I just loved the Richard in movie so much. He was calm and thoughtful and honestly did love Camille. I kept reimagining what if she just opened up to him, after she spent the night at his hotel room, just that one moment of audacious openness —then probably those next spiralling down the rabbit hole would not have happened. Book!Richard was a shit, there was no saving Camille in the book... but in the show, maybe. Maybe
The room smells like sex.
It's a queer smell, crushed synthetic lavender, root beer, sweat and honey—some of it him, some of it me, all fusing in a solid, tangible clot of memento. A bit like reminiscence.
I lie there silently, numbly trying to disassociate from this meaty slab of a body and staring at the flecks of dust in the slit of light coming through the curtains until everything stales and smells like regret.
My body feels awkward and heavy as I try to decode the situation. Whereabouts of last night. I must've fallen asleep listening to his story about how one time he almost ran over a deer. The wide, scared eyes. The shell shocked, shaking body of the creature after he stopped. Richard had to stomp his horn twice before it ran away. "Almost dizzily," he said, reminiscing. "I've seen the same look on convicts, you know. Sometimes you see a thing that can kill you and you don't have the strength to look away."
"Sometimes you don't want to look away," I mumbled.
My wisdom hung in the air for a moment too long. I was thinking of bolting when he picked an eyelash from my cheek and asked why I came.
I shrugged. "Came for a fuck," I said as crudely as possible. "And the essential psychoanalysis that comes after. What do you think I came for, Dr. Dick?"
His lips twitched. Disappointed, only for a second before he smiled grudgingly. "Sleep, Camille."
It was pouring out in the night. I wanted to get out and get drenched. Wanted to catch a cold. Chug a beer. Carve a crude, slimy word on the stretch of clean skin of my back.
I slept over, instead.
One summer, not far after my violent sexual outburst, I finally went to the slaughterhouse up at the hill to watch how pigs were butchered. I don't exactly know why I did it, except I thought it was time. An intractable corner in my brain suddenly lit up one night and I knew I would be visiting that dark, screeching place as sure as I knew what the next word I'd print on the inside of my knee. I'd been planning it for weeks, what I'd wear, how to slip out quietly from the sleeping house, the gray morning light blurring my view. I imagined how I'd cycle up the hill, how to flash one of my more charming smiles to convince Mr. Dexter to let me in the slaughter room where they'd line up the fleshy, pink creatures. Not too old and not too young, perfectly ripe for butchering.
They look like meaty mass from a distance, a rounded, fat line of edibles. But as I inched close, breathing faster by the second, I could see their shapes more clearly. Their eyes zoomed into my purview. Big and dark and frightened by some primal, cave-like fear. The screaming was bad, almost as bad as the milking compartment. The pigs made a guttural, terrified noise like chalks on a board. And I could see the wave of horror passing onto the next one. Eyes fixed and unblinking, they stared like petrified statues until their time came. And then they screamed.
I figured the entire process would be heartless. That the young guy, with pierced ears and nose would yank up their collars as harshly as he can and with one, great swipe, kill them methodically and wordlessly. It disturbed me to watch him talk with his victims, run a soothing palm over each of their heads. The pigs would calm down, momentarily, before he'd swish the butcher knife over their throats in quick, mechanical precision.
I'd vomited three times before finally being stable enough to ride home. The entire day, I kept closing my eyes and seeing the slaughter over and over, feeling a crawling, dribbling sensation all over my skin as I traced my fingers over the newly brandished word, screeching pig, pig, PIG! in big, bold letters.
I turn my head slightly and the soft linen grazes my cheeks. I almost don't breathe, afraid of waking him. His face is turned away from me, so I make do with the curve from his cheeks to his neck to his shoulder the skin of his lower back. His skin is baby soft, almost scarless and supple. Milk -white and untainted. even without the words my skin wouldn't come near to this perfection my skin is little with freckles on my back. down south I can see this slight ridge of his spine and the fading scar marks criss-crossed in certain places. the muscles dip slightly on his backside before the rest is hidden by the draper. I remember holding on to his ass, momentarily, to make him go deeper, fuck me better.
And the memory rushes in, my moan, the primal, hungry noises scraping from my stomach. His grunts, how the bed creaked and I—
I sigh. It's time to leave.
I'm good with leaving. I can live without a last word, or even a quick glance, if I am determined. a kind word or a slang. I can leave quietly. It took me twenty years to realize that it's a superpower. I get up and carefully pick my purse from the ground.
The word keep breathes on my left hip and I steel myself not to look back at the sleeping body. I've taken barely two steps to the door when he says—
"Good morning,"
A flush creeps on my neck. I don't turn back. "Good morning."
"Not leaving, are you?"
"No," the lie leaves promptly. As I turn back, I know he knows I'm lying. But still, he smiles sleepily.
"Good. I was thinking about coffee."
"Great."
With a single moment of hesitance, I pivot as swiftly as I can and head towards the bathroom.
In the mirror, the reflection of me is too familiar. My eyes are pink around the rims, half-lidded. My skin looks waxy, but firm as I gulp a mouthful of mouth freshener and slosh the tangy liquid around my mouth. I still look pretty, though. I wash out the haziness of the morning and square my shoulder before heading out, taking a glass of water from the kitchen counter.
He's up when I go back into the scene, pulling up a worn, gray trouser. With his back to me, I can't help but enjoy the sight of unmarked terrain again. Smooth, baby white skin. I enjoy the sight for a few precious seconds before he turns back and… smiles. He smiles at me as if he's been waiting for me, and I smile back unsurely. His face is lit up with the knowledge of all that's happened last night. So it goes. I hadn't actually dreamt it. I did come running to him like a scared, distressed deer. He'd really gripped my wrists as he thrusted inside me, filling me up with long, drawn out moans. He had actually bit down into my shoulder when he came.
"How's Amma?" Richard asks after a moment.
My sweet, distressed sister. A bit poisonous, though. When I went to see her last evening, she hissed at me.
"She's fine. She's… well, she's going to be fine."
He nods appreciatively. "Glad to know that."
He starts to fix the upturned room a bit, dropping his shirts into the basket beside the table. The zoomed photos of dead girls are pushed and clipped back into the file. He bunches up the bedsheet, no doubt spoiled, and throws it with the shirts. His kitchen is a boxed space not wide enough for a table so I sit in the bedroom cum living room again. As we wait for the french press to make coffee, last night still buzzes in my head, the humming bits of the all too familiar song playing on an incessant loop.
To feel something…
To feel something…
I try to fish out something clever to say. But the silence settles in warm and heavy, like the smell of coffee and the reheated pasta. Richard is either avoiding me, or he really does love precision, cramped in that small kitchen, his bare back hunched over the breakfast.
"Sorry," he says as he comes back. He starts setting the tray immediately. "It's too early to call room service."
"It's alright." I take a sip of my sugarless coffee. "Although, if you are trying to win me over, you should do better than reheated pasta and an espresso."
He holds my gaze. "Next time, then."
If there is a next time.
"Maybe."
And there's that smile again, charming, coy, and infectious. Coquettish, my mother would say. Suddenly I remember why I'm here and not hungover in a seedy bar at the outskirts of the town. All those sparse, chipped out conversations of ours rush into my head. His witty, cynical, silky smooth way of the world. The way he accepted the complexity of this town with nothing more than a half-drawn smirk. His darkness, too, has allured me into this room. I can almost sympathize with myself. There's no way I would or could ignore all that charm and tension—like a drawn out guitar string—bundled up in that ruddy, boyish handsomeness.
"What're you thinking?" His question cuts me out of my thoughts, which are becoming less and less like thoughts and more like technicolor shots of memory-films.
"Nothing," I lie, and take another sip of the coffee to mask that I didn't lie very well.
"Liar."
"How do you know?"
"Because it's always something with you, Camille."
That's what my therapist had said, last summer. "You are pathologically obsessed. Peace distresses you. You can't trust the goodness of fate so you work your brain harder to find something conspicuous." I tell him the same thing I answered Mrs. Goodwin.
"That's what makes me a good journalist."
"And modest, too."
"Not a bit further from you."
He narrows his eyes, still smiling fondly. I can't take all that fondness. It irks me. Slithers some unique melancholy in me, heavy with disillusionment and small head colds. Before I can say something impulsively, he starts talking again.
"You didn't change your clothes," he says carefully.
Uh oh. "No, I didn't."
"It looks uncomfortable, wearing all that."
"I'm comfortable."
"You could have told me. I am a proud owner of a matching flannel PJ."
He stares at me expectantly and I wonder if he's trying to decode me, connect the dots like some riddle, sliding pieces of me in place in his head. I wonder—the thought comes sudden and sharp—if he's thinking of fixing me.
"Sounds like a question you're not sure if you want to ask," I say.
Something ripples in his eyes. The smile drops, and with it drops the warmth of the morning.
"Why weren't you naked?" he asks. "I would phrase it better, if I was—if we were doing this some other time. But… why?"
It's a kink , slips to my mouth so quickly and efficiently that it might as well be the truth. But still, after all these times, I sit dumbfounded, struck with a sudden, violent impulse to be invisible. The countless excuses stacked in my head collapse in on each other and I can't remember any of it. I'm like a rat slipped into the glass cage with the sticky, heavy greed of a cheese slice, suddenly realizing that my captor has left me no chance to escape or hide.
And without fully realizing what I do next, I find myself extending my hand, slowly lifting my sleeve to my elbow.
My naked arm burns and I stare at his face. His dark, shiny, clever eyes move restlessly. I know he's thinking of all the other times he's seen me. I know he's trying to remember as much of the skin I hide. When he finally looks up at me, eyes wide and vaguely like his soul has left his body, I know that he knows.
"Since when?" he asks, his voice breaking a little.
"I was twelve, I think," I say as nonchalantly as possible.
I wait for him to ask if anyone knows. Just my mother . I wait for him to ask if I had gotten any help. Yes, I had . Do I still do it? No . But do I want to? Sometimes . How bad? So bad, so violently bad . I have a sudden, prickling desire to reimagine a specific past. I want to imagine him there when I carved the first letter. I want him marveled, disgusted and sentimental. I want him to look aghast, and stop my hand before I go on to the next word.
It's stupid, childish dream. Of course I'm not projecting a savior on him. He's hardly a composed person himself. His unkempt world floats from my periphery, the discarded notes, and the half opened drawers. The dustbin is full of empty cracker packets, and beer cans. Somewhere in the kitchen, I know, there's a pincher. The one he used on the mouth of a pig to figure out just the right amount of physical strength it would take to extract a tooth from a human skull. He's fucked, he's tied up by sticky notes and bright, fluorescent threads.
So fuck that. Anything. Everything. I tip my chin defiantly. Well?
Without a word, he leans into my hand. The tip of his finger feels thick with warmth. Bright and fluorescent as he traces every word carefully, as if I might bleed again. He inspects my exposed arm, not opening up more. And after a hundred unbreathable seconds, Richard kisses my hand and I almost melt at the softness of his lips.
He clears his throat before he speaks, just as softly as he kissed my hand. "I'm sorry."
"What?"
"I'm sorry this happened to you."
"I don't—" Somehow, I feel it's important to clarify. "I did this to myself," I say, feeling strangely empowered. "I cut myself, no one made me do it."
He nods. "Yeah, yeah, and someone should've been there to stop you. Someone should've helped you."
"I don't understand." He's supposed to fetishize my words. I thought he was going to ask me to strip down. Or thank me passionately for trusting him to show him this, as if it had something more important to do with him and his goodness, than me.
He stares at me. Then sighs. "Camille," he says," my name sounds more heavy, for some reason. It sounds more impactful. "Camille, in my line… I've seen terrible things. People… they do terrible things to each other. To themselves. I know—" He must have seen the look shifting in my eyes, because he splutters more desperately. "I do, I understand, or will try to."
I only stare at him, mute and unblinking.
"I like you. I'd like to take you out to dinner. You can tell me about all this, or not, whatever you want. But this doesn't change that I think you're fucking fascinating. And this wasn't… this never should have happened."
I don't actually know what I'd been expecting. I don't know if I should trust him or not. Girls are not always precious flowers ripe to be plucked. There was a darkness in me, when I was a teenager. I think even if nothing bad had ever happened to me, with me, I'd have ended up in the same bland hotel room, with the same words breathing on my skin.
"I'm not… I'm not a damsel in distress," I say numbly.
"No," he says, and surprising me, and laughs, "I think you're both the damsel and the distress."
He holds my hand and it's surreal. It's that look in his eyes that makes me reconsider everything. Maybe I would have liked to find a savior in him, even if I don't deserve one. I imagine him in my room, sitting on the bed beside my twelve year old doppelganger. He stares at me, the same fondness and warmth in his eyes, when he grabs my wrists tightly—like last night, when I saw face contort in bliss just before he came—and stops me from piercing my skin. He doesn't say anything.
He stares at my hand now, the skin upturned and ugly. I don't dare to move, or speak, or even manage a meager smile at how preposterous it all seems—how, an hour ago, I was about to slip away from the room, in the quiet and rain-freshened morning, never to speak of this again. I look down at when our skins meet, him rubbing circles on my hand, and close my eyes. I imagine that there's nothing there. Maybe someone had stopped me when I was twelve, maybe someone did. Maybe, if I look at it now, I'll see that the scars are gone and the words are not ugly or burning or anything at all.
"Camille," he says my name, a voice rich with tender adoration.
I take a deep breath—the smell ingrained in the morning: half him, half me, and something inexplicable— and open my eyes into the light.