Taunt Me (Rough Love 2)

At the beginning, still, I thought things would fall apart. I thought she wouldn’t believe, that she would confront me and say, “I know it’s you.” When she didn’t, when she started to fight me so violently, it was too exciting to stop. She thought it was life and death. I could see it in her eyes, hear it in her panting breaths, feel it in the spasms of her body.

I have to live with the knowledge that I caused those terrified spasms. I have to live with the fact that I choked her out, pretending to kill her, and then gagged her while she was out so she’d wake up in even more fear. She was so small, so easy to overpower, and I had a psyche full of force and rape fantasies, the fairy tales of my childhood gone screwy and off the map. I knew I was way off the map but I couldn’t stop, because I knew I’d never have such an authentic chance again. Such an authentic chance to rape someone.

But I raped her. I did. I told myself everything would be fine afterward, when she realized it was me all along, but that wasn’t what happened. I hadn’t realized how badly I’d fucked her up until the thing was done and she was cowering on the floor. She shook and cried and shrieked and shrank away from me. The shaking was the worst part. I worried she was in shock, and maybe she was. I’d always prided myself on my ability to take things to a certain edge, take them as far as they could go without really harming my partner, and I knew, for the first time, that I’d crossed that line. Not just crossed it, but blown way past it.

Of course, I pretended I hadn’t, which was probably the worst thing I did that day besides rape her. I pretended that it was merely a scene gone wrong, and everything would be okay now that it was over. I pretended that maybe we just needed to do a little more negotiating going forward. What else could I do? I didn’t want to stop fucking her, and I knew she’d never agree to see me again after what had transpired.

I took her swimming, just to get her out of the hotel room, away from the scene of my crime. I took her up to the pool and we talked. Or didn’t talk, because she was still pretty mad. I wanted to fuck her. I wanted to kiss her. That was the first day I saw Simon’s abuse on her, his marks. His bruises. There was a bruise on her collarbone, and another one near her temple that she’d covered with makeup. I slapped her face sometimes because it got me off, but I never slapped her hard enough to bruise her.

Imagine me there, wanting to blow a fucking gasket at this bruise on her face, knowing full well I’d just stranger-raped the shit out of her. I was glad I was in the water. I needed it to calm me. We both needed peace. I knew how to give her peace. I took her back to the room and did the same brutal shit I’d done to her when I raped her, only this time she knew it was me, and I got her off even harder than I’d gotten her off at the Park Hyatt. I made her come and come and come.

I had to. I wanted to see her again.

I wanted to keep exploring this heightened intensity between us. I had no idea then where I’d end up, alone in my place on Bleecker, with a pair of hunting binoculars clutched in my sweaty hands, trained on her window across the street.

Stalking is fucking exhausting, because you can only know so much. Even private investigators can only learn so much. I knew about her classwork, I knew about her grades, I knew about her friends. I knew her habits, I knew her moods, or at least the moods she carried on her face. I knew when she met with her former pimp Henry at the Big Apple Diner, but I didn’t know why.

They’d had a fight, her and her gay friend Andrew, just after she met with Henry. All I could think about was the resurrection of Miss Kitty, and Chere going back to escorting for Sublime Services. Why else would she have met with Henry? Why would she fight with her friend, when they’d gotten along so well for so many weeks?

Why was she pensive and anxious when she ought to be looking forward to her final semester, and graduation?

I thought about befriending Andrew and offering him money in exchange for information. He had access. He could have told me everything, told me what they fought about, what was going on with her, but it was too risky, so I was reduced to calling Henry myself. After all this time, I still carried his card in my wallet, because Henry was my one and only personal connection to Chere.