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Only pretend,he’dsaid.
Pretend? No one’s imagination was that good, certainly not hers. He had drugged her. She knew he’d drugged her. The violation of her trust wasunforgivable.
Mona dressed in yesterday’s clothes and checked the time—it was nearly dawn. Hours had passed since she’d drunk the wine he’d left for her by the book. She would have to hurry. She didn’t want the drugs leaving her system before she could be tested for them. Hospital emergency wards were slow, but if she left now, she might make it back before opening the gallery at ten. Not that it mattered much. The gallery would go under without Malcolm’s financial support. But she would rather watch barbarian hordes tear it down brick by brick than allow Malcolm to touch one hair on her head ever again. No man was allowed to drug her. She knew he liked to play games, but this was too far. Whatever his endgame was, she wanted no partofit.
She gathered the pieces of the white card off the bed and tossed them into the trash in heroffice.
The gamewasover.
TheBleedingMan
Pomegranate wine andnothingelse.
No opium, no LSD, no mushrooms,nothing.
Mona couldn’t believe it. A few days after her panicked trip to a doctor, she got the call with her test results. There had been no drugs in her system, none at all. Only alcohol, and not even enough of it to make a dent in hersenses.
She thanked the nurse who called. The woman sounded concerned, suggested Mona talk to a police officer if she believed someone had tried to drug her. Or perhaps a therapist if her drinking was causing her toblackout.
Mona drank little, and when she did it was rarely enough to get drunk. And what would she tell the police if she did call them? She’d agreed to whore herself to a man without a last name who paid her in artwork? That he’d given her a glass of pomegranate wine full of an untraceable hallucinogenic and somehow he’d made her believe she was chained to a boulder in a sacred forest being sexually sacrificed to a cloaked and hooded Minotaur so much larger thananyman?
She’d be in a mental hospital bylunch.
A week after that night, Mona went hunting and tracked down pomegranate wine in a specialty liquor store. Alone at her apartment, she drank a glass of it on an empty stomach. It was delicious, yes, sweet and tart, but it did nothing but give her the typical buzz any glass of red wine would. Malcolm had claimed pomegranates had special properties, but when she researched the fruit she found nowhere that claimed it could cause hallucinations, even whenfermented.
One line about pomegranates did catch her eye, however. The Greeks called it "the fruit of the dead,” and was once believed to have come from the veins of the Greek god Adonis. Pomegranate, the only fruit that grew in Hades. Myth and legend. Pomegranate wine would not have made her seen what she had seen, do what she had done, enjoy what she had enjoyed. Something else was at play.Butwhat?
After their fight, Malcolm made no attempts to see her or contact her in any way. She thought he wasn’t even going to pay her for their encounter until she came to the gallery three weeks after that bizarre red-cloaked night and found an empty red wine bottle on her desk, the cork pushed back inside the mouth. She took the cork out, not wanting to know what Malcolm had left for her. She turned the bottle over and the white card pieces fluttered out. He’d come here while she was gone, gathered them up and put them into the bottle. What did it mean? Was he trying to tell her again that she’d promised him carte blanche? She remembered their first night together. He’d used her glass water bottle inside her as a dildo, fucking her with it. She’d called it perverse and he’d teased her that it could be worse, he could have used a winebottle.
That’s what the message meant. It could have beenworse.
In anger, she gathered every single little scrap of fine white paper in the bottle and dropped it into her wastepaper basket. She could not be bought or cajoled into seeing himagain.
Itwasover.
Underneath the bottle was a linen napkin. She lifted the linen and underneath it was anothersketch.
A close-up of a ballerina’s hand, she knew on sight it was a Degas. A beautiful sketch beautifully done. Sebastian would be overjoyed to see it—and her. Oh, he’d be overjoyed to see her again. He’d phoned her twice since they’d gone to the exhibit, and she’d put him off with vague excuses about not feeling well. He’d been sympathetic, if disappointed. She wondered why she told him no. She’d been furious at Malcolm because she’d been certain he’d drugged her. Then she’d learned he likely hadn’t, and she was desperate to find another reason to stay angry at him. He hadn’t raped her. She’d been a willing participant and had agreed to let him do whatever he wanted to her as long as she wasn’t physically harmed. And he hadn’t harmed her physically, not unless she counted have an aching back and swollen vulva the morning after. She told herself he’d made her distrust her own senses, made her question reality, made her think impossible things could and did happen, and that was unforgivable. Because impossible things didn’t happen and if they did they wouldn’t be impossible. If she hadn’t been drugged, then the maze had been real—and so had the clearing in the woods, the coven of priestesses and the horror of the Minotaur who’d copulated with her. She had no proof he’d drugged her. No proof the maze wasn’t real. What was she to believe? That it had happened as she remembered it? No, she refused to believe it. She’d be on the road tomadnessnext.
Once she reconciled herself to never knowing the truth, Mona did her best to put that mad night and all the memories of it behind her. During the day she could occupy herself with work and her constant fears over the gallery’s imminent closing. But at night she dreamed of Malcolm and the beast he’d become and the enormous cock inside her. She would wake up orgasming, wishing to feel the rock under her back once more. Sometimes she even wept. The need to see Malcolm again and spread her legs for him and be taken by him was so strong it left her breathless, reeling, half-sick and miserable. Every night she’d sneak Tou-Tou into her apartment for the sole reason that she could not stand to be alone at night anymore. She passed New Year’s in her bed reading a book and cuddling with Tou-Tou on her chest. The thought of going out and smiling for friends and flirting with strangers made her dizzy. She wanted nothing to do with the world outside her galleryanymore.
Mona couldn’t go on like this forever. She refused to. Every day she came into the gallery fearful of finding a message from Malcolm, more fearful she wouldn’t. A month passed without him returning to put the red velvet choker into a book of art. Then six weeks. Her resolved started to crumble. She felt it breaking down, heard it cracking. But she stayed adamant—she would not give in and forgiveMalcolm.
The Degas sketch of the ballerina’s hand waited in a folder in her desk. It felt like a test, somehow. Like Malcolm knew about Sebastian, knew hetemptedher.
On a quiet Friday she closed the gallery early and calledSebastian.
"I have something for you,”shesaid.
"The words every man longs to hear from a beautifulwoman.”
"Can you come see it?” she asked, smiling at his voice, so warm and solidandkind.
"Tellmewhen.”
"Right now,” she said. "I’ll be at my gallery all evening working in the back room. I’ll leave the side door unlockedforyou.”
"I’m on my way,” he said. "Then I’m buying you dinner. I won’t take no for an answer. Unless youmeanit.”
