Sheena beat Henry with a tease only, but now it came time to terminate…the tease. She had fun. Not like the first time way back when. The first time she teased a man like this she nearly tossed. The power of her sexuality never tested until that first tease test. It marked a demarcation between girl and woman, between victim and villain. Now she teased her men, sometimes beatings sometimes worse, just to watch them clench. She smiled as Henry unclenched. Sheena was not alone in her wonder and fascination with the male of the species. Men puzzled women. Give men what they want and they leave in triumph. Withhold it and they stay in hope. She never knew why this worked but it did.
“Can I offer you a drink? Wine?” asked Sheena.
Her relative non sequitur returned Henry from his temporary confusion.
“Yes, do you have Green Eyes Pinot Noir?” asked Henry. I knew she was kidding about the beating all the time. He checked his trousers, first back then front.
“Did you mean to ask, ‘Do you have Pinot Noir, green eyes?’” answered Sheena, still teasing. “No.” she continued seriously, “I don’t drink red wine. It turns my lips blue”.
Is that how you do it?
“In fact, I don’t drink any grape wine. It weakens my inhibitions…”
That is good to know…that she knows of such things.
“But I do have other types of wine – fruit?”
Each word she spoke dropped sweet potion in Henry’s senses. Each gesture she made worked to further entrance him. Sheena excited his thoughts, accelerated them. He recollected walking into the room fully alert. He remembered that distant moment but now his senses raced as she teased, then pleased him with her kind regard. Now, he slowly but consciously wanted to give in to the abandon her potion offered up.
Abruptly, Henry snapped back from his ruminations to a terrible sound. Sheena screeched a short sturdy stool across the bare floor. Henry looked preoccupied to her, so she recruited her three-legged helper to assist in scaling her tall, lean fruitful rack of wine. Taller now, she perused the slender necks. She twisted them with purpose. He listened to the lilt of her indecipherable comments. He couldn’t be sure of her whisperings. Were they for his ears or for his imagination? Sheena continued her murmuring, her mouth sometimes moving close in, her lips changing color as the ambient light diffused through and upon the curved surfaces.
Is the Princess from Pandora revealing herself unknowingly?
Suddenly, Sheena spoke, “I have a nice raspberry. You surely won’t be feeling any pain…after a couple of pours”.
So are you back to teasing me with a beating?
“I have a nice hibiscus. It helps to regulate body temperature”.
Is that regulation voluntary or mandatory?
“I have a nice prickly pear”.
Indeed!
Sheena interpreted Henry’s choked response to mean ‘Yes, I would like to try them…or rather it’. Sheena grabbed the “Cactus”. Surprised by its color, the rich fluorescent purple spirits evoked romance and nostalgia in Henry. She poured…the flow more like nectar than wine. The long stemmed exquisite promised gratification in the purest sense. The Crystal clarity and veiled motives contrasted, as enchantment always presents.
Sheena placed a glass in Henry’s hand. She placed the cork behind her…this bottle’s destiny already determined. Perhaps Henry wished his near future were as obvious.
As Sheena advanced, Henry noticed the current cork in an extra-large…a giant’s wine glass. 750.milliliters, filled with 751.milliliters of normal sized wine-corks. The fresh soldier laid atop this monument to merriment. Knowing that Henry watched her, she straightened and turned like a ballerina, ready to begin her next part. She approached Henry with her stemware held delicately between the thumb and forefinger.
“Enjoy” said Sheena, sitting her glass on the table beside his and then reaching across to pinch him.
“Ouch, what was that?” said Henry, sipping and squirming.
“I wanted to see if you were still breathing”.
Indeed.
The moment of truth came. Sheena took his hand and led him to the shiny middle door, the door closed and between the whips and the sausages. Henry, in stride, said he didn’t think he was up for this. They both stopped. Sheena pulled something out from her somewhere with her left hand. She bent at the waist, reached around, and tucked it into Henry’s right pants pocket.
Looking down at the skin of Sheena’s briefly and slightly exposed lower back, Henry chuckled nervously as he recalled some vulgarity about ‘bad girls bending at the waist’.
“I know you’ll do fine,” assured Sheena as she straightened.
In the bedroom:
Everything proceeded in a normal, consensual fashion until Henry blacked out. When he came to, nothing was normal or consensual.
Henry awoke from unconsciousness. His eyelids seemed glued together and he heard terrible sounds and he felt wonderful things and he couldn’t move but he was being moved. His eyelid muscles pried at their restraints. They stretched a bit and would have admitted light – but there was none. He screamed so that someone somewhere would hear him but the sounds of that night in that room drowned out his pleadings. The wonderful and cruel sensations continued. Almost imperceptibly, a warm liquid began to drip down on to his face and began to free his eyelids.
Henry’s eyelids stretched again and cracked the blindfold. He sensed something or someone above him. His distended senses could only guess at what was happening to him. A spinning, alternating light source clicked on and allowed his vision to begin functioning and his mind began to interpolate the scene above and before his eyes:
It’s a cat with a rat squirming in it’s mouth and animal blood is dripping on to my face.
Henry blinked and refocused. The terror rose up in his throat even as the rest of his body vibrated with unimagined sensations.
Now, instead, he sees a bear with a salmon flailing in its jaws and an ocean of blood is gushing down upon him.
Henry realized that neither of these things was possible and he lets his eyes take another look. He saw clearly now and was not relieved. It was neither a cat nor a bear. It was Sheena. Sheena held something between her blue lips and gripped it in her ivory teeth and the thing was moving and blood pulsed from it.
It was a beating heart.
The Morning After
A solitary cobweb floated in stealth, moving with the subtle breezes generated by movements of things below. The attachments it formed kept it from escaping. It submitted to contentment in its corner…and existed long because it could go unnoticed. A fragile existence may continue for a long time but it can’t continue forever. A fragile mind can be led to believe almost anything continuously.
The bright sun reflected off a shiny surface into Henry’s face. Where was he? His eyes were sealed shut but he sensed the light. He could not open his eyelids…again. He remembered something about this…was it a dream? At this current moment, Henry felt his arms pinned at his sides and tasted grit in his teeth and he inhaled dust. He was buried alive.
But wait…he could move his head and there was light shining on his eyelids…he was breathing. Yikes, he had heard about this – commercial organ harvesting! The horror of this thought caused him to force his pinned arms from his sides. The hopelessness of this mutilation caused him to cry in futility. But wait…
His tears moistened his eyelids. His eyes peeked through the gauze of crusted sand. He was not in a grave. It was a bathtub. Dirt didn’t cover him. Grout and broken tile covered him. He had not lost any organs…except maybe his mind.
Looking to his right he saw a large hole in the tiled wall; a head size hole; a Henry head size hole. How did this happen? He wasn’t bleeding. His didn’t even have a headache. He simultaneously smelled and saw the reason his skull didn’t crack. Thank god for mildew! He must have crashed his hard head into the soft wall and it gave way. Questions remained, but for now, by the nature of the sounds coming from the adjacent room – the bedroom – he had better, exit with extreme haste.
Something slept, something, in there. It should simply be Sheena or Princess Na’vi or whoever she really was, but no human snored like that. No human could make that vibration continuously both in and out. That deep and satiated resonance next door could tell him something about what happened last night but he wasn’t sticking around to ask questions. It was time to go full coward.
Henry climbed out through the bathroom window. Tumbling on to the porch, he regained his feet in one hysterical gymnastic motion and, it seemed, neither foot touched down again until he was pressing one of them on his car’s accelerator. Now that he felt in control, his curiosity forced him to look back and up to 8D. He squinted through crusted eyelids to look at the middle window. It was dark and blue and there was no movement. No silhouette projected itself against the sheers. Henry turned away and sped back toward his lonely planet.
Watching from the window, a woman stood motionless and immodest and smiling confidently.