Love Is A Battlefield

It’s Valentine’s Day, and so I thought that I’d mark the occasion with a short piece of fiction with a somewhat romantic bent, emphasis on bent.

(And my sincere apologies to anyone who read the post’s title and thought they’d get a Pat Benatar video – maybe some other time.)

This was published somewhere, but I can’t remember the gory details and aren’t fussed enough to get up and check my records.

Enjoy.

LOVE, AND WHAT IT MEANS

 

            Amanda cried after they slept together for the first time. She didn’t mean to but she couldn’t prevent herself, the emotion was so overpowering, and he held her tight, on his face a look of such concern.

            ‘What is it? What’s the matter?’

            She shook her head, wiped her eyes with the back of a hand.

            ‘After all I went through with Geoff I thought I’d never enjoy making love again.’

            ‘What…?’ He stopped, unwilling to ask about things that had happened in her marriage, territory she had always made clear to him was strictly off limits, but the question hovered there in the room like a dark cloud. She saw that he needed to know and if she didn’t speak now it would always lie between them. Better then to get everything out in the open and exorcise its hold over her.

            And so she told him all about the whips and the handcuffs and the knotted silk scarves, about the golden showers and the anal sex and the beatings, all the things that had been done to her and left an imprint on her mind, scars that would take years to heal.

            He listened patiently, incredulity and disgust on his face, but when she had done Amanda looked into his eyes and saw there a sick fascination that was new and yet, somehow, familiar.

            ‘How could you let him treat you like that?’ he asked, unable to keep the note of condemnation out of his voice.

            ‘I loved him,’ she said, and knew that he wouldn’t understand.

            He touched his lips to her forehead, the most tender of kisses, but he would not meet her eyes and there was a catch in his voice when finally, as she had known that he would, he asked her, ‘Do you love me?’