After (22 page)

“You don't keep her safe. You've never kept her safe. It's you she needs to be protected from.”

“Me? Do you think Riggs and his men were acting on my orders when they tried to rape Eva in the orchard? What do you think would have become of her, if I hadn't intervened? Even you couldn't have kept her safe from them for long.”

“So? What? That gives you absolute dominion over her? You keep your fucking soldiers from raping her to death, and that gives you the right to dictate who she fucks?

And where? And when and in which position? I swear to god it's beyond me why she...”

John swallows the end of his sentence.

“You know that's not it, John.” Smith goes on in a choked voice. “It's not fair. And I wish the burden didn't fall so heavily on her. I wish that with my whole heart. But John, she is the future. And it's my burden to protect that future.” Smith straightens and hardens. “And with that in mind, I have an ultimatum for you.”

John squares off, meeting Smith's eyes, glowering.

“Since she can't be trusted, Eva's been moved to more secure accommodations.

I'm afraid I can't afford to leave her in the relative luxury of this room. Or to let you go on living with her, coming and going as you please. And of course there'll be no more working outside, or strolls around the grounds for her. But I will allow you to finish out your term as stud, if you agree to the conditions.”

“Which are?”

“You will visit her only for the purposes of inseminating her. And I will be present, to ensure you make a sincere effort.”

John laughs. It's a broken, cynical laugh.

“And, since the two of you have demonstrated how ready you both are to deceive and defy me, and I would be remiss if I put undue trust in your cooperation, she will be tied down for the duration of your conjugal visits. I can be sure you won't try anything heroic, with her cuffed to a bed.”

“You're fucking kidding me,” John sobs.

“I wish such ugly measures weren't necessary. But you and Eva have made it impossible for me to be more lenient.”

“That's fucking bullshit,” John seethes through clenched teeth. “You're not taking precautions to ensure a prosperous future. You're punishing us.” John's chest is heaving as he glares at Smith like he's trying to fathom a mad mind. “No,” John starts again.

“Not us. Her. You're punishing her. Not for hurting your precious possible future. You're punishing her for being unfaithful to you.”

Smith flinches and pales, as if John's words have opened a mortal wound. “Don't be ridiculous, John.”

“Ridiculous? You know damn fucking well she was doing what you wanted.

Trying to get pregnant. She just wasn't doing it your way. She hurt your ego. Have you even thought about whether she was right? Whether her plan was better than yours? Or were you in too big a hurry to crack the whip to examine what's really going on?”

Smith doesn't yield a single dent under John's barrage.

“Even when you've scared me,” John starts again, reigned in, quiet, slow, “your cold rationality, Smith, I've always respected you. Trusted you, in a way. Trusted you to be straight. Moral. But this. You're becoming the worst kind of tyrant. The autocrat who uses his powers to satisfy his personal whims. You don't even see it. You're hurting her, you're risking everything you pretend to protect, because...”

“Go on, John.”

“I know you, Smith. I know you want to do good. To be good. Please. Please, take a long look at what you're doing.”

“What's that, John?”

“Oh god,” John breathes. “You really are. You're torturing her. Punishing her. Out of fucking petty jealousy.”

Smiths voice is cool. Vacant. “No, John.”

After a long, desperate look at Smith, after defeat has worked over John's expression, after that look of defeat is worn away by a sudden realization, John says,

“No. No. I should have realized. It's not her you're punishing. It's not her you're bringing into line. It's you.” Some painful current shakes Smith. “This. This cruelty, this torture, you're determined to prove to yourself that you haven't been corrupted. That you'll still hold Eva to your law, in cuffs, if you have to, even though you've...you...”

* * * *

Looking hollowed out, drained of life, Smith approaches Eva, still cuffed to her bed. They lock eyes, hers fierce, seeking, his vulnerable, like it's him lashed down, helpless to evade the pain of looking on her. When he comes near, she doesn't flinch away, or stiffen, or yell.

Without touching her, he cuts through the plastic cuffs, releasing one wrist, then the other. He examines but doesn't touch the red indentations where the weight of her arm made the plastic dig into her flesh. But there are no welts, no chafed, seeping wounds. She never struggled enough to hurt herself.

As soon as he's liberated her from the restraints, Smith moves away. Eva gets off the bed, goes behind the beige canvas curtain. The sound of her urine streaming into the water in the bowl fills the little room.

Something is going to be said. Or done. Eva waits for it, pacing the room, working her muscles after hours on the bed.

“I've been unjust, Eva,” Smith confesses, his posture and his expression suggesting he's facing a firing squad, not a prisoner. “Cruelly unjust. I admit: I wanted to scare you. Terrify you, even. But really, it wasn't meant as punishment. To hurt you. I only wanted to show you how awful it might get, if things go really wrong. I believed, when I did it, that I was making you live through a sort of cautionary tale.

“Because, in my blindness, I imagined you didn't take the danger seriously. But I was wrong, I think.” With a look, he pleads with her.

“Yes,” she says.

“My crimes are too grave. I don't ask you to forgive me. But I want you to know I'm sorry. Sorry for all the fear, all the pain you've suffered here. You and John, both.

Because of me.”

“Your apology isn't worth much,” she says. “But I'll forgive you. When you've earned it.”

“How would I do that?”

“You know how. But we can talk about that later.”

“What should we talk about now?”

“Riggs.”

“Why?”

“I was never with Riggs the way I've been with you.”

For a long, long while Smith goes blank and quiet and still. A sudden, vertical catatonia. Eva rides out the silence like one who's learned patience cuffed to a bed, waiting to endure her fate.

Finally, Smith speaks, his voice hoarse, his words slow. “Just smelling you on him, god, I could have murdered him. Because, of course he denied it. Pretended nothing had happened. So it wasn't until I smelled your cunt on his fingers that I had my proof.

“That moment, Riggs standing there, so big and strong, scared and weak, loathsome, and your scent, your sex working on me. I could picture it, you going to him like a warrior into battle. Enduring him. My gut seized up like I'd puke.”

Another vast silence.

“And the next moment, I realized. That's what you'd done with me. Endured me.

You suffered me, my lovemaking, like a wound.”

Something is shaking Eva. Squeezing her. Wringing her until her eyes fill with tears.

“I don't even know what to say to that.” Eva's voice is choked. “God, Avery, I'm eighteen, and I'd never even dated, much less had a lover before seven weeks ago. But I know John cares for me. And I know you do, too. Know it beyond doubt. Despite what you've put me through. Do I accuse you of fucking me just to get off? Or to satiate your massive ego?”

Rough and blunt, Eva's voice ratchets up. She wields her words like weapons.

“But you? I really doubt you cloistered yourself behind the walls of your military fortress as an eighteen-year-old virgin, keeping yourself pure until I—wicked whore that I am—seduced you there in my little prison room. Haven't you been in love before?

Don't you know what it feels like? Do you really think I've just been faking it? When I've kissed you? When I've touched you? Held you?”

“Yes,” Smith fires back, “I have some experience with women. Enough to know, from both sides, that it's not so hard to mistake pleasure and warmth for deeper things.

“I was foolish, Eva, to imagine you could care for me in spite of what I'd done to you. But I would be quite the idiot, now, to let myself believe your warmth, your tenderness has been anything but a means to an end. And I can hardly blame you.

What other means did you have at your disposal, but the ones you've used so adeptly?”

“It's your own fault, Avery. All by yourself you've made a lie of the few warm moments you and I got to share. It's because you really did leave me no alternative that you can only doubt me, now. If you'd let me live here, an equal with all of you, there'd be no reason for you to suspect that I—yesterday you said 'hate,' didn't you—that I hate you. That I hated you every time I lay next to you while you kissed and caressed me.

That I hated you while I held you to me while you were inside of me. I've been honest with you. At least as honest as you've been with me. We've both kept our agendas close. But I've never pretended anything with you.

“You're a flawed man, Avery. And things you've done horrify me. I've never pretended otherwise. And I'd have done anything I could to change that. And hopefully, I have.

“But that's separate from whatever this thing is between us. Just like you giving me away to John like a fucking stray dog.”

Avery is staring at her like he's trying to look through her eyes, through her skull, into her brain. Her heart. He pulls her against him, hard, holds her there, close, his arms and hands encircling and grasping.

Smith's features are little different from their usual configuration—pale, composed, rigid. But his eyes look wild, and a trail of tears flows steadily from them, over the high, defined cheekbones, from the sharp jaw. She presses both palms to his wet face, her eyes locked on his, seeking something in him, or maybe offering up something of herself.

“Don't,” he says, his voice cool and even, even as his tears leak between her fingers and over the backs of her hands.

“What?” Her voice, her look earnest.

“I'm cold. I'm hard. But you—you're cruel.”

She presses a kiss to his mouth. Slow. Soft. Warm. Then asks, “How am I cruel?”

“It's like divine justice, I suppose. A kind of inadvertent masochism.”

“Avery. You're not making sense.”

She has begun undressing him. He is lax, almost indifferent as she unbuttons his shirt and slides it from his shoulders, as she raises the hem of his tank and pulls it over his head and down his arms.

He tells her, “I'm not the first. It's a common literary motif, as I'm sure you know.”

“What's that?”

“The man who creates the monster which subsequently destroys him. Stop it, Eva.”

She's got his belt undone, now, and is getting to work on his fly. He catches her wrists, wrenches her hands away.

“It's not me that's afraid, Avery. Of being touched.”

Eva relents and Smith's eagle talons release her wrists. Her gaze is tender but her act is defiant: she strips the gown from her body in three quick swipes.

Smith lunges. Pounces on her. He traps and bends and pins her, kneeling and immobile on the floor in front of him, her naked form crushed to him.

“It can't work, Eva. You can't milk the heat from me with your body,” he pronounces against the nape of her neck. Then, wrapped around her as he is, he freezes immobile, trapping her naked body in the confines of his marble frame.

“Avery,” she says some minutes later. “I'm cold.”

He seems to rouse himself from catatonia.

“Eva. You're shivering. Get a blanket from the bed, but come back to me.”

She pulls the blanket from the bed, letting it trail on the ground behind her as she walks back to Smith. Only when she's settled between his legs, nestled back against his bare chest does she spread the blanket over his legs and hers, so that even when she pulls it up under her chin it does not come between them. Like vines blindly seeking support his limbs twine around her.

“When John brought you into my office that day,” Smith breathes, as if to himself,

“I hardly even saw you. You were simply the embodiment of an anticipated event. My mind was busy working through the plan I'd come up with almost a year earlier, and while it worked, my eyes hardly saw anything but the expected outward manifestations of your ordeal. You were weak. Starving. Filthy. Scared half senseless. All as I'd expected, if a woman ever actually ever crossed our threshold. And not much different than your predecessors. Of course your fear was of a different quality, after Riggs and his men. I saw right away you were terrified of John. And suspicious of me.

“Then, when I came back to my room, and you'd showered and put on my robe, all the dirt was washed away, your matted hair was clean, and I saw how frail and how young you were. I couldn't see you except juxtaposed beside my plan.

“My plan. It felt so separate from me, like it had been dreamed up and set in motion by someone else, and I was just an automaton, going through pre-destined motions. It never occurred to me to change course. But, looking at you—you were so thin, then, and my robe made you seem even smaller—I wanted to protect you. Hold you, comfort you after everything I imagined you'd been through, keep you safe from everything I knew was coming.

“But the thing about you that really took hold of me, that first night, was that, starved and worn out as you were, young as you were and apart from people for all that time, you'd calculated just where you stood. I saw you make your appeal, trying to play on some combination of my pity and my lust, to keep you with me. You knew you were in for something, knew I was your best chance of escaping some horrific fate.

“I'd planned long before—when I'd come up with the idea of that first ritual fuck to release the inevitable violent pressure I knew would descend on the camp if a woman ever arrived—I'd come up with the idea of drugging the sacrificial lamb. So I laced your wine as I'd planned all along.

“But I couldn't believe how I wanted to keep you with me. Not to trade your reprieve from the lottery for the use of you. I wanted—more than I can remember wanting anything before—to be your asylum. To keep you, unmolested, in my bed. To hold you and feel your anxious trembling subside as you came to see I'd just comfort and protect you and never demand anything of you.