Claimed in the Dark

The house had seven locks on the front door. I had counted them the first night, lying on a bed that was not mine, in a room with a window that did not open, in a city I could no longer name because Luca had driven me here blindfolded with my own scarf.

Three weeks now. Long enough that my body had learned the sound of his footstep on the stairs before my brain caught up to dread it.

That was the part nobody warns you about. Not the fear. The knowing.

He came up at ten, the way he always did, and I was already sitting on the edge of the mattress with my spine straight because the one time I had stayed lying down he had simply stood in the doorway until I understood. Luca did not raise his voice. He did not need to. The whole point of a man who owns the building, the street, the men on the street, is that the volume can stay low.

“You ate nothing,” he said. He set the tray on the dresser. Bread, oil, a peeled orange in segments like he had done it with his thumbs.

“I’m not hungry.”

“You’re punishing me.” He almost smiled. “It doesn’t work. I don’t get hungry when you starve. You just get smaller, and then I have less of you.”

He crossed the room. I made myself look at the window instead of him, at the streetlight smeared orange through glass that would not open, and still I tracked him by the smell, cedar and cigarette smoke and something underneath that was just him, that I had started to find in the pillow when he wasn’t here and pressed my face into before I caught myself.

That was the thought that came then, sharp and out of nowhere. You memorized him. You traitor. You learned the man like a route home.

“Look at me, Mara.”

I didn’t.

He took my chin. Not hard. That was somehow worse, the patience in it, two fingers and a thumb turning my face up to his like he had all the time in the world because he did. His eyes went over me the way a man checks a thing he has bought and intends to keep. Down my throat. The collar of his shirt that I was wearing because he had taken my clothes the first week and given me his, on purpose, so I would smell like him to myself.

“There she is,” he said.

My pulse was going in my throat where he could feel it. I knew he could feel it. And my face went hot, because the heartbeat was not fear, or not only fear, and a man like Luca can tell the difference. He had been telling the difference for three weeks. He smiled like he was reading it off my skin.

“Your mouth says one thing.” His thumb dragged along my jaw, slow, to the corner of my lips. “The rest of you keeps arguing with it.”

“Don’t.”

“Don’t what.” Not a question. He never asked questions he didn’t already own the answer to.

I hated him. I want that on the record, in my own voice, because in a minute it stops being clean. I hated the locks and the window and the way he peeled the orange. I hated that my thighs had pressed together when he took my chin and that he had looked down and seen it and let me see him see it.

“You think wanting it makes you weak,” he said. He was crouching now, between my knees, his hands settling on them, pushing them apart with no force at all, just the weight of his palms and the fact that I let him. “It doesn’t. It makes you mine faster. That’s all.”

My knees went where he put them. That was the betrayal, the small mechanical one, my own joints obeying ahead of my will, my breath going short and shallow before his hand had even moved up. He felt the change. His thumbs stroked the inside of my knees once, and a sound came out of me that I had not approved, low in my throat, and the shame of it lit my face on fire even as my hips tilted toward him.

“There,” he murmured. “Was that so hard.”

“I’m not doing this for you.”

“No.” His hands slid up, under the hem of the shirt, palms flat on my bare thighs, and the heat of them went straight up through me. “You’re doing it for you. I just get to watch.”

His fingers found the edge of me, the cotton I was wearing because he had allowed me that one thing, and he pressed the flat of two fingers there, light, over the fabric, and I was already soaked through it. I knew it. He knew it. He went still for a second, just feeling how wet the cotton was, and his jaw moved.

“Three weeks of telling me no,” he said, very quiet now. “And you’re dripping for me with your mouth shut.”

I shut my eyes. The wrong thing to do. With my eyes shut there was only his hand and the slow drag of his fingers along the wet seam of me, back and forth, learning the shape of what I would not say out loud. My hips chased the pressure. I caught them. I lost them again.

“Open your eyes. You don’t get to hide and have it both ways.”

I opened them.

He hooked the cotton aside. The night air on my bare cunt, and then his fingers there, no fabric between us, sliding through how wet I was, and a noise broke out of me that was nearly a sob. His middle finger circled my clit, found it without searching, and my whole body jerked toward his hand like it had been waiting three weeks for exactly this and had only let my mouth pretend otherwise.

“Say you want it.”

“No.”

“Say it.” Two fingers now, pushing into me, slow, all the way, while his thumb stayed on my clit, and my back arched off the bed and I grabbed his wrist with both hands. Not to stop him. To keep him there. He felt that too. Nothing got past him. “Your hands are holding me in. Your cunt’s holding me in. Only your tongue’s a liar.” He curled his fingers and something behind my navel went white. “I can be patient. I can keep you right here, just like this, for an hour. You’ll break before I do.”

He started to move them, deep and slow and certain, the heel of his hand grinding against me, and I was rocking down onto his fingers now with no pretense left, my thighs shaking, the wet sound of it obscene in the quiet room and louder because of how quiet he kept everything. The pressure built behind my hips, low and tight and rising, that long pull right before the edge.

He felt it coming. Of course he did.

He stopped.

His fingers stilled inside me, buried, the pad of his thumb lifting just off my clit so there was contact and no movement, and I hung there at the lip of it with my whole body screaming and nothing tipping me over. A sound came out of me, raw, and I would have given him the locks and the city and my own name to make him move.

“Now ask,” Luca said.

I shook my head, but my hips were grinding down on his motionless hand, working for it, humiliating myself against his stillness, and he let me, watching my face do the thing my voice wouldn’t.

“Please.” It tore out of me. “Please, Luca.”

“Please what.” Calm. Cedar and smoke. His fingers flexed once, just once, and I shattered toward it and he held me back from the edge again. “Use the word. You know the word. I want to hear my prim little hostage say it.”

And here is where I stopped being able to lie, to him or to myself, with my thighs spread over his hand and three weeks of no collapsing into one syllable in the dark.

The lock turned downstairs. The front door. One of the seven locks, the bottom one, the sound traveling up through the floor.

Luca went still in a different way. His head turned toward the stairs. His fingers stayed inside me, but his eyes had left my face for the first time all night, and something cold moved into his shoulders that I had never once seen there.

Nobody had a key to the bottom lock but him.