by p q laertes
She sat beside Jack on the end of the hotel bed and they watched a rerun of the X Files. Scully stared out of the screen and blessed their union while Mulder died screaming. Or so it seemed to Jack, and Sam agreed with him. He told her she was the moon; so she was the moon. No, he told her, she was the sun, and he was the jealous moon, reflecting back her light. Then she was the sun.
Kate and Petruchio in extremis.
Later, when the television was off, Jack began at her feet, which were very pink and slightly shrunken, because she had stayed in the tiled shower stall as long as he would let her, long after the water had gone cold. At first, she kept her eyes squeezed shut, trying to be elsewhere, to be in yellow sunlight, with Chloe on her lap and Angel close and Bailey -- please, please, god -- smiling across at her; but that only made it worse, and Jack's hands kept dragging her back to the here and the now.
The sheets were soft, very smooth where they met her back, but without the slipperiness of silk or satin. Jack's hands were slightly callused; disciplined hands, and his nails were square-cut and uniform. He worked the arches of her feet, first the right and then the left, with deep, well-judged, workmanlike strokes of his thumbs that first felt good, and then woke some coiled, long-quiescent pain, and then soothed until she could no longer feel her feet at all -- they had passed on to some deeper rest, uncoupled from the tension in the rest of her body.
Finally Sam opened her eyes and watched him. He had taken off his shirt, his shoes and socks, and he looked utterly comfortable, satisfied, confident. Profilers don't have the popular illusions about serial killers; she had known all along that when she caught him at last he would be no demon, no vampire, no angel of death.
But how many times had she called Jack brilliant? How often had she said, first to Bailey, then to Grace, then to anyone who would listen, that you had to admire his cunning, his artistry, his style, didn't you, didn't you, didn't you?
And then she finally met Donald, victim of too much Sunday school and too little imagination, and she punched him out and he stayed down.
Jack-of-All-Trades taken out in one punch.
Not this Jack. Jack, after all, gilded and with the eyes of an angel. An angel incognito -- how easily he had hidden himself from her, blinded her by reflecting her own light back into her eyes.
He smiled, luminously, and leaned forward and cupped his hand over her sex. Sam bit her tongue and had a momentary flash of the room from outside herself -- the woman on the bed, the man touching her, the scent of melting wax and rose-scented soap. A universal scene, so easily misinterpreted.
"Shh," Jack whispered, gently. His eyes, in which candle flame was reflected like stars, promised forever.
A woman named Joan Holt had guest-lectured for a week in a class Sam had taken at Quantico. The class had been taught by the excellent Crawford, who could turn almost anybody into a decent profiler, given time. Joan Holt was one of Crawford's sources; she'd lectured on lunar cycles, numerology, astrology, color symbolism. Unlike Crawford, she was not one for quotable phrases and pithy homilies, but she had said one thing that Sam kept in mind long after she had forgotten that "an agent with a good source is an agent of real force."
"Most people struggle with the terrible questions of life, " Holt had said, "and learn to accept the ambiguity or nonexistence of their answers. Sociopaths suffer from a certain failure of imagination that allows them to believe these questions have simple answers. Further, since death is also terrible, they look for these answers in the vicinity of death."
Now, lying on a hotel bed, the soft mouth of a sociopath tracing ornate and arcane symbols over her skin, Sam remembered sensible, sturdy Joan Holt and her terrible questions.
Why do we die?
Where does the soul live?
What is evil?
Ask Sam Waters, and she would have told you that evil is the plodding procrastination that keeps you from your true vocation, the heavy block on your heart that kills a forgiveness even as you mean to give it, the grey dull shadow that lets you wait until tomorrow to tell someone you love them. Evil is the failure of imagination.
And where does evil come from?
Not a Freudian death wish. Not kundalini blocked at some lower chakra. No hungry demons. No Satan, leading into temptation. The answer is ambiguous, or nonexistent.
She'd visited Donald Lucas at the prison. Scenes from Silence of the Lambs, but with no one in the Hannibal Lechter part. Donald behind glass was as prosaic as Donald in his kitchen.
Serial killers eat beans out of cans and take Metamucil. They are ordinary, dull, uninspired.
But -- "Ohh, Samantha." -- here over her skin moved another kind of evil, clean, sharp-edged; no failure of imagination, but its triumph. And the source of it, gold and pale, like a star of morning: certainly she has found him in the vicinity of death.
He took her left nipple in his mouth, worshipfully, and Samantha cried out, loud and ragged, at the sticky hot touch of his tongue.
She hated him, and he loved her, and these two things, which were the same thing, burst into one another and were annihilated, leaving behind only a bright spark and the death-scent of red roses. And Jack was at her breasts, and she could feel his teeth there, and understood that he held death within him, as a drowning man might hold breath, and that she held life in her, as she had once held Chloe inside her belly, and that these things also were the same, and would come together finally in a spark and the smell of roses.
Jack leaned over her, hand easing the terrycloth of the hotel robe back to leave her hips bare. Before she knew she was going to do it, Sam brought her knees up, curling onto her side, and kicked him off the bed with both feet. Victory screaming through her, she rolled the other way, off the other side of the bed, and ran for the door. When his hand caught her robe, she left it behind. Stark naked, she pulled the lock to the side, hauled on the knob.
Jack grabbed her, spinning her back into the middle of the room and falling onto her, even now catching himself on his knees and getting a hand behind her head so that, despite his momentum, she didn't hurt herself when they landed.
"No," Sam whimpered.
"Samantha. Samantha," His hands were clamped cruelly tight around her wrists now, while he brushed his mouth, his blunt nose, gently over and over her face, her throat. Candlelight made his face half waveringly bright, half dark. He looked like nothing real.
"There. There. Now we can begin again, my Samantha. You aren't hurt, are you?"
"I think you broke my ribs," Sam whimpered.
"No, don't lie. You're stronger than that, so much stronger."
His hold had eased, just slightly, and Sam twisted over quickly and launched herself across the floor, towards the door again. Jack landed heavily on her and hauled her back, one arm around her, across her hips, the other clamped onto her arm. Hotel rug against her cheek, Sam lay panting in defeat.
The arm under her shifted a little and his hand, trapped between her pelvis and the ground, slipped between her thighs. Bending at the hips to draw away from him only pressed her into the curve of his body, where the hot lump of his erection fit neatly into the groove between her buttocks.
Jack let go her wrist to stroke aside her hair and gently, almost diffidently, laid his cheek on her bare shoulder as he began to move his other hand beneath her. A shock of holism stunned Sam and she saw that within them they carried the whole spectrum of a death, her hands guiding his across the throat, his tracing the Y-incision for her.
Jack's fingers were relaxed at first, curved gently, as if only to cup her, but she kept shifting, lest any stillness be mistaken for acquiescence, and his fingers slipped, the side of his index finger sliding against her clitoris, and suddenly his hand was drenched, the tops of her thighs were drenched, and Jack moaned softly, and moved his fingers, moved deliberately and with neither friction nor resistance, into her.
Sam made a breathless gasping sound and jerked her hips back, firmly into Jack's body, and his hand moved, very gently, out of her -- sliding upward and pressing her clitoris lightly into her pubic bone -- and in again.
"Oh Samantha," Jack whispered, sounding awed.
Sam felt hot tears slip over her cheeks, and her hips began to rock minutely. On the fourth or fifth instroke she made a thin sound in her throat and started to shake.
Jack eased his hand up and began a gentle, delicate motion. Sam was so wet that the contact was almost frictionless. Her mouth fell open and she experienced a sudden rush of heat, a split-second onset of fever, followed by a chill, and then heat again. She sobbed into the nap of the carpet.
She was so tensed that it took her a moment to register that the touch, which had been almost nothing, was now nothing at all. And then Jack's warmth against her back moved away. Hair hanging around her face, Sam had to wait a moment before she dared to push herself up on her hands and knees and look at Jack.
He was taking off his pants, his boxer shorts. As his hands moved, she saw the shine on his
fingers, still damp from her. Naked, he smiled at her, all of him luminous at her proximity, all of
him creamy and gilded. As she looked over her shoulder at him, thighs trembling, he stroked her
backside gently. "Come to bed, Samantha," he said.
Why do we die?
Where does the soul live?
What is evil?
And where does evil come from?
We relieve the boredom of god, Sam thought, there was nothing, and then, suddenly, there is Samantha and so there must be Jack, and then we meet, and there's nothing again.
Jack had slid into her as if he had always known the way, and once he was all the way in, he had looked down into her face and sighed, a sound of total joy, and Sam had seen that he was crying.
Now she tipped her hips just slightly, and with the change in angle his beautiful eyes went wide and then squeezed shut for a half second while he breathed hard, tensing. She touched his lips with her fingers and his eyes opened again. She could rake him with her fingernails, she knew, she could rip his eyes out. She saw in his face that he knew this too.
But Jack was back in control, moving on her with considered strokes, one hand between them to rub lightly at her while he braced himself on the other. When the tipping of her hips had taken a regular rhythm, he sped up slightly. Perspiration on his forehead sparkled in the candlelight.
Jack's hand slipped away from her to brace himself more fully and now he was lifting her off the mattress every few strokes. At the deepest point, she felt her heart heave up into her throat, the fullness of him inside her pushing out all the irrelevancies.
I belong to him. That was all that mattered. His angel face was fixed on hers with total concentration, stray tears still streaking his cheeks.
Just as before, the pleasure throughout her body revealed itself suddenly as only another face of a sleeping pain, a pain that had lived silently inside her for years, forever. Sam cried out with the despair, the emptiness of it.
"Samantha?" Jack whispered, his movements faltering. He looked at her as if his heart had torn.
Sam pulled at him, watched his face as he moved, and felt something dissolving, broken up, pushed out of her.
Jack buried his face at her shoulder and made an abandoned sound, which sounded as much like pain as like pleasure, as much like the prey caught as the hunter triumphant. And she had hunted him, she had never found anything in her life she had wanted to do so much, never anything that spoke inside her the way he did -- he had become her life's work. Her life.
"Samantha?" Jack whispered again.
The pain dissolved, along with something else, something that had once been precious to her. Samantha looked into Jack's face and moved her hips to meet his. "Jack," she whispered. He moved more quickly, driving into her. "Jack!"
He belongs to me.
Her body twisted, arched, and a roiling wave smashed over her, uncoupling her finally, irrevocably, from the old tension. Her skin flared with pleasure and she threw her arms around Jack, shuddering and clinging to him.
Samantha felt abruptly like a child, or like a mother with a newborn, serenely aware of the infinity of possibilities, and also serenely unconcerned with them. Jack's teeth pressed her skin, like death, like fear, and eased away again, and Samantha felt their union flash through her, saw them as a doorway god with two faces and one joined body.
Jack's eyes went wide, suddenly, and his head snapped back as his hips jerked twice and then stilled. She felt him throb inside her, and he seemed to stay frozen there for minutes, arms locked, body stiff, emptying all he had into her. Then finally his head dropped forward, sweat dripping from his brow, hair damp and mussed. He sobbed softly and she saw his forearms tremble for a moment before he dropped bonelessly onto her.
Jack shuddered and sighed, and kissed her. Samantha fell, limp, with him into their mutual annihilation, and began to drift off, her mind a mire of sticky shadows.
When we wake up, she thought, I'll put on his skin and Jack will put on mine, and he'll go back to the VCTF and I'll kill for him, I'll kill and kill again. I'll kill.
"A Contrecoeur" 1999 by p q laertes
pqlaertes yahoo com
The Fake Book
For Robin Nance, Skewed Goddess.
Profiler created by Cynthia Saunders.