o rose, thou art sick

He fingers her until she’s crying in the passenger seat, crying and coming hard, and when he takes his hand away there is more blood on the seats and trailing between his third and fourth fingers. He looks at it, and her, and something in his eyes is perfectly bewildered. He kisses her mouth with closed lips, something surges in her – a violence rallying, she wants to do something but she doesn’t know what. Not bite. Scream, maybe. He kisses her throat and unbuttons the first buttons of her filthy blouse.

“India, are you comfortable?”

What a stupid question. “Yes,” she says, but gasps a little breath and feels her breasts pressed against his chest. She feels a little dizzy. Charlie relinquishes her, he lets her go and his hand leaves a scarlet smudge on the dashboard.

“I’ll see you inside.”

She rebuttons her blouse on her way up the path to the house; her hands are shaking. Is this what she wants?

India Stoker is waiting, legs folded, hands in her lap. She wears a nightgown, and a white bra identical to a dozen more that she owns; lying on her childhood bed she ought to feel exposed. She doesn’t.

“Your mother’s asleep downstairs. I don’t think she’ll be bothering us any time soon.” Charlie stands in the doorway and doesn’t smile; his tone is cryptic and somehow it doesn’t bother her. His features are unreadable; she stands up and is quick to embrace him, their arms latch around each other and they wait, in strange silence.

Her face is pressed into Charlie’s sweater and she tries to think of how it smelled before this. The memory presses in of the mud and wet, of the slivers of bark and leaf and rot that have sluiced off her ankles and down the drain.

“I’m on the pill,” she finally says when she looks up at him, and hears the words fall flat. “Cramps. Mother says I should start early.”

He smiles, only enough that his lips are parted and a thin white gleam of his teeth shows.

“That’s good.”

Uncle Charlie lays her down. His hand is behind her head, the other one braces her thigh, too firmly; it pinches. There’s electricity in the touch of his fingers, a strange slow deliberation. No missteps, no lurching anticipation, but something strange; his eyes keep flickering back to hers, even as his thumb traces her breast.

Sex with regard to India has been tight spaces, and too much heat and unpleasant smells and strange boys’ hands, and boys who wouldn’t put their hands anywhere near her but press her against the cold metal of a locker door with their erections gouging into her back. Boys looking at her hair, her breasts, her legs. Men touching her. Fumbling. Uncle Charlie is as cold and powerful here as at the piano bench, and he smells like nothing, like a grave they’ve dug. He isn’t like the others; furthermore, something is wrong. Some critical inexperience. She looks at him out from under her eyelashes, through the hair falling over her face and spilling out under her back like a puddle of ink.

“You’ve never had sex with a woman, have you?”

His liquid eyes, like tin or bottle glass, glance down with silent significance.

“Not with my mother?”

“No, I’m afraid I haven’t. Would you mind it very much if I did? It’s as much your decision as hers, you know.”

India catches his face in her hands, and kisses him open-mouthed.

“Here, I’ll show you.”

His loafers and her saddle shoes are lined up by the edge of the bed; she can see them in the very edge of her field of vision, over the cliff of white eyelet bedspread. It’s all very child-bride, except for the way he’s talking to her, very calm and very patient. Evelyn is on enough tranquilizers to stun a horse, she won’t be waking up from her rest any time soon, not for India screaming bloody murder, but the situation urges caution.

“You’re a mature young woman. You’re capable of telling me what you want, and I’ll do everything in my power to help you get it. Tell me to leave, tell me to stay. The decision’s all yours, India.”

His thumb traces a circle on the back of her hand. There are almost no calluses on his hands, none that aren’t near-blisters from their little woodland escapade, so much for digging wells in Darkest Africa. She’s not even sure about the summers in Bordeaux. He’s watching her like a snake, keenly or a little warily; and then in the same moment she blinks and he withdraws his hand from hers, straightens up from where he’d been leaning beside her and puts his hands back in his lap, like they haven’t just been sharing an inappropriate confidence for an uncle and niece.

What is that supposed to mean to her? That she’s seriously contemplating sleeping with her bachelor uncle? She’s never known him before, they are as much strangers to each other as anyone else not bound by blood. Uncle Charlie never knew his brother, and India has – well, now she’s not sure she’s ever known either of them.

“Would you prefer this to go differently? This needn’t all happen so fast.”

“You’re not having nerves, are you?”, India says with the kind of buttery calm that must come from her father’s side of the family. She sits up just enough to smooth her hair over one shoulder. “You should undress too. It’s only fair.”

She’s not in the habit of touching anyone, let alone touching herself – or she wasn’t, not before it happened, you’ve got a lot to learn, young lady, wringing out a painful climax with the memory of the blood on her hands and the unremitting savagery of the struggle, how quickly it had ended. Charlie like an avenging angel, like nothing in the world was more natural than what he’d just done – the brute power in the the muscles of his arms and back as he swung the shovel; the blood of her much-vaunted purity trickling through his fingers. Charlie has killed before. Charlie’s going to kill again. India would help him if he asked her to, and she already has, twice over. It’s much too late to stop this, even if he tried to give her the option. Weeks too late. Maybe years.

Charlie slips out of his sweater easily. He wears the same style of shirts that her father did, except that she’s never seen anyone who looks like Charlie does, immaculate, like a model home. Perhaps they deserve each other. She helps peel his shirt free and slips a hand under his undershirt. His leather belt slithers free in one smooth movement, and for a moment he holds it in his hand like an object of some consideration. India has to take it from him and set it on her bedside table; it casts a strange shadow.

It wouldn’t be difficult for him to end their collaboration right here and now. He’s not a bulky man by anyone’s reckoning, but then again, neither was Whip Taylor. He doesn’t have to be, she’s defenseless. Her mind is working through it all frantically, even as she knows Charlie must think she’s hesitating – she could probably brain him with the lamp if she reached for it now, but there’s no guarantee he wouldn’t throw her on the ground first, wouldn’t bash her brains out all over the hardwood floor.

All this passes through her mind. Which means it’s most likely on his.

“Are you going to kill me?”

His hand traces her throat, gently. With consideration.

“No, India, I’m not going to kill you.”

Charlie lowers his head and kisses the hollow of her collarbone, the upper slope of her barely sloping breast. Has he touched Evelyn there? Have they been together, have they really only danced? His hand brushes spider-light up her thigh, against her hem.

“Show me what you do when you touch yourself,” he says when he’s facing her again, with frank calm. She hitches up her nightgown and takes his hand instead, fits it against her clit, where he’s already been – his eyebrows raise a little at the undeniable wet heat. She’s dimly aware that he has an erection, even as she’s working it free and he’s murmuring her name with mild surprise; her own desire is a flame stirring in her, burning away like a greedy traitor at the apex of her thighs. She has no expert notions of what to do with an erect cock, sticky in her hand, but he’s soon working out what to do with her, forcing a single desperate little sound out of her that makes her arch against him and press her face into his shoulder to stifle it.

“You’re familiar with the idea, of course. Don’t just put it in me.” The echo of childish language makes her brow furrow. She drives the thought away.

India lies back against the pillow and guides him inside of her; her own body looks stark and white in the light from the window, interrupted by an abrupt patch of dark hair, but she won’t look at his, except through half-closed eyes. She doesn’t want something in her hand, spilling against her; he needs to be inside of her. There’s a twinge of pain as he penetrates her, just the head at first, and she braces against it – then more pain, worse for not being drenched in exhilaration and surprise.

Well done, Whip, she thinks in a stomach-churning moment of internal humor. It does hurt. It’s going to hurt every time. Pity it won’t hurt him, too, it’d be something to remember the occasion by.

Charlie pulls out of her again, carefully, so slowly, and slips back in.

He’s bracing on top of her, almost careful not to press her in place or leave too much of his weight on her, but there’s nothing gentle about his thrusts once he’s found his way around her body. It’s not a fight or an invasion, but flesh pressing into flesh, too much. Having experienced everything but this, she likes it much more – after the pain the two of them are working together, harmonious and perfect, his ragged breathing an encouragement that sends spasms through her. She’s dimly aware that he’s kissing her upturned face, but India’s eyes are closed, her arms are thrown around his neck and she digs in for purchase with brutally short fingernails. This is serious work. They don’t talk to each other; Charlie’s only sounds are grim exertion, and India’s determined not to moan, or scream, or cry.

When she comes, rare little whimpers are coming out of her mouth, like aftershocks; in the moment when she returns to her body again and opens her eyes Charlie is shushing her. His thumb is pressed to her parted lips; India bites it.