And I don’t have any doubts. Everything is right; I can feel it.
“I have to tell you something.”
Those are the first words my husband says to me the day after our wedding. They are somber and spoken in a hushed tone. They don’t shock me, though. No. Isn’t that scary? Petrifying, terrifying, alarming.
I’ve been driving myself crazy for the past weeks thinking something was going on and now I have my proof. I almost don’t want it. I almost don’t want him to tell me something.
But I nod, clutching the sheets to my pink wedding dress. After the short ceremony, we walked around the city and then, Ethan scored some beer for us to celebrate. I had my first taste of alcohol, directly from my husband as he poured the liquid from his mouth into mine. It was decadent and amazing, and I got drunk only after one bottle. I’m pretty sure I crashed before we could consummate our marriage.
“Will you go with me somewhere? I have to show you something.” He scans my face, tracing his finger down the side of it, looking at me with such intensity, such passion.
“Okay, let me go freshen up.”
He nods, still staring at me before bending down to kiss my forehead. “I love you, Pixie. I’m nothing without you.”
With that he gets up from the mattress and leaves, and I’m left with a sense of foreboding. I go and freshen up with wooden limbs so he can take me wherever he wants to take me.
It’s in Brooklyn. The thing he wants to show me. We ride the subway and get there in about half an hour. In those thirty minutes, we don’t talk. Abel’s uneasy and maybe even afraid, and that’s making me afraid. What can possibly be so bad that he can’t even say it? Hasn’t been able to say it for weeks.
Our destination is a brick warehouse. This entire area is lined with metal fences and big trucks lugging deliveries. In all the times I’ve come to this borough, I’ve never set foot here.
As we approach the metal door, Abel squeezes my hand tightly. In the silent, still air, his gesture is loud.
“You trust me?” he asks, with open, vulnerable eyes.
It’s the same thing he asked when we got to Ethan’s apartment and heard those sex noises. I answered him yes, then. I realize I didn’t even have to think about it. But I do now and that cuts him – cuts me – deep.
Taking a heavy breath, I nod. “Yes.”
There isn’t any other answer when it comes to him. But somehow, I know that my life will never be the same after this. He nods at me before pushing the metal door open and a screech sounds, breaching the sanctity of the quiet.
I step in with trembling feet.
Honestly, I’m convinced I’m going to see dead bodies. I already know that they’ll be hanging from the ceiling. There will be blood everywhere. I’ll see plastic sheets stuck to the walls and people in jumpsuits wielding weapons. Anything that warrants the kind of silence Abel’s maintaining has to deal with death.
I’m wrong.
Silence is the last thing that I hear in this place. What I hear is what I never in a million years expected to hear. Moans. Loud and aroused and shameless. It matches the moans I hear through our apartment walls, only these are ten times louder.
And what I see is wilder than any dreams I might have had. There are beds with white sheets. Three of them, actually. They are scattered around the large, loft-like space, at an angle to each other. Though they are partitioned with black curtains, from where I’m standing by the door I can see all of them.
They hold bodies. Naked bodies, tanned skin against white sheets, and they are writhing and arching and slipping and thrusting.
They are having sex.
As if that wasn’t enough, there are people gathered around the beds. Yup, people holding cameras. People holding lights. They are circling, bending this way and that as they take shot after shot after shot.
Click. Click. Click.
It’s weird but I hear the snap of the camera even though my own heartbeats are drowned under the erotic moaning. Then my heart completely stops because I hear a moan very much like mine. It could almost be me.
“Oh God…” it says and I have no choice but to walk toward it.
I wade my way through the space. It smells like make-up and sex and sweat. The floor is a jungle of wires where every step echoes. Or maybe it only feels that way to me because everything in this place is magnified.
I approach the bed in the middle of the three; it’s located straight ahead and far back. A man and a woman are lying on it. Well, not lying. They are moving. He’s thrusting into her and she’s clutching the sheets, her mouth gaping open. She’s on all fours, her breasts jiggling. She wears a gold chain around her neck that swings and flies with every stab of the man’s cock.