Two Good Girls

The Friday after the Sunday in the strip-mall lot, Jade's hunger sharpened. All winter it had run warm — the kitchen floor, the bath, the slow way she dressed Lisa at the foot of the bed — but the sedan had started showing up at the edges of their days like a dog that had learned the walk route, a glint at the grocery lot, an idling shape two streets over, and something in Jade had answered it with teeth instead of fear. She came home from practice later each night. She stood at the living-room window with the lights off, watching the street the way a cat watches a fence, and when she finally turned away, the gentleness that had carried them through the cold months went into the closet with her coat. Lisa felt it coming the way she felt weather — in the way Jade's hand found the back of her neck at dinner and squeezed a half-second too long, in the way she started undressing Lisa at the door before the hello was done, in the way the collar went on in the mornings now instead of after practice, so that Lisa wore it through the ordinary hours of film and grading and felt its weight the way a woman feels a ring she forgot she'd put on. She did not ask what it meant. She had stopped asking what anything meant the night she put the collar on with her own hand; questions were the one country she no longer had a passport for, and the strange mercy was that she had stopped wanting one.

It broke on the hallway wall, Friday night, before Lisa had her coat off. Jade came in behind her and the door had barely clicked before a hand closed in Lisa's hair and turned her and put her face-first into the plaster, not hard enough to hurt, hard enough to end the sentence she was starting. Lisa's breath went out of her in a sound that was half gasp and half something else, and Jade's body came up warm along her back, and Jade's mouth found the hinge of her jaw, and her voice came out low and rough in a way Lisa had not heard since the sand: "You've been so good all winter. Too good. You've forgotten what you're for." The skirt Lisa had worn to work rode up under Jade's hand before she could answer, and there was nothing under it — Jade had stopped letting her wear anything under things weeks ago, a rule so quiet Lisa had only noticed when she reached for underwear one morning and found the drawer empty — and the first slap landed on her bare ass in the cold hallway with a sound that rang off the walls, and the second, and the third, and Jade's other hand stayed twisted in her hair, holding her face to the plaster, so that Lisa's whole world was the cold wall, the sting blooming, and the voice at her ear counting her down.

"Say it," Jade said, and her palm landed flat and loud and Lisa's hips pushed back into it without her permission, the old grammar of her body answering before her mind could catch up. "Say what you are when I'm like this." The spanking went on until Lisa had lost count and started crying, the tears running down her face onto the plaster, and then Jade pulled her off the wall and bent her over the arm of the couch, and the strap came out of the drawer where it lived now, and Lisa heard the leather hiss through the air before it landed, a stripe of white heat across both cheeks that took her breath and turned her voice into something she did not recognize. She counted into the cushion because counting was the only thing left that was hers, and Jade let her count, and by the eighth stripe Lisa was saying thank you without being told, the words coming out of her broken and wet, because the only way through it was into it, and she had learned that lesson on a beach a year ago and her body had never forgotten the tuition. Jade dropped the strap and came down along her back, and the bite landed on the muscle where her neck met her shoulder, hard enough to leave a mark that would be there tomorrow, that would be there in every picture, and Lisa felt the sting of it go straight down through her middle and come out as a sound she would be ashamed of in an hour.

"Stand up," Jade said, and pulled her up by the hips and turned her to face the mirror at the end of the hall, the one that caught the whole apartment in its silver. Lisa had to look. There was no version of this where she didn't look; Jade's hand was in her hair again, gentle now, tilting her face toward the glass. She saw herself — the wreck of her, the stripes rising red across her ass, the bite already bruising at her shoulder, the collar black against her throat, and under the wreck, the wetness shining on the inside of her thighs, because her body had been honest about this since the first day on the sand and had never once learned to lie. "Look at that," Jade murmured, and her voice had gone soft, the bedtime voice, the one that was worse than the rough one. "He sends his little car to watch you walk to the mailbox. He thinks that's who you are now. A girl who got herself in trouble." Her hand slid down Lisa's front, over her small breasts through the thin shirt, and Lisa's breath caught and her hips shifted and Jade held her there, looking at the two of them in the glass. "He doesn't know the half of it. He's never seen you like this. But he will."

The dressing took an hour, and it was its own kind of taking. Jade made her shower first, and stood in the doorway and watched the water run the sting out of the stripes, and then dried her with a towel that smelled like the laundry soap of the apartment they had built together, and sat her on the edge of the bed and opened the drawer. The sweater was cream-colored, thin, ribbed, the kind of wool that clung where it touched and went translucent where it stretched, and there was nothing to put under it — there was nothing in the drawer to put under anything anymore, and Lisa had stopped looking for it weeks ago and only now understood what that meant. Jade worked it over her head and down her body and stood back, and the dark of Lisa's nipples showed through the weave like two small claims, and the neckline hung loose over the flatness of her chest, the way it always did, falling forward when she breathed so that anyone looking could see the pale hollow of her sternum and the fact of no bra under the wool. The skirt came next, short, gray, cut so that it moved when she moved, and Jade's hands slid up under it and found nothing, and she left them there a moment, warm against the bare skin of Lisa's hips, and her smile was small and satisfied in the way that always made Lisa's stomach turn over. Then the small black box on the mattress, and Jade knelt — Jade, who knelt for no one but her, and only in this — and worked the plug into her slow, one hand flat on Lisa's belly to feel it seat, and the fullness settled deep and the remote went into the pocket of Jade's jeans like keys. The collar went on last, and Jade's fingers lingered at the clasp the way they always did, and she looked at Lisa standing in the middle of the bedroom in the cream wool and the gray skirt and nothing else on earth, and she said, quiet, "There you are. That's the girl I keep." And Lisa's face went hot to the roots of her hair, because the embarrassment always arrived first and always would, and because under it, rising like heat off a road, was the thing that made her stand still and let herself be looked at: this was what she was. This was who she had become in the only country that had ever given her citizenship.

The restaurant was a steakhouse off the main road, all dark wood and low light and the warm smell of butter and seared meat, and Jade had asked for a table by the front window when she made the reservation, the way she asked for everything — as if the answer could not possibly be no. Lisa sat with her back to the glass and felt the whole street at her shoulder blades, the cold pressing against the pane, the warmth of the room pressing against her skin, the sweater moving against her nipples every time she breathed. The plug had hummed twice in the car and once at the door, small corrections, and by the time the wine came she was wet through the thin wool of the skirt and mortified and hungry in a way that had nothing to do with the menu, and Jade fed her the first bite of steak from her own fork and watched her take it, and did not take her eyes off her mouth.

"You're the only woman in this room with nothing on under anything," Jade said, low, and her hand found Lisa's knee under the table and slid up, over the bare skin of her thigh, finding the wet seam of her and pressing, and Lisa's knuckles went white on the edge of the table and her breath came out in a piece she could not put back together. "Do you know what that does to me? Knowing you sat through the whole meal like that. Knowing every man in this room who looks at you is looking at a girl who's bare under her clothes and only I know it." The remote shifted in Jade's pocket and the plug woke, and Lisa's whole body went rigid and her hand found the table's edge and her eyes went wet, and Jade watched her come apart in slow motion the way a jeweler watches a stone, and kept her hand where it was, and smiled at the waiter when he came to clear the plates and asked if everything was all right, and said, "Perfect. She's just cold from the window."

The spanking happened in the middle of the dining room, at the window table, with the streetlights washing the glass and the room gone quiet around them. Jade stood and pulled Lisa up by the hand and bent her over the table's edge — plates pushed aside, wine rocking in the glasses, the whole warm room turning to look — and hiked the gray skirt up over her hips, and there was nothing under it, and the room saw that, saw the bare red-striped skin still carrying the marks of the hallway, saw the small dark line of the plug's base where it sat, and the intake of breath went around the room like a wave. Jade's hand came down flat and loud and the sound of it cut through the low murmur like a hand through water, and Lisa's face went hot against the tablecloth and she counted into the wood, her voice shaking, the way she had counted on a beach in front of a hundred phones, and the room counted with her the way the beach had counted, a low chorus of strangers who could not look away. The eighth one broke her and she said thank you into the tablecloth without being told, and Jade paused with her hand resting on the heat of her skin and said, for the room, quiet and clear: "That's my girl. That's the girl who used to be somebody's champion." Then she pulled Lisa up and turned her to the window and drew the cream sweater down over her shoulders, down her arms, baring her to the waist — the small breasts, the nipples gone hard in the cold air off the glass, the collar black against her throat — and the whole dining room saw her, and the street saw her through the lit window, a bare-chested girl with her skirt still rucked up and red marks climbing her thighs, standing still with her owner's hand gentle on her jaw. And Lisa, whose hands had come up to cover herself before she knew they had moved, let them fall, because Jade's eyes said the thing her mouth had said a hundred times and her body had believed a thousand: let them see you. That's the whole thing. She stood bare in the warm loud room with strangers' eyes on her like weather and her heart hammering and the shame cresting and breaking inside her like a wave, and underneath the shame, holding her up, the terrible peace of being so thoroughly known that there was nothing left to hide and nowhere left to run to and no part of herself she had to defend. Jade held her there a long moment, looking at her the way a person looks at the thing they have wanted longest, and then she dressed her slowly, the sweater back over her head, the skirt smoothed down, and she kissed the corner of her mouth and said, quiet, "That's what I wanted to give you. A whole room full of people who will never forget they saw you like that." And Lisa believed her, and the believing was its own surrender, and she let Jade lead her out past the staring tables with her hand riding the bare skin under the hem of the skirt.

The cold hit them at the door like a wall, and the heat of the room and the sting and the hum of the plug all ran together under Lisa's skin until she could not have said which was which. The lot had thinned to a few cars and one familiar shape at the far edge, engine running, exhaust curling white into the cold air, the small glint of glass where a lens would be. Lisa felt the old cold thing settle into her chest where she kept it, the thing she had stopped naming, and started toward the car — and Jade's hand on her wrist turned her, gentle and absolute, and walked her the other way, across the empty rows, straight at the idling sedan. Lisa's heart went into her throat. The sedan's engine note changed, a gear engaging, a man preparing to leave — and Jade kept walking, unhurried, and stopped ten feet from the windshield, and turned Lisa to face it, and slid the cream sweater up over her breasts, baring her to the cold night air and the glass and the man behind it, and put her hand on the back of Lisa's neck and kissed her, slow and deep and thorough, the way she kissed her in the dark of the apartment when the world wasn't watching, and held the kiss until Lisa's knees went soft and the plug hummed between them and the cold bit her bare skin and she could feel the lens on them like a third presence in the lot. Then Jade pulled back, and looked into the windshield, at the dark shape behind it, and smiled the private smile, and said, loud enough to carry through glass: "Get a good one. That's for the file." And she turned Lisa by the shoulders and walked her back to their own car with her hand on the bare skin of her back under the lifted sweater, and helped her into the passenger seat like she was something precious, and closed the door, and the sedan sat in the cold a long moment before its lights came on and it pulled away into the dark.

Lisa sat in the passenger seat with her hands in her lap and her heart going like a bird's, the collar warm against her throat, the plug a live thing inside her, the cold still on her bare skin where the night had touched it, and she watched the sedan's taillights shrink and disappear and she did not know what she felt — except that some part of her, the part that had been trained on a beach and a mat and a thousand nights to read her owner's moods the way a sailor reads weather, understood that something had changed. Jade got in and started the engine and drove one-handed, and her other hand lay on Lisa's thigh, a warm claim, and she said nothing for a long time, and then, quiet, into the dark of the car, she said: "He's been sending that car for a month. Everywhere we go. Did you think I didn't see it?" Lisa's throat worked. "He thinks he's building a case," Jade said. "He thinks he's going to come for you with pictures and lawyers and that righteous voice he's been saving up your whole life. He doesn't understand what the pictures are." Her hand squeezed Lisa's thigh, once, a punctuation. "They're not evidence. They're proof of what he could have had if he'd ever once looked at you the way a father looks at a daughter. And now he gets to watch you be looked at the way you were always meant to be looked at, by someone who wanted you enough to take you." She pulled into their street and killed the engine and sat in the dark a moment, and then she turned to Lisa, and her eyes in the streetlight were the old eyes, the beach eyes, the eyes that had watched Lisa walk into a challenge she could not win and had loved her for it. "He'll come himself soon. They always do, when the watching stops being enough." She reached out and ran her thumb along the collar at Lisa's throat, gentle, almost tender. "And when he does, you're going to kneel to me in front of him, and I'm going to show him exactly what his daughter is now. And it's going to be the most honest thing he's ever seen you do." And Lisa sat in the dark with her owner's thumb on her collar and the night cold coming off her skin and the plug humming low and steady, and she thought of her father's face, which she had not seen since the doorway of the wrestling room, and she found, to her own horror and her own strange relief, that the fear she had carried for him her whole life had shrunk to the size of the cold thing in her chest — and that what she felt, looking at Jade in the dark of the car, was not fear at all. It was the thing that had made her put the collar on with her own hand in her own kitchen on a night she could not remember without her face going hot: the terrible, freeing knowledge that she belonged to someone who would never stop wanting her, and that the wanting had a shape now, and the shape was this — bare under thin clothes in front of windows and rooms and lenses, counting into tables and cold walls, wearing Jade's name where her father could see it and doing it gladly. She leaned across the console and put her mouth on Jade's, and Jade made a small sound into her, surprised and pleased, and kissed her back with the hunger that had been sharpening all week, and the plug woke between them, and Lisa came against the hum of it with her hand fisted in the front of Jade's coat and her face pressed into the warmth of Jade's neck, and when she could breathe again she said, into the collar of the coat, quiet, the truest thing she had said in a year: "Let him come."