One night he ties her with soft sashes and runs a knife across he flesh. He parts her lips. Tells her, in snuff flick detail, what he could do to her.
He could. He might. She’s wet just thinking of it.
For doesn’t love mean being fed upon, consumed, annihilated in the arms of the beloved? She learned that somewhere long ago. It feels like it’s imprinted on her soul, encoded into her very DNA. Carried on her X chromosomes like a gene-linked disease.
He puts his hard-on to her lips, then the knife, then his cock.
“Which one?” he says. For a moment, she can’t choose.
The only thing she fears more than him is the thought that she might lose him.
On the day that she will marry him (an elaborate ceremony on the East Coast City where his parents live), she looks into the mirror as if into a crystal ball and sees the future like an evil spell spread out before her. She cannot leave him; she’s too far gone. She no longer believes she can exist without him. But as her dependence on him has increased, so has her hatred; she longs to pay him back for what she’s let him do to her.
Soon after their wedding, she comes into their bedroom, thinking that she’ll let him fuck her one more time, give him a final opportunity to end it before she does.
She finds him fallen asleep with the tv on, hair like black fur against the pillow, thighs parted just enough that she can be tempted by his beauty one more time.
But good girls never want this.
She puts the pistol against his temple, admiring the aristocratic plane of his jaw, the thick black lashes, wondering what it would be like to fuck him with a bullet.
But she wasn’t raised like that. She isn’t meant to kill this way. No, her killing must be done in increments and secret.
She puts the gun away and comes to bed. The old nightmares threaten her, but she takes solace in his skin.
When she gets pregnant, he says he doesn’t want the child. A baby will take time away from him – he tells her they’ll be happier without one.
For the first time since she’s known him, she stands up to him. Her wrath shocks her and frightens him. The power of mother love seems to give her resolve she’s never known. A child, she thinks, will be something to belong to her – to take the place of the life that she will never have. For the first time since she’s known him, her life soothes down into a sluggish calm, a kind of tranquil torpor. Finally there is something of her own he cannot take away.
The baby is healthy and beautiful. She names it for her mother, and she loves it with a fierce and cannibal cunning.
But the father is the one seduced and charmed. The child becomes his little sweetheart. He dotes on her and plans for her a future full of independence and achievement.
When the baby is a few months old, she sits beside the crib one night, admiring the beauty of her daughter’s face, her laughing eyes and guileless zest. Surely this child will have a charmed life – unlike her cursed one.
The baby frets as she bends over the crib. She has her father’s mouth. The mother feels a rush of loss and loathing. How dare his daughter look forward to the kind of life that she has forfeited. Black envy seethes inside her.
She searches her mind for a gift appropriate for the daughter of the man that she despises.
And it comes back to her – bitter and seductive, the words like licorice laced with strychnine, dark and sweet and sickening.
The words change, but the meaning is always the same: men are evil and lust-crazed and dangerous… women exist to be debased and defiled…
… but good girls never want this.
You must never want this.
And so the curse is passed.
That night, when she lies down next to her husband, her sleep is deep and dreamless.
Maxim Jakubowski
MAXIM JAKUBOWSKI is a London-based novelist and editor. He was born in the UK and educated in France. Following a career in book publishing, he opened the world-famous Murder One bookshop in 1988 and has since combined running it with his writing and editing career. He has edited a series of 12 bestselling erotic anthologies and two books of erotic photography, as well as many acclaimed crime collections. His novels include It’s You That I Want To Kiss, Because She Thought She Loved Me and On Tenderness Express, all three recently collected and reprinted in the USA as Skin In Darkness. Other books include Life In The World Of Women, The State Of Montana, Kiss Me Sadly and Confessions Of A Romantic Pornographer. In 2006 he will be publishing a major erotic novel which he directed and on which 15 of the top erotic writers in the world have collaborated on, America Casanova and his collected erotic short stories as Fools For Lust. He is a winner of the Anthony and the Karel Awards, a frequent TV and radio broadcaster, crime columnist for the Guardian newspaper and Literary Director of London’s Crime Scene Festival.
