Rooms

She came back the next night.

And the next. And the next.

She did not stay. She came, and she took me apart, and she left, and each time she took me further and let me fall further and she did not let me land. The denial became the air I breathed. It was everywhere. It was in the way she looked at me, the way she touched me, the way she put her mouth on every inch of my body and refused the inches that mattered.

But her own needs she took freely. Each night she pulled my face between her thighs or pulled my hand between her legs or ground herself against my body beneath her, and she took what she wanted without hesitation and without apology, and she came, once, twice, her sounds sharp and uncontrolled in the dark, and when she was finished she buttoned her clothes and looked at me with the mask on and told me to sleep and left me on the bed shaking and hard and unanswered. She took. She always took. What she never gave was permission.

On the third night she took me out of the room.

I had not been past that door in weeks. The hallway was stone, candlelit, cool, and it stretched in both directions and I followed her down it on unsteady legs and she did not look back. She walked and I walked and the marks on my neck pulled toward her like a compass needle and I did not think about where we were going because thinking required a mind and my mind had been gone for weeks.

The room was at the end of a corridor I had never seen. She opened the door and she took my wrist and she led me inside and she closed the door behind us and I stood in the center of the room and I understood, looking around, that I had been here before. In the nights I could not remember. The room came back in fragments, a wall here, a shape there, the way a dream comes back in the afternoon.

It was warm. That was the first wrong thing. Every room I had been in with her had been cool, her temperature, her climate, the air around her made for her body and not mine. This room was warm. Heated. The floor was covered in something dark and soft, and the walls were draped, and the light was low and red and it came from everywhere and nowhere.

There was a chair. A large low chair, wide as a daybed, upholstered in dark leather, angled so that whoever sat in it could see the whole room. Elena walked to it and she sat and she crossed her legs and she looked at me standing in the warm red light and she said, "Take off your clothes."

I took them off. My hands shook on the buttons. She watched every button come undone and she did not help and she did not look away. When I was finished I stood in the warm light and I was naked and shaking and hard and she looked at me, patient, assessing, in control, and her eyes moved over me slowly, from my face to my throat to my chest to my stomach to lower, and she took her time at the lower part, and her mouth curved.

She held out her hand. I crossed the room and took it and she drew me down and she positioned me, her hands on my hips, turning me, pressing on my lower back until I understood what she wanted, and I knelt on the chair with my back to her, my knees on the wide seat, my hands on the back of the chair, my spine arched, my body open to her, exposed in a way that made my face burn.

She put her hands on me. Both of them, flat on my lower back, and she slid them down, slow, over my hips, and she dug her nails in on the way back up and I heard myself make a sound and she did not stop me. She explored me with her hands the way she had explored me with my mouth the nights before, systematic, thorough, learning every muscle and every bone and every place that made me gasp or clench.

Her mouth found the back of my neck. Cold and wet, her hands on my hips holding me in place, and her mouth moved down my spine, vertebra by vertebra, her tongue tracing each ridge, and I pressed back toward her and she held me still and she took her time. Her hands came around my hips, her nails dragging along the crests of my bones, her fingertips tracing lower, along the creases where my legs met my body, close, so close to where I needed her, and the proximity alone was enough to make my whole body shake. She traced the lines of me with her nails, following the V of muscle beneath my stomach, running her fingers along the edges of me without ever closing her hand, and the sounds that came out of me were not sounds I had ever made before, raw, uncontrolled, desperate, and she wound me to the edge with nothing but her hands and her mouth on my back and the maddening nearness of her fingers and she stopped.

She stopped.

I made a sound that was close to a scream and she slapped my thigh, hard, and the sting of it cut through the need and she said, "Be still."

I was still. I was shaking so hard the chair creaked. She sat back. I could feel her looking at me, the cool assessment of her gaze on my body, on the way my muscles strained.

"Turn around," she said.

I turned. I knelt on the chair facing her and she was right there, close, her face level with mine. She put her hand flat on my chest and she pushed, gentle, firm, and I went down, my back flat on the wide seat of the chair. She stood beside me and she looked down at me laid out below her and her hair fell around her face.

She pulled her dress over her head. She was not wearing anything underneath. She stood beside the chair in the warm red light and she was pale and perfect and I pulled toward her without meaning to and she put her hand on my chest and held me down.

She climbed onto the chair. One knee beside my head, then the other, and she straddled my face and she looked down at me between her thighs and she said, "Again."

I opened my mouth and she lowered herself onto it and I tasted her again and she was already close, already wound, and she ground against my face with that same greedy urgency and I felt her thighs tighten and her hand fist in my hair and when she came this time she bore down on me with her full weight and her thighs sealed shut and my lungs were already empty and the world went dark at the edges and I kept my mouth on her because she had not told me to stop and I did not stop until she lifted off me and I gasped, my chest heaving, my vision blurred.

She climbed off the chair. She stood over me and she looked down at my face, wet with her, wrecked, desperate, and she reached down and she traced one finger along me, one long slow stroke from base to tip, and I arched off the chair and she took her hand away.

"Good," she said. "Very good."

She dressed. She did not hurry. She let me watch her put her clothes back on the same way she had let me watch her take them off, slow, deliberate, and I lay on the chair and shook and did not move because she had not told me I could move.

"I will send someone with food," she said, buttoning her shirt. "You will eat tomorrow. All of it."

"Elena."

She looked at me. For one second her face did something. Her jaw worked. Her eyes went soft and raw and then hard again, fast, the mask snapping back.

"Eat," she said. "Sleep. Tomorrow I will need you again."

She left. I lay on the chair in the warm red room and I did not sleep and the need in me howled and I pressed my face into the leather that smelled like her and I breathed and I shook and I did not touch myself because she had not told me I could and that was all that mattered. That was everything.