"Who?"
"Don't pretend, Brant! You couldn't seem to stop saying her name. You called it over and over. Syl. I want to know who she is, dammit!"
"Cut it out, Eve." The sudden coldness of his voice sounded a warning, but at this moment she didn't care, and she went on recklessly.
"No! No, I won't cut it out, Brant. I want to know."
She knew she sounded like a fishwife, but she didn't give a damn. At least it showed that she was human.
His mouth looked white and taut with anger.
"All right. She was my aunt. And my first lover. I loved her—and I ended up killing her. Is that enough for you?"
Eve felt suddenly calm, and oddly empty inside. She heard her voice persist.
"Tell me about her. About you, as you were then. How was it you were actually able to feel love, Brant?"
"No! Goddammit, that's enough. I won't be probed, Eve. Not even by you. Syl was a part of my life a very long time ago—let her be! Just as I let David be."
"Ah, you actually said his name. Why haven't you asked me about him, about how I feel about him, or if I feel about him? Or is it that you don't give a damn— about me, that is."
"Shut up, Eve! What makes you such a bitch today?"
"You do. Every now and then, strangely enough, I get this urge to know you. To understand what's under the surface. You married me, Brant. Why? You never did tell me the real reasons, did you?"
He stood up and walked away from her.
"No more questions, Eve. I'm not in the mood. Maybe I'm not ready to bare my soul to you yet. So leave me alone, will you, please?"
"Oh, God! Do you always have to be so—so controlled? So damned polite? Do you have to make me feel I have to be the same way?"
Hating herself and him, both, Eve felt the uncontrollable tears erupt. They gushed from her eyes, and she was shaken by sobs that made speaking impossible.
He came back to her (unwillingly, she thought—and hated him more) and caught her shoulders.
"Dammit, what am I supposed to do now? I'm not used to tears from you. I don't mean to force you into any kind of behavior pattern, Eve. If that's what I've done, then I'm sorry. But sometimes I find that I'm human, too, you see. Stop it, now."
She couldn't stop. At last, words came from her again, gasping and ragged.
"I want to—I have to be alone. I have to think—I must know—"
She knew she was doing everything wrong. She should be more rational; she should not say anything, because he would never understand.
There was a kind of baffled rage in his eyes now, and she was afraid of him again, for the first time since their marriage.
"I don't understand you, Eve. I think you're asking me for something, or trying to push me into something. What is it? Do you want to be fucked?"
He hadn't used that word to her for ages. Something in the way he said it now, so offhandedly, so contemptuously, cut into her hke a whiplash.
She raked at him with her nails almost instinctively, leaving red streaks down the side of his face.
She heard him suck in his breath with shock and pain, and then he shoved her backward off the divan, forcing her. down onto the floor with her arms twisted behind her. When she was lying on her side, moaning with rage and hurt and fear, she felt his free hand rip away her thin cotton shorts—felt him press against her and enter her without warning.
The weight of his body pressing against hers and the cruelty of his grip on her wrists turned
her over onto her belly, and she screamed out loud as he went into her roughly and deeply. She found she couldn't move— the breath hissed out of her lungs every time he thrust himself even deeper inside her unprepared, resisting vagina.
"Don't—don't—don't!" she cried out to him, hating him. But it was too late for him to stop now or for her to stop him, and she knew it and finally lay there with her face pressed against the rough matting that covered the floor, accepting his violation of her because she had to, and screaming again only when he pulled out of her and brutally and unexpectedly forced himself into her the other way—the way that Randall Thomas had used her. The pain of his intrusion was excruciating, and she kept screaming until he put his fingers up her vagina at the same time, and suddenly the pain became pleasure, and she stopped trying to pull her wrists from his grasp and cried out instead with excitement and shame that she could obtain such perverse ecstasy from the way he was using her.