After (54 page)

Running downstairs. Waking Roger. But she just stood there and let them pull the nightgown off.

Arnie clapped, sending a jolt of terror down her spine, and over Jack's “shhh!'

said, “Shit, sweetheart, you have got the sweetest little titties.”

They dragged her onto the sofa, and Arnie got beside her and started sucking a nipple while Jack got down on his knees on the floor in front of her and pushed her knees apart. Rapt, he stared at her sex as he spread her open, then leaned in and touched her with his tongue. When she whimpered, they both seemed provoked. Arnie leaned across to suck her other nipple, and Jack splayed her legs wider, sealed his mouth over her sex, and stroked his tongue through her folds until that aching, needful pleasure in her belly ruptured.

“That ever happen with Roger?” Jack asked with a self-satisfied grin.

Bewildered, feeling more naked, vulnerable than ever, she just shook her head.

They took their turns, then, and left. When she heard the front door open and close, she knelt down by the vent. Heavy, even, she heard her owner's familiar snore.

Still terrified he'd wake any second and come up for her, she washed herself carefully, put the night gown back on, and got in bed. He didn't come until morning, sick and foul-tempered and sluggish, but determined as ever.

The next time, Jack made her suck him while Arnie fucked her from behind. After, Jack licked her again until she came.

They made a routine of it, these surreptitious visits. Once in a while it would be just one of them, Jack or Arnie, but usually it was both. She thought probably they went as a pair to the sex hotels, too. They seemed to like it, the dynamic of the two of them, taking turns thinking of things to make her do, watching each other, having an audience.

Whenever Roger locked her into her room, now, she knew he'd have company, and all evening she'd lie by the grate, listening for that pair of voices, then wait, wound tight, sick with fear, until they came to her. Jack would be on top of her, inside her, watching her face as he slid in and out of her, and she would lie under him, shaking through those anxious minutes, knowing sooner or later they'd be caught, that something awful would happen to her.

At the same time, some small part of her liked having them come to her. The sex with them gave her physical pleasure, which Roger's disinterested conjugal visits never did. But mostly, she was grateful that they talked and joked with her. When they were there, she felt less lonely. And nearly human.

Then there was the night, after the familiar drone of male voices died down, after the sound of footsteps on the stairs and the key scratching at the lock, the door opened, and just one man came in.

“Hello there, Nikki.” A lean, wiry man with auburn hair and blue eyes was standing there, a mean little smirk on his lips. “Your friends Arnie and Jack let me in on their little secret. Said you wouldn't mind if I paid you a visit.”

“Well,” she huffed, trying to sound brave, “I do mind.”

“That so?” He took a few steps toward her. “Do you think you get a say?”

When he came close enough to touch, she grabbed for the lamp and swung, hard as she could, aiming for his head. But he was strong and fast and ready. He caught the lamp and took her down in one blurred move, crushing her scream out under his palm.

“Who are you gonna call for? Huh? Roger? He'll send you out for branding and the whorehouse so fast, this night with me will look like a slice of heaven.”

She still struggled, tried to scream while he pinned her on her belly under his weight, yanked up her night gown, wrenched her legs open with his knees, yanked her hips up off the mattress. Once he was inside her, she stopped fighting, gave up on screaming. Through the hate and frustration, she hardly felt him pumping, pawing at her tits, his hand wedged between her chest and the mattress.

After a while he pulled out, caught a fistful of her hair and shoved her face-down into her pillow, holding her down so hard that terror pumped through her, thinking he was trying to suffocate her. Then she'd screamed her whole strength into that pillow as he forced his cock into her ass. The first brutal thrust felt like being ripped open. As he started fucking, it was like he was tearing, burning her flesh. She sobbed and screamed and choked through it all. When he was done, she was drained. Limp. Without another word he pulled out, took his weight off her, zipped up and left.

The next time, Jack came alone. She stayed limp and indifferent as he put his arms around her and kissed her cheek.

“I'm sorry about Jonathan,” he whispered. “He'd found us out. I only let him, so he wouldn't report us. I don't mean just me and Arnie. I mean, I figured, better one night with him, for you, than the hotel.”

Jack set her away from him and scanned her face.

“Did he hurt you?”

“What are you apologizing for?”

“I just didn't want you to think me and Arnie—“

“What do you care what I think? I'm not even a person to you.”

“Come on, Nikki.”

“None of you. Buy me. Sell me. Lock me up like a bear in the zoo. Threaten me.

Force me. Do you apologize to your dog? Worry what he thinks of you?”

“Nikki,” Jack said, his voice and eyes serious. “What do you want?”

“Get me out of here. Take me somewhere safe.”

“Honest, Nikki. I don't think there is anywhere safe. And trust me, you don't want to be caught as a runaway.”

“Fine. Then leave me alone.”

“Don't say that, Nikki. We have fun, don't we?”

“If you stay, if you come back and fuck me, don't pretend to be my friend. Not if you think sticking your dick in me is worth what that man did to me. Not if you're willing to risk me getting sent somewhere where that will happen to me every day.”

Jack left without fucking her. He and Arnie stayed away for a couple weeks, but one night they came back, and both of them pretended nothing had happened. Limp and dull, she let them do what they wanted. But for her there was no more joking, no more talking, no more pleasure.

It had been going on for a few weeks when, just as Jack finished and Arnie was getting ready to take his turn between her thighs, the door swung open. Her whole body went icy, and she just lay there, frozen. Roger and another man, old and oddly tall, stepped into the room.

“Just as I told you, Roger,” the old man said in the deepest baritone she'd ever heard.

Arnie was up and off her, squeezing himself into the farthest corner, struggling to get his pants zipped.

“I saw you, Jack,” the old man said, pointing an accusing finger, “slip something into Roger's whiskey last week. And again tonight. You know the penalty for debauching another man's wife?”

“She's not my wife,” her owner breathed, barely audibly, not looking at her, even now.

The old man turned to Roger. “I'll make the arrangements. You needn't do anything, Roger.”

As they left, the old man said, “The authorities will be here within the hour. I defy you, in that time, to find any pleasure together that will be worth the price you're all about to pay.”

Then he turned the key on the three of them, and less than an hour later, true to the old man's word, a pack of black-uniformed men showed up.

* * * *

“I don't know what happened to the two men,” Nix said to Artel when she'd told him, simply, that her husband's friends liked helping themselves to his things when he wasn't looking. “But I was taken from my gilded cage to a less pleasantly disguised prison for the night. The next day, they inked over my husband's mark.” She touched the two-inch wide band of greenish black circling her upper arm, “then the guards cuffed me and took me to the town square. There were maybe fifty men there. A few had brought their wives, a sort of cautionary tale. They looked faceless in their hooded cloaks. Like they were just shadows in there.

“Two of the guards carried me over to the platform they'd set up, and latched my cuffs so my arms were locked over my head. Then they stripped off the robe they'd dressed me in. Then the first one got started. Later I found out, they did it by lottery.

Chose which men would punish me for being raped in my husband's house.”

She was hyperventilating, and could only get two or three words out on a breath, but she couldn't stop. The story was spewing out of her now like vomit, like some muscle down inside her was squeezing it from her, and she couldn't keep it in if she'd wanted to.

“You know, they let you think it will be all of them. Laying there, chained down, I thought I'd lose my mind, that Roger or Jack or Jonathan times fifty, the ugliness of it, the feeling of being reduced, erased would wear me away to nothing before it was over.

“I remember, when the first one got on me, at first I didn't really feel him, even once he'd started fucking. It was the crowd that I felt. All those eyes watching him do that to me. Even the shadows under those hoods, knowing there were women in those cloaks, hidden, watching. Maybe they believed what the men said, that I'd betrayed my husband. Maybe they thought I deserved what was happening. Or maybe they just watched, knowing that soon, that would be happening to them. And the men, shouting things. So pumped up to see me there, getting my 'punishment.' So eager, I thought, for their turn to come.

“When it was over, when the fifth one finished, and they unclipped my cuffs from the bolt and picked me up, and I was still me, I just...”

She glanced at Artel. He looked full of pity. Wounded. She reined herself in.

“Well. So, I lived. They dragged me off to the hotel. I endured that for a few weeks. First chance I got, I ran. Since then, I've spent most of my life off the books.

Free.”

“But not all your time,” Artel said, his voice soft and sad.

“It was strange, the first time I was caught. I was so puffed up on all this strength I thought I had.” She laughed, not bitter, a genuine laugh at how naïve she'd been back then. “I thought I was so tough, indestructible, just because I'd eked out an existence hiding in farm houses and country stores in the no-man's land between towns. Just because I'd gotten away with a couple close calls.”

The laughter drained away from her voice, from her eyes.

“But when they got started on me. The frustrated rage, the anxious helplessness I'd felt before, with Roger and the others, even that first punishment in the square was nothing compared to what I endured when they did that to me, after I'd been free. Once I'd belonged to myself for all those months. It felt like they were killing me. Ripping me apart. Rubbing me out.

“The first time I was on my own, I got hold of a gun early on. Carried it with me everywhere. Slept with it. I had fantasies of aiming it at whoever might find me, try to take me back to town, threatening to shoot them. Getting away. That first time on my own, I thought the gun would save me, without ever having to hurt anyone.

“But after they caught me, after they marked me a runaway and turned ten of the town's fine young men loose on me for a couple hours, after they locked me up in another hotel, I knew, when I got away, when I got a gun, I'd kill the next man who came near me. I wanted to kill. I promised myself, I'd shoot as many as had raped me. I kept count.”

“And did you? Kill the next man who came near you?” Artel asked.

“No.” Almost. Her gun was cocked and aimed. “He was with a cell of the resistance. I'd never heard of it. He told me what it was. Said he was there, scouting for safe houses. I followed him, my gun aimed at his back, to a huge white farmhouse. He gave a signal, and I thought I'd walked into a trap. But way off across the field, I saw the front door open, and three people came out. Women.

“They taught me how to really fight. And the men there, seeing them work, die to help us, I decided I'd only kill the men I knew were hurting us.”

She waited, then, for him to ask her about the night before they'd given her to him. But he stayed quiet. He just sat up, beside her on the edge of the bed, gazing down at his knees.

“I wish I could undo all the hurt that's been done to you,” he said.

His hands were on his knees, still and lax, but she had the idea he was working hard at not reaching over. Putting his arms around her.

“You haven't asked me not to touch you.”

Now he turned. Looked at her.

“No.”

His hair was soft. For some reason she hadn't thought it would be. Softer than hers. And warm. But his cheeks were rough with a day's growth of beard. The roughness was a comfort, somehow. Maybe because it was what she'd expected. His gaze held hers as she traced the angles and contours of his face with her fingertips.

When she took her hand away, he stayed still, looking at her.

“I know you want a friend, Gareth. And you deserve one. I just don't know how.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Ghosts haunted thoughts. Spiteful tongues licked at her brain. Mid-sleep, at the thick dark center of night, a frail sound crept through her dreams. The distant chirp of a cricket was a trick. Really, the stridulation of wings was the chafe and cry of two planks of red oak under the weight of a man. The clank of the rusty iron latch, the catch of the door were more honest.

Someone had come in. Or someone had gone out. Out, yes, or the symphony would have played in reverse.

From the window, Nix saw Artel's tall, broad figure, a shadow haloed in shuddering yellow, fading into the woods. Bitter salt rose up from her gut, choking her.

Pants. Boots. Knife. Gun.

In just her tank, she snuck into the chill autumn black, an unlit candle and matches in her pocket. Invisible, she sought his light. Alternately, his haloed shadow, or a tiny point of brightness, fluttering and bobbing like a faerie in the story her mother had read to her, once, danced out from behind a column of black, beckoning her deeper into the dark forest. Then the shadow man faded to invisibility, and the faerie dove to earth, lit upon some unseen perch, and stilled.

She crept ahead, in her mind begging the twigs and leaves for silence. Nearer and nearer that sleeping faerie, that yellow flame still in the still night, unmolested by the spent clouds and dormant wind, she stealthed, the wet forest floor silently swallowing her every step.