When he came to the door that night he heard the chains rattling inside and stood outside and listened for a moment. The clanging, the heavy hollow scrape of the chains moving on the floor. He held a plate with a piece of steak cooked so it was like a rose in the center and it bled all over the white porcelain. There was a field green salad and the leaves glistened in a separate bowl. A blood orange hung in his pocket. He held his breath and the chains stopped dragging. The clinking ceased. He heard the bed shift. He wondered if she could smell the balsamic vinegar.
He walked into the little blue room. Rhiannon sat near the head of the bed with one leg curled around her ankle and her knee folded up beside her chin. A blanket swaddled her to the waist. Her white skin, the pale silver blanket, the creamy shade of her clothing, the comforter diluted champagne; his brain unfocused into lines and folds and angles and curves. The ink on her skin screamed into the white noise, floated on a sea of textures: the cashmere blanket, the raw silk of the comforter and the smooth silk of her clothes. A shadow of snow and light reflected through a welter of clouds. She leaned forward, her long arms draped across the blanket. All of those ivory lines in motion. Her face tilted, the light sliding along her cheekbones. She lowered her goosedown eyelashes and looked at him sidelong.
“I know you must be hungry,” he said.
Her legs unfolded. She crawled forward and her shoulder blades thrust up like a cat’s, her body unwinding in a sinuous avalanche of slow motion. She stretched out onto her belly. The chains dragged across the top of the bed. Her feet lifted and crossed at the ankles and she looked up at him, settling her chin in her hands.
“Do you want to eat?”
“Yes.”
Her eyes were crystalline; when she looked at him they were clear and sharp and they cut.
He squatted down at the foot of the bed and slid the plate onto the blanket. “Here.”
Her eyes widened at the steak. Her nostrils twitched. He put the salad bowl beside the plate and she plucked a clump of leaves with her fingers and tucked them into her mouth. Her jaw worked and she studied the steak. It had been cut into neat squares and stood in a puddle of rich browned blood. She swallowed.
“Fuck,” she whispered. “Fuck me God that looks…so…good.”
“It’s bigger than I thought…you’d want.”
“No. No. It’s perfect. Perfect. I’m so hungry. I’m starving.”
She stuffed a chunk of meat into her mouth. Her eyes rolled back a little and she moaned and chewed and ate another piece, stirring the salad with her fingers, sucking the vinaigrette and bits of Parmesan off her fingernails. She picked up the bowl and ate the salad in three monster mouthfuls and ripped into the steak, pulling the bits of meat apart and licking the blood off the insides of her fingers. She swooned into the task of chewing. She hunched over the plate and wolfed down half the meat. She wiped her mouth on the back of her wrist and gnawed up what was left and tilted the plate over her lips. She slurped the blood.
“There’s more upstairs…do you want more?”
“Yes!”
He took the plates upstairs into his small kitchen and dumped them in the sink. He grabbed a baked potato and the bit of steak he couldn’t finish and sliced it up. He opened the potato and churned up the insides and sliced some butter. He added a spoonful of sour cream and stirred it in and salted it a little and stuck the spoon into the potato’s starchy guts. He flicked the butter on top and grabbed a bottle of water out of the refrigerator and balanced the plate on his arm. He carried it all downstairs.
“Oh God, potato…I smell potato!”
He came in and she was waiting at the edge of the bed, sitting up, the chain on her neck stretched to its limit. She reached out for the plate. He sat down on the bed beside her, perched on the corner of the mattress. She moved back a little and sat on one leg and took the plate from him. She got down to work. She ate the few bites of steak and stirred up the potato. She ate some of it with her fingers and some of it with the spoon, peeling away thick chunks of crunchy skin, folding it up and smearing it through the melted butter. She closed her eyes with each bite. Her jawbone moved beneath her skin and her throat flexed and pleasure climbed out of her taste buds, traveling across her face. Carl sat with his hands loose in his lap and watched her.
“Mmmm this is so good,” she murmured. “This is so good.”
He took the orange out of his pocket. “Here.”
Rhiannon stopped mangling the potato and looked at it. She looked at him and took it out of his hand.
“It’s a blood orange.”
She tossed the plate to one side. She dug her nails into the rose-tinted skin and the tendons stood out on the backs of her bony hands. Her nails breached the rind and released a fine mist of pungent oil. She slid her fingers underneath and loosened it, the juice staining her nails a livid scarlet. She peeled the rind away in chunks. She dropped the chunks onto the plate. Thick red juice clung to her fingers and the flesh was so dark it was almost purple. She took a bite. She sucked her knuckles. She held his eyes with her own and her hand crept to his shirt, the dazed fingers winding it up in a tight fist and she bared her teeth and hauled his face up into hers. The sudden motion in his spine and the noise of the chain startled him, and he forced a hard breath into her proximity, and then she kissed him and it was all agitated slippery silken skin and strong jaws and her tongue massaging a frisson, orange and beef-blood mixed up with something sharp and musky and strange. She took a bite out of the orange and let the flesh fall into his mouth. He sucked it off her tongue and bit down on the warm juicy pulp and the bright sweetness exploded on the back of his throat, went off like a flare in the dark recesses of his brain, the sweet and the sour mingling with the soft simmer of her mouth and the decadence of her tongue. He swallowed and drooled and she moaned, drinking up the flood, bathing in a wash of saliva and desire. He gripped the back of her skull. He inhaled her oxygen and licked the lining of her mouth and sank into the pliant texture of her flesh, the way it molded to the insistence of his lips, the smooth raw redness of her abraded skin. He made some sound, a vocalization he didn’t perceive until he felt it galvanize her muscles. She bit his chin. Her mouth was on his neck and the intensity of it squirmed hot through his bones. He gasped and she brought the half-skinned orange to his lips, her fingers clenching, and the juice spilled through them and oozed shreds of pulp. Most of the juice ran down his neck. He licked his lips and she touched the top one with the stringy flesh. His breath stuttered and his thighs flexed and he moaned. He wrestled the orange away from her and flung it against the wall.
Her clothes were smooth and her skin was smooth, and in her satin existence she slid against the bedclothes like a vessel upon the water, sinking down, chains softened and whispering on the thickness of the bedclothes. Her skin was a beacon, a sea of warmth and scent and his skin followed hers, drawn by momentum into the wake of her flesh. He slid the silk up over her skin, pale giving way to pearl, the poignant declivity of her ribs and the sloping ivory bowl of her stomach, living and rising up on a tide of sweet yearning breath. He smelled her. Her underlying structure quivered toward him, the tender heat of her skin rich with invisible blood, fraught with tremulous entrainment and the hesitation of his breath. Her hipbones were blunt blades slipping up through fields of warm snow. He braced them with his thumbs, let his nostrils come to rest in her navel. The dark scent of her secrets touched his mind. He rested his cheek there, the crest of her pubic bone insistent along the side of his chin, the restlessness of her long legs a seismic event. He pulled away from his surroundings. The blue walls and the heavy bedclothes and the chains receded into a shadowy underworld and there was only the faint bruised-flower scent of her skin, the buried salt, her cradle of soft muscle, and the anchor of her hips.
He unveiled her. The skirt came up into his fists and her legs parted like curtains doors dancers cells dividing, lips frosted with luminescent hair and again in raw gleaming pink, and beyond that the pungent fitful darkness, a midnight eye bereft of stars, a long unbroken corridor of seconds and doors, white smooth skin white hairs skinned raw flesh bleeding open copious amounts of glistening slime. The smell embedded tiny hooks into his brain and pulled until his teeth clenched and his breathing went shallow and the muscles between his ribs clamped into tight knots. His legs loosened into a swooning sensation that moved upward in slow increments and at the brush of wiry briny hair on his bottom lip it collided with the building tension below his sternum and made a storm front in his belly. He tasted metal. He warmed her in his breath and the smooth wet surfaces of his mouth opened into the blowsy embrace of her cunt. He swallowed her. The muscles anchored in her groin twitched. He scooped up her buttocks and squeezed them and drew her floppy hood into his mouth. He sucked and her breath vibrated through her sprawled lips. Her voice throbbed in her clit.
He licked. He sensed her hesitation, felt the strain and the quiescence within her. He strengthened his tongue. Her legs trembled and her cunt wept and wept and wept, he longed to soothe her facilitate her make her boil make her safe, haul her in and lift her out of troubled waters and set her adrift in the harbor of his intent, make her into a storm, take in her rain and give nourishment to her burgeoning momentous screaming pleasure, the domination of her hesitation, the divorce of her mind and her body and the sacrifice of both upon the dirty altar of her soul. Her heart beckoned in her clit. It thrust against his tongue and demanded acknowledgment, strangled his breath in its siren song, longed for something to fill up its empty places and placate the endless fulminating seething darkness. That raw place. He pushed his fingers inside and the muscles tightened and the clamor of her heart pounded through her hidden walls. It made a rope of his tendons and shinnied down them and traversed the links of his bones. It climbed into his own heart, kicked down the trapdoor and invaded his soul. It crackled up through every nerve back to his brain and roared in his cock.
He listened to her shattered breath, put a hand on her ribs felt the way they threatened to shimmy apart stay with me, stay and go where you need to”a broken moment hovering and the sudden surrender in her cunt before her legs wound tight and her ribs split and her voice roared up squeeze squeeze breathless deathless clinging brute flesh”the thunder under her skin, the broken composure, the grasping immolation and the gasping twitching yield to an absolute dominion of pleasure.
A flood, a river, a great hungry ruby-throated serpent swallowing swallowing down down and the screaming amnesia fingers across her face, tenuous grip and oh the rampage of his bones and the fevered embrace of her thighs, choke that toothless mouth until it killed him. She was drenched in sweat. He came back to the harsh labor of his lungs, the misfiring neurons, the ripe soft clenching aftershocks and the thin whistle of his stunned vocal cords. She breathed with him, struggled up out of her own limp place. She breathed through pale lips. He slid out of her, an evisceration of heat and cool air.
He moved back onto his knees. His loosened pants fell and he pulled them up. He zipped and buckled. She was splayed apart, broken and breathing, creamy and wet and peaceful and somnolent.
“Nice,” she breathed.
He backed off the bed. Her eyes opened and she turned her face and looked at him. He picked up the plate. He picked up the orange, mangled and mutilated thing that it was. He could smell it. He smelled citrus and sweat and cunt and mud and silk and the basement beyond the four painted blue walls. He looked into her eyes and in their silence they beckoned but his mind dug in its heels and his body balked, his tired euphoric soup of cells, and before she had a chance to open her mouth and shape words with her voice and set them loose in the small space he took his mess and left. He sat down on the other side of the door. He put the plate aside and shook all over and every quiet clink of chain was a needle digging into his softest parts until the pain was too much and he wanted to scream but couldn’t. He had no voice left. He’d sprayed his voice into her bottomless guts. Outside the door he couldn’t smell anything but dirty basement but if he waited her skin would seep through the boards and whisper to his nostrils and he’d have to go back, it would be like gravity, what goes up cannot stay up and the fall is dangerous and bruising and sweet. He trembled in his hands. The blood orange clung in stains to his fingers. He licked them.