Guardian Girl (The Chronicles of Staffordshire) (52 page)

With her eyes fixed on Lenore, Lena offered a desperate prayer to a God she didn’t think was paying much attention.
“God… Please… Forgive me! For everything I’ve ever done to hurt Lenore, please forgive me! Please let my Freaky Baby be in there somewhere. God, please help my baby girl! What can I do? What do I need to do to help my Freaky Baby! How do I do this, God? HOW? PLEASE! HELP ME!”

Lena stayed huddled in the corner of the bedroom, her bare bottom parked against the hardwood floor. The minutes wound by waiting for The Beast to go back into hibernation.

She prayed in desperation.
“Help me, God! Please help me get my Freaky Baby back! I’ll do whatever it takes, God! I’ll do whatever you want! Just help me get Lenore back! Please, God! Help us!”

Lena
rested her cheek against her knees and peeked over at Lenore. Lenore stared back through empty eyes, repeating, “Soy una niña mala. Merezco azotes.” in an eerie, endless loop.

“Help me, God. Please help me. If you’re listening… Help me get Lenore back. Please, God…”

Lena suddenly felt warmth wash over her body. A sensation like a soft blanket swaddled her naked flesh. She felt compelled to reassure herself.
“It’s alright, Lena. Everything is going to be alright. Lenore is going to be fine. You’re going to help her…”

Her turbulent heart settled. The Wild Child experienced a comforting epiphany. Lenore wasn’t
gone
! Not forever, anyway. She was just
lost
for a while. Like Lena, she needed someone to throw her a lifeline. The tools Lena needed to help Lenore make her way back to sanity were right there in the room. Right there on the bed. Right there attached to her ruptured roomie.

Lena stared unblinking at the chains and the cuffs.

“NO! Really? You want me to… To chain myself? To Lenore? But I can’t do it! I can’t put those goddamned things on my body! They’re sick! Those… Those things… They made Lenore like this!”

Was she talking to herself? Or was it God? Suddenly, Lena wasn’t so sure she was the only one knocking around inside her head. But surely God wouldn’t tell her to do…
That.

“But I can’t do it! I know! Look, I know it’s not the same. But I can’t. Come on! Don’t ask me to do that! I’m afraid! I don’t want to wind up like Lenore! What? Just half? Only half? Okay. I’ll try. But please, God. If this is you… Please… Just… Help me through. Help Lenore come back to me!”

Lena took a hesitant first step toward freeing Lenore from the dungeon of her mind. Crawling from the safety of the corner, the Wild Child fought exhaustion and what felt like a strained rotator cuff to return to the bed. With her right arm she pushed down against the mattress and struggled to her feet. She stood unsteadily, watching Lenore. Lenore stared at Lena’s pussy, endlessly repeating…

“Soy una niña mala… Merezco azotes… Soy una niña mala… Merezco azotes…”

The Wild Child crawled onto the bed and released the ratchets. She removed the cuffs from the left side of Lenore’s body and gently flipped the freaky supermodel to her back. Lenore was completely detached from reality, lost to Lena’s intimate work. She did not resist.

Lena reconnected the right half of Lenore’s body to the left side of the bed and ratcheted Lenore’s chains snugly, not painfully. Then she walked around to the other side of the bed, approximated the ratchets, climbed on, and shackled her right arm and leg to the right side of the bed. Lena slid over Lenore and pulled herself taut. She lay, body-to-body, chest-to-chest, face-to-face, kissing Lenore, pressing their cheeks together. Lena grabbed the shackle on Lenore’s wrist and pulled her body tighter, crying into Lenore’s ear and hair.

Lenore perseverated, whispering, “Soy una niña mala… Merezco azotes…” Her free arm moved by lover’s instinct, wrapping around Lena’s back. Lenore stroked the Wild Child as Lena cried into her hair. The supermodel’s twisted monologue soon evaporated back into the dark recesses from which it first emerged.

Closing her eyes and basking in the protection of Lena’s body, Lenore silenced. She remembered the last time the two women embraced under their gold, satin sheets, powerful, simultaneous orgasms capping a night of energetic excess. Lenore smiled at the memory. She kissed Lena’s cheek. She stroked Lena’s hair and rubbed Lena’s shoulders with her free hand.

Lenore felt the cuffs on her shackled wrist and ankle. Her eyes sprang open, bright, alive, and present.

“Lena…?”

The Wild Child wept.

“Lena… What… What is happening? What are you doing?”

Lena could not speak. Quiet tears gave way to breathless sobs.

“Lena… Why are you lying on me like this? Why are we attached to the bed?”

Looking away from Lena, Lenore stared at Lena’s bloodied hand. The Wild Child’s essence smeared the cuff around Lenore’s wrist. Lenore shifted her gaze to the chain holding her arm captive to the bed. Lenore glanced to the other side, at the cuff on Lena’s wrist, and the chain binding Lena’s arm to the bed.

“Lena… You are bleeding! Are you okay?”

The Wild Child flared. “NO, LENORE! I’m
not
fucking okay! I’m
not
okay, damn it! I beat you up, Lenore! I beat you senseless you stupid bitch! You had me chain you up and then you made me beat you! So NO, damn it! I am NOT fucking okay! I want to go out and slit my wrists because of what I did to you, Lenore!”

Lenore could not understand why her forever lover would inflict such harm. Throbbing pain pulsed in her shoulders, bottom, and back, confirmation of Lena’s claims. Lenore lacked all memory of the event.

“But… Lena… Why did you beat me? Why would you do something like that to me? I thought you loved me?”

Lena clung to the freaky supermodel, saying nothing. All she could conjure were tears.

Lenore eyes scoured the room, searching for clues to the cause of Lena’s attack. She looked toward the dresser and saw the bag with the dog collar image. It triggered a fragment of a memory, reconstituting ghoulish words. The tearful self-doubt that Lena shared in confidence with Lenore after losing in the semi-finals of the US Open became the malevolence Mrs. Hyde vomited back into her girlfriend’s face.

“Freaky Baby, I have all the natural talent in the world but I can’t win a goddamned major. I’m a pathetic loser…”

Fear seized Lenore. “Oh my God… NO! GOD, NO! Lena! What did I say? What did I do to you?”

“LENORE, IT HURTS! IT HURTS SO MUCH! You kept attacking me, Lenore, even after I begged you to stop! You said things to me you’ve never said before! Y
ou wanted me to punish you
! You lashed out at me with stuff about my game, Lenore! You made me so angry I wanted to kill you!
I could have killed you
, Lenore!”

Lena’s voice trailed off, falling into her own broken, looping monologue and a waterfall of remorse as the possibility of Lenore’s death sank in. “My God. I could have killed you, Lenore. I could have killed my baby girl…”

Another word came back to Lenore.
“…ashamed…”

Lenore thrashed her head back and forth, grappling with heinous crimes against her beloved Wild Child. “LENA! WHAT DID I SAY TO YOU? I remember saying horrible things but… It's so foggy! I can’t remember
why
I said it! Why would I say such horrible things to you? I love you! I
love you so much
, Lena! Why would I…?”

“I DON’T KNOW, DAMMIT! You
totally
snapped! You
begged
me to hurt you! You just kept telling me how
pathetic
and
embarrassing
I was, teasing me about not being able to win a major. Lenore…
You repeated stuff I told you about being afraid that I was getting too old for the game!”

Fed by the pounding beat of Lena’s wounded heart, Lenore submerged in remorse. She knew she had turned against Lena. She knew she had abused Lena’s trusting, loving spirit. The answer to a single question evaded her.

“Why?”

Lenore turned her face away from the Wild Child in shame, begging Lena’s forgiveness. “Lena! I am so sorry! I can’t remember anything!” Lenore pounded the mattress with her free hand. “OH GOD! I want to die! I want to kill myself so I will never do this to you again! Someone must save you from me!”

“No, Lenore! Don’t you
even
talk about dying on me! Don’t go there! I can’t bear to think about losing you! I love you too much to lose you!
Please
don’t say you want to kill yourself. Please don’t say that!”

“But Lena...!”

Lena needed time to think, to neutralize the potential for Lenore to take another ill-timed trip out of her mind. She had to fill their mouths with something other than words.

Fearfully, cautiously, Lena kissed Lenore. The move worked. Lenore kissed back. Spiritedly. The crazed energy in Lenore’s response took away Lena’s breath.

Remembering little of the incident, Lenore left Lena waffling between choices equal parts hazardous and horrible. If Lena repeated Lenore’s hateful, vicious words, she risked driving Lenore back into Mrs. Hyde’s sweet, sociopathic cesspool. If Lena dwelled on the chilling details of her physical attack, she risked a return of The Beast. Part of her still wanted to get even and The Beast was rattling its cage.

As they kissed, Lena prayed again, not fully believing it would work but having little left to lose.
“God, please help me! What do I do? How do I help Lenore?”

Leveraging Lenore’s inexhaustible libido to keep her distracted from their plight, Lena persisted with the kiss. She considered and discarded option after option. A seed of a possibility finally planted itself in the soil of Lena’s desperation.

“Oh my God! That’s it! Lenore
wanted
me to kill her…”

Lena quieted the kiss, withdrew, and brushed her lips across the side of Lenore’s face, breathing into Lenore’s ear. “Lenore… My beautiful, freaky supermodel… I don’t know why you said what you said, but once you pushed me I couldn’t stop myself. I think you
wanted
me to kill you, Lenore. I think you knew you could get me so furious that I
could
kill you. It felt like you wanted me to kill you so I would punish you for something horrible you’ve done.”

“But Lena,
why would I want you to kill me?
I love you! Why would I want to make you do something like that? I must be sick! I must be some kind of a monster!”

Lena slipped her free arm under Lenore’s neck and clutched her head, kissing Lenore’s face, dumping as much affection into her fragmented roommate as her brutalized heart could muster. “Lenore!
Listen to me
! You’re
not
a monster! You are definitely
not
a monster. And up until tonight… Well… Yeah, you've had your moments. But I never thought you were ‘sick.’ At least not like some kind of a… A serial killer or something.”

Lena pressed her bloodied left palm to Lenore’s cheek. “You’re in pain, Lenore. I don’t know why, but you’re in some kind of pain way down inside, something you’ve never talked about with me before. When I chained you to the bed it brought all that pain straight to the surface and then you tried to get me to punish you for whatever it is you did.”

A ghostly nightmare sprang to life before Lenore’s eyes, a horror long ago locked away but never quite outrun. A Paris hotel room. A sweet, misguided older man and a lonely, flattered, 16-year-old girl. His lifeblood covered her hands and arms and naked chest.

So much blood.

Lenore wept, sounding like she was about to take another trip out of her mind. “Lena… I… I… Oh God! No puedo! No puedo! No puedo! NO PUEDO! NO PUEDO!”

Lena quickly pressed her index finger to Lenore’s lips. She ran her sore palm up and down Lenore’s hip and leg. The gentleness of her touch rekindled pleasant sensations, the feelings of love the women shared every day for years. The scab broke on Lena’s wound and her blood smeared Lenore’s thigh.

“Shhh… Easy, Freaky… Easy… It’s okay. Shhh… Whatever it is, Lenore, it doesn’t matter right now. Don’t even think about it. What matters right now is that my Freaky Baby is back with me. The woman who said all that nasty stuff was someone I don’t know. It was like my Freaky Baby took a mental vacation off the planet and Mrs. Hyde came by to head-sit.”

Lena slipped her hand between their chests and placed her palm over Lenore’s heart. “But right now… The girl I’m with
right now
… I know YOU! I love YOU! I can’t live without YOU, Lenore! Nothing makes me feel more alive than feeling your heartbeat in my side every night.

“So… No, Freaky. You’re
not
a monster. And I don’t ever want to hear you call yourself that!

“But I have to tell you, Lenore… You really scared me tonight. I never want to see that side of you ever again. I never want to hear Mrs. Hyde take over your mouth ever again. And I never want to become the monster Mrs. Hyde brought out of me, either…”