Warm and Willing - Lawrence Block [7]
They would be in it. She wanted to throw back her head and scream. This couldn’t be real, couldn’t be happening to her. And how could he think she was excited, how could he read her fear as passion? He didn’t know her at all. They were a pair of strangers united in a farce called matrimony and nothing good could come of it.
She was sure of this.
“You must be hungry,” he said. “We’ll eat first. The food is supposed to be excellent here. We’ll have dinner and then we can come back upstairs.”
A reprieve. She would have a meal first—that was his concession to her virginity. She would be appeased with food, fattened for the slaughter, then taken upstairs and possessed. How could he think that she was hungry? Didn’t he know her at all? Didn’t he have the slightest degree of sensitivity, of empathy?
Downstairs, they ate in a dining room with paneled walls and heavy furniture. There was no cloth on the table, just well-weathered old wood. The food could have been good or bad and she would not have known. She never tasted it. She sat across from him and tried to make conversation but could barely do that, and she ate without being aware of what she was eating.
Then he hurried her upstairs
He carried her over the threshold. He was a tall man, a strong man, and as he lifted her in his arms she thought that this ought to be giving her a sense of security. But it had the opposite effect. She felt so very small and weak that she wanted to cry out.
“I love you,” he said.
She couldn’t answer.
“Don’t be afraid—”
When she saw him nude for the first time she began to tremble visibly. She was afraid, she couldn’t look at him. The sight of him, and the feel of his eyes on her own bare flesh, and the huge bed looming at her.
He lay for a long time on the bed with her, his hands busy with her body. She felt him touch her, his hands on her breasts, her legs, and she thought that this was supposed to be awfully exciting. But all his games of love had the opposite effect of what he intended. Every touch made her quiver, not with passion but with fear and distaste. Every kiss made her just that more aware of what was to come.
And she began to realize that this was wrong, that there was something specifically wrong with her. A woman was not supposed to be revolted by her husband’s caresses. Fear might be normal, fear at the onset of love, fear of pain and fear of the unknown. All virgins were frightened at first. But what she felt was a great deal more than the normal fear and anxiety of a virgin bride. Much more.
Finally, it was time. She felt her whole body go rigid, resisting him with the passive determination of a follower of Gandhi, and she felt his hands, strong, sure of themselves. And then a sharp stab of pain that seared her flesh and blinded her and brought tears to her eyes. She gasped from the pain, and he seemed to take that gasp for evidence of long-dormant passion.
The pain ebbed gradually but not completely, so that there was a subtle background of pain as an accompaniment to everything that followed. She lay inert, a living corpse, feeling nothing but the pain, feeling none of the pleasurable sensations you were supposed to feel when the pain receded and the man you loved made sweet love to you.
Nothing.
Nothing at all.
Afterward, when he had rolled aside and lay panting next to her, she stared up at the ceiling and wondered if this was really all there was to it. It seemed so small, so useless, so—so unpleasant. There had to be something wrong with her, something very wrong with her.
“I love you,” he said.
She said nothing.
“Baby?” His hand on her shoulder. “I hurt you, didn’t I?”
“I’m all right.”
“I wanted it to be good for you. But … well, maybe it has to be painful the first time, for a woman. How do you feel?”
Dead, she thought. Dead and turning cold.
“It’ll be better for you,” he said gently. “It’ll be better.”
It never was.
They walked through cool streets now, She was smoking