Whores
They have very different means of coping with Dorcas's little problem. Apparently, Dorcas is going to keep hopping in bed with the entire castle until she finds somebody who can give her an orgasm, as if that's ever going to happen. For Tom's part, Dorcas has always gotten him off just fine, and besides, he's got plenty of other ways of getting girls to writhe with their backs arched below him. The thing wouldn't be even a remote priority if it weren't for… she's Dorcas. Her hips make him queasy. She's growing out her hair.
The sex would be great if they didn't feel anything before, he says. We have terrible sex, says Dorcas, and Tom can't tell whether she's talking about her panic attacks or whether she just thinks he deserves better—normalcy. She doesn't seem to understand that, if it were anybody else, it wouldn't be a priority. Her neck makes her a priority, and if he can't own that, then he's almost fine with owning bodies instead.
No one else has ever looked at him like Dorcas used to—like he deserves to find what he's looking for, like he's not admirable, like he's not despicable, like he's pitiable. Tom tries so hard to figure out what the point is. The best and worst part is that they've got a point in their eyes before the life goes out. He wants to steal it. He rips his insides apart to pay rent to this world until he steals it. Tom tries so hard, and he disgusts her, the girl with the hips who believes there's a better way, but when his spasms wear off, he still sees nothing at all, and if that doesn't do it, then surely it'll have to be the eyes that do it, maybe.
It started with her hips, and then she started to puzzle him out, and still it didn't make her go, at first. Tom thought that maybe she could be the point, the girl with the pity, but she cries when she's naked and she's never going to win her fights. Dorcas bruises herself like she'll spout out Spellotape to patch up them both, but she doesn't know he's putting pieces into rings she won't be able to find, and she doesn't know how to want people, just how to love them, and that's worse for everyone in a way, to be loved but not wanted.
She gets queasy from intimacy, not bodies. She kisses people because they're raw, because she's raw, because she thinks they won't chafe when touching together their cracked hands. Tom doesn't feel her as his savior, and Dorcas must hate herself for whoring herself out because she can't loathe him, because she needs to learn how to loathe him. Half her problems would be gone if she could jack off like everybody else does in this castle, but she's never known how to save herself, and she has a funny way of demonstrating that she's needy, and he wonders what Avery must have done to her in third year to make her so needy. She's growing out her hair. She still asks him to pull hard on it, sometimes, between his episodes.
