She held the device up. It was a small, metal, open box with two pointed screws reaching into the opening. Though he’d heard of its name, he’d never seen one and so didn’t recognize it by sight alone.
“Look me in the eyes, pig. This is important.” He pulled his gaze from the strange device and into her eyes. “Your education will not be complete until we are convinced you have learned that women not only deserve to be treated well, but also are your superiors. We’ll need to hear it in your voice, and we know what a lie sounds like.” She paused and watched his eyes. This close to her face, his fear was heightening. Hidden underneath her shadow, his hands automatically pulled at the restraints.
“These are called thumbscrews,” she said, holding the device up again. She placed it softly on the table in front of his hands. “Put your thumbs inside. All the way to the knuckle.” He did it, afraid more of what would happen if he didn’t than if he did.
She spoke again in what was almost a whisper. “Good.”
She turned the screws, first the right then the left, until the sharp tips dimpled his skin. “They can be incredibly painful… or slightly more than uncomfortable. It’s all an exercise in pressure.” Then she rotated the screw over his right thumb a half turn. The tip twisted and descended, pushing the skin down and resting solidly on the bone. It didn’t hurt- not quite- but he could already tell that another quarter turn would do the trick.
He squirmed on his knees. His mind reeled at any means of escape, all impossible of course. He saw the woman smile. “You’re thinking this isn’t real,” she said. “You’re thinking that it’s all a dream,”
It is. I’m having a nightmare. I’m out of the fortress. I’m safe under a bridge. I ate a tomato. But I never wake up before-
“that any second you’ll wake up. Well, it’s not a dream. I can assure you this is all very real. I can assure you this will hurt more than you are mentally prepared for.”
She twisted the same screw again one quarter turn and, just like he’d known, it hurt a great deal. He groaned but didn’t scream. Was he allowed to scream? He couldn’t remember.
“Think about what it was that you did to get here,” the woman seemed to sing. “Was it something that hurt some young girl…” she paused and twiddled her fingers deliberately above the right thumbscrew, “…as much as this?”
She twisted it again, another quarter turn, and the pain shot through this thumb, straight to the bone itself, and this time he did scream.
“Think,” she continued, still too, too calm, “did you do it once?”
An eighth of a turn. He winced harshly.
“Twice?”
Another eighth. He seethed through his teeth, tried to hold back the scream. His shoulder dropped in some useless effort to minimize it. A tiny squeal pushed through his pressured throat.
She ignored his reactions. “Or was it, perhaps, a few hundred times?”
She reached out again with her fingertips and grasped the knob at the top of the screw. In a flash he felt the sweat bead and roll from his forehead and temples. In a quick move she twisted it again just an eighth turn and the screw descended another millimeter into his thumb. But by then the point had already pierced the skin entirely, leaving a tiny tendril of blood, and had pressed into the surface of his knuckle bone. This turn dropped the sharp point down and in, splitting the bone like hardwood under an axe, and wormed its way to the interior.
He screamed hoarsely, letting out the pain and frustration in an ugly bray. “God! Stop!” he shouted next. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! Please stop!”
“Of course you are, pig, now that you’re not in control.” She was so calm, so smooth. “Amazing how that works, isn’t it? You’re only sorry because you’re in pain. Well, what about her? Why were you never sorry because of the pain she suffered? Let’s both think about that concept for a moment.”
She feigned thinking in an obnoxious pose, thumb and forefinger under her chin, eyes rolled to the ceiling, fingers strumming the metal table. With each downbeat of her final finger, the table chattered lightly and the tiny vibrations it sent triggered another fuzz of pain in his damaged, skewered thumb.
In his disturbed sleep under the wooden bridge, Obe writhed uncomfortably with his right thumb locked straight and his wrist strained and twisted.
The woman kept strumming, kept sending vibrations to the screw in his thumb, kept feigning deep thought. He continued only to seethe with anger. Then she talked some more, but here the dream faded away from details.
She’d asked questions and he’d answered. She’d played with the other screw, but it never got as bad as the first. At some point she’d been satisfied by something he’d said and left the room. Relief had washed over him, but his thumbs were still pierced by the metal points of the screws and the pain didn’t lessen from moment to moment.
He sat on his knees for only ten minutes before another woman opened the door, and, oddly,
No, it was only meant to look that way!
snuck into the room. But it had felt like nearly an hour. And this woman was the one he always remembered. More beautiful than the rest by far with her soft eyes, high cheekbones, and curling hair, she was the bitch who had started it, the one who had seduced him and lured him to ‘Hawaii.’
“Oh, God, I’m so sorry about her,” she said.
Remember her, even now you remember her.
“Are you in pain?”
But before he could answer she turned both screws back a half turn and, God-like, lessened the pressure. His right thumb actually hurt more for a brief flash as the bone squeezed back into place.
“Thank you,” he groaned. But he didn’t trust her. Not for a second. She was one of them.
“Sure, darling,” she said. And her voice was sweet, pleasant, almost Southern Belle instead of the calm cold of the other. She knelt down beside him, which also seemed odd, but then slid a hand on his shoulders, softly.
“Don’t mind her. She doesn’t realize you’re not like the rest.” Her hand crept up and fingered the hair at the nape of his neck.
“It’ll take some doing, but I think I’ll be able to get you out of here soon, okay sugar?” Her other hand was suddenly on his thigh. A horrific voice inside him screamed to make her stop, but he was a vulnerable young man who’d just gone through the worst pain of his life. His natural reaction was to yearn for a soothing, pitying beautiful woman like this.
“I so much didn’t want you to be here,” she said, and the hand moved up.
“I wanted us to be together.” The hand slid in. He felt the tingle of warmth trying to grow there, and it felt so incredible that she was about to do what it appeared, even at her own risk.
Hardly a risk when it was all part of the plan, Mr. ‘C’.
“Maybe, if you can stay quiet, I can help you to feel better before anyone knows I’m in here.”
That voice. So soft. So inviting. So sensual. Her hand moved again and carefully avoided the sore skin and stitches of his recent operation, and then wonderfully grasped the haft of his growing penis. It was then he learned the purpose for the metal ring of angled spikes.
Yes. The Anti-Erection Ring. Remember what Rhonda taught? It swayed maturation in Victorian England. Rhonda loved it. Rhonda built her own. Rhonda equipped us all.
In his slumber, Obe he moaned imperceptibly.
His penis, now engorged with blood from the beautiful young woman’s seductive stimulation, pushed deeply into the spikes. The pain was not that of the bone-splicing screws, but was instead reminiscent of the debilitating clamminess of a crushed testicle the one pain he’d never feel again. He groaned, gratingly, as the erection tried to push the obstacle away.
“My what a big…” but she squeezed and he didn’t hear the rest. Squeezed incredibly, fulfillingly good, and at the same time pushed the blood back down and expanded the base even more. He screamed yet again, this time in both pain and in a pleading weakness. Suffering at the hands of these barbarians, he had a
lready learned he could not fight, could not negotiate, could not apparently even beg his way out, so he could only scream in defiance and hoping like a lost child that it would soon end.
The woman released her grip, and his abused member slackened and wonderfully started to wilt.
“You-oo’ve done well,” she said, and he looked up hoping to strike her dead with his stare. But what he saw in the split second before she caught herself and hardened again was an echo of her caught voice.
Past her fake smile, past her beautiful face, was a look in her eyes that couldn’t lie. Even modern civilities could not destroy the body language which is the most base of all communications. Perhaps it was the very animalistic nature of the moment that made it possible, but in that instant as their eyes locked, they shared a true tick of understanding born from a millennia of evolution.
It was a look of pure compassion. Somehow, deep behind the depravities she committed on a daily basis, this woman’s pity was real.
Not the last time. She was different. She suffered too.
For a moment they were not woman and man but simply person and person. She told him, in that one brief look, that she was sorry. He’d wanted to answer through his own look that it was okay, that it wasn’t her fault.
But this was merely a reaction to her honest humility, and his anger at what had been done to him was still too fresh and too strong. Instead he had snarled at her weakly from the corner of his mouth. The moment was eradicated instantlyshe’d remembered who she was and she quickly and clumsily escorted him back to his box.
His next training session didn’t come for four days. And for four days he had fantasized about the woman who was unlike her peers. Most of those whims involved escape. Just once, however, he’d allowed himself to build pressure on the spikes of his most hated device. Just once he’d welcomed physical pain as payment for the joy of pure passion.
In his makeshift bed under the wooden bridge, Obe’s sleeping form spoke the name ‘Josie’ and finally slumbered on in peace.
CHAPTER 3
SCRUPA
1
The night with the candles had been horrific. Even with the new steely reserve Josie had found within herself, Charles had pushed her to her absolute limit of physical endurance. The things he had requested and performed had been sexually demeaning, and she’d been prepared for that. What she had underestimated was his stamina, his creativity, and his anger.
For over six hours, right up until the last stroke of midnight, like some kind of pornographic Cinderella story, he had used her like a thing. And all the while she had given him praise and submissive false hope. The Physical. The Emotional. The Sexual. Anything and everything he had wanted, she had not just endured, but pretended to enjoy, to relish, to yearn. The dominatrix she had been to him in the days preceding had been so quickly overpowered by the rapist he was at heart. As with them all, once the seal of politeness was broken, Charles’ true nature had come out. The truth was she had gotten through it only because of the vehemence for men she had been taught on the island.
When Charles had pinched or slapped, Josie had pictured him screaming. When he had bit or cursed, she had pictured him begging and crying. When he had grunted, growled, and shuddered like the animal he truly was, she had pictured his corpse engulfed in the flames of Gertrude’s incinerator. Even when he’d finally quit and she’d emerged again after another scalding shower and found him contentedly, disgustingly, asleep, she had fought the urge to find a fork and plunge it into his soft neck. Yet for every thought that had given her strength, she had hated herself even more than Charles.
I’ve turned to the Dark Side, she thought. I am the very thing I once hated. I am rage.
The film of comedic angels had been replaced by a PG version of Die Hard with a Vengeance. Sadly, the only censorship that seemed to have been made were obvious voiceovers of the more colorful verbal passages. The guns, explosions, sweat, blood, and other violence were all entirely intact.
The world is rage, Josie thought, and put the inflight headphones away. She need not pretend so much anymore. Charles was fully seduced. Her hard work was already done.
“Ma-an prob-lems?”
“Huh?” Josie jumped a little. The elderly woman sitting to her other side had hands which shook even more than her voice. Her ever-quivering fingers rested on Josie’s arm now.
“I was as-king you if it was prob-lems with your man there that makes you the on-ly one in this plane who hasn’t found some-thing to do.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Rea-ding, snoozing, wa-tching the movie… perhaps stri-king up a pleasant conversation with a stran-ger?”
“Oh,” Josie smiled. “I’m sorry. I…”
“It’s all-right dear,” the old woman soothed. “We all have that look a few ti-imes in our lives.”
“Is it that obvious?”
“Mmm,” She nodded. “You want an ear to yap at?” Josie smiled softly and flicked her eyes toward Charles. “Oh, he’s busy with his guns and vi-lence like men do. And a stranger can be the best lis-ner. I won’t bull-shit you any, and I’ll be gone after we land. So,” her shaking hand patted Josie’s arm, “tell Grannie Vi-ra all about it.”
Josie looked at Vira- Grannie Vira- and thought to herself while her new companion waited patiently in the silence. “He’s angry,” she finally said, “and he won’t change.”
“That’s good,” the old woman said. Josie paused, confused. “That you know he won’t cha-ange, I mean.”
“I’m not staying with him, if that’s what you’re thinking.” She had lowered her voice, just in case. “This trip will end things. And that’s not a bluff, not even to myself.”
Grannie Vira eyed her a moment before replying. “I believe you,” she finally said. “But that’s not why you weren’t watch-ing the mov-ie, was it?”
“No,” Josie admitted.
“Then talk! Get it out. It’s eating you up in-side. Anyone could see that. Let me hold on-to that scrupa for a while.” Josie twitched at the unfamiliar term. “That was my mo-ther’s word for all the bad things people think they can han-dle alone but can’t. She used to tell me, ‘Vira darling, if you hold your own scrupa, it’ll kill you one day.”
“I like it.”
“Good. Now give me your scru-pa dear. You’ve he-ld it long enough.”
Josie laughed quietly then glanced at Charles again and sighed. “Despite what he is, I can’t hate him. I want to. I think I should. But I just can’t.”
“That’s what’s both-ering you?”
“Yes.”
“That you can’t ‘hate’ this man who beats you?”
“He doesn’t beat me, but yes.”
“Sure he does you little fibb-er. I knew the in-stant you got on the plane.” Josie’s eyes widened. “The way you winced so much handling your luggage and he did-n’t care about it. Your long sleeves. That far-off loo-k in your eyes. It doesn’t take Hercule Poirot to deduce what’s really been going on.”
And here Granny Vira’s hand suddenly held still on Josie’s forearm. It seemed heavier all of a sudden.
“But your prob-lem, deary, is sim-ple. You aren’t like him. You’re not an-gry. You only want to be because that’s how he dea-ls with things. You’ve got to remember that your problem is in how you dea-l with things. You’ve been fool-ed into think-ing you can only do what it is you see every day.”
Inside her, a tingling sensation- a thing of the mind not the body- appeared. Josie knew the words she was hearing were important, and she clung to them with mental claws.
“The nice part,” Grannie Vira went on, “is that the so-lution is also very simple because it’s something you’ve already be-gun. You need to drop him, of course, but not just to es-cape from him. You need to do it so he-e’s no longer what you see everyday. You need to make your own at-mosphere now. Have fun. See-ee the world. Have a few girl-friends over and burn all his stuff. Then have them over a-gain and talk about Bra-ad Pitt for a w
hile.” Josie laughed. “Oh he is a slice of Heaven, isn’t he?” Grannie Vira teased. “But what I me-an is… you have to be your own woman, make your own happiness, my child. That’s always be-en true, and it always will. Oh, and whatever you do, don’t find an-other man for a while. In your condition you’ll just mag-net to another just like him. Trust Grannie Vira what she tells you dear-y. She knows from exper-ience.”
Josie sat quietly for a few moments. Grannie Vira waited again. The tingling in Josie’s mind was a buzz now. She almost had something she could finally grasp. Those claws were sharp and restrained only by a thin trip-wire. Anything could send them snapping shut.
“Thank you,” she said. She tried to sound happy, but her mind was too desperate to give the old woman her full attention.
“My plea-sure,” Grannie Vira said. She didn’t seem to notice Josie’s distraction. “I’d re-think your def-inition of what abuse is, but I think you’ll be fine.”
And there, on an airplane miles above the vastness of the open Pacific Ocean with her secret bruises slowly healing and Charles dumbly watching violence beside her, Josie’s mind found something to snatch its claws onto.
Scrupa, she thought, her own movie now beginning to play in her head. Be my own woman. A sudden thought struck her and she breathed a sudden, powerful breath. Beside her, Grannie Vira’s eyes glanced over but politely ignored it. It’s the island, she thought. That’s what I see everyday. It’s abused me as much as Charles ever has. Maybe more.
“Thank you,” Josie said again, this time with full sincerity.
“Mmmm,” Grannie Vira intoned at her. And her patting hand didn’t quiver at all.
2
Monica had so easily manipulated the landlord. But then, immoral people embraced a little immoral behavior when offered enough money. She had observed Josie’s secluded maneuvers in Charles’ apartment for nine days and nights, and not once in her vigil had she slept more than three straight hours. She didn’t know how the hell Rhonda did it. She was utterly exhausted.
Woman Scorned Page 5
