Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 130, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 793 & 794, September/October 2007

The Erstwhile Groom by Laura Benedict

© 2007 by Laura Benedict

“I’m living proof that dreams do come true,” says Laura Benedict. “I wrote fiction for almost 20 years before selling my novel Isabella Moon (releasing in September) to Ballantine Books.” The book is not, however, the author’s first major fiction sale. She debuted in our Department of First Stories in ’01 under the byline Laura Philpot Benedict.

Kurt follows his wife, Livia, through the kitchen, which is dim even at mid-day because of the heavy awning shading the room’s single window. She pushes open the basement door, presses the light switch, and stands aside so he can carry the bags of canned goods downstairs.

“Yams,” he says. “Twenty-nine cents a can. You can’t beat that.”

“Lunch is on the table,” she says. “We’re out of pickle loaf.”

He knows how much Livia likes pickle loaf, but it won’t be on special again, he thinks, until the next week.

“Monday,” he says from the basement. “Can it wait until Monday?”

Livia doesn’t answer. He hears her footsteps clip across the linoleum. Always she wears shoes that he believes other women would wear for dancing, smooth leather shoes with high, chunky heels and deep vamps that hint at the cleavage between her toes. The shoes make her legs look long and elegant. He’s never liked how Livia shows off her legs; though she’s almost fifty, other men still stare at her.

Kurt sets the grocery bags on the floor and tugs gently at the window shade that acts as a dust cover for the storage shelves on the wall. The shade is crisp and cracked in a few places now, and does not roll as smoothly as it used to. He feels along the top shelf for the grease pencil he uses to date canned goods. He will date them and arrange them on the shelves, oldest in front and newest to the back, knowing full well that Livia doesn’t appreciate his efforts. She will quickly raise the shade, reach in, and take whatever can she cares to, regardless of the date. It’s no wonder, he thinks, that she’s never noticed that there’s something not quite right about the shelves, that they aren’t as deep as they might be.

It’s been over twenty years since Kurt last entered the windowless room hidden behind the shelves, with its rough stone walls and hard-packed dirt floor. The room had been his childhood hideaway, its floor the dusty terrain of his elaborate war games. It was a place to hide from his mother and her incessant piano playing, a place to run to when his father came home red-faced and frustrated with work.

When they moved in, their house was one of the larger ones on the street, with a backyard that sloped gently toward the alley behind it. Inside, its many rooms were small, but rather grand, with high, decorated ceilings. But it had languished in disrepair. They might never have found the false wall if his father hadn’t had to install a new boiler in the basement. The door hidden behind the wall was so small that Kurt, still just a boy, had to lower his head to get through it.

Kurt stood close beside his father, who held a lantern that cast flickering shadows on the walls. His chest felt tight, as though the musty room were sucking the breath from his lungs. The floor was swept clean except for an old ticking mattress in the corner; cobwebs dangled from the ceiling’s wooden beams. It looked to Kurt like a dungeon prison from an old book. When his father held the lantern close to a wall, they could see that many of the deep scratches covering it were words, the confusing lines rude maps.

“Sklaven,” said his father. Slaves. “The neighbors will all want to come and see,” he said, with some irritation. He told Kurt and his mother to keep the room a secret.

Livia’s lunch is frugal: a piece of rye bread smeared with cream cheese and a few olives. She never complains to Kurt, though, about the lunches he asks her to make for him: the sandwiches of Braunschweiger and boiled egg or of gelatinous head cheese accompanied by fresh potato salad made with celery and sweet pickles. He likes to eat a big meal at lunch and a smaller supper that will not weigh heavily on his stomach and cause him to lose sleep.

Kurt’s sleep is precious. Many nights he lies for hours beside Livia in the room that used to be his mother’s, listening to her gentle, even breaths. There in the dark, his hands aching with arthritis, he tells himself that the door behind the basement shelves is more than secure, that the corpse of Danny Kelley will rest on the other side of it always, undisturbed.

Before Kurt is able to pick up his sandwich, the kitchen door slams and his daughter, Mitzy, runs through the kitchen and into the dining room. Her nose is running and her face is splotched with red, but she doesn’t stop even to tell them why she has been crying.

“Mitzy, what is it?” Livia gets up and follows her down the hall and upstairs.

Kurt stares at his plate. This young man, this Brent, to whom Mitzy is engaged, has brought them nothing but grief. Twice, already, Mitzy has called off the wedding, and Kurt is hoping in his heart that this time will be the end of it.

Mitzy is sweetly feminine, all smiles and grace. She has Livia’s lush dark hair and thin frame. Her fair skin is prone to delicate round beauty marks. Mitzy’s tender heart disturbs Kurt. Over the years, he has turned away many boys from their door, boys who were sure that Mitzy would want to see them, talk to them, because she’d let herself become too friendly and confiding. She lacks her mother’s dignity, her iron core.

Livia was the one who helped him pick out a flower for his lapel every morning in her aunt’s florist shop, where he would stop on his way in to work. With her slightly almond-shaped eyes, trim waist, and fashionable clothes, Livia was an exotic for Kurt, so different from the zaftig German girls in the neighborhood — various Karins and Heidis and Gretchens, the ones his mother was always trying to get him to date. What did it matter to him that he was already thirty and unmarried and living with his widowed mother? What did it matter to him that the one time he asked Livia to dinner, she blushed and stammered, finally making an excuse he knew to be a lie?

Kurt was in no hurry. He knew that, eventually, he would have Livia for his own.

On Sundays, he began to go to the late Mass so he could sit a few rows behind Livia and her aunt. And was it wrong that he observed her every step as she walked, alone, to the high school for the Wednesday evening meetings of the Sweet Songbirds club? Once, and only once, he’d hidden himself in the doorway of McSorley’s pub until she passed by, stepping out to greet her, pretending that their meeting was an accident. From the amused sparkle in her eyes, he could tell she’d been surprised — did he dare even think, pleased?

Friday nights were for bingo at the church hall, where Kurt would sit with his mother until the last cards were played. If he chanced to meet Livia’s eye from where she sat with her girlfriends — he was very careful, usually, not to draw attention to himself — she would give him a friendly, if diffident, wave. After bingo, he would dally outside the church, watching her walk away until his mother agitated to be taken home. Who was to know that he went out again after his mother was safely tucked in bed? The alley beside the florist shop was soaked in darkness, except for the light in a second-floor window that he believed to be Livia’s. When it went out, he could go home and sleep a little better knowing she was safe inside.

Kurt sees the lights of a car swing into the driveway just before nine. He knows immediately that it is the boyfriend, or fiancé, as Livia would have him called.

“Papa?” Mitzy’s voice comes down the stairs.

Kurt goes to answer the frantic knock at the back door.

Livia has a satin-bound photograph, hidden, she thinks, in the cedar chest at the foot of their bed. In it, a young Livia, looking unhealthily slender in a narrow-waisted, polka-dot dress, stands close to Danny Kelley, who wears a pencil-thin moustache that rides above a small, almost feminine mouth. His right arm encircles Livia’s waist and appears to Kurt, even over the distance of years, to be pulling her to him, forcing her body against his in an intimate, frankly sexual way. There is a look of casual cruelty in his eyes.

But what of the beautiful Livia, her eyes filled with a tenderness that causes a brief, painful swelling in Kurt’s throat each time he takes the photograph from its hiding place? Her chestnut hair gathers in soft waves across her shoulders and drops a few teasing inches down her back in the style of a sultry Hedy Lamarr. Her arm, graceful in the draped sleeve of the dress, reaches possessively (protectively, perhaps?) across the man’s chest. This is surely not the Livia who stood beside Kurt in the dimly lit Lady Chapel at St. Mark’s Catholic Church, those same fingers pressed into his own large hand as the priest led them through their vows. That Livia’s still-young mouth had acquired new lines and she stood with a stiffness that the girl in the photo would have mocked. An aura of happiness radiates from the photographed Livia, a laughing, confident kind of happiness that his Livia surely could not imagine.

Kurt turns on the porch light, illuminating the boy’s face through the glass, and wonders that Livia can bear to see him each time he comes to the house. This boy, this Brent whom Mitzy met at a dance at the armory — but for his smooth upper lip and modern haircut — is the image of the young man with Livia in the photograph. Kurt even asked Livia once if Brent reminded her of anyone. But she just said, “No,” and went on reading her book. It bothered him that she didn’t even ask him why he’d wanted to know.

Kurt opens the door only the width of his body. “Yes?” he says. “What is it?”

Brent stands with his hands shoved into the back pockets of his blue jeans; he wears a bulky green letter jacket that is too hot for the weather. On its breast is the image of a halo shot through with a flaming arrow. He gives Kurt a toothy smile.

“Hey, Mr. R.,” he says. “Is Mitzy here?”

“Mitzy is unavailable. I don’t know the particulars.”

Brent shakes his head. The smile is gone, replaced by a look of intense sincerity. “It’s just a misunderstanding, Mr. R. A miscommunication, you’d call it. Mitzy needs to hear what I have to say.”

The air about the boy smells of flowers. Kurt thinks that perhaps the lilies of the valley on the other side of the porch are releasing their scent, but the smell is stronger, sharper. He realizes that the boy is wearing some kind of perfume.

“If I could come in just for a minute,” Brent says. He lowers his voice, taking Kurt into his confidence. “See, there’s this girl, and she’s been pestering me an awful lot. She won’t leave me alone. She’s just this girl, this kid from the neighborhood.”

“I’m sure Mitzy will call you at some point,” Kurt says. He’s not interested in the boy’s pitiful confessions. He takes a handkerchief from a rear pocket, blows his nose loudly into it, and stuffs it back into his pants.

Out in the yard, a yellow rectangle of light shining down from Mitzy’s window blinks out. Beneath the sound of traffic humming on the road in front of the house, Kurt thinks he hears a window sliding quietly open. He wants this boy to go away so he can start making his way toward bed. If he goes to bed much past nine o’clock, he doesn’t sleep well.

“Look,” Brent says, changing his tack. He takes a step toward Kurt. “Mitzy’s over eighteen. Right? She gets to make her own decisions. And you need to tell her that I’m here and that I want to see her.”

When Mitzy first came home that afternoon, Kurt thought that she and the young man would have to work things out themselves. But he sees that he has made a number of wrong assumptions about the young man. Acutely aware that Brent probably outweighs him by twenty pounds and has at least an inch of height on him, Kurt steps out of the doorway and grabs him roughly by the upper arm. “It’s time for you to leave, now. You’ve got nothing to say to anyone here.”

Brent jerks away, his lip twisted in a sneer.

“Go on,” Kurt says. He’s worried that if he says more his voice will shake.

Brent shouts up to the window above them. “Mitzy! Mitzy, come down and call off your old man!”

The two of them stand frozen in the porch light, each waiting, perhaps, for Mitzy to answer or for the other to move or speak. Kurt is no longer tired — the surge of fear, or anger, whatever it was that prompted him to lay hands on the boy, has energized him and made him feel suddenly younger, more vital.

“Mitzy!”

Above them, the window slams shut.

“Don’t imagine this changes anything,” the boy says to Kurt. “You watch how everything will be just fine, tomorrow.” He gives Kurt a cheerful salute and starts up the steps into the yard. He pauses and leans down to pick up a handful of smooth pebbles from around the steps. Turning back to the house, he throws the pebbles at the window so that they spatter against the glass like fat, noisy raindrops.

Kurt watches the car back out of the driveway, its headlights bouncing clumsily as a single wheel rises up over the curb and then down again. His heart is still pounding as the car speeds down the alley, spewing gravel into the night air. He knows that Eda Hidebaugh in the house next-door is probably watching from her darkened window, but he’s angry enough that he doesn’t care.

One Wednesday evening, Livia left her aunt’s shop, but didn’t go to the high school. As Kurt followed almost a block behind, she walked more quickly than usual, despite her high heels. She passed by McSorley’s and turned, heading toward the Irish part of town — a part of town where Kurt didn’t like to go, where there were gangs of young men and teenagers who intimidated him and made him wish he carried a gun, even a small one, in the pocket of his jacket. But Livia walked confidently. The streets were quiet, with few people sitting out on their stoops. When Livia did pass a group of boys on a corner, Kurt was too far back to hear what they said to her. He only heard a shout and a laugh from one of the boys, but Livia kept walking and they didn’t follow her. Relieved that he wasn’t going to have to reveal himself to defend her (With no weapon, what would he have done? He told himself that his fists would have been enough.), Kurt jogged across to the other side of the street for several blocks, still keeping Livia in sight.

Nothing could have prepared him for what he saw next. Livia stopped in front of a pub he didn’t know and reached out her hand to the man there who was obviously waiting for her. Kurt hurried forward, watching as they embraced, watching as the man wrapped his arms around Livia and slid one hand down her back to rest it just at the top of the swell of her behind. (So many times Kurt had imagined putting his own hand just there. He could almost feel the linen of her dress beneath his own fingertips.) But instead of pushing the man away, Livia seemed to cling more tightly to him, kissing him harder.

The next morning, Kurt learns from Mitzy and Livia that things have been decided. Livia calls the priest at St. Mark’s to let him know that the wedding is off, and asks Kurt to drive her to the florist and the dressmaker’s to see about settling the bills even though she knows Thursday is his library day. It looks to him as if the whole foolish affair is going to cost him a least a couple hundred dollars. But he thinks it might almost be worth it not to have that particular young man sitting at his dinner table again, eating his food and drinking his beer. He is glad that Mitzy will not have children with Brent, attractive, sneaky children whom he would have to guard against, to prevent them from stealing his small treasures, like the tiny jade turtles his godfather had brought him from Japan, or doing noisy things out in the yard that the neighbors could gossip about. Kurt flushes with shame at the thought of having such grandchildren.

Livia comes out of the florist’s wearing an irritated look. More money, he thinks. They had saved for Mitzy’s wedding, but he had hoped that it would come a few years later, after the money had gained more interest.

“They wanted half the final bill,” Livia says, getting into the Chevrolet.

“We’re not going to pay it,” Kurt says. “They can try to come and get it from me.”

Livia shuts the door. “I already gave them a check,” she says.

Kurt drives away from the florist’s in silence. Is this how things are going to be, now that he is retired? Did she think that she would be making the money decisions? If he’d had any idea, he would’ve stayed on the city payroll, no matter how good the early retirement deal had been.

“I’ll deal with the dressmaker,” he says. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the edge of Livia’s mouth lift just slightly. Is she laughing at him? He chooses to think that, given what she’d just done, she wouldn’t dare.

Danny Kelley was known to Kurt, and many others, as a small-time criminal who dealt in liquor and cigarettes without tax stamps, even some marijuana. Kurt was astounded that his Livia would be involved with such a man.

The lovers met the next Wednesday, and the next. It was on a Monday morning that Kurt came into the shop to find that Livia was gone.

Brent’s car is in the driveway when they get home. Eda Hidebaugh stands with a hose, watering the plot of struggling strawberry plants at the edge of her yard. Kurt can tell by the way she tries to wave them over that she wants to talk.

“She would have to be out here,” Livia says. “Will you deal with her too?”

“Why are you making a joke?” Kurt says. “Just go inside.”

They walk together to the back door. Hearing Eda’s tremulous Hello, Kurt doesn’t turn around, but raises his hand in a brief wave.

The kitchen is cool and silent in the midday heat. Mitzy has remembered to close the windows before noon. Kurt wonders what state he’ll find her in with Brent there. He tells himself that they should have known better than to believe her when she told them that she wanted nothing to do with him ever again. But she’d seemed so resolute that morning, her tears dried, her voice calm. It hadn’t been like the other times she’d called off the wedding when she’d been almost hysterical in her vehemence. Her mercurial nature was a puzzlement to him. He wondered if it didn’t have something to do with Livia’s having an Italian grandmother on her father’s side.

“Mitzy?” Livia calls softly down the hallway. Kurt follows her. He doesn’t like how quiet the house is. He expected weeping, or words of anger — not this fraught silence.

Livia enters the light-filled living room a second before him. “Oh good Christ,” she says.

Kurt looks down to the floor to see his daughter, her blouse open and her skirt kicked away, lying beneath Brent, whose bare behind is glaringly white in the sunshine. Mitzy makes a low moaning sound; it is not a sound of passion, but of the deepest pain.

Kurt pushes Livia out of his way and grabs Brent by the shoulders, expecting to get him off of Mitzy and give him the beating of his life. But when he tries to lift Brent away, the weight is such that he can only shove him to the side and onto the rug. It’s then that he sees the kitchen knife jutting from the wound on Brent’s neck and the blood soaking his daughter’s half-naked body. Freed, Mitzy rolls slowly onto her side and curls into a ball, still moaning, sounding as though she will never stop.

Danny Kelley lived in a row house down near the river. Kurt bought a car with the money he’d been saving to buy a ring for Livia and took to spending hours in the hillside park overlooking the shabby neighborhood, waiting, watching for signs of Danny Kelley and Livia coming and going from the house. Livia wore different clothes — even her walk was different, more languorous, seductive. He was losing her a little more each day.

Brent’s body is heavy, but Kurt must wrestle with it alone. Livia has taken Mitzy upstairs to bathe and calm her. He could hardly bear to watch as Mitzy shambled away, her head pressed to her mother’s side, Livia’s arm supporting her. It’s best that neither of them should see what he is going to do.

The shelves are so stiff on their supports that Kurt nearly falls back more than once onto the cans littering the basement floor as he yanks them off the wall. Twenty-some years of rust and dirt has secured them even with the shades he’d hung as protection. He stacks the shelves against the wall and stands looking at the exposed door.

Danny Kelley struggled.

It was late afternoon, just before five o’clock, when they approached the shabby roadhouse on the Kentucky side of the river. Kurt had followed Danny Kelley there before and knew where to pull off the road and into the trees as Danny Kelley went on to the roadhouse’s driveway — in fact, Kurt knew enough about Danny Kelley’s routes to offer them to any policeman who wanted to know. How easy would it have been just to have Danny Kelley arrested. But then Livia would have been shamed further, and Kurt would never have had her. His pride demanded that much.

Kurt got out of his car and moved quickly through the thin woods separating him from the roadhouse. Several yards from Danny Kelley’s flashy Buick, he stopped, watching as Danny Kelley, loaded down with a pair of crates, was let inside the building.

At first, Kurt hadn’t any idea but that he would wrap his hands around Danny Kelley’s throat and squeeze the life from him, but as he slipped into the back of the Buick his hand came to rest on one of the ropes Danny Kelley used to secure his bottles.

He waited, barely breathing. Sweat ran in a rivulet down one of his temples and into his eye. As he twisted the coarse rope in his hands, his decision — which had seemed, in the beginning, to be a painfully obvious one — began to feel to him like madness, like a fever that had overtaken him, but was now cooling.

Before he could reflect on his thought’s logical conclusion — that a sane man would simply have declared his love for Livia and wooed her with gifts and letters and promises, as, surely, Danny Kelley had done — Danny Kelley was in the car and had started the engine. Kurt fought against the urge to close his eyes as he dropped the rope around Danny Kelley’s neck and jerked it backwards, knocking the man’s cheap straw hat to the seat. Danny Kelley’s hands were suddenly in his hair, grabbing frantically at Kurt’s ears; his fingers jammed into Kurt’s eyes and nostrils. Only the Buick’s enormous steering wheel kept Danny Kelley in his seat as his body tried to arch away from Kurt. It seemed to Kurt that an hour passed before Danny Kelley stopped moving. The rope felt as though it had seared itself into Kurt’s flesh, but for a long time he was afraid to let it go.

Brent’s body lies on the basement floor, wrapped in the area rug from the living room, surrounded by cans of apples, carrots, green beans, corn, stew, yams, beets, and sauerkraut. Only the rug’s padding, which Livia had insisted that they buy when they brought the rug home, had kept the blood from soaking through to the living room’s wood floor.

It takes some work to get the door to the hidden room open; Kurt forgot that he had nailed it shut. As he works, he can’t get the image of Brent’s face in death out of his mind. The boy’s pale forehead was broad and open, his empty eyes a bright, honest blue. He was from good German stock. Brent, even though he’d sometimes treated Mitzy shabbily, always had an air of innocence about him that Danny Kelley had never had. He was nothing like Danny Kelley.

Finally, the door is open. Kurt is afraid to look inside the room, but he steels himself and squats down to inch his way in, the beam of a flashlight leading him on.

Kurt lay in bed, looking at his burned and swollen hands. His hands had killed a man, yet he felt little remorse. It would take time for Livia to come to him, he knew. But he would be there for her, waiting.

“Kurt!” His mother’s voice was a fierce whisper.

Kurt sat up to see his mother in the doorway in her long nightgown, her gray and black hair hanging over her shoulders.

“There’s someone in the house,” she said. “In the basement.”

“No,” Kurt said. “There’s no one there.” But he felt the fear rising in his body.

“He’s pounding on something,” she said. “I can hear him.”

Kurt couldn’t speak. No one had broken into the house. The knowledge that Danny Kelley was still alive down in the hidden room flooded over him.

“Go!” she said. “You’re the man now, Kurt. Do you think your father wouldn’t go and see? You get his gun from the bureau. I will call the police.”

Kurt, his hands shaking, went to his father’s empty room and got the gun.

“Don’t call the police,” he whispered as he went downstairs. “Promise me you won’t call. Let me do this.”

“You call,” she said. “I don’t want to go back down there.”

He closed the bedroom door and heard her lock it behind him.

In the dark kitchen, he opened the basement door and stood, listening, to Danny Kelley.

The musty air of the room steals his breath away just as it had when he had first stood there beside his father a lifetime ago. The beam from the flashlight picks out a pair of shoes lying in the middle of the floor. They are surrounded by toy soldiers — a hundred or more — and look like giant fortresses that the soldiers had been unable to scale.

Knowing that the shoes cannot be all that is left of Danny Kelley, Kurt forces himself to slide the beam across the wall, where he sees the familiar scratchings of the slaves who’d once hidden themselves here. But he doesn’t stop to examine them. They are nothing to him.

He finds Danny Kelley, who is little more than a dusty pile of outdated, cheap clothes with bits of bone sticking out of them, in the corner behind the door. For more than twenty years, the Danny Kelley of his nightmares and dreams was a ghoul, a half-alive creature who lived behind a door that was twenty times the size of the one standing open behind Kurt. Danny Kelley was the echo of a hoarse voice, cries punctuated by the sound of weakening fists pounding at the door. But the bugs — the eaters of the dead — had long ago made their way through the hard-packed dirt and found Danny Kelley.

Finally unafraid, Kurt inspects the wall nearest the skeleton to see if maybe Danny Kelley had scratched Livia’s name into the wall with his dying strength. But Kurt had emptied Danny Kelley’s pockets before putting him in the room, taking his cigarettes, money, keys, and matches. Danny Kelley had died in the dark, an erstwhile groom forever separated from his bride. But he would no longer be alone.

Kurt’s mother would not leave the house until it was over. For those first few days, the most worrisome days, the days when Kurt would begin to shake and sweat at work thinking about Danny Kelley, she would play the piano for hours on end to keep from hearing the noise coming from the basement. At night she played the radio just loudly enough. She would make Kurt cold suppers so she wouldn’t have to linger too near the basement door. They would eat on the back porch or upstairs in his father’s old bedroom. Then, for a whole day, then two, then three, they heard nothing.

Kurt replaces the shelves and restocks them, filling a single bag to take upstairs. He crumples the empty bag that had held the fertilizer he’d hurriedly sprinkled over Brent’s body at the last moment, hoping that it had enough lime in it to have some effect.

He finds Livia sitting at the dining room table. Livia — who he knows is made of iron inside — sits slumped over the table with her head resting on her arms. His heart aches for her, for Mitzy. At his touch, Livia looks up. Her face is lined with care, but she hasn’t been crying. It is Mitzy who will be their biggest worry.

Kurt sits in the chair beside her rather than at his usual place at the head of the table. Upstairs, Mitzy, with the help of a couple of painkillers from an old prescription, is finally sleeping.

“I was thinking,” Kurt says softly, “of who Brent reminded me of.”

Livia shakes her head. “No, not now,” she says. She reaches out to cover Kurt’s hand briefly with her own, then goes into the kitchen. Kurt hears her get a glass from the cabinet and turn on the faucet. The water runs and runs, and the sweet, domestic sound of it blends with his single thought: She knows about everything.

For the benefit of Eda Hidebaugh, when it is full dark, Livia combs back her hair and Kurt helps her don Brent’s letter jacket. He watches as she backs Brent’s car out into the alley and drives away to leave it in the lot of a bar to which he often took Mitzy. A half-hour later, praying that Mitzy will stay in her stuporous sleep, Kurt picks up Livia and drops her off a few blocks from home.

He is waiting when Livia comes in by the front door, which is hidden from Eda Hidebaugh’s gaze. When she holds out the handkerchief that he had given her to wipe her fingerprints from the car, Kurt takes her into his arms to pull her firmly to him. Her body feels soft and malleable to him, as though he could pull her close enough that they could become one person. She belongs to him now, and no one else.