by Gabi Moore
And I wished that Mark was here with me. I wish that he would obliterate me, once and for all, and put me out of my misery.
I stood and looked at my reflection as the two women fussed around me, and all I could think about was his cock, and how magnificent it must feel to have it in me, all of it, to the hilt, and even further… I nodded and smiled and swished the skirts in the reflection, but inside I was lost in visions of perfect, total ruin. I wanted my entire body destroyed, burnt in flames till nothing was left. I wanted to be broken. And I wanted him to break me.
I put my clothes on and started saying my goodbyes to the women, making my next fitting appointment.
“I shouldn’t think it will be easy to find a white leather garter, to be perfectly honest, my dear…” said one.
“Oh nevermind, that’s not really necessary, I was just saying whatever came to mind. I don’t even want a garter, I don’t think.”
The day before I had read a story of an ostracized woman, in a village in Jaipur, who doused herself in petrol and set herself alight in her husband’s bean fields.
My destruction was quieter. The flames around me were made of lace and satin, but they were flames nonetheless. My cries for help were more like polite ‘thank yous’. But it was all the same. I didn’t know what I was doing. But I couldn’t stop. Why not marry Anthony? Why not dance this stupid dance right through to the end?
So that’s how my weeks went.
I picked out flower arrangements while imagining being fucked so hard I’d pass out. I took little sample bites of vanilla cake, then chocolate, then vanilla again, all the while thinking secretly to myself that what I really wanted was to taste the whip, to taste the sour tang of blood on my lip as I bit down in animal ecstasy. Anthony gave me little gems and trinkets as gifts, and I smiled and thanked him. And then imagined myself sliced open against their sharp edges.
Anthony didn’t touch me. I didn’t touch him. He believed that I was nervous, or chaste. I didn’t correct him.
Sleeping with him was a task that could wait. First, I had to book a wedding venue, and send out invites. I had to organize the dress. The reception. The favors. He didn’t seem to care. I waited for him to push the issue, he never did, and we both breathed a sigh of relief.
Chapter Fourteen – Mark
It was the third Sexpo I had been to. I had paid for a stall, rented the truck again and diligently turned up with a few of my finest pieces and a couple hundred glossy pamphlets for all the curious visitors who would inevitably walk by.
I debated whether to show a photograph of the tree I had built for her, but decided in the end that I would. It was a work of art, and I was damn proud of it. A tool was still a tool, even if the people it was designed for only ever used it once.
“Oh wow, what’s that?”
A pretty girl peeled off from the crowd in the bustling arena and made her way over to my newly erected stall. My first visitor for the day. I smiled and watched as she looked over the display and ran her fingers over the sample items.
“Your arms go in the buckles, over there, and your feet hang down here, loose.”
She nodded and smiled. She seemed a bit young, but whatever. I watched her with interest as she flipped through a folder laid out on the table.
“And you make things like this on demand? Like, people can order things?”
I scanned the crowd around her, making sure I wasn’t missing any legitimate potential customers. She was cute and all, but there was no way in hell a moon-faced twenty-two-year-old was going to cough up for one of these pieces. No, that’s not what she wanted. That’s not what she wanted at all.
She was a perfect ambassador for what I’ve come to think of as ‘pink flags’: little signs and signals from a woman that will seem utterly endearing if you’re horny and not thinking very clearly …but like blaring warning signs if you’re not.
She was too young, for one. How could you tease the edges of a woman’s limits if she hadn’t even had time to grow any yet? Plus, she was playing coy. You know the kind of thing – cocking her head and giggling with all the confidence of a girl thinking she’s gonna blow my mind later with some wild Cosmo magazine tips or a novelty condom she bought with her babysitting money. Girls like this are like cotton candy – just sugar that dissolves, no base note, no grit. And while she may get off on the idea that you’re some big bad corrupting wolf, the game hit a little too close to home for me, honestly.
She was that girl who’d enthusiastically agree to a no strings arrangement but then linger around, hoping you’d marry her by accident or something. She had those long fake nails but hadn’t ironed her shirt. She seemed a little drunk. Like she’d come on to you but then call you a pig when you responded.
I smiled vaguely at her and nodded.
“Yup. Everything you see there was built specifically for each customer.”
“Oh wow, that’s so awesome.”
She just stood there, pretending to be interested in the folder.
“I love talented men, really. I’m an artist myself,” she said and tilted her head to the other side and smiled.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. Mostly sculpture. I find your work so inspiring…”
“Oh, well thank you.”
She dawdled, looked at her feet, cleared her throat.
“Do you use any of these things yourself?”
I lifted my eyebrow at her.
“That’s a very personal question,” I said, laughing. Her face lit up and she kind of leaned in and gave me a breathy giggle.
“I guess. I don’t know if you’ve noticed though, but we are at a sexpo…”
I couldn’t put my finger on it, but at that moment I found her almost unspeakably annoying. It’s not that she was immature. Something told me that she was perfectly mature, only this was her adult, fully settled form. There was just something wrong about it all.
“Yes, well, I try to keep my private life out of my work,” I said curtly and gave her a polite smile.
She looked deflated.
“Oh, sure, yeah, I understand that. Just curious.”
“Well, they’re really built for the connoisseur, you know? For people who actually take this kind of thing seriously.”
Her face fell. She pretended to look at something else and then hurried off, mumbling something and looking a little embarrassed.
“Poor little thing!”
I turned to see Valerie behind me. She wore beaded cat ears, black whiskers painted onto her cheeks and a naughty grin.
“Oh hey, I didn’t see you lurking there,” I said.
“Yeah, it’s like watching a nature documentary. I thought that little gazelle was toast for sure.”
“Her?”
“Yeah, are you feeling OK? You sick? The Mark I know would have pounced on that, no question,” she said cynically.
“She’s a baby,” I said with some irritation, and lined up the edges of the business cards for a second time.
She laughed.
The funny thing was that it was almost exactly the same way I had met Valerie. She had been some plucky, ‘curious’ girl at a kink festival two years back. I had just started making custom pieces, and feeling like a rock star, and when she sauntered over and twirled her pigtails at me I didn’t give it a second thought. She pouted, asked me to ‘initiate’ her and within three months we were already up to two pregnancy scares, one death threat from her ex and one evening in which her guinea pig escaped but because she was on MDMA she was convinced I had assassinated it and she called the police on me. One evening, after we had a stupid fight about whether Down’s Syndrome was caused by toxins, she broke up with me and said she’d kill herself for sure.
I don’t know how the hell it happened, but Valerie and I eventually became friends. She slowly shifted her crazy onto other unsuspecting fools, and I became something like her big-brother confidante, either because she grew up and felt bad for making my life a living hell, or because I was
the only guy in her life not trying either to fuck her or actively get a restraining order on her.
And so I’d see her around. She’d pop up at events like these and come and find me, and I didn’t mind the company so much. Sometimes she’d hit me up late at night when she’d just broken up with some guy, or she’d tease me and try to make me blush with some sordid detail of her always-insane sex life. But for the most part, there was a touching familiarity there. I guess seeing one another at rock bottom has a way of bonding people.
“Hey, Mark, seriously, are you tired or something? You look like shit.” She thumbed through the catalogue herself.
“Gee, thanks.”
“Oh come on, I’m serious. You OK?”
She tilted her little cat ears to the side.
“Perfectly fine.”
She stared at me and widened her eyes.
“Ooooh, I get it. Girl trouble!” she said, like she had just figured out a riddle.
“Shut up.”
“Oh. My. God. Spit it out. Who is she?” She slid up to me like we were in a romcom and like I didn’t have a stall to manage and shit to do.
“She’s nobody. There’s no one,” I said and walked over to the other end of the stall. She gasped and looked me up and down.
“Oh man, it’s more serious than I thought.”
“Shouldn’t you be in school? Don’t you have a court date to get to or something?”
“Ok, fine, don’t tell me, I think I can guess anyway,” she said, and held up her fingertips to her temples pretending to be some kind of mystic divining the future. Her eyes fluttered closed.
“I’m seeing …I’m seeing a beautiful woman… yes, a real hottie. You think she might be something special, you’re a little scared actually, but what’s this? You’ve said something stupid to her? Ah, yes, I can see it now, clear as day… she’s so complicated, she comes with so much baggage, you’re really attracted to her it’s just you don’t know if you can take all of that shit on…” she said, using a phony voice.
I stared at her blankly.
“How do you know all that?”
She laughed and poked me in the ribs.
“Call me an expert.”
“I’ve just met someone. But it wasn’t serious. She’s getting married, actually.”
“Shit.”
“Well, yeah. So that’s that. It’s a mess.”
“Huh. And I know how much you love mess,” she laughed.
I slumped down in my seat.
“She has a kid, too. I always swore I never wanted to be a father, never wanted to take care of kids, you know? Anyway, she’s run off with this real tool, I mean, you should see this guy. And I can’t get it out of my head. Why him? What on earth could she see in him? And yet, there it is. I guess women just want assholes, right?”
“Oh please,” she said and rolled her eyes hard at me. “Don’t give yourself airs, you’re a tool as well.”
I cracked a smile.
“I’m serious. Not to be funny, but you’re getting on in years. If you don’t want to date the ‘babies’ who come around to your stall, then you’re going to have to date older women. And those women are …messy. They have kids. They need commitment.”
I sighed and rubbed my face.
“Come on already with the whole commitment spiel. Did you really just appear out of thin air to come and lecture me about relationships?”
She grinned at me.
“Actually, I’m here with someone. Don’t freak out, but we’re tying the knot early next year,” she said, and watched closely for my reaction.
“You’re shitting me.”
She burst out laughing and danced around the stall.
“No, I’m serious! He proposed last month. I can’t believe it. He’s amazing, you’d love him.”
I scoffed and looked at her sideways.
“Never took you for the marrying kind,” I said, a little surprised.
“No, you’re the one who’s not the marrying type, I’ve always believed in true love,” she said and swanned around, grinning at me like an idiot. “Anyway, seeya around, he’s probably waiting at the food court for me.” She pecked me on the forehead, gave me a little wave and then disappeared off into the crowd again.
I frowned.
When your insane ex starts making more sense than you do, it’s time to worry. I sat there for a while, mind reeling. It’s not that I had commitment problems. It’s just that I hadn’t found anything that looked worth committing to yet. That was a separate problem, wasn’t it? Goddammit it if I knew.
Kat had been on my mind every day since she walked out of my studio a few weeks ago. I had been a wreck. I had already burnt through the anger I had at that idiot Anthony and why an ass like him would get to have a woman like her. No, I was passed resenting him. Now, I had a sneakier, uglier suspicion. That maybe, he wasn’t an ass. Maybe, he actually did have something offer her along, something I was missing.
I shook my head and told myself to stop stressing about it. There was nothing I could do now. Why bother? She would marry him and that would be that. So I was a bit stupid when it came to relationships. So I didn’t exactly get emotions and all that shit. Fine. I was an artisan. I could build things, real things, with my hands, and I was independent, and I answered to nobody, and if I had to be a lone wolf till the day I died, so be it. If she wanted some white bread asshole like him, maybe she wasn’t what I thought she was anyway.
By the time I had packed up the stall for that evening and arrived home, I was in a sour mood. I slammed the car door shut and blustered inside. I took one look at the tree, picked up my phone and called Antony. I left him a terse message explaining that I wouldn’t be available to do cabinetry for him anymore, and that he needed to find a new supplier.
I pulled a beer from the fridge and slammed the door, clinking all the beers still in there, then slumped on the couch.
Fuck him.
And fuck her.
I guzzled back the drink and stared daggers at that stupid tree. It had taken me hours of work to put that thing together, and she had just left it here. What the fuck was I supposed to do with it now?
I clenched my jaw, set the beer aside and got to my feet. Without thinking about it too hard I found myself in the adjacent room, axe in hand. I went over to the tree and took one long look at it.
All the useless work I had put into each and every branch. All the carving. All the bolting and gluing and balancing. For nothing. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever made, and I had made it for her. And it was good enough to play with, sure, but not good enough to accept. I wasn’t the one with commitment problems, she fucking was.
With a strong, sinewy movement I pulled the axe off to the side and let it hover in the air for a moment before tightening my shoulders and swiping it down hard in one blow, bringing the edge of the blade crashing into the polished wood of the trunk.
The crack echoed in the studio.
I took a deep breath and opened my chest to yank the axe free and lift it up again for another blow. I struck again in the split, widening it and causing the tree to wobble on its base. I struck again. And again.
Thin, hot beads of sweat prickled my skin. Each thwack sent painful ripples all through my biceps and into my spine, but I kept on, until the trunk dislodged and came splintering down, and then I kept on still, stepping into the wreckage and hacking away further till every last polished bough was split into shreds…
Chapter Fifteen – Kat
“You’re not supposed to see the bride before the wedding, you know. It’s bad luck,” I said playfully.
He only laughed.
“Sounds like stupid superstition to me. Besides, I already know what you’ll look like. You’ll look like yourself, just in a wedding dress.”
Anthony was sitting beside me on the couch and we were watching a home makeover show. In a little while, I’d offer to make him some cocoa. And tomorrow, we’d get married. It seemed surreal. But also st
rangely comforting.
“A superstition? I mean, why not just throw away the rest of the wedding stuff, then, you know? It’s all more or less tradition,” I joked.
He didn’t smile.
“Not really. It’s important for friends and family that we take the event seriously,” he said.
I shrugged. “Still, it’s weird to just and pick and choose traditions, don’t you think? Kind of takes the magic out of everything.”
We both stared straight ahead at the TV; Nicky was banging something on the floor in the other room and singing a song to herself.
“I’m not sure what your point is here, Kat. It really does seem to be just a meaningless tradition.”
“Ok, fine, just forget it.”
He gave me a dry look.
It seemed like most of our arguments these days centered around what was and what wasn’t meaningful. And usually the question was resolved by him: most of the world was silly, meaningless and immature. And the things he was interested in were also conveniently the few things that were legitimate. He had laughed when I told him about the buckled garter belt. He had scoffed and asked, “but why?” and I had spent the rest of the afternoon wondering the same thing.
“Let me make you some cocoa,” he said.
Our usual conflict resolution style was to make some kind of beverage for each other.
“Sure, not so much sugar this time, please.”
Some women would call this lucky, I guess. I could learn to do the same. The doorbell buzzed, and I nearly leapt out of my skin. I got up quickly to go and see whom it was.
“My dear, are you expecting anyone?” I heard him call from the kitchen. I pretended I hadn’t heard him.
I opened the door and there was nobody there. But in the darkness, on the welcome mat, was a gift. I quickly scanned around but saw nobody, then picked up the parcel and went inside again. I heard Anthony clattering away in the kitchen. I examined the parcel: lumpy, crudely wrapped, and as big as a microwave. My hands tore it open quickly, and I took a moment to understand what it was.
