheap perfume, burning at once. I look up and she’s crying, lips moving but I hear no words.

‘This will all end well.’

She doesn’t respond to me, just cries harder. Every step shimmies the knife in my gut, opens the hole wider and wider. Sends bright blue shocks across the hallway, but that may just be blood-loss. My legs have disappeared.

I can see my breath. The light hasn’t changed but we’re outside. The wind burns uncovered skin. Heels smack against the concrete steps, her cries accentuating the thuds. I tell her that it’s okay, that she doesn’t need to apologize, that I shouldn’t have turned my back on him, that we’ll be in Memphis or Miami soon, but watch my words drift away in the wind. My knee brushes against the cold steel of the fence when she lays me down. She crouches, presses her face to mine and whispers something I can’t understand.

Her lips on my eyelids. We’ll be okay, belle. This will all end well. Icy puckered depressions over my eyes. ‘I’m so sorry.’

I have no body, no arms. I am a head resting on the sidewalk, the bottom of my neck sticking to the cold concrete. I can feel my lips move but can’t fashion words.

‘I’ll pray that someone finds you.’ She kisses me again and hurries away, out of my sight. I close my eyes, try to absorb the echoes of her heels, try to pull myself along the whipping current and follow her.

Something touches my face. She’s come back, caressing me. Her hand is made of paper. I open my eyes. A crumpled bill. Brown fingerprints. A small pebble in my back. The memory of her breath. A chill down my side. The squeal of brakes, thick southern shouting. The black sky.

This will all end—

——————————