"Get out," she said.
"If you insist. I wasn't quite finished with you. But no harm, no foul," Malcolm said, waving a hand dismissively. He climbed off the bed and quickly dressed in his three-piece suit. "Next time we'll end on a better note."
"No next time. I don't want you to ever come back."
"I'm afraid we had an agreement, did we not? You recall this?" He pulled a crisp white rectangle of paper from his inner breast pocket. He showed her one side-white and blank-and the other side, also white and blank. "You agreed to do anything."
"You drugged me. You made me hallucinate."
"I didn't, actually … but even if I did, that would fall under the umbrella of ‘anything,' wouldn't you agree?"
Mona snatched the card from his hand and ripped it into pieces. She sent them scattering all over the bed.
"Get out. Never come back."
"You don't mean it."
She pulled away from him, turned her back on him, and wouldn't look at him.
"You're a monster," she said, a sob rising in her throat.
"It was only pretend. I warned you … "
He had warned her she wouldn't know fantasy from reality. He had, but this was different. Fantasy and reality were one thing, but Malcolm had made her question her very sanity.
"Get away from me. Now."
He slammed the door so loudly she jumped. The candle blew out, and the room went dark but for the skylight.
Only pretend, he'd said.
Pretend? No one's imagination was that good, certainly not hers. He had drugged her. She knew he'd drugged her. The violation of her trust was unforgivable.
Mona dressed in yesterday's clothes and checked the time-it was nearly dawn. Hours had passed since she'd drunk the wine he'd left for her by the book. She would have to hurry. She didn't want the drugs leaving her system before she could be tested for them. Hospital emergency wards were slow, but if she left now, she might make it back before opening the gallery at ten. Not that it mattered much. The gallery would go under without Malcolm's financial support. But she would rather watch barbarian hordes tear it down brick by brick than allow Malcolm to touch one hair on her head ever again. No man was allowed to drug her. She knew he liked to play games, but this was too far. Whatever his endgame was, she wanted no part of it.
She gathered the pieces of the white card off the bed and tossed them into the trash in her office.
The game was over.
The Bleeding Man
Pomegranate wine and nothing else.
No opium, no LSD, no mushrooms, nothing.
Mona couldn't believe it. A few days after her panicked trip to a doctor, she got the call with her test results. There had been no drugs in her system, none at all. Only alcohol, and not even enough of it to make a dent in her senses.
She thanked the nurse who called. The woman sounded concerned, suggested Mona talk to a police officer if she believed someone had tried to drug her. Or perhaps a therapist if her drinking was causing her to black out.
Mona drank little, and when she did it was rarely enough to get drunk. And what would she tell the police if she did call them? She'd agreed to whore herself to a man without a last name who paid her in artwork? That he'd given her a glass of pomegranate wine full of an untraceable hallucinogenic and somehow he'd made her believe she was chained to a boulder in a sacred forest being sexually sacrificed to a cloaked and hooded Minotaur so much larger than any man?
She'd be in a mental hospital by lunch.
A week after that night, Mona went hunting and tracked down pomegranate wine in a specialty liquor store. Alone at her apartment, she drank a glass of it on an empty stomach. It was delicious, yes, sweet and tart, but it did nothing but give her the typical buzz any glass of red wine would. Malcolm had claimed pomegranates had special properties, but when she researched the fruit she found nowhere that claimed it could cause hallucinations, even when fermented.
One line about pomegranates did catch her eye, however. The Greeks called it "the fruit of the dead," and was once believed to have come from the veins of the Greek god Adonis. Pomegranate, the only fruit that grew in Hades. Myth and legend. Pomegranate wine would not have made her seen what she had seen, do what she had done, enjoy what she had enjoyed. Something else was at play. But what?
After their fight, Malcolm made no attempts to see her or contact her in any way. She thought he wasn't even going to pay her for their encounter until she came to the gallery three weeks after that bizarre red-cloaked night and found an empty red wine bottle on her desk, the cork pushed back inside the mouth. She took the cork out, not wanting to know what Malcolm had left for her. She turned the bottle over and the white card pieces fluttered out. He'd come here while she was gone, gathered them up and put them into the bottle. What did it mean? Was he trying to tell her again that she'd promised him carte blanche? She remembered their first night together. He'd used her glass water bottle inside her as a dildo, fucking her with it. She'd called it perverse and he'd teased her that it could be worse, he could have used a wine bottle.