The Red(41)

More.

And more was exactly what he gave her.





Dora and the Minotaur





The welts took nearly a month to heal. Mona wondered if Malcolm had timed his evening with the crop to coincide with the coming of cold weather. Whatever the cause, she was glad for the chill in the air to give her a reason to keep her body well-covered as she healed from the crop and its hundred kisses.

In the days after that night, she could barely remember the events without trembling and hiding herself in her office until she'd gotten hold of herself again. How had he done it? Trained her so quickly to crave pain? And she'd asked him permission to love him? What had possessed her to ask him about his children?

Possessed her. That was it. She felt like he'd gotten into her soul somehow, into her mind, and had taken control of her body and her brain. The thoughts she had of him kept her up at night-sometimes weeping with shame, more often burning with longing. Not a day passed she didn't make herself come once or twice. One day, four times when she became fixated on the specific memory of her lips on his boot buttons, how she'd worshiped him on her hands and knees, how she'd opened her holes up to him in an offering that he'd accepted with a vicious lash of his crop. No man had ever made her feel so much as Malcolm did. Pain didn't cancel out the pleasure-it doubled it, trebled it. With other lovers she'd felt pleasure and lust. With Malcolm she felt pleasure and lust, but also pain and fear, love and hate. It was the most potent of alchemies. She would have sold herself to him every night of her life for another taste of those boot buttons. 

Mona didn't know what to do with herself while she waited for Malcolm's return. She tried focusing on her work. Malcolm had left her a pen and ink drawing by German-American cartoonist Lyonel Feinenger as payment for the night with the crop, and she liked it so much she knew she wouldn't sell it to pay off her debt unless she absolutely had to. The drawing was of two ghosts carrying their own urns while a tall and skinny black cat stared wide-eyed at the pair of silly spirits.

A handful of gallery events had generated a little income for The Red, but the debt still loomed, growing larger with interest every day. She treated it like she treated fantasies of Malcolm, chasing them from her mind whenever they reared their heads.

Still … she thought of him.

Mona wanted to believe Malcolm had some feelings for her. Feelings other than simple lust or desire. He never left until she fell asleep, and she often fell asleep with him inside of her, his ardor for her body far greater than her stamina. She'd asked him the night with the crop why he came to her so infrequently and he'd said their encounters were taxing, that it took him time to recover. She found that difficult to believe. A man with his libido worn out for a month or two from one night of sex? Impossible. No, he must have a wife waiting for him in England. She'd worked up the courage to ask him about his children, but she couldn't stomach mentioning a wife. Though if his children were grown as he said, why wouldn't he leave his wife? If he even had a wife? Was she the source of all his money? Is that why he stayed with her? Or was he divorced, and something else took him back to England for weeks on end? Grandchildren? She'd guessed his age at forty. If he were older-forty-five perhaps-it wouldn't be unreasonable at all for him to have a grandchild or two if he had married in his early twenties and his children had too. She shouldn't think about such things, about his home life, about what he did when he wasn't with her. A girl could go crazy letting her mind run along that rabbit trail. Her brain felt like a horse on a carousel, always moving but going nowhere.

October turned to November, and the orange and red leaves turned brown and then fell to the sidewalk where they made their final transformation to sooty black. The crisp air turned cold. This would be her first holiday season without her mother. Mona had friends, but she'd seen little of them since Malcolm came into her life. She cried off dinners and movies, pleading poverty and exhaustion. She didn't want her friends asking her what was going on. In a weak moment she might tell them, and since meeting Malcolm she'd had nothing but weak moments. She tried to put herself in her friends' shoes. What would she say if her college roommate Natasha called and said she'd sold her body to a man-a man with no last name, a man who didn't use condoms, a man who had no qualms about fucking other women in front of her or bringing other men to their sessions to fondle and finger her? No, Mona couldn't tell anyone. They might try to talk her out of doing it, and that was the last thing she wanted. She could either see Malcolm or she could see reason, and Malcolm was a finer sight than anything as dull as reason.




 

 

November turned to December.