After I just held our son and dreamed of our future. She was in here, planning to leave me. To leave him. After everything I did, everything I sacrificed for this woman.
I fucking killed for her.
I almost destroyed our entire fucking world for her, and this is how she repays me?
I hold out my hand, palm up. My arm is steady but a tremor of pure, undiluted fury is vibrating through my entire being. “Give it to me.”
She doesn’t hesitate. There’s no fight left in her, and that’s what frightens me the most. If she fought, I could match her. If she screamed, I could silence her. But this passive resignation, this welcome for the end, it is a void I cannot fill, a lock for which I have no key.
She places the cool, heavy handle of the razor into my palm.
I close my fingers around it, feeling how smooth the obsidian is. I look at her, sitting there like a beautiful, broken doll, and the plan forms in my mind, fully realized.
She cannot leave me. She will not leave me.
I will break her like I did before. I will crush the last of her until she is nothing but a vessel, a thing for me to possess entirely. I don’t need her love now, I don’t need her joy, or her happiness. Not now I have a son, now I have an heir.
“Sit,” I command, my voice low and controlled, belying the storm within.
A flicker of confusion crosses her blank features. She stays where she is, on the edge of the tub.
“I said, sit,” I repeat, the tone leaving no room for disobedience.
She slowly shifts, settling more firmly on the porcelain edge. I turn and take a towel from the heated rail, laying it on the floor in front of her. I kneel on it. The position is subservient, but the power has never been more firmly in my grasp.
“Spread your legs,” I say.
Her eyes widen, just a fraction. The emptiness recedes for a second, replaced by a dawning apprehension. She knows this script. It is one of domination, of ownership. It is a language we both understand far better than the language of gentle fatherhood and forgiving motherhood.
She does as she’s told, parting her knees and baring her cunt for me.
“If you want to be clean,” I say, my gaze locked on hers, “then I will do it.”
I reach for the shaving cream on the counter. The hiss of the can is obscenely loud in the tense silence as I take her left calf in my hand. Her skin is cool. I can feel the fine bones beneath, so fragile I could snap them with a twist of my wrist.
Instead, I begin to apply the white, frothy cream, starting at her ankle and working my way up. Past her calf, over her knee, to her thigh. My touch is not rough, but it is deliberate. Clinical.
I open the razor, and the blade winks in the bathroom light. I hold her leg firmly, and with practiced, precise strokes, I begin to shave her. The sound of the blade scraping against her skin is the only sound in the room. She doesn’t flinch, she doesn’t take her eyes off me.
She is staring at me with that same unnerving calm, but now I can see the understanding in her eyes; she knows this isn’t about shaving.
This is a reassertion. A reclamation.
I am tending to her, but I am also reminding her that every inch of her body belongs to me.
Her life belongs to me. Even her attempts to leave it are subject to my permission.
I finish one leg and start on the other. The same methodical process; Apply the cream. Hold her fast. Scrape away the fine, invisible hairs. I am cleaning her. Purifying her of these dark thoughts.
I am proving, with every stroke, that I control even this most mundane of acts. That I control everything.
When both legs are smooth and clean, I pause. I look up at her. Her face is a pale mask, her breathing is shallow.
“And the rest,” I say, my voice a soft murmur that hangs in the steamy air.
A faint blush colours her neck. She leans back slightly, bracing her hands on the edge of the tub, and allows me to perform the intimate task. I am meticulous, obsessively so. There is no passion in this act, only a terrifying, absolute possession.
All the while, she stares back at me. Her eyes are no longer empty. They are filled with a bleak, horrifying knowledge. She knows that I have seen through her, that I have turned her moment of desired finality into yet another scene of my relentless domination.
