Free Fifty Shades of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde Page A

“A nice roaring fire and your splendid form above it! If perhaps your valet would assist, we could hang it up and see what it is like!”
    Dorian stepped into the dining room. He walked toward her slowly, with a heaviness quite contrary to his typically light and boyish gait. A strange darkness still hung over his face. Rosemary went on chattering about light, and frames, and wall space. But all she could think about was his nearness. He came to stand right beside her. His scent was sweet and musky—intoxicating. In her dreams, she breathed it in and was wondrously infused with life.
    â€œWhy did you come today?” asked Dorian, turning to her darkly.
    Rosemary felt herself turning beet-red. Was she so transparent? Well , look at yourself , she thought, frowning at her tattered smock. And your frantic entrance! Ha! You flung yourself in looking about ready to lie down on railroad tracks .
    â€œI came to give you the painting, Dorian,” she said. “I came because I can’t have it in my studio for a moment longer. I can’t have it anywhere near me.”
    Dorian remained perfectly calm. Oh, he was always so wonderfully calm! It helped her articulate her crazed thoughts.
    â€œDorian, from the moment I met you, your personality has had the most extraordinary influence over me,” she said, nodding. Yes, she must keep going. It was time to tell the truth. Let the world lie to me , she thought, but I shan’t lie in return .
    â€œI was dominated—soul, brain, and power—by you. You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream. I worshipped you. I grew jealous of everyone to whom you spoke. Helen, oh, Helen! I shall never forgive her for stealing you from me, but that is another matter. I wanted to have you all to myself. That has been my only want since I laid eyes upon you. I am only happy when I am with you. When you are away from me, I live in unbearable desire. These dreams of you—of things you do to me, err, things we do together— they possess my life both waking and not. Of course, I never let you know anything about this because I hardly understood it myself. I only knew that I had seen perfection face-to-face, and that the world had become wonderful to my eyes—too wonderful, perhaps, for in such mad worships there is peril, the peril of losing. . . . Weeks and weeks passed, and I grew more and more absorbed in you. For so long I have been hiding from what I know, but there is no point in hiding from it any longer.”
    In a leap of bravery, she grabbed his hands, clutching them to her heart. Unable to yet look in his eyes for fear of the rejection that could be dwelling there, she kept her focus on his hands, imagined them tearing through her chemise as they did in her dreams.
    â€œPerhaps Helen is right!” she cried. “It is a far greater sin to deny our nature than to let it be free!”
    â€œThat Helen,” he said, with a cruel ripple of laughter. “Helen spends her days in saying what is incredible and her evenings in doing what is improbable.”
    â€œYou’re starting to sound like her,” said Rosemary. She regretted bringing Helen up. Already she felt stifled, choked, as if Helen were standing behind Dorian, making mocking faces at her.
    â€œI talked to Helen about my infatuation with you, Dorian, and she just laughed at me. I didn’t mind it then, so accustomed was I to her taunting me, but after she took you from me, I realized that, no, I won’t be the meek mouse in this while she stalks you like a cat. I don’t know what you’ve done together, but looking at you now, so alienated and despondent, I know it can’t have been good. Oh, as if anything Helen does is good! She strives for the very opposite!”
    She was nearing hysterics again. Why must she fixate on Helen? Here she was holding her beloved’s hands—and he