Exiled (A Madame X Novel) (17 page)

“That is difficult to believe, Caleb.”

“I know. But yet it is true.”

“The original Caleb. What happened to him?”

You make a sound, somewhere between a grunt, a growl, and a hum. A strange sound. Animal, rather than human. “I killed him. After Amy died and I went into business for myself, he came looking for me. I refused him. He tried to force it, and we fought. I won. Made sure no one would ever find him. Although a man like him, I don’t think anyone would ever look.”

“So you told me your name was Caleb Indigo.”

“Yes. Because I was . . . I didn’t want you to know Jakob.” A brief silence. “So then we began meeting at the café. Once a week, twice. Sometimes more. I continued the charade of being Caleb. Acted out
a persona that wasn’t me. Pretended to an emotionless façade I did not feel. Never told you anything about me. I never touched you. It was clear you had a crush on me, an infatuation. I tried not to encourage it, and even made it clear you were too young. But I couldn’t make you stop coming to our café, and I couldn’t stay away, knowing you would show up looking for me. You made advance after advance on me, and I turned you away. Made you angry, time and again. But always you came back. You couldn’t stay away and neither could I. This went on for months. And during those months, I found the Caleb persona useful. I pretended to be Caleb more and more. Caleb was . . . calm. Cool. Powerful. I could hide behind him. He wasn’t the orphan, the homeless boy. He wasn’t a whore. He wasn’t weak. He was
in control
. I
liked
being Caleb.”

A pause, a breath, and you clear your throat. Begin again. “And then something unforeseen happened.”

“The car accident?” I asked.

“No, not yet. That was later. This was . . .” You breathe slowly in and out several times. “I was alone, late at night. Out walking. I’d been drinking. I didn’t drink often, but that night I’d had a deal go wrong and needed to unwind. So I went to a dive bar far from anywhere I normally visited, and got drunk. Very, very drunk. I was stumbling home, and there you were. Walking home from the library. Of course, the library had closed hours and hours earlier. But you’d take the books you’d checked out to an all-night diner nearby and get a cup of coffee and sit and read. The waitresses all knew you, and they let you stay as long as you wanted. I walked by that diner. You’d just walked out, and you had your books in your backpack, and you were wearing . . . God, this outfit I would never have let you leave the house in. A short skirt, sandals, and a blouse that showed too much cleavage. You’d grown up in the two years I’d spent watching you, the months we’d spent talking in that café. Sprouted breasts,
started wearing a pushup bra. Of course, even at sixteen you didn’t need one, but you had no one to tell you no. Your parents loved you so much, but they had to work endless hours, because New York is an expensive and merciless mistress. So there was no one to tell you to put on different clothes. I remember that night. More vividly than any other night in my life, I think. I was behind you, and you . . . I don’t know. You felt me, I think. You turned around, and you saw me. You seemed happy to see me. It was the best feeling, that joy in your eyes, meant for me.”

I do not like where this is going. I do not like the hesitance in your voice. I am silent, still, frozen, as if only my ears function.

“We walked together. I remember the moment you took my hand. It was so innocent. But yet . . . so sinful. We were crossing a street. It was nearly midnight, and the sidewalks only had a few people on them, in that neighborhood. We were only a few blocks from your apartment building. I remember it. You put your palm to mine, and our fingers just . . . wove together. I think I stopped breathing, because I knew I should let go, but I was drunk, and I didn’t want to. I let myself pretend we were just . . . two people. We held hands, and walked, and talked. Or rather, you talked and I listened. You were normally a quiet girl, I think, except with me. You saved all your words for me, it sometimes felt. Poured them all out on me.

“But then . . . you changed everything. For me, and for yourself. I stumbled. Tripped on a crack in the sidewalk, and—somehow, somehow—I ended up holding you in my arms. I’d fallen against the wall of an alley, and you were in my arms. You smelled good. You were so close. Your eyes were large, and I couldn’t look away. And then you kissed me.
You
kissed
me
. And that was your undoing. You might have escaped me, if you hadn’t kissed me. But after I’d tasted you, tasted the coffee on your breath, tasted the virginity in you, I
knew. I just knew. You were
mine
. Sixteen, a virgin, and destined to be mine.

“I tried to resist you. Even after that. I pushed you off me, said something vulgar and demeaning, something about how I didn’t fuck naïve little virgins.”

A pin could prick the silence. A knife could flay it. A word could shatter it.

He tasted sour, the way Papa’s breath sometimes smelled, late at night. But this was different. This was Caleb, and I was tasting him. Kissing him. And he was kissing me back! It was beautiful. It was right. He was finally seeing me. His hand was on my waist, just above my hip. I wanted him to touch me where I’d never been touched. I leaned into him, pressed my chest against his, pressed my hips against his. Without words, I begged him to touch me. To show me how to be a woman, the kind of woman he wanted. He moaned, deep in his throat. It felt as if the moan were coming from deep within the earth, as if the ground itself were making the sound. His fingers tightened in my skin, gripping my waist. His tongue touched my teeth. I whimpered and opened my mouth, so I could taste more of him, so he could show me how to kiss with tongue. It was my first kiss, and it was everything I’d ever dreamed of. My first kiss, with Caleb! Oh, oh, oh . . . his hands were moving now. Downward. To my hips. Yes! YES! I whimpered again, and then his hands were palming my bottom, lifting me, pulling me harder against him. And I felt IT. A thick, hard THING between us, pressing into my belly. It felt so big, so hard, and I wondered what it would look like. I knew what sex was, of course. I knew how it worked. I even knew I was supposed to put my mouth on him down there and suck, and it was supposed to feel good for him. A blow job. Girls gave men blow jobs. And men did things like this, what he was doing to me. Holding my bottom, his fingers gathering the fabric of my miniskirt so more and more and more of the flesh of my buttocks was bared. I wasn’t wearing panties. A dare, to myself. I LIKED it, too. It felt wrong. Naughty. But so good, the way my
thighs rubbed together, the way my privates felt every draft of air as I walked. The way I had to sit carefully so no one realized. I was a good girl, but I didn’t WANT to be good. I was invisible at school. No one noticed me. I had no friends. No one even picked on me. I just wasn’t there. I wanted to be seen, to be noticed, to matter. I used to matter, before we came here, to this country. America was not what I thought it would be like. Not as clean, not as magnificent. Not as wonderful. Mama and Papa were always gone now and never had time for me. No one had time for me, except Caleb, and he’d made it clear I was too young for him. So I tried to grow up faster, for him. I listened to conversations about sex, looked things up on the Internet. Learned to curse in English. Today, I didn’t wear panties, because maybe he’d notice, maybe he’d realize I wasn’t a little girl. And he had! He’d noticed! He was kissing me and touching my bottom—my
ass
—and I felt his
cock
. Maybe he would have sex with me. I wanted him to be my first everything. My first kiss, my first boyfriend, the man who took my virginity.

He had my skirt up around my waist, one hand huge and warm and rough against my butt cheek, gripping it. The other . . . oh God, oh God, oh God . . . it was moving around between us. Inches from my privates. I’d touched myself there, of course. Made myself feel amazing sensations. Made things explode inside me, like something was coming apart in my privates, in my belly. Maybe he’d make me feel that. Or even better. I felt his finger, right THERE, nudging ever so gently against the edges of my privates—

But then he stopped.

He grunted roughly.

“You’re not wearing any panties.” It wasn’t a question.

“No,” I whispered.

“Fuck.”

He’d never cursed like that.

“What?” I asked. Tried to kiss him again, wanting him to keep going. Keep going!

But he shoved me away. Hard. I nearly fell to the dirty ground, and he stood there, leaning back against the wall, the hand he’d been touching my privates with pressed to his face. He was staring at me. His eyes were narrowed to slits, and his chest was heaving up and down as if he’d just run a race.

“You’re a virgin.” Again, it wasn’t a question. I heard the liquor in his voice. But he was lucid, coherent.

“Yes. But I’m ready. I want this. I want
you
, Caleb.”

His eyes go dead. I don’t know how else to think of it, other than that they just go . . . flat. Empty. Hard and cold. He stands up straight, shoves his hands into his trouser pockets. Arrogance radiates off him in thick, palpable waves. He takes a long step toward me, stops so his face is less than a foot from mine, staring down at me with those eyes like cold dead chips of stone.

“I don’t want you, Isabel.” He delivers this calmly, easily. I know it’s a lie. “I don’t fuck naïve little virgins.”

My heart twists, and my eyes sting.

“I tried to be nice about it, but you just don’t get it, do you? You’re so naïve! You actually think I’d fuck you? I wouldn’t even let you suck my dick. So just go home. Okay? Go home, and grow the fuck up, stupid little girl.”

And then he turns and walks away. He does not stumble, does not waver or sway. He turns the corner, and he’s gone, and I manage to hold back the tears for a moment, two, and then they pour down my face. I feel the pang, the ache, the hate, the twist of the knife in my heart.

I turn and go home, replaying every moment, repeating every word he said to me.

*   *   *

I
didn’t mean it.” You whisper this. Never have four words felt so porcelain. Especially from you. “I didn’t mean it. But I had to make you . . . stop. Make you go away. Before I ripped that skirt off your
delectable, too-young, sixteen-year-old ass and fucked you there in the alley. You were all woman. Sixteen, and a woman. But yet, still a girl. So naïve. So innocent. Yet so hungry to be worldly. The makeup you put on when you came to see me, you caked it on. Too much of your mother’s perfume. I pretended not to see you as you would approach our café, but I always saw you. You would stop at the corner, and fluff your hair, tease it out. Tug your shirt down and push up your tits. Pull your skirt up to bare more leg. As if seeing more of your skin could tempt me any more than I was already tempted. You were just pouring gasoline on a wildfire, but you didn’t realize it. I was Caleb, and Caleb never gave anything away. Caleb did not feel. So you never knew just how close you came, that night, to being fucked up against an alley wall like a common slut. I fantasized about it, about that night. Fantasized, dreamed of what I might have done differently. How I might have held on to your ass and lifted you up around my waist. How I would have slid my cock into you and fucked you so hard it would have hurt you. A virgin, you were, and you would have bled all over me. I’d never fucked a virgin before, and I wondered how tight you would feel. I’d fucked so many women, so, so, so many. All of them older, more experienced. Thirties, forties, and beyond. Or younger women who’d already been initiated into the world of hard and fast fucking, the way I did it. You would have cried, maybe. Then I could have kissed away your tears and fucked you gently, to show you that I could.” You speak reverently, using words I’ve never heard from you, expressions and turns of phrase and inflections that I didn’t know you knew. You are fading between being Caleb and Jakob. “I jerked off, thinking of all the things I wanted to do to you. I fucked my whores, pretending they were you. But I stopped going to the café. I stayed away from Brooklyn, where you lived. I stayed away. I stayed away, Isabel. For you, I stayed away.”

I believe this. It frightens me, so I believe it. You wanted me, sixteen-year-old me. And I wanted you, twenty-nine-year-old you. But you stayed away from me. Because you wanted to fuck me so hard I would cry. You stayed away. I wish you had succeeded.

“And then the accident happened. It was in Manhattan. I still to this day do not know why you were there, in Manhattan. What you were doing. It was late. Past midnight. Cold. Wet. A fall day, a few months after the kiss. I was good, I was being good. Staying away. Keeping you safe from me. Keeping you out of my world. I was walking. I liked to walk, back then. I would walk to get something to eat, I would walk to meet clients, I would walk just to walk, so I could think. Of you, most often. Walking out the desire to find you and take you home and keep you. I didn’t wait for the light. There were no cars, and I was preoccupied, so I just crossed, as I have a million times. But a car, an older green Impala. I remember the car. The rust on the front left wheel well. A crack in the windshield, low, near the base. A rock chip that spread, most likely. I froze. The car was barreling toward me, too fast to stop. That moment, it changed everything. If I’d just moved, if I hadn’t frozen . . . things would be different.

“The driver hit the brakes, swerved to try to miss me. The back tires hydroplaned on the wet cement, and the car kept coming toward me, this time sideways. I saw him, your father. Behind the wheel. I saw his mouth moving as he swore, or yelled, or something. I saw your mother in the front seat beside him. Screaming. And I saw you. In the back. I saw you.

“Why did it have to be you? Of all the millions of people in the fucking city, in the whole fucking world, why did it have to be
you
? Why you?”

Why me, indeed?