Beautiful Agony (A Tale Of Savage Love, Part I) (5 page)

Perhaps I was nothing more than a pathetic masochist, but
regardless of my questionable motivations
, I continued.

Now, getting down to basics:

I imagine you
are
perceived by those around you as
an attractive, highly-influential,
well-respected person within your chosen profession.  I think
you stifle your inborn creativity in exchange for
increased productivity,
not to mention
as a coping mechanism to effectively
smother yo
ur one and only outlet for
devastating
self-doubt
and
crushing
fear
. 
I believe you are quite definitely a woman who
se peers, by all accounts,
think is
secure, ambitiou
s, courage
ous, and strong.  In fact, your
very
choice of
words suggest
to me
that you project yourself as
a
veritable
power-house of
female strength
and liberation.

But
it’s
all really nothing more than a cautiously cultivated lie
, is it not
?
  A façade so meticulously crafted that it was meant to con
-
not just everyone
around -
but
very
possibly even
you,
yourself
.  That dangerous dichotomy is exactly why you need me, because s
weetheart,
I can see right through your
pure and
unadulterated bullshit.

And so
,
rest assured;
regardless of t
hat puerile little ad of yours (
that humorous paradigm of hypocrisy that merely flirted with the truth
)
, I can still see
the exquisite angst and immaculate torment that both lie so lovely and guarded,
right
beneath the surface of your othe
rwise bland and derisory words. 
What you truly need
, my dear,
is a real man w
ith a firm hand; a man with the
ability, the strength, the knowledge, and the will to effectively control you
.  To
carefully regulate your pain, fastidiously dole out your torture, and methodically
manage
your
pleasure, gratification, indulgence, and anguish
.

In so doing, I can free
you from your
own self-hatred.  I can also
help you
break free from the manacles of your
overwhelming
inner turmoil
,
and
grinding,
suffocating self-
doubt.

You’re quite endearingly lost and floundering, yet the longer
you stay missing, the harder you
’
ll be to find.

I believe I can
recover your truth…I
f
you have the humility and the courage to do so.

Whatever has happened to bring yo
u to me;
is the past.  All that matters
f
rom this
instant
forward is the next moment, the next breath,
the
next beat of your
hot, red
heart.

If you can overcome your instinctively cu
mbrous fear, if you’re ready to
meet a
powerful
man who has the capa
city and the necessary force to
captivate, dict
ate, educate, and regulate you;
email me a
recent photo
and your full name.

And please, a word or two that is the real you.

If I like what I see
, I
will respond
.

Sincerely yours,

~Adam Cowell Bishop, BishopsBaneNexus@
flamesofphoenix
rising.net

What a
n arrogant bastard, I thought as I sat there half-stunned
.  I mean, obviously he wouldn’t call me if he thought I was dog-ugly, but most people had the common courtesy not to allude to that fact so blatantly.  The generally acceptable thing to say would be something like, “Send me your photo and if I think we may be compatible, I’ll call you.”  Or just ask for the photo and, if he didn’t like it, not bother to contact me again.

But to be so blunt about the whole thing! 
Not just the photo part, but
all of it
. 
Then again, if I was going to be truthful with myself, his searing honesty had primarily been what had managed to hook me.  Because regardless of the fact that he’d come across as somewhat co
ndescending, he had somehow
pierced
through my own rather
ambiguous
ad,
and honed
into the heart of me
.  For I believed his words; that he could,
in actuality,
see what lay beneath the surface.  And I also, strangely enough, believed that he
just might be able to
help me.
 
Now,
hand shaking, I moved the cursor over
to
the little
.jpeg
box and
nervously
clicked on his picture
.

Hardly
able to
even
draw a
complete
breath,
I found myself oddly denying the
impulse to
look right at him, and focusing
in
on his surroundings instead.  I don’t know what my recalcitrant reluctance stemmed from – perhaps a fear that he wouldn’t be attractive to me?  Or worse; terror that he
would
.

He was standing in the midst of
what
l
ooked to be the
penthouse apartment
of a luxury, high-rise building
.  It was extensive, and had a gorgeous view of the Manhattan skyline.  First and foremost, i
t meant he lived nearby.

But it w
as his taste in
décor that I found most intriguing.  Everything
around him, all of his furnishings, were
made of either glass, silver, or black leather. 
His carpet was white, and it seemed that there was
not a spot of color anywhere. 
The
walls
, too, fell within these parameters.  They held
either abstract
black and white art
or
simply
nothing at all.  I could see two paintings and the rest was just bare expanse of drywall.  No family photos, no portraits of his beloved grandmother or favorite dog:  nothing.

I gazed at each insignificant detail for long seconds on end, yet
finally, unavoidably, I’d seen it all.  You could only study a screen-sized photo for so long without running out of things to note.  Now, there was nothing else to do but look at him.  So look, I did.  Instantly, the spit shriveled in my mouth.

The man, himself, was uniquely interesting; just certainly not “handsome” in the usual
sense of the word.  He was
well
built
, had short-cropped dark hair, and what looked to be nearly colorless, crystal-gray eyes.  They were so startling they made me uncomfortable just by the merits of him looking out at me via the
pixelated
surface of the
digital
photo, alone.  How would I feel, then, when I was pinned and wriggling beneath his gaze for real?

His jaw was very square, his cheeks angular, his nose long with a slight hook at the bridge, and his overall expression was blandly menacing, in a way I couldn’t quite pinpoint.  Yet what caught my attention first and foremost was the large sc
ar that ran
from the
very
top of his left cheek, all the way down across
the curve
, finally ending at his upper lip
where it clearly cleaved the surface.  What had happened to him to mar him so badly?

I was transfixed by it, hypnotized, mesmerized.  I simply couldn’t tear my eyes away.  It was a
n absolutely flawless
illustration of what I’d longed for all these years:  something external, something that
marked me
, something that
showed
others
how damaged
I was
inside.  Perhaps if I’d had similar scars to bear on my
body
, I wouldn’t have ended up with quite so many upon my
soul
.

I studied that
garishly-beautiful
blemish
for a long, long time. 
I imagined that for most people,
they, too, also
first
saw
the scar
; the raised, puffy welt, so starkly brutal it was like a jag of lightning
right
across his face. 
Of course they would be engrossed by
it for an entirely different reason – perhaps
reacting
with curios
ity, revulsion, or even disgust.  Me, on the other hand, I looked at it with only
envy
instead
.

The scar
was
quite startling;
vivid white,
which was
particularly
discordant
against
the backdrop of
his otherwise
deeply-
tanned skin.  I questioned for a moment why he’d sent this angle of himself, and not a more flattering one where I couldn’t see so much of his scar.  But then again, perhaps when you had such a central disfigurement, right on your face where it was the first thing that any pe
rson who met you would ever see,
it was easier to get it out of the way up front.

Personally, the scar didn’
t bother me at all
(certainly not like his eyes did)
. 
You see,
I found it a lot less threatening when people’s damage was easily vis
ible, rather than buried deep inside
,
like mine.  I did
wonder
, though,
how in the hell he’d
actually
gotten it.

As far as the rest of him went, h
e appeared tall, and lithely muscular.  He certainly wasn’t a body-builder type, but he did have a well-defined and toned chest beneath his black t-shirt, and his arms looked like they were corded with languid steel.  His was a runner’s body; someone who could go long distances, push himself to the ends of the earth and
beyond, and yet never even get the slightest
bit winded.  Looking at him excited me in some un-nameable, irrefutable way.

Maybe it was
stupid, but something inside suddenly
made me want to go along with
exactly
what he’d asked.  At least p
artially.  Everyone in the
biz knew me as Ruby Sweet. 
So,
I figured there was
no harm in using my middle name for now.  Once we’d actually met and
if
I
decided to continue this
venture further, then I would tell him my first name.

Cropping
just
a head-shot of myself
out from a photo of the most recent office-party
mêlée
(that a colleague had fortuitously posted on Facebook)
,
I
saved it and named it “
Evelyn Sweet, 212-555-8686
”
.
  Then I attached it to my return email.

The
number
happened to correlate to an anonymous,
“
pay-as-you go
”
cell,
and
it
was not registered to me in any
official
database. 
Any woman dating in this day an
d age, really needed to have just such a thing
when giving out her number to random
strangers.  Because face it, even if you met a guy in a bar and talked to him for hours, and felt like you’d known him since birth, he could be a cold-blooded, psychopathic killer, and there was no sense giving
him
the key to your identity right off the bat.  With this number,
I
knew I could use it safely, and this guy, Adam, would
never be able to track me down if I
decided
I did not want to meet with him in person
again
after
our first public outing
.
  Well, that was
if
he contacted me back.