The Red

  That night she dreamt of The Bleeding Man again. In the second dream he died while inside of her and the red was everywhere, on her hands and on her chest and on her mouth as she drank the blood straight from his heart.

  Roman Charity

  On the Ides of March, Malcolm finally made contact with her again.

  She’d just closed the gallery for the evening, which entailed nothing more than drawing the red velvet curtains behind the front windows, flipping the OPEN sign around, and locking the door. Upon returning to her office to fetch Tou-Tou from his basket, she found a book of art lying open on her desk. It had been so long since she’d seen Malcolm, she’d almost given up hope he’d ever return to her. She glanced around the office, sniffing the air, hoping to catch any glimpse of him, any trace of his scent. Her body came alive merely at the possibility of Malcolm. As ecstatic as she was that he wanted to see her again, she feared to open the book. What did he want with her this time? What would he make her do? What would he do to her? What would he make her enjoy him doing to her?

  She sat in her desk chair slowly and told herself she was doing it for the money. For the money she would see Malcolm again. For the money she would submit to his sexual demands. For the money she would open the book.

  But it wasn’t for the money.

  She opened the book anyway.

  The red velvet cord marked a page near the back. On it was a painting called Roman Charity, dated 1767 by the artist Jean-Baptiste Greuze. She’d never seen the painting before or heard the phrase "Roman charity.” It meant nothing to her, but the scene was clear enough. A thin old man languished in a prison cell and a young woman in a voluminous dress offered him her breast to suckle. A prostitute visiting a prisoner? Seemed like a logical explanation for the scene. It was tame enough. Bare breasts hardly shocked her. After the Minotaur nothing could shock her.

  In her head she heard Malcolm’s voice taunting her.

  Don’t say things like that. Men like me take statements such as that as a challenge.

  Mona still didn’t know what had happened the night with the Minotaur. Had he drugged her with an untraceable drug? Or had the wine been potent enough to daze her into seeing the back room as the meeting place for ancient Athenian priestesses and the Minotaur they served? Or was there another possibility far more terrifying than being drugged or going mad?

  What if—somehow, some way, some impossible way—it had all been real?

  Mona knew that question would plague her the rest of her life if she never learned the answer, and she would never learn the answer if she never saw Malcolm again. Reason told her to run, to escape this dangerous game she was playing with this dangerous man. But she was past reason now. She’d had the strongest orgasm of her life while chained to a boulder with a half-man, half-beast inside her. There was no going back after that. She could only go forward.

  After gathering Tou-Tou in his carrier, she went to her apartment. She had some of her mother’s old gala dresses hanging in the closet. One was blood purple with bell sleeves and full skirts with gold braiding on the bodice. It looked like something from a late Renaissance painting. As soon as she put it on and stepped in front of the mirror, Mona felt an overwhelming compulsion to return to the gallery that very night. She tried to ignore the compulsion, but it grew stronger when she unbuttoned the back of her dress. It felt like an itch, only inside her brain where she could never reach it. Quickly she buttoned the dress again and the itch lessened. She took a step toward the door and it lessened more. She walked away from the door and sat on her bed and the itch grew so strong she wanted to beat her head into her hands. There was nothing for it. She had to go.

  The streets were almost empty at this late hour, yet she still received her fair share of strange glances in her dress with the skirts so flowing she had to hold them up to avoid tripping over the hem as she half-walked, half-ran back to The Red.

  She entered by the side door and didn’t hesitate a second before slipping through the door into the back room.

  But the back room she knew was gone.

  "Malcolm…what have you done?” she whispered as she the door closed behind her.

  For surely Malcolm had done this deed. But how? The wood flooring was gone, replaced by hard stone. The walls were stone as well. Flaming torches lined the stone walls and the smell of burning wood pricked at her nostrils. She could see the dark night sky through a square, iron-barred window chiseled in the stone. She pressed her back to the wall when she saw two men approaching. They were carrying bronze helmets under their arms, and wore dull white tunics and leather sandals. They looked like how she’d always pictured ancient Roman soldiers.

  "You there,” one said to her. "Coming or going?”

  She panicked. "Coming,” she said. "But I don’t—”

  "Cimon’s girl,” the other said. "Let her pass. He’s not long for the world.”

  "I’ll search her. You know our orders.”

  She shrank from his hands when they reached for her but she knew she must not fight as her body was bent over and searched. Searched for what? For weapons? Her? She had nothing. The soldier ran his hands all over her body and through her clothes. The two soldiers smiled at each other as the one lingered longer than necessary under her skirts where she was bare and naked. Mona warmed to his touch. Malcolm had trained her to enjoy being violated and this man was certainly violating her. He cupped her bottom, rubbed it, slid his hand between her thighs and pushed one finger into her.

  "I don’t have anything,” she said as he stuck in a second finger and stroked her inner walls. "I swear I don’t.”

  "Let her pass,” the older soldier said. "We have to finish our rounds.”

  "If we must,” the younger one said, taking his hand out from under her skirt. He pointed at an open doorway with the fingers that had just been inside her. "Hurry. He’s not going to last much longer.”

  "Thank you,” she said, dipping into a curtsy. She rushed past the men and down the passageway. Torches lit her way, although she didn’t know where her way led. Cimon? Who was Cimon? The man in the painting? The prisoner? She was there for Malcolm, but who knew what role he’d decided to play in this carnal Wonderland.

  She heard low moans coming from the rooms she passed. They weren’t moans of pleasure but of profoundest suffering. This was a prison. She understood that. And somewhere in this prison was Malcolm, waiting for her. The panic in her heart was real. Her lungs pounded with it. Her dress felt tight across her chest. Her breasts ached horribly, and she wondered if it was because her panicked breathing was constricting her blood flow. They felt congested, swollen. Ignoring her pain, she ran down the dust-choked corridor until she came to the very end.

  The cell was not guarded and the iron door wasn’t locked. She looked around to see if anyone would stop her from entering. She saw no one. She took a torch from a wall sconce and entered through the open door.

  "Malcolm?” she whispered. The room was dark and dank and cold. She heard the rattling of a chain on the stone floor and she inched toward the sound. "Malcolm? Oh, God, Malcolm…”

  It was him, though he hardly looked himself. He lay naked but for a loincloth on the cold floor, his knees pulled to his chest and his hair the white of dirty snow. His body was skeletal. She could see every bone and every sinew and every joint. The withered face was unmistakably her Malcolm, his black eyes glinting like flint. He had not lost his will to live, though it seemed he had lost everything else. His only possession was the iron shackle on his ankle that bound him by a thick chain of heavy links to the wall. Mona put the torch into the wall sconce and knelt on the floor by his head. She touched his face tenderly and wept.

  "What’s happening?” she asked. "What have they done to you?”

  He opened his lips but no sound came out. She looked for water, for wine, for anything to wet his tongue. The dungeon was empty but for his broken body.

  "Starved,” he whispered.

  "Oh, God.” Mona gathered his
shivering body to hers. She could have counted his ribs with her fingers in the dark he was so thin. She wrapped him as best she could in her thick skirts.

  "Food,” he said, and it sounded like he was trying to ask her a question.

  "I have nothing,” she said. "They searched me.”

  He nodded, resigned to his death, and closed his eyes.

  She rocked him against her like a baby in her arms. He was so frail, so helpless, it made her heart ache. The pain in her breasts grew unbearable. She wept in sorrow and in pain. Malcolm rested his head on her chest and she groaned under a fresh wave of agony. Something was happening. She felt the front of her dress grow damp and warm. Was Malcolm bleeding on her? Frantically, she pushed the bodice of the dress down. She saw no blood, only her breasts, red and swollen and her nipples distended. The fluid was leaking from her breasts. White fluid, not red.

  At once she understood the painting and the meaning of Roman Charity. It wasn’t a painting of a prostitute paying a conjugal visit to a prisoner. It was a painting of a woman feeding a starving prisoner from her own breasts. Without a second thought she took her breast in her hand and lifted it to his mouth.

  "Suck,” she told him, but he seemed too weak to hear her. She tilted his head gently forward and cradled him in her arms like a child. The guards had searched her body for food but they couldn’t take the food from inside her body. Malcolm slowly parted his lips. She pressed her nipple into his mouth, and this time he was able to latch onto her breast. She wrapped her skirts around him even more, hiding this private act from prying eyes lest they rip her away from him and the nourishment that would keep him alive. As he nursed from her breast, her pain eased. She kissed his forehead, his hollowed cheeks as he drank from her body. As the minutes passed, he seemed to gain strength. His thin hand clutched her bare shoulder as he drank more deeply of her. By the firelight of the torch, his hair darkened from white to gray and slowly, ever so slowly, to black again.

  When he’d emptied one breast, she shifted him in her arms, pressing her other breast into his mouth. He latched on far more quickly this time and she wept with relief. He would live. She had saved him.

  "What crime did you commit?” she whispered. "Why are you here?”

  "I loved a woman I shouldn’t have loved,” he said, so quietly she wouldn’t have heard him but for the echo of his words off the stone walls.

  "And you were imprisoned because of that? Starved?”

  He nodded and took her nipple into his mouth again and suckled.

  "Did I hurt you?” she asked.

  "Yes,” he said against her breast. "Not your fault.”

  Her hot tears fell on his face as he nursed. She asked him no more questions as he fed from her. She’d never known such terrible tenderness as she knew now with his frail body in her arms and her body feeding his in this most intimate of ways. Holding him in her arms, nursing him from her breasts, she knew she did love him, though what that meant for them she didn’t know. Nothing made sense. All of this was impossible. How could she lactate like this without ever having had a child?

  At last he seemed sated. He released his hold on her breast and lay his head back in her arms. She rocked him like a mother with a child, though the words she whispered were the words of lovers.

  "Forgive me,” she said to him. Though his body was still thin and weak, his face was again the face of the man she’d seen in the gallery the first night, the face of a man at the prime of his life.

  "It isn’t your fault,” he said. "You didn’t know what you were doing to me when you brought him to our bed.”

  "Sebastian.” She sighed. "I was angry at you. I wanted to be with someone else so I could pretend I didn’t want you anymore. I didn’t think I could hurt you.”

  "I felt it happening,” he said. He sounded like a man recovering from a long illness. His voice wavered, weak and tired, but he would live. "It was like…bleeding. Bleeding out.”

  "How? How did you feel it?”

  He shook his head. "I can’t explain. Not yet.”

  "I want to have your child,” she said. "Will you do that for me? You said you would leave me, but I want to have your child whether you stay or go. Can I?”

  "You may have my child. It’s what I’ve wanted all along, for you to have the next heir.”

  "Why?”

  "A deathbed promise.”

  "What was the promise?”

  "I can’t explain.”

  "Not yet?”

  "Not yet,” he said. "But you’ll understand soon enough.”

  "I can wait,” she said. "I trust you now.”

  "That’s all I ask.”

  "Do you need more?” she asked. As soon as he told her he would let her have his child, her breasts felt painfully full again. He nodded and she lowered her bodice again, giving him her breast. The milk flowed into his mouth. By some magic his rail-thin body filled out until he was once again whole and healthy and he looked himself again, proud and virile. She didn’t question it or fear this magic anymore. It simply was.

  "I’ll have a son.” As soon as she said it she knew she wasn’t dreaming of the future but seeing it. Somewhere a house made of stone awaited her, iron gates, and a garden of red-thorned roses. "He’ll take after you. I’ll name him anything you tell me to name him.”

  "Name him for me,” he said before returning to her breast.

  She nodded, smiled. Her son would be named Malcolm, after his father. And she would nurse the son like she’d nursed the father and she would love them both until the day she died.

  Mona wrapped her arms around Malcolm to hide them from view. She’d heard footsteps in the corridor and feared discovery.

  "I must help you,” she said.

  "Let me inside you,” he said.

  That was easily enough done. She pushed him gently onto his back and straddled his stomach as he lifted her skirts to her waist. With one finger he stroked her, splitting her along the seam of her sex with his fingers. The folds parted for him easily as he touched her. As soon as she’d grown wet enough, he positioned his cock at her opening and eased her down onto it.

  Mona wept with joy to have him inside her again. Her purple skirts made a blanket for them and under that blanket they coupled themselves together, deeply, slowly, and with such tenderness she feared she’d never stop crying. Malcolm kissed her face, her tears, her hair that spilled over her shoulders. Somehow—he didn’t tell her and she knew he wouldn’t—somehow she knew he’d been languishing, a prisoner, all this time. She’d fed him through their lovemaking and when she’d taken it away from him, she’d starved him somehow. Someone else had made him a prisoner but it was she who’d taken his sustenance from him.

  "I’ll never banish you again,” she said as she moved up and down on him. She clenched her inner muscles, wanting to hold him tight inside of her and never let him out. "You scared me so much that night. Was that your true form?”

  "Only the form of my soul,” he said. "A prisoner, deformed, half animal.”

  "You’re beautiful to me,” she said. "I’ll do whatever it takes to free you.”

  "The time will come when I’ll ask you to do something you don’t want to do again.”

  "I don’t care. I’ll do it anyway. There’s nothing you could ask me to do that I won’t allow.”

  "Will you let me go when it’s time?”

  "If you’ll leave me your child in your place, then yes,” she said. "But please don’t ask that of me, my love.”

  "You don’t love me.”

  "I do, I swear I do.” She showered his face with kisses. "Tell me how to prove it and I’ll prove it to you.”

  "When I must leave you, you’ll know what to do.”

  "Then when you leave me, I’ll do it.”

  Though he was whole and healthy again, he still nursed from her breasts. She knew once they were empty they wouldn’t be full again until she’d had his child. She didn’t know what magic made this possible but she didn’t question it. She’d
never felt closer to a lover, not even those long nights with Ryan inside her, shielding her from the reality of her mother’s illness. Malcolm pushed her gown down to her waist and ran his hands along her bare back. The floor was hard and cold underneath them and tore at her knees, but to her it was finer than any luxurious bed since Malcolm was inside her again.

  Beneath her, Malcolm lifted his hips, pushing into her from below. She held perfectly still as he rocked his hips and pounded into her. It was heaven to take him, to spread her thighs and open herself to receive all of him. He reached under her dress again, found her clitoris and kneaded it. The pleasure was unbearable. She could hardly stay silent as he took her, fully in control of her body even as he lay on his back chained to the wall. His money had made her a whore, but his cock had made her his slave. She never wanted to taste freedom again. She only wanted to taste him.

  "Come for me,” he said into her ear. He took her breast in his mouth again and sucked it while he stroked her under her skirts. A low soft moan emanated from the back of her throat and the contractions began. Her wet inner walls clenched and released before they were seized with a violent fluttering that dragged on and on. She felt it in her back, in her thighs, in the inmost parts of her. At last it passed and she collapsed onto him, her sore