Dirty Hands

Ash bled badly after the cutting. Justin was forced to return the knife to the flames in order to cauterize the wounds: a deep notch cut into her cunt lips on either side, and also the jagged saw-gash where he had carved away her hood. Ash endured the pain stoically for two days, but on the third it was clear that the injuries had become infected in spite of their best efforts to keep them clean. It was then that she gave him a number to call—only in the event of an emergency, she said.

A day later, she was delirious with pain and fever. She begged him not to call. He called. Late that evening, the doctor arrived.

He gave his name as Dr. Alman, and he remained with them for nearly a week as he nursed Ash back to health. Justin inquired on several occasions whether or not they should take her to a hospital, but the doctor brushed aside those questions. "She's a strong one," he said. "She'll fight."

And fight she did. Through agony and fever, through chills and exhaustion, Ash fought the infection with all her heart. The illness drained her terribly, left her eyes sunken and her body thin, but still she fought. Justin remained by her side through it all, leaving only when the doctor forced him to, or when Ash begged him to go and sleep, and only then for a little while. At long last, however, it became clear that she would pull through. That was when the doctor took his leave.

"Wait," said Justin. "How will we pay you? Do you need my address?"

"It's taken care of," said the doctor. "Don't you worry. I'll have my due."

Justin was gentle with her after that. She looked delicate to his eyes, her already lean and athletic form having been made even leaner, hungrier by the fever. He wanted to hold her in his arms and apologize again and again and again, and yet he knew how little good that would do. After telling her that he never wanted to hurt her, he had nearly killed her.

They went fishing the first day after the doctor left. In spite of her protests, he was the one to carry the gear down to the river and back. He even insisted that she dress warmly for fear that she might catch cold. She just looked so small and so vulnerable. The last straw came when she caught him cleaning the fish for dinner.

"For God's sake, stop it!" she cried. "I was sick and now I'm better, and I'm still yours. How much longer are you going to wallow in your guilt?"

Stunned, he dropped the fish back into the basket and stared at her. His eyes narrowed. "For as long as I want," he said, only half serious. "Do you have a problem with that?"

"I do," said Ash. "Because you are my ma—" She broke off, perhaps realizing she was about to overstep. "You're my dominant. And you can do no wrong."

"If I can do no wrong, then how did you nearly die?" he said, suddenly much angrier than he had been. Was it only his imagination, or had she been about to call him master?

"Because I was weak," she said. "And faithless. And disobedient! You didn't give me permission to die, Sir."

At this, he laughed and threw the knife into the basket as well. His hands were covered with fish guts and he had nothing to wash them with. She brought him a towel and water and bathed his hands, keeping her eyes lowered.

"You can do nothing wrong, Sir," she whispered. "Even when it might seem that you have fallen short, it can only be my fault. I must be punished."

"For the fact that I almost killed you by accident," he muttered, raising one brow in disbelief.

"Let me be your scapegoat, Sir."

A mischievous smile twisted one corner of her mouth. It was, he was certain, the first smile he'd seen on her lips since the night he cut away her hood. He kissed her smile.

And then, because she was so fragile, he bound her hands behind her back, and he hung her from them. He pulled the rope tighter until her shoulders were nearly pulled from the joint—until her stringent bonds began to wrench inhuman groans of agony from deep within her. Only then did he begin to use her body for his pleasure, driving his hard fists into her sun-gold flesh over and over. He made her his scapegoat: he made her take his sin onto her flesh and made her suffer for it, until she was bruised to the bone. His knuckles were bleeding before he stopped, and she had vomited twice upon the earth that spun beneath her.

He cut her down. Ordered her to lick up her sick. "Eat it, cunt," he snarled. And then he kicked her. Sobbing all the while, half suffocated by the beating and the terrible position in which she'd been tied, she obeyed him. He kicked her again, and she pissed herself, and she licked that up as well—scraping piss-laden mud from the earth and swallowing again and again. The only mercy he granted her that evening was that, when all was said and done, he fucked her ass instead of her cunt. Her cunt was still too damaged to accommodate him. She apologized for that, too.

They had meant to leave the next day, but she had a black eye. They stayed that day and another afterward, waiting for the swelling to go down. Finally, the swelling had gone down in her eye and in her cunt, and he fucked her face to face on her own bed, and they kissed and lay together, and they knew they couldn't stay any longer. "I'll pack in the morning," she whispered.

"I'll help you," he said.

She glared at him, but she didn't argue.

Eight weeks had grown to ten. She still had time, but he was fast running out. He had another thirty pages to write and then revise, and then write and revise all over again. They had to return to the world, even if the world didn't want people like them. Even if the world could never understand them. With a heavy heart, he went through the cabin one last time to see whether he'd left anything behind by mistake.

"Ash," he said, having found one of his camera filters lying on the bedside table. "About the picture..."

"Forget it," she said, carrying her duffle out to her Toyota. "It was nothing. I shouldn't have said anything."

"I never meant to cross your boundaries," he said. He joined her at the back of the truck and found the pocket where the filter should have been. "I should have asked first."

Ash sighed, shaking her head. "Justin, it's not like that."

"It's not like what? There's nothing for it to not be like. It's your choice."

"It's not meant to be my choice!" she said.

And he finally had to admit, "Then I don't understand. Why?"

She smiled. She tried to look at him and couldn't, and she ran her fingers through her hair and growled at herself. "God," she muttered. "I thought..."

He waited, and then he coaxed. "Thought what?"

"I thought you were going to kill me, okay?"

She turned on her heel and walked away. Her taut, perfect ass taunted him from beneath a pair of shorts and he was too stunned by her words to even leer at it properly. He stood there blinking by the tailgate, still holding the filter he'd forgotten in his hand.

So that was it? Ash thought she was going to die that night? She thought he was going to take that knife and plunge it into her heart, and so she didn't want there to be any incriminating photographs on his camera? His mouth was still open, so he shut it and dropped the filter into the pocket and zipped it shut. And then he went after her.

"You thought I was going to kill you?" he said, still not quite believing the words.

"Just forget it," she said, now picking up his last bag. "I was caught up in the moment, and you did this whole Abraham and Isaac thing and—"

"You noticed that?"

"Of course I did. It was brilliant. Can we drop it now?"

She kissed him and smiled.

"No!" he said, still not sure how he felt about this. "Maybe if you kiss me again."

She did.

"No, a real kiss."

She did, again. Slowly. With tongue.

"And I can have all the nude photographs I want?"

"As long as you never kill me," she said, and it was all too obvious that she was trying not to smirk. "Or at least don't get caught."

Justin made rounds one last time. He always forgot something. He wondered, now and then, if it were a subconscious wish to come back. Had he ever forgotten anything at any place he didn't want to go? He couldn't remember. That was the nature of forgetting things, after all. He opened the closet and glanced inside, and now that all the clothes and bags were gone again, he noticed a kind of simple, half-finished wooden stick leaning in the corner. Almost a kind of staff.

"What's this?" he said.

"What's what?" she asked him. He had to go and find her, carrying the stick. "Oh. Well, it's a stick."

"You keep a stick in your closet?"

"It's kind of a walking stick."

"Not even kind of," he said. "It's much too short for that."

"What would you call it?"

"A stick?" he tried. "Almost... A wand."

"Well, then it's a wand. And I'm a witch. I'm your fairy godmother, and I'm taking you back to the university so you can finish up. Are you ready?"

"Ah... Yeah, I guess."

He ought to have been thinking about his thesis on the way back, but he wasn't. The only thing he could think about, the whole way back, was the wand in Ash's closet, along with the words the doctor had spoken to him when he insisted that they take Ash to the hospital.

No need, the doctor had said. She's a strong one. She'll fight. The elm wand is proof of that.

Perhaps, had he been thinking scientifically, he would have asked her what kind of wood her wand was made of, but in truth he never felt the need. He knew, if he asked, that it would be elm. He was sure.