Free Nine & a Half Weeks by Elizabeth McNeill Page A

look at the tightly woven carpet, a rich gray, now only a few inches from my face. “Crawl around,” he says, his voice very low. “Crawl over to the door. Crawl around.” I move my right arm forward, my right knee, my left arm. I think: is it elephants that do this differently? My left knee. I am suspended in a silence that is broken by someone’s muffled conversation in the corridor outside the apartment. A door slams. The cellist on the floor below begins to practice and I concentrate on his characteristic initial outburst with interest. I have always assumed that musicians warm up slowly, like joggers. This one starts out with great verve and volume and gradually winds down over the course of his three-hour run. He is bald and surly, I’ve seen him in the elevator. “I can’t,” I say.
    It seems as if the sound of my voice has made my body crumple. For a second my face is flat against the carpet, which appears flawlessly smooth when seen from a standing height but is less soft to the skin than one might expect. I sit up. The height of these heels prevents me from sitting in the position I suddenly long for: my knees drawn up to my chin, my arms around me.
    “Tell me,” he says, neutrally. “1 feel stupid,” I say. “It makes me feel foolish.” The one lamp at the other end of the room is not bright enough for me to be able to see the expression on his face. He folds his arms behind his head and leans back against the couch cushions. 1 get up, teeter, say, “This rug itches”—under my breath, but as if imparting valuable information—and sit down in the nearest chair. 1 cross my arms over the shirtfronts I have wrapped around me. One of the sleeves has come down and I tug the cuff over my fingers and curl my hand, inside the fabric, into a fist.
    “It’s not as if we haven’t been through all this,” he says, not looking at me. “I hate packing. I hate unpacking even worse. It took me a week to unpack that suitcase of yours, the last time around.” The cello below erupts as if flayed by a madman.
    “What I don’t get is why you can’t keep the idea of being hit in your mind, why it always actually has to be done to you. Before you say to me, no, I don’t want to do that—why you don’t picture me taking off my belt, in your head. Why you don’t remember from one night to the next what it feels like when it comes down on you. We have to fucking negotiate each and every time and in the end you do what I tell you, anyway.”
    “No,” I say, inaudibly first. “No,” I say, “please…” He leans toward me now, pushing hair off his forehead. “It makes me feel like a dog,” I say, “crawling…. I’m scared you’ll make fun of me.”
    “You should feel stupid,” he says. “What a crock of shit. If 1 ever make fun of you I’ll let you know.” I shake my head, mute. Scowling and scrutinizing me closely, he walks toward and past me. I am sitting rigidly at the edge of the chair, my knees pressed together, my forearms tight against my stomach muscles. His hands are on my shoulders. I am pulled back until my shoulder blades touch the upholstery. Then his hand in my hair, massaging my scalp, closing into a fist, drawing slowly back until my face lies horizontal, the top of my head against his cock. He rubs the lower half of my face with the heel of his hand. My mouth soon opens. When I am moaning steadily he leaves the room and comes back with the riding crop. He lays it on the coffee table.
    “Look at it,” he says. “Look at me. In three minutes I can get you so you’ll be in bed for a week.” But I barely hear him. The inadequate, the minuscule, the fiber optics passage I have in my throat instead of a trachea allows me only quicksilver sips of air. My open mouth feels bruised.
    “Crawl,” he says. I’m on hands and knees again. I press my face hard into my right shoulder and feel how the trembling in my chin, instead of being steadied, transmits through bone after bone until my