Kept

The world got smaller. Or she got bigger. I could not tell which.

It started with the nights stretching longer. She would send the car at dusk and I would go down to it without question, without packing a bag, without telling anyone, the dark window would carry me to her, the door would open, and she would be there, and the rest of my life would fold up small and quiet and wait.

My work stopped mattering. I did not lose the job. I couldn't have. Things kept arriving, signatures were handled, emails answered and meetings rescheduled, as though some quiet hand were tending the machinery of my old life from a distance. I did not ask. I did not want to know. I wanted the nights.

She fed on me every night now.

Not always the same way. Sometimes quick, her hand in my hair, her mouth on the marks, the white hurt and the gold and then her pulling back composed, wiping her lips, leaving me on the floor of whatever room she had put me in while she crossed to the window or pulled out her phone or started to read resting a book in her lap. Those nights I was food. Those nights she did not look at me at all, and I knelt where I had fallen and felt the hunger in me settle and i did not move until she told me to move.

But other nights.

Other nights her hands shook.

She would start the same way, cool and controlled, her mouth on my throat, and I would feel the moment it changed in her, the small tremor that ran through her jaw, the way her grip on my shoulder would tighten past holding into wanting. And I would feel her breathing change against my skin, uneven, unnecessary, a habit of the body, surfacing now because something in her had slipped its leash.

Those nights she did not stop at the blood.

She pulled back with her lips wet and her eyes too bright and she would look at me the way she always looked at me, furious and hungry and trying not to be either, and she would put her hand on the top of my head and press down. Slow. Deliberate. And I would sink.

I knelt.

I knelt before her and looked up and her hand stayed on my head and her fingers curled into my hair and I watched her face work through something she could not name. She did not ask. She pressed, and I went, and my knees found the floor and my hands found the cool skin of her thighs and she let out a breath she did not need, sharp, unsteady, and her head tipped back.

I did not know what I was to her in those moments. I did not try to know. I put my mouth where her hand guided it and I felt her shake apart above me and I held her hips steady while she took what she wanted and when it was over she would pull me up by the hair and kiss the taste of herself off my mouth and push me away and straighten her clothes and not look at me for an hour.

I did not understand any of it. I understood that she needed. I understood that the needing frightened her. I understood that whatever I was, whatever the thing in me was that made her shake and slip and press my face to her with both hands, she could not stop coming back to it, and the not being able to stop made her more cruel, not gentle, and I took the cruelty because it was the only language she had for what she could not say.

Some nights she did not bother with the kneeling.

She would come in late and cross the room and shove me down wherever I was, the bed, the couch, the floor, and pin me by the throat with one cold small hand and take what she wanted with the other, her eyes shut, her jaw tight, using me with a focused desperate efficiency that left no room for tenderness or even thought. She would finish fast and hard against me and then she would bite and the gold would take me under and I would wake on the floor with my shirt torn and my throat stinging and her gone.

I told myself it was enough. Being needed. Being used. Being the warm thing she could not stop coming back to even though it scared her. I told myself it was enough and I knew it was not and I did not know what would be enough because I did not know what I wanted from her anymore except more, more of her hands on me, more of her shaking, more of the look on her face when she slipped, and the wanting scared me too, because it was starting to feel less like hunger and more like something I had no word for.

One night she had me on the bed. She was above me, her knees either side of my hips, her hands flat on my chest, and she was moving against me with her eyes closed and her head tipped back and her mouth open, and I watched her face and I reached up and touched her cheek.

She stopped.

Her eyes opened. She looked down at my hand on her face and I watched something collapse behind her eyes, fast, like a door slamming, and she caught my wrist and pinned it above my head and her grip was hard enough to bruise.

"Don't," she said.

"I wasn't."

"Don't."

She moved my wrist to the mattress and held it there and she did not move again for a long moment and I lay still beneath her and felt her pulse under the skin where her hip pressed mine, slow, so slow, and her face above me was stricken and closed and furious.

"You don't get to do that," she said. "You don't get to be gentle with me. Do you understand. That is not what this is."

I did not understand. I had touched her face. I had only touched her face. But she was looking at me as though I had said something that could not be taken back, and her hand on my wrist was shaking, and I could see her trying to find the cruelty again, reaching for it, needing it to put the door back between us.

"Yes, Elena," I said.

She closed her eyes. She let out that breath she did not need. She let go of my wrist.

She did not come back for three days after that, and when she did she did not look at my face, and she fed from my wrist standing up, and she left without a word, and I sat in my apartment in the life she kept tidy for me and tried to understand what I had done wrong.

I had touched her face.

I had been gentle.

And she had looked at me as though the gentleness was the one thing she could not survive.