The Heart of Darkness

“…the heavy, mute spell…that seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast by the awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts, by the memory of gratified and monstrous passions.”

Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness

“You make it easy for me to wake up wanting to rape you,” he said.  All I’d done was get up to use the bathroom, then crawled back into bed and curled my back against him. He’d drawn me tightly in to his body…then tighter still, throwing a heavy leg over both of mine, then an arm across my shoulders, closing a hand around my wrist.
You may recall that I don’t like being pinned, but I schooled myself to lay quietly, trying not to let my panic telegraph itself to him.
I swear that man can sense my fear like a hound scenting a rabbit, and just like the hound, his blood rises to it.
He tightened his grip, pressing his weight into me, pinning me further beneath him, to the mattress.  My heart raced. I couldn’t hold still any longer, but when I struggled, minutely, trying to loosen his grip without fully waking him, he clamped down harder.
And then he was on top of me, holding both wrists, kneeing my thighs apart, thrusting blindly into me. And my body, god, my body opened to him of its own volition, it doesn’t listen to my brain, it betrays me, it gets wet, it pulls at him, sucks him inside me, even while my head is saying otherwise.  His hands were hard on my wrists, his weight crushing me. I gulped air, struggled in earnest.  And felt the rising heat of my excitement that the struggle induced.
The first slap, coming so unexpectedly out of the darkness, shocked me to stillness.
Hands are an amazing tool. He does not often simply hit me, with his hands. Hard, thick hands and fingers, though he uses them to pry me open, though he spreads me and pinches me and grabs me with them, he doesn’t often use them as bludgeons. He slapped me, my face, my breasts, my thighs…each one a shock, each one a betrayal, somehow, of the intimacy of his bedroom, of the darkness that cloaked us. Somehow, it was all the more shocking because he did it in the dark, in our bed.
And all the while he fucked me, deep, long thrusts, opening me, my body responding while my head reeled, while I fought demon images of my own.
At some point he tied my hands above my head.  And then one leg. He stopped slapping me, but the sting remained, there, in my mind. The sting and the shock.  And incredibly it continued to fuel me as he pushed into me, fuel me to a ferocious kind of desire until I was thrusting and pushing back at him, devouring his body with mine, the pain in my wrists and my ankle be damned.  I was devoured and devourer, I was taken by the darkness and I was the darkness itself.
Later, lying in his arms, the darkness once again a thing of comfort embracing us, he used a length of rope as a gag and then laid my head back down on his chest, and I felt an obscure kind of comfort in that, in the enforced silence, as I made peace with my own heart of darkness.