Chapter 25 25

She was finally able to control herself again.Ridiculously enough, she did it by reciting Nora Calligan's Little Prayer. "One is the feet," she said.Her dry voice echoed in the empty room, "Ten little toes, cute little piggies, all in a row. The second is the legs, beautiful and long. The third is sex, and everything is wrong there." .” She kept counting down, recited the couplets she could remember, and skipped over the ones she couldn't remember. Keeping her eyes shut, she went through the whole paragraph five or six times and realized that her heartbeat had calmed down.Once again the worst fears faded away.But she was not soberly aware that she had made a significant change in at least one of Nora's babbling little couplets.

After repeating the sixth pass, she opened her eyes and looked at the room like a woman who just woke up from a peaceful midday sleep. However, she avoided the corner of the dressing table. She didn't want to look at the earring again, and she certainly didn't want to look at the footprints. Jesse, listen, please listen to me. She closed her eyes and found that she could actually see the part of herself she later called Mrs. Burlingame.The lady was still wearing the shackles, and now she held her head up—the movement of the wooden yoke was cruelly pressed against the back of her neck, and the movement would not be very comfortable.Her hair brushed away from her face in an instant, and Jessie was surprised to see that it wasn't the wife, but a little girl.

Ouch, but she's still me.Jesse thought, almost laughing.If that wasn't an example of comic-book psychology, she didn't know what was. She had been thinking about Nora just now, and one of Nora's favorite things to babble about was how people cared about their "inner child."Nora claims that the most common cause of unhappiness is not being able to feed and care for that inner child. Jessie nodded solemnly to all this, while maintaining his conviction that the idea was largely a sentimental catchphrase of a new age of liberal fraternity. Even though she thought Nora had caught too many colored beads of love and peace from the late '60s and early '70s, she liked her after all.Now that she clearly saw what Nora called her "inner child," it seemed perfectly normal.The concept seemed even somewhat symbolically correct, Jesse thought.In this situation, the wooden flail is a very appropriate image, isn't it?The person who wears the shackles is the future wife, the future Ruth, the future Jesse.She was the little girl Papa called Baby.

"Speak, then," Jessie said, her eyes still closed.Tension, hunger, and thirst are intertwined, making the image of the girl in shackles very real.Now she could see a faux vellum note on the girl's head that said "Sexual Seduction".Of course, the words were written with Peppermint Dew lipstick. Her imagination didn't stop there.Beside the baby is another pair of wooden shackles, another girl is wearing it.The girl was maybe seventeen years old, plump, with pimples on her skin.Behind the two prisoners appeared a communal grazing land.After a while, Jessie saw some cows grazing in the pasture, and someone was ringing a bell—it sounded like it was on the other side of the mountain—and the bell was monotonous but regular, as if the bell ringer was going to go out all day. Shake it like this...or at least until the cows come home.

You're out of your mind, Jesse.She thought vaguely.She thought it was true, but it didn't matter.Before long, she might count this as one of her blessings.She pushed the thought away and turned her attention back to the girl in the shackles.At this moment, she found that her irritation had been replaced by tenderness and anger.This Jesse Mehert was older than the one who had been molested on the day of the eclipse, but not by much, perhaps twelve, at best fourteen.At her age, there was no reason to stand in chains for any crime committed.But what about sexual temptation?For heaven's sake, sexual temptation?What kind of joke is that!How can people be so cruel?Is it so unreasonable?

What are you trying to tell me?baby? Just want to say it's real.Said the girl wearing the flail.Her face was pale with pain, but her eyes were serious, concerned, and lucid.It's real and you know it.It will be back tonight.I think, this time it will not only look at you, but also do something else.You have to be out of the handcuffs before the sun goes down, Jesse.You must leave this house before it returns. She wanted to cry again, but she had no more tears.Nothing but a dry, sandy sting. I can not do it!she cried.I have tried everything!I can't get out by myself! You forgot one thing, the girl in the chains told her.I don't know if that matters, but it probably does.

What's up? The girl turned her hand in the locked shackle hole, her clean pink palm facing her.He said there were two kinds of handcuffs, remember? M-17 and F-23.I think you almost remembered yesterday.He wanted an F-23.However, this model is not produced in large numbers and is difficult to obtain.So he had to settle for the next best thing and get two M-17s.You do remember, don't you?When he brought the handcuffs home that day, he told you everything. She opened her eyes and looked at the handcuffs on her right wrist.good.He literally told her everything.In fact, he babbled on about it like a drug addict smoking two pipes at a time.It started when he called her from the office one morning.He wondered if the cottage was empty—he could never remember the days when the housekeeper was off, and when she assured him the house was empty, he said he would make her wear something comfortable.He described it as "something I wanted to try almost immediately."She remembered it piqued her curiosity, even on the phone, sounding like Gerald was going to go berserk at any moment.She suspected that he was ingenious again.From her point of view, this is normal.They were about to enter their forties, and if Gerald wanted a little experiment, she would make it easy for him.

He got here at record-breaking speed (she thought, his car must have left a trail of smoke all three miles behind him on the 295th block).What Jesse remembered most clearly that day was how he was scurrying about in his bedroom, his face flushed and his eyes sparkling.Sex wasn't the first thing that came to her mind when she thought of Gerald (on a word association test, perhaps the first word that popped up was safety).However, the words nature and security are almost interchangeable.Of course, in his mind, sex comes first.Jesse believed that if his fine fine-striped trousers were slow to take off, the usually elegant lawyer's penis would undo the zipper of the shorts.

Once he took off his trousers and shorts and threw them away, he began to move with ease.He ceremonially opened the box of Adidas sneakers he had brought upstairs.He pulled out two pairs of handcuffs and held them up for her to examine.The veins in his throat throbbed, a tiny vibration almost as fast as the flapping of a hummingbird's wings.She could remember, even then, how tense he must have been. Gerald, you'd have done me a great favor if you'd been so excited right then and there. She should be terrified to think so unkindly about the man she had spent so much time with.But she found that the emotions she developed were mainly objective self-loathing.When her thoughts returned to his expression that day - those flushed cheeks and shining eyes, her hands were quietly clenched into hard little fists.

"Why can't you make me clean?" she asked him now, "Why do you want to be such a nasty person? So overbearing!" Never mind, stop thinking about Gerald, think about handcuffs.Two pairs of Craig safety handcuffs. M-17 type. The M symbol stands for male and 17 is the number of the notch in the deadbolt. An exhilarating heat surged through her stomach and chest.don't do that.she told herself.If you absolutely feel that way, pretend it's indigestion. However this is impossible.What she felt was hope, there was no denying that.The last thing she can do is balance with reality.She kept reminding herself that her first attempt to free her hand from the cuffs had failed.And yet, as much as she tried to remember the pain and failure of that attempt, she actually found herself thinking how close it was to being out of the handcuffs—so fucking close.She was thinking then that a tenth of an inch would do the trick, and a half inch would definitely do it.Protruding knuckles under the thumb are a problem, yes.But, just because she couldn't bridge a gap no wider than her upper lip, she was going to die on this bed?Of course not.

Jesse snapped those thoughts away, turning his mind back to the day Gerald had come home in handcuffs.To think of how he lifted the handcuffs, with the silent awe of the jeweler displaying the most expensive diamond necklaces, letting them pass through his hands.She herself was deeply moved by the handcuffs, to such an extent.She remembered how they shone, how the sun streaming in through the window shone back on the blue steel plate of the handcuffs and the four curves on the deadbolt, the notches in which the handcuffs were adjusted on the wrist. size. She wondered where he got them—it was pure curiosity, not accusation.But he would only tell her that a clever ghost in the courthouse had helped him.He winked at her vaguely as he said this, as if there were a dozen of these crafty fellows running through the halls and front yards at the Cumberland County building, and he knew them all.In fact, he acted that afternoon as if he had acquired not two sets of handcuffs but a couple of Scud missiles. She has been lying in bed, wearing a white lace romper and matching silk stockings.This outfit will almost certainly always be here.She looked at him with a complicated expression, feeling amused, curious and excited... But, on that day, being funny took advantage, didn't it?Yes, Gerald was always trying so hard to be Mr. Cool, and it certainly amused her to see him loping around the room like a horse in heat.His pubic hair curled wildly into the shape of a corkscrew.Jessie's younger brother used to call the corkscrew a "little dick" as a kid.Gerald was still wearing his Victory black nylon socks.She remembered biting the muscle inside the bill—and biting hard to keep from laughing. That afternoon, Mr. Calm spoke faster than the auctioneer at the bankruptcy auction.Then he stopped suddenly in the midst of his rhetoric, and a look of amusement and wonder crossed his face. "Jerald, what's the matter?" she asked. "I just realized, I don't even know if you want to think about it," he replied, "I've been babbling and talking. I'm just saying you know what it is, as you can clearly see Come out like that. But I never once asked you if you would--" She laughed then.Part of it was that she was so tired of the scarf trick and didn't know how to tell him.But the main reason is to see him excited about sex again, which should really be appreciated.Well, perhaps it's a little quaint to use the idea of ​​handcuffing your wife before "deep sea diving with a long white pole" to arouse your sexual desires.But so what?It's just between the two of you, isn't it?And it's all a joke—it's really nothing more than an X-rated comic opera.Gilbert, Sullivan du Bondage, I'm just a lady in handcuffs in The King's Marine.There are, however, even more eccentric sexual perverts.Freda Soames across the street had told Jesse (after two drinks and half a glass of wine before lunch) that her ex-husband liked to have her powder him.Put on a diaper. She laughed out loud.Gerald looked at her, his head tilted back slightly, a small smile on the left corner of his mouth.Over the past seventeen years, that look had grown familiar to her—it meant either getting angry or laughing with her.Often it is impossible to tell which side he leans on. "Would you like to share?" She didn't answer immediately, but stopped laughing and stared at him.He wanted her expression to be that of the most ferocious Nazi that ever graced the covers of men's adventure magazines.When she felt that she had reached the proper level of icy arrogance, she threw up her arms and uttered seven words so thoughtlessly that Gerald sprang to the bed, looking faint with excitement. "Come here, you rascal." Immediately, he clumsily handcuffed her wrists and tied them to the bedposts, which in the master bedroom of the Portland house had no rails at the headboard.If he had a heart attack there, she could slide the handcuffs right off the top of the bedpost.Panting, he fumbled for the cuffs, one knee resting pleasantly against her beneath him.As he was busy talking, one of the things he told her was about M and F, and the function of the deadbolt.He told her that he had wanted the Type F because women's handcuffs had twenty notches in the tongue instead of seventeen.Most male handcuffs are seventeen.More than four means that the female handcuffs can be stuck smaller.However, they are hard to come by.When a court friend told him he could get him two pairs of men's handcuffs for a very fair price, Gerald jumped at the chance. "Some women can pull their hands straight out of male handcuffs," he told her, "but your bones are pretty big. Also, I don't want to wait. Now... let's see... He snapped the handcuffs around her right wrist.At first he pulled on the deadbolt quickly, but slowed down as he neared the end.He asked her if she felt any pain as the notches were rattled past, and it went well until the last notch.He made her try to pull his hand out, but she couldn't.Most of her wrist slipped out of the handcuffs.True, Gerald told her later, even that shouldn't have happened.But when the handcuffs caught on the back of her hand and the base of her thumb, his comical anxiety faded. "I think they'll work just as well," he said.She remembers that line well, and she remembers his later line even more clearly, "We're going to have a lot of fun using them." The memory of that day came vividly to her cortex, and Jessie pressed down again.She tried somehow to shrink her hands enough to pull them out of the handcuffs.This time, the pain came quickly.The pain didn't start in the hands, but in the overstretched muscles of her shoulders and arms.Jesse squeezed his eyes shut and pressed harder.She tries to shut out the pain. Now her hands join the angry chorus.Once again she was approaching the maximum of her muscular strength, and the handcuffs began to dig into the few fleshy backs of her hands.At this time, the hands began to call.Posterior ligaments, she thought.She tilted her head and grinned, her lips parted in pain, but no saliva flowed out.Posterior ligament, posterior ligament, fucking posterior ligament! nothing happened.Not loose.She began to wonder—strongly doubted—whether there was anything besides the ligaments.There's still bone there, along the periphery of the hand, under the thumb joint, some nasty little bones.Some small bones that probably killed her. Jesse let out a final scream of pain and disappointment, and dropped his hands again.Her shoulders and upper arms trembled from the exertion.The operation of slipping out of the handcuffs is over.Because they are M-17s, not F-23s.The disappointment was almost worse than the physical pain.It pricks like poisonous hemp. "Bah, fuck!" she yelled into the room. "Fucking bastard, fucking bastard, fucking bastard!" Somewhere along the shore of the lake—a little farther today, judging by the sound—the chainsaw began.This made her even angrier that the guy was back yesterday.It's just a stylish dude in a red and black plaid flannel shirt, sycophantic out there pretending to be Hercules Paul Bunyan, letting his chainsaw whine and dreaming of taking his little one with him at the end of the day Crawl into bed - maybe he's dreaming about football or just a few cold drinks in the marina bar.Jessie sees the penis as clearly as she sees the girl in the flails in the checked flannel shirt.If the thought alone had killed him, his head would have exploded out of his asshole at that very moment. "It's not fair!" she cried. "It's not fair—" A dry spasm locked her throat, and her voice was hoarse, and she grimaced, terrified.She felt the bones splinter in her way of escape - oh God, she felt it - but she had almost escaped once.That was the real source of her pain—not the pain, and certainly not the invisible woodcutter with his whining chainsaw.That's knowing she's close to escaping, but can't get any farther enough to escape.She could go on gritting her teeth and taking the pain, but she no longer believed it was doing her any good.The last quarter of an inch taunted her out of her reach.If she keeps pulling, the only thing it can do is cause swelling in the wrist, making the situation worse instead of better. "Don't keep yelling that I'm stuck. Say it." She whispered reproachfully. "I don't want to hear that." You must come out of the handcuffs anyway.The young girl replied softly.Because he—it—was really coming back.tonight.After the sun goes down. "I don't believe it," she said hoarsely. "I don't believe that man is real. I don't care about the footprints and earrings, I just don't believe it." No, you believe it. No, I don't believe it.No. you believe. Jessie tilted her head to one side, her hair almost falling to the mattress, her mouth quivering helplessly. She believes it.