Page 4 of Demonic Delights

“There’s no prettier sight than your body falling apart underneath my touch,” I recall him saying, and my throat constricts at the memory. “Always so readily, so voraciously. The way you react to me, Roxana ... sometimes I think I was put on this Earth to ruin you.”

The inherent issue with marrying and settling down young is that it feels like the other person has been your whole life. Because, really, he has! And if things don’t work out, there’s nothing to go back to. The fact that I’ve no income to speak of and no work experience makes it as good as impossible to leave unless I’m willing to move back in with my mother in Romania. And I’d rather go and take a nap on railroad tracks than ever do that.

“That’s right, beautiful,” my vision fuses with my imagination and croons, cruelly this time, like he’s relishing my anguish. “You can never leave me, can you? There is absolutely nowhere for you to go.”

Whimpers roll from my lips, and I throw my head back, because stern Silas, Silas the tormentor, oh he never fails to tap into the darkest part of my soul and push me into a freefall.

Heat explodes deep within me, and a single tear rolls down my cheek as I ride out my orgasm, my release quaking through my body in ripples before dying out all too soon.

I pull the vibrator out and switch it off, but I stay crouched in the tub for a while longer, listening to a song without hearing any of its lyrics.

I can tell myself over and over that I feel stuck and imprisoned. But the truth is that what keeps me here is knowing that by separating from Silas, I would also be inevitably separated from the fantasy of him I had all those years ago, and that was the most powerful thing I’ve ever experienced. I’m not going to feel that way ever again. I’m no longer young and naive enough to feel things so strongly. I’ve hardened and darkened too much. And so I’m unwilling to let go of that, even as the man it’s tied to is dragging me down what feels like a bottomless pit.

Because to me, he is like a poison with an addictive taste.

And I can never get enough.

While Silas showers, I go to the kitchen to start preparing our dinner. I run my fingers along the butcher-block counter as I walk towards the tall white pantry cupboard right by the archway separating the kitchen from the antechamber. It is Sunday, and so I was planning to make roast beef as usual. But as I open the fridge, my eyes immediately land on the wrapped sirloin cut. I recall the loud splat with which it landed on the wrapper as the butcher slapped it down, and suddenly I don’t feel like making that at all.

I take a packet of spaghetti and two jars of ready-made tomato sauce from the pantry. Silas won’t be pleased, but who cares? He’s already in a foul mood anyway. I fill a pan with water, add some salt and olive oil, and wait for it to boil.

And I don’t know what it is about waiting for the first bubbles to appear that always makes me take stock of my life. There’s no reason why watching that still, oil-stained water surface should be conducive to an existential crisis, but I find that it often is.

And it usually takes me back to when Silas and I first met. To when we first began seeing each other ten years ago, when I first arrived at Thornedale University as a dewy-eyed freshman on a scholarship.

He did have a reputation. I am pretty sure that despite his good looks, most of the other girls distanced themselves from him the minute he tried to get close to them. For reasons that would likely take years of therapy to understand, I alone saw him as a conquest, determined to become the one who would be more than just a rumour, more than just a fling. And where I lacked experience, I more than made up for with enthusiasm. Not a month after meeting him, I was stuffing my mouth with his balls, rolling them gently around my mouth with my tongue. Tracing my tongue over his perineum and around the puckered starfish of his asshole and wondering at the same time why I wasn’t the least bit disgusted with it. In retrospect, it is horrifying how quickly I went from being almost a virgin to eating out the ass of a man who was only five years younger than my father. It always reminds me that I used to be ambitious. A long time ago.

And as much as I would like to consider myself the rebellious kind, the sad truth is that my mother being completely crazy about Silas for sure helped his cause. To her, he may as well have been a lord, this ‘English gentleman’ with ‘all his degrees and his prestigious job’. No matter his age or the controversial nature of our relationship, he was my gateway to the Western world. Our ancestors burned at the stake in Transylvania for fraternising with evil forces, and yet her daughter snagged an upper-class Englishman! When Brexit went down, she encouraged me to plant the idea in his head that we should marry so that I would secure an indefinite leave to stay in the country. And like the good, obedient fucking daughter, I did. Same as more recently, I succumbed to the pressure she’s been putting on me for years; the pressure to carry and birth my ‘insurance’, tying Silas to me with genes and blood just in case a ring wasn’t enough. I hate that she has a point.

You don’t expect to become the ageing, unattractive wife at twenty-nine. Especially not when you marry a man sixteen years your senior. But looking back, I should have expected exactly that and nothing else. How short-sighted we are when very young! A thrill-seeking nineteen-year-old has no compassion for her twenty-nine-year-old self. Because the ten years separating them seem like an eternity, an uncrossable barrier, its opposite side so distant it may as well not exist. That nineteen-year-old will not think twice before sacrificing the twenty-nine-year-old’s soul for momentary pleasures.

And then, ten years pass by in a heartbeat.

I’ve become so stagnant. I am like a hollow log, rolling inertly in a pool of mud, no more able to sink than to reach firm ground.

Years stretch out in front of me, twice as many as I’ve already had and more. Thinking on them, I feel the same kind of dread as when looking up at a night sky, the crushing endlessness of the cosmos. The same fear I was also plagued with on our honeymoon Caribbean cruise when all land would disappear from view and there would be nothing but sea all around us, the water vast and the horizon unreachable.

Sometimes I found it comforting to remember that there are people who die young, like in accidents. In my darkest moments, I used to think there was no reason why I couldn’t be one of those people who pass away at forty, thirty ...

But then, lately, I recoil from all such thoughts when I remember what happened on November 30. I remember the blood pooling on the white bathroom tiles, its sharp tang in the air. The taste of the cigarette in my mouth, the burn of that first inhale searing my lungs, the tingling in my fingertips from that first rush of nicotine. Andrew Wilson’s unnaturally dark eyes.

I’d told the police officer that his irises were rimmed with dark red, and that made them look dilated.

“You mean his pupils were dilated?” he corrected me. “In English, pupil is the dark thing in the middle, iris is the coloured ring that surrounds it.”

“No, I meant irises, not pupils,” I assured him. “I’ve lived in this country for ten years. I am a citizen. I speak the language. I know the difference between pupils and irises.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense.”

“No,” I agreed. “It doesn’t. But it is what I saw.”

The now boiling water bubbles and sputters as it overflows from the pan, spilling over the hob and onto the floor. I curse, bending over with a kitchen towel in my hand to mop it up.

“Need a hand?” Silas emerges from upstairs, walking around me from behind, trailing the cedarwood scent of his shampoo with him.

In the past, he would not have walked past me in this position without slapping my rear at least, if not pulling my trousers down to take me there and then. A shiver runs up my back expectantly, but he doesn’t touch me.

“Spaghetti? On a Sunday?” he asks, his forehead wrinkling with disdain as I toss the soaked towel into the sink.