Fresh Girls & Other Stories by Evelyn Lau Page B

neither did you, you were lifting your watch every so often to check the time and thinking of dinner with your wife who, if you were lucky, might wear the red leather outfit you had bought her, even if she never assumed the role. There was no time that afternoon to duck into changing rooms with burgundy lace and ripped, fringed leather skirts. The fluff no longer interested me, the delicacy of lingerie seemed an offense. It was the trickling cat o’ nine tails that tickled my fingers, it was the canes perched rigid on the walls, it was even that morbid black leather mask molded to the dummy’s unseeing white face on the top counter that ran currents through me. I felt as though the world I had walked on for years had flipped and on the other side there lived people who turned up palms of blood and leather.
    The woman with the motionless eyes uncurled the bracelet and we felt the tips of the studs. When she saidthe bracelet had been banned I said I wanted it and you paid for it and that night I fell asleep with it on my wrist, while candles flickered around the room in crystal holders. It tormented me all night because each time I moved my hand I would hurt myself into consciousness. The next day I wore it and pretended it was a joke from a friend, and at lunch a man came to my table and said, “You could kill somebody with that.” His eyes were brown and overly trusting. Later when I hugged my lunch companion good-bye she let out a yelp and said, “You stabbed me in the back.”
    It will be a good toy for next time, applied to the more vulnerable parts of your body. I will stroke you with the eager points of the bracelet and then I will hurt you with them. That is part of the joy, the caresses that I allow before pressing down the pain. I like it best when I kiss you with full-mouthed tenderness before slapping your face; when I lick a finger and circle it lightly around the head of your penis before pinching the skin of the shaft; when I take one of your truncated nipples into my mouth and stroke its little hard point between my teeth before I bite.
    I listen to you when you call at night needing somebody to talk to, and I spend half an hour with you on the phone while you talk about your marriage and your kids and your practice, and I never tell you you areboring me or that my time is not for you. I show my harmlessness by giving you books of poetry, but I am never able to read more than a few lines aloud to you before you become impatient and pull me to the floor, where we lose our words and our regular faces.
    If we are victims of each other, then in those moments we are the most beautiful victims in the world. Sometimes when I stand over you, when my heels are gouging into you, I look beyond you towards some thin line of distance and understand that each time your face wrenches with pain I am spreading a slow dark stain down the still-white years of my future, and that in that sense you are killing me and not the other way around. Each time you scream, it wrings out the light in me and leaves twisted red and black cords like knotted whips lying on the wall and waiting, hungering to be used, to be applied against white skin that flinches away and cries.
    You have the kind of engaging smile and blue eyes that, in the daytime, makes you one of the most popular dentists in the city. How could they know those same fingers take a piece of wire and wind it so tightly around the base of your penis that I wince for you? How could they know your mouth fills with everything that sifts across the bottom of high-heeled shoes that have walked the pavement? You are friendly enough, your hand cupstheir trusting chins, you see into them and reassure them. You see into them the way you saw into me the first night we met over drinks and lounge music, and even though I said little and at that time knew nothing, you saw something in me you described as dark, very dark; you saw a part of me I had not seen in hours of mirror