M Sellars - The End Of Desire

“Where are you going?” she asks.

I stop and furrow my brow.

“Yes, I’m talking to you, little man,” she continues, still without looking at me. Instead she seems to be intent on the items she has piled on the small table next to her.

“Me?” I ask calmly.

“Yes, you.”

“How? You aren’t even really here.”

“You tell me,” she counters. “It’s your vision, now isn’t it? Ah, there it is…”

She smiles and holds up a scissors-style cigar cutter.

“Right now I think I would prefer to believe you’re a figment of my imagination,” I tell her.

She shrugs. “If you want to believe that.”

“You left it up to me.”

She counters with a question. “Yes, I did. But you aren’t that stupid, now are you?”

“No.” I shake my head. “Unfortunately, I don’t suppose I am.”

She giggles. My answer is obviously amusing to her. Canting her head to the side but still not looking in my direction she says, “You belong to her don’t you?”

It is a statement as much as a question, however, I ask, “Her who?”

“The her who is taking what is mine,” she spits. “Felicity, I believe is what you said.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

She carefully trims the end from a cigar then sets it alight. Silence flows between us as I watch her. A thin stream of blue-white smoke comes from between her pursed lips as she blows on the glowing tobacco and inspects to see that it is burning evenly. Placing the lit end in her mouth, she then exhales slowly through it, sending a cloud of pungent smoke billowing from the end. I know all too well that she is “smoking it” for her Lwa.

After a moment she pulls it from her mouth and rests it on the edge of the table.

Again, there is a theatrical flicker, and the stern, auburn-haired woman is in her place.

“You’re lying. I think you do know,” she says as if there had never been a lull in the conversation.

“Why do you think that?”

“Because you feel it.”

“Feel what?”

She finally looks up at me and smiles thinly, her dark eyes piercing. Reaching to the side, she takes hold of the victim’s hand. He is securely bound so he is unable to pull away, but a horrified squeal begins behind her as he struggles, only to be interrupted by her careful method of bondage. I hear a metallic snick and watch as she slips the cigar cutter over his pinkie finger at the second joint.

“The same thing we are going to feel when I do this,” she says and punctuates the sentence by bearing down and squeezing the cutter closed.

The stir that had been wriggling deep inside my body flared in that exact instant. No longer was it simply extreme arousal; it was now tickling nerve endings I didn’t even know I had. The result was a pleasure so intense as to be literally excruciating in its scope. I now knew the true meaning of having something feel so good that it hurt.

The room began to spin and then everything went completely black.

I opened my eyes and the acoustically textured ceiling filled my field of view. I felt spent in a way I had never experienced before, and to say I was confused wasn’t doing my current state any justice. I was completely addled. I was in agony deep inside, but it was a pain born of emptiness. An ache that called out, begging to be filled by the pleasure once again.

With a groan, I started to sit up but felt a firm pressure pushing me back down. I fell back and my head thumped against the floor.

I blinked.

Now I not only saw the ceiling but Annalise as well. She was leaning over me, one high-heel encased foot pressing down on my chest and holding me to the floor.

“Tell Felicity I want it back,” she said. “All of it.”

In that moment everything shifted, and the three-dimensional quality of the vision flattened then faded in a bloom of light. I was still squatting next to the bed, staring directly ahead as I had been at the beginning. I did notice, however, that I was holding my breath. I let it out with a heavy sigh. My eyes were itching and dry, so I closed them, but the moment I did so I feared I would regret the action. It seemed that blinking was getting me into a lot of trouble right now. Still, I knew that sitting here forever with my eyes closed wasn’t going to get me anywhere, so I steeled myself in preparation for the onslaught of another round and allowed them to flutter open.

The vision was still gone.

I stood up, rubbed my eyes, then turned and started back toward the small room housing the vanity. I had only made it two steps when I caught myself and came to a halt.

An unbelievably intense feeling of deja vu overwhelmed me as recent memories flooded in. Though the hollowness still ached deep inside, my rational brain pushed through the fog and assumed control once again. I decided not to bother with a repeat of the trip to the sink that I wasn’t even sure I had really made. I simply needed to get out of here before leaving became impossible.

Turning, I headed toward the front of the room, skirting around the end of the bed then reaching the door in two quick steps. Any sense of stealth and caution to which I had earlier subscribed was now depleted. I pulled the door open and stepped out into the night, almost forgetting to tug it closed behind me. Starting up the walk, I broke into a jog, trying to put distance between the scene and me as fast as I could.

I gave my watch a quick glance and figured that I’d only been in the room for a little over twenty minutes. It had seemed like much longer, but that was the way of things with ethereal visions. They seemed to run by a clock all their own.

Nearing the office, I fished the room key out of my jacket pocket and popped it through the mail slot, barely stopping as I did so. Turning, I started on an angle across the lot toward my car.

I had only made it a few steps when the authoritative voice hit my ears.

“FREEZE! POLICE! LEMME SEE YA’ HANDS, RIGHT NOW!”

My arms were starting to go numb.

Of course, since my hands were still cuffed behind my back, I don’t suppose I should have been surprised by that fact. I shifted slightly forward in the metal chair then rotated my shoulders as much as I could manage in an attempt to jumpstart the circulation. While I was leaning, I extended two fingers on my right hand, grasped them with my left, and held tight. It was a trick Ben had taught me long ago to relieve the pressure of the cuffs on my wrists. At the time, I hadn’t really understood why he assumed I would need such knowledge. It wasn’t like I had a tendency to get myself arrested. However, I was grateful for the arcane tip now since it afforded at least a small amount of relief from the biting restraints.

I glanced around at the blue-green walls in search of a clock. I was guessing that I had been warming this chair for better than an hour, but my sense of time was so screwed at the moment it might have been no more than fifteen minutes. By that same token, it could easily have been half a day. I simply didn’t know. Twisting slightly in my seat, I looked back over my shoulder to inspect the wall behind me and found nothing but another sea of nauseating blue-green. I’d already engaged in this futile exercise more times than I could count, so why I was bothering again I had no idea. There was nothing for me to see, other than the sickening color and the one-way mirror across the room in front of me. For all I knew, someone was on the opposite side of it watching me. In fact, I would bet hard money on it.

Settling back in, I hung my head and spent some time staring at the worn, grey carpet. It was patterned with more than its share of stains, the origins of which I didn’t even want to speculate over. But, when you have little else to do, your brain will tend to entertain itself however it wants, so it set about trying to identify the oddly shaped splotches of its own accord, regardless of my feelings on the subject.