Cucked Raw: The Bull's Property

I wake on the floor beside the bed.

The carpet is rough under my cheek, and the room is still dark, and for one second I don't know where I am. Then the ache in my back tells me, and the cold tells me, and I remember. I've been sleeping here for three months.

Above me, the bed creaks as someone shifts. I hear her breathing, slow and deep, and under it his, lower, heavier. The two of them, in the bed that used to be ours. I lie on the floor and listen to them breathe and I don't move, because moving would mean admitting I'm awake, and I'm not ready to be awake.

The key is around my neck. I feel it before I touch it — the cord, the small cold weight of it against my chest. The key to my own cage. I wear it like a dog wears a tag. I reach up and close my hand around it, and the metal warms in my palm, and I think about the fact that I could use it. I could unlock myself. I never do.

My alarm is set for six. It always is. I'll get up and make the coffee, the way I always do, and I'll pour it for them, and I'll be useful, because that's the thing I know how to be. That's the thing I've always known how to be.

The floor is cold. I'm hard inside the cage, and it hurts, and that's the first thing I feel every morning now — the wanting, trapped, before I've even opened my eyes.

Ava sits up in bed, and the first thing I see is the collar.

It's black leather, wide, with a steel ring at the front, and it sits against her throat the way it's sat for three months. She touches it when she wakes — two fingers, the same gesture she used to make at her own bare throat when she was thinking. Only now there's leather under her fingers, and a ring, and she doesn't have to think about it anymore. It's just there.

Cole's hand comes up behind her and settles on the back of her neck, his palm over the collar, and she leans into it. The gesture is the same one I've watched a hundred times — his hand on her neck, the way you'd hold a dog that's about to jump — but now there's leather between his skin and hers, and somehow that makes it worse, or better, or both.

I catalog the collar the way I catalog everything. Black leather. A steel ring. No lock. That's the detail my mind snags on — there's no lock on it. She could take it off. She could take it off at any moment, and she never does. The collar isn't his control over her. It's hers, chosen, worn like a wedding ring.

And around my neck, on a cord, the key to my cage. One of us is locked and one of us is free, and I'm the one with the key.

I reach up and touch the key, and I don't know what I'm reaching for.

The house is his now, and you can see it in every room.

His boots by the front door, heavy and scuffed, where mine used to sit. His tools in the hall closet, a canvas bag with a contractor's smell of sawdust and metal. His jacket on the hook that used to hold mine. The house has rearranged itself around him the way a body rearranges itself around a new organ.

I notice these things the way I notice everything — one at a time, cataloguing, because cataloguing is easier than feeling. The boots. The tools. The jacket. The way the kitchen table sits a few inches off the wall now, because he moved it when he fixed the sink and neither of us moved it back.

Ava doesn't see any of it anymore. That's the part that gets me. She moves through the house as if it's always been his, as if the five years before him were a draft that's been written over. She touches his things the way she used to touch mine — absently, possessively, without thinking.

I stand in the hallway in the morning quiet and I look at his boots next to the door, and I understand that I'm the only thing in the house that hasn't been replaced yet.

I make the coffee the way I've made it for five years, and I pour it the way I've poured it for three months.

Ava sits at the kitchen table in one of Cole's shirts — an old flannel, too big on her, the sleeves rolled — and the collar is still around her throat, and her legs are bare, and she looks like a woman who has nowhere to be and no one to be for. Cole sits across from her with his hand on her bare thigh, unhurried, the way you'd rest your hand on a table.

I set the cups down. Cole takes the first one without looking at me. I get what's left in the pot.

"The rules haven't changed," Cole says. It's not addressed to anyone in particular. It's just a fact, stated the way you'd state the weather. "She's free use. Any time. Any way. This is my house now. You understand."

I nod. I pour the rest of the coffee. "I understand."

The word comes out of me the way it always does — flat, willing, ready to be useful. I set the pot down and I stand there with my hands at my sides, and neither of them looks at me, and the morning moves on around me like I'm a piece of the kitchen that happens to be standing up.

Ava reaches for her cup and the shirt rides up her thigh, and I see the edge of the writing there, the dark ink on her skin, and my stomach does the thing it always does now — drops and tightens at the same time.

It ...