Gerald's Game - Stephen King [3]
She sighed. Yes. It pretty much was.
'Gerald, Ido mean it.' She spoke louder now, and for the first time the gleam in his eyes flickered a little. Good. He could hear her after all, it seemed. So maybe things were still okay. Not great, it had been a long time since things had been what you could call great, but okay. Then the gleam reappeared, and a moment later the idiot grin followed.
'I'll teach you, me proud beauty,' he said. He actually said that, pronouncing beauty the way the landlord in a bad Victorian melodrama might say it.
Let him do it, then. Just let him do it and it will be done.
This was a voice she was much more familiar with, and she intended to follow its advice. She didn't know if Gloria Steinem would approve and didn't care; the advice had the attractiveness of the completely practical. Let him do it and it would be done. QED.
Then his hand — his soft, short-fingered hand, its flesh as pink as that which capped his penis — reached out and grasped her breast, and something inside her suddenly popped like an overstrained tendon. She bucked her hips and back sharply upward, flinging his hand off.
'Quit it, Gerald. Unlock these stupid handcuffs and let me up. This stopped being fun around last March, while there was still snow on the ground. I don't feet sexy; I feel ridiculous.'
This time he heard her all the way down. She could see it in the way the gleam in his eyes went out all at once, like candle flames in a strong gust of wind. She guessed that the two words which had finally gotten through to him were stupid and ridiculous. He had been a fat kid with thick glasses, a kid who hadn't had a date until he was eighteen — the year after he went on a strict diet and began to work out in an effort to strangle the engirdling flab before it could strangle him. By the time he was a sophomore in college, Gerald's life was what he described as 'more or less under control' (as if life — his life, anyway — were a bucking bronco he had been ordered to tame), but she knew his high school years had been a horror show that had left him with a deep legacy of contempt for himself and suspicion of others.
His success as a corporate lawyer (and marriage to her; she believed that had also played a part, perhaps even the crucial one) had further restored his confidence and self-respect, but she supposed that some nightmares never completely ended. In a deep part of his mind, the bullies were still giving Gerald wedgies in study-hall, still laughing at Gerald's inability to do anything but girlie-pushups in phys ed, and there were words — stupid and ridiculous, for instance — that brought all that back as if high school had been yesterday . . . or so she suspected. Psychologists could be incredibly stupid about many things, almost wilfully stupid, it often seemed to her, but about the horrible persistence of some memories she thought they were bang-on. Some memories battened onto a person's mind like evil leeches, and certain words stupid and ridiculous, for example — could bring them instantly back to squirming, feverish life.
She waited to feel a pang of shame at hitting below the belt like this and was pleased — or maybe it was relief she felt — when no pang came. I guess maybe I'm just tired of pretending, she thought, and this idea led to another: she might have her own sexual agenda, and if she did, this business with the handcuffs was definitely not on it. They made her feel demeaned. The whole idea made her feel demeaned. Oh, a certain uneasy excitement had accompanied the first few experiments — the ones with the scarves — and on a couple of occasions she'd had multiple orgasms, and that was a rarity for her. All the same, there had been side-effects she didn't care for, and that feeling of being somehow demeaned was only one of them. She'd had her own nightmares following each of those early versions of Gerald's game. She awoke from them sweaty and gasping, her