Rose slept on the mattress on the floor where she had slumbered so happily with The Beast the night before. In the morning, The Beast brought her breakfast as always, but she rolled to face away from him and refused to speak until he set down his tray and left her alone. When she was sure he had left the house, she went downstairs and gathered supplies for herself. She took bread and fruit from the pantry and visited the library, where she found as book that presented itself as an autobiography of someone calling themselves Moll Flanders. Tomorrow she would worry about the future. Today her only concern was to mourn what could have been. ***********ing a bedroom at random, she threw herself onto the bed, flipped open the book, bit into an apple and began to read.
The book was entertaining enough, although Rose was exasperated to find that once again the protagonist’s ethical journey was a central theme. Once she got over her initial vexation at choosing yet another morality tale – she was beginning to doubt that modern authors other than Austen actually knew it was possible to just write a good story – she found the work quite agreeable. Rose was pleased to discover that the protagonist’s journey involved a great deal of fucking, although she was frustrated that none of it was described. Moll careened from husband to husband, always looking for an angle, always dallying with penitence before being forced by circumstance to revert to type. Whoever the real author was, they had pulled a clever trick by making the characters other than Moll shallow and nameless. It conveyed Moll’s self-obsession and vanity while also focusing the narrative on her character development.
As the day waned, Rose read the last pages of the book. Predictably, Moll repented her greedy and criminal ways to find happiness with her true love, her ‘Lancashire husband’. The moral of the story was not lost on Rose – Moll, like Betsy Thoughtless, found love after a long trial and finally overcame the flaws that had undermined her. Yet it also struck Rose that both stories involved a true love who was lost, only to be recovered after suffering the attentions of inappropriate and unpleasant men. She could not imagine that her own true love was anyone other than The Beast. Was it really necessary for her to leave him, only to inevitably return? In that moment, she decided that it was not. She knew very well what she wanted, what was good for her and whom she loved. The challenge she faced was assuaging his fears.
At peace with her decision, she slept.
***
Rose was still ignoring The Beast, and he didn’t know what to do. He’s not been able to find her in the morning; she hadn’t slept in her room, which he supposed was fair enough given that the bed was in ruins. He saw her leaving the library when he came back from the garden, but she walked by him without acknowledging his presence.
“Rose,” he said, following her. “Rose, talk to me.”
“I don’t have to obey you anymore,” she said without turning or slowing her pace. “You’ve given up your right to command me.”
“Please Rose. At least join me for dinner.”
“Very well,” she said. “You can stop following me now.”
Standing on the landing, he watched her disappear around the corner.
The Beast spent the afternoon lavishing attention on dinner for the evening: woodpigeon breasts followed by nutmeg-spiced syllabub – Rose’s favourites. He did not doubt that it would do little to assuage her anger, but even a little was better than nothing, and it made him happy to do something nice for her in any case. How was it that doing the right thing had made him feel guiltier than when he had surrendered to his base passions? There was no logic to the way his mind worked.
As seven o’clock approached, he carefully arranged dinner on the table ready for Rose. After some deliberation, he also opened a bottle of wine to breathe. If a little alcohol made her shout at him, it was probably for the best. He’d rather have her condemnation than her silence. He sat on the reinforced trunk that served as his chair. Rose appeared in the doorway precisely as the clock in the hall chimed. Blank-faced, she made her way to her usual chair and sat down, nodding to him in terse acknowledgement. Without a word, she picked up her knife and fork and began to eat. She did not rush, but rather approached the meal with mechanical efficiency.
Even without her prickly demeanour, she was stunning to look at. The soft curves of face, her dark, elegantly tangled hair, the subtle movement of her neck when she swallowed, her slim shoulders and pale sculpted collarbones, her tiny breasts… Rose looked up from her food and directly into The Beasts eyes. He was staring and, judging by the challenging look she gave him, she knew it. Ashamed of himself, The Beast looked down and turned his attention to his own meal.
He had to find some way to talk to her. “Wine?” he asked, picking up the bottle.
“Yes please,” she replied. He poured them a glass each. Rose sniffed the bouquet as he had taught her to do and took a demure sip. They continued to eat in silence.
As The Beast ate, his mind drifted back to her body. Having been caught staring, he was afraid to look at her, but her sheer presence was making him vibrate like a tuning fork. He could hear the gentle clink of her knife on her plate and her slow controlled breathing. Her delicate natural scent curled in his sensitive nostrils, floral like her namesake, yet human at the same time – sweat and soap and sweetness. He imagined pushing over her chair and raping her on the floor. No warning or ceremony, no punishment or build-up, just a sudden violent fucking. He would terrorise her with his claws and teeth, maul her breasts, choke her and beat her while he stuffed his cock deep into her tight little hole. Would she welcome it? Would she be happy when he was done with her and left her lying on the dining room carpet, crying and dribbling seed from her cunt? It seemed likely that she would, and would hide it from him even if she did not. She would sacrifice herself to him in the name of a love she was too young to understand, an infatuation baptised as a romance.
The Beast’s cock pushed insistently against his breaches. Rose had finished her meal and was regarding him with chilly amusement as she sipped her wine. He could feel her looking at him as he mopped up the last of his gravy. He was afraid to look up and meet her gaze, although he didn’t know whether doing so would crush him with shame or wash away his reason with lust.
“There’s… syllabub,” he managed.
“Oh,” said Rose, with mild interest. “That will be nice.”
He fled to the kitchen to fetch the pudding. There, he took a deep breath, rearranged the swelling in his breaches and composed himself. He washed his hands, picked up two dishes of sweet, creamy froth and returned to the dining room.
“Rose, we need to talk,” he said setting down the dishes. “You’ve made your point. Please can we discuss this? I don’t want you to leave angry.”
“Tomorrow,” she said.
“Tomorrow?”
She ate a spoonful of syllabub and appeared to consider his question.
“Yes. Tomorrow,” she said decisively. “At two o’clock when we’d usually have lessons. We’ll meet in the drawing room across the hallway. That has comfortable seats.”
Defeated, he slumped down onto his seat and ate his syllabub. He couldn’t tell if he’d done a good job with it or not. It just tasted sweet.
The next day The Beast headed into the drawing room with his heart steeled. Rose couldn’t carry on this way forever; she was a clever girl. He just had to talk to her calmly sensibly and she would see reason. He would be sorry to see her go, but he would remember her for the rest of his life and he would know that he gave her a real chance at happiness. He barely used this room, and as he entered he was startled by its transformation. Rose had cleaned his house slowly and methodically, so while he had noticed and appreciated the change, he had also had time to become used to it as it happened. It was only in looking at a room that remembered as dusty and derelict that he realised just how much she had accomplished.
The room had a grandeur that reminded him forcibly of his early life as a minor prince. Tall windows with heavy velvet curtains looked out onto his garden where winter snow glistened on the leaves and branches, and opulent seating was scattered tastefully around the fireplace, a low, healthy blaze radiating a fierce, steady heat. Among the seats was The Beast’s trunk. On the mantelpiece, pink primroses peaked out from a spray of winterheath in an elegant vase. The Beast blinked. Rose had picked his flowers. She knew his garden was important to him. It wasn’t like her to be so thoughtless – or perhaps cruel. He screwed shut his eyes and shook his head to clear it. Rose wouldn’t purposefully bait him. It must have just been an oversight on her part. The flowers did look attractive where she had put them, and in any case, he needed to stay focused for their conversation.
He caught Rose’s scent and heard her entering the room behind him. “Good Afternoon,” she said as he turned.
He was agog. Rose had on the floral dress she had been wearing the first time he saw her. It was a garment that reminded him, infallibly, of the nearly unbearable desire he felt when he had first seen her standing defiantly in his doorway. He’d admitted to her that it was his favourite, but he’d been too cowardly to admit the truth: that from the first day he’d seen her he had wanted to throw her to the ground and spend himself in her dainty cunt, and the dress was a link to that first blush of lust.
Rose had once again painted her face, but this time she had done so with considerably more skill and subtlety. The pink of her lips was slightly darker, her face a touch paler; her deep, round eyes were accentuated by the finest of outlines, and the blush of her cheeks was just fractionally exaggerated. A beauty spot adorning her cheek was the only overt touch. The Beast had told Rose that the dress she was wearing made her appear like a ‘perfect little dolly’, and her new make-up accentuated this impression by making her natural prettiness seem to be the product of artifice: something too cold and flawless to be real; a sculpture of purity and innocence carved from pale rose marble. And yet at the same time, the composition of her beauty was nothing but the features he had come to love presented to him anew, the veil of familiarity torn away.
She was making a bid to change his mind, he realised, but it would not work. Were he to yield to temptation, it would only prove that he was not to be trusted. Moreover by reminding him of her perfection, if only its shallow physical aspect, she reaffirmed his conviction that he could not allow her to squander herself on a malformed sadist.
“Good afternoon Rose,” he said sadly. “I’m glad we’re talking.”
“Is that what we’re doing?” she asked, “Or is your plan that you will talk and I will listen?”
“No Rose, I’m… I want to – it’s important to me that we don’t leave things on a bitter note. I feel very privileged to have known you, and I—”
Rose cut him off. “You want me to aid and abet you in your bid to lie to yourself.”
“What? No, I—”
“I will make it simple for you. You invited an impressionable young girl into your home, lavished attention upon her, and seduced her. You played mind games on her to make her think she had to let you do terrible things to earn your love, and then you beat her and raped her. Now you’re bored of her and you’re discarding her, but you want to make yourself the hero of the story so you’re pushing her to accept your rejection as some kind of noble gesture. Even the way you’re trying to convince me to think about what you did to me is for your own benefit.”
Winter rain trickled through The Beast’s veins. “Please believe me, I only want what’s best for you Rose.”
“I believe that you believe it – but I see the truth you hide from yourself. You were a spoilt boy who raped girls and eventually received some small measure of justice. Now you’ve had countless years to tell yourself tales about how you’ve changed, how you’re good now even though you’re still kidnapping women you fancy. But given the chance you went back to your true nature in the blink of an eye, and now you want to exile your rape victim because you can’t stand the stink of your own shit.
“I’m sorr—”
“Oh shut up! Do you think I want your apologies? If you weren’t such a coward you’d be holding me down and fucking me right now.” Her voice became a parody of innocence that scraped at the insides of The Beast’s skull. “Oh, sir I’ve been so naughty! I stayed up past my bedtime picking your flowers and making inkblot butterflies in your copy of Euclid’s Elements. Please sir, do what any gentleman of good breeding would and torture and humiliate me for your own pleasure.” Clasping her hands by her cheek, she smiled a sickly, disingenuous smile and gave an exaggerated flutter of her eyelashes.
The Beast stood quivering as lust, guilt and rage went to war within him, sometimes forming alliances, but always betraying one another as they vied for supremacy. He had thought guilt the righteous leader, but now his passions whispered even as they screamed. ‘Surrender to us’, they seemed to say, ‘and you will never feel anything but joy. Cast out your self-loathing and embrace your dark urges. She’s right, so why not prove she’s right? She wants it deep down, and if she doesn’t – so much the better.’
Rose had crossed the short space between them, and now she put a hand down to cup the unmistakable bulge that had grown in his breaches, massaging it slowly but firmly. At the same time she put her other hand against her almost-flat chest and began to rub at her nipple with her thumb through her dress. Instead of looking up to speak to his face, she now addressed herself to the broad wall of his chest in a voice dripping with mock sympathy.
“Oh dear sir, it seems I’m touching your cock without permission now. It must be so hard for you to live with such a naughty girl. If you were good enough for me you’d be putting me in my place right now, but you’re not, are you? You’re just a broken, ugly, foul-smelling rapist who’s not even brave enough to be a monster. A hypocrite who thinks a few reading lessons balance out the sadistic violation of an innocent virgin. Fuck you! There’s no saving me after what you’ve done. I’m already soiled, so the only thing left is to finish the job. You don’t love me, and you’re too much of a coward to even give me your hate. You pathetic cunt.”
With a roar halfway between anguish and anger, The Beast threw her away from him onto a nearby sofa. “You stupid idiot bitch!” he shouted. “I’ll teach you the meaning of regret.”
With a ferocious burst of speed he leapt on top of her. His clawed hands engulfed her forearms from her wrists almost to her elbow. He bared his slavering fangs and stared down at her with unconcealed madness in the slit pupils of his shining green eyes.
“Goody Two Shoes,” said Rose.