I stare at him, feeling like there is a button at my throat that needs undoing. Illuminated by the wrath of the fire, Henry has never looked more terrifying.
“I’ll kill them,” he continues in a soft and maniacal voice. “When we get out of here, I’m killing them. Anyone who put their hands on little you. I don’t care if you tell me not to. I don’t care if you tell me no.” He is watching me as he says this, observing me, breathing hard through his mouth. I say nothing. I do nothing. But I signal him anyhow. He gets up slow, unfurling himself inch by exhilarating inch, and then he begins to approach me in his graceful, wolfish way. I am frozen to the spot. When Henry has set eyes on you, it is too late to run.
“Do you hear me?” he says, coming nearer.
I nod. Behind me, a piece of burning wood splits and steams.
“Do you understand?”
Again I nod.
“Full sentences, sweetheart.”
“I understand.”
Henry stops before me, above me. His hair is wild from the boat ride over here. Little devil horns, all over his head. His lips are an unbelievable bright cherry red, and when he puts them on mine, he tastes like a blast of cinnamon. I grind my pelvis into his, filled with strange, tender aggression, and Henry’s groan rumbles the walls of mythroat. He kisses the bridge of my nose, my eyelids, he bites the divot in my upper lip, telling me that only he gets to put his hands on me, and only because I ask, and because he will do anything I ask, until we are eighty years old and rocking in our rocking chairs on our front porch, watching our grandchildren shoot each other dead with water guns. If that’s what I need, that’s what I fucking need.
“Stop,” I tell him, but he doesn’t. “Henry, stop.” I twist my face away; I push him off. He takes me by the wrists and begins to back me into the bed and he only stops when I tell him to give me his phone.
This is what Henry has always wanted from me. The rough stuff, the mean stuff, the exposure and the humiliation, that’s my idea of submission. But this is his. My doe eyes. My pliability. The stuff that hives my skin but is knotting me up all hot and tight every time I glance at the windowsill to see Henry’s phone turned on us.I am being forced to do it like a sweet, normal girl, I tell myself,and yet it is also what I want.
Henry and I are standing in the glow of the fire, swaying together like someone is sawing a violin off camera. He wedges a finger under my chin and lifts my face to his. His eyes are a metallic gray-blue, and my fingers are drawn to the swell of his pink lips. Henry gives me a discreet nod.That’s right. That’s good, Faye.
He slips his hand beneath my hair and kisses me, walking me until the backs of my knees bump the edge of the bed.
“Tell me you missed me,” he says into my ear. He sits me down, kneels in front of me, waits.
I say it, staring at his mouth I have missed like home.
Henry kisses me, says with his lips on mine, “So sweet.” A filthy noise comes out of me, one he does not need to ask for. He slides off my pants. He unbuttons my shirt and pushes it down my shoulders whereit catches on my elbows and stays. He’s sitting on his heels, between my legs, and he’s toying absentmindedly with my pussy, watching as my jaw goes slack, as my cognitive abilities decline.
“I love when you spread your legs for me,” he says, and then he puts his warm hands on my knees and pushes them flush against the edge of the bed. He lowers his head and in a slow and specific pattern, his tongue makes its way up my inner thigh, tracing his next instruction. AnMat my knee, anOwhere a miniskirt stops, anA… I moan obediently at the place where he draws the last letter.
My fingers in his hair, one hand behind me for balance. I lift myself into him and release, the nanosecond beat between his lush mouth and the cool nothing air inducing an agonizing, ever more urgent rhythm. Pleasure stabs at my middle, and I let out a pained whimper that I have not gotten what I need yet, that I will too soon.
“Fuck,” I say, clutching the hair at his scalp and smashing his mouth into my clit. “Fuck.” Something is spilling inside of me, creeping into my every corner, filling me with a warm, impossible feeling. I slip a hand between us and pull myself farther apart, and with his tongue Henry pens my pussy a love letter.Home, he writes. My pussy is home.Safe. My pussy is safe with him.Safe. Safe. Safe. The word is an accelerant. I fuck his face. I am safe. I show him everything. I am safe. I thrust myself into his mouth, I give him everything, and I ride the release like a lucid dream.Henry, I am marveling while my body soars over the atmosphere. I soar and I soar and I soar and I land in the palm of his hand. Henry is covering me, holding me like you would an open, pulsing wound to limit its exposure to air. I curl over him, kiss myself on his mouth, reach down between us and undo his belt, unbutton his pants. Henry rises over me and crosses his arms over his torso, gripping the hem of his shirt and sliding it over his head, tossing his sandy hair this way and that. I put my hands on his lean torso. I look up at him inawe, tug down on his pants. He puts his tongue between his teeth and hisses as fabric snags on his cock. I hold his eye as I kiss the blood-warm head, blow cool, soothing air on him. A sharp, startled exclamation from Henry, and then he’s picking me up, wrapping my legs around him, dampening himself on me and easing inside like someone trying to find the most comfortable position to sleep. He lays me down on my back in a single fluid movement, like he picks up Faye-shaped weights every day in his basement, like he’s been training twelve years for this very moment. My necklace flips up, the heart lands in my mouth, and I bite down like I am in pain. Henry brushes the hair out of my eyes and mouth, unearthing me, revealing me, and he puts a thumb on my chin so that he can watch my face. He goes slow, his forehead creased with arousal and determination, and when he can no longer go slow, he buries his face in my neck. “Say you love me. Say you love me and this will all be over.”
I press my lips together in defiance. I refuse to do it, so that when Henry reviews the tape, he will be forced to say it’s not good enough. We will have to do it again, and again, until he believes Corrine will be pleased with the result. I lift my hips to meet him, I let him all the way inside even though it hurts, especially because it hurts. He comes with a vicious cry, his hand around my throat. Punishment for daring to defy him, or maybe he doesn’t really want me to say it either. Maybe he is also realizing that the moment I do what he says is the moment this ends.
I love him, and that’s why I won’t say it.
Chapter 32
I make the fatal mistake of falling asleep on Henry’s torso, arms and legs barnacled to him in sweaty, symbiotic attachment. I was only planning on closing my eyes for a few minutes. I wanted to be dressed when Corrine returned, to have the buttons of my shirt buttoned to my chin, held high. Instead I stumble headfirst into terrifying dreams of waking to find that Henry’s form has been replaced by my suitcase. Inside are my linen clothes and gold jewelry and my forty-two-dollar shampoo. My laptop logged in to the many luxury e-commerce sites I surf when I have writer’s block, fantasizing about the events future me will attend, the people who will admire me and give me the attention that I am starved for at home. These were once my essentials, and now they feel mocking and immaterial.
“Faye,” Henry’s voice is saying, impossibly, because he’s left me alone in this bed. He has abandoned me. “Faye.”
My eyes flutter open to find Henry standing over me, holding my shoulders and rocking me with gentle urgency.
“The police are here.”
I stare at him, foggy and uncomprehending.
“You have to get dressed.” He pulls me into a seated position, swings my legs around and places my feet on the floor, begins to dress me likeI have just come out of surgery and my limbs are still anesthetized. Out the front windows, the lake is dusty and unattended to in the predawn dim. A patrol boat is docked at the pier. There are flashlights. Holsters. The crackle and quick death of a radio signal.
My knees knock together, my mind wakes up, and I start to help Henry but put the wrong buttons in the wrong buttonholes. “What are they doing here? How did they know? What do we say?”
“I don’t know,” Henry says, an answer to all of it. And then he sighs, the saddest sigh I have ever heard. With strong and steady hands, he rebuttons my shirt for me. I put my arms around his neck and hold him for the last time, maybe. He is warm and Henry-smelling, and he holds me back and I know he is thinking the same, that I am warm and Faye-smelling and this cannot be it, an ending where we don’t make it. I pry myself away from him and go over to the door, and I remember that while I never won an award for my acting, I have for the words I wrote for my character, and that I must have said them convincingly enough for the voters to vote for them.