I know the woman beneath it.
I remember her hair, that exact shade, catching the real sunlight outside the manor walls back then. I remember the way it fell in waves around her shoulders, the way it seemed to glow even in the gloom.
She was, sheisstill beautiful, there’s no denying that.
But the beauty is now overlaid with something else.
A weariness. A resignation.
Like looking at a flower grown in the shade, its petals still bright, but lacking the vibrant life they once had.
She’s wearing a silk dress, the one that hugs her curves like a second skin, shimmering in colours that aren’t natural. It makes her look like a fallen angel, or a goddess stricken with a mortal curse. Maybe both.
I undo the top button as I approach, then the next, letting the fabric hang loose. My shirt is damp beneath, clinging to my back. I shove the sleeves of myshirt up, exposing the scars on my forearms. Thin lines, white as chalk against my sun-baked skin, stark reminders of the things I’ve done, the things Ihadto do.
My footsteps on the floorboards are loud, echoing in the cavernous room. She turns as I approach, her eyes locking with mine. They’re still that pale glacial blue, but they hold a depth now of things I couldn’t have imagined when I first saw her.
Pain. Acceptance. And something else, something predatory, maybe?
Or perhaps just the weariness of knowing exactly what you are, and what you can expect from this world.
“Antonio,” she says. Her voice is soft, but there’s a hardness underneath it, like stone. Like the floorboards beneath my feet.
How many times have we played this scene now? How many times have I seen the flash of relief when she sees it’s me here, and not a different man? A different Lord come to fuck her, come to use her holes in whatever depraved ways they can think of.
I don’t reply. I simply walk over to the small table by the window and pour myself a generous measure of the amber liquid. The burn is welcome. I hand her a glass but she just looks at it, then back at me, her expression unreadable.
Just like everything I’ve offered her, she plays hard to get. She doesn’t take it.
“You’ve been with my daughter,” she says. Her voice is smoke-burned and cool. Not an accusation. An application for a fact to be confirmed.
“Yes.” I reply.
She closes her eyes and in the arches of bone beneath, I watch an entire lifetime pass. Grace was born in a pretty pink room in a four-poster bed, surrounded by every luxury. I did not visit that day but I sent flowers, lilies. Elaine hated lilies. She called to tell me so, still soft with drugs.
“She looks like you,” I say, because cruelty is most effective when it is true.
Elaine’s mouth tightens. It’s almost funny. She spent half her youth trying to erase her mother from the mirror, and now she is repaid in kind. That is the currency of daughterhood I guess.
“She is eighteen now I think.” Elaine says, and I guess it must be hard to keep track of time when every day all you do is fuck or be fucked.
“Nineteen in March.”
Her face falls at my words. “Then she doesn’t have long.”
“No,” I agree. “She does not.”
She breathes once, a slow exhale through her nose that the body uses when preparing to be struck. The life inside this woman is stubborn and practical. It is the life that taught her how to move through drawing rooms where the decanters weighed more than her wrists could lift. It is the life that made her lift them anyway.
“How is she?” she asks, her voice regaining that soft edge.
I pause, the glass halfway to my lips. The question hangs in the air, heavy with unspoken things.
“She’s been sick,” I state, watching her face, wondering if she’ll reveal anything. I’m almost disappointed when I see nothing but concern there. “Being confined the way she is does not suit her temperament, but she is recovering now.” I add.
Elaine nods, her gaze fixed on some point beyond my shoulder, perhaps seeing ghosts or just the bleak future. There’s no triumph in her acceptance, no joy that her daughter is getting better, just more resignation. The same resignation I saw in her face when I walked through the doors of this place. The same resignation I see now, reflected in her eyes.
Sheisher fate.
