Exposed (Madame X, #2)(55)

I do not remember this. But I am staring at you. I am lying in a bed. The frame of the photograph contains a bit of silver rail, pillow, some blue fabric, probably the hospital gown. How can you have taken this photograph of me, looking so fresh, so candid?

“You came out of the initial surgery just fine. Woke up after, everything seemed fine. I snapped this. You remembered me. We didn’t really talk, just sat together. Then the nurses kicked me out, saying you needed to sleep. And when I came back the next day, you were gone. They said something had gone wrong during the night. Swelling in your brain. They had to do emergency surgery, put you in a medically induced coma. You didn’t wake up from it for six months.”

I take the phone from you and stare at myself. The younger me. As if I could find clues to my past, to my former self in this digital photograph, nothing but pixels, nothing but ones and zeroes. I cannot. I do not see myself in this. I see a girl, a sixteen-year-old girl. Lost and alone, trying to be defiant. Staring up at a camera held by the man who’d saved me, unhappy but daring. Brave, but scared. I see this. Did I know then that my parents were dead? Did I even have a chance to mourn? Or did the bleeding in my brain steal that from me as well?

I cannot get over the way I appear in the photo. My head shaved, how it highlights my eyes and cheekbones, the delicate but somehow strong shape of my head. I look a little masculine, but I am yet somehow unmistakably female. Involuntarily, I run my hand over the top of my head, almost expecting to feel stubble.

Could I?

What would it feel like? To feel nothing but scratchy stubble and scalp? No hair, no long thick black tresses.

I could do it. Perhaps I will.

Perhaps to truly become Isabel, I must shave my head and regrow my hair once more. Cut away the coiffured, styled, curled, brushed, perfect locks of Madame X and become Isabel, a new woman, rebirthed and fresh and raw.

You turn in place. Take your phone back, shut it off, toss it aside carelessly. It lands on the seat of the armchair and bounces once. You are looking down at me. You take my braid in your hand, tug my head back. You are standing close, not quite touching. Towering over me. Blocking out all the world with your muscled bulk, and I smell you. Feel your heat.

Anger flushes through me. I push you away, but you do not let go of my hair, and I must return to you or suffer the pain. “Let go, Caleb.” I accept the pain and continue to push away.

You swell with an inbreath. “No,” you growl. “I know you’re angry. But you cannot deny that you feel this, Isabel.”

I do. Oh, I do. And that is the true source of my rage. That I cannot help but feel this. Somehow your proximity eradicates all that exists beyond you, all that exists outside of you and me. Your heat and your brutal strength occlude my ability to remember why I hate you, why I do not trust you.

This feels familiar.

I know when you will move next. You will wait a beat . . . a second . . . a third, and then—yes. Now. You cup the back of my neck, my own hair crushed against my neck, soft and silky against my skin, between my neck and your hand. And you lift me up thus, force me up to my tiptoes and your lips are insistent on mine. The kiss blasts me. Shadows of confusion contort and cavort with rays of truth, dance on the walls of my twisting mind like a puzzle of chiaroscuro. You kiss me dizzy and then release me. Abruptly, violently.

“Fuck,” you snarl. “Fuck. I taste him on you. I smell him.”

“You knew,” I say, wiping at my lips with the back of my wrist. “You knew where I was going, and who I’d be with.”

“That’s different than tasting it.”

“And how do you think I feel, watching you f*ck Rachel?” I hiss. “How do you think that feels for me, knowing you leave me, still smelling of me, and go to her. Bed her . . . taste her, f*ck her. And then come back to me, and bed me, taste me, f*ck me, and now both of us are on your skin. Or more, even? The other girls on that floor, too, maybe. Are there others? Other girls, in other buildings? Girlfriends elsewhere in the city, who know nothing of each other? Like that girl from the limo . . . what was her name, the Jewish one?”

“Isabel—” you begin.

“There is nothing you can say to me, Caleb. Nothing that will make it better. Nothing that will take away that betrayal. And then you did what you did to me, right there by that elevator. The way you used me.” I swallow hard against the rage and the hurt. “The way you’ve always used me. It’s never been about us. It’s been about me belonging to you. Being your whore. Only you do not pay me in money, you pay me in life. You pay me in things, in false memories and mantras in the night, old stories and half truths. You pay me in things far less useful or tangible than mere currency, Caleb. And I will not accept those forms of payment anymore.”

I turn then, and you let me go. Allow me to walk away. But then you’re behind me. Standing far too close. Breathing on me. Your front touching my back. I can feel your erection against my backside, and your hands clutch my hips. Your lips touch the curve of my neck, near my shoulder.

You murmur to me.

“Can you walk away from this, Isabel? How right we feel together? Yes, I use you. But you use me just the same. You accept what I give, and you take more from me. You do not stop me. You do not say no. You beg for more. Not in words, but sex is not about words, is it? You beg for more with the way you breathe, the way you tense when I draw closer to you, the way you arch back into me. The way you lift your hips when I touch you. The way you moan when I make you come, over and over and over. You come for me, Isabel.” Your large, powerful hands with your squared-off, manicured nails and rough calluses paw across my hips, one scraping up to cup my breast, the other down to my core. “Do you remember the first time I touched you?”