Gillian Flynn - Gone Girl:

He enters, and he makes my mouth water. The smell. He brings me something nice to eat, but not as nice as what he’s had: He’s thinning me up, he always preferred his women waify. So he brings me lovely green star fruit and spiky artichokes and spiny crab, anything that takes elaborate preparation and yields little in return. I am almost my normal weight again, and my hair is growing out. I wear it back in a headband he brought me, and I have colored it back to my blond, thanks to hair dye he also brought me: “I think you will feel better about yourself when you start looking more like yourself, sweetheart,” he says. Yes, it’s all about my well-being, not the fact that he wants me to look exactly like I did before. Amy circa 1987.

I eat lunch as he hovers near me, waiting for the compliments. (To never have to say those words —thank you —again. I don’t remember Nick ever pausing to allow me—force me—to thank him.) I finish lunch, and he tidies up as best as he knows how. We are two people unaccustomed to cleaning up after ourselves; the place is beginning to look lived in—strange stains on countertops, dust on windowsills.

Lunch concluded, Desi fiddles with me for a while: my hair, my skin, my clothes, my mind.

“Look at you,” he’ll say, tucking my hair behind my ears the way he likes it, unbuttoning my shirt one notch and loosening it at the neck so he can look at the hollow of my clavicle. He puts a finger in the little indentation, filling the gap. It is obscene. “How can Nick have hurt you, have not loved you, have cheated on you?” He continually hits these points, verbally poking a bruise. “Wouldn’t it be so lovely to just forget about Nick, those awful five years, and move on? You have that chance, you know, to completely start over with the right man. How many people can say that?”

I do want to start over with the right man, the New Nick. Things are looking bad for him, dire. Only I can save Nick from me. But I am trapped.

“If you ever left here and I didn’t know where you were, I’d have to go to the police,” he says. “I’d have no choice. I’d need to make sure you were safe, that Nick wasn’t … holding you somewhere against your will. Violating you.”

A threat disguised as concern.

I look at Desi with outright disgust now. Sometimes I feel my skin must be hot with repulsion and with the effort to keep that repulsion hidden. I’d forgotten about him. The manipulation, the purring persuasion, the delicate bullying. A man who finds guilt erotic. And if he doesn’t get his way, he’ll pull his little levers and set his punishment in motion. At least Nick was man enough to go stick his dick in something. Desi will push and push with his waxy, tapered fingers until I give him what he wants.

I thought I could control Desi, but I can’t. I feel like something very bad is going to happen.

NICK DUNNE

THIRTY-THREE DAYS GONE

The days were loose and long, and then they smashed into a wall. I went out to get groceries one August morning, and I came home to find Tanner in my living room with Boney and Gilpin. On the table, inside a plastic evidence bag, was a long thick club with delicate grooves for fingers.

“We found this just down the river from your home on that first search,” Boney said. “Didn’t look like anything at the time, really. Just some of the weird flotsam on a riverbank, but we keep everything in a search like that. After you showed us your Punch and Judy dolls, it clicked. So we got the lab to check it out.”

“And?” I said. Toneless.

Boney stood up, looked me right in the eye. She sounded sad. “We were able to detect Amy’s blood on it. This case is now classified as a homicide. And we believe this to be the murder weapon.”

“Rhonda, come on!”

“It’s time, Nick,” she said. “It’s time.”

The next part was starting.

AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE

FORTY DAYS GONE

I have found a piece of old twine and an empty wine bottle, and I’ve been using them for my project. Also some vermouth, of course. I am ready.

Discipline. This will take discipline and focus. I am up to the task.

I array myself in Desi’s favorite look: delicate flower. My hair in loose waves, perfumed. My skin has paled after a month inside. I am almost without makeup: a flip of mascara, pink-pink cheeks, and clear lip gloss. I wear a clingy pink dress he bought me. No bra. No panties. No shoes, despite the air-conditioned chill. I have a fire crackling and perfume in the air, and when he arrives after lunch without invitation, I greet him with pleasure. I wrap my arms around him and bury my face in his neck. I rub my cheek against his. I have been increasingly sweeter to him the past few weeks, but this is new, this clinging.

“What’s this, sweetheart?” he says, surprised and so pleased that I almost feel ashamed.

“I had the worst nightmare last night,” I whisper. “About Nick. I woke up, and all I wanted was to have you here. And in the morning … I’ve spent all day wishing you were here.”

“I can always be here, if you like.”

“I would,” I say, and I turn my face up to him and let him kiss me. His kiss disgusts me; it’s nibbly and hesitant, like a fish. It’s Desi being respectful of his raped, abused woman. He nibbles again, wet cold lips, his hands barely on me, and I just want this all over, I want it done, so I pull him to me and push his lips open with my tongue. I want to bite him.

He pulls back. “Amy,” he says. “You’ve been through a lot. This is fast. I don’t want you to do this fast if you don’t want to. If you’re not sure.”

I know he’s going to have to touch my breasts, I know he’s going to have to push himself inside me, and I want it over, I can barely restrain myself from scratching him: the idea of doing this slowly.

“I’m sure,” I say. “I guess I’ve been sure since we were sixteen. I was just afraid.”

This means nothing, but I know it will get him hard.

I kiss him again, and then I ask him if he will take me into our bedroom.

In the bedroom, he begins undressing me slowly, kissing parts of my body that have nothing to do with sex—my shoulder, my ear—while I delicately guide him away from my wrists and ankles. Just fuck me, for Christ’s sake. Ten minutes in and I grab his hand and thrust it between my legs.

“Are you sure?” he says, pulling back from me, flushed, a loop of his hair falling over his forehead, just like in high school. We could be back in my dorm room, for all the progress Desi has made.

“Yes, darling,” I say, and I reach modestly for his cock.

Another ten minutes and he’s finally between my legs, pumping gently, slowly, slowly, making love . Pausing for kisses and caresses until I grab him by the buttocks and begin pushing him. “Fuck me,” I whisper, “fuck me hard.”

He stops. “It doesn’t have to be like that, Amy. I’m not Nick.”

Very true. “I know, darling, I just want you to … to fill me. I feel so empty.”

That gets him. I grimace over his shoulder as he thrusts a few more times and comes, me realizing it almost too late— Oh, this is his pathetic cum-sound —and faking quick oohs and ahhs, gentle kittenish noises. I try to work up some tears because I know he imagines me crying with him the first time.

“Darling, you’re crying,” he says as he slips out of me. He kisses a tear.

“I’m just happy,” I say. Because that’s what those kinds of women say.

I have mixed up some martinis, I announce—Desi loves a decadent afternoon drink—and when he makes a move to put on his shirt and fetch them, I insist he stay in bed.

“I want to do something for you for a change,” I say.