Tourist – Part 3

“Oh, no, no, no…” she said, so softly, more air than words, as if anything louder could trigger a cataclysm.

The tip of the knife. Its impossible point hiccupped on her pores as it traced her jaw line. A tear slipped over the crest of her lip, hung there, burning the kiss-bruised flesh with its salt. It only made more fall.

“Why are you crying, baby?” he asked.  He tilted his hand, shifting the knife, and caught the offending tear on the tip of his pinkie.  “You weren’t crying before. Before you were moaning and gasping and begging me to fuck you harder. Didn’t I fuck you hard enough, baby?”

“Yes. Yes you did.”

“Then why,” he whispered, letting the silvery point follow the line of another tear, recently shed, from her eyelash, down her cheek, and into her hairline, “are you crying?”

They were sitting on the wreck of his enormous hotel bed. Taupe sheets torn from their moorings at an earlier stage in the evening. He sat propped up against the headboard, legs spread wide and bent at the knees, with her between them. One hand curled possessively around her throat, the other held the knife.

She didn’t know much about knives. It was one of those ones that folded sideways, with a long, thin blade. The handle was white mother of pearl. It glinted creamily in the light of the bedside lamp, but not as much as the steel. Did it matter what kind of knife it was once it had killed you?

His cock was hard, upright, throbbing against her tailbone. Upright like the knife. Angry like the knife.

“You’re frightening me,” she whimpered.

“Ah-h,” he breathed, as if it were a revelation. The tips of the fingers at her throat stroked the skin there. “And you don’t like that? Not as hot as my fingers in your cunt?”

She wet her lip to stop the sting and gave her head the tiniest of shakes.

“No?” He lowered the knife. And because of the way he held her throat, because his hand was big and forced her chin up, because she was terrified to do anything that would anger him more, she could not see it.

The cool metal kissed the top of her breast, the faintest scratch it made on route to her nipple. Unable to control her breathing, the shallow, panicked gasps she took forced the tip to take a meandering journey.

“But your nipples are hard,” he said. “Are you a liar as well as a whore?”

“No.”

“Ah, darlin’, all women are liars and whores. Some are just better dressed and better spoken.”

She felt the knife-edge flick her nipple and she jerked back, deeper into the hot cave of his grasp to get away from it. In her mind’s eye the keen edge had taken the tip off it. But there was no pain, just a screaming, crawling skin terror where the pain might have been.

“Don’t. Please, don’t,” she wailed, her fear getting the better of her, panic starting to turn her extremities to ice.

The hand around her neck cupped her chin, raising her head. His grizzled cheek was against hers, rough bristles sliding over her wet face.

“Did you think I would ruin such a pretty thing?” he asked with the kind of soothing tone used on infants or dumb animals. “Such a pretty little thing?”

She felt another flick, against her left nipple. Then another, and another, and she realized he was using the blunt edge of the knife. The inexplicable moment of relief divulged strange chemistry into her bloodstream. It made her tendons twitch and left the taste of metal in her mouth.

“Oh, no. Not there. Not your sweet little nipples. I’d never do anything like that.”

With a speed that made her lurch again, he trapped her ankles with his own, locking a foot around each, and pulled her legs apart.  He spread them wide enough to hurt.

“But perhaps…” his voiced trailed off, and the knife-tip skimmed the curve at the side of her stomach, mounted her hip.

“No. No.” The panic ignited again, phosphorous bright.  She reached out blindly, jogged his arm and felt the blade bite into just where her hipbone pushed up her skin. “Fuck, no!” she cried.

He let go of her neck then, wrapping his arm around her shoulders, flattening her arms tight to her chest.  Her eyes locked on the dark red bead of ruby blood that budded against the pale skin.

“See what you made me do, baby?”