She looks down at the text that startles her out of her stupor. It’s from a foreign number. She closes the phone and gets up, giving up on sleep. Her violin croons at her from the piano room, and she crosses to it, lured by the promise of sore fingertips and cleared minds.
The violin purrs under her fingers, and the sound of music soothes her soul. She’s never more grateful for the sound insulation of the piano room, because Petra sleeps soundly when she goes to check on her after her arms go sore.
Still, the phone is practically shrieking at her from its silent stillness on her nightstand. She washes her face, goes into the room, and it still shrieks at her. The foreign number blares itself into existence. She rubs her eyes, her forehead, the pulse pounding in her temple. When she opens her eyes, it’s still there.
She squares her shoulders, thinks ‘What do I have to be afraid of to?’, and approaches the phone as though approaching a trapped animal. It doesn’t buzz again, but the text is still there on her screensaver. She swipes past the password, and lets the feeling of familiarity and dread settle deep into her stomach as she opens the text. It’s simple:
‘Can we talk?’
A second text, followed up after a few minutes, as if the sender realized how little they revealed:
‘About Petra.’
Then another, after another few minutes, and the tone of it is so unlike the woman she used to know that she wonders for a crazed instant if someone had stolen the phone and is playing a practical joke on her:
‘This is Lydia.'
A final text:
'Tár. Lydia Tár.’
She stares at the words, bright in the complete darkness of her- theirs, once- bedroom, and shuts her phone off again. The ringing in her ears quiet in the rustling of her duvet as she lays back down in bed. Her mind runs a mile a minute, but one thought burns brighter than anything else. It lulls her to sleep, a sweet symphony like music to her ears:
Lydia Tár needs to suffer.
The next morning, she edits a text and sends it off. The phone lies innocently on her nightstand, and she stands to go make Petra breakfast. She’s never been particularly proficient in the kitchen, but besides the initial eyes falling in disappointment, Petra has said nothing. She reminds Petra to eat her vitamins.
“Sharon?” She turns from where she’s cutting up pieces of melon for Petra’s lunch. “Can we go see Lydia tomorrow?” Tomorrow is Saturday. Petra hasn’t seen Lydia in two months. She’s running out of excuses to tell Petra why she can’t see her mother. She thinks back to her text.
“If you promise you’ll eat all your vegetables at lunch and dinner today.” Petra’s face lights up, and Sharon feels a pang of guilt pierce her stomach. She turns back to the melon.
She wonders what Lydia thinks when she sees her text as she drives Petra to school. Her text back is simple, gives away nothing:
‘Come to Berlin tomorrow.’
She thinks she knows what Lydia would do. First, she would frown, her eyebrows drawing tightly together. It won’t escape her notice that Sharon is commanding, not asking. She’ll run her fingers over her lips, chew her lower lip unconsciously until she notices and stops. The thought will fester in her mind, the lure of Petra heavy, outweighing everything else. She’ll sigh, the sound weighed down, and unwillingly fork over her money for a flight from where ever she is to Berlin. Unwilling, because that way she concedes to Sharon’s power play.
The violin sings under her fingers today, and she soars through the notes like an eagle soaring in the sky. Elation is such an obvious color on her that more than once someone asks her if something good has happened. She says nothing, “Just happy for the weekend.” Her heart pounds out the truth every time: Lydia Tár is coming into her clutches.
Lydia sends her another text that night, after she’s put Petra to sleep (“I ate all my vegetables, Sharon,” Petra says sleepily. “Can we see Lydia tomorrow?” She wonders if she’ll have to lie to her daughter and nods. “Good job, baby,” she whispers, presses a kiss to a small forehead.) and has poured herself a cup of wine. She doesn’t drink often; dislikes being controlled by her own senses instead of the other way around. Still, she finds herself drawn to the warmth promised by the bottle tonight. The wine is tawny on her tongue; it supplements the text. Try as she might, she can’t discern animosity in the short text:
‘Where should I go to meet you?’
She could make her wait, but the wine loosens her inhibitions and she’s thrown off by the sincerity. Her fingers tap a response back:
‘Petra is at a friend’s until 5. Come to the house before.’
Lydia’s response pings back quickly. ‘Alright.’ Another text comes in, a few moments later, an afterthought, ‘Thank you.’
She shuts her phone off and doesn’t reply. She realizes belatedly that she hasn’t asked when Lydia’s flight comes in. The rest of the wine goes down smoothly.
In bed, sleep doesn't come quickly. The bed is wide, cold. She is desperate for sleep, but her mind races. So she lets her fingers wander, erotic and melancholic. It doesn't take much before she comes, her hand pressed into her mouth to silence any sounds. The warmth afterwards cradles her to sleep.
Petra pouts a little when she tells her that Lydia will be here when she comes back from Christine’s, but when her friend comes she goes without complaint. Sharon waves goodbye, reminds Petra to be good, and goes back into the house. She dresses carelessly, realizing when she steps to find a belt that she’s unknowingly dressed in a dress shirt and clean trousers, uncannily like Lydia. She buckles in the belt and ties her hair back, her curls fanning out behind her. A shield of sorts.
When the knock comes, she’s sitting in the living room, reading with a glass of wine. She waits for a moment, letting the second knock, more timid this time, come again. Then she opens the door.
“Sharon.” The sound of her voice, gravely and deep, resonates in the silence. Lydia has lost weight, the shadows under her cheekbones more prominent. She’s still in her characteristic grays and neutrals, familiar. Sharon feels a prick under her clavicles, then anger at the prickle of tenderness. “May I come in?”
She says nothing, steps aside and waves Lydia in. Her eyes observe while her mind churns: Lydia will take note of the wine glass Sharon left on the counter; Lydia will think she’ll be able to ween something out of a wine-softened Sharon. Lydia will notice the book next to the glass; she’ll make a comment about it to showcase her superiority. Lydia will see her favorite chair pushed to the corner of the room; she’ll be indignant and it will seep through into her words as she speaks to Sharon.
Lydia remains standing. Her hands are deep in her pockets, and her stormy grey eyes are unreadable. When she speaks, though, her voice is undeniably sincere. It throws Sharon off. “Thank you for seeing me.”
She shrugs. She lets herself give Lydia a morsel of hope. “Petra misses you.” She speaks in German. Lydia will know what she means by it.
She watches carefully, but the only sign of displeasure that Lydia makes is a slight darkening of her eyes. She answers in German, too. Sharon feels a flash of vindictive pleasure. “I’ve missed her.” Then, softer, “I’ve missed Berlin.”
Sharon ignores the implication. “What do you want?” It comes out softer than she means for it to, because she doesn't know how to react to a compliant Lydia. The sight of it sends heat down her body. She clears her throat and reaches for the wine.
Almost as though acting on instinct, Lydia reaches out. In the next instant, she stops herself, tucks her hand back into her pocket, controls her expression. Sharon ignores the flash of disapproval in Lydia’s grey eyes and takes a sip. “The injunction fell through.”
Sharon nods. Francesca has disappeared entirely, which means she wasn’t able to stand in court. The only things against Lydia are the accusations online, Krista’s suicide letter, and her actions against Elliot. The accusations are baseless; even Sharon can tell the ‘racist’ video is edited, and poorly at that. The suicide letter coincided with Krista’s record of addictions and stays in mental institutions. Elliot forgave Lydia publicly, under the auspices of reports of Lydia being ‘unwell’. Really, the only thing stopping Lydia coming back to Berlin is herself.
Sharon wonders if social media realizes how easily Lydia can slither away from repercussions. She wonders if she is immoral because she wants Lydia to suffer for the hurt Lydia caused her. She couldn't care less about the likes of Krista Taylor.
“I was,” Lydia clears her throat. A nervous tick. Odd. Lydia is too good at putting on masks to be this readable. “If the divorce… I was hoping to reach an agreement for joint custody with you for Petra.”
She snorts. She doesn’t mean to. But she snorts, and at Lydia’s incredulous expression can only snort again. She lets out peals of laughter that might sound like sobs if she looked any closer. She doesn’t.
“Joint custody?” She chortles out when she can speak again. “Which court do you think is going to give you that?” She takes a deep breath, laughs stilling, words darkening. Lydia looks shocked. “You may have avoided the courts, but everyone knows.” A half-lie. The truth is hidden deep in rumors. “Can you run from the court of public opinion?”
Lydia’s German has always been impeccable; Sharon once believed Lydia is German. Now Lydia stumbles over the syllables, “Don’t be cruel.”
Sharon takes another sip of her wine. She sets her glass down, ignores the coaster, just to see if Lydia’s brow will crinkle. It does. She’s glad she can still predict that much. “You're telling me that?”
Lydia’s face, already pale, pales even more. She’s a sheet, paper-thin and skeletal white. “You’ve always been the only person who’s counsel I seek.”
The power is relishing. Sharon takes a step closer. For a moment, she thinks Lydia will cower. The heady smell of her shampoo attacks Sharon’s senses. She takes a deep breath. Arousal sprinkles over her rage again. Adding fuel. “Really? Love?” Her voice twists on the word. It is a cruel word. It wields power over her, and Lydia abused it. “You know better than that.”
Lydia stands ram-rod straight. Her hands are still deep in her pockets. “Please, Sharon.” She speaks in English now. Sharon feels another gleam of vicious victory. Lydia hates revealing vulnerability. “You know I respect you.”
Perhaps that, to Lydia’s twisted mind, is more meaningful than love. It wouldn’t be far-fetched. Lydia has always thirsted for respect. From the moment she stepped onto the guest conductor’s platform, Sharon could smell it on her. It was tantalizing, the smell of ambition. So was Lydia, lithe and witty. Sharon let herself fall. Let, because she never relinquished her control. She weighed costs and benefits and then let herself fall for Lydia. It was when she found that she couldn’t cut Lydia loose, even when Lydia pranced around under her nose, that the full impact of Sharon’s fall smacked her. She had been rendered blind. Pliant.
She had been seduced by the texture of Lydia Tár’s respect.
She responds in English. She has no qualms about seeming imperfect. “A weekend a month.”
Lydia blinks. “Excuse me?”
“You’ll get a weekend a month.” She repeats herself. “And you will take it. Otherwise, I can find many a court that would give me full custody with no visitation rights.” Lydia isn’t a German national. Her reputation is in tatters. The battle would be bloodless.
They stand too close in an empty room. A whisper away. Lydia’s eyes are dark, indecipherable, even as she stands tense and conceding in Sharon’s territory.
Lydia steps closer. They are nearly pressed together now. “You wouldn’t do that.” A waver punctuates the end of her words. It gives her bluff away. “Not to Petra,” she clarifies.
“No.” Sharon tells her. “You wouldn’t do that to Petra. Because if we go to court, you will know you brought this upon her.”
Her words hit home. Though Lydia still stands nose to nose with her, Sharon feels her sag. Another moment, and Lydia takes a step back.
“Alright.” The word is laced with deep resignation.
Sharon takes a step closer. The gap closes. Resignation is a motley color on Lydia; it makes Sharon infuriated. Lydia deserves what she gets. Lydia does not get to look defeated. Lydia stands barefoot, and Sharon towers over her. It makes her head spin with power. She leans to the side and presses a tender kiss on cold skin. “I’m glad we could reach an agreement.”
She feels Lydia wince away from her lips. She presses another kiss to the other cheek, draws back. Dark stormy grey eyes meet hers, and they are hidden. Another beat, a breath, and suddenly she feels warm lips cover her own. Lydia rises on her toes, and the movement of her lips against Sharon’s are hesitant. A transaction, Sharon thinks.
She bites down hard. Lydia flinches, and then pushes harder. She parts her lips, and Sharon wastes no time thrusting her tongue into the soft recesses of Lydia’s mouth, using her teeth to bit down on a plump lower lip, so hard that she tastes blood. Lydia squeaks, and falls back when Sharon pushes.
Lydia looks up at her, shocked. Her lip is bleeding, the metal taste lingering in Sharon’s dental cavity. “Sharon.”
She feels fire burning up her intestines, a burning to ravage. To hurt, as deeply as she has hurt. Her hands move on their own, and she’s drawing her belt out of its loops. Lydia’s eyes flicker down to it, then back up to her eyes. She repeats, a sliver of fear in her whisper, “Sharon?”
Roughly, Sharon flips Lydia, uses her height and newfound strength. The fragility of Lydia’s wrists in her hands as she groans and arches away pricks Sharon’s eyes. She blinks hard and wretches Lydia’s hands up to tie them together with her belt. Lydia’s struggles are weak. Sharon tugs at impeccably pressed dress pants until they come off. Underneath her, splayed on the couch in her underwear, Lydia is small. Bird-like. Immensely breakable. Lydia shudders when Sharon’s fingernails trace the barely healed scars on her back. “You’ll do what I say,” she switches back to German evenly. Lydia whimpers. “If you tell me to stop, Petra stays at Christine’s. If you come before I allow, we go to court.”
Lydia’s face is pressed into the cushions. Sharon flips her again, starts unbuttoning the crisp, collared shirt Lydia dons. Calmly: “Do you understand?”
“Yes.” Her voice, majestic and all-consuming on the conduction’s platform, is small. Nearly a sob.
Sharon finishes the last button and pulls the shirt off. Lydia wears a simple black bra. Sharon’s eyes rove over the swell of flesh newly revealed hungrily. Her fingers ache to touch, grab. Heat pools under her abdomen, and her answer is heated. “What?”
“Yes.” Lydia’s face is pressed into her arm. Her answer is wrangled.
“Good.” She tugs off Lydia’s underwear, bends to take the soft skin on her neck into her mouth. She sucks hard. It will bruise tomorrow, and the thought spurs her on. Her hand finds Lydia’s folds. “You’re wet,” she pulls back to remark coldly.
Lydia trembles. Her eyes are shut tightly, and her lips press together so hard they are pale. The look enrages Sharon. How dare Lydia look as though she is mistreating her? She raises her other hand and smacks Lydia across the face. Skin reddens immediately, and Lydia’s eyes fly open to stare at her in disbelief. “Look at me.” Sharon spits out, her anger getting the best of her.
Lydia’s not nearly wet enough when Sharon thrusts two fingers inside her for it not to sting, but she makes no sound. Her eyes remain open, though they flutter weakly, and her gaze is dazed. She looks at Sharon through hazy grey fog, and Sharon feels sadistic victory coursing through her veins as she thrusts harder, curling her fingers inside Lydia to scrape her walls. She leans in to suck the tender flesh under Lydia’s chin, paints her skin with spit. Her other hand forces open Lydia’s mouth, shoving her fingers into her mouth. She presses down on Lydia’s tongue, and finally she hears the sounds of anguish and euphoria that erupt from Lydia’s throat. She removes her hand, glad that Lydia doesn’t try to stifle herself again, and leans down to swallow Lydia’s sounds. One hand continue pumping, thrusting in and out harder and harder, strength pumping through Sharon’s veins. The other moves to Lydia's long, elegant neck. She squeezes. Lydia chokes in her mouth.
Lydia’s legs start twitching, starts to make sounds that Sharon knows means she’s about to come. “Don’t come,” she tells Lydia calmly, replacing her hand on Lydia’s neck with her teeth. Her hands don’t slow.
Lydia nods, her face pale and sweaty, and she bites her lip hard. Sharon takes pity on her, doesn’t try to force sounds out of her again, and keeps pumping, rubbing her palm against Lydia’s clit periodically.
“Please,” the sound wretches out of Lydia’s mouth after a few more minutes. “Please, Sharon.”
She slows her hand a little, releases Lydia’s nipple from her mouth. She asks, her voice cold, “Please what?”
Lydia meowls, her breaths coming so fast she could be hyperventilating. “Please let me come, please, please, PLEASE,” she shrieks as Sharon's other hand flicks Lydia's clit, all semblance of cool and collectiveness disappearing.
Sharon appraises her. Lydia is drenched in sweet, her lip still bleeding from where Sharon had bit her, made worse by Lydia biting her own lip to keep quiet. Her dress shirt is unbuttoned, crumpled, her bra undone but still hanging on her. Her blond hair sticks to her forehead, hands are clenched in fists where they are still raised above her head, legs squirming but spread wide as Sharon kneels between them and pummels her. Her neck is dotted with red, glistening with sweat and spit.
Sharon takes pity on the pitiful creature in front of her.
“Count to fifteen. If you mumble, stop, or stutter, we start over. If I can’t hear clearly, we start over. When you get to fifteen, I let you come.”
She starts moving her hand again, and Lydia cries out. She bites herself, hard, on the arm, and Sharon nearly stops when she sees Lydia draw blood. She’s already taken pity on Lydia, she reminds herself, and steels herself against the panting out of Lydia’s mouth.
“One.” Lydia grits out. “Two.” A moan erupts out of her mouth, but the next word is still clear. “Three.” Sharon’s fingers flick her clit, and Lydia’s body nearly vaults off the bed. “Four.” Sharon takes Lydia’s nipple back into her mouth. Massages her other breast. “Five.” The sounds become more and more strangled as Lydia continues. “Six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven,” Sharon is rubbing Lydia’s clit now, hard and fast, the way she knows Lydia likes. “Twelve, thirteen, fourteen, FIFTEEN!” Lydia screeches the last word. “Can I come can I come can I come can I come?”
Surprised and sated that Lydia is still asking her, Sharon releases the hardened nipple in her mouth and says, low and deep over Lydia’s crazed mumbling, “Yes.”
Lydia screams. Her body launches clean off the bed, almost as though she is being ripped apart by the orgasm. Her chest heaves, arching up, and her hands go red with the strength they push against the leather belt. She convulses, clamps down hard around Sharon's fingers. It's stunning-- Lydia Tár, undone.
Lydia falls back down, still sobbing, boneless. Her body twitches when Sharon removes her fingers, but she doesn’t say anything, just breathes like sobs. Her arm is still bleeding from where she bit herself, and Sharon suppresses the urge to get her a bandage. Instead, she stands. She contemplates briefly leaving Lydia like that, tired and tied. The pulsing of her own arousal, though, demands attention. She weighs letting Lydia know her effect on Sharon with ruining Lydia. She chooses the latter. In one swift move she’s pulled down her own trousers and in another she is straddling Lydia’s face. Lydia jerks back.
“Be a good girl,” she tells Lydia. “Show me how you do it to your pretty young things.”
Lydia’s eyes look up at her. They are not reproachful, not sullen. They are numb, dazed, and Sharon grabs a handful of her hair.
The first touch of Lydia’s tongue nearly makes Sharon come, but she won’t give Lydia the pleasure. Instead, she grits her teeth to swallow her moan and starts talking, struggling to keep her voice even. German slips out. “Imagine those pretty things seeing you now.” Lydia groans against her clit. “Imagine the orchestra seeing you now. The great,” a moan interrupts her, and she can’t stop it. She continues. “The great, impossible Lydia Tár, used like a fucking sex toy.”
Lydia’s tongue teases her clit, finding easily a sensitive spot. Her teeth scrape Sharon at times, gently, even as Sharon keeps speaking. “That’s what you are now, Tár. A discarded thing good for only one thing. You think you have control?” She gasps, pants, continues. In English, so there is no misunderstanding: “You are pathetic.”
She comes, arching her back into the sky, Lydia’s mouth on her clit.
“Make yourself presentable,” she says when she can talk again. “You don’t want Petra to see you like this.” She unties the leather belt from Lydia’s wrists and wretches her up. “Do you want to see what you look like?”
“No.” Lydia croaks out, her eyes closed.
She pushes Lydia up, drags her to the full-length mirror in their bedroom. Forces her to open her eyes. “Too bad.”
She drops her hand, pulls up her pants, and walks out of the bedroom.