He didn’t pull his hand back.
Slowly, agonizingly, he laid the iPad on the desk. Turning around took all my willpower. I braced myself so tensely I barely made it up the cellar stairs. Any second, I expected his hands on my neck, hard as rock. But that didn’t happen. When I looked back from the top of the stairs, he was still standing on the same spot, one arm hanging, the other still raised, but, like his face, invisible behind the stairwell’s walls.
And hours later, tripleX o’clock, middle of the dimly lit night, in bed, staring at the frozen FaceTime blur you’d pinned all your hopes on, you said to Julia, “So whadda I do now? Tell him what I think? Confront him with what I think he m—”
“No, of course not,” Julia said. “Even if you’re right, and you can’t be sure, that would be the stupidest move.” She said, “Listen, I’ll tell you exactly what to do.”
But that’s as far as she got, cuz at that moment all the lights went out. This time not only the image stuck, but the sound too. My MacBook was on battery, so it took a while before I realized it wasn’t a Wi-Fi glitch.
The bedside lamp was out.
The clock radio, all black.
And on the landing, an immense darkness was bulging.
7
I had no idea how long I’d been in the dark; all I knew was that Nick was in the room.
I couldn’t see him. It was more the sound of air that had awakened me, an invisible eagle sailing above, the breath of something huge, so close it made the sheets flutter up, then down again. And now he was here, lost somewhere in the same darkness. No, not lost. There, in the corner. Staring at me. The Hermit. And me in total sleep paralysis, me Prometheus, panicking, limbs frozen.
He approached the bed.
Oh Jesus. He approached the bed.
It was like he was strewing more darkness with each step. A spreading ink cloud. An abyss rending the room apart. Incredible, so big, that thing coming at me! Maybe he really was the Hermit, broken loose from my grandpa’s story, escaped from Huckleberry Wall before it burned down, and now here in the guise of an incubus. Naked as an incubus. In my half sleep, that thought was as terrifying as it was exciting.
I must have fallen asleep; no other way. After the power blackout, I lay in the dark, staring, perplexed, unable to bring myself to go downstairs and find out what had caused it. The things he’d said. That gesture, the way he slapped his hand onto the smiley mouth. Schizophrenia, Julia said. Split personality, Julia said. The classic, violent doppelg?nger, stemming from hidden yearnings and suppressed subconscious thoughts, Julia said—she got that from Dr. Phil.
And makeup sex not one of the options that came to mind. Makeup sex not the first thing to come to mind when you were wondering if your boyfriend’s gesture was meant to be a threat. But that was what I was thinking about now, as he slunk toward me on the bed.
I felt the mattress sagging under his weight. And it kept on sagging, making me sink between mountains of down. That shadow, it crawled over me. What a powerful creature! My hands went up and felt skin. I knew that skin. Could dream that skin. I could just make out the intense, possessed gleam in his eyes, right above me, hungry as a bird of prey. This creature, this demon, the face was wrapped in bandages, but it didn’t smell of antiseptics now, it didn’t smell like something medicinal. It smelled like stone. Like earth. Like something that came from earth itself. There was also no smiley mouth drawn on the bandages. Maybe Nick forgot to, after changing them. Maybe not. I couldn’t care less.
Good or bad, I wanted to be under his power, wanted to be Prometheus at the mercy of the eagle’s claws.
’Course I wondered how his mutilation would affect our sex. A dysmorphophobic like me, a facial focus like mine (no pun intended), and stuff gets into your head. Like Josh Fonesca, for one. You know, the one with the bush-burned girlfriend and the engagement ring. Banging clouds of ash from that carbonized carcass every time his dick is raring for action. Or Billie Hamilton, the one who said on Ellen DeGeneres, “I don’t even see it when I look at him,” which, technically speaking, is only possible if she wraps Gollum’s face with both her legs, like she’s the buzz saw, while he holds his breath and sucks her wet insides with his face in stitches—and I don’t mean he’s laughing.
First time he’s on top of you again, that divine, sweat-wet body. The transplant scars on his arm and thigh, they look like zippers. Pull on one suture and—zip—all the insides come gushing out. Or imagine Nick starting to groan and—snap—all the stitches behind that mask pop open, the mask first yellow, then brown, then red.
I mean, sex is about body parts, but this was overdoing it.
Believe me, thinking like this could really put a damper on your nighttime fantasies in New York.
So there’s me, lying there, trying to surrender to him, desire and disgust entangled in a death match. Clutching that luscious body and pushing away the horrors behind those bandages. I shut my eyes, tried to bundle my energy, felt I had to prove something. If I could, we’d pull through it together. If I could, I wouldn’t hurt him again. The eagle, my grandfather, my guilt, all bought off with a single shtup with my biggest nightmare.
And it went well. It went well. Till I looked down my sweat-soaked body and saw that swaddled head down there, his hands on my hips and, yep, me buried in strips of gauze, disappearing into that unknown, damp heat inside.
And I thought of Billie and Gollum. Seriously, fuck Bilbo and Gollum, but I couldn’t help it.
I’ll tell it like it is. I went limp. No matter how I tried. Or how Nick tried. Never happened to me before, not with Nick, my Nick, my walking Sexual Healing. Felt like I was falling through the covers, plunging till I’d disappear, and I only understood the emptiness I felt when I realized Nick had gotten up and was vanishing into the darkness.
“Nick, wait . . .”
But he was gone. Drifted away like a ghost, cuz I heard no footsteps, no creaking stairs, no cracking floors. Zip. Like he had never been there.
Only heard him once he’d reached the cellar, cuz that’s where the screaming began. Numb, paralyzed, dead scared, I listened to Nick go apeshit. The crashing of stuff being dashed. The screaming, muffled, tortured, wordless, went on forever. Worst of all, despite all previous doubts, there was no doubt about it now: it was Nick who was screaming down there.
8