After going home, sleeping, and waking up again, Tarri put on any clothes she could find -- sweatpants, a wrinkled tank top lying on the floor, it didn't matter -- and left her room. It was dark out already, but a few people were out walking, and Tarri saw a guy with long hair walking his happy girlfriend along with his arm wrapped around her waist. The sight saddened her. Within her was a powerful desire to be part of a wholesome couple like that. But solitude, for Tarri, was essential to her need to serve Woland. The small tokens of affection they exchanged -- she tucks his shirt in, he tucks stray strands of hair back behind her ear -- filled Tarri with something like despair; the closest touch she knew was Woland's cold one. But when she considered treating Rachel with such tenderness, she was filled with a strange repulsion.
At least, she thought to herself, she was free in a way they were not. That happy girl being kissed on the shoulders had never gone out to the forest and stripped herself naked. She had never been fucked by whatever Woland was; the price of the long-haired guy's love was that if the girl wanted to do something, she had to take into account what he thought, wonder if maybe it made him angry or whether really he wouldn't want something different. Even if he said, "Yes, do it," what if he was just covering up his secret wish that she really not do it, and what if this wish secretly drove them apart? That would itself make whatever she wanted impossible to enjoy.
To whatever extent that another person is involved in your life, she thought, to whatever extent you care about them, they control you even without trying to, simply because the more intertwined their life is with yours, the more your own actions affect them. What the long-haired guy and the happy girl had achieved with each other had a steep price. And in that case, Tarri thought, the girl was in a worse position, because Tarri, independent and powerful, could fulfill her own needs even at the price of traveling her path alone. Tarri, despite her submission to Woland, was the master of her own limited world; the other girl, who lived in a wider and more free world, was its slave. Tarri tried to derive some pleasure from this thought, but as she watched the girl nuzzle up against her boyfriend's shoulder, it didn't help much.
She walked along the cracked sidewalk, gazing up at the night sky. She loved the sky and always had, its changing moods -- it was like a painting that was being re-painted all the time. In this one a few dark purple clouds drifted slowly, obscuring the stars, and Tarri saw the blinking red dot of an airplane shrinking as it soared away. Her head was tipped back as she gazed up into the night, though the street was empty, and so she didn't bump into anything. Again she was filled with a sense of wonder and awe.
Since she existed, since she was Tarri, there had to be a world for her to live in. Everyone was the same inside; there was no Tarri. This knowledge brought a cold pleasure; fundamentally she was a body, a piece of meat, and there was no one to touch her, no one to rub or massage or kiss her -- but still she felt a kind of pleasure, and like the ecstatic orgasm her twisted journey into the forest had brought her, she suspected that pleasure was inaccessible to those who devoted their lives not to appreciating the world but instead each other.
Before her was the dirt path leading into the forest. The tall trees of the forest loomed above, casting deep shadows, rising and falling on hills which she knew were covered in yellowing dead leaves. As she walked this path, it was all so clear to her: the warm air blowing across the skin of her face, the hissing of wind through leaves and the distant white rush of the stream.
Finally this stream approached ahead. Tarri walked down to the flowing water, then stood beside it for a moment, watching its tiny bubbles created as the water dropped down the horizontal slopes of the rocks. She pulled off her top, enjoying the air flowing across her arms and breasts, then slid her sweatpants down her legs. Neatly she piled up her clothes by the riverbank, and then, totally naked, she stepped into the river and began to walk upstream. The rocks were slippery on her toes, and she was worried she would fall -- she walked slowly, setting her tender feet down carefully so that she didn't slip and fall. She wore no makeup, and had stopped shaving her pussy. Her legs she still shaved, but who knew -- maybe she would completely give up the beauty rituals of human beings and give herself totally to the forest, walk on all fours like a doe, allow hair to grow where it would.
She knew the path now. The First Clearing lay up ahead. Tarri no longer feared Bexes. She had become used to this undead perversion simply through exposure.
Tarri left the creek, stepped into the clearing. Bexes lay before her, splayed out as always in the position in which it had died. Once she reached it, Bexes reared up onto two legs, and regarded her with its corpse face. Then it turned around, and she followed the deer into the forest once again.
The strange light of the Second Clearing burned ahead. The gate to the clearing was old and rusty, and Bexes nosed it open. Tarri now felt calm, even peaceful. Having decided to return to the Second Clearing, she would simply do whatever Woland wanted. Nothing mattered except pleasing him. If he wanted her simply to sit naked at his feet while he smoked, or to prepare his weird stew for him, she would do it; if he wanted her to suck him off or rub him with hot oil all over his body, she would do it; if he wanted her to be a slut for him, to fuck her and come in her pussy, she would do that, too. What mattered was only that she not let her own will intrude for even a moment. That, paradoxically, would be the only real perversion she could commit.
She entered the Second Clearing, and Bexes closed the gate behind her. Woland stood with his back turned, at his table; steam curled around his white robe. Beside him stood Rachel, waiting.
"I'm here, Master," said Tarri. She kept her feet together, head bowed, hands behind her back, as he liked.
