Magdala

He pressed his thumb against her lip, letting the pressure build until she looked up at him with trusting dark eyes, racked with fear. She was beautiful, pale and reeking of an innocence that thrilled him. How old was she? Twenty? Twenty one? Young enough to be his daughter. The perverse nature of that fact was something to savour as he leant in closer to her.

"Do older men usually fawn over you?" He said, his voice soft in the fading stagelight. She stared up at him, silently, those pitch like orbs seeping into his mind. He stroked her cheek. So soft, pure like fresh linen. The summer sun had warmed it a little, and a fiery resistance radiated from her. He traced his fingers down to her neck. "Do they usually make a fool out of themselves around you?" She was blushing a little now, a tinge of lust in the corner of her cupid's bow. He leant in closer, inhaling her scent. Floral, a childish perfume. "I bet they do."

He let his hands trace down to her waist, small and supple against his hands. Somewhere within her, a pulse drummed against his palms. So silent, so remote from his own extroverted life, spent out in front of cameras and audiences like a bizarre dollshouse. This little mouse, a clever little mouse, moved in the shadows, ripe with young beauty and an intelligence that left him uneasy. The Showman and The Shadow, pressed together at the back of the theatre in some strange twisting of fate. God, he ached for her. He imagined her small round breasts beneath her plum red dress, her soft limbs untoned and unworn by time.

He wasn't what she has imagined, he knew that, not the smiling charming gentleman the world knew him as. He was predatory, wolf like, filled with an anger that surprised her. He could read it in the small seconds where he touched her. Her silence began to irritate him. "Well, my pretty?" Again, she said nothing. "Do they touch you like this?" He raised a hand to her breast, pressing it so firmly that her heartbeat ripped out like a caged bird beneath. She looked away, desperate for him to tire of her disinterest. It did the opposite, it filled him with a rage to break her out of this strange meditation. Furiously, he pulled her skirt up, separating her pale white legs with a heavy hand, pinning her to the wall.

"I will have you," he said, grabbing her jaw. "And you will look at me. God damn it, you will watch me do this to you." He entered her, hoping the suddenness of the act would cause her to cry out, do anything to remove her regality. She shut her eyes in pain, her body shuddering against him. She was wet, tight and warm, perfectly formed like an unfurled rose. Her lips parted, red against the white of her skin. Fuck you, Magdala, he thought, staring at her, numb to the pleasure beneath him. Fuck you for even making your rape an act of your piety.

He'd wanted to reduce her to a whore in the act, break her spell over him, just another woman he'd had in the gallery. But she wasn't, she was ethereal, frightening, basked in white stage light and the red ripped fabric of her dress, lipstick spilled across her cheek as if some ugly wound, some bizarre mark of suffering on a saint. He felt no pleasure, only the numbness of awe at her resistance. He had entered her body, but not her soul. Normally women whimpered and pleaded, giving into his wishes with greedy mouths and hands, but she just shut her eyes and seemed to pray up to the stars painted on the ceiling.

"Look at me!" He cried, shaking her until her eyes opened, chestnut and blazing with defiance. He stared back at her, feeling the closeness of her soul for the first time in the act. But not any sign of conquering her, making her human to him, only a sense of vandalising the sacred. A candle burned in her and he could feel the heat scalding him, hammering into his hands and limbs.

For the first time, he saw droplets of sweat on her forehead, the sheen of pallor against her neck. She was ill, feverish, too weak to resist but too divine to be broken. Finishing suddenly, he felt her small body become limp against his. "Magdala?" He asked, surprised by his concern. The pulse was there, the eyes closed. Hastily pulling down her dress, he picked her up, childlike. She needed rest, sleep. As he carried her, he became filled with dread. This wasn't a spell that could be broken by lust.

He loved her.