by Jane Henry
In my old life, back in the States, I didn’t even want a romantic relationship, much less… this. I can’t have children. I was in my early twenties when I was told my body would never be able to conceive a child, but I didn’t care. I have benign tumors that block my fallopian tubes. Uterine fibroids, the doctors called them. They never bothered me before, and my infertility doesn’t trouble me. It was a door shutting to something I never wanted open, and I figured it was one instance when the universe knew what was best for my body, because I never wanted babies anyway.
And I never wanted a partner. Men are selfish, cruel creatures, and I don’t wish to share a bed with one of them.
And yet that’s exactly what I’m doing.
You have no choice, I say to myself.
Do I?
Before I can continue further, a wave of nausea rolls through me I’m so hungry. What has he done to me? The smell of something delicious wafts through the open window, and I sit up in bed. It never occurred to me to get up. He told me not to.
I hear him walking back toward me and note the way the sky’s faded to indigo. Soon, it will be nightfall. I’m not sure I’ll be able to sleep, after that long nap I just took.
The door to the room swings open, and Adrian walks in, wearing a pair of boxers but barefoot, carrying a large steaming pot in his hand. Hunger rolls through me like thunder.
“Oh my God,” I say, pushing myself up to sitting. “What is it? What did you do? Did you finally capture that bird and make… a stew or something?”
“No,” he says. “It’s a can of stew I found in the stores out back. I’ve opened it and inspected it, and it seems perfectly fine. But I’ll try it first.”
I nod and sit up in bed. He walks over to the side of the bed and nestles the hot pot on the little bedside table. He lifts a spoonful to his mouth and tastes it.
“Only one spoon,” he says. I’m beyond caring. I’m starving, and this man has put his mouth over every inch of my body. He dips the spoon into the pot and brings a steaming spoonful to my lips. I open my mouth to let him feed me. My mouth waters as the first taste of savory gravy and meat touches my tongue.
“Mmm,” I say. “Oh God, that’s delicious. I forgot how good meat tastes.”
“Me, too,” he says, getting himself another spoonful. We continue like that in silence, him alternating feeding me spoonfuls before he eats a few himself. A little dribbles on my bottom lip, and he wipes it with the pad of his thumb. I lick it off and smile. It’s almost sweet. We eat the entire pot, and I fall back on the bed, full.
“Wow, that was good,” I say. “If I never see another fish again…”
“Seriously, though,” he says. “I have some good news.”
“Do you?”
He nods. “I tested some of the berries. The dark purple ones on my skin didn’t leave a rash. So the next step is to touch it to my lips. If it doesn’t burn or hurt, I can take a small bite and see.”
I nod. It’s useful information.
“I found something else,” he says. He lifts two small flasks.
“Is that… did you find whiskey?” I ask, incredulous.
“I did. Apparently, our studious scientists had some other resources.”
“I see,” I say. He uncaps one and hands it to me.
“Take a sip,” he says.
I do, then nearly sputter as the liquid fire burns my mouth. He laughs, takes it from my hand, and takes a long, impressive pull from the bottle.
“God,” he says, taking a deep breath and wiping his hand across his mouth. “I needed that. Haven’t had a drink since before I went to jail.”
“Ten years ago,” I whisper. I know the dates. They’re tattooed in my mind, permanent details that were my life focus for months.
His eyes meet mine and we both sober, remembering who we are and why we’re here.
We’re not friends.
I reach for the flask and he hands it to me. This time, I don’t sputter when I take a long pull, but welcome the flame that burns my throat and belly. I hand it back to him wordlessly, and he takes another long sip.
“Why’d you do it?” I ask. It’s a risky question. He’s stronger and capable of hurting me if I push him.
He doesn’t ask me what, merely looks toward the door as if he’s looking at a time and place that’s light years away from here. He doesn’t respond at first, as if he’s trying to decipher if I’m worthy of a response.
Finally, after a while, he turns and looks to me.
“What were you told?”
I blink, surprised by the question. “What was I told? That matters?”
He doesn’t break eye contact as he takes another sip of the whiskey. “It matters,” he says.
“I saw the pictures,” I say, as if somehow that explains everything.
He doesn’t say anything.
“Did you?” I ask. “Did you leave those welts and bruises?” I don’t know why I’m asking. I’d convinced myself he was guilty from the beginning. Do I somehow need to believe that he was innocent all along? But if I do, doesn’t that make what I did unforgivable?
“Yes,” he says baldly. “I was the one who left the marks.”
My stomach clenches. I look away. I can’t look at him the same knowing he’s capable of inflicting that type of violence. For a moment… for just one moment there, I thought he wasn’t the monster I thought he was.
“She wanted it, Nadine.”
I huff out a sardonic laugh. “That’s what the rapists say.”
He shakes his head, then reaches for my chin and yanks my eyes back toward him. “It’s what the rapists say,” he mimics. “And sometimes, Nadine, that’s fucking true.”
“Fuck you,” I snap without meaning to. As soon as I do, I expect him to hurt me, to turn me over his knee or even slap me, but he doesn’t.
“You watch your tongue,” he warns. I feel the correction halt me in my tracks, immediately subdued.
I guess he doesn’t need to take it further.
We’re getting off track.
He exhales and runs a hand through his hair. “She was my submissive,” he begins. “And she was a masochist.”
I nod. I know what that means, at least.
“She enjoyed being tied up, so I did it. I tied her up. The marks of rope on her wrists were from the session the night before. A consensual BDSM session.”
I feel as if I’m going to lose my dinner when I remember her brutalized body. The bruises and welts. I nod. I don’t want to inhibit him from saying more.
“I spanked her, often and hard,” he said. “Sometimes I whipped her, sometimes caned her. It was rarely enough. She wanted to be hurt. Humiliated. Degraded.” He turns and meets my eyes. “It’s not as uncommon as you might think in BDSM circles.”
I still don’t say anything.
“We met at a club in NYC. She was a long-term member, and I was new. Moved there when I decided to relocate.”
“Because of your father,” I interject.
His eyes narrow, but after a moment, he nods. “Yes,” he says. “because of my father. And my uncles. And my brothers.”
I listen, imagining for a moment that maybe the history of the monster I’ve made him in my mind isn’t the truth after all. That maybe there is more to the story than I assumed.
Isn’t there always?
I’m not too proud to admit that sometimes I can be wrong.
Am I this time?
“So I met Lori at the club, and we both realized we had some things in common.” He shrugs, and takes another deep pull from the flask, then wipes his mouth with the back of his hand again and sighs, in contentment or resignation, I don’t know. Likely both. “We had a mutual love,” he says, looking away again. “She liked to receive pain and I like to inflict it.”
He doesn’t say liked.
I like to inflict pain.
My ass burns and my muscles contract. Does that make me afraid? Disgusted?
Or turned on?
&nbs
p; I don’t know if I like how it makes me feel. I push myself to go numb and focus on his words.
“She wanted to be hurt, Nadine. You can believe it or not, but you’re a smart girl. You know BDSM clubs exist, and you know at least a little of what goes on in them.”
“They’re consensual,” I say. “And no one goes around beating people or bruising them or welting.”
He raises a brow. “In the sanitized, romance-ready package presented to the world at large? Sure. In real life?” He shakes his head. “Not so much, sweetheart.”
This time the sweetheart loses the edge. It isn’t a slap in the face but something… different.
I can’t quite understand that the brutal marks on the woman were something she wanted. It seems like a lie monsters feed to people to normalize brutality.
“She wanted to be killed?” I ask him. He flinches and looks away, then as if on autopilot takes another sip of the flask, then hands it to me. I take it from him and gratefully sip more. We should make this last. We should ration it like we have everything else, but it’s like we can’t help it. As if we need this tonight, to give us one night where we don’t have to be responsible and careful. To make us brave enough to talk about this elephant in the room.
“Of course she didn’t want to be killed,” he says. He turns his black gaze to me, piercing me in place. “But the people who killed her watched her. They knew who she was. They knew I was the one she came to when she wanted to be hurt, whipped, bruised, and welted, and they knew I inflicted that on her. Carefully, Nadine. I watched her, we talked, I knew how far to take her and when she needed harder.”
“You liked hurting her,” I say, accusing.
“I just said that,” he grits out, his words like a lash across my skin. “I admit it. I did. I’m a fucking sadist, and I never said anything different.”
I flinch. He is. God, he is. When he takes his belt to my ass or pinches my nipples, his cock gets hard. He’s hungry for pain. He gets off on it.
He continues. Maybe the alcohol has finally spurred him on, or maybe he just needs to admit it, to say it out loud and get it over with.
“So the night before, we had a rope session. I tied her up, and she had marks that remained that I refreshed when she came to me. I tied her up tightly, and I whipped her. Caned her. And paddled her. Yes, many submissives at the club would have found it too much. Lori? She was disappointed when I didn’t draw blood.”
I blink in surprise. He plows on.
“Feeling the pain helped her let go. It relaxed her. That night, I brought her to subspace.”
I don’t know what that is and I’m afraid to interrupt him.
He goes on as if he’s in court, a staunch defense of what really happened, and I hear the sincerity in his voice. “She was floating, in bliss. Couldn’t even speak or move. And I was just about to give her aftercare. I untied her ropes and was going to make sure I brought her down. I’d worked her good, and she’d need attention. We had a large tub in the bathroom in a private room in the club, and I was going to bathe her to bring her back, help her come down after that high.” He turns away and runs a hand through his hair. “I left her on the bed. I wanted to get an extra blanket, in case she was cold when she came down, which happens sometimes. She didn’t even know I left the room. And when I came back, the door was locked.”
A chill runs down my spine. I wish I could believe he’s lying. I want to hold onto my innocence and his guilt, but I know in my gut what he says is true. I apprehended a man who was innocent.
He isn’t a monster. Christ. He isn’t.
I take a silent sip of whiskey. This time it doesn’t burn.
“Then what?” I whisper.
Never looking away, he continues. “They killed her. Strangled her to death. I heard thumps and rumbles and the bathroom window being opened. I pounded on the door, but it did no good. I finally broke the door down. She was on the bed. Dead.”
“And that’s how they found you,” I said. I know what the reports said. They found him cradling her dead body in his arms after an anonymous call to the police alerted them to her death. He was named as her murderer and the circumstantial evidence was overwhelming.
“They strangled her with the same rope I used to bind her,” he continues, his voice tight. “The only rope mark I didn’t leave was the one around her neck. The rope bore my fingerprints. Her entire body did. The autopsy report found my mark on every inch of her body.”
I know that, too. Traces of his hair on her. His fingerprints on the whips and ropes that inflicted her bruises. His semen in her body.
He didn’t stand a chance. He had no alibi. He was in the club that night, he’d been the one to mark her, and his rope choked the life out of her.
“Who did it, then?” I ask, still not giving myself permission to believe him.
“My father,” he says. “I have no doubt. I betrayed the family. Death was too simple for me.”
His words ring true.
Christ Almighty, it’s true.
“And that’s why you escaped,” I say, thinking about it. In my mind, I convinced myself this man was a monster, but is he really one?
My body still throbs with what he’s done to me.
Yes. Yes, he’s a monster.
But is he?
Throughout his entire description of what happened, I wouldn’t let myself think about my training. I know how to tell when someone lies, and I know when someone tells the truth. I’ve never needed a lie detector test. I’m never wrong.
He maintained eye contact while we spoke, both his breathing and voice remaining steady. He admitted his part in this, that he was the one who inflicted at least some the bruises and rope marks. His hand never drifted to his throat, and he spoke at length, in detail, and in full sentences.
He’s telling the fucking truth.
I look away, unable to bear the thought of what he lost. He suffered a terrible childhood. He knows hunger and pain.
And loss. Terrible, heartbreaking loss.
“I was going to ask her to marry me,” he says, finally looking away. “I even bought the ring.”
My stomach twists and a lump rises in my throat.
“Marriage is for losers,” I whisper.
He huffs out a laugh. “How would you know?”
I shrug. “Half of the people who get married don’t mean what they say. They don’t keep their vows and they break it off anyway. The other half who stay together fall out of love if they were ever in fucking love anyway. And the rest? Why do they need rings and shit? When love is real, it’s real, without having to proclaim it from the fucking rooftops.” I shake my head and take another sip of whiskey. “I’ll never get married.”
It’s an odd thing to say. Hell, I don’t even know if I’ll be alive on my next birthday, much less ever return to a society that does things like have wedding ceremonies. I immediately feel like a total asshole. I turn away from him, tired from the drink and I wonder if that’s why he brought it to me. It doesn’t really matter though. I could stay up all night and sleep all day without a problem.
“Yeah,” he says, shaking his head. “Me, too.”
“And then what did you do?”
“You mean to escape?”
I nod.
“I made friends, had connections, people owed me favors,” he responds. “I had to be discreet, since I’m positive it was my father who put me behind bars to begin with. I’d saved plenty of money and used some of it to bribe the guards. I had money, clothes, and a fake I.D. waiting for me the night I broke free. Got a non-stop flight from NYC to Honolulu. Eleven hours later, arrived in Hawaii, and from there I went to the Samoan Islands.”
I can’t really make the mental shift from monstrous murderer to heartbroken lover, so I don’t. I tell myself that maybe what he’s telling me isn’t true.
But my gut knows better.
I turn away from him.
I’m sorry, I think.
Sorry for what? Everything. For fu
cking everything. If it wasn’t for me, we wouldn’t even be on this island. I’d still be in America, and he’d still be living a life of freedom on his island. And Carlos would still be alive. So would the pilots.
I close my eyes when they water, because I don’t cry, and I don’t really have a reason to. The bed creaks, and I can hear him moving. I don’t open my eyes, but I feel him on the bed beside me. The alcohol must be getting to my head. I have the strangest, overwhelming need to cry.
I open my eyes and he’s lying across from me on his belly, his arms propping up his head, which is turned to look at me. I stare into the depths of his midnight gaze and don’t break eye contact. In his eyes, I see the loss he’s suffered. The tragedy of death, and a past that nearly broke him. I interrogated everyone I could before I hunted him down. I know the scars on his body were inflicted by his father.
I don’t know the meaning of his tattoos, though.
“Did it hurt?” I ask, pointing to the tattoo that covers him from his neck to his lower back in intricate tribal black.
His lips quirk up. “Yeah, it hurt. Hurt like fucking hell.”
Well that was a stupid question.
“Why’d you get it?”
He shrugs. “I was eighteen and stupid and wanted to prove I could. My father hated tattoos, so I was pretty well determined I’d get covered.”
An act of defiance, then. Because he could.
I nod, and my eyes grow heavy with sleep.
“Kids do stupid things,” he says, but for the first time during this conversation, I know he’s lying. It wasn’t a stupid thing. It was a very strategic move.
But I’m tired. The alcohol is lulling me to sleep.
“Yeah,” I say with a huge yawn. “They do stupid things. But hell, so do adults.” My breathing slows. I’m so utterly exhausted.
“Adrian?” I rarely call him by his first name, and I wonder if he’ll allow it.
“Yeah?” he says.
“I’m sorry.” I can’t look at him when I say it, so I keep my eyes closed. I feel his fingers in my hair, but they’re gentle this time. He smoothes the hair away from my forehead and tucks a strand behind my ear.
