Jewels

“Harder,” I hissed through my teeth.

His body towered over mine in the dark. Between the two silky panels of the blackout curtains — with a floor-length white drape hanging behind them — a narrow gap had been left open, letting a sliver of light seep into the dim room. Besides his quickened breathing, I could hear the engines of cars rushing past outside, breaking the stillness of the night. Their headlights spilled through the opening, and for a moment warm yellow light swept across his face. I locked my gaze with his as the soft glow caught in his dark brown eyes, and over and over again I fell in love with that mesmerizing look — the one that had caged me from the very first moment we met, and never let me go again.

It wasn’t the first time I had looked at him like that. There was something in his eyes that pulled me back into the same deep, dark well every single time, no matter how often I told myself I would resist this time. Even the first time, I had felt as if he weren’t simply looking at me, but at some hidden part inside me no one else had ever seen. As if he instinctively knew where my cracks were and wasn’t afraid to trace them with his fingers.

I always felt him through my entire being. That raw, masculine presence of his — it always broke down every carefully built barrier inside me. There was something almost unbearably beautiful about the way another man could so completely command my attention, my thoughts. My body responded to him shamelessly, as if every inch of me were begging him to drag me deeper and deeper into the dark.

I didn’t just love him. That word was far too small for what I felt. I clung to him like he was some fatal certainty. As if my existence could only remain whole as long as he looked at me, touched me, breathed beside me. And the more I loved him, the greedier something inside me became. Not for tenderness. Not for peace. But for his closeness to leave marks on me. Maybe even then, in that dim room, I already knew this hunger would one day go too far. I just didn’t care. Because once you place your whole life into a single gaze, sooner or later you become willing to throw everything into it.

I wanted to close my eyes, surrender to the pleasantly stinging sensation of his broad hands wrapping around my throat and squeezing the air from my lungs. But I resisted the temptation. I didn’t want to break the spell his eyes were pouring into my soul — not even for a second. The hot, pulsing air leaving his nose cooled before it reached my face; the chill of it made my lashes tremble. His face was far from mine. I knew how much effort it took him to look me in the eye while hurting me because I had asked him to, but he did it anyway, because he also knew the effect those dark brown irises had on me. I knew I was pushing against his limits in moments like this, but the dark desire rising from deep within me had never once been strong enough to make me stop.

Another car passed outside. For a second, his gaze slipped from mine and landed on my left arm stretched out beside me. The light struck the deep scar there, and I could almost feel it glowing.

He had promised he would never again take part in the desires I had for suffering after, the week before, I had drawn out the most alien side of him and, during one of the cuts, he had driven the edge of the knife deep into my flesh. My commanding look changed into terror in a heartbeat when thick, dark blood started bubbling from the long wound. Panic overtook me, and for one second I lost control of myself — a short, sharp scream tore out of my throat. I clapped a hand over my mouth at once to stifle it.

But that was the moment he snapped out of it. The knife hit the tile with a loud clatter as it twisted out of his hand. Blood was already dripping from the end of my elbow, black and glossy in the dim light, gathering into a small pool at the leg of the chair.

That half minute we spent under the weight of the shock felt endless. My first thought was that the wound had cut through something in his soul — something inside that indestructible bond our desire for each other had made. He jumped up from the chair, sending it crashing behind him, and then I heard a sharp crack followed by stinging pain across my face. My head jerked sideways from the slap — one I undoubtedly deserved, yet it still shattered my emotions into pieces. I heard his footsteps as he ran into the bathroom, his black socks leaving tiny red prints behind him.

I felt my muscles seize up. My feelings, my words, my movements all froze inside me. I stayed there in that same posture, my head tilted to the side, staring blindly ahead, when I heard a metal box hit the tile and then felt his hand on my arm. He didn’t say a single word.

I only came back to myself when the front door slammed shut with a deafening crash. He had wrapped a tight compression bandage around my arm; a small red stain bloomed immediately at the top of the thick white gauze, but the blood hadn’t soaked all the way through. I couldn’t tell whether he had wound it so tightly because he knew first aid, or because his anger had joined the slap in that gesture too. I had to loosen it later, because it was cutting off my circulation.

For a long time after he left, I couldn’t move. Not because I lacked the strength, but because I felt that if I did, something inside me would fall apart for good. It was as if some part of that strange, frightened energy that had burst out of him the instant he saw the blood had stayed behind in the room. What truly paralyzed me wasn’t the pain, but the realization that I had managed to tear something open inside him that should have remained untouched.

And yet when I finally lowered my head and looked at my arm again, something besides shame had begun to stir inside me. The wound throbbing beneath the bandage didn’t merely hurt. It existed. It was there. It refused to let me lie to myself about what had happened. It lay beneath my skin like a secret that could no longer be pushed back into the dark.

Another person might have looked at it with disgust or fear. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. It wasn’t the sight of the blood seeping through that drew me in, but the thought that something in me had been changed irrevocably. As though a piece of my body had preserved something from that night in a way that words and memory never could.

Later, when the wound only throbbed dully beneath the tight fabric, I caught myself several times wanting to touch it gently, if only I dared. Not to check how much it hurt, but to make sure it was still there. That it hadn’t vanished. That something would remain of it once the blood dried, once the flesh closed, once all that seemed left of what had happened was a thin pale line.

Maybe even then, in that hour, I had already begun to see it as something other than a wound. I still didn’t have a name for it. I only felt that it didn’t take something from me — it added something to the dark, warped image of myself I had always carried inside me. Like an ornament. Proof. Something both humiliating and priceless.