CALICO LANE

“Why should I stop?” he asks me.

I search for an answer, and fail. “I’ll do anything you want,” I tell him. And he replies coldly: “What can you give me that I don’t already take?”

Nothing, you bastard. We both know it. And I blame myself for not withholding.

Sometimes I ask him to fuck me, to let me suck his cock. I bargain. I threaten. I tell him that I can’t take it. None of it exempts me.

“Do you want me to stop, or do you want to run?”

That question always brings me close to tears. I cannot consider making that final breach of contract.

“I don’t want to run,” I tell him, and despair.

Playing with the Lawyer is not a scene: it’s a reckoning. He picks one of his metal toys. (Shame to call them toys, more like tools, or pets — some have names, these pieces of bar stock and broken fencing blades.) He hits me. Each stroke leaves a bruise. I’m tied so I can’t fight. Often he leaves my jeans on, so as not to cut me.

He doesn’t do warmup or fondling or nicely paced strokes. It’s a fucking beating. If I’m a canvas, he’s applying his marks.

On the flip side, there’s no escalation. It starts out as bad as it’s going to get.

He kisses me sometimes, in the middle of one of his turns, but it’s dispassionate. I used to ask him to kiss me. “I’m scared,” I’d say. “Please, give me a minute. Please kiss me.” And sometimes he would, but it felt mechanical, all wrong. He was like an actor imitating himself.

At first I took it like a champ. I’m still amazed what willpower lust and alcohol can impart. I wanted fiercely to take it for him. I guess I was confident he would not hurt me more than I could bear.

In subsequent repetitions, I quickly realized it was going to happen whether or not I wanted it, unfold without regard to what I said or did, and last until he was done. Maybe I began pleading to have some illusion of control.

After a couple weeks I started begging when it became unbearably awful. Don’t, I’d say. Please. His name tumbled from my mouth as it never did during sex. I can’t take it. Stop. Oh, God, please don’t.

Sometimes my begging would get his attention, and he’d turn his face and stare at me without a flicker of recognition, like my trembling and sobbing didn’t move him in the least. Didn’t even register as human emotion. That’s where my serial-killer comparisons come in: it seems inhuman, to remain so violent and yet so completely calm. He never seemed angry, not even while laying open my thighs. I could have been a side of beef he was carving, but he wasn’t doing it to be mean.

His face was the scariest. He has many moods during sex, from vicious to playful. He’ll act angry then, for sure. Slap me, choke me, call me names and say filthy things that make me wet. But the face he has when he hurts me isn’t a face — it’s an absence. He doesn’t talk. The walls go up, and his eyes go blank.

I know I’m more worried about the neighbors than he is. So today, each time he hits me with the sabre-cane I scream. Why hold back? Maybe it will scare him. Maybe he was blustering when he said he didn’t care, and he’ll have to stop and gag me. Maybe someone will knock. He doesn’t know mercy in that state but he knows reason.

I’m shaking, both with adrenaline trembles, and the larger twitches of dry sobs that rack my whole torso. My face is wet. That’s new. Then again I have cried almost every time we’ve fucked lately.

I’ve caught his attention with my insistence: he pauses, stares at me with those eyes.

This time he doesn’t deign to argue. He focuses on my face, although I don’t have confidence in what (if anything) he sees there. Then he shifts his attention, ignoring my increasingly frantic begging. He lifts the sabre in his hand and I screw myself up.

I’ve seen that face before. He’s gone.