Proud Woman Against His Methodical Revenge

His hand hit the back of my neck and the mattress came up under my knees before the rest of me had agreed to fall. The edge bit. The frame ran under the mattress there, a hard lip of wood under a thin skin of ticking, and it found both kneecaps and held them. My palms skidded on the sheet and found nothing that would hold, and he used the slide, dragging me the last inch until my knees were jammed on that rail and my mouth was level with him where he stood. He had lost the shirt somewhere between the door and the bed; I had heard it hit the floor behind me and had not turned to look. The buckle had already given. I heard it tick against his thigh, loose, the trousers hanging open on his hips. I did not make the sound that wanted out of my throat. I set my teeth behind my lips and kept them there.

He did not ask with his hands. His hands already had the answer. One stayed fisted at my nape, not yanking, just owning the angle, the other guiding himself against my mouth until the heat of him parted me. Salt. Skin. The blunt pressure of the head against my tongue, then past it, and my jaw had to open or break. I opened. I hated the way my throat tried to accommodate him on the first stroke, hated the wet click of it, hated that my eyes watered from the mechanics and not yet from anything he could use. I breathed when he let me breathe. I did not give him a moan to hang his revenge on.

He set the ration early. Four strokes, then he eased back until the head rested on my tongue and air came in around him, thin, tasting of him. Four more. Then five, and the fifth went deeper than the others, and the air did not come. My diaphragm jumped against the clench of my own ribs, a spasm I felt in my spine, and I rode it with my eyes open because closing them would have been a flinch and he would have counted it. He let me have one breath. Then six. I started counting with him, not to brace but to prove I could, to make the ration mine. The ache began at the hinge of my jaw, a dull pin, and spread back under my ear until it sat behind the lobe like a bruise forming from the inside. Spit pooled under my tongue. I did not swallow it. Swallowing would have moved my throat around him in a way he could call eager, so I let it fill my mouth and run, hot at the corner, cooling down my chin.

Joe leaned down. I felt the shadow of his mouth near my ear more than I heard the room. “You walked in here with your chin up,” he said, almost nothing, a thread of voice. “Same chin. Open wider.”

I opened wider because the angle demanded it, not because he had spoken. That distinction was a blade I kept turning in my own hand. My tongue worked because not working would have been a gag and a cough and a mess he could call surrender. I kept it controlled. Slow where he wanted desperate. I took him to the back of my throat and held, eyes open and watering now in earnest, staring at the dark of his bare stomach, at the jump of muscle when I swallowed around him. The water blurred him and I did not blink. Blinking would have sent it down my face where he could see it. I held it on the lid until it burned, until the stomach in front of me doubled and swam, and I let the burn be the thing I was fighting instead of him.

“There,” he whispered, and his thumb found the hollow under my jaw where my throat was working. “That. That’s your throat giving up before you do.”

I pressed my tongue flat and took the next stroke like a shelf takes weight. He went seven. I counted seven with my lungs flat and my chest starting to hitch and a sound building under my sternum that had nothing to do with words, and when he pulled back for air I breathed through my nose because my mouth was full of him and spit and I would not gasp. He felt the discipline of the breath. I knew it by the way his hand tightened at my nape, a small annoyed squeeze, like a man turning a key that won’t catch.

“Breathe through your nose, then. Fine.” The thread of his voice frayed and came back. “Small. That’s the word you used. Into the mic. They were laughing before you got to the end of it.”

The microphone had whined. I heard it now, in the muscle of my jaw, that split-second feedback before my mouth finished the word. I took him deeper instead of answering. Punishment or offering, I would not label it. My knees screamed against the bedframe. The wood had warmed under me and still chewed. Drool ran down my chin onto the sheet in a dark coin I refused to look at. He fucked my mouth in short, measured strokes, the way a man counts a debt, and every time my throat clenched he paused, waiting for the break in discipline, the gag, the plea. I would not gag for him. I breathed on his rhythm like it was a job. Pride had a taste. It tasted like him and like iron where I’d bitten the inside of my cheek to keep the want from having a voice.

He pulled out just far enough for air to knife in. Spit strung from my lip to him and broke. I did not wipe it.

“Say you came for this.”

I looked up. That was the only answer I had budgeted. My mouth was swollen, shining, and I held it closed. The silence sat between us, thick as the hand still on my neck. His cock twitched against my lower lip, impatient, and I felt a mean, private flare of triumph that his body was louder than mine. Then he pushed back in, deeper, and the triumph guttered. My throat fluttered. A sound started in my chest, not a word, worse, a raw caught note, and I killed it against my palate until my nails carved crescents into the sheet. He felt the kill. I knew he felt it. His thumb stroked once, cruel, at the hinge of my jaw, as if he could coax the corpse of that sound back out.

“Want,” he said into my hair. “That’s all. Want.”

He hauled me off by the hair. The sudden emptiness made my jaw ache worse than the fullness had; the hinge clicked when I closed my mouth and I tasted my own saliva going cold. I swayed on the rail. He didn’t let me find my feet so much as he dragged the decision out of them, off the mattress, half-standing, my knee buckling on the carpet, my hip cracking against the footboard as he turned me. The rail of it caught me just under the bones. Waist-high. Exact. He bent me over it with a forearm across my shoulders and the breath left me in a grunt I turned into nothing by locking my teeth on my own wrist. The footboard dug. My breasts crushed against the far side of it. One shoe was gone. I didn’t know when. The carpet burned my toes as I scrambled for purchase and found the leg of the bed, the stupid carved leg, and clung.

He shoved my skirt up. The air on the bare backs of my thighs was a slap. I had not worn anything under it. That fact arrived in the room before either of us spoke it, and I felt him go still for half a second, not mercy, inventory. He had meant to tear something. There was nothing to tear. The silence of that was worse than a word. I pressed my forehead to the mattress beyond the rail and stared at a wrinkle in the sheet until it blurred, and I did not explain myself. Explanation was cousin to confession.

“Nothing,” he said against my spine, and it was not a sentence, it was a man finding out. His cock slid through the wet I had been refusing to acknowledge, a long obscene drag, and my hips jerked without my permission. He laughed once, air, no joy. “There.”

I bit my wrist harder. The skin gave. Copper. He lined up and drove in, one mean stroke that seated him to the root and knocked my hipbones into the footboard hard enough to bruise in the shape of the carving. I made no sound. The effort of making no sound shook my arms. My cunt clenched around him in a traitorous, milking grip, and I hated it with a clarity that felt like nausea. He felt that too. He stayed buried and rolled his hips, grinding, letting me feel the thickness, the pulse, the way my body opened and clung while my mouth stayed a locked door. The open denim of his trousers scraped the backs of my thighs on every roll, the buckle swinging loose and cold against my skin.

“Say it,” a whisper at the nape, damp. “Say it and I’ll slow down.”

I pushed back onto him. That was the counter. Not a word. A shove of my ass against his stomach, taking him, setting a pace he hadn’t offered, fucking myself on the length of him in short angry rocks that made the footboard tick against the wall. If he wanted a confession he could have my spine instead. The tick became a knock. My thighs burned. Sweat gathered under my breasts and at the small of my back where his hand had planted, fingers spread, holding me down and open while I tried to use him as if use were not the same as want. And then I heard it. The sound I was making on him. Not my throat, lower, the wet slap and suck of my own body every time I shoved back, obscene and rhythmic and mine, and the heat that went through my face at it was the first thing all night I could not account for. I shut my eyes. The sound did not stop because I had stopped looking.

He took the pace back. Of course he did. A hand on my hip, a hand between my shoulder blades, and he stopped letting me rock and started pulling me onto him instead, a long withdrawal that left only the head inside and then a drive that moved me forward on the rail. The rail moved too. It had been sitting across the crests of my hips; the first hard stroke shifted me an inch and it bit lower, into the soft above the bone, and the second stroke put it on the bone itself, the hard front edge of my pelvis grinding wood through skin. I tried to push back to where it had been. His hand on my spine said no. Each impact shoved a noise up my throat. I swallowed them one by one until my stomach hurt with it.

My toes were the first to go. I had been balanced on the balls of my feet, one shoe on, one off, and the uneven height meant the bare foot did all the bracing. The carpet was cheap, the kind that pills, and my sweat had made it slick under the pad of the big toe, and every time he drove in the foot skated back a fraction and I had to reclaim it before the next. I lost the fight by degrees. The heel of the shod foot came up. My weight went to my hands, to the carved leg under my left palm, and the leg was wood that someone had varnished and my palm was wet and the carving gave me nothing to grip but grooves. I felt my fingers slide out of the grooves and clamp down on nothing and slide again. My right forearm went flat on the mattress past the rail to catch me. Then the elbow folded. It did not decide to; it simply stopped, the way a knee stops on a stair, and my chest dropped onto the top of the footboard and the breath went out of me in a grunt I could not turn into anything.

A word was forming. I felt it before I knew which one. The shape of it sat on the back of my tongue the way his cock had, blunt and whole, and it was please, and I knew with total clarity it was not please stop. I turned my face and bit my wrist where the skin had already broken and the word went into the bite instead of the air, and I held my jaw shut on it until my teeth ached and the taste of my own blood was the taste of the word gone. He slowed. For one stroke I thought it was mercy and I nearly moved into it, nearly rolled my hips to ask for more of that slowness. I caught my own body in the act, my mouth already opening on the vowel of it, and I shut it so hard my molars met. He felt the catch. The next stroke was a punishment for the almost.

My hair stuck to my mouth. I could smell us, salt, skin, the sharp clean of whatever he’d washed with before he decided revenge could be methodical. He was methodical. Deep, withdraw until I almost lost him, drive back in until my vision speckled. He wanted the speckles to become a cry. I gave him the speckles and the wet and the shake in my legs and nothing with a consonant in it.

“Carmela.” My name, used like a thumb on a bruise. “You don’t get to be the quiet one. Not you. Not after.”

I turned my face so he could see it in profile: shut, shining, furious, and silent. A tear of strain, only strain, I told myself, cut sideways into my hair. I blinked it gone before it could be evidence. He snarled, a small animal sound, and fucked me harder, as if speed could pry a syllable loose. My foot slipped. The bare one. The carpet gave under the sweat on it and the foot went out behind me like something kicked, and the shod foot was already off the floor, and for the length of one stroke I was not standing on anything. The rail was the only thing holding me up and the rail was holding me by the pubic bone, and his cock was in me to the root, and my hands had nothing. I felt myself start to go over. Not forward, sideways, the balance tipping toward the dark side of the bed, my hip sliding off the end of the footboard, my shoulder dropping. I made a grab for the carved leg and my palm skated off the varnish and my fingers closed on air a foot from it. The whole of me was weight now and the weight was his.

He caught me by the hips. Both hands, hard, thumbs in the dents above my ass, and he hauled me back onto the rail and onto him in the same motion, so fast and so deep that the head of him hit the place behind my navel where there was no more give, and the breath I had been holding left me as a white, silent shock that started in my cunt and went up through my stomach into my teeth. My mouth opened. Nothing came out. I would not let it. The nothing tasted like blood and victory and the orgasm I was already feeling the shape of and refused to step into while he was still winning the angle. My feet found the carpet again. I did not thank them. I did not thank him.

He pulled out. The loss was obscene, a gape of air, my body clutching at absence. I sagged over the footboard, shaking, and he didn’t give me the dignity of standing. His arm came under my ribs from behind and lifted. The rail let go of my pelvis with a drag of skin and I felt the exact line of it stay behind, pressed into me like a brand. Then I was upright, almost, and there was nothing under my feet but carpet and nothing inside me and nothing holding me but the forearm across my ribs, and the air in the room was cold on the wet between my thighs. That was the moment I wanted to cover. Not on the rail, not on my knees. This, the two steps between the footboard and the side of the bed with my skirt rucked at my waist and my thighs shining and nothing to lean on. I did not cover it. My hands had nowhere to go and I put them nowhere.

He walked me the two steps. My knees did not help. The first one buckled and he took the weight and the second one knocked the corner of the bedframe and I felt the bruise start under the skin, a small bright coin. He turned me and the mattress came up under my ass and then my back, and the ceiling was there, and I had not decided to lie down. For the length of three breaths his hands were off me entirely, the only time all night. I heard the trousers go. The buckle hit the floorboards with a flat clank and the denim scraped down over his knees and he kicked free of it, one foot and then the other, and I kept my eyes on the ceiling so that I would not be caught watching him do it, so that he would not have that either. The cushion was already waiting, shoved up from the pile at the headboard sometime before I had walked in. He had planned the geometry of this before he had planned the first word. He got one hand under the small of my back and lifted and shoved it under with the other. My pelvis tipped. The tilt of it opened me before his hands did, my thighs falling apart on their own weight, and the cold air found the wet he had left and I felt it like a tongue. Then his hands did the rest. He folded me, pushed my knees back toward my shoulders until the stretch burned in the hinges and I was bent in half under him, exposed, nowhere to hide the wet or the flush or the way I was still trying to pull him back in with muscles I could not lecture.

V-fold. I knew the geometry because my body was the geometry. He climbed onto the mattress bare now, all of him, and braced a forearm by my head and sank in, and the angle was deeper than the rail had allowed, a thick relentless fill that pressed up behind my navel and made my mouth fall open on a silent O. I stared at the ceiling. A crack in the plaster. I counted it. He withdrew and drove, and the cushion creaked, and my folded legs shook with the effort of staying in the shape he’d put them in. He didn’t have to hold them long. I held them. That, too, was a thing I would not survive examining.

“Look at me.”

I didn’t. Looking was a door.

He changed the stroke, slower, filthy, the kind that drags every ridge of him along the swollen front of me until my stomach jumped. “Look at me. Say it. Say you wanted this before.” His breath hitched between the words. “Before. Say before.”

My eyes stayed on the crack. My cunt said yes in pulses I couldn’t censor. Slick sounds filled the quiet his whispers kept trying to colonize. Each thrust rocked the cushion, rocked me, rocked a pressure low and bright that I had been outrunning since my knees hit the frame the first time. I bit down on nothing. My jaw trembled. Sweat ran into my ear. His breath broke against my cheek, hot, uneven, and I realized with a sick lurch that he was close and furious about it, that his revenge had a body and the body was not obeying the timetable. Good. Let him fail first. Let him spill without the speech. Let me win by lasting.

He knew. He always knew the petty shapes of my pride. His hand slid between us, two fingers finding my clit with an accuracy that felt like an insult, and he rubbed in tight circles timed to the deep grind of his hips. I tried to twist off it. There was no room. My knees were at my own shoulders and his chest was on my shins and the fronts of my thighs and the fold had taken away every direction I could have moved. My hamstrings had started to cramp, not the burn of a stretch but the hot knot of a muscle seizing, and the cramp was in the exact place I would have had to use to pull away. So I did not pull away. I lay in the trap and felt the circles and felt my own hips move a quarter inch toward his fingers and I hated the quarter inch more than I had hated anything in that room, more than the laugh, more than the whine of the mic.

His weight came down. He let the forearm by my head take less and let me take more, and his chest flattened my folded thighs into my own ribs and my lungs went to half. I breathed in sips. The burn behind my knees had become something else, a hard white line from the back of each knee to the base of my skull, and the cushion under my hips was damp and warm and had stopped giving. He was not fucking me now so much as leaning into me, short, deep, a grind that never fully withdrew, and the circles on my clit tightened to something that was almost a pinch. My thighs shook in a rhythm I did not set. The shake went up into my stomach. My mouth was open and no air was going in or out of it; all the air was going through my nose in short hard pulls and that sounded like something too, and I could not fix it without stopping breathing.

And then it ebbed. I felt it ebb. The pressure under his fingers crested somewhere short of the top and started to slide back, the way a wave decides against the rock, and I thought: there. I thought I had done it, that stillness had worked, that the thing could be refused if you only lay under it long enough and gave it nothing to climb. My cunt loosened on him a fraction. The shake in my thighs eased. I let the breath out through my nose slow and even, the way you breathe when you have won, and I kept my eyes on the crack in the plaster and I let myself think about afterward, about standing, about the shoe.

He felt the loosening. He did not say anything. His hips shifted a quarter inch up, and the forearm by my head took a little more weight, and the angle changed by that much and no more, and the head of him was suddenly dragging on the front wall of me on every short stroke instead of past it. His fingers did not change speed. They did not have to. The thing that had ebbed came back from a different direction, lower, under the cramp, under the half-breath, and it came back faster for having been refused. My ankles had crossed behind his neck without my permission, the heels locked against the top of his spine, my own legs holding me open for him, and I felt them lock harder as if my feet were on his side. I did not uncross them. I could not. The cramp had my hamstrings and the fold had my knees and the lock was the only thing that stopped the shaking from becoming something with a sound.

“Give it to me,” he said, and his voice had frayed. “Not the cry. The words. Say want. Say it. You know. You’ve always known what I—” He cut himself off. The unfinished thing hung there, uglier than a confession, and I felt it land in my chest like a hook. He would not name his need. He wanted mine on a plate so he could pretend his was only the knife.

I would not feed him.

The circles tightened. The thrusts shortened, stayed deep, a ruthless little pound that never let the pressure drop. The ceiling crack blurred. The ache was no longer low; it had gone up the front of me, a wire from my clit to the place under my sternum where I had been storing every swallowed sound all night, and the wire was pulling the storage open. I fought it the way I had fought the sounds: with stillness, with teeth, with the stupid belief that if I did not move into it, it could not take me. It took me anyway. The climax hit like a muscle tearing, sudden, total, my cunt clamping down on him in hard rhythmic grabs I could not style into indifference. My mouth opened on the speech I had been too proud to give and what came out was air. Only air. My eyes flooded.

I did not decide to cry. The tears arrived the way the orgasm did, involuntary, humiliating, hot tracks cutting through sweat at my temples and running into my hair. A sob tried to follow. I strangled it. The tears would not be strangled. They kept coming, silent, shaking out of me in time with the aftershocks, and I felt him see them, felt it in the stroke, a stutter in the rhythm as though his hips had looked.

Then he lost it. The curse started as a word and broke in the middle into something uglier, a sound with no letters that he put into my neck, and his hips stuttered and shoved and stuttered again, driving through the clutch of my body as if the clutch had caught him too. I felt him come. The pulse of it, deep, the shudder going through his shoulders and up into his nape where my crossed ankles were locked, so that my own heels felt him break, and his forehead dropping to mine for one unguarded second in which I felt the tremor in him and the wet of my own face between us.

He went still. Inside me. On me. The cushion was soaked under my hips with sweat and slick and his come already leaking around the place we were joined. My legs trembled in their fold, ankles still locked behind his neck, and would not unlock. The tears kept up their small, mortifying work. I stared past his shoulder at the headboard and let them fall, because wiping them would have been a second surrender and speaking would have been the one he had built the whole night to extract. I had not given him the speech. I had given him this, which was worse, which could not be quoted back to the room that had laughed.

Joe lifted his head. I saw it in the set of his mouth before he arranged it: the victory, arriving on schedule, and then something that was not victory. He looked at the tears. His thumb came up and hovered near my cheekbone, a breath from the wet, and did not land. I did not know why it did not land. I thought it might be that landing would have been a kind of touch he had no name for, or that he did not want the evidence on his skin, or that he simply could not tell anymore which thing his hand was about to do. I could not see any of that. I could see the thumb, and the hover, and the swallow that moved in his throat above me, and I made my guess, and the guess was not kind to either of us.

“Don’t,” I almost said, and didn’t. The word died behind my teeth with all the others. My voice, if I found it, would have shaken, and I could not afford what a shaking voice would mean in this room.

He reached back and unhooked my ankles from his neck, one and then the other, the way you take off a collar, and my legs did not know what to do with the freedom and stayed half-folded in the air. He pulled out slow. The drag made me flinch, a full-body twitch. His mess and my own cooled on my thighs, a second wet under the first. He sat back on his heels between my ruined legs and looked at what he had done: the bruises rising along my hipbones in the shape of a footboard, the line of the rail still printed above them, the bite mark on my own wrist, the tears still moving. His cock glistened, softening, absurd and human. His hands opened and closed on his bare thighs, opened again, lay flat. I watched them and read whatever I wanted into them, and what I read was a man looking for something to say about my crying that would not sound like he had wanted it, and I could not have told anyone whether that was true or whether I needed it to be.

The room ticked as it cooled. Somewhere a pipe knocked. I unfolded by inches, graceless, the stretch in my hips a bright wire of pain, the cramp in my left hamstring releasing one fiber at a time and then catching again, and I did not sit up all the way. Sitting up was a road toward the door, and whoever reached the door first handed the other one the bed. I pulled the edge of the sheet over nothing important and left my face bare, tears drying tight on my skin, and I did not reach for my shoe.

He didn’t reach for his trousers where they lay kicked against the wall. He stayed kneeling in the mess, breathing hard through his nose, the way he had breathed at the end. His mouth opened. I watched it open and I watched it stay open for the length of a breath, and I could have filled it with any question I liked, did I hurt you, did you mean it, do you want me to go, and I filled it with all three and then with none, because the mouth closed on whatever it had been and I would never know, and the not knowing sat in the room with us like a third person who would not leave either.

I turned onto my side, away from him, not leaving. The cushion stuck to my hip. My throat ached from the words I had not said and from the use he had made of it before that. A last tear ran into the seam of my nose and hung there, tickling, idiotic. I let it hang. Behind me, the mattress dipped with his weight as he lay down at the far edge of the same bed, not touching, not going. The distance between our spines was a hand’s width and a word said into a microphone and the need neither of us would put a name on.

If I got up, I became the one who had only been passing through, and he became the one who stayed with my tears on his sheets. If he got up, the room would keep me, and the keeping would be my answer. The come on my thighs had gone cold and tacky and pulled at the skin when I shifted. The bruise on my pubic bone had woken up and was starting to throb in time with my pulse, and the hip I was lying on had folded into the cramp again and I could not straighten it without rolling toward him. So I did not straighten it. We lay in the cooling wet, breathing out of time with each other, the footboard ticking once as the building settled, and neither of us moved toward the door, because leaving would have required becoming the one who had needed to remain.