Abduction (40 page)

“I’ll tell you, Vaughn, things went wrong, before. All my carefully laid plans went amiss, Devan was endangered and she ran, and I thought things had truly been spoiled.

And I found myself doubting whether I had really been doing the right thing for our girl.

But this, frankly, puts all my doubts to rest. I could not have orchestrated this better if I’d had perfect omniscience. Truly.”

All of Conrad’s childlike charm had been swallowed up in a moment of unforgivable hubris. After all he had done to Devan he had the gall to take that journal—

the site of their purging of all the pain they had shared, like paternal twins separated at birth but feeling each other’s deepest emotions—and take it as a sign from fate that the universe was in accord with his will?

“Goodness, Vaughn. I wish you could see yourself. You look like you might be about to actually disintegrate with hate. Do I really seem like such a monster to you?” Vaughn could almost feel a tickle of incredulity percolating up through his thick, filling rage.

“Yes.”

Conrad allowed himself to feel duly impressed by the mastery Vaughn had achieved over his voice.

“Come, now, Vaughn. Take a moment, take a breath, and give a little thought to what’s really going on here. Have I physically hurt either one of you?”

“Yes.”

“If you’re thinking of our little discipline session with the belt, I’m afraid I can’t allow that to count. Devan enjoys it far too much. Now, kindly answer me—the belt aside, have I hurt either of you?”

“No.”

“Have I used either of you for my own sexual gratification?” Vaughn was silent.

“Have I?”

“Just because you haven’t gotten off doesn’t mean you’re not using her for your pleasure.”

“I don’t pretend not to be enjoying myself, Vaughn.” Conrad laughed a low, warm laugh that would have been utterly charming and disarming under other circumstances.

“I am, of course, enjoying myself immensely. But not, ultimately, at your expense. Or Devan’s. You’ll just have to have a little faith in me. I’ve been planning for a very long while now just how to break Devan of the chains that might have held her back from a full and interesting life. And now, knowing what little I do about you, I feel fairly sure that I can do the same for you, though I’m afraid I’ve not had the chance to give your liberation the same careful planning.”

Vaughn barely heard what Conrad had said about him. He was consumed with concern for Devan.

“You really believe you’ve helped her? That you’re helping her now?”

“Yes, Vaughn. I do. I am giving that magnificent girl exactly what she wants.”

“You’re wrong. You don’t know her.”

“You’re mistaken, Vaughn. It’s you who does not know her. And the amusing thing about that is that the parts of her you don’t see are so like the parts of yourself that you deny.”

“You didn’t see her. She’s trying to be brave now, because of me. But I’ve seen her fear—the fear you put into her. She’s terrified of men. Terrified of being touched.”

“I know she is Vaughn. And I know it’s me that made her so. And I know that to you I seem cruel. But as I’ve said, you don’t know her. Not really. You’ve read this?” Conrad held up the diary.

“Have you?” he pressed when Vaughn glared in silence at the pilfered trove of both of their secrets.

“Yes.”

“There’s a hint of the truth here. But only as much as she herself is consciously aware, only as much as she is willing to admit. Her deep, erotic association with fear.

She realizes it’s a turn-on for her. But she thinks it’s just about fantasy. What she doesn’t realize, what she’s avoided admitting to herself, is that she needs the fear in her real life. Already she’s changed—I’m sorry you couldn’t have seen her before. This girl who since puberty has written the most delicious, vivid, wonderfully perverse erotica lived a sexless existence. You read what she’s written here, so you know. Not only had she never been touched by a man; she’d never even touched herself. Not once had she experienced sexual pleasure. Everything was in her head, and to see her walk down the street, to watch her talking with the men around her you would think no notion of herself as a sexual being had ever entered her head.”

“But look at her now. I’m sure you see at least a shadow of what I see. You are a man to her. I’ll hazard a guess that you have been from the moment you encountered one another. From the moment you chased her down and tackled her and she thought you would rape her. If you had not been such a brute with her at the beginning she wouldn’t care for you as she does now.”

“You’re insane.”

“I see that you mean that quite literally. And I understand why I frighten you.

Confuse you. It’s not easy for someone like you to understand a person like me. But I’m right.”

“You’re wrong. Devan isn’t –what—pathologically drawn to rapists.”

“You’re not a rapist. And neither am I. And if you’d raped her, if you were that kind of man, she would hate you and you would have harmed her horribly. But it’s her fear of each of us that has awakened her real desire—something she had never experienced.”

Vaughn was worked up to a painful frenzy. He felt that Conrad was listening, actually engaging and deliberating. And he was sure, after watching Conrad with Devan, seeing how he looked at her, and watching his face as he had read her words that Conrad actually cared for her in his own, twisted way. He really was after more than prurient gratification. Vaughn began to hope, fretfully, desperately, that if he could just find the right words, a compelling rationale, he might actually be able to alter Devan’s fate. To save her.

“Maybe you’re right. Maybe, on some level, fear is a kind of aphrodisiac for her.

But that doesn’t give you the right to force a particular experience on her. You may think 363

this is the most exciting first experience she could have. I may think that her first time should be sweet and tender. But neither you or I should dictate how she experiences sex for the first time. She should.”

“Perhaps you’re right, Vaughn. In fact, I’m certain you’re correct. It’s wrong for one person to assume control over another, dictate what’s best for them. Devan’s a grown woman. Inexperienced, and a bit naïve, but still, she’s an adult and should be free to make her choices, just as I got to make mine. Just as you got to make yours.

That’s right, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

Vaughn felt a euphoric but precarious sense of hope. Was Conrad really about to relent?

“There’s a flaw, though.”

Vaughn’s insides felt as though they were slowly melting.

“May I ask you something, Vaughn?”

Vaughn just looked at Conrad, knowing his acquiescence would be superfluous.

“You say that Devan should be allowed to choose the nature of her experience.

But don’t you agree, that there are certain experiences which, by their very nature, are unchooseable? Beyond the realm of choice? If one longs to be controlled, one can’t enlist a master and set his tasks. Some experiences are only to be had by withholding consent, by having free will taken from you.”

Conrad held up the diary. Vaughn’s whole body—every muscle, fiber and corpuscle—tightened.

“This is something you know about first-hand, Vaughn, though I might not go so far as to say you understand it. You, Vaughn, could not enjoy a consensual sexual encounter with a man. Hmmm? No, you’re basically a straight guy who, thanks to a comprehensive regime of cultural programming, has ingested the notion that sexual contact with other men is unmanly. Repugnant, even. It’s fundamental to your identity, and any breach of your heterosexuality literally threatens you as a person. Vaughn Doe would never fuck a man. Vaughn Doe wouldn’t take a man’s cock in his mouth. Vaughn Doe would never let a man give him head. And yet…”

Conrad waved the diary before Vaughn.

“Take away his free will, tell him he has no choice, tell him he’d better submit or else, and Vaughn Doe comes, his prick buried in the throat of some bloke.” Vaughn was panting, tight-lipped and pale with his need to silence Conrad with a bone-crushing blow to the jaw.

“If you ask me, Vaughn, it wasn’t that the fellow was so brilliantly adept at fellatio.

And it wasn’t even the sight of those women writhing about before your eyes. It was the idea. The knowledge that it was a man’s mouth you felt hot and wet on your cock that made you come so hard and so quickly.”

Conrad laughed low and soft from behind closed lips.

“Poor fellow. I’m torturing you so cruelly, and without even a small effort on my part. I won’t pretend I’m not enjoying it a little, but I swear it’s not the point. I only wish to point out that this experience…” Again he indicated the diary, “this delicious, intense experience, would never have been possible for you had someone not forced it upon you.”

Vaughn’s raging, hate-fuelled adrenaline was pounding his veins like a flooded river at a dam. It was hard to form a thought from the myriad voices of memory and emotion, but his hope and fear for Devan drove him to rise above his base reaction to Conrad’s torment.

“It’s true" he finally managed in a hoarse whisper. "You’re right. It was amazing.

The way I came in that guy’s mouth was, maybe, the most intense sexual experience of my life. Those three people, holding me hostage at gunpoint, took away my free choice and gave me that. And it lasted about forty seconds. A minute maybe. A minute of perfect, forbidden ecstasy. And that minute of ecstasy cost me everything. Everything. It ruined a whole life. Everything I’d built in my nineteen years of adulthood. My career. My marriage. My friendships. All of it. Is that what you want to do to her? Give her an hour or a week of unbounded pleasure, and leave her so fucked up, so confused and full of self-hatred that she’ll be incapable of having a normal relationship with a man?” With an effort he softened his voice. “You can’t know, Conrad, what you’ll be doing to her. You don’t have the right to mess with her head like this. The best orgasm in the world isn’t worth not having a normal life.

“A normal life? Devan wasn’t meant for a normal life. She’s an extraordinary girl meant for extraordinary things. That doesn’t mean easy. It may not mean happy. But Devan was never going to be the girl who finished college and met a nice boy and settled down and got married and had kids. If I hadn’t come along, Vaughn, that girl would have spent the rest of her life fucking the phantoms in her head, and died a virgin.

“And you know perfectly well that I’m not talking about one or even a string of brilliant orgasms. I’m talking about teaching her a way to experience herself. Maybe she wouldn’t have died a virgin, you know. Maybe, one night, she might have sat there in her little apartment, penning another delicious fuck scene, and finally decided to taste a tiny sample of what she’s been writing about for years. Maybe she would have gone out to a neighborhood bar, struck up a conversation with some dullard, and gone home with him. Can you imagine it? Picture our Devan, our quiet, marvelous, strange Devan, her mind filled with all of her fierce, erotic, high-strung liaisons, submitting to the platitudes and clumsy gropings of some plebian mongrel. ‘You’re really pretty, Devan. Here, let me just shove this pile of dirty laundry onto the floor. There, now let’s fuck.’ Conrad animatedly portrayed his notion of the Don Juan of the Seattle bar scene.

“Why, Vaughn, why should Devan be relegated to such a fate, when it’s within my power…” Conrad paused to grin meaningfully at Vaughn. “…no, when it’s within our power to make her dreams literally come true?”

“Because they’re fantasies. Christ, even you must be capable of understanding the difference. People don’t want to do every single thing that excites their imagination.”

“We’re not talking about ‘people,’ Vaughn, we’re talking about Devan. And Devan, I assure you, very much wants sex to be what she has dreamt it to be. Yes, she’s frightened. And her fear makes that sweet girl so wet between her thighs that her panties are soaked through before she’s touched. You know, I’ve read every one of her erotic stories, and there isn’t one, not a single one, which omits an element of coercion.

She wants to be taken, Vaughn. And I regret now that I didn’t bring her diary, her real diary from home, along when I tracked her here, just so you could read it now. There, 367

though she never quite gets around to admitting that she wants to live the life she’s dreamt up, she most certainly acknowledges that her fantasies are her vision of love and sexuality. She wants to be held down. She wants to be tied up. She wants to feel hands on her knees as her thighs are forced apart. She wants to say no and have her cry of refusal smothered with a brutal hand over her mouth. Not by some indifferent or misogynistic rapist, but by a man consumed with desire for her, desperately driven to give her pleasure. And this is why, when I take her virginity tonight, it will be in such a way that her fear is ensured, and with it, her greatest possible arousal.” In the next room, cuffed to her headboard, Devan sat in the waning light of late afternoon and the murmur of male voices drifting about her ears like disembodied phantoms seeking her from elsewhere in the cabin.

Those voices were both a comfort and a torment. That they were talking told Devan that Conrad was not doing…other things to Vaughn. She did not know what to imagine, Vaughn under Conrad’s gun, the two of them closeted away from her sight.

She felt she knew what to expect from Conrad where she was concerned. Torment, but no violence. What he might do to Vaughn she feared to guess. She believed, half because he had convinced her of it and half because it comforted her where Vaughn was concerned, that Conrad’s mania was not general, but focused upon her. That it had been born of her strange stories and their incongruity with her as a person. Conrad’s only interest in Vaughn, she tried to believe during this anxious separation, was in their bond.

That they were talking worried her, too. She adored Vaughn. Adored. That was her word for how she thought she felt. Deep caring for him as a person mingled sweetly with her swelling desire for him as a man. And in that adoration there was a trust. She believed faithfully that he cared for her. She felt that she had an effect on him that, in spite of the wealth of sexual experience she knew he must have, he did not take for granted. She felt that for him there was something special, incredible, in what had been happening between them before Conrad’s arrival.