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This was dying. She knew because she had felt this once before, for eight days in May of 2006. She had sat beside a hospital bed and given her breath so that he would keep breathing. She would hold her breath and watch his chest rise and fall, rise and fall, will it to keep expanding. She would hold her breath until her chest ached and her eyes throbbed, because if he couldn't, then she wouldn't. She would simply lie down and die with him.
She couldn't breathe. She simply lay on her side on the cold, tile floor and gaped uselessly, mouth open and eyes glassy with tears. She tasted snot and salt on her tongue and coughed, a phlegmatic, rattling wheeze. The bathroom lights wavered, and she pressed her burning cheek to the cool floor.
I can't breathe, she thought dully, and the realization brought no panic, only a sour relief. If I can't breathe, then I can't feel. The numbness will settle in and burrow deeper and deeper into my bones. Fingers and toes first, and then it'll spread up my arms and legs and into my stomach. It'll take Junior's place in my womb and grow there, and if I give it enough time, it'll reach out and crush my heart in its nerveless, liberating fingers. Her lips twitched.
If you can't breathe, why are you cryin', girl? her grandfather asked. You got your asshole blowing in reverse?
She was so flummoxed by the image that conjured that she blinked and hiccoughed in surprise. Then the comical scenario was blotted out by the recollection of Don holding hands with another woman at a table in a fancy restaurant, and the pall of misery descended again, a cold fire that cramped her chest and stiffened her limbs. She drew a shuddering, razor-wire breath and spat it out again, and her fingers clawed spasmodically at the worn tile grout.
Her grandfather was right, though; she was crying. It was a low, animal sound pulled from her gut. Hunh. Hunh. Hunnnh. Broken and brittle, a garbled moan possessed of perverse eloquence.
A gut wound, her grandfather muttered prosaically. Deep and lethal by torturous, ruinous degrees. A gut wound can take hours or even days to kill, and most of the time, it's not the wound itself that does the Reaper's work. It's the infection, the slow, patient fever-boil of a festering wound. All it takes is one speck of dirt or undetected shrapnel to hide beneath the dressing, and the damage is done. It breeds, hot and virulent and sickly-sweet, and all the doctors and nurses can do is watch the body rot.
You saw more than your fair share of a gut wound's handiwork as a stripling during the War. The Hogwarts infirmary was never big enough to hold them all, no matter how many Expansion Charms the overworked Aurors and Mediwizards cobbled together. The wounded spilled into the corridors, and before it was over, they were on top of and under the tables in the Great Hall and carpeting the entrance hall of the castle. By the last week, there was no one left to carry them off the field and no place to put them even if there had been, and so they suffered, rotted, and died where they fell.
That swot, Granger, put her mind to use and organized a medical trench for the wounded who still had a chance at survival. The Triage Trench was what the Mediwizards called it, but the rest of you-those of you with eyes and a lick of sense left in your addled brains, that was-called it what it was: The Devil's Abattoir.
No one wanted to look at it, but sometimes it couldn't be helped. You peered over the lip a time or two, and what you saw in those reluctant glimpses will last a lifetime. You remember the bodies. In the beginning, some practical and idealistic soul-Granger again, like as not-tried to arrange them in tidy, symmetrical rows, but it didn't take long for the fanatical order to give way to chaos, and the dying crowded each other. Soon they were stacked like writhing cordwood.
St. Mungo's sent nurses and Mediwizards and novice apprentices, and they slogged through the muck in the trench with grim determination, their green smocks spattered with mud and shit and blood and piss. Sterility protocols went out the window, and they ripped bandages from one patient to use on another. Your most vivid memory of the trench was seeing Madam Pomfrey wading, ankle-deep, through the sluice in that trench, that godawful Devil's brew of piss, blood, shit, and sloughed skin. She had the hem of her smock bunched in both grimy hands, and her scrawny, old-woman's ankles were slathered in gore.
She looked at you over the lip of the trench, and her face was haggard and streaked with dust and the remnants of other people's lives. You were startled at how old she looked, how wasted and slat-thin she was inside her clothes. That wasn't the woman with whom you'd gone toe-to-toe two years earlier, when Harry Potter was the world's most famous vegetable and the Serpent King's head was on the chopping block. It was a wraith in Pomfrey's clothing, and you half-expected her to walk among the bodies, ringing a bell and calling for both sides to bring out their dead. But she never did. She just trudged from patient to hopeless patient, sponging faces and bringing dirty water to cracked, burning lips.
The worst part of the trench wasn't the sight, but the smell, that hideous, rotten-pork reek that blanketed everything for a hundred yards in every direction. It was the gassy, sickly-sweet stink of overripe fruit and spoiled meat, of bodies run to rancid fat. It made your guts heave and your eyes water even if you breathed through your mouth and cast Masking Charms underneath your nose. It was the smell of the end.
The trench was where you learned about gut wounds. You never graced the trench, but you saw plenty who did. They lay in their spot with bandages covering gangrenous wounds, and they were septic for days before they died. The maggots moved in while they were still alive, and you'd watch a green-faced apprentice picking them out of leg and arm stumps and empty eye sockets with dirty, ragged fingers.
They were all bad, those infected wounds, all ended the same way-with the bearer dying in their own shit, raving all the way to Charon's ferry-but gut wounds were the worst. They had their own smell, a simmering, ominous, primeval stench, shit and digestive juices and raw meat, and the wounds would weep and fester and make the poor bastards speak in tongues.
One bearer of a gut wound was a young Auror fresh out of the academy. He'd taken a Sectumsempra to the gut, and his intestines were peeking through the hole in his abdominal wall, bulging through like an obscene second pecker between his fumbling, incredulous fingers. He was dazed as his fellow Aurors dragged him into the trench, and he vomited blood, black and clotted, onto the earth. His friends knew he was dead; they kissed him before they clambered out of the trench with their blue robes clinging to their calves and ankles. You knew it, too, and the ruthless pragmatist in you wondered why Pomfrey even bothered. She had to know what you did. But you knew the answer to that question without having to ask it. She was a Hufflepuff, and Hufflepuffs never gave up. They were Gryffindors without the glory, tenacious as the badgers that adorned their House crest. She would go on until there was no hope, and that was that, and that was beautiful, and you admired her even as you recognized the futility of her task.
It took twelve days for him to die, and you remember thinking that it was like some perverse Twelve Days of Christmas, where coal was just the foreplay. You saw him the first day by accident because you and Seamus Finnegan were spotting each other to the shit pit that used to be the Hogwarts moat, but after that, there was nothing accidental about it. You went by every day under the pretense of scavenging for wands or other magical weaponry, and you looked into the pit.
At first, you told yourself that you were looking because you hoped to see a miracle, but that was a dirty lie, and you knew it. You made that trip every day because you wanted to watch him die, to see if he carried death with the same grace as those born with one mangled foot already dangling off the precipice. It was a petty, vicious, twisted thought, and you hated yourself for it, but you couldn't help it, either. You had to know, so you picked your way over the bodies on the same path every day, and if anyone ever asked why you chose to walk into the heart of the miasma, you just told them that's where most of the usable weapons were. The Mediwizards tossed them over the side during injury assessment. It was true as far as it went, even if it didn't go all the way to the truth.
The first day, he was still lucid, but the fever patches were blooming on his cheeks, and he was shivering beneath the ragged, filthy tatter of blanket. He saw you studying him from the lip of the trench.
It'll be all right, miss, you'll see, he told you, and tried to offer you a reassuring smile, but blood bubbled between his teeth like plum pudding.
No, it won't, you wanted to say. You're for the carrion crows. But you just nodded and crept back to Seamus Finnegan and didn't say a word for the rest of the night.
By the fourth day(on the fourth day of christmas the good lord gave to me), delirium had set in, heralded by the high, sweet stink of pus and rotten meat, and he raved. His eyes rolled to whites in their sockets, and his swollen tongue spoke in gabbled, garbled riddles. Sometimes, he spoke in foreign languages-French and Polish and maybe even Yiddish-but mostly he spoke in the language of the dead, glottal consonants and swallowed, throttled vowels.
By the sixth day(on the sixth day of christmas the good lord gave to me), the maggots had settled in, and the wound festered and clotted with a foul mixture of shit and infection. His stomach bloated with gas and rot and God knew what, and talking had been abandoned in favor of crying and screaming and vomiting. His lips were cracked and bleeding and covered in milky foam. His hands opened and closed and left parallel furrows in the wet ground.
You went back on the eighth day(on the eighth day of christmas the good lord gave to me). God knows why. The experiment had long since lost its novelty and given its answer. Death was just as ugly for the blessed as it was for the broken. It was equally graceless and equally savage, and there was no dignity in it. It was the great equalizer. You didn't want to see any more, to know any more, but it was a diseased, swooning compulsion, like spreading your twisted legs for the pulsating spray of the shower heads when you discovered the first, clumsy joy of self-service sex. You went because you couldn't not go, and you watched.
By the tenth day(on the tenth day of christmas the good lord gave to me), you wondered why Madam Pomfrey didn't put him out of his misery. She didn't have to speak the two forbidden words that burned on the tip of your tongue like passion fruit, the ones that would earn her the clammy embrace of a Dementor. There were Bone-Breaking Curses and Severing Hexes and Compression Charms. There was the simple, final twist of a neck. She could have done it easily and quickly, and the unearthly, glutinous yowling of the damned would finally stop. But she never did. She just mopped his brow and stepped over his blindly groping hands.
The thing that had once been a young Auror stared at nothing and clawed stupidly at the dirt, unwittingly digging his own grave in the mire of human soup. He was emaciated at the end, filled with nothing but the infection that had consumed him from the inside out, and his bony ankles and knobbed, fleshless heels dug into the mud with a wet squelch. His blood-stained teeth were enormous inside his gaunt face, and his eyes were opaque marbles. He smiled at nothing. He knew death was coming for him, and he was glad.
On the twelfth day(on the twelfth day of christmas the good lord gave to me), he left the world with a final glat! No dramatic soliloquy, no parting pearl of wisdom. Just that one nonsense syllable and the gut-wrenching stink of diseased shit. You lurched away from the trench with your eyes bulging and your heart triphammering in your throat, laughing and retching at the same time.
Seamus Finnegan found you beside the shit pit, laughing and singing the Twelve Days of Christmas, flopped bonelessly over the side of your chair with your hair dragging the dirt. You were laughing so hard that you couldn't breathe, and he told you later that they sounded like sobs. Maybe they were, because tears streamed down your too-warm cheeks like blood, and there was certainly no joy in your heart, only a sick shame that you had watched an Auror die like it was a spectator sport and felt nothing but horrified curiosity and a guilty relief that it wasn't you. You laughed to keep from screaming, and to this day, you're not certain it worked.
The Auror was who you thought about in those long hours after midnight when you were holding Don's limp hand in the ICU and willing him to keep breathing. You knew the doctors and nurses had taken exceptional care with him because he was a boy in blue, and that they'd picked out every last fleck of masonry, plastic, and copier. They'd safeguarded against the possibility of infection with massive infusions of antibiotics. You knew all of this, saw evidence of it in the snarl of plastic tubing jutting from his hands and arms, but you couldn't shake the conviction that the gut wound was going to claim him, too, and it would be just as long and agonizing as it was for that Auror.
You didn't dare sleep at his bedside because every time you closed your eyes, you saw blood bubbling from between plum-pudding teeth and smelled the reek of suppurating flesh beneath medical gauze. Adrenaline kept you awake for the first 72 hours after surgery, and when that finally started to ebb, you slipped away for bottles of No-Doze. You dry-swallowed them by the trembling fistful, crunched them between furry, coffee-stained teeth and gagged at the sour grit. You didn't sleep for eight days, almost nine, because once those blue eyes opened, you didn't want to lose sight of them again.
On the fifth day(on the fifth day of christmas my true love gave to me. And oh, wasn't that just a blast from the past that made your skin crawl. You thought it every day that your love was dreaming, and you never could quite place why. And now you know the rest of the story as old Paul Harvey would say.), you had a waking nightmare in the overbright confines of your Sleeping Beauty's bower of glass. You dreamed he opened his eyes, and instead of the bright, blue eyes to which you had grown accustomed, they were cataracted milkglass. He reached for you with dirt-caked fingers and smiled at you with plum-pudding teeth, and as he reached for you, black bile seeped from underneath the bandages.
You made it to the bathroom before you succumbed to gibbering hysteria. You meant to hole up in the handicapped stall, but you made it as far as the back wall, and then the sobs rattled you out of the chair and onto the floor. That's where Hawkes found you, huddled under the sinks and wailing incoherently in the dirty paper towels that nobody bothered to clean up. He thought it was just a delayed reaction to the stress of the past few days, and he hmmed and mmmed while you coughed and gagged and scrabbled at the floor. He didn't realize that you were caught in the grip of total recall and digging a grave for an Auror who had wasted his last coherent words telling you a pretty lie.
You couldn't stop crying. You just cried and cried and rocked and rocked and dug your grave. It came up like bile, and you spat it on the floor in great, noisy gobbets of sound. You were convinced that your sins had come home to roost, that God knew about your perverse experiment at the edge of the trench and was going to exact His vengeance by tainting your love's scrupulously clean wound. He was going to blight them so that he rotted from the inside out for twelve long days and departed the world on a single, nonsense syllable. God never forgets, and your husband was going to pay for your indifferent eyes peering over the crumbling lip of that trench all those years ago.
You tried to tell him, tried to confess. My fault. My fault, you moaned, and coughed on slimy, bitter guilt, but Hawkes just looked at you with compassionate, uncomprehending eyes and murmured that none of this was your fault in his soothing, doctor's tenor.
Rebecca, none of this is your fault, he said over and over again, crouched beside the sink on his lithe haunches. The whites of his eyes were luminescent in the darkness beneath the sink. Not your fault. We're going to get him through this, and he's going to make a full recovery. Now, why don't you come out from under there and let me take you to the cafeteria for a bowl of soup? I can't promise it'll be good, but at least it'll be warm.
But you didn't want a bowl of tepid, watery soup. You wanted absolution. So you shook your head and scrabbled mindlessly at the floor with ragged, fraying nails, and he didn't try to stop you, not until your frantic strokes left bloody weals behind. Then he reached into the shadows with his beautiful surgeon's hands and pulled you into the light, a reluctant child pulled kicking, screaming, and bloody from a diseased and dying womb.
He held your shivering, spasming body against his strong, still one, and you recoiled because that was Don's place, not his. You yowled and sputtered and choked on snot, and when you were exhausted, he lifted you into your chair and rolled you into the cafeteria, where he force-fed you soup the same color as the walls, and only after you'd eaten three slices of toast and downed a cup of hot chocolate did he let you go back to your Sleeping Beauty. You waited until he was out of sight, and then you rolled into the bathroom and crunched half-a-dozen No Doze.
You shook, shook, shook all the time, a buzzing thrum in your nerve endings that never quieted. You refused to leave the next time the nurses came in to change the bandages. You had to be sure that the rot hadn't gotten into him, the seething triumph of the gut wound. So you set your brakes and watched as they undressed your prince. It made you want to cry, seeing him without even a sheet to protect his cherished dignity, and you were tempted to drive them out with your magic and your rage, but you had no choice but to let their trained hands do for him what you couldn't. You watched them, and you hated them, and when they were gone, you rolled to his bedside, rearranged his sheets, and apologized for not having steadier hands.
Three days later, he opened those beautiful eyes for real, and your name was the first word out of his mouth. Not Mac or Stella or his mother's. Yours. It was soft and slurred and laced with pain, but it held enough power to drive the demons back. He drifted in and out of awareness for the next few days, but his hand responded to yours even when his eyes were closed, and whenever you whispered I love you, he squeezed hard enough to make your fingers ache. The gut wound had passed you by.
But oh, you got a gut wound now, girl, and the poison runs deep. You're never going to draw it all out. It's probably going to kill you; you're probably going to bleed out on this floor. If you don't bleed to death or strangle on the memories hunkering on your chest and in your lungs like croup, you'll die from the infection, just like that Auror in the trench.
You know what the bitch of that is, my girl? It'll take a lot longer than twelve days. It'll take the rest of your life. You'll scrape yourself off this floor and find the strength to pack your clothes and pick up your son from his grandparents'. You'll find enough mule-necked pride and bitterness to leave New York behind like you left Scotland at seventeen. You'll find a new home and a new job, and you might even gather the courage someday to leave his name in the records of a county clerk.
But you'll never outrun the rot. It'll find you every time you look at your son, who carries his father's face. It'll slip into the wounds that his innocent face reopens whenever he smiles at you or toddles over to show you the picture he drew for you. It'll sink its vicious, killing teeth into your bones and guts on the day your Junior asks about his father. It'll claim you in the end, and until it does, you'll carry its identifying mark in the pale strip of flesh on the third finger of your left hand.
She raised her hand from the floor and peered at the wedding ring on her third finger with bleary, tear-scalded eyes. The small band of diamonds inset into the gold winked with mocking promise, and she closed her eyes against the sudden image of Don slipping it onto her finger with his warm, gloved hand. Oh, it hurt. God, how it hurt, and she curled in on herself, hands pressed to her stomach as if to staunch a wound.
A gut wound, she thought deliriously. Can't fix those, and shuddered convulsively.
Had she really thought this was her fairy tale, her happily ever after? Of course she had. She must have. Here she was, lying on the bathroom floor in the throes of a sickness with no name.
Oh, it's got a name, all right, her grandfather corrected gently. It's heartsickness.
She thought that wasn't quite right, but before she could offer a better name, her burning stomach locked, and she was scrabbling wildly for the toilet bowl. Her sweating fingers jammed painfully on cold porcelain, and color blossomed behind her eyes.
She tried to shout, "Fuck," but all that emerged from her mouth was a sour, dangerously wet belch. She twisted desperately, and a muscle in her lower back gave a sharp, sizzling twang of protest. She hissed through gritted teeth and groped for the ring of the toilet seat.
Mourning sickness, she thought stupidly, and vomited. It was sour and sickly-sweet, and her muddled brain insisted on crying while her stomach heaved, so that she nearly aspirated bile. She coughed and spluttered and slalomed drunkenly in front of the bowl. Her knees howled at the unnatural position and the hardness of the tile under them. Her long hair, trailed into the dirty toilet water, and as she watched a golden tendril float in a seductive dance with a scrap of partially-digested lettuce, she was seized with a crush despair and bone-deep loneliness.
If Don were here, he'd've ambled into that bathroom to see what was the matter by now. He'd crouch beside me and brush the hair from my face and ask if I was all right even if it was the lamest, most obvious question in the world. Then he'd pick me up from the floor and sit me in my shower chair with a bowl so that I could vomit without wrenching my knees from their sockets. When I was done, he'd wash my hair and hand me the Listerine, and then he'd tuck me into bed and clean up the mess. That's the way it always goes. It was a ritual when I was pregnant with Junior and tossing my cookies at the drop of a hat.
But there was no one here to perform the ritual now, just the tart stink of her own puke mingling with the faint scent of old cleaner.
"I want my baby," she moaned pitifully.
Except he's night your baby anymore, said a mournful voice inside her head. And who knows how long it's been since he was?
An image arose in her mind of Don's lips forming the word pumpkin just before they grazed another woman's knuckles, and she slumped to the floor with a glottal, furious wail.
"Mine. He was my prince," she gasped to the empty room, and let the sobs take her, hard and wracking and merciless. She burned with them, bowed and arched as they winnowed through her veins like lye. She was on a pyre, and she was sure that at any moment, she would burst into flame in an immolating fire.
No phoenix, you, and isn't that a blessing?
I told you love was poison, murmured a silky voice inside her head. I was a bastard, hard and cruel as the Scottish earth I once defended with you, but I never lied, never shielded you from the truth. Not you. I owed you that much. I told you the truth, though I did not couch it in kindness, and you hated me for it. But I always pay my debts, Miss Stanhope.
I warned you that love was poison, insidious as nightshade and twice as deadly, and you did not believe. For all your proclamations of jaded cynicism, you wanted to believe in happy endings, be as blind and ignorant and saccharine as your Gryffindor housemates. You longed for the myth of happily ever after. McGonagall and the old fool would happily let you persist in your delusions, but not I. Is that not the greatest obligation of love, to tell the truth no matter how savage the bladed tongue?
I told you, foolish child, and now look at you. You were once a stubborn chit who brought Dolores Umbridge to her knees in a bit of Slytherin cunning I could not help but admire. You displayed treachery and savagery in all its glory, and if you tried to tell me that your ears don't ring with the memory of Vector screaming and writing in the grip of Cruciatus, I'd know you for a liar. Your legs were broken, but your fangs were not. Those were long and full of venom.
You were stronger as a stripling child than most adults whose paths I have ever crossed, and love has reduced you to a weeping wreck on the bathroom floor. Alone, you could bend the world to your indomitable will, change the course of rivers and time. Bitterness and self-reliance made you impenetrable. The girl who needed no one has been replaced by a spineless milksop paralyzed by the prospect of life without her better half. A house divided cannot stand, Miss Stanhope. Even the Muggles knew that.
She had been so proud of Don Flack, dazzled by the possibility that such a sweet, gorgeous, normal man had been interested in her. It had been flattering and heady, and more than once, she'd pinched herself to make sure she wasn't dreaming as she primped in front of her mirror for a date.
And that was a change, wasn't it? grunted her grandfather, and it was possessed of a gravelly, aching tenderness. You always kept yourself clean and tidy. Life in an institution had long ago instilled a pedantic need for personal cleanliness, but you'd never primped, never worn hose or tied ribbons in your hair or painted your nails. Hell, shaving your legs was a hit-or-miss proposition, sandwiched between staff meetings and office hours. You saved your energy for the more pressing demands of getting by in New York-the broken subway turnstiles and the elevators that stood inert in their shafts despite all the frustrated button-pushing in the world.
But Don made you feel beautiful, so you wanted to be beautiful. You stopped at makeup counters and tested the lipsticks and the rouges, and you let the counter girls work their inexpert but good-hearted magic. You invested in nail polish and moisturizers and softly-scented body lotions. You experimented with depilatory creams, and for the first time since puberty seeded hair beneath your skin, your legs and armpits were bare. You considered mucking with the coarse that between your legs, too, but after a vivid nightmare about mixing up hair remover with Miracle-Gro, you decided to let that sleeping dog lie.
You even bought dainty underthings-lacy bras and panties and a pair of scanty nylons. Oh, you still have a drawer full of old warhorses, tattered, cotton bloomers with more stains than a sous chef's apron, but when you knew there was going to be loving, you wore the danties. They made you feel wanton and seductive and unapologetically feminine, and those were feelings as foreign as moondust before Don entered your life.
You loved it when he spider-walked his fingers over your nylons from sole to thigh. It made you shiver. He made you shiver with the way he looked at you. His hands were always soft, but his eyes, they burned cobalt inside that handsome face, and he poured fire from his lips every time he whispered in your ear or murmured sweet nothings into the shallow valley between your breasts.
It intoxicated you to think that you, with your strange, fractured angles could affect a man like that. That knowledge was as arousing as the skillful work of his hands and mouth. Sometimes more. The glazed want in his eyes or the outline of his erection against the fabric of his pants was enough to dry the spittle in your mouth and dampen your panties. His ragged breath against the shell of your ear when you slipped your hand into his boxers could make the room spin and your nipples furl inside your blouse.
You had never thought of yourself as anyone's lover. In fact, you'd never viewed yourself as a woman at all. You used to tell Neville and Seamus that you were Rebecca Stanhope, brain in a box, and when neither of them, sweet souls, both, contradicted you, you accepted it as truth. When Don chose you from all the women in the city to share his body and his bed, you couldn't believe it, and you fell into it with abandon.
There was no part of you he could not touch, could not imbue with a lascivious fever heat. Kisses weakened your knees, and his fingers tracing gentle lines over the bony knobs of your spine made your heart stutter. He reduced you to malleable putty in his big, warm hands, and he coaxed your fractious limbs into positions you never thought possible.
You trusted him, and you let him teach your body about acts it never knew to crave. You let him tie you up with scarves and cuff you and bend you over the kitchen table and have his way with you while the table jounced under his bucking hips and the wool from his dress blues scratched your ass. When you were a girl the idea of taking a man's prick into your mouth repulsed you. After all, you knew what came out of there, and after long years in the company of more boys than girls, you also knew how sloppy they could be.
But Don made you want to try it. You wanted to see how he would react, what sounds you could coax from him with your curious tongue. You weren't sure what to expect that first time, but he smelled clean and vaguely musky, and when your tentative lips slid over the hard, quivering head of his prick, he tasted of warm flesh, copper and sea salt. It was a foreign taste, but not a bad one by any stretch. The taste of him when his hips arched and his eyes rolled back was thicker and more bitter than you'd anticipated, but that wasn't terrible, either. Once you got used to it, you started to actively crave it, to daydream of it when you were alone in your cramped office with nothing to do but shuffle idly through stacks of your pupils' ineptitude.
But the taste wasn't what made you an addict. It was the sounds he made when your eager, quick-study tongue scoured the rigid, supple underside of his shaft or lapped the sensitive, glazed head. They shivered along your nerve endings like the notes from an Aeolian harp, thrummed in your bones, and whenever you heard the groans and moans your mouth wrenched from the pit of his belly, your brain shut down, and there was only deep, ravenous want, heavy and insistent as nausea.
He was a strong, proud man, your prince, but you could make him beg. With a flick of your tongue, you could rob him of the ability to speak, could convince his well-toned muscles to twitch and cramp and claw his broad fingers into the unprotected fabric of the couch. You could make them fist and curl into your hair in a frenzied attempt to urge you downward. If you touched a certain spot behind the fleshy heaviness of his balls while the tip of your nose grazed the coarse hairs of his Adam's thicket, you could make him forget to breathe, and with that secret in hand, there was no giving up this monkey. The thrill of it ran too deeply in your blood.
Of course, he had his means of power, too, and he exercised it just as fiercely and wickedly as you. It's a dirty thing he does, dirty, wicked, and shameful. When you were a tiny mite of a girl with the aching buds of breasts on your chest and the faintest wisps of hair between your legs, your sex ed counselor at that cripple ranch for the Houdini set told you that while love between a man and a woman was perfectly natural and in the Good Lord's natural order, there were certain things good girls refused to do even with their husbands. She never said what these forbidden fruits were, but you could guess because you were a smart girl with a vivid imagination. And you didn't need Mrs. Prissypants Simmons, with the too-tight hose and the fever-blister rouge to tell you that what he sometimes offers you is one of those things.
You were in Atlantic City the first time it happened. You'd been married six months, and since you'd demurred on a proper honeymoon to spare his strained budget, he took you for a weekend across the way. He'd wanted to take you somewhere else, he said, to Maine for the lobster and the roaring Atlantic, or to Maryland for the crab cakes, but there wasn't enough time in a short weekend, and besides, he thought you'd enjoy the lights and the endless numbers of the casino. If you had your heart set on the sea, he'd take you to the Jersey shore.
He was right. You did enjoy the lights and the numbers, even if you could have done without the noise and the hum of endless conversation. You stuffed yourself gormless at the casino buffets and drank and even danced a little, swaying to the music while he whirled you around the floor in his arms. You played the slots and dabbled in probability and a spot of clandestine Arithmancy to pocket a tidy chunk of change. Not too much; it wouldn't do much to attract the attention of the goombas who patrolled the floor in slick, three-piece suits, but enough to pay for the trip and sock away a nest egg for you and Don's golden years.
And there was the loving. Always the loving. You were surprised that your persnickety love, who knew far too much about what people left behind on bedding, would ever agree to a romp in a strange bed, but he had prepared for the weekend in every detail and brought his own sheets. You laughed until you cried as you watched him tuck in the corners and fuss over the creases, but he was serenely unfazed.
Hey, a tumble in a strange bed is a damn fine thing that shouldn't be missed, he said sagely as he padded from one side of the bed to the other in his socked feet to tuck in a corner. I just don't wanna scratch my ass the next morning and find a souvenir from some guy's nutsack.
That made you laugh until you nearly choked to death, but he was right about that, too. It was a fine thing, a nasty-fine thing. You could be as loud as you wanted without worrying about Mrs. Petrinski's nasal, reedy voice coming through the wall like noxious carbon monoxide to break the mood. You could exhort him to go harder, faster, and deeper in the cheesiest, most vulgar language because nobody was going to give you the stinkeye in the morning, and if they did, who cared? They were never going to know your name or where you lived.
The first night was just languid lovemaking to temporarily consecrate the bed as yours and another pre-dawn romp with rum and Coke on your mouths, sloppy and scrabbling and feverish because you needed the simple comfort of union. You fell asleep without bothering to shower, and when you woke up, your tangled bodies parted reluctantly, masking tape peeled from particleboard.
But the next night… That night, he was primal and possessive. He spent a lot of time with the lubricant, so much that you told him you were A1-A in the hemorrhoid department, thanks. He bit your shoulder as he positioned himself behind you, a gentle nip that prompted a surprised gasp.
I'll stop if you want me to, he whispered into your ear, and one hand slithered up to cup a breast.
You didn't have the foggiest idea what he meant. You had never wanted him to stop since the day he'd taken you into his bed, but then he pushed into you, and you did want him to stop. It was the wrong damn hole, and it had never been intended as an entrance, only an exit. It was too small, and you were certain he was splitting you in half. Your mouth gawped, and your fingers scrabbled and twisted in the bed linens. His hands gripped your hips, and his breath was warm on your neck and the side of your face when he whispered that it was all right, that he'd stop if you wanted him to. Just say the word, doll.
But you didn't say the word. It hurt, but not badly enough to overwhelm the curiosity. That was stronger, truer, and you wanted to see how far he would take it. You took deep breaths and willed yourself to relax, and after a few minutes pain dimmed into tolerable fullness in your belly, and you could concentrate on the softness of his lips on your skin and the gentleness of his fingers as they swept over your taut belly and dipped between your legs to find the slick dampness.
Curious tolerance turned to wanton pleasure by the end, a fact that surprised him as much as it did you. You still remember the sharp intake of breath when you began meeting his thrusts, and he lost all sense of control when you begged him not to stop. It was hot and nasty and dirty, and you loved it because you were doing something that most of the good girls never dreamed of. You weren't supposed to be getting laid at all, and there you were in a nice hotel, indulging in this beautiful obscenity with your prince. That was the thought that tipped you headlong into the abyss. You were smiling as you came your brains out underneath him, laughing, and the tremors shook you to pieces and his loving hands molded you together again. You did take a shower after that one. You wanted to get dirty, not be dirty.
It's not a proclivity in which you often indulge-God knows what would happen to your pooper if you did-but its rarity increases the thrill. Every three or four months, he assumes that delicious mount, and blood turns to liquid fire in your veins. It's dirty, but sacred, an act of startling intimacy and tenderness for something so rough, and the satisfaction runs deep to know that there is no part of you that he has not possessed.
You thought it meant something to him, but now you wonder if he wasn't just exploiting your weakness for him and your ravenous need for touch. Maybe while he was telling you you were beautiful, fuckin' beautiful with sweat beading between your breasts and on the flushed nubs of your nipples, he was laughing at your breathless, unalloyed neediness. Maybe while he was whispering in your ear about what doing that to you was doing to him, he was imagining what he would say to his buddies in the precinct. Maybe they all went to Sullivan's for beers and sniggered at how easy it was to get you out of your clothes.
And if he was doing that, who's to say he wasn't talking out of school about everything else you let him see, all the other vulnerabilities you exposed in the mistaken belief that he'd protect them? Maybe he told them about the accidents you have when you can't find an accessible toilet quickly enough. Maybe he told them about cleaning vomit off your front and shit off your rear after one of your spastic seizures, when your muscles lock and your teeth grind and all you can do is scream your way through the pain. Maybe he bitched about having to spoon-feed broth into your mouth like you were a helpless baby bird because your nervous system was too fried to receive its marching orders, let alone interpret them. Maybe, just maybe, he admitted that he regretted taking you on as his pet pity project.
"No," she whimpered. "No, no. He didn't marry me for pity. He loved me once. I know he did."
He loves you still, insisted a fierce voice. You've too much proof of his devotion to throw it all away on the anger of a moment.
She wanted to believe that voice, longed to believe it, but she couldn't trust it. It was the pitiful voice of love disappointed, the voice of a gangly, asexual child who remembered too many nights spent alone in a spinster's bed. It was the voice of forlorn, blind hope, and it came out of her TV every morning at nine, when Jerry Springer salted the wounds of the abused and downtrodden with his microphoned knout.
He loves you still. Shrill. White-knuckled panic. He does. Only love would move him to care for you the way he does. Only that would prompt him to crack jokes while he mops vomit from the bathroom floor and gathers up your soiled clothes to carry to the laundry room downstairs. Only that sweet devotion would move him to feed you soup when you're too weak and logy to do it yourself. He gave you his name and his child. Do you think he would do all of that for mere pity?
Then why was he sitting in that restaurant, kissing that woman's hand? Why did he call her pumpkin? Why didn't he take the chance to set things right when you offered it? You mean so little to him that he didn't even bother to feign remorse, to run from the restaurant with insincere explanations and apologies at the ready. He just sat there with that beautiful, indifferent face and watched the knife sink home and twist in its mark. You were his plaything and nothing more. He gave you his child because yours was an available womb.
Besides, this isn't the first time the thought's crossed your mind. His mother said the same when you were in the hospital waiting room, spit it at you like venom. You told yourself it was the grief-stricken ranting of a mother unwilling to accept that she no longer held pride of place in her only son's heart, and that only son assured you of his love four months later while you sat in the ceramic debris of your dinnerware with blood and dust on your hands.
Now you're not sure. There's been a thaw in the formerly frosty relationship between you and Mother Flack of late, and you assumed it was because of Junior, that wriggling, squalling, marvelous culmination of all her grandmotherly aspirations. His arrival has transformed you from barely-tolerated pariah to accepted member of Clan Flack. She's stopped baring her yellowing fangs at you every time her beloved boy's back is turned, and seeing her with Junior, you understand why your love became the man he did.
But it wasn't Junior, was it? She can afford to be kind to you now that she knows you for a fool. She smiles freely because she knows her son's heart isn't yours anymore, if it ever was, and while you're blissfully holding his hand or pecking his cheek, she's imagining him hip-deep in his new love.
There was no coherent thought for a long time after that. Just wave after wave of mourning sickness. She cried until her throat hurt and beat her hands against the unyielding tile until their throbbing matched the ache in her chest, and when they could not stand another blow, she scratched until her fingertips were raw and bleeding and painting red phoenix feathers on a clean, white canvas. She vomited constantly. Sometimes she hit the bowl, and sometimes she didn't, and she found that she didn't care either way. She just retched and grimaced and wiped the tendrils of saliva from her lips with the back of one frozen, bloody hand. She cradled her aching, empty stomach.
And she cried. It was a crying without cadence or end, a single, unceasing note pulled from the bottom up and fueled by the death rattle of her dying memories. It was, she realized with no surprise at all, the sound of breathing, and just as permanent. From this day forward, it would accompany and mark all the moments of her life. It would whistle and hum around the rim of her tea mug and seep into her lectures and the lullabies she sang to Junior at night. She would carry it along with her surgical scars and the pinprick scar from the MMR shot she'd gotten as a child.
Rattle and hum, baby, she thought. Rattle and hum.
She cried until her head was heavy and stupid and her nose and ears were plugged. She was still crying when Mrs. Petrinski's voice drifted through the wall.
"Cut it out already," she demanded. "'M tryin' to watch my shows."
"Bite me," she muttered dully, and tittered.
She didn't know how long it was before the voice of the Serpent King spoke again, but it did.
That, Miss Stanhope, he murmured, is quite enough wallowing. Stop sniveling and get up. He's broken your heart, not your spine. The latter is pitiable; the former is not. He is no longer worthy of your time. If he chooses to bed a harlot, then leave him to it. Pack your bags and scrape the dust from your heels and never look back. You've done it before, and you can do it again. All you have to do is remember your hatred.
That well still runs deep, does it not, Miss Stanhope? And the water is still bitter as gall. All the love of your fallen prince's heart could never sweeten it, nor did you want it to because you knew its potency all too well. Love is fleeting and ephemeral as dreams, but hatred is eternal. It never truly dies. It only sleeps. Hatred drives men to crawl across the battlefield, dragging their entrails behind them, just to sink their teeth into the throat of the enemy one last time. Love is a child's game, but hatred is stronger than the grave. Hatred is the stuff of immortality.
She heaved herself into a sitting position, propped haphazardly against the wall with legs akimbo. She scrubbed her feverish face with her hands and drew a deep, shuddering breath. "Won't get fooled again," she warbled, and cackled. God, she hated that song, but it was true. She wouldn't get fooled again. It was time to cut her losses before love played her for a fool again.
Junior was spending the night with his Nana and Grandpa, and she saw no point in disturbing him. Better to pack and burn the bridges of this life she had made without her screaming, confused, infant son to weaken her resolve. Bloodlettings were best done in private. She would collect him in the morning as planned. In the meantime, she'd pack a bag for them both and take a trip beyond the wall in Grand Central Station to get a hotel room for the next few days. After that, well, she'd take that when it came. She raised her hand to Summon her wand, first two fingers jutting in a tight point.
You promised him there would be no magic, shrieked the small, desperate voice of love unconquered.
"Yeah, well, he promised to love no other," she rasped, and in her mind's eye, she saw Don brushing his lips over Jezebel's fingers. "Accio wand!"
The scrape and creak of an opening bureau drawer. The rustling jostle of wands shedding a velvet bag. The whoosh of air and the clatter of wands jockeying to reach her first. First one, then the other darted through the bathroom door and landed in her upturned palm. The undeniable weight of them surprised her into tears again.
"Am I really doing this?" she asked the empty room.
Yes, you are.
She pointed the thicker wand at her chest and clutched the thinner one in one nerveless hand. "Automus Wingardium leviosa!" she said listlessly, and just like that, magic returned to her life, unspectacular and uncelebrated.
She Levitated herself out of the bathroom and into her chair, which was parked beside the bed, and there she sat, broken and dazed. She knew what she should do now, but she lacked the strength to do it. Breathing was a conscious effort of will. She caught sight of her reflection in the vanity mirror and shuddered. All was drawn and in darkness except for her hair, which burned like golden fire in defiance of her sorrow.
He always loved your hair. He loved to turn it in the light after lovemaking, to smooth it in the sunlight, to bury his face it when he came. You told him it was your crowning glory, but the crown has grown too heavy. Leave it for him in remembrance of what was. Let him come home and find it strewn over the bed like golden silk. He made his bed. Now let him lie in it.
"Accio scissors!"
The scissors zoomed into her palm from the kitchen, bright and sleek and eager to please. She stared at their gleaming blades, and for a moment, she was tempted to plunge them into her wrists and anoint them with her lifeblood, but there was Junior to consider. Sweet Junior who smelled of talc and caramel, and who was warm and contented against her breast as he suckled. It wasn't his fault that everything she touched had the disturbing habit of turning to shit.
She opened the blades, raised them alongside her cheek, and stuffed a hank of hair between them. Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair.
"I loved him. Oh, God, I loved him," she said, and blinked away tears. Her fingers tensed on the cheap, plastic grip of the scissors.
Just then, there came an authoritative rap on the front door. The scissors trembled in her grip.