Page 28 of Mine

My body ached for fingers that no longer touched me. I opened my eyes, my breath ragged in my throat, staring up at him in disbelief. My body clenched, clenched at nothing. He was gone, and I felt utterly hollow. His face was implacable, totally unreadable. He didn’t frown, or scowl.

“Rien,” I gasped. “Please don’t… don’t stop…”

He smiled as he leaned back, away from me, and raised his hand between us. His fingers glistened in the light. As I watched, he licked my juices off of his hand, one finger at a time.

I moaned. My body was wracked with a need that overpowered all rational thought.

“That’s enough playtime for now. You’re an excellent actress, Sara. I almost believed you there, at the end.”

Anger flooded me. I hated him for bringing me here. I hated him for the pain and the pleasure, for offering me release and tearing it away at the last moment. Most of all, I hated him for not believing me.

“You can’t…” I whimpered, hating too the sound of my own voice, whiny and clinging. “Please. You can’t stop. I’m so close.”

“You’re not close to anything,” Rien said. “I can see it in your eyes. You’re still holding on to whatever ideas you had of me before. You’re not here. You’re somewhere else.”

“I’m not,” I cried angrily. “I swear…”

“Next time,” he said, standing up, “I want you to keep your eyes open. The whole time. You understand? Or I’ll never take you any further.”

He put his hands in his pockets and stood there casually, waiting for my reply. My whole body, every cell, clamored for touch, and now he was pulling away. Taunting me. Teasing me. Making me want something and then taking it away. I hated him for it.

“Fuck you,” I hissed.

He smiled then. I hated him even more for smiling because he was so beautiful when he smiled. A beautiful face that hid a monster behind it.

“I like you, Sara,” he said, his smile twinkling in his eyes. “I think we’ll have a lot of fun together. You won’t have very much fun right now, I suppose. You probably won’t be able to move for another hour.”

A cry choked in my throat. An hour? I had to wait an hour before I could move. An hour before I could touch myself and get rid of this awful ache. It seemed impossible.

“Or I could bring you around sooner and strap you back down on the operating table in the other room. I’m heading there now, actually. If you’d like to join Mr. Steadhill and see whatrealtorture is, I’m sure I could arrange it.”

“No,” I whispered.

“Good. Then I’ll see you later, my dear Sara.” He bent down and kissed my forehead—and God, my body thrummed another ache as his lips touched my skin—and left the room. I lay on the couch, unable to move, unable to do anything but think about the monster who had captured me and how awfully, terribly much I wanted to feel his touch again.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Rien

What a wonderful plaything. It was like learning a new instrument when I touched her.

I hummed as I passed through the secret bookcase door, the wall sliding back into place behind me. On the operating room table, Mr. Steadhill was still breathing heavily. I turned on the music, a light classical quartet piece by someone I didn’t know. Baroque, maybe. The strings trilled their melodies in the air.

I snapped on my gloves. Pleasure first, then pain. I enjoyed inflicting pleasure on the girl, but pain was my first love. Now, I picked up an eyedropper of silver nitrate and pulled up a stool next to the operating room table. Mr. Steadhill was asleep, but he would not be asleep for long. Raising the silver nitrate above the bare half of his face, I let the liquid drop onto his exposed tissue.

He woke with a jerk, his body twisting on the table. The screams from behind his gag did not go well with the music, and I frowned, reminding myself to go back to the linen-knotted gag instead of cotton.Drip, drip, dripwent the eyedropper.

I remembered when my parents had forced me to learn the cello. All of their friends had children who could play the piano or the violin. My mother didn’t love cello music, but she loved the idea of cello music. And she loved the idea of having a son who could play such an instrument. What a thing to brag about!

At first I’d hated it, but then I started to practice alone in my room. When I took up the cello and set it in front of me, cradled between my knees, I realized that I liked it. I liked the way my fingers curled around the neck. I liked the way I could scrape the bow across the strings. The low notes would vibrate the wood so that my whole body trembled along with it. The notes would run through me like waves of water.

Once my mother realized I loved the cello, she sold it and bought a grand piano instead. I never played another note.

Drip, drip, drip.The silver nitrate would cauterize the facial wounds that were already becoming infected. Although my operating room was sterile, the air was not. I thought back to my medical school lessons. One of the first scientific experiments to prove that infections could move through air was by deliberately infecting patients. It was something that my professors had called inhumane. Back then, doctors would put an infected patient next to an uninfected one. The only thing between them was a gauze membrane. They did not touch, but the infection would spread from one patient to another. Then they knew that the disease passed through air as easily as through bodily contact.

Was that inhumane? The knowledge of these diseases must have saved thousands of lives afterwards. I couldn’t judge these early doctors for their actions. They thought that what they were doing was for the best.

“What I am doing is for the best,” I said, dripping the silver nitrate onto Mr. Steadhill’s face. He screamed and screamed and did not understand. His muscles twitched under the drips of the concentrated liquid. His eye was glazed over, reddened. I would have sprayed it with saline, but he really didn’t need his sight in both eyes. Instead, I dripped silver nitrate onto the eye.

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