'You're not really the Chanel No. 5 type, but nobody ever knew enough to tell you. You should wear Chanel Coco, if you want Chanel, or L'Air du Temps, if you're feeling a little more feminine. You ought to wear a good scent every day,
He took his fingers from her chin and moved behind her. The bed sank under his weight. 'Hands,' he said. She put her hands behind her back, and he grasped her wrists and lashed them together. 'This is a disgrace. You need a manicure more than anyone I've ever met. Pedicure, too. And you have to start using some really good nail polish, I don't care what kind. We're going to have to shop for some essentials, and after we get toothpaste and stuff like that, I'll get you some female equipment. It'll help our project.'
She heard him rip off a length of tape and felt him coil it around her joined wrists. 'Why are you doing this? Are you going somewhere?'
'Don't want you to run away while I wash the Westerholm slammer off me. Want to come in with me?'
'No, thanks.'
He cackled. 'You can have one after.'
'After what?'
He patted her shoulder and hitched himself off the bed to carry the tape and the knife to the table, where he placed them in their old positions and made sure they were properly aligned.
'Are the two of us going to sleep in this bed?'
He looked over his shoulder in mock surprise. Slowly, as if pondering the question, he revolved to face her. 'Since there's only one bed, I suppose I presumed… And twin beds are so Ozzie and Harriet… But if you have strong objections, I guess I could sleep on the floor.' His drawl ridiculed his own words. 'All right?'
She nodded.
'All right, then.' Dick Dart stripped off his shirt, dropped it on the floor, and undid the top of his trousers. His tasseled black loafers came off, and he bent down and skipped out of his trousers. His arms and shoulders were flabby, and a crust of black hair covered his chest. The shapeless slab of his stomach pushed out the waistband of boxer shorts decorated with a fly-fishing pattern. 'But I don't expect to have that problem.' He pushed down the shorts, exposing a nest of brown curly hair and a long, thick cucumber penis ridged with prominent veins. He tossed the shorts onto the chair and unselfconsciously walked to the table to pick up the roll of tape. His buttocks were flat, almost absent, and his heavy thighs and calves ended in wide, oddly primitive-looking feet, like those of dinosaurs. Tufts of black hair grew alongside his spine at the small of his back.
He ripped a four-inch section off the tape and came toward Nora, penis swinging before him like a pendulum. 'We'll work things out.' Then he was standing in front of her, the ridged gray cucumber at the level of her eyes radiating stinks like a swamp. She began to shake. Tears slipped from her eyes. He pushed up her chin, smiled down over the bulge of his belly, and flattened the tape over her mouth. 'Breathe through your nose. Don't panic.'
He pushed her shoulders and sent her flopping backwards onto the bed. Dart disappeared. She tried to gasp, and coarse tape clamped against her lips. Her body demanded oxygen, immediately. Pain blazed in her shoulders, and the rope chewed her wrists and ankles. She rolled from side to side, choking on tape, and finally remembered to breathe through her nose. Dimly she heard a chuckle, then the closing of the bathroom door. The shower hissed and rattled against the tub. Dart's unmelodious voice began singing 'Them There Eyes.' Nora rotated her hands and wrists the quarter inch permitted by the rope handcuffs. She lay collapsed against the bedspread, too terrified to cry.
Nora had a sudden vision of herself as seen from above: naked, bent across the bed, trussed like a roaster for the oven. She looked like a corpse in a crime-scene photograph. The woman in the photograph was nothing, an emptiness, less than pathetic. Some deaths might be preferable to the madness waiting within her, but not that one.
Dart came out of the bathroom, hair plastered to his head, water shaping the hairs on his legs into vertical lines. 'What a picture you make.' He unfurled a towel and systematically began rubbing it over his arms, chest, gut, genitals, legs.
'Back in a second.' He vanished into the bathroom and reappeared with a fresh towel. Instead of returning to the bedside, he closed the bathroom door and stepped back toward the closet. Nora watched his reflection in the mirror on the bathroom door. He scrubbed his hair until it floated about his head, and then lightly ran the towel over his neck, his chest, his penis. He clutched himself with the towel, pulled himself roughly several times, and manipulated his testicles. After reaching a satisfactory stage of self-arousal, he stood sideways, held in his belly, gave himself an encouraging pat, as much a slap as a caress;, and twitched upward another half inch. Dart had forgotten all about her. His beloved, the cucumber, jutted out before him. Dart clutched it in his fist and jerked up and down causing the entire structure to darken to purple, bloat out another half inch, and raise itself in an upward curve. This; accomplished, Dart turned to face himself head-on. Excited by the sight of itself, the thing in front of him stiffened into a curved rigidity ending in a red-blue knob the size of a small apple. Dart's eyes were glazed, and his mouth was open. Nora thought he was about to ejaculate. He hefted his testicles and groaned.
Dart strode back into the room. 'Hope you appreciate my consideration in showering. Did it for me more than for you, but wouldn't want any unseemly body odors distracting you from what most women find a deeply enjoyable experience.' He straddled her legs, bent over her, pushed the head of his penis into her stomach, and rubbed it back and forth across her stomach. 'Like that?' He stroked one of her breasts with his free hand. Nora closed her eyes, and he pinched her nipple. She uttered a sharp sound of protest into the tape over her mouth. 'Pay attention,' he sang, twirling the nipple painfully between his thumb and index finger. 'We are going to perform an introduction, and it isn't polite to close your eyes.' Smiling, he hitched himself up onto the bed and settled his knees on either side of her rib cage. 'Nora's titties, meet the Big Guy.' He leaned forward and ran the Big Guy along first one nipple, then the other. He lowered himself between her breasts, squeezed them around himself, and pumped back and forth. Dart released her breasts and hitched himself forward to thrust his beloved before her eyes. 'Don't call me Dick for nothing, right? Never saw one like that before, did you?'
The object four inches from Nora's eyes looked like something pried out of calcified mud at an archaeological dig, something offered for half price at an Arabian bazaar, something carved from an enormous root. Granddad had brought it home from his travels and shown it to Grandma, and after she stopped shouting at him he had taken it upstairs to the attic and buried it in a steamer trunk. Varied in texture from corrugation to a dangerous, slick smoothness, lumpy with veins, a goiter stuffed with rocks - was this what most men wanted to have? Would Davey wish to swap his nice, willing member for this? She knew the answer. He would, absolutely.
She shook her head.
'Going to go places hubby could never take you, Nora-pie.'
He moved off the bed, went to the table, and picked up the largest knife. Then he knelt in front of Nora and peeled the tape off her legs. Instead of cutting; the rope, he laboriously untied the knot. Her legs loosened and sagged. Nora instantly closed them, and Dart chuckled and stood up. 'Move up on the bed,' he said.
She hesitated, and Dart brought the point of the knife into contact with her left thigh.
She got her feet on the bed and levered herself up to the pillows. Her arms and shoulders ached, and her wrists burned. Dart walked up beside her on his knees. When he reached her groin, he slapped the knife on the pillow, thrust his hand between her legs, and rummaged around until he inserted a blunt fingertip. Nora's body shuddered and went cold.
Humming to himself, Dart withdrew his finger and slid on top of her. He pushed her legs apart, planted his knees between them, and moved down to take aim. Nora made a high-pitched sound muffled by the tape. Her face was covered with tears.
Dart maneuvered a portion of himself into her and grunted. He shoved forward. Nora felt as though she were being torn apart. She screamed and heard only a thin, weightless wail. Smiling, Dick Dart propped himself on his elbows and held the knife to her throat. 'What we have here is a reality lesson. All sex is rape, pure and simple. I am going to put my cock into your pussy. This act has been known to send women out of their minds, even then it was rape…' He pushed himself another quarter inch forward. '… and do you know why? Because when it was all over, I owned them. That's the secret.' He hoisted himself up, withdrew a tiny bit, and then rammed himself into her. Nora screamed again and rolled to one side.
Dart shoved her back down.
