She's out before dawn, pushing against the streets, forcing herself to fly. She imagines it, always, for those first few, hardest blocks, as like kicking off from the lip of a pool, into the same thick resistance. Each day begins in something like frustration, as she thrusts, hitting hard and harder, until something inside her catches the spark. The sky goes violet. Everything always darkens, slightly, after first light. She notices this because it is on her internal checklist of things to notice, like the carwash that cannot be held responsible for antennae or spoilers and the curving, six-inch display models of the nail salon, the Korean social club/banquet hall, and the job skills acquisition facility, the graveyard and shuttered nightclubs and twenty-four hour gas station convenience stores, then the homeless camps set up along the grey beach with, beyond them, blurring, the froth-flecked lake itself. The landscape recedes around this point, leaving her alone with that which is real, the burn of her breathing and her muscles and her weight, the weight of her body. She pushes until she is aware of precisely what slows her down, what she hates.
Digging his fingers into the flesh of her ass and upper thighs, he says, Your body's mine, and she just wishes he would just take it, then. She doesn't want it anymore. Oh, my bunny, my princess, my angel. He buckles over, wheezing, scrunching against her, pressing down, but all she feels is her own width, spread by the cords and the ankle bar.
When he goes slack, the restraints remain. If she's met with some rubric of approval she still—after five years—has yet to figure out, he'll remove the gag before he leaves the bedroom. On rare occasions he'll even let her wrists go, but the legs stay, and anything plugged inside her, at least till he's done in the bathroom and sometimes longer, sometimes till he's flipped through the tv or checked his e-mail, gotten hungry enough to come in tell her how good she was, how he'd like a sandwich, or, more likely, tell her to go for takeout, though unless she's passed some rarer rubric he'll say, I think you better steer clear, and pinch some spreading part of her, his fingers like calipers, saying, We want you to keep in shape, right?
He sends her out to Charcoal Delights, one Super Dog, slightly blackened, works, but with extra celery salt. He's on the phone when she leaves, arguing with someone from the office, feeling self-assured again.
These are among the things she thinks about, out on the streets, as the hour winds down and her mind comes back to her, overfull, before, in the final, cool down phase, she focuses and works through the most immediate and banal, issues like outfits and what needs to be ironed or not.
She knows that any attempt to please anyone else is only a measure of her own, private, self assessment. She's well read, and been through therapy, in college, after the vomiting. She knows, too, the satisfaction of emptying herself, knows how, despite the acrid taste and sense of shame, the unshakable filthiness of it, there remains an addictive calm, a purity of discipline and control. Beyond the pain, beyond the crude dynamics of retching, there is a perfect mastery, of rising above the limits of the body. That sense of satisfaction carries over, and these days she thinks of it, feels it, more and more.
His gentleness, later, is exaggerated to the same extent as his violence before, everything a kind of theater, with cooing, skimming of fingers over her ribs. I don't think there's any bruises, he says, and tells her how good she was, Such a good girl, and how proud he is of her, how grateful, as he goes through the unbinding.
She works the circulation back to the skin of her wrist with a twisting motion, standing in line. It's gotten so, given the current conditions, she's not quite able to identify as someone who enjoys sex, which seems wrong, or at least disappointing. It makes her feel old. What she likes, honestly, is being free of it, that sense of release, the catharsis that comes once the act is done, once all the elaborate props are unlatched and put away, once she slips into a pair of retired running shoes and drives down Foster to the Charcoal Delights, taking the time to sit in one of the booths, slowly sip a quarter of a milkshake before collecting his order, glistening in grease-soaked wax paper wrappings, and heading home.
Her mother had always insisted that it was to be avoided, vanilla, that a taste for it was necessarily a character flaw. Her mother had held that it was not in itself a flavor but, rather, the lack of flavor, an absence, blandness given a name. She appreciates the extent to which this is untrue - the mottled, many-faceted richness and the clarity that comes with truly tasting, being and perceiving, savoring even the sensation of wet coolness rising through the straw between her fingertips, her lips, the trickle of condensation down her thumb. This, too, she'll undo in the morning, she thinks. The foam cup is still heavy when she throws it away.