Forbidden Desire

6 - Pounding Bodies

The letters and words printed along the pages spread like a tangled bed of sheets. I traced them with my thumb, making out the shapes to turn into sounds that remained mocking to my ears. R-o-m-a-n-c-e. My spine knew the word, trapped within a series of stories that were locked behind my very own ignorance. I was twenty-years old, yet the books felt designed for different hands, for different times. For the gods who haunted this archive and its long aisles of scripts.

The cold concrete floor bites through the thin material of my skirt. I flip through the pages, a wave of nausea slapping boredom into my fingers. I stand in search of literary language that is easier to digest, my back long last, able to breathe from the bite of the shelves.

I scan the novels: A Spinster's Love, The Cloud Glazer, Love's Prejudice. The titles are not the matters that bore me. It is the meaning behind the covers, the syllables I cannot comprehend. I look over the towering shelves, thousands of stories I can't grasp. They are an escape at the tip of my touch. The letter of pages mock me.

Never have I felt or seen it as unfair in this moment, the circumstances of my lacking education. These lords and society have stripped me of opportunity. It doesn't just lie on the basis of leather and its rasp ink...no! It's much more than that. They have beaten me bare and trapped me to the cognitive level of a child.

The books are a mystery. As long as the wall remains, separating my understanding of the scholarly universe and the meaning it means to convey, there will always be this link of dissonance between the ink and the fresh paper, that I cannot gap or shut close.

Boredom festering, I tour the path of other sections, distancing me from my master as a dimmed hum began in my eyes. Surely he wouldn't mind in my looking around? I was still on the same level, in the same wing. He had given me free rein in a world where it was not possible for people like me to go and come as they pleased.

I wandered deeper into the belly of the dust-craved beast, beyond the old map of redrawn lines, the geography of Old London. The librarian's voice resembles that of a flock of crows as she continuously shushes passerby crowds or individuals deemed disruptive, and misplaced books take form, wanting to trip me as I pass through sections. Past the detailed coordinates of the chilled North and drawing closer towards the damp air as a chill ran through me, the ink no longer providing protection.

Then the sound reached me. That's when I heard it. I froze. Paralyzed with the fear of being caught.

It didn't belong to the temple of shelves basking in their silence and history. A wet rhythmic pounding. A rattle of force. THUD! THUD! THUD! Like the beat of a heart, it amplified against the stonewall of secrets as I stepped closer, hiding behind the satin curtains. The moan was guttural. As if someone were being split apart. Split into two. Open from the insides.

I inched closer, my curiosity a blind, foolish thing. He dismantled her. My breath hitched, trapped between my airways. It stuck to my throat like a shard of broken glass. Somewhere deep down I knew I had drifted to far. Into a forbidden part of the private reading alcove. I sweep the curtains gently, partitioning it to sate my challenged perception of reality.

There were no words to describe what I saw. I couldn't comprehend the biological anatomy of the two figures tangled in heat. The mahogany table held them, a Lord as pale as curdled milk, struggling for survival. He hunched over a girl no older than myself. Hitting her not with his fists but something else entirely. He drove into her with a profound violence that shook the groaning desk.

His face buried into the open crook of her neck, suckling, his teeth barred as he took what belonged to him, retreating in a snarl. The girl thrusts her head back, her eyes thrown back, rolling into the foggy white of her skull. Her mouth hung open, spilling breathless, strange sounds. He pinned her against the bite of bark, hiking her skirts along her waist, a cloud of white lace bunched around her hips. His hand gripped her thighs so hard the reddened bruise blushed as she drowned into the wood.

His knuckles turned white, driving his body into hers. A conducted rhythm of violent pounding that threatened to turn her cross-legs purple.

Is this what he'll do to me? I thought as my heart hammered against my ribcage, reaching the threshold of breaking free. It's pase increases into a frantic rhythm.

The master plays with her, his movements jagged and relentless, pulling back as she searches for him. A cruel game of give-and-take. A torture of the mind. Then my vision blurs. His pale face begins to shift as his hair turns a vicious black, resembling a starless void, exerting large spurts of thick white along the leg of the table. His jawline takes the haunted edge of familiarity. It's sharp and defined, an soft oldness etched into his features. He wears a dark expression. The girl's head thrashed with a silent scream, turned a ragged sob, until she hollowed thin. Until there was nothing more to her.

And the girl...her eyes morph into a dull, dazed, and glassy green. I saw myself and my master. Not two strangers. He broke me with his touch, like the illustrations in his books. Not to catch me from a fall, but to pin me down. He sought not only to break but to destroy.

A soft, sharp gasp lets itself known. The audible vibration reaches her ears, and she stiffens, back arched in a shuddering attempt to cry out. Her eyes shot open, glossy, glassy, snapping towards the frame by the curtain. She's softness basked in completion. She looked finished. Totaled.

With a trembling hand, the sweat-slicked finger points me out from my hiding spot. Her master stops, turning, heaving, his eyes shot with predatory rage to find the intruder. His anger turns my blood thin ice.

A subtle confusion graces his face, "Who is there?" He roared, his eyes searching for mine. "You!" He shouts, halfway between a groan and a growl.

I don't wait. I don't linger to answer the consequences of my veiled secrecy. I turn and bolt, seeking confirmation that he is lost as I find the nearest exit. "Stop her!" he commands as he fastens the buckle of his belt. I push through a crowd of scholars, their long robes flowing behind them, "Watch where you're going, girl." One hisses. His breath is too far gone to reach me as I turn the corner of the courtyard, receding my head to my front as I collide with an older woman of intellect, her hoop skirt spinning in friction as her sweet perfume clogs my sense of escape.

I run before her rage can be dealt, her stack of books around in disorder. Finally, I down the steps of the entrance, free from the shackles of a master who seeks to kill his slave. Free in the world of my choosing, to go right or left or wherever the damn wind takes me.

Only then do I recollect my thoughts and my master's warning. He had told me not to wander, and I had done the opposite. I search for the town car. Maybe if I stay there the driver will inform him of my whereabouts? I take my leap of faith in search of the tinted black windows, walking the paved grounds of the library and undeniably lost.

I walk across the busy street, my collar a burn across my nape. Should someone see it, maybe they'll return me to him. However, the glances of disgust are irrelevant compared to the lives of academic students and professors.

"Master!" I want to yell, but the word dies in my throat. He'd warned me not to disturb him, and surely my absence will cause commotion and disturbance. Here I was, running through the world of the elite predators, bringing the very attention I wanted to be rid of.

In a sigh of defeat, I find an alley. It's dark and secluded. A prayer that it will hide me from this world of monsters, like my master. I wish not to be found but to disappear. To escape, and behind the trash bin and rotten banana peels I shall. I want to understand written words, to be free enough not just to read but to craft and create, and in the figment of my imagination, I desire the hero that will rescue me from my torment and shed light on this dark suffering.