Page 100 of Call Off the Dark

Helen opened her eyes and inhaled sharply. Isaac’s eyes: They had turned pure black.

He stilled, watching her carefully. The moment was a question. Helen closed her eyes again and answered by reaching for him. She pulled his face into her neck and told herself she hadn’t seen what she had—or maybe she didn’t care even if she had—and when he lifted his head again his eyes looked normal, and she almost believed her own lies.

When he finally entered her, he went very slowly, but it wasn’t her sense that he was being careful, watching her for signs and giving her time to adjust. She sensed it was because he was savoring a leisurely kind of ownership over her. He smiled down at her, and it was dark and victorious, and she didn’t know if it turned her on more or made her mad. God, both.

She dug her fingernails into his back. She had no idea if he liked that, but she didn’t really care. They moved together and it was sweet and only a little sharp, so she pulled him deeper into her, harder.

She didn’t want it to feel like a whisper. She wanted it to feel like a shout.

Her sheer nightgown had been pushed up around her chest—somehow it had never made it over her head—and it was an afterthought of silk caressing her neck as Isaac’s hands found her breasts and squeezed and then moved down to her waist until finally he gripped her hips so she felt tethered to the bed as he moved in and out of her, steady, forceful, as if this transgression had been his right all along.

Eventually, Helen pushed up against his chest and said, “I want to be on top,” and they moved into that position. That was the only thing spoken during the entire encounter, but so many words flashed through her mind, some of them dirty and delicious and some of them desperate and devastating.

As she rode him, she felt the pressure building inside of her. Through the darkness, she could see his gaze roaming up and down her body and she could tell he was getting close too. His hands grabbed on to her, tried to change her rhythm to what he needed, and she pressed one hand lightly to his throat to tell him to stop and he immediately obeyed. It was his fast acquiescence that pushed her closer. Keeping her hand on his throat—because she was still a little mad and it felt a little good—she lowered her head. That’s when she saw the blood on the white sheets next to her. She immediately thought of the virgins through the centuries, losing their innocence in arranged marriages they never wanted. It took her a moment to understand what her blood was doing on these sheets, and then she remembered the cut on her leg and the wolves in the woods and Isaac’s voice commanding her:

Run.

She pressed her hand harder against his throat and felt herself come.

Chapter Forty-One

Afterward, Helen and Isaac rolled apart, and as she caught her breath, she became acutely aware that she was just down the hall from her sleeping husband. The anger had drained away, now replaced with a feeling of satisfaction unlike any she’d ever felt before. It was dark and shadowy and strange. This was how villains were made.

Helen looked over at Isaac. He was lying on his back, body relaxed, having found his own release shortly after hers, eyes on the ceiling. She still tasted desire in her mouth, but it was an ambivalent kind now, mixed with shame.

She sat up, and he looked at her and smiled lazily. She pulled her nightgown down over her thighs. The silk was terribly wrinkled from being shoved into a mess above her waist and pressed between their bodies. She didn’t know where her underwear had landed. They weren’t among the twisted rumple of sheets.

Helen stood up but she didn’t see her underwear on the floor next to the bed either. Her eyes roamed the dark space, then saw Isaac was pointing to the far side of the room. She went around the bed and found them on the floor near the wall.

As she pulled them on, she didn’t look at him. Then she smoothed the silk of her nightgown but it was useless. She gave him a quick smile before starting toward the door.

He pushed himself upright and whispered, “Come here.”

She stopped. “What?”

“Come here.”

So she went to the edge of the bed, and he grasped the front of her nightgown and pulled her down for a kiss.

Kissing him felt different to her now that she knew what it was like to have him inside her, and the softness of his lips and taste of him filled her with a new wave of longing. If she weren’t feeling so anxious about what had just happened and what it meant for her and her marriage, if she were just operating on desire alone, she would have crawled back on top of him. But instead, she pulled away from the kiss. “I have to go.”

And she left.

Helen didn’t return to her bedroom that night. She couldn’t sleep next to Wade after what she had done. She wrapped herself in a blanket from the couch and fell asleep there.

In the morning, she awoke to Wade’s hands shaking her. He stood over her with a grim expression. “What are you doing out here?”

She looked up into his eyes and felt a wave of guilt. She thought, I’m definitely the villain now.

“I fell asleep reading,” she said.

Wade looked down at the Edgar Allan Poe book on the coffee table. Before curling up on the couch, Helen had set it there to support her cover story.

“Why is there a bloody towel in the kitchen?”

“Oh.” She had forgotten to tend to the hand towel. “I cut my leg when I went outside. I thought I heard something in the shed.” She lifted the blanket to show him the cut on her shin. It was already starting to scab over.

Wade shook his head. In his mind, more nonsense. “Do you know where my coat is?”