Gagged (32 page)

“Which story?”
 

“About your scars.”
 

And she holds my hand. She cradles my arm, rolling it in her lap, tracing a delicate finger along those old white lines.
 

“I guess I owe you that story. But first, if I may, I have a question.”
 

“Caspian White, asking for permission?” She feigns shock. “The man who brought a girl to his dungeon, on a leash, to fuck in her every orifice?”

“If I may,” I repeat.

“You may.”
 

“How did you know I wouldn’t betray your trust?”
 

I assume she’ll have an answer. Now that I’ve freed her and we’re both better, I imagine that what comes out of her mouth will be like something from a greeting card. She’ll tell me that she knew I was worthy. Or she’ll tell me that if you can’t trust the people around you, then you can’t truly live.

Instead she says, “I
didn’t
know.”
 

“So why did you come here? Why didn’t you say no, if you couldn’t be sure? You didn’t have to put on the collar. You didn’t have to get into the car. All of those things were unreasonable, and all much further than I’d meant to push. So why agree? You could have refused to let me tie you. Or got off when the elevator stopped in the lobby.”
 

“I was naked,” she says.
 

“Yes.” I cup her breast. “That much, I remember.”

She’s quiet for a long time. Then: “You scared me, Caspian.”

The way she says it, I want to apologize.

“A lot of you still scares me. Sometimes you’re surprisingly sweet. Sometimes you’re an insufferable asshole. But you have this side to you … ”
 

“I know.”

“It wasn’t play. Was it.” She says it deadpan, like the answer is obvious.
 

“No.”

“You wanted to hurt me.”
 

I think about how to respond. The answer, in the simplest sense, is no. I don’t want to hurt her. I didn’t want to hurt her. I never, ever want to hurt her. The idea is repugnant. I doubt I’m even capable of finding a way to want to hurt her. But it can happen on accident. Or impulse. When we started today, it wasn’t Aurora I wanted to destroy. It was her way of seeing the world. Because the way she is — it threatens the way I am. She makes me see possibilities I’ve never considered. I’ve always been so certain of everything. I’ve always had absolute confidence. The shitty way things turned out in a few places, I’ve told myself that it was fine because those things couldn’t have been different. But Aurora’s made me wonder. She’s made me doubt my choices. And in the doing, she’s made me realize that so much of the horror around me might have been avoidable. And if that’s the case, then so much of it was my fault.
 

I didn’t want to punish Aurora. But something inside me needed to invalidate her, to make her irrelevant. She couldn’t be right. She couldn’t win this stupid little contest. Too much was at stake if I didn’t force my way to be the
only
way, like how I’ve forced everything else.
 

In the end, unsure how to reply, I simply give her both halves of the unreconciled contradiction.
 

“It wasn’t play. But I never wanted to hurt you.”
 

She’s fixing me with her blue eyes. I feel her weighing me. I feel her trying to decide who I am, under it all.
 

And finally she says, “I trust you.”

But it’s hard to accept. So, ready or not, I start my story. I hold up my left arm, and with the right hand, I trace my old scars.
 

“It wasn’t always shit, between my father and me.” I’ve never said that aloud, despite being prompted repeatedly by Lucy. I swallow past an obstruction. I push through discomfort, just like Aurora has done so much. “Up until I was seven or eight, I knew how he was with other people, but he wasn’t really that way with me. He had his moments. He did shout, and did have standards. But because I was young, I think he didn’t have many expectations. So we got along. Business and success and making the most of myself were minor issues. He was shit to my mother and I guess to me and Lucy at times, but I was a kid; I forgave because he was my father; I sort of got used to it and let it roll off my back. And it was fine.”
 

I take a deep breath. I’ve never told this story. Never. Even Lucy only knows the version that let us all keep making eye contact through breakfast.
 

“But one day, one of the popular kids at school asked to borrow my bike. The kid had never been nice to me, but everyone liked him, and I wanted him to like me, too. So he said, ‘I’ll bring it back. Trust me.’ But of course he didn’t, and of course he never had any intention to. I hid it from my father for as long as I could, but one day he asked me flat-out what happened to my bike, and I couldn’t lie. So I told him what had happened, now with three days of feeling stupid under my belt. I thought he’d yell and scream. I thought he’d spank or hit me, like he’d done before. Instead he got thoughtful. Then he said, ‘Okay. It’s unfortunate, but he said you could trust him. You had reason to trust. But the bike is still gone, so you’ll need to buy a new bike yourself.’ I was okay with that. I could scrimp and save my allowance. And it was so much better than being screamed at.”

Aurora sits up. She’s watching me with sympathy I don’t want, and it makes me uncomfortable. She touches my bare shoulder. She takes my hand.
 

“So he gave you the scars,” Aurora says.
 

“No. I gave them to myself.”
 

She holds my hand tighter, not understanding, maybe not wanting to.
 

“We lived in this shitty little house at the time. My father eventually had his successes, but that was still in the future. It was rundown, peeling paint, classic wrong-side-of-the-tracks story. Steam heat, from these giant cast-iron radiators. I hated those radiators. They hissed like snakes. And we used to get shit caught behind them all the time. A ball would roll back there and we’d have to wait for a warm day, with the radiators off, to get it back. They got so hot, we’d sweat. But it was boiler heat, and the best you could do was to close the valve and wait for them to cool. You erred on the side of too much heat because it felt dangerous, in this particular house, to leave them on during the day, but we wanted it warm enough going into the night.

“So one day, I come home from school to find a bunch of electric heaters. The kind you plug in, essentially ratcheting our heating up a step from dangerous to merely wasteful and inefficient. None of them had thermostats or functional on/off switches; he’d plug them in and then unplug them when it got too hot. And that’s how he afforded them on his salary. Or at least that’s the story I heard.

“So one day, after we’d gotten used to the sweltering electric heaters to replace the radiators, it’s just the two of us at home. My mother and Lucy are out. My father is walking through the kitchen, and he kicks one of Lucy’s toys right behind the goddamned radiator. Then he says, ‘Hey, Caspian. Reach back there, and get that for me, will you?’ But he’s got longer arms, so I tell him I’ll never be able to reach it. And he says, ‘
Try
.’”
 

Aurora’s grip tightens on my hand.
 

“He’s looking right at me, Aurora. Like something’s wrong. I can practically smell it. But he didn’t like when you told him no, so I went to the radiator and looked back at him. It was like hellfire. The little electric heater was belching out the heat. I think I hear the old radiator hiss like a snake — a sound that still gives me chills. And I tell him, ‘Dad, it feels like the radiator is on, too.’”

Aurora shifts. Her eyes watch me, uneasy.
 

“He tells me that it isn’t. But I’m sure it is. I can’t outright touch it because that would be like calling him a liar, but I can feel the heat wafting off it. And so I tell him again that someone turned it on. I’m sure of it.

“But then my father looks right at me. Strange expression still on his face. And he says, ‘Trust me, Caspian. It’s off.’”
 

“But it wasn’t,” Aurora says.
 

“It was on full blast. All the way up. And most of my brain got that fine, but you know what it’s like to be a kid. My father ruled our family like a despot. Usually a somewhat benevolent despot, up until that point, but a despot nonetheless. You didn’t question him. And what’s more, it wasn’t just about obedience. We all trusted him. He’d taught us that way. So when he’s looking right at me, asking me to trust him, there was a deep part of me that rationalized like a motherfucker. Of course I could feel the heat. But this was my father. If I couldn’t believe him, who could I believe? It was passive-aggressive. It was all sorts of things. But he sold me, Aurora. Stupid as it was, he sold me. And so even as I reached straight down from the top between the wall and the metal, I think I knew what was coming, but was brainwashed and manipulated by belief in my father.”
 

“Jesus,” Aurora says.
 

“The metal sank into my skin like wheels into mud. Two fins, side by side.” I show her the twin scars, marveling at the human body’s ability to heal what had once seemed terminal. “And then, while I’m gripping my arm and screaming with the skin already starting to blister and turn black, he stood there with crossed arms and a smug smile. ‘
This
is what happens when you trust,’ he said.”
 

“That’s horrible!”
 

“But it worked. I forgave him later — not that he apologized — because he was my father and I figured that was what good sons did. And he was still nice — that one horrible, scar-making episode set aside. I convinced myself that it had been my fault. I knew the radiator was on; I made the choice to stick my arm down there anyway. And the association stuck: trust and all that goes with it only gives other people weapons to use against you.

“Slowly, our relationship crumbled. Maybe I finally started admitting that it was his fault, not mine. Maybe I got out of the brainwashing enough to see all the small ways he’d hurt us. But it was over after that. It focused me. I got tired of playing at recess, so I read instead. I didn’t want to hang with my friends, so I made plans for little entrepreneurial endeavors like lemonade stands and comic-lending libraries. It all made me become the guy who was later able to build GameStorming, much to my father’s lack of awe. Because I’d had my adult epiphany early. I just kind of didn’t want to be a kid anymore.”

“Caspian,” Aurora says when she sees that I’m finished, “I’m sorry.”
 

“Sorry for what?” I’m surprised to see tears in her eyes. I don’t understand. It’s just a story, from a long time ago.

“Just … sorry.”

She leans against me.
 

Wraps her arms around me.
 

But I wonder why I’m not affected as she is. I wonder why, now that I think about it, I’m numb.

Finally she looks up at me, wipes her eyes, and says, “For what it’s worth, I enjoyed your turn. But I have no intention of letting you win this bet.”
 

It’s a strange thing for Aurora to say. I just kind of look at her for a moment before I finally respond with, “Okay.”
 

She stands then hunts around. I watch her, feeling something I can’t quite describe.
 

“Are you leaving?”
 

She nods. “Until my next turn.”
 

“I don’t really want to keep taking turns,” I tell her. And I don’t. It’s all a mishmash. As pleasurable as this was — and as much as I know Aurora enjoyed it — I don’t like the path we took to get through it.
 

“Tough shit,” she says.
 

Her clothes are in the limo, so she’s putting on mine, and they’re way too big. She’s like a kid dressing an ill-fitting doll, and it’s adorable.
 

“Okay. So. Tomorrow?”
 

She shakes her head. “Saturday.”
 

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

A
URORA

O
N
S
ATURDAY
,
WHEN
C
ASPIAN
AND
I arrive for what I assume will be my final turn in this peculiar wager, he’s dressed to the nines as usual. Fine black suit, white shirt, black silk tie, shiny black lace-ups. Beside me in my own coal-colored dress, Caspian looks immaculate, but in this room his attire hardly stands out. He’s lost in a sea of lesser suits.
 

“I don’t think I can do this,” he says.
 

My hand is on his back. He’s actually pressing into it, and the pressure is growing ever so slightly with each second spent in the doorway. He’d say that he’ll stay if I insist, but his body feels differently.
 

“If you’re never afraid,” I tell him, “you’re never truly alive.”
 

“It’s not the same thing.”
 

But I say, “Of course it is.”
 

“I don’t even know why I’m supposed to be here.”

“You’re here because I’m forcing you.” He looks down, and I give him a tiny smile, a small squeeze of his big arm for encouragement. “So relax. I won’t let anyone believe you’re here because you want to be. I won’t let anyone think you’re here because you’re paying tribute, expressing honor, or are sorry.”
 

“Then why, Aurora?”
 

I catch the eye of a blonde across the room. I’ve never met her, but she must recognize me from my photos — oh, the many pics Caspian must have leeched from my LiveLyfe profile. She looks just like Caspian. She’s shorter and smaller and obviously has a feminine bearing, but she has his same confident stare. She crosses a room like he does. As though she owns it. She has shoulder-length hair, dark at the barely-there roots, cut across the front in pixie bangs. She’s bright-eyed and seems tightly bolted, but it’s obvious she’s spent a lot of her morning crying.