Track 18 (Blue)

  Many drinks later, Isaac and Alice were back at his apartment fooling around on the kitchen floor. None of the clocks around were working but it was closer to the time he had to get up than it was to the time he should have gone to bed.

  “Aren’t you glad I made you that present?” she said.

  Isaac was half squeezed between the fridge and a fruit tray. The little pillow was wedged between his neck and a powerpoint. The discomfort he felt, though, was everywhere else.

  “We’re not gonna have sex, though, ok?”

  She was adamant about that.

  “Ok,” said Isaac.

  Her hands, though, were already unzipping his jeans.

  “Oh my god,” she said as if it were her first day of drama school. “I don’t know what has come over me. I am never normally like this.”

  She openly exaggerated every syllable.

  “I can stop if you want,” said Isaac, illiterate to what was written between the lines.

  “Don’t you fucking dare,” she said, ripping her blouse open.

  Her breasts were magnificent.

  “Woah,” said Isaac, slapped with fear, surprise, and wonder.

  Were her body a poem, it would be impossible to put into words.

  “You’re beautiful,” he said.

  He felt as if the world was a flower that was only now opening its petals.

  “Call me your little whore,” said Alice.

  “What?”

  Needless to say, he was taken by surprise.

  “Do it,” she said. “Call me your dirty fucking whore.”

  “I..uh….”

  Isaac had never been the vocal kind. At sporting events, when everyone else chanted, cheered, and clapped along, he sat in his seat and celebrated on the inside, while at birthday parties; he mouthed the words while everybody else sung along. It’s not that he didn’t know what dirty talk was, it’s just….he had no idea how to do it.

  “Who is my little whore?” he said, sounding as if he were coddling a kitten or bottle feeding a newborn lamb.

  Alice laughed. She still had him pinned against the wall and was straddling him so he couldn’t escape. She had a smile on her face but her fingers clenched at his collar and her eyes were fierce as if at any second she was about to open up his face with a pair of knuckle dusters. She looked like she was having the time of her life.

  “You’re fun,” she said.

  Then she stripped naked, climbed onto the kitchen table, and spread her legs as wide as she could. All his romantic ideals were being provoked and poked fun at; and as a result, he was petrified. Isaac had always imagined sex as a slow Sunday drive on a long country road between endless field of wildflowers; something quiet, soft and delicate. But this was loud, fast, and reeked of gasoline and burned rubber. By the time he built up the courage to get on his feet, she was already masturbating.

  “Come on,” she screamed, whipping her body around so that she lay on her stomach with her legs hanging off the table and spread open like the pages of a book. “Rape me.”

  “What? No. Hold on. What?”

  She pinned her hands behind her back and pressed her own face into the table, lashing about like a suffocating fish, grazing her forehead against the wall as she did, acting as if she were trying to break free from cable ties and a wretched kind of fate.

  “Hold on a sec,” said Isaac, his idle expression erupting into one of horrible shock and awkward confusion. “Did you just ask me to rape you or rate you?”

  In the heat of passion, it could have been either one. Maybe she was asking for validation, for him to shower her with adoration, praise, and a hundred thousand synonyms for pretty. That he could do. He could spend the whole night if she wanted to, reciting haikus about the soft and gentle curve in her breasts and how the colour in her eyes likened to the mouth of a river. He could, just as easily, paint a picture for those hundred thousand words.

  “Rape me with your giant cock, you bad motherfucker.”

  She didn’t want a haiku.

  “I thought you said that,” said Isaac as if he’d hoped she said the other. “Just to be clear,” he said, trying to sound justifiably concerned yet still open to new ideas. “I’ve never really done this kind of thing before so….I mean, if that’s what you want.”

  He looked upset as if he’d stumbled upon a stack of dead kittens.

  “What if….”

  “Rape me,” said Alice again, this time as if her patience had worn thin.

  Alice smacked her head against the table and, as if they were being pulled apart by some archaic torture device, she spread her legs further until her cunt and asshole were all that Isaac could see – both of them pulsing in heightened anticipation.

  “Hear me out,” said Isaac, ignoring her vagina and bare buttocks. “What if,” he said as if they were trying to lift a piano up a set of stairs. “What if we did the sex, you know, just like you are and all that, but…..and this is just a suggestion…but what if we did all that only we didn’t use the R-word?”

  “The R word°”

  My neighbours might hear so…”

  Alice turned her face, enraged.

  “What the fuck?” she said.

  “Me?” said Isaac a little distraught. “What the fuck, you?”

  Even as he said that he wished he didn’t; she scared him.

  “What’s the problem?” she said.

  She was still on her stomach and rubbing her wet cunt on the edge of the table. Her tone, though, had changed entirely. She had broken character.

  “Look, this is new for me. I haven’t done anything like this before. I’ve never….raped anyone.”

  “It’s not actual rape,” she said, clearly disappointed that she had to explain something that, like a joke, should have been pretty bloody obvious. “I don’t actually expect you to rape me. It’s role play. Jesus.”

  “No, I know that,” said Graham, his face shaped like a bruised pear. “I was just thinking, you know, why even use the R word? What if I pretended to be the internet repairman or something? That would be kinky too, right?”

  “You can be a fucking botanist for all I care.”

  “What if we did it differently?”

  “Different how?”

  The longer he took to make his case, the more pained she made her body.

  “What if instead of raping you, I save you from being raped, and then let’s say we spent months, maybe even a year, really getting to know each other and then tonight was the night I professed my love for you and this is the first time we consummate that love?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “No. Here’s the scenario, alright? I was walking home from a party and you followed me in your car until I was all by myself and then you grabbed me, threw me in your trunk, and took me back to your apartment where you bound and gagged me and bent me over your kitchen table. And that’s where we are now with you about to force your cock into my asshole and rape me until the sun comes up.”

  “Hmmm,” said Isaac.

  “What do you mean, hmmm?”

  “I’m not sure how I feel about that. It sounds kind of messed up.”

  “It’s a rape fantasy. It’s supposed to sound messed up. That’s what makes it kinky. I know you’re not gonna hurt me, but I wanna feel as if you might.”

  “I get that, but…”

  “But what? You’re really making this more complex than it needs to be.”

  “I mean, am I supposed to be thinking about raping you as I’m making love to you?”

  “Making love?”

  “OK, hear me out… what if we don’t say anything out loud, which might I add, these walls are thin. Then, while we’re making….while we’re having sex, you can think that you’re being raped if that’s your thing, and I think we are making passionate and considerate and tender consensual love?”

  “So I think you’re raping me but you think it’s consensual?”

  “Exactly,” said Isaac pleased as if they’d finally found some middle ground.

  “Fine by me,” said Alice.

  Then she contorted her body again as if it had been forced that way.

  “Please, sir,” she said, pulling her ass apart with her hands and sticking her cunt into the air. “Don’t hurt me.”

  “What?”

  This time she shouted it; loud enough for the neighbours to hear.

  “Please, just let me go,” she screamed, her voice soaked in desperation. “Please don’t do this. Don’t rape me.”

  She wept as she spoke; her words a last and broken plea. As she did, she pushed her two index fingers into her asshole, pulling it open, and thrust her body forward until her face was squashed against the wall.

  “I’ll do whatever you say,” she shouted, her voice a cocktail of terror and ecstasy. “Just let me go. Please let me go.”

  At this point, Isaac was half expecting the police to barge through the door.

  “What are you waiting for?” she whispered, breaking character again. “Rape me.”

  “I…don’t….know,” said Isaac.

  “Oh for fuck’s sake.”

  She unbound herself and then sat upright on the kitchen table.

  “This isn’t gonna happen, is it?”

  Isaac said nothing. He stood there doe-eyed waiting for her to say what he wished he had the backbone to say himself. He had never really quit anything in his life, but he had been so terrible at many things that often people did the quitting on his behalf.

  “Fine,” she said, laying on her back and spreading her legs once more. “We’ll do it your way.”

  “Really?” said Isaac.

  At this point, he kind of hoped they would just watch some TV on the sofa.

  “Fuck me,” she said, opening her cunt again with both hands.

  If anything, she sounded bothered but there was no doubting her commitment.

  “Okie dokie,” said Isaac, trying to sound a great deal more confident than he actually was. He hoped, at the very least, at the end of this they would cuddle. “Just a second,” he said, as he fumbled over a condom.

  The fear was evident on his face, though he did his best to pass it off as sex appeal. The whole R-word had apparently had an unfortunate and seemingly irreversible effect.

  “What’s taking so long?” she said.

  “Just a sec,” said Isaac. “Nearly there.”

  Maybe it was all the whiskey or maybe he was just the stress and trauma of role paying a rapist; whichever it was, he was flying at half-mast, almost crying as he struggled to pull the condom over the head of his penis, doing about as well as that time he tried to hang Christmas lights from the last rung of his balcony. By the time he did get the condom on, he looked like he was trying to please her with a wet sock.

  “Ha!” said Alice, hopping off the table. “You’d make a terrible rapist.”

  It sounded like the type of insult that should have been a compliment.

  “Come here,” she said, getting onto her knees and taking Isaac’s cock in her hand, masturbating him fast and firm as she sucked on his balls, staring him long in the eyes as she did. She didn’t judge his awkwardness or even acknowledge his failure. Instead, she calmly and assertively took control of the situation - pushing him back onto the floor and mounting him with all the zest of an action hero.

  “I’m your dirty whore,” she said as she writhed on his cock. “Call me a dirty fucking whore.”

  Isaac braced himself as best he could. She was intimidating, to say the least. Still, he had never been this excited. It bordered on sheer terror. Yet at the same time, as her supple breasts pressed against his face, and he lightly kissed and licked at her erect nipples, he had, he supposed, gone native.

  “You’re a stupid whore,” he shouted.

  And there was nothing sexy about it whatsoever. He sounded like he was yelling at a passed out hooker from the window of a speeding car. Alice laughed, though. She could see he was giving it his all in spite of being terrified for his life. If anything, it turned her on more.

  Her eyes rolled in ardent celebration as she forced his cock deeper inside her sopping wet cunt. Her fingers curled and clenched and her nails dug into his chest, and she had to turn away so as not to bite off his nipples or chew at a piece of his tongue.

  For Isaac, it was almost like being on that country road, now that he had adjusted to the way that she drove. He shut his eyes and imagined them both in the midst of that field of colour and perfume – nestled on a bed of soft petals. He imagined the sun setting and all the little birds and butterflies, fluttering overhead as they made their way back to their nests and homes for the night. He imagined Venus, almost visible in the sky as the night, and its chandelier of flickering lights, waiting to cover them like a soft and cool blanket. He imagined all the tender and sweet words he longed to whisper in her ear.

  “I love your fucking cock,” she said, almost growling.

  “I love……”

  ‘Don’t say, you; don’t say, you,” he thought.

  “Your pretty vagina.”

  Alice laughed again.

  “Put your hands on me,” she said, pulling at Isaac’s wrists.

  Isaac placed his two hands on her magnificent breasts once more.

  “Not there,” she said, lifting them up to her neck. “Strangle me.”

  Isaac sat there limp unsure what to do. His hands clasped like a silk scarf.

  “Oh for fuck’s sake,” said Alice, clearly disappointed, but still writhing on Isaac’s cock. “I’m not asking you to rape me,” she said. “Just strangle me and slap me around a bit.”

  “Yeah, you see, I don’t condone violence against women. That’s the thing.”

  “It’s not violence. It’s sex.”

  “I know but…”

  They both argued back and forth for what seemed like forever. Their eyes were locked in sometimes heated and sometimes considerate debate. All the while, though, as if their organs had their own agreement, their hips thrust and their bodies slapped against one another; the sex continuing in spite of their semantic impasse.

  “I don’t feel right about doing that to a girl.”

  “What? Strangling?”

  “Everything,” exclaimed Isaac. “Literally everything you’re asking me to do.”

  Alice took his hands once more and placed them on her neck and she squeezed them tight. She moaned as she did, gaging for a second, before rolling her eyes back in some kind of orgasmic joy.

  Isaac panicked and pulled his hands away.

  This time Alice didn’t get mad. She rested one of her hands gently on his right shoulder and cupped the other one between his legs as she writhed in long, deep succession. Her face was shaped like a prayer.

  “Please,” she said, smiling.

  Isaac was on the verge of orgasm; she had kept him there for the last twenty minutes. He would say yes to a root canal at this point and she knew this.

  “Please?” she said, again, making it impossible to say no.

  Everything seemed awesome and entirely worth the risk.

  “This isn’t a trap, is it? I mean, how do I know you’re not gonna tell someone I strangled you and they match my fingers to your neck and I go to jail?”

  “You think I would do that?”

  Gone was her bullish demeanour. Instead, she softened her body and wrapped her arms around his neck limberly. Even her eyes looked as if they were made out of cotton candy.

  “It’s trust that makes it work,” she said.

  The look on Isaac’s face, though, said enough.

  “Oh fuck you,” she said, pulling herself off him. “You’re fucked up, you know that? You’re weird,” she shouted. “You’re screwed up in the head.”

  And she left.

  Track 19 (Red)

  It would be another few weeks before the trial was able to continue, what with all the formalities of law enforcements, grieving families, and worse still, the university’s internal processes. The only pertinent question that kept rearing its head was, ‘Will this get published?’

  In that time, both Graham and Isaac pawned over the data they had accumulated and supposed on what any of it meant; if it meant anything at all. Their focus should have been on the study; on supposing what went wrong. Instead, voxel by voxel, both men found themselves continually distracted by the goings-on their lives.

  “How did you know Mary was The One?” said Isaac, his face as serious as one could get; as if he had just been pulled from beneath a mound of rubble and support beams.

  “The One? There is no ‘The One’,” said Graham. “Nobody’s that bloody flawless.”

  He sounded so sure, irrespective of any bias.

  “Relationships take effort,” he said. “From both sides. A lot of give and very little take. Each lifts or pushes with the other in mind and that’s what creates momentum; it’s what makes the whole thing move in one direction. Love isn’t a thing, it’s a verb. It’s not something you have, it’s something you do. I mean, you have to practice love every day. If you’re busy thinking about how she feels and what she needs then all she has to think about is how you feel and what you need. You push against each other, you hold each other up. Opposing forces.”

  Even as he said it, he thought about all the times he had let Mary down – the hundreds of times she had asked him to hold her and he had rolled over and pretended he was asleep; or how, instead of admitting he was wrong – when almost always he knew that he was – he’d choose to start a fight and wind up calling her a cunt or whore; or something far worse. He thought about all the times he had let go, assuming that tomorrow he’d make up for it and pick up the weight.

  “Marriage is selfless,” he said as if he were only waking up to it now. “It’s about looking out for each other. You worry about her so she doesn’t have to. And then she’ll worry about you all the same. It’s reciprocal.”

  When was the last time, though, he had actually worried about her? When was the last time he had assumed that she could do with some care? Time had been hard on them both; it had hardened them both. They hadn’t had sex in months; they hadn’t fought in years. In his head, were she an experiment, she would be one that required little to no peer review; were she a movie, she would be one that could write and direct itself.