Misericorde
Some might have thought her room was lonely, but she liked it fine. It occupied one small corner of the old, rambling house, and had three windows overlooking the river, curtained by trees. In the afternoon the light filtered through the hand-sized leaves, and she sometimes sat there, watching the shimmering kaleidoscope of green and gold. She played that song on her headphones then – that classic Siouxsie, “Melt”.
“Pulling away from the funeral of flowers, with my hand between your legs.”
It was a long summer waiting for class to begin in a town where she knew no one. She had no car. Some days she’d just pick a direction and walk, watching neighborhoods go slowly by, wondering at who lived inside the houses.
There was one house she always walked by; it pulled at her. High on the north side of town where the streets climbed great hills and the houses were old. A three-storied Victorian, and the paint was chipping badly, and the lawn was high and wild. You might think no one lived there, but for the lamplight coming from the windows, and the wind chimes singing on the front porch.
One day she walked by it, and he was sitting there on the cement steps that lead up to the grass. He was tall, and dressed in black so worn out it was more a palette of gray: threadbare pants, a sweater with holes by the elbows, boots criss-crossed with white lines from where the laces had pressed too many times. His hair was a shock of a hundred directions, short and messy. His eyes were green as glass and he stared at her.
She looked once, then again, then stopped. She laughed a little.
He let her squirm in her nervousness before he saved her.
“You do a lot of walking,” he smiled, a grin that started small on his lips and grew to something more cheshire and strange.
She laughed again and nodded. “Yeah, well – there’s not much else to do.”
“Yes there is,” he said quietly. His voice was scratchy like he’d just woken up from a nap. He got to his feet. “You ought to expand your horizons.”
She just watched him walk back to the house, her own words stolen as if by thieves.
She saw him again weeks later, as she walked by the old house and the distant roll of thunder spoke of the heady rain to come. The air was thick and smelled sweet – the trees were greener somehow against the angry darkness of the clouded sky.
Drops of cool rain pelted her just as she passed his house, and he was there, under a black umbrella, watching her.
“You’d better find shelter,” he advised, and turned to walk back up the path through the grass.
She opened her mouth to say, “Thanks” – but realized it wasn’t an invitation. She watched him go back into the house and she cursed him, even as the rain was soaking through her clothes, making her hair stick to her skin. She ran home.
It was black as night when she made it back to her rented room. The private entrance in the back had a lousy lock and she spent fifteen minutes struggling with the key before it gave in to her. Up the narrow stairs she pelted, pulling at her cold, wet clothes, and gained the landing, opened her door to her small room.
A towel wrapped itself around her shoulders, arms from behind her, a voice scratchy as if roused from sleep.
“You’re wet,” he said.
A gasp pulled up from her throat only to be silenced by his mouth firmly pressed against hers. The month of isolation had set her body like a trap: he pushed her back, back against the wall and pinned her there to kiss her soundly, and her skin thrilled with the release of blood beneath. The towel fell to the floor.
Amid this her mind spoke up once, just once – feebly reminding her this was strange, this was not right. Her mind found voice and she pulled her mouth from him, gasping, “What are you doing?”
He laughed even as he pulled her by her arm to the bed. “You should know what I’m doing. And if you don’t know, you’ll learn.”
She could remember that at no point he gave her any rest.
He had pulled off most of her clothes, ordered her to remove the rest, and had first lain with her, pinning her beneath him while he kissed her – his jeans rough against her skin, his low-slung loosened belt hurting her as he moved his hips against her. She looked up to see he wore a necklace – a simple silver chain with a four-leaf clover charm. Then he’d slid off of her, pulling her to sit on his lap as he carried her to the overstuffed chair by the window.
“Watch the trees blow,” he told her. There was perhaps a half-hour of daylight remaining, although the storm had darkened it nearly to night. The intensity of green was mingled with the bruised purple sky beyond, and she obeyed him as he forced open her legs to straddle him, as he reached up and buried one hand in her long hair to hold her still, while the other hand teased down over her ass, down her thigh, then up into her sex and idly brushed across her clit. She sucked in her breath, bit her lip and watched the trees. He began to push one finger up into her from an angle, his other hand letting go of her hair to grab the curve of her hip and guide her into a sort of dance: with each thrust of his finger into her she grinded upon his lap, brushing her hard little clit against the roughness of his jeans. He pushed two fingers in now.
He felt the slickened muscles begin to twitch inside her, heard her breathing jump in little lovely gasps. “Good…you like it. Go to the bed,” he told her. She was trembling, dizzy – she did as instructed, feeling the wetness already coat the inside of her thigh like heated sugar.
He stood before her, then dropped to his knees on the mattress, unzipped his fly and pulled his cock free of his clothes. “Suck it ’til I come,” he said.
She bent to do this, first letting her tongue dart out to taste the head, then pressing the head to her pursed lips before pushing the long shaft into her mouth, and a tear dropped from her eye as the shame of the instruction hit some proper part of her. But he was good in her mouth, his flesh warm, clean, much too big for her to take all at once; the clear drop of pre-cum sweet as sugar as it met her tongue.
His hands traced up and down her back as he watched her suck his cock.
After a long time he pulled her from him. “That’s enough,” he told her, guiding her back to fall on the bed again. He crouched over her and pushed two fingers in her mouth, then watched as she tried to suck them. Impatiently he pushed her legs apart and thrust into her.
“You would give it to me, wouldn’t you?” he asked, fucking her harder as he grabbed handfuls of her silken hair.
“No!” she answered, not knowing what he meant, but wanting to disagree, to be contrary, to hurt him, to just not let him win, and her voice sounded like that of a petulant child’s.
“Yes you would,” he hissed, suddenly venomous, grabbing her jaw with his hand and squeezing, causing her lips to purse. “Don’t lie – I know you would,” and with that his mouth descended on her, tearing with hard kisses at her throat, her neck – leaving a daisy chain of soon-to-be bruises across her breasts. She began to cry, her eyes squeezing shut as she held on to him, her heart thudding in her chest as the cruel thrusts filled her, he was so big that it almost hurt, and his eyes were so green she thought even as the thunder broke upon the roof and the rain spat at the window, and she came, arched her back, grabbing up handfuls of the sheet and let her tears come rolling down, sobbing.
When she woke up it was half past midnight, and he was gone.
School had started the day she walked by his house again. The weather had scorned any evidence of summer, burnt the leaves on the trees to angry reds and luscious yellows, sent haunted winds to torment such places as corner rooms. She’d listened to the hush of the dry dead leaves on her windows at night; she’d thought about him, needed him to return.
She stood there in front of his house. The lawn was dead, overgrown with weeds, broken glass littering it like sullen jewels. The windows were boarded; no windchimes sang from the porch. A realtor sign swung on its post, ready to fall as the wind knocked it back and forth. There was a phone number to call – she walked up to read the faded print and caught sight of something glittering, hanging from the sign post. It was a chain, that clover charm he’d worn. She lifted it free, put it in her pocket and hurried away.
The woman at the realtor’s office was very polite as she explained how long the house had been for sale.
“Two years now. And I expect it’ll be much longer. Horrible thing to happen to a family. I’m sure you remember hearing on the news – that boy lost his parents in a car accident, and then took his own life, alone in that house. They should have never left him alone.”
She set the phone down, shaking. She couldn’t stop shaking.
She transferred after that year to a school close to home, and in time she would go weeks, even months without thinking of him. But that year had curled itself into her heart. That year she spent most nights by her window, talking to the wind in the trees.
“I would have given it to you.”