“I found out the next morning,” Elle said. “I woke up in his bed and my collar was off my neck. I could hear water running down the hall so I went to take a shower with him.”
* * *
She wanted mornings with Søren almost as much as nights. Nights were a secret time, dark and erotic. A time for sin and whispers, passion and pain. But mornings...mornings were an everyday time. Light and bright. Drinking coffee together. Reading the newspaper. Discussing the day ahead and plotting how to make it through the hours until the next night they could be together came again. As much as she loved the sins and the secrets, Elle also longed for the light, for the simple pleasures of fighting over the sink while brushing their teeth and making the bed—he took the right side, she took the left—and, of course, taking a quick shower together.
She stepped into the shower and in an instant she was in his arms. His mouth was on her mouth, on her neck, on her breasts. The hot water poured over them both. She reached up and slicked his hair back, marveling at how much darker the blond turned when wet.
“Did I say you could get out of bed?” he asked, biting her hard on the neck. She shuddered at the sting of his teeth on her tender skin. He pulled her hair hard enough to elicit a gasp. He bit her lips again between kisses, dug his fingers into the soft flesh of the small of her back.
“No, sir,” she said, smiling in her defiance. She felt the tip of his erection pressing against her belly.
“Did I say you could steal my water?” he asked, pinching her nipples to the point of pain.
“No, sir.” She pushed her hips against him, eager already to have him inside her. They’d never made love in the shower before, and she treasured all of their first times. First kiss, first touch, first time he beat her in his bedroom, first time he beat her in the living room and then took her on the floor by the fireplace...she wanted all their firsts and all their seconds and all their thirds and she couldn’t get them fast enough. “But what are you going to do about it?” she taunted. “No floggers in the shower. No whips, no toys. How are you going to punish me in here?”
And then he smiled. The smile scared her.
“Like this,” he said and pushed her face-first against the tile wall. “This is how.”
There was, in her memory, a split second of pause. And in that split second she’d had three distinct thoughts.
I know what he’s going to do to me.
I don’t want him to do it.
How do I stop it?
Before she could remember the answer to number three, he was inside her with one vicious thrust. She screamed into her arm as he penetrated her anally. It felt like a burning blade sliced her body in half from neck to knees. His mouth was at her ear and she heard his breath catch in ecstasy. Her pain was his pleasure, he’d told her. So surely now he experienced the greatest pleasure of his life as she had never known pain like this. It was without beginning and without end and for all she knew in her blind panic she would feel like this forever. He came inside her.
And then it was over.
He pulled out of her and kissed the back of her neck. She stood stock-still as he stepped out of the shower. Slowly she sank down onto the floor of the bathtub. Her arm bled from a small cut. Wide-eyed and without recognizing her own body, she wondered how the cut had got there, whose arm that was and why it was bleeding. Oh, it was her arm. Of course it was. And the cut came from her teeth. She’d been bracing herself against the wall and had bitten her own arm. Silly her.
“Eleanor? Are you staying in there all day?” Søren pulled back open the shower door and looked down at her sitting with her knees to her chest, her arm bleeding, the water beating off her like a storm she didn’t notice was happening.
She looked up at him.
“I forgot my safe word.”
* * *
Elle turned and looked at Kyrie, who was staring at her wide-eyed with horror.
“That’s it,” Elle said.
“What is?” Kyrie whispered the words.
“The way you’re looking at me now is exactly the way he looked at me when I told him I forgot my safe word. I had never seen that look on his face before. I didn’t think you could shock Søren. No, it wasn’t shock. It was horror.”
“I can believe it,” Kyrie breathed. “What did he do when he realized what happened?”
“He turned off the water and opened a towel. He held it open and waited. I got up and stepped into the towel. What a pair we must have made right then. He was already dressed—collar and everything. And here was this naked girl, soaking wet, wearing nothing but a white towel. He picked me up and carried me to his bedroom. He didn’t say anything, not a word. He dried me off and checked to make sure I wasn’t torn or bleeding. I wasn’t except for my arm. So he cleaned the cut on my arm and put a Band-Aid on it. I think...I think I laughed then—when he put the Band-Aid on. I asked him why he didn’t have Snoopy Band-Aids. Those were my favorite as a kid. I’d get so excited when I scraped my knees or elbows as a kid because then I had an excuse to cover myself in Snoopy Band-Aids. Anyway...” She paused and took a much-needed breath. “He dressed me in my underwear and one of his white T-shirts. And then he held me in his arms, in a chair. He held me and I held him. And we didn’t talk about what happened. And we didn’t need to talk about it. It never happened again.”
“Never?”
“Don’t get me wrong, he hurt me. A lot. But never like that again. And he always had my explicit consent before doing anything new. But even when you’ve given your consent, sometimes you still don’t know what you’re in for.”
“Sounds like joining a religious order. Before I got here...I had no idea what I was getting myself into.”
“Søren said the young seminarians he knew were all so bright-eyed and happy—thrilled even—to take their vows of celibacy, to give up family life for God and the church. He said you could watch that light visibly fading year after year. Ten years into their priesthood, twenty years, and they were running on fumes, drinking heavily, cheating every chance they got, or worse. They didn’t know what they’d signed up for. Same with being a submissive. You go into it wide-eyed and then reality comes along and kicks you in the ass—sometimes literally.”
“Were you angry at him?” Kyrie asked. A good question, she had to admit. Elle wished she had a good answer. She wished she’d been angry at him. That would have been healthier than blaming herself. But she’d given him permission, and he’d taken her at her word. Who was to blame? Maybe nobody.
“Back then I was only mad at myself for forgetting my safe word. And I was ashamed. Which was a foreign feeling for me that day. I felt so stupid. I had one job as his submissive—say my safe word if and when I wanted the scene to stop. That would have stopped it. One word, and I couldn’t even do that right. It took me a few weeks to get over that feeling. Søren, he was more careful with me after. And when we had anal sex the second time about a month later, it was amazing. Like the best sex we’d ever had. I think he was trying to make up for what happened in the shower. That morning in the shower, I think maybe...”
“What?” Kyrie asked.
Elle smiled and remembered the story Kingsley had told her about his first time with Søren on the forest floor. He fucked the life out of me, Elle. Every other time we used lube but that night, there was only blood. My blood. And I hope God is as understanding as you two like to tell me He is, because if I get to Heaven and God wants to wipe my memory of the night and take away the blood and the pain, I’ll turn on my heel and walk straight into Hell just to keep the memory.
“Søren had one other lover before me, a hard-core masochist. I think Søren forgot who he was with for a second. If so, he never forgot again. And I never forgot, either. But that didn’t stop me from whispering my safe word to myself over and over again for the next two weeks until it was the only word I knew. At night before bed, when I woke up the next morning, before lunch, after lunch and into my coffee. It’s a miracle I didn’t introduc
e myself to people that way by mistake. ‘Hi, I’m Jabberwocky, nice to meet you.’”
“Why did you pick that word?”
“I loved Lewis Carroll’s books as a kid. So did Søren. It was something we had in common, and if you compare his childhood to mine, you’d see how crazy it was we had anything in common at all. I loved the books because I thought they were funny. But he... When Søren was five years old, his father sent him to England to live with relatives and go to boarding school. He said he loved Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass because he wanted to believe there was another world out there he could get to by stepping through a mirror or falling down a rabbit hole. But he didn’t want a Wonderland with Mad Hatters and March Hares. He wanted to see his mother again, and he didn’t know how to find her. He’d walk past a mirror and catch a glimpse of his own blond hair and he would...he’d think for a second it was her waiting just around the corner of the world inside the mirror.”
Elle closed her eyes and let herself love the lonely little boy Søren had been once upon a time.
“So Jabberwocky was my safe word because it meant something to both of us,” Elle said, clearing the knot from her throat with a cough.
“Did you ever use it?”
“Once more,” Elle said. “The night I left Søren once and for all. But that’s a longer story than this one and you need to get back to your room. It’s almost 3:00 a.m. You have to get up soon.”
“I don’t want to go. I want to stay with you all night.”
“I know,” Elle said, kissing Kyrie on top of her head. “I know that feeling. But if you want another night with me, we can’t get caught.”
With obvious reluctance, Kyrie rolled up. Elle saw her wince.
“How are you?” she asked Kyrie. “Are you sore?”
“Sore,” she said, nodding. “And happy. Are you happy?”
“I feel better than I’ve felt in a long time.”
“I’m going to be thinking about you...what we did, all day tomorrow.”
“Me, too,” Elle said, tying a knot in the cord of Kyrie’s white robe. “All tomorrow and the day after and the day after...”
“We can do it again, right?”
“Yes, definitely. But we’ll wait a couple days until you’re healed. Take warm baths. That’s an order.”
Kyrie grinned. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Kiss me good-night. That’s another order.”
Kyrie bent down and kissed Elle on the mouth. It should have been a quick kiss but it lasted far too long and yet ended all too soon.
“Good night, my dove,” Elle said, brushing Kyrie’s hair over her shoulder. “Sleep well.”
She started for the door but stopped and turned back.
“You used your safe word the night you left him?” Kyrie asked.
“I did.”
“Was what he did to you that night...was it worse than what he did to you in the shower?”
Was it worse? The night she’d left him Søren hadn’t laid a hand on her. He hadn’t hit her, hadn’t touched her and didn’t fuck her in any way.
Elle glanced away, let herself remember what had happened, forced herself to forget.
“Much worse.”
25
Haiti
“ARE YOU OUT of your Haitian mind?” Kingsley demanded, to which Juliette had a cruel retort.
“Are you out of your French courage?”
“I’m half-American.”
“I thought Americans were supposed to be brave, always running off to play war.”
“You’re getting courage confused with stupidity.” He leaned forward and looked down. “I shouldn’t have done that.”
“It’s not that far down. You’ll be fine.”
“You have gone mad in the heat,” Kingsley continued. “Sunstroke? Heatstroke? That would explain this.”
“Pussy,” Juliette said.
“Meow.”
“You know you want to...” Juliette gave him a cat-eyed smile.
“I know nothing of the sort. I have no desire whatsoever to do this. You are living in a dreamworld, a dreamworld where gravity does not exist. I live in the real world. I have been shot four times. I have looked death in the face, shook his hand and said we have to stop meeting this way. So if you think I’m going to do this, you are as foolish as you are beautiful.”
Juliette leaned over the edge of the cliff. Kingsley followed her eyes fifty feet down to the blue-and-white water below.
“I must be,” she said. “Because I’m going to jump. And you’re going to follow me down.”
“Is this a cry for help?” Kingsley asked, forcing his gaze back up to the sky. The view down to the water had made his head swim with dizziness.
“Diving’s fun,” she said. “And it’s not as hard as it seems. You have to close your eyes...listen to the waves. You hear that? That crash when they come in? That’s when you jump. By the time you hit the water, the wave will be on its way out away from the rocks.”
“You’ve done this before?”
“I have.”
“Many times?” he asked.
“So many times.”
“And you’ve never been killed?”
“I’d hardly be standing here talking to you if I had been,” she said, still smiling. They’d spent the past few days in his bed at the beach hut. They’d hardly come up for air or water or food. They’d survived on sex, thrived on it, feasted on each other and been sated. But this morning Juliette had woken him at noon, dragged him from bed, told him she had a surprise for him.
It was a terrible surprise.
“Mon roi,” she said, wrapping her arms around his neck. She wore nothing but a red bikini and a skirt around her hips festooned with white-and-red flowers. And he had on nothing but his khaki pants rolled up to his calves. “There is something I want to show you and I can’t show it to you unless we go down to the water. And there’s only one way down to the water.”
“Then how do we get back up again?”
“Maybe we don’t,” she said. “Maybe we stay down there forever.”
“Because we’ve crashed against the rocks and died?”
“Because it’s Paradise. And who would ever leave Paradise?”
“Adam and Eve left Paradise.”
“Adam and Eve were expelled from Paradise. They weren’t allowed to stay. And ever since God sent Adam and Eve from Paradise, we’ve been trying to get back there.”
“And you know the way?”
“I know a shortcut.”
“Is death your shortcut?”
“Trust me,” she whispered, looking at him with her bright and gleaming eyes. “I’ve done this dive a thousand times. You wait for the wave to hit, you jump, and in seconds...there you are, in the water, safe.”
“What if I jump at the wrong time?”
“Then the water throws you against the rocks, your spine shatters, your skull explodes like a dropped egg, and you die.”
He saw the mirth shining in her eyes. She was trying to scare him. Oh, she would get it later for this. If he survived this insane leap.
“I’m going back to the hut. Paradise is not worth the risk.”
“Paradise is the only thing worth the risk.”
She pulled away from him and untied her skirt.
“What are you doing?”
She looked back over her shoulder at him. “Everyone thinks Paradise is up...high up in the sky and far away. But it’s not. It’s down there. And I’m going. With or without you.”
“You can’t go without me.”
“We all go alone. But you’re welcome to meet me there.”
Then she winked and turned away. He fell silent and watched her close her eyes. She was listening, listening to the water. With her eyes still closed she took a step and another. And then she was running and with the ends of her red wrap in her fingers she launched herself off the cliff. Kingsley raced to the edge and watched her swan dive down to the water, the
wrap in her fingers still floating and flying behind her like red-and-white wings. She hit the water with the smallest of splashes and he held his breath. Between the inhale and the exhale he lived and died a thousand deaths.
When she surfaced again and waved up at him, he breathed out