“Fuck me,” she said, “oh please, please fuck me.”
“Yeah,” he said, pulling away. He kissed the flower tattoo on her hip. “I’m gonna fuck you.”
“I want you in me.”
“You like to be tied up, huh?”
“I’m so wet, god, please fuck me now.”
“You like getting fucked all tied up, huh?”
“Yes, please, fuck me. C’mon and fuck me.”
“Yeah,” he said, then grabbed her by the thighs and flipped her over on her front. He pulled her toward him along the bed till the phone cord stretched taut and she was kneeling at the edge of the mattress, her knees on the ground. She looked back at him as he lifted her skirt up over her ass.
“Put the condom on and fuck me,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said, rubbing her hips, sliding a finger inside her. The same finger he pressed against her asshole, rubbing it between her buttocks, and she jerked.
“Hey,” she said.
“Shhh.”
“No, really, hey.”
“It’s fine,” he said, rubbing the wetness around her sphincter, then pushing his finger in.
“No. No. I said no.”
“It’s good.”
“No wait a minute,” she said, going cold inside. “Untie me.”
“It’s good,” he said again. “Tight.”
“No, seriously, untie me.”
His left hand slid along the line of her jaw, his finger brushing her lips. Then he clutched her face and pressed hard in her cheek where her jaw met her skull, cracking her mouth open. He swept her briefs up off the floor and crammed them in her mouth and held them there with one hand while she bucked and tried to scream. He grabbed her top with his other hand and looped it around her mouth, cinching it tight like a bit and double-knotting it at the back of her skull.
“Shush now. You know this is just what you wanted.”
She felt him get up from behind her. She writhed, wailed muffled shouts, trying to get free. Over her shoulder she could see him digging in her dresser and she kicked and bounced until she was on her back facing him. He had a bunch of her tights in his hands. She tried to shout and curse through the gag—her taste—choking on spit and cotton. She tried to scream.
“Roll back over,” he said, grinning, taking her by the ankles and flipping her smoothly. She kicked, shrieked into the gag, but his hands held her like cuffs. He pulled her legs up in the air, forcing her weight onto her neck, and she howled in pain. She tried to kick back but had no leverage; he’d pinned her legs in his armpit. He secured her ankles together with a pair of tights, then dropped her to the mattress, her knees slamming to the floor, and climbed on top of her. He used another pair of tights to reinforce the gag.
He grabbed her hard by the back of the neck, forcing her nose into the comforter. She inhaled the gray fabric, trying to breathe, could feel him on her, his flesh dense and burning. “Shhhhh. It’s okay now. It’s okay. I saw you looking. I saw you and knew what you wanted. It’s gonna be okay. Hush now,” he whispered, “or I’ll knock your fucking daylights out.”
She was sobbing, trying to talk, trying to say no, don’t, stop, please no. Trying to get free but feeling her will evacuate, weakening by the moment. He slapped her in the back of the head and told her to hush, then grabbed her neck and squeezed hard.
She went slack. Gray. Feeling herself rattle loose from herself, thinking: who’s this happening to—the room going out of focus, the gray fabric blurring. Thinking: who decides things. Thinking: where’s Matt, and what happened, and who is this. How? Who? What’s happening and who to, yes, no. Whose body? No. Who makes choices? No. It’s not me. Not mine. No. No.
When he was done, he found a kitchen knife and cut the phone cord from the bed frame, got dressed, and walked through the house, dim and blue in the early morning, then out the back, past the fridge and blank-faced computer, past Xena watching him from the floor, into the yard where the dying embers of last night’s fire smoldered in whitened ash.
A moment of indecision caught him there amid the party detritus, the empty beer bottles, the grease thick on the grill’s black rack, the complicated flowers on the table, then he went back out the way he came, through the gate, got on his motorcycle, and rolled past all the quiet houses rustling to wake now on Columbus Day, past the silver-black gleam of picture windows and past the yellow light shining from a kitchen or bathroom where some early-rising citizen prepared for the day. At the bottom of the lane, he turned west.
Bleeding over the redrock, dawn spilled across the land. Monument Valley was out there somewhere, where they’d shot all those old cowboy flicks, and in the south an isolate line of mountains massed white-capped and gray. To the north, the valley narrowed to a chasm, rust-colored cliffs closing in over the Colorado, then the highway climbed out of the gorge, past the turnoff to Dead Horse Point, and up onto the plateau, opening to flat land.
Silent where he’d left her, cut loose and curled in a wounded ball, Dahlia opened her eyes.
babylon
Put forth your strength: bureaucratic construction now holding the soldier and man of no tomorrow
over black seas under nay, we used not to call upon IED attacks and suicide
bombs youngexulted in
documents detailing Takbir, gates of hell abide therein, torture and pass along main supply
Allah true.
So think of the Department of artillery, tank rounds and die, city to kill, employed to carry out the strike. The occupations fight
special officers definitely better than we
gulf with significant success
more than 12 hours. “But I think massive aerial strikes that many here said before pilots aboard the USS last week ahead for Iraq’s interim also went to Baghdad University or the senior Library at Basra and Command Council issues wrote about the case of an Iraqi man who…”
again the same, certain we send apostles by bench in water and urine
dull rumbling tingling command of Allah
lost. This statement has Iraq’s major museums and libraries retribution and that time is despite detainees, in addition, material assets oh yeah, she’s bomb. “We’re hit,” the voice and angle measurement with his eyes I left uptown, 29, of Lomira, Wisconsin. ‘Babylonian’ mathematics jump the gun, groups of insurgents took over common the wooden mountain of Placus and should be allowed in. End of fucking where they killed seven, a child—ill-starred sire of an ill-starred care many push-ups you can do from the ambush into the house when we need you to kill somebody, a sorrowing widow in your house. The ancient culture is kill them. Yet as a mere infant
now that you are, kill
the first days after the war. Even though he escaped the action began at 5, his life henceforth one of labor and killing two GIs and wounding mellow, spaced out from waiting, says the sheikh the police shocked the motorist down the road.
In-depth oral history of the war based on interviews with political leaders between the sexes in Punic gulf any civic. These shall enter the garden resistance and US forces killed at least
the light of his sky
another in the fire, then the secret one read by Jordan, a lot of pressure to produce and other interrogation centers how is it that here in Babylon, I call you to occupy and said no title to be called to, Abdul told Al Jazeera TV