Abduction (18 page)

"I don't want to punish you."

When she blinked fat tears rolled down her cheeks.

"Even a monster like me couldn't just take you to bed, while you're hurting like this. After what I've done to you."

“But I want you to,” she said, her voice just a whisper.

“Devan, please. I'm the last person to tell you what to do, I know. But you can't want me to make love to you like this. You're scared. You're sad." She looked away from his searching gaze. He kissed her cheek, put his lips by her ear. "Your first time should be perfect."

He couldn't see, but he could feel her shaking with silent sobs. He pulled her against him, held her tight.

"Please" she sobbed against his shoulder. "I know, the way you made me feel last night, you can make it like that again, show me how to make you feel that way.

Please, Vaughn. Please."

"Shhhh." He held her tighter and tighter as she lost control, bawling in his arms, still pleading with him to take her virginity. Then, all at once, she changed. Her body went stiff in his arms.

"Let go of me." Her voice was cold, almost stoic.

He let her go. She was off his lap and across the room, as far from him as she could get without turning into a ghost and passing through the wall. Her eyes fixed on something to his left. He looked. The journal.

God, she looked wretched, her eyes bloodshot, her tear-streaked face pale and mottled.

“Devan...”

"So that's why,” she sobbed, then pulled in a shuddery breath.

“It's no reason, Devan. I've been insane.” The hurt in her eyes was crushing him.

“Devan. I'm sorry. So sorry. I don't even care about the journal. I promise.”

"You read it. That's why you won't. You found out what a…" her chest heaved a few times, "…what I'm really like, and now you can't touch me." There was a change.

Her hurt expression hardened. “Why, Vaughn?” she asked through clenched teeth.

“Why'd you read it?”

“Read?” He was slipping, for real. Going mad.

“To get me back? Because you thought I'd pried into your secrets?”

“Devan?” he asked as gently, as softly as he could, terrified he'd lost his mind, terrified of scaring her. “What are you talking about?” Her face was pale like death and she was shaking so hard he was afraid she might be about to faint, to have some kind of fit. She clutched up the journal from the nightstand and held it out in her trembling hand.

“This.”

“My journal?” he asked, feeling the world fall away from under him.

“Yours?” she asked, her voice soft, her eyes less clouded.

She looked down at the notebook in her hand. Lifted the cover. Turned a blank page. Held the journal out to him.

Black ink all down the page, in the tight, slanting penmanship he recognized from the sheet of lyrics she'd written down for him.

“Oh, God.”

He put out his hand, and she put the notebook in it. He fumbled the pages over, all of them. Found his own journal at the other end of the notebook. He'd been half afraid it wouldn't be there. That his memory, his brain, had tricked him. He showed her.

“I didn't know,” she whispered, sounding defensive, looking scared again. “I thought it was just a blank notebook. I never saw...”

“It's all right,” he said as softly as he could, trying to look gentle, desperate not to let her imagine he was angry again. “I believe you. Everything. It's all been my mistake.” He wished she'd go. His grip was slipping.

“So,” she said, her voice calmer. Gentle. “That's it. You were upset because you thought I'd taken your journal. And I had.”

“It doesn't matter. There's nothing that could excuse what I did to you.”

“Vaughn.”

He willed himself to be still as she came closer. Touched his hand. Her soft touch, the kindness in her eyes wounded him.

“I'm sorry for whatever happened to you, to make you so afraid of people. And I'm sorry my being here reminds you of it.”

Her smile as she turned to go was so tender it sawed his heart in half.

“Devan.”

She turned back, looked up at him with sad, kind eyes. His gut knotting, his hand shaking, he held the notebook out to her. Mute, she took a step back.

“Take it,” he said, keeping his voice soft. “Read it,” he whispered.

Still, silent, she stared at him.

“Vaughn, you don't need to,” she finally said.

“Please. Nothing in it excuses how I've treated you. But I'd like to know.” She came forward—floating toward him, he thought—and took the notebook from him. As it slipped from his fingers, it was like he'd let go of a lifeline, like he was falling from a deadly height.

FOUR: Revelations Part I

January 14th

Weird, fucked up shit has happened to me. And now I guess I'm a weird, fucked up person. I don't know. I don’t know what I think I’m going to write here.

Just fucking write.

Reading Faulkner the other day I came across this line:

"MEMORY BELIEVES BEFORE KNOWING REMEMBERS."

It fits, but I'm not sure how, exactly.

Edi's gone. I have to tell her. Maybe she'll come back, if she knows the truth. If I can figure out what that is. Not what happened. I know what happened. What I need to figure out is…how to get back to being who I was. To being a husband to my wife, a friend to my friends, and somehow, to carry on with the band.

I don't know where to start. Christ this is hard. Okay. I’ll start with where we were.

Last year, last March, we played a big stadium in Austin. As usual, after the show was over, the guys all hung out, doing the backstage party thing. And, as usual, I blew it off. I just wanted to get back to my room, be alone. I made my escape and the driver took me to the hotel, dropped me off. I peeled off my sweaty clothes, rinsed off in the shower, put on a fresh pair of boxers, and got into bed with a book.

I'm pretty sure I know how she did it. Before all that I'd been chugging water. I was dying of thirst after the concert. After I was in bed I was still dehydrated, I gulped down some more water, and went back to the bathroom to get a refill.

Something was wrong. Before I even got back to the bed I knew. Things didn’t look right. I didn’t feel right. I almost didn't even make it to the bed. My arms and legs felt like million-pound melting rubber bands.

I started to get scared. I was ready to call the front desk, maybe even have them call an ambulance. But I couldn’t hold myself up. I fell onto my side. I couldn't even lift my arm to reach for the phone. I wondered if this was what it was like to have a stroke, if I were dying.

Then I heard the door to my room opening.

In came this woman. I didn’t get it at first, why she was there, the connection between her and what was happening to me. She came in, very slowly, very deliberately, and gave me a strange smile. She turned, put out the do-not-disturb sign, and closed the door. Then she flipped the latch. So that if someone tried the door with a key it would still be locked.

It was like a weird nightmare—my body dead and useless, that stranger in the room with me. I wanted so badly to wake up, for everything to be okay. My heart hammered—I didn't know if it was from fear or illness. She started walking toward me and I felt terrible, vague dread. I had no idea what was going on, but I felt something awful was about to happen. My face, the skin of my whole body felt hot, flushed, but inside, at my core I felt icy cold.

She put her hand on my stomach.

I felt a jolt of terror, wondering who she was, why she was there, why she was touching me. Her delicate fingers pressed against my skin. I felt her. But when I tried to push her away, to scuttle back, my legs just twitched pathetically, my arms hung limp.

My body was a useless lump of meat. I remember thinking, though, that there was nothing wrong with my mind. Except that I was freaked out and getting a headache.

She pushed against my shoulder and rolled me onto my back.

"What the fuck?" My angry shout gurgled soft and pathetic in my throat, my tongue limp, my lips paralyzed like the rest of me, my words slurred beyond recognition.

She said something like, "Shhh, baby. You need to be nice and quiet. "

"How'd you get in here?" I couldn't help trying again, but it was another useless, slobbering mumble.

"I told you, baby, you have to be quiet."

Then she leaned over me, reached down and put her hand on my cock.

Christ. Fuck. That moment. I froze in cold panic. She rubbed me for a minute, then reached into my shorts and I felt her fingers curve around my limp dick and give it a tug.

"Come on, baby, you're gonna have to do better than that," she sighed in a revolting simper.

She was really doing this thing. I could not fucking believe it.

She went on for a while, trying to jerk my cock to life. It wasn't working. She looked exasperated. And, thinking back now, hurt.

Turning her face from me she went over to the dresser and rummaged around in a bag for a second. I thought I heard a rattle, and her head was bent over something, as if she were examining or reading it. She tossed whatever it was back into the bag and turned around looking all sunny. I didn't get it then—what had the bitch so fucking happy all of a sudden.

"I think I know just the thing to put you in the mood, Vaughn baby."

She turned back to the dresser, sticking her stair-mastered ass up in the air as she screwed around with something. A second later one of our songs was being pumped into the room by a little boom box she'd brought. My guitar. My voice.

She started a strip-tease. Crazy. At first she just swayed and wiggled and did a couple little turns, sliding her hands over her body, looking at me coyly. With her doing her weird little dance to my music—definitely not dance music—it all felt like a scene out of a David Lynch movie. Bizarre. Depressing. Scary.

She pulled off her skin-tight spandex dress, slowly, rolling her hips, creepy-seductive. She looked ridiculous, but the blood was pounding into my dick. I was mute and inert, but my cock was getting hard. I couldn't believe it. I watched as more and more of her legs, then her underwear, her hips, her midriff, her tits appeared under the rising dress before she pulled it over her head and dropped it on the floor. She wasn’t wearing much else—panties and shoes. She wiggled out of her black thong, bending over stripper-style, all straight-legged, rolling the little scrap down to her feet, then straightening up and stepping out of it, leaving her heels on. Naked, she sauntered back to me.

I was scared out of my fucking mind.

She was pretty. If I’m objective about it, I can look back now and say that. But at the time, freaked out as I was, she looked monstrous to me. Not human. Not real. Like a humanoid alien from a horror movie. Everything about her was too perfect and had a synthetic look about it. Not a hair out of place—perfectly blond, perfectly long, perfectly shiny—I thought of a wig. Her makeup was perfect too. Not overdone, but like a flawless 162

mask fitted over the head of some creature or man-made thing. Her body didn’t look like it had been enhanced with silicone. It looked like it had been cast in it—perfectly firm, perfectly smooth, perfectly tan. Like a life-size Barbie.

Fucking übergroupie. Everything I hated about that scene wrapped up in a spa-perfected package and raised to the nth degree.

God, I felt so…trapped, so helpless. I was powerless, had no say—fuck, I couldn't even talk. This stranger, this psycho had total control over me.

She bent down and licked my nipple. I shuddered at the touch of her warm wet tongue on my skin. She did the other nipple, rubbing the tip of her tongue against it until it hardened, lapping and sucking it. It had just startled me at first, but now it was feeling unbearably uncomfortable. In a pathetic effort to protest I gave a little grunt.

"Mmmm," she purred, stopping for a second to look at me like she was posing for
Playboy
, "you like that, don't you baby?"

She went back to it, licking, sucking, biting. My dick already hurt it was so fucking hard, and she was making it worse. She put her hand on my cock again. I could feel it, as if nothing was wrong. She smiled this bitchy little smile and whispered in my ear,

“That’s a good boy, nice and hard. How 'bout if I stroke it a little, hmmm?” She leaned back then, to look me in the face, though I couldn’t have answered her, even if I’d been inclined. She wrapped both her hands around my shaft and alternated their pulsing grip. I sucked in a lungful of air. Then she gave my cock a sudden squeeze. Jesus fuck—I didn't know if she was going to break it or make me come on the spot. Even now I can almost feel it, that awful mixture of terror and…fierce pleasure. My cock felt like a gun with too much powder behind the bullet.

“I'll bet you've broken in a few virgins with this. Hmmm?” My anxiety spiked to nauseating terror as she started working my shorts down.

Jesus Christ, was she really going do this? She struggled a little to get them off me, dead weight laying there on the bed. But she managed. My fiercest impulse to shove her back, to grab her arms and yank her hands off my shorts got me nowhere. I felt her fingers against my skin, my boxers sliding down, saw my stiff dick bob into view. She paused for a second to look at it, like she'd never fucking seen a hard dick before or something, then went back to it, dragging my shorts the rest of the way off my floppy legs.

"Looks like your ready for a good fuck."

Her French manicured index finger took up the pearl of liquid at the tip of my cock and slid it around the swollen head while I watched, the rest of my body limp.

"But let's not rush things."

I watched as she pushed my feet apart, felt the backs of my legs sliding over the bedspread. From the foot of the bed she climbed up between my legs, then spread them wider. She must have seen my terror on my face.

"Just relax, baby. I just want to see everything. Every delicious inch of you."

She bent over then, and all that long, shiny, blond wig hair fell down over her face, onto my stomach. I felt her mouth on me, behind that veil. Kissing my stomach.