Fractured Crystal: Sapphires and Submission (11 page)

“Yeats, I think. Leda and the Swan. It’s been a long time since I read that. Damn Irishman. So often maudlin and sentimental
—
and then he grabs you, absolutely grabs you so that you can’t escape.”

“I wouldn’t like to escape,” she said, quietly.

His hand stroked her head. “Are you sure?” he asked. “Do you really want to be mastered by the brute blood of air?”

She pressed her other hand between her aching thighs, squeezed it, the faint longing of pre-orgasm already haunting her loins as she pressed her mouth to his nipple, kissed it.

“You’re so strange,” she said to him, softly. “But also so wonderful. I wish I had met you before.”

“Be careful what you wish for.” Although he appeared relaxed, the tone of his voice had shifted again and the prickles rose on the back of Kris’s neck. Her armour had not yet entirely disappeared.

But she was tempting fate this morning, tempting the devil that lay a few inches away from her beneath the sheet. Pushing back the cotton, she clamped her other hand tighter between her thighs. Magnificent. Wonderful. Simply looking at it was enough to bring on its own mini orgasm, even now when it was only half erect, not yet full rampant.

Moving her fingers to his shaft, she gently stroked him, admiring the contours of the large, bulbous head
—
so smooth to the touch, with the slit opening above his prepuce. The shaft was wide and veined, and when she lifted it in her small fingers she enjoyed the weight of it, the heft of it as a weapon in her hands. Bending her head forward, she kissed the tip of it.

“So foolish,” she said more to herself.

“What is?” His voice came from behind her head.

“We don’t even know each other. I mean, all I know about you is your name, really. I don’t know what you do
—
or what you did. I don’t even know your bloody age!”

“Thirty-eight,” he replied.

“Well, that’s a start.” She lifted her own gaze away from his monstrous manhood, which was stirring more thickly beneath her touch and looked up at him. “But I want more.”

“Be careful what you wish for.” His tone was more clipped this time. A warning.

“But don’t you want to know about me?” she asked, pleaded even.

“Of course.” He raised both arms behind his head and looked down at her. She couldn’t decipher his stare this morning: though they had barely known each other for more than days, already his sudden mood shifts, from apparent passion to a cool appraisal, were disturbing her more than she cared to admit. “I want to know how you move, how you feel. I want to know how you cry out. I want to know what your animal self is.”

“But what about what I do? My art, for example? Where I work?”

“Your art I’m sure I’ll see
—
I’ll experience it when you produce it. As for your work
—
is that really important?”

She frowned at this, sulking slightly. “Well, I guess not. I’m a nobody, really.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“That’s what it sounded like.”

He sighed and looked back at the ceiling. “I really don’t appreciate these kinds of games,” he told her. “Fucking brilliant. I tell you to have a safe word, but I forget to reserve one for myself.”

“I just want to know about you, that’s all. Okay, if you won’t tell me about what you do, what about that photo that I saw on the first day I came here. It’s quite clear why you’re interested in me. Was she your wife?”

“Don’t do this.”

“But really. I’m interested. Tell me, please. What happened to her?”

He did not reply but continued to look up at the ceiling, his lips moving for a moment as though in silent prayer
—
or curses. For a moment, Kris regretted the question, but still she could not leave it alone.

“I don’t mind, really,” she told him, lifting herself up onto her front now, slightly above him, her breasts hanging down and the nipples brushing against his chest. She could not resist, but at the same time she was aware that something was shifting beneath her, like tectonic plates far away in his body. “Tell me, please,” she whispered, this time a little nervous but at the same time insistent. During the night he had begun to dominate her physically. Now she wanted her payback in whatever form she could get it.

When he gazed back at her, his eyes flashed and her anxiety became something more pronounced. There was a determined look on his face.

“You want to know about me?” he asked. “You want to fucking know about me, little girl? I’ll fucking let you find out all about me
—
here, now.”

So saying, he slid sideways. Sensing that something was not quite right, Kris attempted to pull away but he grabbed her with his strong hands, refusing to let her go. His mouth was clamped tightly shut, a vice of grim resolve, and the loving light that had been in his eyes only a little while before when she awoke was now completely gone.

"What are you doing Daniel?" she asked anxiously. "You don't have to be so rough."

"Oh, but I do, little girl, don't I. We both know you like it rough."

Something in Daniel's words made Kris freeze, a trigger. Little girl hurt, little girl lost. For a second, the merest moment in time, Kris's heart experienced a fatal ambivalence to his words and actions, a struggle for mastery in herself. Then the censor inside her came down, prevented her from fighting at all
—
and Daniel mistook her new passivity for submission.

His hands were strong as he pushed her around so that Kris’s heart was beating even faster now, a genuine panic and anger coming over her. She didn’t want to fight him, but this was wrong and so, finally, she started to struggle, her slender arms feeble in his powerful grasp. As she gave a gasp, he flung her sideways onto her front. She tried to push herself up but once again he took hold of her wrist, forcing her down and half rolling on her so that the weight of his body trapped her on the bed.

As he forced his knee between her thighs, her welt-marked, bruised buttocks pushed upwards against his belly, his thick, heavy cock pressing in the crease of her cheeks, she floundered beneath him, crying out.

“Please! Daniel! Please! Fucking stop! Will you stop it?” She was becoming furious now, and in her desperation her fear rose as she felt his erection stiffening even further, becoming something monstrous in her back.

He was on top of her now, his body much larger than hers. As she struggled to fight with her wrists, he held her down easily, pulling back one arm so that it was painfully pinned up behind her, the weight of his body on hurting her more when she struggled.

“Fucking hell, Daniel!” she shouted. “Just stop it now!”

He did not listen, however. Releasing her other wrist, she could feel him moving his hand behind her head. Her free hand flailed and sought for some purchase, some object or weapon even, and she screamed in panic when she felt his hand return to her buttocks, squeezing between the cleft, rubbing wet spittle around her anus.

“No! No!” she shouted, as much furious as frightened. “Not that! You bastard! Fucking hell! Just stop it!”

He paid her no heed, but pressed the head of his cock against her anus, began to use his weight on her. In desperation she had panicked, but now a moment of awful clarity emerged in the seconds before he could tear into her.

“Alfama! Daniel, Alfama! Please, stop! Please! Alfama, Daniel!”

The effect was almost instantaneous. He froze on top of her. She had
begun
to sob, but he did not console her, did not apologise. Instead, after a few moments lying above her, his body tense, he rolled off her and simply left the room.

She was crying
—
more from anger than fear, and when at last she climbed from the bed and pulled on a shirt and jeans, her whole body was trembling.

Daniel was outside the front door of the cottage, utterly naked and staring at the distant hills. His broad back was turned to her, a dark silhouette as she approached the bright outline of the doorway. She was shivering, watching him as he turned his gaze to her from the far off horizon. At last she spoke.

“Would you have continued? If I hadn’t... hadn’t said it?”

“I don't know.” His voice was brittle, restrained. “I lost control then. That's... unusual for me. A first time, in fact, but then, you just being you brings up things that are dangerous for me to know. I told you how to stop me. If you hadn’t the wit
—
nor the will
—
to understand it is what you want...” The rest of his sentence faded away on the air.

At this, her anger and rage suddenly boiled up inside her. “Who the fuck are you, Daniel? What gives you the fucking right to do this?” Leaping forward from the doorway, she hit him as hard as she could on the back
—
making him stagger slightly more by luck than by force. “What gives you the fucking right?”

As she continued to punch him, for a while he stood with his back to her and absorbed her blows silently. Then, as she drew back her arm for a final ineffectual blow, he suddenly turned and grabbed hold of her wrist, making her suck in her air in fear and surprise.

“You do,” he told her. “You do, if you want it that way.” His voice was quiet. “Maybe I was wrong about you. Maybe you’re not the one after all. But you give me the right to do everything
—
if you want it.”

He released her hand and strode back into the house. She fought back the tears, her head a maelstrom of emotions as she heard him moving about upstairs. When he returned down a few moments later, dressed in trousers and a shirt of his own, she had not shifted from the spot where he left her.

“I told you I’d push you,” he said to her, his voice calm, assured, though she did not look at him while he spoke. “And I gave you the key to stopping me. If I surprised you... perhaps I
am
sorry, though that’s not in my nature. It’s just the way it is. I’m going for a little while. If you want to leave... well, you know where your car keys are. Don’t worry. I’ll make sure all your belongings are returned to Dalrigh. There’s no need for you to come back here.”

She kept her head faced downwards, not out of shame nor even fear of him, but once more full of the feelings of frustration and anger that were so familiar to her. As she heard the Land Rover driving away, she did not look up but, instead, stared down at her left hand, curled as it was in a fist. It felt to her at that moment as though her whole arm was sheathed in steel, a thick, immobile carapace that refused to allow her to move even had she desired to do so.

Returning to the croft, Kris stared for a few moments at her car keys hanging by the door. Her Toyota was still outside, the only vehicle now on the dirt track that led up to the house.

She felt numb. That in itself was
not
so much of a shock. What was perhaps so surprising to her was how calm she felt. Her anxiety was gone. It was not simply a realisation that the immediate threat had now departed, but also her armour was spreading across her whole body. This is what it did so often
—
it was her protection against real life, her apathy, her defence.

With a shrug, she raised her left arm and lifted her keys from the hook. Everything sensible told her to leave. It had been fun while it lasted, perhaps, but it was clear that Daniel was fucked up in some way and the chances were that she would get hurt if she stayed. She’d been hurt too many times.

Entering the interior of the house, she decided that she might as well get as many things as she could. She was not entirely sure where Daniel had deposited her phone
—
probably in the wardrobe in the bedroom, which was the only locked place she knew of for certain in Comrie, no doubt stashed away there with his precious photograph. Well, fuck him. She’d find some way of getting it back.

Crossing the living area, she paused by the table. Her pad still lay out on its wooden surface, open at one of the drawings of the birdman. Loplop. She paused. Loplop. Damn that bastard. He’d seen it when she couldn’t, and she suspected that sometimes
—
just sometimes
—
this stranger who had only come into her life barely a half dozen days before could see aspects of her more clearly than she could herself. She also had a suspicion that the mirror into Daniel Logan was more fascinating to her than she cared to admit.

Leave. Go. Get out.

Instead, she crossed to the shelf and picked up the volume of Yeats’s poetry that she had seen there. Flicking through the index, she found the page she was looking for.

“A sudden blow: the great wings beating still

Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed

By the dark webs...”

She nodded to herself, her mind balanced between amused cynicism and darker desires. She remembered something about Yeats, some lines that she had read long before and which had taken her fancy. Turning the pages, she found them again
—
ah, yes! There they were: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”. Was there some revelation at hand, a second coming?