Elise Blackwell - The Lower Quarter

He called through the door, “What about me? How much do I wear?”

“Up to you,” she said. Realizing her voice wasn’t loud enough to carry through the thick wood, she repeated it with forced volume: “Up to you. I can hurt you through your clothes. Most guys wear boxers. A few need to be naked.”

“What’s your preference?” Even at its raised pitch, his voice was patrician. Something in the accent or intonation — she couldn’t identify it, but she recognized it all the same. Yes, the paintings were the real thing.

“Doesn’t matter to me either way, but my clothes stay on.”

When she came out, face set to make it look older and more serious, he was wearing jeans and nothing else.

She thought she might start with him over the bed, testing whether what he said about pain was real before striping his back or his feet with the single tail, which she had used before but only lightly or to make noise — all pretend. But that felt wrong. She chose a leather strap, drawn by its simplicity, its ability to leave marks but not draw blood. “Grab the doorway,” she said, “up high.”

He smirked but did as she said, his feet on each side of the door as he faced the hall, his hands holding the frame near the top on each side. There was something off about the shape he made — a star tilted because his hips weren’t even, the left one lower than the right, leaving him slightly cocked to the side. The imperfection appealed to her. She bit her lip just hard enough to make it hurt, for her to imagine the blood near the surface seeping through the skin.

She hit him hard across the back of his jeans, but not as hard as she could. The next time a little harder and then again, settling on what she calculated to be severe but short of what she was physically capable of and counting to twenty. She’d show him his pain threshold wasn’t as high as he thought it was, that he didn’t really want what he said he did.

His body stiffened with each strike, resisting rather than giving in, more brittle than relaxed. When she told him to look over his shoulder at her, his expression was hard and unreadable. He was not pliant, and he had not been transported to that other place, the place of permanent now with no responsibilities. She wielded the belt as hard as she could, and he glared at her. His eyes showed no pleasure, no connection, no release or escape, no fear or desire. Nothing.

She stated the simple fact: “You’re not a masochist.”

He shook his head, still glaring at her. She couldn’t tell if it was due to the light through the plantation blinds or if his eyes were really wet. If what she was seeing was the beginning of tears, they were tears of physical pain, or perhaps of anger, but not of humiliation.

“And not a submissive,” she said, letting the belt fall against her own thigh. “So what the hell is this? Did you lose a bet or something?”

He dropped his arms and turned toward her, taking a step closer. This made her want to back away, but she held her stance and looked directly into his eyes, nearly see-through in color but opaque in expression.

“I wanted to feel what it’s like to have something done to you that you don’t want done,” he said.

“You want to be punished for something.” She knew that she should be afraid of what the something was, yet she no longer perceived him as a potential threat. It might have been because of his off-kilter stance, though that would be dumb; a physical flaw can make someone more dangerous just as easily as not.

His lips parted as though he was about to answer her, but they closed before they opened again with what she was sure were different words: “You could say that, yes.” The blink again, slow, as if for effect. “How could you tell I didn’t like it? I’m guessing it takes one to know one?”

His voice was louder now, direct, accusatory, and she felt the place inside her unlatch. Her knees bent just slightly. A patch under her sternum quivered. “It’s from this side”—she handed him the strap she’d been using—“that you learn compassion and forgiveness.”

His laugh was almost a snort when he shoved her over the bed. “You think I should be rehabilitated instead of punished? Or that someone can learn to use power with restraint?”

When he struck her across the back of her thighs, the sting was sharper than any she’d ever felt. She heard her breath catch, and then she relaxed into pain, never knowing quite when or where it would come.

An hour later, she had broken both of her rules. Surprised by the strength of the weak-looking man, she was nude and had been fucked bound on the floor, bent over the bathtub, pressed against the wall. She’d been whipped and pinched and forced to her knees, her hair pulled hard. He’d taken her across her pain threshold, and she’d let him, afraid that if she broke the scene it would end instead of soften.

When he was done with her, finally, he lay on his back on the bed. She lay on her side, looking away from him and at the wall, smelling his smell coming from both of them, slightly metallic but also like sanded wood.

“Do you want to know what it feels like from this side?”

Her question was quiet, but he heard her and responded: “I’m not interested in your psychology, and I don’t want to hear any stories about how your self-esteem was injured as a child by the teacher who threw away your dandelions or the daddy who didn’t like the poems you wrote.”

“But you are interested in it, because it’s my reaction that gives you pleasure, and you’re wrong about it. I’ve never written poems, and I don’t have self-esteem problems or daddy issues.”

“Well, then?”

She changed sides, facing him but maintaining the distance between them on the high bed. “Clarity. There’s no indecisiveness, because there are no decisions. There’s not any regret, because there’s no past. There’s no anxiety, because there’s no future.”

“Indecisiveness is not my problem. I like making decisions.”

“Obviously you like control. I won’t ask why.”

He remained looking straight up at the gauzy canopy that made the bed into its own room. “If you ever want to do this again, you need to stop with the psychology right now. It bores me, and its little equations are almost always wrong.”

When she left she felt something close to exhilarated, barely noticing the long bike ride home. Maybe she had found him: the man who could show her who she was outside time and place. If he happened to be an asshole with a limp, that was probably part of the territory. His talent was rare.

Most guys would play at the role if asked — most guys will do anything to get and keep getting sex — but only for very few was it not play. She didn’t know what it meant that it came naturally to this man, or what it meant that her role came naturally to her, but the man was right in his condemnation of easy psychology. She knew that as well as anyone and again resolved to return to her intentionally unreflective life. She liked what she liked and had finally found a place to get it.

Only when she arrived home did she realize that she had not returned his money to him. For a moment she thought she would keep it — after all, she’d ridden all the way uptown and started to do what she was being paid for — but then she recognized that she could not because of the words she would be if she did. She was none of those words. She was her own person.

Eli

The hotel used real keys with cumbersome rings, making practically appealing its rule that all room keys be left at the desk. Behind the down-on-its-luck reception desk and the surprisingly crisp woman staffing it, a partial wall of small numbered cubbyholes held the keys of guests out walking the Quarter. Eli counted: his key would make that number three.