The Naked Woman
1
The naked woman caught Natalie’s attention.
Later, when she had opportunity to think about it, Natalie would reflect that had she but ignored the slut, she would still be free. Nothing of what occurred afterwards, on the subway, in the elevator, in the prison of that cursed apartment, would have occurred. This useless speculation was to cost Natalie many a sleepless night, on those rare occasions when she was permitted the luxury of sleeping alone.
It started on a Monday morning. Natalie was standing in the lobby of the building in which she worked. She was sipping the expensive coffee she had bought next door, thinking about all the things she had promised herself Friday she would do over the weekend yet hadn’t gotten around to. She had turned to talk to her friend Cindy when she happened to look up at just the right moment, and she saw her.
Natalie’s first reaction was laughter. She spilled her coffee.
Her coworker from the office glanced at her. “What?”
“That,” Natalie said, sputtering. She replaced the cap on her cup. “Look over there.”
Cindy turned her head. She wore an expression of polite interest. “What?” she repeated.
“That naked woman over there,” Natalie said, and she pointed.
The other people waiting for the elevator, there was always a crowd at that time of the morning, turned as one. A second later, a guy in an off-the-rack business suit, snorted, as if to say, “Good one.”
The crowd went back to their coffees and their newspapers, their BlackBerrys and their cell phones.
Natalie was given annoyed looks. Cindy turned to her. “What naked woman?” She spoke sort of low, as if she wasn’t sure whether or not her friend was making a joke. Her cheeks were blushing.
“That naked woman, right over there!” Natalie spoke with vehemence, possibly to make up for Cindy’s lack of volume. “Can’t you see her?”
The woman was absolutely starkers . . . naked as a jaybird . . . clad only in her birthday suit, outside the big lobby window in front of the building. She was outside naked in front of everybody! coffee dealers, bike-riding messengers, men and women in suits, the traffic, the pigeons.
“No,” Cindy said. Her friend was staring straight at the woman. Natalie’s reaction was incredulous.
“A preoccupation with sex usually indicates a lack of occupation with sex,” someone snarkily remarked. There was laughter. Cindy tried looking again. “Where?” she asked, with not a hint of sarcasm.
“There . . . ah.” Natalie trailed off. Something was wrong. She could see the woman. She could definitely see her. She was naked in front of everybody!
Nobody else, though, was reacting to her presence.
Passersby outside were passing her by. In fact, none of them so much as spared the naked woman a second glance, let alone a first. They were acting as if they couldn’t see her.
Everyone was acting as if they couldn’t see her.
In the movies or on television, when people are drinking and see something odd, they ostentatiously scrutinize their drink and throw it away. Natalie did not do this. Instead, she took a long, hard look at Cindy’s face. Then she did the same for the man in the bad suit. Neither of them were joking. They were serious. Natalie took a step toward the window. The elevator group made way. Living in the urban jungle, the people of this city knew to make room for crazy people. At that moment the elevator doors slid open. The people who had been waiting got on, including Cindy, whom Natalie saw cast a last look in her direction before boarding.
She never spoke to Cindy again.
People crossed in front of Natalie, who stood there in her building’s lobby amazed. She knew she wasn’t mistaken. She knew she wasn’t hallucinating.
She absolutely was seeing a naked woman! Why couldn’t anybody else see her?
And, Good God! why did she look like that? Ms. Buck-Naked-in-Front-of-Everyone! wasn’t just naked, she was stacked and naked! She was stacked the way a blow-up doll was stacked. Her boobs were fantastically big. Natalie didn’t dare and estimate her bust size. The woman looked as if she had volleyballs hanging off her chest! Her areolae were the size of old-fashioned silver dollars!
She was beautiful but not in an elegant or sophisticated way. This girl was a slut. She had a narrow waist, painfully narrow to Natalie’s discriminating eyes. Her stomach was taut and well muscled; Natalie could only imagine the sort of exercises and motions that would necessarily go into producing such a blatantly sexual carriage. Her skin was flawless, tanned, lovely. Her legs were shapely and long.
Upon inspection, Natalie realized her first impression had been mistaken. She approached the lobby window for a closer examination. The naked woman wasn’t entirely naked: she was, in fact, wearing a pair of extremely high-heeled shoes—stilettos—at least six inches in height. Natalie herself would never have been able to walk in the punishing posture as these forced that woman outside to do. A degrading mince was all the slut could manage, ass uplifted, her whole body curved to account for her outrageous figure. The naked woman’s face was the real confirmation of her abject sluttiness, however, porn star body notwithstanding. Her makeup was exaggerated, completely overdone; it was, frankly, sluttish! Her lips were heavily coated in gloss and a bright, bright red. They were puffy, too, so apparently collagen-enhanced, Natalie wondered seriously how the girl’s voice would be affected. Her shadow emphasized a blatantly carnal stare; the woman’s eyes were needy, as if begging for a long, hard fuck.
She was a blonde, naturally. Her hair was long and bound into two long, very long pigtails, each hanging all the way down to the middle of her hourglass waist. Everything about her screamed sex.
When she had first seen her, the woman had been passing in front of the building. By the time Natalie got close, she had almost cleared the long lobby window. Now she was stopped, standing in profile to Natalie, as if waiting for her inspection.
Natalie looked around outside. No one was paying any attention to this spectacle. No one.
Maybe it’s for a TV show, she thought. She turned her head, looking for a camera crew. She saw none. The thought occurred that maybe she was being set-up, like for one of those gag shows on MTV. But no one was pointing a camera in her direction, either, or at least none that she could see.
Maybe it’s hidden? Natalie found herself getting angry. “Somebody better not be . . .” she started to say, and then she trailed off again.
Natalie’s mouth fell open. She still had her coffee cup in one hand. She gave it a compulsive squeeze.
They go around her, Natalie observed, disbelieving. They step aside so they won’t step into her.
It was simply true. Natalie followed the path one guy took, a man in a dark suit, as he came striding straight on at the slut. He was talking on his cell phone. He appeared as if he was going to walk right into the naked woman, not seeing where he was going. Only at the last moment did he turn aside.
He walked past the naked blond girl without any acknowledgement of her presence whatsoever.
Once past her, the businessman angled back toward the middle of the sidewalk, exactly along the path he had been pacing before. All the while, he kept on talking on his phone.
Natalie had been watching carefully. His eyes did not stray at all.
A pair of women in gray skirts and white blouses, each of them carrying a stylish briefcase, next came upon the naked figure. The women were talking to one another and laughing.
Natalie forgot to breathe.
Without stopping their conversation, or their laughter, the executives took a step apart. They walked past the naked woman, one to each side of her, each of them passing but bare inches from those massive, balloonish breasts. On the other side, then, they came back together, bread and butter.
A bike messenger rolled by. He didn’t stop either. No one did.
It was the most amazing thing Natalie had ever witnessed. The woman outside clearly wasn’t invisible. People were, after all, stepping around her. Everyone could see her. They just . . . weren’t seeing her.
Acknowledging her.
Her hand was stinging. Natalie’s vision suddenly went blurry. Around her, the building lobby wavered, as if seen through a heat-induced desert mirage. Natalie dropped her coffee cup.
For a moment, a bare moment, the woman outside . . . disappeared.
Natalie blinked. No mistake. The naked woman was gone.
She blinked again. And just like that she was back, standing in exactly the same position as before.
Blink. Gone. Blink. Back again.
Natalie closed her eyes. She pinched the corners of her eyes with thumb and forefinger. She frowned a couple times, straining. Then she looked up again. For a second Natalie found herself looking right through the naked woman. She could see people passing on the other side of her! She could see the street through her and the building across the street! Natalie blinked uncontrollably.
The woman was back again, as solid as before, and as naked.
Outside, she turned to face Natalie. Natalie knew the outside of the building was tinted; it was almost impossible to see someone standing inside the lobby. Nonetheless, that was exactly what the naked slut now appeared to be doing. She turned and she faced Natalie square on, the two women separated from one another only by a reinforced plate of glass. Natalie took an unconscious step back.
She felt eyes upon her. Was the girl staring at her, or was she was staring . . . ? Natalie turned around.
A man stood there, looking upon her as she had been looking upon the naked woman. He was a large man. He stood out amongst the businessmen in the lobby, not merely on account of his size or his fixed stare upon her but because of him. He looked . . . strong. Powerful. Masculine.
Natalie’s knees twitched. She had a sudden and nearly irresistible impulse to kneel. His cock must be so massive, she thought, and the unexpected inappropriateness of the idea was shocking.
His clothing was casual, no tie, brown shoes. He wore mirrored sunglasses. He was blond, his hair luxurious, thick, like a lion’s mane across his shoulders. The top of his shirt was partially open; his chest was massive, handsome. Natalie’s stomach became warm.
The man had a sheer physical presence about him, a sense of his being there so great that everyone else in the atrium was proportionally diminished. They had been reduced to a fuzzy, black-and-white background. In contrast, this man was in bold Technicolor. And he was looking at her. At her!
Natalie felt an urge to bolt. She didn’t. Couldn’t. She stood, looking back at him, feeling absurdly like a deer caught in a pair of oncoming headlights.
“You Can See Her,” the man said. His blunt phrasing made it a statement, not a question. Unable not to, Natalie nodded.
“That Is Unusual,” he spoke again. He had an accent. Natalie was unfamiliar with it. It sounded like nothing she had heard before, in real life or on TV or the movies. His commanding voice all but reverberated in Natalie’s ears. “It Is Fortunate You Are A Woman.”
He looked her up and down, his penetrating gaze ripping the clothes from her body. Natalie felt herself appraised, like an animal in a stockyard. She lifted her breasts toward him, not knowing why.
“You Appear Not Unsuitable,” the man eventually proclaimed. “We Will Come For You.”
Natalie’s face went cold. Her pussy was still hot and wet. “Don’t . .” she started to say. But the man lifted the cell phone he had been cradling.
He took Natalie’s picture. We will come for you, she thought. She opened her mouth to scream.
And then the wavering stopped. It stopped, just like that. Somebody put a hand on her shoulder. Natalie’s heart skipped a beat.
“Are you all right, miss? You dropped your coffee.”
Natalie turned. A white-haired building security guard was beside her, holding her crushed cup. She looked down. She had spilled her coffee. Her hand stung. The pain was distant, a million miles away.
She staggered, and the guard had to take her in his arms to steady her.
“Whoa!” he said. To Natalie, the sound seemed distorted, slow: “Whoooaaaaaaaahhhhhh!” She realized she was on the verge of a faint. The whole world was spinning.
The guard helped her to a chair. Natalie closed her eyes and took several deep breaths. “Do you want me to call you a doctor?” the guard, an elderly gentleman, asked her. She was unable to respond.
When she dared look up again, both the man and the naked woman were gone.
Before moving east, Natalie had grown up in California. She had experienced her share of earthquakes. One time, she had been inside a poorly built house that during some minor tremors resettled on its foundations. The sensation had been like being on top of a long, rolling platform, a platform that had kept rolling until it reached the proper indentation in the ground and then settled in, key into lock, round peg into round hole. Earthquakes before that time had never really bothered Natalie; they were inconvenient and messy and, yes, dangerous, but they had also been no big deal. For the first time in her life after an earth tremor, after being in that house, Natalie had vomited, her nausea so great she had thought she was going to die. Never before had she felt—literally felt—the underpinnings of the world shift like that, and from that day on Natalie had never truly felt comfortable again on the West Coast.
The way she felt following her encounter in the lobby vividly reminded her of why she had moved.
The security guard called for an ambulance. Natalie allowed herself to be taken to the hospital, even though she was morally certain there was nothing physically wrong with her. Later, a doctor asked her about stress, and she remembered nodding, confirming his opinion, though in truth Natalie enjoyed her work. She was an artist. She drew illustrations for advertising. She did not feel stressed.
Nevertheless, she confirmed the doctor’s opinion about exhaustion, and she listened to his patronizing lecture about maintaining balance in her home and work life, just so she could be released.
Throughout her brief stay in the emergency room, what worried her most was being committed for psychiatric evaluation. Maybe I should be, she thought a little later, though, and shivered, again feeling nauseous.
It was a peculiar sensation, unlike anything else that had ever happened to her, save for her experience in the earthquake. Natalie found herself in a position where she couldn’t be sure of her own senses.
I know I saw that woman, she said to herself shortly after being released, in the taxi the office had arranged to take her home. At least, I think so, she added, increasingly uncertain. She felt shaky.
At home again, she was even more unsure. By that afternoon—her boss had told her to take the rest of the day off—Natalie was seriously considering making an appointment with an eye doctor, or better yet, a psychiatrist.
She walked around feeling that everything might break at a touch.
When she got home, she paced about her apartment, double-checking the windows, triple-locking the door. After a while, she sat down on her sofa. She drew her feet up to her body and curled there.
She sat, trying hard not to think.
You can see her, the man had said. His words resounded in her head, over and over. It is fortunate you are a woman. And the worst: We will come for you.
Eventually, Natalie got up, went to the desk in her bedroom. She came back with the sketchpad she sometimes played around with. She put her tongue to the edge of her mouth, bit it gently, eyes wandering the blank page. She had to be certain. She had to be sure she had seen what she had seen.
Her hair, she recalled, focusing on the details. She had two long pigtails.
Pencil in hand, Natalie drew a few tentative lines. Then a few more.
For an hour, Natalie would draw something, use her eraser, draw again, and so on. Before deciding on a career in advertising, she had entertained notions of illustrating children’s books for a living. Her talent, she had come to know, was only mediocre, and at any rate her interest in pure art had waned in college. It became only a pastime. Slowly, in steps, Natalie drew a picture of the naked woman she had seen, or thought she had seen, that morning. She drew with a passion she had not felt in years. She put in a perspective as seen from the inside of the lobby. She made crude little boxes to represent the passing cars; she made even cruder outlines for the passersby. Only the woman herself got Natalie’s full attention, and only she received the benefit of her inspiration. Slowly, the slut took shape on the page: her curvy figure; her mincing walk; the graceful length of each arm as it hung down by her hip.
The slut had worn no rings, no jewelry. Natalie’s eyes narrowed. Earrings? She had been too far away to be sure, but she suspected not. The stilettos, she recalled, were black and had looked uncomfortable, if pretty. She penciled them in, making the footwear as black as she could on the page.
Breasts: too huge for words. Hips: smoothly muscled. Lips: like that famous actress’s, only more so.
The more she drew, the more certain Natalie became that she had not hallucinated what she had seen that morning. The details were too clear, her vision of the naked woman too precise for it to be a mere dream. Indeed, she felt like there was more she could put down than she was.
She felt like she was forgetting something. Something important. Right on the tip of her tongue, too.
Gradually, she filled up the page with black and white. In the end, only the slut’s eyes remained blank.
The tip of Natalie’s pencil hovered long over the empty ovals she had made. The sexual hunger that had been so clearly written in the girl’s face: Natalie was sure she could portray that. And so she had.
The naked woman’s thick lips, as round and as puffy as the mouth of a sexdoll, said it all, as did the vivid and easily discernible perkiness of her nipples. But Natalie knew she was missing something.
She tried to picture what the woman’s eyes had looked like.
There had been something else there, she was certain now, some other expression in addition to that vapid sexual hunger. Natalie sat over her picture, holding the pencil, the sharp tip hovering. Only when she put it down did it come to her.
She looked sorry, Natalie thought, amazed, realization dawning.
She hadn’t remembered, hadn’t seen, until now.
Natalie put the sketchpad away. She didn’t need it anymore.
While part of her had been laughing that morning, and, later, grown frightened, some more attentive part had noted the sheer look of . . . of pity on the naked woman’s face. Even from several feet away, beyond that long window, Natalie had made out the haunted, helpless expression in the woman’s eyes.
The slut had seen that Natalie had seen her, and she had been sorry for it. Sorry for her, Natalie.
“I didn’t hallucinate that woman,” Natalie said out loud. “I didn’t hallucinate that look she gave me, and that means I didn’t hallucinate him, either.” He had taken her picture. He had taken her picture!
It is fortunate you are a woman, he had told her, in that peculiar accent. You appear not unsuitable, he had said. She was sorry, Natalie thought. She was sorry that I had seen her.
We will come for you.
“I have to get out here,” Natalie said to herself. “I have to get out of here right now.”
Natalie sprinted to the bedroom. She flung her closet door open and tore through its contents, recovering one of the suitcases she had used in her move from California. She opened it, and she hurriedly went through her dresser drawers and the cast-off pieces of clothing she had earlier flung to the floor. She packed as if with the knowledge that at any minute someone—that strange man!—would break in and tie a rope around her neck. Barely five minutes later she was running to the front door.
She stopped. A weapon?
There was a gun store five blocks from her apartment. On the other hand, Natalie had never fired a gun before in her life. She didn’t know the first thing about them. And isn’t there a waiting period, she asked herself, before you can even get the gun? She wasn’t sure. Natalie’s apartment had a kitchen nook. Leaving her bag by the door, Natalie went to the kitchen and pulled open a utensils drawer. She removed a large meat-cutting knife and looked at it for a second, debating. Then she flew back to her suitcase, knife in hand, and packed it. A minute later Natalie was on the sidewalk outside her building.
By this time late afternoon traffic crawled the street beside her. Her building employed no doorman; the tenants’ board considered hiring one to be a wasteful luxury. If there had been a doorman stationed there, she could have asked him to flag her a cab. Or maybe not, Natalie thought, looking first in one direction, then the other. That would be the perfect way to grab me, some guy pretending to be a cab driver. She had read a book or watched a TV show that had had such a kidnapper driving a fake cab. That she had been driven home earlier in a taxi she blew off. She hadn’t been so scared then!
Natalie started walking south, hurrying.
She was aware at some level that she was in a state of panic. She was aware that she was acting like a paranoid loon. Once again Natalie considered the appropriateness of making an appointment with a psychiatrist. For God’s sake, she was carrying a concealed butcher knife on her!
She wiped some of the sweat off her brow. She deliberately slowed her pace from the near run she had started out with to a more normal walking speed. Breathe, girl, she told herself. Just breathe. She looked behind her. All she saw was her building down the street. Everything looked normal.
Natalie sighed slowly, heavily, letting that rush of adrenalin that had got her out of her apartment slowly drain away. No one was following her. Maybe no one was. Maybe everything she had seen today really had been a hallucination. Rampant paranoia, too, was a warning sign of madness, after all.
She really had no idea where she was going, only the vague notion she was headed in the direction of the subway. Natalie thought about going to the police and at once dismissed the notion. If she herself believed that what she was doing, how she was acting, was crazy, what would the authorities think?
Officer, this morning as I was going to work I spotted this woman, this naked woman. No one else could see her, but I could. She looked like a blow-up doll but she had scared eyes. She wanted to warn me to run away, I think, but I didn’t realize this until later, I don’t know why, maybe it was because she was invisible. Then this man approached me. No one else could see him, either, maybe. I’m not so sure about his invisibility. What I do know is that he sounded really strange; he had a voice like from outer space or something, and he threatened me. Well, not so much threatened as saying he was glad I was a woman, because I think he meant he was going to abduct me, and so I ran out of my apartment because I got scared, and this butcher knife? well, Officer, I just wanted some protection, I couldn’t get a gun, you see, so I took a knife from my kitchen, that’s understandable, isn’t it? why are you looking at me like that, Officer?
Yeah, Natalie could see herself going to the cops. She would be locked in a nuthouse before she could snap her fingers twice. The whole thing sounded mad even to her.
She kept walking, a single woman in the big city with no boyfriend or fiancé she could count on, no friends she felt close enough to call and stay with (and even if she had such friends, would it be right to call them, if what she felt wasn’t just rampant paranoia? would calling one of them put her in danger too, because she was a woman?), a young single woman who had run out of her perfectly safe apartment for no earthly reason she could now think of, night approaching, with a butcher knife hidden in her bag.
One look at her, and anyone in their right mind would think she was trouble.
I could go to a hotel, Natalie thought.
There were plenty she could choose from. It would probably be the best thing she could do. She could stay somewhere overnight—get out of the night, she didn’t exactly feel comfortable walking around at this time of day, wouldn’t even under normal circumstances—and think about what she was doing.
She crossed the street to avoid a group of boys she saw approaching. Natalie redoubled her grip on her bag, which was starting to feel heavy. The boys passed her without glancing in her direction.
The thing was, Natalie wanted distance.
Yes, staying awhile somewhere and seriously considering what she might or might not have seen that morning, what she might or might not have heard, wasn’t a bad idea at all. But before she did that, Natalie wanted to put some distance between where she lived and worked and where she could stay and think about how crazy she was acting, just in case she wasn’t crazy.
She might take another day off tomorrow. She could take a vacation. She laughed, humorlessly.
Just as her feet were beginning to get tired, Natalie saw the subway street entrance. Darting her eyes right and left in a mildly frenetic manner, she took the stairs down, quickly paid her token, and stood on the platform to wait for the next car. That there were other people around her was reassuring. There were a couple of black teens talking earnestly a few paces away, but they looked totally absorbed in whatever they were discussing. They didn’t even spare Natalie a glance. Likewise, the older men and women around her, the men in work clothes coming home from work, the women carrying bags of groceries with their children hanging on their legs, were all engrossed in their own little worlds. None of them so much as looked at the frightened woman among them.
After a few minutes, the subway car arrived in a loud whoosh! Its doors slammed open jerkily, and everyone, including Natalie, climbed aboard.
Maintaining space between herself and everyone else, Natalie counted seventeen on the subway with her. She had never bothered to count the people on a subway car before. After a minute, the vehicle rattled familiarly. Its doors slid shut, and they were on their way. The person closest to Natalie was another woman, older than she, glasses, her hair tied back in a colorful shawl. She had a Dean Koontz open in front of her. Across from Natalie a burly guy sat in heavy boots, a grayish shirt, and a longshoreman’s cap. He had his head down and his eyes closed. Her other fellow passengers filled the range of people in the city. The teenagers, Natalie noticed, were still together, sitting almost on top of one another in order to share a set of iPod earphones. A mother gathered her children near her, one to each side, like a protective hen, staring suspiciously at everybody. She noticed Natalie glance her way, and she didn’t break their shared look until Natalie did, blushing. It was just a dream, she thought.
Just a dream.
Three people got off at the next station. Eight more joined them. The mother with her two little children gave the newcomers the evil eye as well. Her kids were preternaturally quiet.
Okay, Natalie said to herself. Okay. I’m either crazy, or there are naked women capable of walking around in broad daylight without anybody noticing them. I’m either going out of my mind, or a man with a funny voice that nobody else could see but me is gonna come after me.
Her hand clenched around her bag. She easily had the largest bag on the entire subway, she noticed.
So, I’m crazy, Natalie thought. That’s the easiest solution, right? The best? If that’s the case, I should see a doctor as soon as possible. She shuddered. The knowledge that she was carrying a butcher knife in her oversize bag weighed on her like a brick. I could be . . . dangerous.
On the other hand, if she wasn’t crazy, then she might really be in danger. If that was the case, to whom could she go? Where could she go? No place would be safe. Suddenly Natalie wished she was back in her apartment or that her cell had internet. She could maybe look up articles about, say, naked women walking around. Surely she wasn’t the only person who had seen these twisted freaks?
Maybe there were ways she could fight them, like vampires with crucifixes or werewolves with silver bullets. Surely they had to be some kind of supernatural agency, to be able to walk around with no one seeing them like that? Natalie giggled. Yeah, I’m totally crazy, she thought.
Maybe so. But she definitely wasn’t going back to her apartment tonight. Definitely.
The car hit another station. Along with a few other people, the evil-eye mom left with her children, casting baleful looks at everyone as she departed. Maybe a half-dozen or so new people got on.
Natalie didn’t bother to count this time. She was thinking about a nice hotel room somewhere.
That was when it happened: the first time she lost control.
In retrospect, the sensation that came over Natalie, as the car rattled and resumed moving, was akin to sex. At the time, because it happened so quickly, so immediately, the feeling was impossible to describe. Too, Natalie was panicked, naturally. The sudden loss of control over her limbs, the knowledge that her own body was no longer responding to her commands but to another’s—the separation, in fact, of her mind from her body, the perfect oneness of her becoming two broken and separate things, the essential “she” now trapped, and her body, formerly of herself but now an alien and detached thing—overwhelmed her.
But in retrospect, more than like anything else, it was like sex.
Natalie felt a veritable presence, a living force that some deep, dark part of her, in her soul, perhaps, recognized as somehow, mysteriously masculine, almost supremely masculine, physically penetrate her, fill her, and that was it.
She became a living hand puppet. Or a sock puppet, say, filled to utter capacity by a very large penis.
It was a little like that, too.
Such awareness, and its greater horror, came only later, though. Natalie’s first conscious awareness that something was wrong was when she stood from the subway bench and began removing her clothes.
It was a nonchalant striptease. First to come off were her shoes, which she slid off without bending over, left one first, then right. Then, without hurrying, Natalie’s body undid the buttons on her blouse.
Natalie’s body: she wasn’t performing this action. Her body, and her body alone, was.
When her top was loosened enough, she shrugged out of it and cast the light piece of clothing—she hadn’t changed from her work clothes—onto the subway bench.
Inside, Natalie was screaming. Oh my God, what am I doing?! She stood in front of the group of subway passengers in her bra.
Stop it! Stop it! She tried to will her fingers to stop what they were doing—unclipping the fastener—but they kept right on betraying her, ignoring her, working entirely on their own. Within a moment Natalie was casually dropping her bra on top of her blouse. She stood revealed to the crowd topless.
The air hit her nipples and made them hard.
The woman in the shawl kept her eyes on her novel. The man in the longshoreman’s cap maintained his state of slumber. The two teens listened to their music.
Natalie’s traitorous hands moved up underneath her breasts and cupped them. In front of the subway crowd, she began to fondle herself provocatively, blatantly, pulling and kneading at her warm bosom, offering herself, with all the carnal abandon of an exotic dancer. Her hips swayed as she performed this obscenity, as if she actually were on a stage with a pole behind her. The horror of it made Natalie feel faint and nauseous. The touch of her hands on her own bare and sensitive flesh, the prickly sensation of fingers which had once been a part of her, her own fingers, yet now not! made her skin crawl.
It was infinitely worse than being pawed at by someone else. Then, there was always the sense of being whole, of being one person, one sensory creature. Now, she was divided, torn in two, and the violation, the fondling and tweaking of her nipples, the caressing of her bosom, the sway of her hips as she repulsively undulated her body, only further emphasized the integral disconnection in her. She was a prisoner abusing herself. Not only was she utterly helpless, trapped not only within her own body, unable to control even her own hands, her own movements, she was made to suffer abuse from what had once been herself. Natalie pinched her nipples. She sullied her own breasts; she exposed them. She played with them in front of everyone. Her nipples grew even harder beneath her fingers. Through her fingers she felt them harden. It was like looking at herself in a mirror with another mirror behind her: the dirty sensations, her skin-crawling disgust, her embarrassment, reinforced one another exponentially.
Natalie’s detached, yet fully responsive hands rolled down her taut stomach. Her fingers slid into the space between her pants and her sensitive flesh. Oh, please no! she wept inside her mind. Please no!
No tears reached her face. She unbuttoned the front, slid the zipper down, and with a grinding ripple of her legs allowed the dress pants to slip down her bare legs.
She stepped out of them and in the same motion fell gracefully to her knees.
With only a flimsy pair of panties protecting her womanhood, Natalie spread her legs on the subway floor, balanced herself, and arched her torso backwards, the small of her back straining, unfamiliar muscles being put to work. Painfully, she continued the stretch until her head was nearly brushing the cold gray floor tile. She continued until her breasts were pointed toward the ceiling.
Natalie’s mouth opened. She swept her tongue suggestively across her lips. Once again she fondled her breasts, lifting her arms away from the floor yet managing at the same time to hold herself in place with her thighs and lower legs.
The strain was unfamiliar and agonizing. It was a position a belly dancer might take, only she was no belly dancer.
Nonetheless, Natalie’s tummy began to writhe like one to an inaudible music, her flesh rising and falling to a slow, syncopated beat, her abdominal muscles rolling as if through each tidal move of her stomach she were conveying a small object across her skin, as she had seen street magicians manipulate coins across their fingers. She rocked her upper body left and right. Her hands left her breasts, and her arms swept up and over her, swaying back and forth as the wind might move a tree’s branches.
She pulled her neck back, hearing the joints pop as she did so, feeling the ache of untried muscles being put to the test. Natalie closed her eyes—or rather, her body closed its eyes—and she was trapped in a heaving display of forced shamelessness.
Her ass finally made contact with the floor.
With no more control over herself than an animated doll, Natalie’s body brought her arms down for support. She lifted her lower body and uncurled her legs out from underneath her, spreading them into the air. She bent her knees. Her feet touched down, and she arched her whole body upwards, braced by hands and feet, offering her soaking panties to the ceiling.
She opened her eyes along with her mouth, gasping heatedly.
A blond girl was playing with her cell phone a few feet over. A man with glasses was reading a newspaper. A young couple seated next to each other were talking. Natalie couldn’t understand what they were saying over the sound of the train. None of them were watching her.
For an absurd moment, Natalie felt a flash of fuming resentment.
What!? Am I not good enough for you people!? Then the cold certainty that they weren’t just ignoring her, they weren’t seeing her set in, and she realized what was happening.
She had become like the naked woman. They couldn’t see her. They couldn’t see her!
The force that had taken control of her body, that had also maybe taken control of all the rest of the people in the subway car (They can’t see me! They can’t see me!!), compelled Natalie to continue her arch until she felt her spine might break. Only gradually was she forced to relax from this position.
She laid her back against the cool tiles. Her hands came around as she began to lift her thighs.
No, she tried to yell out. Not that too! But try as she might, she was unable to keep from taking her panties in hand and ripping them away, discarding her last and innermost veil of privacy.
Now she truly had become as that invisible naked woman she had so callously dismissed earlier as a slut. She understood. She had had no more control over herself than Natalie did at that moment.
I’m sorry, she prayed. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Please, God. Please!
Lowering her ass once more, feeling now the cold tiles without even a flimsy piece of cloth to separate her from the subway floor, Natalie curled about, quickly turned over, and went to her hands and knees.
She saw a discarded piece of gum beneath her face. Then her head was pulled upwards, and she was forced to lick her lips once again wantonly.
At once, with her new perspective, she saw that she had once more been mistaken.
The subway was filled with people. Men, women, teens. Nearly all were looking at anything other than at the woman who had thrown all her clothes to the floor and had so brazenly displayed herself to them.
Nearly all: near the end of the car was a little man in a brown coat.
He had on glasses, thick horn-rims, and he was balding, with only a fuzzy strip of reddish-brown curls encircling his scalp. He looked like an accountant. And he was the only one in the entire car who could see Natalie. She was sure of it.
She was sure because he was staring straight at her. He was sweating. His hands were shaking.
On her hands and knees, with her naked ass lifted as high as possible, Natalie crawled over to him, crawled across the dirty subway floor. When she started, he jumped; for a second Natalie thought he was going to run away. His eyes widened as she approached. His breath started to come in hitches.
People got out of Natalie’s way. Their repositioning was casual, made as if with no thought behind it. Natalie was reminded of the people who had stepped out of the path of the naked slut that morning.
Despite her proximity, nobody’s hands or feet so much as brushed against her.
The little man she was crawling towards also changed his seating arrangement. He opened up his coat, not with little difficulty, his hands shaking still. People got out of his way, too. Despite the relative crowding of the car, its passengers made room for the two of them as Natalie got closer.
She knew what she was going to do before she did it.
Traitorously, scandalously, Natalie’s hands reached out and unzipped the man’s pants. She pulled them down along with his underwear and was unsurprised at the stiffening of his cock. Help me, she thought.
Natalie bent forward between his legs, one hand pressing on each of his hairy thighs. She then leaned forward and licked the man’s penis. The control over her body and actions was so great, she could not even shudder in the ultimate revulsion she felt. The man jerked involuntarily.
Natalie floated her head over his groin, pressed in, and began to lap at him, running her tongue over each side and length of his cock.
“Oh God,” the man breathed. He put a hand in Natalie’s hair to guide her. But she needed no guide.
Natalie pushed him back into his seat. Crouching low, feeling low, starting at the base of his member, she ran her tongue in the soft space beneath his cock and above his balls and worked her way upwards, drawing and wrapping her tongue about him. Her touch was light, delicate. Her mood was anything but. When she got to the end, Natalie felt herself take a deep breath. Then she went down on him.
His cock filled her mouth. She pressed down on him, swallowing, unable to choke, until her lips brushed against the base of his stomach. She squeezed her cheeks about him. Her tongue flickered.
The man leaned back in his subway seat, moaning. “Oh God,” he kept whispering, over and over. His hand tightened in her hair until it was painful. Natalie slid her mouth back, then worked her way in again, repeating the motion a couple of times until she could feel the energy of him wanting to burst.
She could taste his precum. It was sour and awful. She wanted to gag yet was unable.
One hand reached out and pinched the bottom of the man’s cock, holding him, preventing him from releasing. He gasped. She drew back a final time, gasping herself as she pulled from him, a sticky fluid stretching across her parted lips, connecting her to him. He let go of her hair. Natalie raised herself from her crouch, spread her legs, and sat in his lap. She straddled him and guided him inside her.
Her hips began to move without her volition. She wriggled like an eel. Slowly, she began to fuck him.
Inside, she cried out. Her thoughts were all but incoherent in their outrage and shame. The man’s fingers pawed at her backside. Her breasts pressed into his face. He licked at her nipples.
She felt absolutely no pleasure. Her breathing was heavy, she was making every appropriate wet sounds, she carrying through with all the motions; but she was removed from all of it. Her only emotions were revulsion and horror at her self-inductive rape.
He sucked on her. She pushed on his chest and squeezed her hips. She pressed down, ever down.
“Your reward,” she said, not knowing why she was saying it. The words meant nothing. “I am your reward.” In point of fact, she wasn’t saying it; the words were as much a part of the absolute control of her body as anything else.
“Oh, God,” the man screamed. Finally, he spurted inside her.
Overcome with horror, with disgust, it all abruptly became too much for Natalie. The world turned black, and she fainted.