Flesh clinging onto the Desolate

When I picked her up that night two years ago, it wasn’t planned. She was a classic wrong place, wrong time case, or so I thought. I was driving over a bridge during a downpour, and there she was, drenched and clearly ready to jump. When I passed her she smiled at me. I hit the brakes and reversed back to her. I rolled down the window, prepared to smooth talk her but she yelled out first. 

“Keep going! I don’t want anyone to watch,” she waved me on, and she was still smiling with black streaks running from her eyes. 

“Watch you leap off a bridge?” I tried matching her tone. She wasn’t at all what I expected, but that was a quality she would maintain throughout our affiliation. 

“Yeah, it’s embarrassing!”

I put the car in park. 

“I guess you’ll just have to be embarrassed then.”

She leaned over a bit looking down at the river below, hanging on to the railing behind her with her arms stretched taut. For a moment I thought she was going over but she pulled back. 

“Aren’t you going to try and stop me?” She looked back at me again, pushing her rain slicked hair out of her face. 

“Should I?” I asked from behind my crossed arms with my elbows bent out over the car window. 

She lifted her face to the rain. 

“I think you’re supposed to,” she said, returning her eyes to me. 

It was hard to explain but this felt like we were playing a game. I cocked my head back, beckoning her. 

“Get in the car then,” I said. 

“Where will you take me?” 

“Anywhere you want,” I lied. I thought I lied. 

I didn’t drive straight home. I drove around in circles for a while and, if she noticed, she didn’t say anything. She told me she was on the bridge because she was bored. It wasn’t the pain or grief or suffering that drove her to the consideration to end her own life, although she assured me there was plenty. Rather, it was the all consuming apathy that followed. She told me she’d waited nearly three weeks for it to rain so she could finally ‘do it right.’ She laughed while telling me, and I laughed with her. 

I asked her if anyone else knew where she was and she told me there was no one to know. She was so perfect. 

I got a lot of satisfaction watching people come to in the basement for the first time. Everyone reacted differently but there’s a spectrum. Most people got angry. That anger was always nothing more than thinly veiled fear, just a desperate attempt to stay in control. Of course, some people didn’t hide the fear, or couldn’t. There was the pleading and blubbering and pissing themselves. Rarely there were the quiet ones (like you.) They had this somber, fucking boring, resignation dressed up like acceptance, like a speedrun through the first four stages. But in the end, I always had them make up the work they missed more than a few times over. (Don’t I?)

Christine woke up hazy. They all do that. She looked around the room with her eyes squinted, remembering, recalibrating. I watched her gaze trail down to the metal cuff around her wrist and then finally up to me. I watched the recognition as she studied my face with her big, glassy eyes. I was practically vibrating waiting for her to speak. I wanted to hear the suicidal girl beg me for her life. Instead, her lips pursed and she tried with little success to suppress a grin. I stared back at her bewildered and she shook her head vigorously a few times. She blew out some air and her face became suddenly very serious.

“How do you want me to be?” She asked, pushing herself up onto her knees. Her words just kind of hung in the air. I saw a twinge of disappointment pinch her brows when I didn’t say anything.

I don’t often feel like I don’t know what to say.

“Do you want me to cry? Or scream? I could scream at you. Oh, should I try and seduce you?” She bit down on her lower lip, again, failing to hide a smile. I couldn’t help but consider which one of us was locked in with the other.

“Are you fucking nuts? Do you think we’re playing around?”

“No,” she muttered quietly, looking shameful.

“What do you think is happening?” I asked, crouching down to her level. God help me if I had to get any lower.

“You kidnapped me,” she answered, nodding along to herself like it could convince me she was doing a good job. I studied her trying to figure out what kind of angle this was. She shifted her weight, uncomfortable with my lack of response. She broke the silence herself.

“Only, I don’t know if this is a Dark Romance or a Crime Drama…or a Horror?”

I grabbed the collar of her shirt and stood up, dragging her with me. She yelped when I slammed her back against the wall. Her eyes were closed and she cringed away from me.

“This is real life, psycho. Do you not get that? I’m going to kill you,” I spoke slowly, underhandedly, like she was stupid.

“Not for some time, I hope,” she said, looking up at me with those sad, grey eyes, and her chin tucked like a guilty dog. Stupidity wasn’t her problem; I don’t know what was, but it wasn’t intellect.

I beat her senseless that night. I uncuffed her and everything so I could really throw her around. Of course she bled and she cried. Despite how uncannily she’d presented herself to me, she came apart the way they always did. I now had proof that she was in fact human, but every now and then she’d look up at and that smile would flash while she licked the blood from her teeth. And every time it made me want to hurt her more, until eventually it didn’t. I did it anyway.

She never fought back in earnest. Animal instinct took over and she would sometimes shield herself with her arms, but she never tried to hit me back or even get away. I watched fear and pain and lust dance across her face until we were both spent, panting—her on the floor curled into herself and me bent over, hands on my knees.

She peeked up at me and scrubbed her hair and tears out of her eyes with a shaking arm before dragging herself back up to her knees. She wiped her mouth and stared cross-eyed at the thin string of saliva and blood connecting her fingers to her lip. She sopped it up with the hem of her shirt. I stood up straight and raked my hair back.

She scooted forward raggedly, obviously in pain, and she loosely gripped my pant legs at my mid-thigh. I almost shoved her away, but curiosity stayed my hand. She was so fervent, I just watched her and waited.

“Did I do good? You’ll keep me?” she said, her voice graveled from crying. Finally, something in me clicked with her. My anger was entirely unwarranted. Why should I try to convince her not to enjoy this? Why shouldn’t I enjoy it with her?

“Maybe. I haven’t decided yet. Maybe I’ll just drop you back off at the bridge, I think it’s still raining,” I said smoothing her dark curls behind her ear. She grabbed at my hand and started kissing and licking her blood off of my knuckles. A shiver lit up my nerves when she took two of my fingers into her mouth. I felt one of my rings clack against her teeth.

“Pleathe,“ she said with her mouth full and her eyes skyward.

I softly dragged my fingertips down the soft, wet length of her tongue before roughly hooking them behind her bottom teeth. I leaned over her and pulled her closer.

“You really like attention, don’t you?” I asked and she nodded weakly, her eyes glued to me like if she looked away she’d shatter.

“And you don’t care where it comes from?”

She stared up at me dumbly so I shook her head side to side for her. She smiled around my fingers and her tongue twitched needily at my knuckles.

“Alright then, angel. I’m gonna keep you. Normally, I keep this a secret for a while, but you’re special, aren’t you? I’m going to make you my little star down here, and you’re going to get more attention than you know what to do with. How does that sound?”

She hummed softly with approval. Suddenly, eagerly, her fingers were at my waistband fighting with the button while refusing to take her eyes off mine. I retracted my hand and slapped her cheek before taking a half step back.

“Take it down a notch, save it for the cameras,” I said and she had the nerve to pout at me. I grabbed her arms, hauled her back to the wall, and clapped the cuffs onto both of her wrists. I’d give her more freedom of movement later, but I wanted to figure out how far down the roots of this masochism went.

I had been with a more than a few willing partners who wanted be slapped on the ass or choked a little, and who was I to judge or deny? But this was ridiculous. She was like a bloodied, little zealot staring up at me.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, we’ll start right away and see if you’re up to scratch, hm?”

She nodded feverishly.

“You’re going to make me a lot of money. Folks go crazy for crazy, and yours is hard to come by,”

My clientele typically go for the unwilling, but this was no normal ‘safe, sane, and consensual’ sanitization. If the beating she took tonight was any indication of what I could continue to do with her, of what I could get her to beg for, then they’d have no problem watching Little Miss Deathwish wage war on her own body through me.

I was nearly to the door when I heard her call out to me.

“When you do kill me—what‘ll it be like?”

“It’ll be spectacular,”

Over the next two years I couldn’t ever seem to find a fit enough end for her. She exceeded my every expectation with every desperate performance. She found genuine purpose in the pain and she worshiped me for it. The audience loved her. No one else has made me as much money.

I chopped off about half her hair when it got too matted to maintain, and I think she hated that the most. Not the time I stitched her mouth shut with a needle and thread, or the time I fed her tabs of acid before alternating laying into her with a belt and forcing her to watch splatter films. By the end of the first year she was missing a few fingers and a couple of teeth (molars only, I wanted to keep her pretty face,) and she had more scars than I could count.

One night, maybe a year and a half in I woke her up and took off her cuffs. She clung to me shivering and I let her.

“What are we doing?” she asked.

“We aren’t doing anything,” I said, “I’m going to be gone overnight,”

“Am I going too?” She sounded like she was already falling asleep again.

“Mh-mm. Just thought you’d be more comfortable like this while I’m gone,” I shook her a little, and she reluctantly looked up at me, “Pay attention, I’m leaving tonight and I won’t be back until tomorrow. The door is gonna be unlocked, okay?”

She was hanging around my neck, planting drowsy kisses on my throat and cheek. I could feel her inhaling the scent from my shirt collar.

“Do you hear me?” I asked.

“Uh-huh, door’s unlocked, I’m unlocked,”

When I got home the next day, she hadn’t moved an inch. I told myself this was no longer my fault. Nothing I did to her muddled that holy reflection I saw in her eyes.

I started running the stream almost every day. Sometimes I wasn’t even down there and she’d just babble whatever nonsense she was thinking at the camera. She couldn’t even see anyone’s replies. She was just happy to have eyes on her. She’d talk and cry and touch herself and aggravate her newest injuries. She was like a machine, but I couldn’t replace any of her parts. She was getting sick more often.

I would take her upstairs to bathe her and sometimes when I was done, I’d scoop her up and take her to the second floor—to my bedroom. She was so frail by this point, she could hardly hold onto body heat. I’d lay her on the bed and she’d disappear into the blankets and I’d follow her under. She’d writhe with loud frustration trying to find something, somewhere in her body that didn’t hurt. She couldn’t, but she’d curl up against me and fall asleep. I considered keeping her off the air for a while. I would have put anyone else in the ground by now, and maybe it would have been kinder to, but I wanted her around. I cared about her about as much as I possibly could care about anything. Even still it wasn’t enough to keep her safe.

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Two years and a few months in now, I was crouched in front of her, watching her sleep. She’d gotten all of a week off before I got too impatient, too restless to tear into her again. I should have given her a month, if not more. The hungry eyes behind the cameras were as impatient as I was. I poised the tip of the knife in my hand over her cheek and twirled it, until the needle edge of it woke her up. She looked up at me with nothing short of adoration.

“Good morning, Phillip,” she said dreamily.

“Still wrong,” I said laughing behind my mask.

She made a dissatisfied noise.

“If I ever guess right will you even tell me?” she asked.

“I swear I will,” I said, unlocking her cuffs.

“Oh yeah, you need to empty my shit bucket,”

“You seem to be talking out of it just fine,” I dragged her to the center of the room to a big basin of ice cold water surrounded by my lights and cameras. I didn’t have a lot of time that day and drowning was something she reacted more poorly to than most things. I would give them as much bang for their buck as I could.

Before she could protest, I shoved her face-first into the water. I held her against the bottom with my boot on the back of her neck while I zip-tied her hands behind her. I took my time with it, watched the water creeping up my pant leg, and made eye contact with the camera, before pulling her up by her hair. The lens was right in her face when she came up.

“Say hi to everyone, angel,” I didn’t wait for the sputtering to stop before I pushed her back under. She jerked around weakly and she started screaming under the water. I waited for the noise to stop before hoisting her up again. She landed on her knees and sat back on her heels gasping.

“Can we do something else?” She whined and shimmied uncomfortably and then froze for a second, realizing she was hovering over my boot. I watched from above her as she spread her knees until my boot pressed against her crotch. She looked up at me with my hand still holding her soaked hair. I shook my head at her while she rocked back and forth, biting down on her lip and keening obscenely.

“Are you guys seeing this? It never fucking stops—she literally can’t help herself,” I addressed one of the cameras.

Then I addressed Christine.

“You have ten more seconds and then you’re going under again.”

She whined, but went to work grinding on me. As promised, ten seconds later I pushed her forward and into the water. For good measure, I slapped the backs of her thighs a few good times to get her to waste her oxygen. When I knew I should pull her up, I waited a few seconds more. She came up coughing, and I sat her back down on my boot.

“Keep going; we’re not finished until you are,” I said as she was still coughing, already close to tears, but she listened.

This went on for a while. Probably too long. I never really gave her enough time to progress toward the orgasm I wasn’t even sure I’d let her have. Even still it felt like she was getting there anyway. She was going back and forth between sobbing and moaning, and I couldn’t imagine how that must feel. What that must do to someone’s soul. If Christine had a soul she’d have already sold it to me.

At around the thirty minute mark I pulled her back for the who-knows-how-many-th time and she started vomiting water. Before she was even finished spewing, she was already back on me going at it. Her breath was hitching and her arms twitched behind her. The flush rising up her chest wasn’t just from the drowning. I knew her body and I knew her signs, and she was teetering right on the edge.

Right when I heard that last big gasp, I put her under. I reached around and palmed her between her legs and she squirmed against me with enthusiasm. Whatever she was screaming was lost under the water, and I kept her still until I felt her ride out her climax. When I pulled her up, I let her fall to the floor and she just writhed and cried. I stepped over her to retrieve a camera. I crouched in front of her and held her face up for the camera.

“What do you say?” I asked.

Her eyes were only on me, like the audience didn’t exist.

“Thank you,” she said, and nothing would convince me that she didn’t mean it.

Two weeks later she was dead.

I hadn’t done it. Not the way you’d think at least. There was no show, no spectacle like I had promised. Her body had just given up. I guess what she had told me on the bridge was true. She didn’t want anyone to watch.

I just walked downstairs one morning and she was gone. I don’t know what the cause of death was exactly. It could have been anything. Her mind could have kept her here forever, but her body couldn’t keep up.

I do miss her, I think.

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