Jeremiah Quick (30 page)

The struggle I could see in his eyes, on his
face, with every awkward, hesitant reach for his fork or water
glass… delicious.

I devised a million tests of endurance for
him, and he passed every one. I also designed tests of obedience,
and these he did not always pass. Sometimes he was doomed to
failure by design.

He was… everything I wanted him to be at any
given time.

He was my perfect, beautiful boy.

I punished him for every sexual encounter
he'd ever had with anyone who wasn't me.

He'd had a love affair with another man for
almost two years. I punished him for that one by putting a cock
cage on him, and leaving it on for almost two full months. That was
so hot I think I fucked him twice a day, enjoying the fact that if
he tried to come erect inside the cage it would only hurt him and
make him more miserable.

I forced him to drink my blood, and he was
no different than Pretty, in that regard. He didn't want to drink
it at first, but eventually took it into himself as greedily as he
took my cock.

My precious, precious boy.

There was nothing I asked of him that he
wasn't willing to try.

He looked at me as if he were gazing up on
the face of God, the poor dear, even while I know mine is much
closer to that of the Devil. Option B. If there's a God, there has
to be a Lucifer, the incarnation of Eden's serpent, coaxing Eve to
eat the apple – that's who I would be. He who has knowledge shall
be free. He who gives knowledge, a teacher of the best kind.

She.

She won't ever forget now.

Not now.

I've etched it into her skin, secured it
with the formula.

Oh, it's not carved deeply, not like if you
wanted serious scarification.

I don't and won't make that big of a bloody
mess of her, won't disfigure her.

Just these fine reminder lines, that's
all.

I hope it's enough.

It has to be enough.

Chapter 36

J
eremiah cut lines
in Pretty's skin and told her story after story about Jamie. The
terrible things he did – they did together – in sordid detail. The
night he had both blood and shit from fingertips to elbows. The
time he strung the boy up on a rope contraption that strangled him
if he struggled. The pleased toying that came next, how many times
Jamie struggled despite all warning, how he'd cut off his own
breath to the point of passing out at least half a dozen times.

So much.

They were horror stories. Filled with blood
and pain, sweat and tears. And yet the listening part was not
horrible because his voice, his eyes, and even his hands were
infused with so much love, it was impossible to misunderstand.

He repositioned her now and then, and always
in between, stripped the bed and covered the plastic mattress with
a pristine white sheet. He put down towels soaked in the burning
solution, then coaxed Pretty onto them with firm voice and firm
hands, now on her back, now on her side, until there were few areas
left uncut.

She didn't even flinch from the lime-scented
water anymore.

She was mummified in bandages and
periodically he re-wet them with a saturated sponge, but she'd
removed those body parts from her psyche and no longer considered
them hers. If there was pain in the re-wetting, she didn't feel it.
And she didn't mind the idea of being scarred with the fine white
lines of his symbols. These scars would be beautiful to her.

There were places on her back where her
nerves jumped
into
the knife, and the pain was a pervasive
sort of pleasure, a leaping toward him rather than a flinching
away.

She no longer flinched away from any of
it.

Who knew her every inch like he did? The pen
and its strange gentle knowing, yeah, sure – but there was nothing
in the world like being known with a blade. The cold kiss and even,
sharp split, the way it entered her flesh and knew the inside of
her, and loved her so much it craved a deeper bite than even
Jeremiah would allow.

She thought of the cutting instrument as a
'knife' though it could have been anything, and often was. He
switched between hand held craft or Xacto knives, scalpels, box
cutters, the large folding knife. For all she knew, he could have
been using an ice cube to fool her.

She fuzzed out sometimes, like when he drew
in blood and pain over her spine – she felt that keenly– the drag
and arc over bony protrusions – the pain bright and real, then,
though still she arched more often into the knife than away. She
let the pain consume her, imagining blood patterns down her back, a
pool in the center hollow where her spine dipped inward.

It wasn't at all like the concentrated lines
of a tattoo gun, it felt more precise, and without the white-noise
distraction of the buzz.

This was – clearer, somehow, edged in pain,
yes, and at times a similar pain, but so much more intimate, so
immediate, that sometimes she screamed without realizing she was
screaming.

And when she could hear beyond herself
again, Jeremiah would be stroking these shocking wounds with blunt
fingertips, stretching them open with mean little tugs and sighing,
"Yes, yes, Sunshine, let it out. No clenched teeth, no repressed
emotion. Let me hear how much you hate me."

And when she sobbed, because she
should
hate him but didn't – she didn't – he would take her
head in his hands and lick her tears again.

She loved that he frightened her beyond
measure, though somehow she knew that wasn't why he was doing this.
He was doing it because something in her spoke to him, begged him
to teach her all of this, and yet it would be to no avail. She'd
come to realize that she'd still be the person she was now, when
this was all over. Her basic nature would remain. And for some
reason she knew this was why his hate was so interdependent on his
love.

He wanted to hate her.

But he couldn't.

He was blind to her daily trials. He had no
concept of a life without significant interaction with others –
check the homework, do the laundry, feed them and transport them.
It wasn't glamorous, and had never been. It was a lot of petty
this-and-that bullshit, and one can get as lost in that as in a
crowd of protestors holding signs.

This is what he didn't know: sometimes
Pretty hated her small-detail life of complacency, and longed for
the fire and zest of her youth – the social change, the outrage
that fueled her college years. Fuck yeah, nineteen times a week she
wanted more. No fucking doubt.

But… there was a bigger picture, a broader
scope, that he might never see, but that Pretty now saw with
stunning clarity.

She would raise open-eyed children who
weren't afraid of the Dark, who wouldn't be sheep, who could never
grow up to be Them. Because they'd have Pretty, and because Pretty
had Jeremiah Quick. They were the lucky ones, all of them, and it
mattered.

He loved her, hated her, hurt her, and made
her cry. And if he asked her to die for him, she would gladly
agree.

But that's not what he asked.

Chapter 37

S
he.

She stops fighting the process and accepts
it. Almost like an art form, a living, breathing sculpture, leaning
into the knife, begging to be molded by my Dark, and soon enough
I'll have her rolling in it, reveling in it.

She doesn't cry much anymore, and I'm
thirsty for her tears. For a while I'd been giving her long breaks,
but now they weren't more than half an hour, sometimes less,
sometimes only long enough for me to gulp down a beer, feed her
some water, or take a piss. There is momentum now, an urgency to
finish that's both exhilarating and fear-inducing.

There is only a little bit left. Her hands
and her face.

I want her in the student desk for her
hands, a blood manicure, willing to sit and offer them to me, one
by one, front and back. Four. Four directions, four elements.

It has to be perfect.

She has to give them to me, on her own. Sit
there across from me holding out her hands, giving permission.

She does.

As I cut symbols into her palms, and tiny
numbers and letters into her fingers, I tell her about this place,
the furniture, all the trouble I went through to make it Jamie's
version of heaven.

She watches my face, periodically watches my
hands, the careful angle at which I hold the knife, the shallow
draws of blood.

I tell her more about Jamie, how we missed
each other twenty times in ten years, and then he inherited this
house from his grandfather, and I found him before he'd been here a
month.

Way out here in the wilderness was perfect
for us, ten years of looking for each other, ten years of
wondering, of wild imagination. It was Jamie who wanted the
dungeon. We could play whatever games I could devise.

This, he tells me, the first time I held him
and covered him with my body, my arms wrapped around his slim
shoulders, and all kind of perverse thoughts in my head just from
that first moment of REAL. He wasn't a fantasy, he was here. I'd
pressed my ear to his chest and listened to his heartbeat –
thump-athump, thump-athump. My boy under my head and my heart and
my hands. Mine.

And so I gave him everything he asked for,
and then anything else I could think of that he might like. I gave
him sick and twisted fantasies, and he ate them, every one, and
asked for more.

And when I worried that I'd crossed some
line or another, he'd laugh at me – laugh! – and say something flip
like,
Oh, my love, my heart, not even close
.

He was the perfect boy for me.

How it was possible I could have and hold
him was beyond me, never mind the more-than-that activities of
horror that I wanted to (and did) perpetrate upon his willing
body.

The more-than-that was bliss. Sometimes I
made him my little boy doll, dressing him in boots and ripped
tights, miniskirts, makeup, and lace. He looked even more boy then.
And it made me want to eat him immediately.

Who gets this kind of boy, ever, even once
in his life?

I did.

Chapter 38

L
ater he positioned
her on her back, hands restrained to the topmost edge of the
bedframe, with restraints just above each of her bent knees, and
these he attached to the bed near her shoulders, pulling her legs
up, keeping her obscenely exposed.

Pretty cried when he cut the curve of her
jaw with one hand and slid fingers into her with the other; the
sheer terror of having the blade to her face competing with the
lewd openness he was requiring from the rest of her – left her
gasping and rigid, shocked and dreadful. Words could hardly
describe the utter vulnerability of it – that he asked for
positively everything, and she gave him positively everything – and
in that moment their souls were joined in a way she'd never
experienced before.

He was in her and on her, surrounding her,
hurting her, loving her. He licked blood and tears from her face,
and looked so fragile, so hopeful while he did it that she couldn't
look away from him and didn't try to, just stared right into his
eyes until his thumb brushed across her clit, and the spark-shock
of it made the world go away.

If he'd killed her right then she'd have had
no complaint. If he'd asked her permission to snuff out her life,
she'd have given it. She'd have kissed his lips goodbye.

She was… embarrassed, afterward. More
horror-stricken than she'd been for any of his stories, perhaps
because now she'd become one of them.

Her simple existence had ended.

Now she was a monster, a mass of scars and
hurt and
change
.

He kept his left fingers inside of her as
his right hand carefully drew shapes and symbols – glyphs, he
called them – on her forehead and along each line of her lower jaw
with the fine point of the craft knife. Tears streamed form her
eyes in a continuous flow, and he consumed them, of course.
Something about facial nerves were immediately connected to tear
ducts, and she cried more tears than he could capture on his
tongue, and he tsk-ed her and made soothing noises.

Sometimes his fingers twitched or curled,
shocking her back into that reality, the one in which he violated
her in so many ways she almost couldn't keep track.

The little brush inside changed her focus
for short seconds of time, made her aware of her position – open to
him in every possible way.

When he was done cutting her face, he took
his fingers away, and Pretty marveled at the loss.

He put her on hands and knees, then, and
rutted into her as if he were furious.

The worst part was that she was wet for him,
and his cock slid easily in to mark her as his own. The entry alone
made her come, and his subsequent hip-snapping motion built her up
to climax all over again – and the inside of her head formed the
rhythm of a chant –
Jeremiah Quick, Jeremiah Quick, Jeremiah
Quick
– and he was imprinting himself on her psyche in a way
that she couldn't fight.

He fucked her twice that way, the first time
sliding his cock into her pussy and it was so perfect it made her
whimper at first and shout by the end. The second time was slower,
and lasted longer, and his cock stretched the muscles that
protected her anus, demanding entry, demanding submission. That
time left her aching and raw and begging for
him
to come, to
end this, although he was still wringing orgasms from her
over-stimulated clitoris, and she peaked and tensed, relaxed, then
peaked again, tight as a stretched wire.

He chanted, too, in her ear, "Mine, mine,
mine," and she surrendered to him, trying to stay open for him, be
open for this.