Contract Broken (Contracted #2)

by Aya DeAniege

  After a month working in the gym, one of my trainers mentioned a night class to me. The class was on self-defence, geared towards teaching women how to take down a bigger opponent.

  He would bring it up every single day until I finally gave in to his suggestions and attended.

  Once a week I went to a therapist. Our sessions mainly revolved around us sitting there and her asking how my week had gone. She never really pried into anything or insisted we talk about something. If it did come up in conversation, she’d ask if I wanted to talk about it and I would say no.

  I didn’t want to share with this woman, even if Mr. Wrightworth trusted her with his secrets. To me, she seemed like a predator, and that made me uncomfortable. She wasn’t open about her relationship with the community or about how much she knew. I only had Mr. Wrightworth’s words to go on.

  Once a month I would go to the stylist, then I would spend the entire next day in medical. They would check everything from my toes to the top of my head. I was not the only one to receive this treatment. Every other worker in the Program had a mandatory checkup once a month Nicole did most of my checkup for me, or was with me as the doctor was there.

  The first month she frowned, the second month she asked me about the bruising on my shins.

  I had gotten clumsy suddenly. I’d forget I had a drawer open and run into it. I’d take some skin off my arm where I hit the edge of a table. Smack my head on a table when I bent to pick up a pen. Little things, things that had never bothered me before. Most of the time I didn’t even remember what I had done to earn the bruise. I’d find them when I showered, or the next morning as I dressed.

  The entire time there was a building pressure under my skin. I didn’t know what it was but suspected it had something to do with not knowing what was going on. In those two months, I hardly saw or spoke to Mr. Wrightworth. Only when I requested a meeting or we happened to pass one another in the hallway.

  I learned that both the men and women of the Program whispered about him whenever he wasn’t around. They didn’t seem to care that everything they said was recorded and could be viewed at his leisure later on. The whisperings revolved around his sexuality and who they thought he was favouring at that moment. There were sidelong glances at me whenever he walked into the same room as me.

  I didn’t know then, but apparently Mr. Wrightworth has a tell. He would ignore those who were doing well, or who he was keenly interested in. Even if that interest was because they were recovering from a bad contract. Publicly he was always watched. It seemed everyone wanted to catch him playing favourites, to find him giving preference to someone he liked. They all wanted to be the one to find Mr. Wrightworth’s flaw because he appeared too perfect.

  Little did they know, the man’s dark secrets were played out in his apartment.

  When not working or at a mandatory event, I spent my time in my room watching whatever the controllers put on the television. I made certain to wear clothing at all times while in the sleeping portion of my room because I had no idea how to control the television without them. It was almost comforting to know that they were watching over me, but remained faceless.

  I’m not sure how they managed the whole building. Possibly they simply loaded up a random playlist of videos for each apartment with the television on.

  One day they put on Vikings vs. Zombies: An Erotic Tale and I ended up sobbing my eyes out at the reminder but didn’t ask them to turn it off. I cried through the entire movie. As the credits rolled there was a knock on my door and then footsteps running away.

  With a sniffle and a frown, I approached the door cautiously and yanked it open. There sat a large, floppy, stuffed animal with a piece of paper taped to his nose.

  ‘Sorry we made you sad.’

  As it turned out, the controllers didn’t just control things. They did learn about everyone in the Program and a little about people in general. For the most part, they didn’t react to what they saw. We were just people going through the motions of life.

  They didn’t like to see someone crying alone, though, and would do whatever they could to cheer them up.

  I dragged the new item into my room, kicked the door closed and dropped onto the bed with it in my lap and my arms wrapped around it.

  It was so soft and squishy.

  And then they chose then to put cat videos on my screen. What is it about cat videos that make them so timeless? The videos changed a little each time a new one started until I ended up watching baby pandas tumbling over one another. I had never seen a panda before, they went extinct long before I was born, but they were also so adorable. I flopped over as one of them did and was out like a light.

  I snapped awake when the door opened. Though, I lay perfectly still to not give away the fact that I knew someone was in the room. I waited until the person was right at the edge of the bed. The element of surprise, my self-defence teacher said, was a powerful weapon.

  If he didn’t have such a unique form—which I recognized in the light cast by the tumbling bundle of puppies playing on the television screen—I would have used my self-defence training on Mr. Wrightworth. As it was, he reached past me and turned on the light attached to the wall above my bed.

  He frowned down at me, then looked at the stuffed animal. With a glance, the television shut off. Mr. Wrightworth seemed to stare off for a moment, then turned back to me.

  He was a bit like a god in the Program building. The controllers were willing to do whatever he wanted and anticipated his every need. He had hired them, he knew them so intimately, and they knew him so well that sometimes he’d only open his mouth to say something and the room would change to his desires.

  “I was alerted to some odd behaviour, are you all right?” he asked quietly.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “Ah, the explosive ‘fine’ answer,” he murmured.

  He reached for the blankets and dragged them up over me and the stuffed animal, effectively tucking us both in. Then he sat on the edge of the bed and set a hand on my shoulder.

  “How about I read to you until you fall asleep, and we can discuss everything else in the morning, hm?” he asked, pulling out his phone.

  “I’m not a child. I can put myself to sleep,” I said, trying to sit up.

  His hand, still on my shoulder, suddenly turned to stone. I couldn’t sit up, and it remained that way until I stopped resisting and settled back down onto the bed. It didn’t seem commanding so much as firm. Perhaps a little exasperated, it was the middle of the night, after all. Mr. Wrightworth never did well with sleep deprivation. His patience was short as it normally was.

  At two in the morning, however, he had absolute no time for prideful whining.

  “I never pegged you for a little, but I suppose playing at the different titles is a part of exploration,” he murmured in response. “You will lay there and listen to this story. Ah, here it is.”

  Mr. Wrightworth had a way with the verbal arts. He was gifted with a deep voice and years of being Nathaniel’s aide, and then working with rich folk, had given him an accent unlike any I had ever heard before. I swear he liked reading people to sleep, but he’d never admit it.

  I’m not certain when exactly I fell asleep, but the new sleep was a great deal deeper than that of before. When I awoke again, Mr. Wrightworth was gone, and the curtains had been pulled back. I had the stuffed animal in both my arms, hugged close with my nose buried in the top of its head right between its ears. It was so fluffy, and it smelled a little of plastic and a lot of clean fabric. I brushed my face against the soft fur of the bunny and considered staying in bed.

  Then the television turned on. Some happy woman from a children’s show was talking about greeting every day with a smile and a song.

  With a groan, I threw back the blankets and dragged myself out of bed. I tossed the blankets back to where they belonged. Then I set the stuffed animal on top of the bed.

  Going through my day was almost painful. I wanted to stay in bed,
and in that moment of the night before when Mr. Wrightworth started reading the story. It was the safest I had felt in months. It was the first night I hadn’t dreamed of my time with Nathaniel’s father.

  At breakfast I dropped a knife on my foot, thankfully it was only a butter knife. I very nearly dropped my tray when I tripped over the tiles on the floor. I was completely out of my rhythm. Every table was full, I had to wait awkwardly for someone who had finished, and clearly had been for a while, to notice that I was waiting, and to get up and move.

  Then the elevator didn’t work. Not, as in the controller didn’t open the doors, but the elevator was literally broken. I walked up ten flight of stairs and ended up huffing and puffing at the top.

  “Need to do more stairs,” Mr. Wrightworth said as he held the door open. “I need to see you at some point today. Will three hours from now work?”

  I could only shrug as I panted. I had nothing going on in the day, having just closed my first audit and about to start my next one.

  “You’re right, I’ll bring you lunch, and we’ll eat in the archives as we talk,” he said, tugging at his tie. “See you in four hours.”

  I walked into the archives and had just slid the glass door into place when Kathy walked in.

  Yes, her name was Kathy, and she was the chatty one.

  I spent an hour just trying to get her to shut up about her dog. First off, I didn’t understand her keeping an animal that didn’t listen and chewed everything and pissed all over everything. And yet she refused to train the thing. That is not something to talk about. That’s something to deal with on your own. She was almost always talking about that dog.

  Unless she was one-upping you.

  Kathy was just about the only annoying thing about the Program. While in the building, I never understood how she got hired in the first place, or what she did. Everyone knew her, but no one knew what she did besides wander the hallways bothering people.

  Like it was some creepy social experiment.

  After Kathy had left, I hurt myself no less than six times. Hitting my knee on the file cabinet, slicing into my finger with a file, as in the thick manila sheet that holds the files. Until that point, I thought papercuts were bad. Getting cut by something thicker than paper somehow hurts worse.

  Slammed my hand in another drawer, ran forehead first into a pole, and—just as Mr. Wrightworth walked in—somehow managed to stab myself in the finger pad with a letter opener.

  I had been playing with it idly, and he startled me. I don’t care what he might have said about what he saw, I did not stab myself on purpose, I was not, at any point, trying to hurt myself.

  “Who gave you a letter opener?” Mr. Wrightworth asked as he finished placing the bandage.

  “It was in a drawer,” I said, motioning with my free hand.

  “Mm,” he responded, sounding very much like he didn’t believe me. “I brought you a book. The church book club will be reading this in a month or so, and I thought perhaps you would like to join the book club.”

  I perked up at the mention of the church. The book he handed me was some silly thing that was relatively simple. It wasn’t even very thick. Frustrated, I looked up at Mr. Wrightworth, thinking that he was trying to pull a fast one on me. During my visit to the church, I had heard the group discussing Canterbury Tales by Chaucer. It didn’t make sense to me that they’d be reading something by a contemporary author which was a third of the size of Canterbury Tales.

  The man smiled ever so slightly. “I also brought lunch. It seems you and I need to have a discussion.”

  “What about?” I asked, setting the book on the table.

  Mr. Wrightworth ignored me and picked up a container, handing it to me before he picked up the other one. He pulled out a utensil for each of us and gave me one. Then he sat and started eating as I glowered at him. Annoyed, assuming that Mr. Wrightworth wasn’t going to talk until I ate, I sat beside him and poked at my food. We ate in silence.

  When he finished eating, Mr. Wrightworth closed his container and placed it back into the bag.

  Then he reached out and took my half-eaten container and set it back into the bag as I tried to follow it.

  He didn’t even say anything to me about it, just did it.

  Licking his lips, Mr. Wrightworth sat back in his seat and studied me. There was something so very self-assured about the way he sat. He seemed to enjoy the moment of silence as I struggled.

  “I’ve had complaints. Not complaints, but comments, really. Perhaps concerns would be a better way to put it. I’ve had concerns about your behaviour.”

  “About what?” I asked. “I do my work. I keep my head down. Is this about Kathy? I mean, sure, I don’t like her, but I’ve never been rude to her.”

  “Kathy? No, she complains about everyone who doesn’t agree with her every word,” he murmured, sitting forward to entwine his fingers and set them on the table. “The comments I received are about your well-being. It seems you’ve been hurting yourself more and more.”

  “I—no, that’s not true, I’m clumsy. I guess...?”

  Mr. Wrightworth looked pointedly at my bandaged finger before he looked up slowly and met my eyes. “Clumsy?”

  His look made my breath hitch in my throat. My stomach twisted as the man waited for an answer that I couldn’t seem to form. At least, not an answer that I knew he would accept. As the silence stretched on, Mr. Wrightworth appeared almost amused. I struggled to get anything out of my mouth. If only to get the talk over with so I could go back to work.

  “I’ve been running into things. Maybe there’s something wrong with my brain and my balance. I’m not hurting myself on purpose.”

  “I have yet to accuse you of doing it on purpose,” Mr. Wrightworth said. “There has been some who suggest that you are doing it for attention. Do you feel starved for attention, Darling?”

  He never uses my real name.

  The only name he ever used was ‘Darling’ and I suppose he wasn’t just asking after my well-being then, or my mental stability. He was asking about something else. It had been months and months, after all.

  And I had been thinking about it, craving it. Like an addict cut off from their drug of choice, I lay awake at night thinking about it, but not daring to touch myself.

  “Well, I don’t exactly have friends,” I said, looking down to my hands in my lap.

  I picked at my nails as Mr. Wrightworth watched me silently. I found a snag on one of my nails and picked at it vehemently as the silence drew on. I glanced up once, catching those hazel eyes watching me, then focused back on my lap.

  “I told you I don’t make friends easy,” I said to my lap.

  “You did, just as I told you that I don’t make friends quickly. What about Nicole? You only visit her for your medical appointments.”

  “I... didn’t know I could visit Nicole.”

  “I see,” Mr. Wrightworth murmured. “Then I suppose I should tell you that you need to make an effort to make female friends. You need to talk to someone about something. Someone besides Kathy. She doesn’t count, even if you do talk to her, it’s like talking to a wall with that one.

  “You can visit Nicole. She’s been wondering why you haven’t. She thinks that her religious beliefs and yours might align, that you could enjoy one another’s company.”

  We talked like that in public. Anything to do with the community was referred to as if it were religion instead.

  “I can maybe, if I...” I sighed. “I don’t know where to find Nicole outside of my medical appointments.”

  “Talk to her during the appointment about doing something else,” he said sternly. “And look at me when I’m talking to you, not at your lap.”

  I sat up and met his eyes. But only for a moment, then I looked away again.

  “You should try to make regular friends as well. You need to go to movie night and try to talk to someone else. Not making connections is dangerous for you, you are very closed off.”

 
“I’m not closed off, not at all.”

  “The controllers feel sorry for you,” Mr. Wrightworth said. “They’ve never given someone something before. If there’s a problem, they report it. That’s their jobs. I had to write up the controllers for inappropriate behaviour. The only damned reason I knew there was a problem was because I walked in to check on them.”

  “You wrote them up for having a heart?” I demanded.

  The man made a sound that was almost a snarl.

  “The rules are very clear. They broke the rules, and they had to be written up. They’re damned well lucky circumstances aren’t different, or I’d bend them over their desks.”

  I flushed at the thought.

  “Your position with Nathaniel was sexually based,” Mr. Wrightworth purred out. “Some of the men have started talking about the possibility that you miss that part of your contract. They may try contact of some sort.”

  “No, I don’t want that!”

  I was up out of my seat and had placed the table between us before I knew what I was doing. The extra space was needed. I looked to the exit and wondered if I could make it out the door before Mr. Wrightworth caught me. Would the controllers interfere if he...?

  He’s gay. I’m afraid a gay man might hurt me.

  I dragged in a slow breath and hugged myself. My heart beat hard in my chest. I could feel it in my throat and almost hear it in my ears. The whole world seemed to get smaller despite my reminding myself that Mr. Wrightworth was gay. He wasn’t a threat to me.

  “That is interesting,” he said, standing as I shrunk away from him. “Have you been seeing your therapist?”

  “You know everything about me, you can probably see the tapes of my sessions, so you know I’ve been going to the therapist.”