Tabula Rasa

by Kitty Thomas

  I still didn’t know how we’d gotten here, from basic safety and food and shelter and polite indifference to... this.

  “Shannon?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What if I hadn’t come down to the party? Would this still be happening?”

  “Probably not.”

  “So then, aren’t you glad I interrupted your party?” I asked hopefully, thinking it might buy me some... something.

  He smiled, a real smile that made me forget everything he was and everything he wasn’t. “Yes, I’m glad you interrupted.”

  “So why punish me?”

  The smile remained on his face, but it twisted somehow as the rest of his face seemed to fall into shadow. “Try negotiating with me again, and you’ll get more. Do you want more?”

  I shook my head quickly, already certain that I didn’t, even without any experience to base that feeling upon.

  So this was how it was going to be? I’d fantasized about Shannon, but my fantasies had never been like this. Though realistically, I didn’t know what kind of sex I expected Shannon to be into. Once I’d decided he wasn’t into it at all, I could think about any silly romantic thing I wanted. If it wasn’t happening ever at all anyway, why worry about what he’d realistically do? Who cared? Realism wasn’t required to come.

  I’d been using him to erase Trevor from the first night inside Shannon’s minimalist sanctuary. Each orgasm brought on by vague sexual thoughts of him made Trevor fade a little more into the background, first into a nameless face in a crowd, then into a shadow, then into a ghost. Until he was mostly gone except for when I had a bad dream about the park. I didn’t bother Shannon with those. I was sure he didn’t care about any post traumatic whatever I had going on.

  “Elodie. Now.”

  I glanced back at the balcony door, trying to decide if I should run out there and scream my head off. But I didn’t want to.

  “What if you lose control and kill me?”

  “I’m not a Halloween monster. I don’t get red tunnel vision and think kill kill kill. I’m always in control of myself. But this continued discussion is adding to your punishment.”

  When it became clear that I couldn’t bring myself to go to him, he stood, and brought the paddle with him.

  “Okay, then.”

  With every step forward he took, I took a mirroring step back. Like some dark tango. When we got close enough to the wall, he grabbed my wrist and twisted my body to face it.

  “Ow, ow, ow.”

  “Relax,” he said, as if it were possible with the way he’d wrenched my arm behind me. Maybe he’d once been a cop. Or military and cop. Or military police. I could imagine Shannon cuffing a criminal. Easily.

  When I stopped struggling, he released his grip on my wrist. He kept one hand on the back of my neck, holding me in place against the wall while the other brought the paddle down across my ass and thighs several times in quick, hard succession. The sound rang out like a hollow gong in the echoing empty minimalism of the room.

  Tears streamed down my face at the intense burning sting. “Shannon, please. Please, stop.” It hurt. It really hurt. But I think my fear was that, despite everything he assured me, he would lose control. I was afraid he’d just beat me to death. I was afraid he liked this too much.

  The paddle came down against my skin once more, even harder, so hard it briefly knocked the wind out of me. He kept his grip on the back of my neck.

  I pressed my hands flat against the wall on either side of me, bracing myself, seeking anything to hold onto. I tried to focus on the texture of the light gray wallpaper rippling beneath my fingertips in elegant, sophisticated patterns. I took slow, measured breaths. I did everything I could to live inside those breaths and nowhere else.

  “Beg me again. Beg me not to hurt you.” His voice was low and guttural, not even human.

  “Please, you’re scaring me. Please don’t hurt me.”

  “Apologize for your behavior. And be specific.”

  “I’m sorry I disobeyed you and went downstairs. I’m sorry I left my room. Please,” I sobbed.

  “If I tell you not to do something again, are you going to go ahead and do it anyway?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “No, Sir,” he said.

  “N-no, Sir.”

  When he flung the paddle away, it made a soft thud against the carpet, such a seemingly harmless sound. Heat rose off my flesh as if I were burning up from the inside. But despite this fact, and despite my terror, I felt a hard, steady pulsing throb between my legs, and I was sure if my hand were to stray to the apex between my thighs, that I would be very wet. Embarrassingly so.

  Shannon pressed himself to my back and cradled me against the wall for several minutes, his breath and heartbeat keeping time with my own. I didn’t speak. I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t say no man had ever done this to me before. Perhaps they had. How could I know? Trevor hadn’t. Trevor’s tastes had always run strictly vanilla, without so much as a stray rainbow sprinkle to be found. It was all lights out and missionary with Trevor—nothing too threatening.

  I had never really gotten off with him, but at times, there had been a comfort in warm body grinding against warm body, of embraces under down comforters near a warm roaring fire. I hadn’t wanted to fuck up the tiny bit of not terrible that had defined my life in the park.

  I don’t think I’d ever once thought that I needed Trevor to fuck me—as if he were the only source of water that could put out my flame. It had never been so dramatic as that. But standing shoved against the wall with Shannon’s rough jeans pressing against my heated raw flesh, I thought I would climb out of my own skin if he didn’t put his dick inside me.

  I would never say this out loud. I was still waiting for a man who wasn’t a monster to bust in and rescue me off to a clean suburban politeness where everything was safe and smelled like lemons.

  And yet every raw nerve ending screamed for Shannon to possess me and keep me forever, and now that he’d paddled me and I’d reacted as I had, I suspected in the darkest well of my being that I didn’t do polite sex. I couldn’t say it was Trevor’s sociopathy that had kept me from being excited by him. Because Shannon was a sociopath, too.

  He sighed against my hair. “It’s exactly what I was afraid of.”

  “What?”

  But I knew.

  “I like your pain and fear.”

  I tensed beneath him, but inexplicably the excitement between my legs didn’t fade away.

  Chapter Six

  Shannon released me and began to pace, lost somewhere inside his own head for the moment. I just stood there, except now I was facing him. I leaned against the wall, memorizing the pattern of the wallpaper pressed against my bare flesh. I’d lost the will somehow to feel self-conscious about my nudity. He’d drunk it up like peach tea on a hot summer day, so it seemed weird to be self-conscious after all that appreciative ogling. There was no question he was attracted.

  Or that I was, no matter how desperately I’d tried to ward those impulses away.

  “Go to your room,” he said, refusing to look me in the eyes.

  “Why? I thought...”

  He took a long, deep breath as if he were one of those toys that had to be wound up before it could express itself. “Until very recently, the only person in the world I cared even a little bit about was myself. I can fake empathy pretty well under the right circumstances. Most people don’t notice because most of their empathy is just as fake. Everybody’s wrapped up in their own shit, so maybe we’re all just pretending, and it’s not just me.”

  He stopped and seemed lost inside that thought for a moment. Finally, he managed to untangle himself from it to continue. “I don’t trust myself with you if I like hurting you... given the other things I like.”

  As if he had to spell that out for me. He thought murdering people was fun. He thought hurting me was fun. He loved it when I cried and begged him, so exactly how little would it take for him to cross o
ver to the thrill of killing me?

  If I was a smart woman, if I had any brains inside my head at all, I would have done what he asked. You’d think without memory to take up much space in my brain that I’d have more room for deeper cognitive reasoning.

  But instead, I went to the bed and picked up the rope, then I went back to Shannon and pressed it into his hand. This was insane. I was insane. My captivity with Trevor must have broken me. In a sense I’d been born in captivity. I didn’t remember a time I had ever been free. Now I needed the ropes and the cage to feel safe—even when I knew I was anything but.

  Shannon’s hand closed over mine and the rope as he looked hard into my eyes. “If you cross this line with me, we aren’t going back.”

  “Is it going to end in my grisly murder?”

  “I hope not.”

  I believed he meant it. But how could I know? He was so good at faking everything.

  “I thought you weren’t a Halloween monster. I thought you were always in control.”

  “I’m going on past performance. I might be wrong.”

  And I might never get my memory back. I might always live in this gaping void, this endless eternal twilight, this space where lost souls wandered and moaned in hallways in the dead of night.

  He seemed to consider the point we’d reached for a moment, as if he could rewind the night to before I’d walked in on the orgy, as if we could go back to the happy roommate illusion we’d been living in.

  There was no time for me to change my mind, as if I could bring myself to. I was terrified of him and what he was capable of, and yet I needed him to fuck me more than I’d needed anything since I woke in the pirate ship.

  He tossed me on the bed and began tying my hands to the headboard much like he’d done in the motel room that night. I still couldn’t believe I’d handed him the rope. But in only a few moments he’d created a gnawing hunger inside me that I knew only his cock could satiate. I needed him inside me like I needed air.

  I was certain that no amount of touching myself in the darkened room down the hallway would ever calm the desire he’d ignited. I needed to be perched on the knife-edge of living and dying. I needed to be so swept up in the present moment that I had no time to worry about the giant pieces of nothing inside my head or the giant pieces of lies Trevor had put there.

  This was the only space and place in which I could be free of all of it.

  Shannon spent a good ten minutes securing me to the bed frame, spread out before him like a buffet he would no doubt take his time with. Briefly, a panic settled over me, some primal deep thing... maybe something attached to a memory. I didn’t know. Because whatever it was refused to crystallize into a fully formed vision or thought.

  “Elodie,” he said calmly, his hand pressing gently over my belly, stilling my movement.

  I looked up sharply, trying to shake off the weird feeling. “Yes, Sir?”

  “Do you want me to fuck you?”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “Then this is the way it happens. Or not at all. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  He didn’t have to sell me on this. Really, he didn’t. If he wanted to sweetly make love to me in what I assumed was the standard normal way, I would have probably found it unappealing in general, judging from what had just happened and the way I’d reacted to it. Despite my wild attraction to Shannon, I had a sneaking suspicion that much of that attraction was this dark sexual layer that I may not have seen consciously, but somewhere, deep inside my mind, in the places untouched by the amnesia, I’d recognized... something.

  I might not have my memories, but I still knew in a very basic way what I liked because what I liked was formed and reaffirmed each moment I existed. I didn’t need decades of remembered history behind me to tell me grapes were delicious or sunsets were pretty or that I liked sex mixed up with a little bit of danger—or a lot, depending on an outside observer’s tolerance for risk. It seemed apparent that my tolerance for it was endless, despite this brief moment of visceral fear.

  “I’ll leave your feet free as long as you don’t try to kick me. If you kick me, things will get ugly. Do you understand?”

  I nodded quickly. I wasn’t sure what all that entailed for someone like Shannon in this particular situation, but I was one hundred percent sure I didn’t want to find out.

  Instead of stripping off his jeans, he sat beside me, his hip settling into the groove of mine, the scratchy denim rough against my skin. He leaned over me and tweaked my nipple hard between his thumb and finger.

  “Ow!”

  He merely smiled in return. Unlike over by the wall, I could actually see his face now and how much he liked every drop of pain he delivered. My self-preservation finally kicked in, and there was nothing I wanted more than to get away from him.

  I wanted to go back to the moment in the castle, the moment when he was going to call his friends and the police and get me some help. I closed my eyes and tried to remember it, the smell of burning flesh from the fireplace, the smell of Trevor’s blood. The smell of my fear.

  Shannon was right. This was too dangerous, this fire I played with. He wasn’t some regular guy who liked a little slap and tickle with silk scarves. I twisted away, jerking hopelessly at the ropes.

  “Let me go. I changed my mind.”

  He looked angry. His hand moved up to wrap around my throat and he squeezed...just enough. Just enough to let me know the danger I was in, how completely I was at his mercy.

  “Why?” he practically growled at me.

  “I’m scared.”

  “I know. I like it. I like it so much that I never want it to end. So if you’re worried I’ll just snap and kill you or do serious damage, you can put those fears aside. I would never do anything to endanger my ability to do this again and again.”

  “It’s too dangerous.”

  Shannon’s eyes narrowed until all I could see were slits of pure evil. How could I have trusted this man? What was broken in me that I thought Shannon could give me safety?

  He took his hand off my throat, and a whimper escaped my mouth. The second it was gone, I wanted him to put his hand right back where it had been. But it wasn’t safe.

  “You gave me the rope. I was going to take the high road.”

  “I know.”

  “I told you if we crossed this line we weren’t going back.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.” I was so fucking stupid. It was like giving a bottle of whiskey to an alcoholic or asking a junkie to hold some heroin and syringes for a few days.

  “No,” he ground out. “I told you not to come downstairs, but you came down anyway. I was going to let you go back to your room, and you put the rope in my hands. Do you want me to fuck you, Elodie? Don’t lie. I can’t abide liars.”

  I wanted to say no, but if I lied to him, he would see right through me, and God help me if I ever betrayed him.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want me to make sweet romantic love to you that we both know is a lie?”

  I shook my head. The thought made the bile come up in my throat. It was too much like the sham with Trevor.

  “Good. Because I don’t make love. You know you’re mine, right? You were mine the moment I laid eyes on you in the castle.”

  My pulse fluttered harder in my throat.

  “Answer me, Elodie.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “Now, I’m going to fuck you, and I’m going to do it my way. Unless you are in genuine distress you will not speak another word until I’ve come inside you. Are we clear?”

  “Yes, Sir.” There was a small crazy voice inside me that said if death was the possible price for having his hands on me, then let it come.

  I closed my eyes and jumped into the gaping chasm where Shannon had already set up a life of comfortable darkness.

  He didn’t remove his jeans, just undid them. My hips surged upwards as he drove into me, his fingers digging hard into my hips. Somehow I knew he wanted to flip m
e over onto my stomach, but the intricate knotwork he’d made wouldn’t allow for such spontaneity mid-game.

  “Shannon, please, the ropes hurt.”

  He fucked me harder causing them to pull and chafe even more. “Good. Cry for me.”

  My eyes were still closed, and the tears slid from the corners of them, down my cheeks, and onto the sheets. The ropes dug and burned into my wrists like a branding iron, but I wasn’t crying because of that. I cried because despite the overwhelming relief of Shannon’s body moving inside of mine, of all the tiny nerve endings he awakened with this relentless friction, I was convinced I was going to die.

  What if, at the last moment, the known killer in bed with me decided killing me was better than fucking me after all?

  A moment later, I felt a warm tongue on the side of my face, licking up my tears as I cried them. It startled me enough to make me open my eyes.

  When Shannon pulled back to look at me, that intense expression was back. It was the look that made me wonder for brief seconds at a time how I could ever fear him. That was the look of a man who wanted me to live forever. Just so he could keep doing this.

  That final thrust made me gasp, and pushed me right up to the edge of my own pleasure.

  After a few beats, he pulled out of me. I was going to let it go. Even without completion, even with the moments of abject terror, it was far and away better sex than the droopy display with Trevor had ever been. But Shannon knew I hadn’t come, and he wasn’t having it.

  He still straddled me, one hand gripped my throat, forcing me to look at him. The other snaked between my legs, stroking me in a slow, steady rhythm until my release came, causing a scream to tear out of me like nothing I’d ever heard. At least not in my known memory.

  We stared silently at each other for several minutes. Somehow I knew he’d fucked a lot of women, but whatever emotion he felt now, it was new. It was mine. His face was filled with the same awe as a baby discovering his own hands for the first time.

  Shannon untied my wrists and pressed a kiss against the rope-burned skin. He got up and retreated to the bathroom then came back with a tube of something and some gauze and medical tape.