Fear itself

7

They say when you’ve been shot or stabbed you don’t feel the pain right away. Not so with a broken nose, as Dorie could have testified even before this most recent fracture. The agony is immediate-sharp and centralized at first, then spreading outward from its locus, swelling and blossoming until it envelops your entire head, which feels as big as a float in the Thanksgiving Day parade. Then, just when you think it can’t get any worse, the throbbing begins-slow, rolling waves with barely enough time between ebb and flood, between dread and pain, to form a wordless prayer, much less a coherent thought.

And yet, as she lay on her back in the darkness, vaguely aware that she was drowning in her own blood, a stray thought did manage to insinuate itself into Dorie’s consciousness, complete, discrete, in a disembodied voice that was somehow familiar, though not her own: There are worse things in life than bleeding to death.

Yeah, or drowning, she answered quickly, before the tide could pull her under again.

Thank heaven for pure dumb luck, thought Simon, ruefully rubbing his brow, just below the hairline to the left of the widow’s peak. He knew it was only an accident of timing that he’d ducked his head to go titty-diving just as Dorie had brought her head up to butt him, so that instead of catching him in the nose with her forehead, she’d caught him in the forehead with her nose. Broke it again, too, judging by the amount of blood.

He crawled toward the sound of her moaning-an eerie, bubbling sound. The closer he got, the more blood there was-his palms were sticky from crawling through it, the knees of his trousers were damp by the time he reached her, and when he rolled her onto her side to prevent her from drowning, her bare skin was wet and slick with warm blood.

Not as unpleasant a sensation as he might have thought. In fact, it reminded him a little of bathing Missy-the feel of soft, cushiony flesh beneath slippery-smooth wet skin-only without the attendant taboos, of course. Unlike Missy’s, Dorie’s body was Simon’s to do as he pleased with, for as long as he could keep her alive-and contingent, as always, upon the amount of fear they could generate together.

Because without the fear, dead or alive, it was just another naked body, and naked bodies, per se, had never held all that much fascination for Simon. Which brought him back to the question of the moment: what to do about this one. Stop the bleeding, of course. Clean her up a little. Hog-tie her, hands to ankles, keep her out of mischief. And no gag: the poor thing’d be breathing through her mouth for days, if she lasted that long. Maybe throw a spare mattress up against the side door leading to the garage: that was the weak spot for the soundproofing.

But after that, there would be no sense in hanging around. Something that Simon had learned over the years, something most people would never know, was that while anticipation of physical suffering produced fear, the actual pain was itself anodyne. For several more hours, while her agony was in full bloom, Dorie would be incapable of experiencing any viable fear.

Inconvenient, sure, but Simon was only mildly disappointed. Because the ejaculatio praecox that had plagued him since early adolescence rendered penile insertion problematical and extended intercourse all but impossible, he was incapable of enjoying prolonged sexual gratification, but when it came to the fear game, Simon Childs was an all-night, do-right, sixty-minute man. The longer he could make a game last, the better he felt about himself.

And since Dorie’s broken nose was going to force him to delay his gratification for another twelve to twenty-four hours, Simon realized as he crawled off into the darkness to find his goggles, by this time tomorrow, barring complications, he could expect to be feeling very, very good about himself.