A Time of Predators

The skinny Spanish-looking one had been second. Hot eyes, hot hands to force her knees apart. She whimpering, then willing herself to relax, to watch the ceiling as she had hundreds of times beneath Curt, to forget that this indignity was happening to a complex and subtle being named Paula. Three minutes, perhaps, worrying her like a terrier. And then, when his moment arrived, crying out like a rabbit struck with a stick.

She’d still been safe, even then. Still unfeeling.

She mounted the stairs slowly, shoulders sagging, to run a tub full of steaming water. Her blouse was ruined but the skirt was still intact. She hadn’t been wearing a slip. Her bra was holding with one hook. She removed everything, chucked it all into the woven wicker clothes hamper they had bought one year during a Mexican vacation, dumped in more bath oil than she usually used.

The steaming water, touching abrasions and sore places, forced little cries from her; but she resolutely lowered herself into it. Her body flushed a bright pink. She began lathering with an intense and useless concentration.

It was no good. You couldn’t wash it off.

The fat one hadn’t even gotten his pants down before he was finished, was still standing in the middle of the floor. Rick had hooted with laughter and had gone to the door to tell the others about it.

Paula stood up, lathered her body until it was creamy with suds. It was the body which betrayed you. She looked involuntarily down at her breasts, sore to the touch and marked with angry red finger-marks which soon would be purple. The broken skin around the tooth-marks in her right shoulder already had turned red and puffy. Wasn’t a human’s bite supposed to be more septic than a dog’s?

If that one really had been human at all.

Curt, damn you, why weren’t you here? She sloshed away the soap, sighing. Who was she kidding? Curt had fought a good war once, a quarter of a century ago; but now, tonight, that big animal one would have taken care of Curt with one hand.

Yes, it had started with him, the big animal one who had hurt her. Started with his hateful empty grin, his hard breathing as he bent above her, the agony of iron fingers gripping her breasts almost impersonally. When she had screamed, then he had lunged forward to enter her. Twenty minutes, so they both had been slippery with sweat. No watching the ceiling that time. Then his oily face had been jammed down against her neck, forcing her head to one side; and then, when he had come, his teeth had sunk into her shoulder.

She still might have been all right, if she just had been given time. But Rick, aroused by watching the big animal one on her, had taken her again, immediately.

Paula carefully dried her brown, beautifully female body with a huge woolly towel, merely patting at her bruises. She pouffed an extravagant amount of powder over herself and then, still nude, went to listen at the head of the stairs like an insecure child suddenly convinced that its parents have abandoned it. Was there any more terrible feeling than that universal childhood terror? Yes. The knowledge of having abandoned oneself. Abandon all hope, ye that enter here.

10:39.

In the bedroom she brushed out her hair, then chose her frothiest negligee, one with a pale blue peignoir which fit over it and tied at the top with a blue nylon ribbon. She sat at her dressing table to carefully make up her face, applying eye shadow, mascara, and lipstick with calm, sure little strokes.

Just this once, Curt, leave them early. Come home and explain it to me, convince me that I couldn’t help it.

She turned her face from side to side, examining the effect. The lips had been a problem, but the splits were inside and the lipstick tended to minimize the puffiness. She put her tiny jeweled watch, an anniversary present from Curt, on her left wrist, pausing to admire its twinkling against her tanned flesh. Eleven o’clock.

Still at the dressing table, she smoked a cigarette part way down, knowing that her deadly calmness was not natural and stemmed at least partially from shock, but also knowing that the abyss which had opened inside her was too fetid to be tolerated.

11:06. Sorry, Curt darling. Too late now. Much too late.

Paula completed her penultimate chore quickly, with a classical allusion she was sure Curt would appreciate, and taped it to the mirror. To the bathroom medicine chest, return, sit down, examine the effect again. Not with a bang but a whimper. My, so literary tonight. First Master Heywood, then Signore Alighieri, then Citizen Tacitus in her own literary effort, finally Mr. Eliot. Hurry up, please, it’s time.

And past time. She might have supported even her partial sexual arousal by the animal one’s savaging, if it had stopped there. If she had stopped. But Rick had taken her that second time, immediately.

And she had reached her climax.