Small Crimes
This one-shot is dedicated to Majikat who never ceases to inspire me with her beautiful work.
This piece is far more abstract than is my usual style, and was something I wrote to break free from the writer's block which had, unfortunately, been constraining me.
Credit for the lyrics belong to Damien Rice for his song 9 Crimes
Leave me out with the waste
This is not what I do
It's the wrong kind of place
To be thinking of you
It's the wrong time
For somebody new
It's a small crime
And I've got no excuse
She can feel the expensive linen caressing her skin, a chill from the open window coaxing her into wakefulness. But she doesn't want to be awake. Because to open her lids and acknowledge where she is and what she's done is to welcome the shame.
And she does not want to do that.
She wants to stay in this bed of silken sin and wash away the thoughts that haunt her, the thoughts and the nightmares that chase her steps when she is not around him.
She turns over and presses her palm to the bare sheets. They are cold and bereft and so is she. She feels the guilt begin to soak into her skin at the realization. When she is left alone to dwell on what they are doing she is chewed up by it. But when he is here with her, his skin slick and pale against hers, vital, breathing her in and intoxicating her so that she forgets; in those small hours the guilt is gone and all she feels is the touch and it is far too right and far too wrong.
She knows she is weak because of it, because of him. And though she tries in vain to remember how it all began, this desperately messy situation, her thoughts are clouded by other memories. Memories of him and her each night passed, when his face would hover over hers, trembling with the need, his eyes a darkened grey that burn right through her.
And each morning she would lie in his bed willing him to come back and dispel her fears for just a moment longer. But he never does. So she walks away, back to her life and her reality and she says she will not come back. And yet she does.
She always does.
She commits this crime over and over and she prays for salvation and a deliverance that never comes. Deliverance from him.
Staring at the ceiling, she thinks that she should feel tears and shame and anger at herself, but she cannot. Not while she is still here and soaking in his scent. He keeps the thoughts of her fiancé away.
But she knows that it should be the other way around, she should be lying in bed with her betrothed one. But she can never fool herself of the difference between the two, for he would never leave her in the bed alone.
She wonders if he knows the truth. There are times, she knows, that she smells of him and of their sin and she wonders that he never says anything when she comes home too flushed. She both fears and hopes that he does know – so that the guilt of her lies should no longer bury itself beneath her skin.
There is no happy ending now, she learnt that long ago. The world in which she sought perfection was unable to deliver and neither was she. So she settled. Settled herself into the cavity between two wrongs: the man she ought to marry and the man she should never have allowed to touch her.
She knows very well that there is no logic for what she does, for why she comes here to him so often and so willing. It is not in her nature, or so others would say.
But she has lived in a world that made no sense, a world once marred by darkness and horror, by fear of one person, one thing. And she knows that she is jaded because of it. They all are.
And this is how she copes. This is how he copes.
In this twisted suspension of reality, they exist without past or future, without thoughts of others and the consequences they would incur. They exist this way, in this room, because they can. They can wrap themselves in one another and revel in this aphrodisiac called illusion.
She often wonders in those moments, when she is awake and he is outside, what he is thinking. She tries to catch herself from such thoughts because she recognizes the danger of them, but she cannot always contain the curiosity, the need to know.
But she always stops herself from forming the question and letting it fall gracelessly from her lips. Because that will be the end of it. And despite the cold and the shame she does not want this to end.
This cannot end.
Leave me out with the waste
This is not what I do
It's the wrong kind of place
To be cheating on you
It's the wrong time
But she's pulling me through
It's a small crime
And I've got no excuse
His palms run restlessly over the smooth wrought-iron of the terrace, which leads from his room, his sanctuary. He stands out here now because she is in there still, her legs tangled in his sheets and her curled mass of hair spread like a fan over his pillows.
She looks good that way, sprawled and uncontrolled. She is vulnerable when she is like this, and he knows that he should never have seen her in this way. But he does, and he knows that though he should give it up, this strange addiction he has to her, he is not sure he can.
Is not sure he wants to.
The rightness, the wrongness; it is a balm to old wounds. She heals them with her touch, with her kisses and though it is not permanent it gives him a reprieve from the anguish of his memories: his flaws and his mistakes.
He doesn't sleep the way she does. He lies in the bed he ought to share with his wife, with her lying next to him. The imperfection and asymmetry of it confuses and satisfies him in those hours, so that though he does not sleep he feels an ease of which he is unaccustomed.
He wonders how she can sleep so well and so peaceful when he cannot.
He watches her when she sleeps, watches her lips, the taste of which haunts him; watches the way her hands curl defensively around herself. She clutches at him, so that at times he thinks perhaps she needs him too.
He often wonders what she dreams of. Does she dream of him, or of the other – the one he tries not to think of? Her fiancé, yes. But not her lover.
Because although he knows well enough that they ought not to be here, and be doing the things they do, he feels as though he owns her. A part of her at least. A part he wishes that no one else would see, because he is possessive like that.
And he cannot control it. He cannot control anything.
His life, his thoughts, they spiral from time to time. To the depths of darkness in their need to reminisce, to remember the horror and the dread that once was his life. Not so very long ago.
They come at times, the memories, when he least expects them, to remind him of why his life is a mirror of shattered and mismatched pieces of glass.
Because he broke it. Poor decisions and ill-timed mistakes, no matter the reasoning, have caused him to be this way. A shell of what he was. And he cannot help but wonder when he is most bitter, if it is better this way.
This numbness he so often feels is his saviour. It rescues him from the scarring and the self-hatred. But there are times, infrequent though they may be, that he fears he shall drown in the numbness. That one day he shall never resurface to feel or think a thought.
That is why he does it. That is why he needs her. Because she pulls him to the surface, reminds him of his livelihood when he is sure that he is no longer breathing.
The taste of her, the taste of transgression is a reminder of past crimes, and of new ones.
He wonders often, when he is standing out here with the bitter wind biting at his skin, whether he can give it up, this strange compulsion that he has. He thinks of her twisting beneath him, the glisten of moisture that builds up on her brow, the breathy sounds of anguish and of bliss that she does not know she makes.
He wonders whether she will do it instead. Will she walk away and not come back? Perhaps she will, is his answer. Perhaps her innate goodness, her need for the approval of others will win out one of these days and pull her back into its realm of sanity.
He cannot think what he will do when that happens.
He can only hope that one day he will learn to save himself from the darkness that beckons.
Perhaps that is what she will teach him.
But he cannot reflect on that now. Though he would never tell her that; he fears she will walk away and not come back, he likes to think that she wouldn't. Even though he knows that this is not enough for her.
And yet she continues to return, she continues to heal him.
Sighing deeply, he turns to look into the vast room he had left many hours ago, as he always does. He can tell that she is waking now, choking on the doubts that beckon to her.
He will not allow it.
She turns to look at him and he wonders how she heard him move. For he was so very silent. She looks at him in that way he loves and hates, the way he always did and never knew before now.
No, he decides. He will not let her change her mind. Will not let her resurface from her own pain. And though he knows it is selfish to want her to lie in his web a little longer, he wants to drown with her.
To wallow in this sin, in this crime for just a moment longer.