Page 47 of Salt in the Wound
“Illusion,” I said.
Yes, I want you, and I want you collared, and I want you mine. That should be enough to terrify you, because I would hold nothing back until I’d eaten your very heart.
I still couldn’t make out Mark’s expression, not enough of it, at least. All I could see was that sculpted mouth in the shape of utter indifference. His eyes glittering from the shadows.
“I don’t understand,” I said. The words were bitter on my tongue, and I knew it was because they tasted like failure, like defeat.
Even now, I refuse to admit to myself that they tasted like heartbreak.
“I think you do understand,” Mark said. He had a hand in his pocket as he looked at me. “I think you understand what’s happening very well.”
“But you said—” I stopped. I sounded childish. Pleading for a grown-up not to leave her alone in the dark.
Mark had lied last night. About wanting me to be his—possibly about all of it. His body hadn’t lied, but that didn’t matter. He’d used my body as a tool against me, and undoubtedly, he could use his own body as a tool when necessary. Same as a flogger or a pair of leather cuffs, his hands and his cock were just part of a scene. Even when that scene was entirely a lie.
I closed my eyes, shame dripping into my gut. Hot and viscous.
I’d believed him last night. I’d believed every word he said about wanting me, about keeping distance between us in order to keep me safe. Because I’d wanted to hear it. I’d wanted him to want me as much as I wanted him; I’d wanted him to give me no choice about being his.
I wanted to belong to someone, to be told I was doing a good job; I wanted to be hurt and cleansed and freed from what I did last summer in Rome, and then held until this loneliness finally, finally went away—
But that was a child’s wish, and I was no longer a child.
As St. Paul said, I had to set aside my childish ways.
Had I really thought I might have some kind of fairy tale with Mark Trevena? The man who owned a sex club fueled by blackmail and secrets? Who had done God only knew what for the United States government and had seemingly no remorse over it?
And what about me? Regular girls were allowed to fall in love, to hope for other people to love them back, but I was not a regular girl. I’d been promised to God too long ago, and my life had always been meant as a sacrifice.
That I’d hoped for more, hoped for affection and sex, showed how frail and selfish I still was. How imperfect my offering to God remained. The books on saints weren’t full of stories of people begrudgingly surrendering their lives to God or weeping over what they’d lost when they decided to follow him. They did it with glad hearts, and if they couldn’t do it with a glad heart, then at least they did it with a quiet, noble one.
So Mark had lied last night, and weak, hopeless sinner that I was, I’d believed him.
But I couldn’t find the most crucial thread of this—even after pushing aside the stinging humiliation, the hollow ache of rejection and loneliness, it eluded me.
“Why?” I asked. “I was the one who suggested we eliminate my hymen. I would have done it without—without all the things you said. Without you pretending.”
Even now, all this time later, I still look back on how my voice trembled with unshed tears and I shake with shame. We are called to forgive, but how can you forgive someone for seeing one of the weakest versions of yourself? How can you ever forgive yourself for showing it to them?
It was only the city light from the window that revealed the way his hand flexed after I spoke. The tiniest shift of his fingers. But his face didn’t change. And when he spoke, his voice was as cold as it had been the first day I’d heard it.
“I’m not willing to lose all that I could gain from this marriage to your father’s whims, even if it means temporarily courting his paranoia. And all that I could gain will be severely compromised if you grow to hate me because you gave this up for as clinical a reason as assuring your father. If you had spread your legs with no motivation other than that—even if you’d gone back to your room and wedged your own fingers inside of yourself without me there—it would have forever been a mark in your ledger against this marriage. Against me. One more thing you thought you were stoically surrendering when you were actually only hiding from yourself how much it hurt to have taken away.” He lifted a shoulder. “This way, you couldn’t lie to yourself later and say your hand was forced. You wanted it as much as you’ve ever wanted anything physical. It was your choice.”
“A choice informed by the lie you told me,” I said. I hated that I was naked right now, that my voice was still quavering, but I wouldn’t reach for the sheet or clear my throat. He wouldn’t get my shame from me as well as my weakness—at the very least, I’d keep that one thing for myself. “How do you know that I won’t hate you for making me believe that you wanted me? Making me believe you wanted me to belong to you?”
“A calculated gamble,” replied Mark calmly. “But one I felt confident in taking, because I know you, Isolde Laurence. You’ll always hate yourself first. When you look back on this, it will be yourself you want to burn alive; it will be your own choices you want to scourge yourself for. You might tell yourself that it’s because you’re so deeply sensible and logical that you know you could never control me or my actions, that it’s only worth agonizing over your own behavior. And you’d be partly right. But there’s a lot more to you than sense and logic, isn’t there? You were born guilty; you were born feeling stained and ready to suffer for it. God found you before anyone else could, and so now you’ll lay yourself on any altar you can find to atone for the sin of being alive when your mother is dead, for the sin of being mortal and therefore imperfect. For the sins you intentionally commit now in God’s holy name.”
My lips were open, my ribs were seizing, but the air wouldn’t come. I couldn’t seem to drag it back into my lungs, back into my blood.
“You can’t—” I finally managed a short, sucking breath. “You can’t know that.”
He can’t. He’s lying. Bluffing.
He stepped close enough to touch me, turning so that the light from the window caught more of his face. There was pity in it when he said, “Of course I know it, Isolde. Just as I know you think to play the game with me, capturing my pieces on the board, just as I hope to move your father’s. But I have played this game a lot longer than you and with people far more dangerous than you, and I will win every match, little wife, every bout, and I won’t even need to try when I do it. I know everything about you and you know nothing about me. I am willing to do whatever it takes to get what I want, and you will always be shackled to what your God asks of you.”
He reached out with the hand that wasn’t in his pocket, his fingers lifting my chin. I stared at him stonily, willing him not to see the tears pricking at my eyes, the fast swallow of my throat.
“You are terrified that your soul will be damned to hell. And I no longer have one left at all.”
