by Moore, Gabi
“You heard her, now, put down the gun,” I heard army boy’s voice rise above the chaos.
Turning around from my place in the kitchen and daring to look into the living room long enough to realize what was happening, I saw that my boss had been knocked over, and was bleeding from the nose. Another man had been shot and was bleeding out on my floor. The wounded man’s back was pressed up against the front door. He didn’t look good. In fact, he didn’t look like he was going to make it out of my living room.
A sinking feeling came over me, and I looked up to see the bullet hole in the door. The wood to the door was cheap, and the light coming through from the day outside only caused a bleak contrast to come into my mind.
I trained my weapon on the man who had stopped by to drop off the bag. The man who had stolen the bag from me, and who had gotten me into this mess. I blamed him wholeheartedly, and I knew that there were only minutes left before the police arrived. I was certain that the neighbors would have called the moment that they heard the first gunshots. My entire cover was blown, I had to think fast.
That was the first time I had actually shot a man.
I wasn’t prepared for the psychological trauma caused by taking such an action. We may think, at times, that we are capable of pursuing a certain type of action, and we may even play around by pretending that we are comfortable moving in a given direction — if the theater of the moment suggests that such an action take place.
I took a deep breath and began to cry.
“Fuckin’ shoot him, Piper,” my boss said.
He was on the floor and had his pistol out on the ground. My pistol was locked on the man with my bag, and the man’s pistol was focused on my boss. My eyes continued to shift between the man dying at the door, and the man who stole my bag. I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t move forward with the kill.
While I was still deliberating over what the hell I was going to do, the man jumped through the front window, carrying my bag with him as he left.
I could hear the police sirens echoing throughout the cityscape. They were on their way, and all I could do was stand there frozen, and helpless.
My boss checked the pulse on the man on the floor and found that it was negative — he was already gone. Running over to me, he grabbed me by the arms and dragged me forcefully outside of the room. We left out the back and ended up running through the corridors of the apartment maze adjacent to where I lived.
The whole area was slummy, and we as we ran, we were given shelter by the ambivalence of the community members living nearby.
It wasn’t that they wanted criminals to live near them, it was that they had enough problems by their own merit without having to resort to intervening in the problems of others. I watched doors shut, and curtains get drawn while we passed through the narrow passageways of Venice.
My lungs burned, and yet my boss continued to run and pull me along with him. His grip on my arm was held fast, and there seemed to be no way that he was going to relinquish control. My own heart was beating so fast, and all I could think about was how everything had changed as a result of a single action.
Perhaps it wouldn’t have gotten to this if I hadn’t of pulled the trigger. Or, if I traced things back further than that, perhaps I wouldn’t have arrived here if I had been more selective about where I placed the bag. Finally, I realized that my thoughts moved onward until they reached the place where I was forsaking my own life.
If I hadn’t of been born, continued my inner dialog, none of this would have happened.
When you reach a place like that in your mind, the easiest thing to do is to conclude that you should either act on that information or stop wasting time thinking about the consequentiality of events in sequence. I decided to do that latter, though it took me a fair bit of mucking around in confusion to reach that conclusion.
My boss was absolutely livid during the entire process. He held so tightly onto my arm that I could feel bruises welling up beneath my skin.
Finally, we made it to a place about two miles away from my house.
Apparently, we were far enough away from the apartment, because my boss pushed me into a wall, and got about an inch from my face.
“What the fuck was that about?” he spat.
I could tell that he was furious. He had only been rough like this toward people when they had caused him serious problems. Knowing what I did about how much the bag was worth, I knew he would be upset, unfortunately, I wasn’t in a position to do much of anything besides hyperventilate, and cry.
Then he slapped me.
The strike was a hard, open palm hit across the face. He didn’t hold back either. I was so shocked that he had actually hit me that my tears immediately stopped. I felt a throbbing pain pulse through my face and stared into the eyes of the man who had struck me. I didn’t know it yet, but with that hit, everything had changed.
“You want to explain to me why you fired on Johnson?” he growled, while clutching my shirt inside of his fist.
“I didn’t know…” I began.
“You didn’t know. Well, because you didn’t know, the goods are gone, and one of my best men is now in the morgue.”
I cried. Tears came down from my eyes without much awareness as to why they were coming out.
“I was trying to shoot,” I tried to explain.
“Well, obviously you weren’t trying hard enough, because when you had a chance to shoot him a second time, you held the trigger. Who was that? Some kind of freelance friend of yours, trying to work with you to rip us off?”
His voice was on edge, and it seemed as though he was trying desperately to regain control of a situation that had proven to be completely out of his control.
My boss was a man who didn’t like to be out of control. He liked to have everything just so, and when things didn’t go according to plan, he wasn’t exactly the most graceful man I had ever met. I was authentically scared. There was very little that I felt like I was able to do, and in that moment, with his hand on my shirt, and the knowledge that he had a weapon pointed at my chest, I felt like my life was about to end.
Instead of thinking about why I had shot Johnson, or about why the other man had stolen the bag, I was caught in a thought loop where I was visualizing my death, then and there, in an alley on the east side of the slums. He could have done it, he really could have killed me right there, and nothing would have been done about it. The way that he grit his teeth, and kept exhaling in a fierce and abrupt way demonstrated that he was struggling to maintain control.
“I swear, I didn’t mean to do that,” I begged, my voice quavering. “ I was surprised… and you kicked the door down.”
“I kicked the door down because I thought you were getting mugged! We were visiting to check on things, to make sure that everything was going smoothly. Imagine our surprise, when we have entrusted you with a package as rare and valuable as that particular shipment, only to hear you screaming while some dude is ripping you off.”
Then he lowered his voice, and each word of his question was punctuated by a thrust of his weapon into my chest.
“You’re going to talk, and you’re going to talk now. Who was that man?”
My heart was racing. I could barely think. I was so scared, and if he had only slowed down, or stopped being so aggressive, I might have been able to think clearly, to respond more appropriately to the situation. As it was, I was too frightened to say much at all.
“I don’t know his name,” I replied, haltingly.
“You don’t know his name? A man walks into your house, and walks out with four million dollars worth of inventory, and you don’t even know his name?”
The hand that held the pistol raised up and he slammed the butt of the weapon into the bricks to the right of my head. Little pieces of the wall broke off from the force of his blow, and then I realized that if I was going to get out of this alive, I would have to adapt my approach entirely. I had to become unafraid of this man, and I had to reclaim ownership of the situ
ation.
I took a deep breath and closed my eyes for a second. He slapped me again, but this time, it didn’t sting as it had the first time. As it turns out, the first time, I was responding more in shock than in pain. I didn’t show the same amount of resistance the second time.
They say that when you meet an aggressive force, there are psychological pressures that are buried into an interaction template that both parties are unconsciously participating within. The aggressor, in this case, my boss, was furious, and as I continued to be afraid of him, he continued to push forward in the same method. In order to psychologically break the pattern of engagement, the party who is more conscious needs to assume a role which is outside of the behavioral matrix that has been established. The ‘victim’ needs to shed the role of ‘that which is aggressed toward’, and move into a new state of mind — one without fear.
When I opened my eyes, I stared at him coldly, as unemotionally responsive as I could muster. My eye contact in that moment told him more than anything my words could have ever shared.
I’m not afraid of you, and there is no reason for me to be.
Chapter 11 - Piper
To my surprise, the switch worked.
A consciousness change came over my boss, and he realized that in order to recover the thing which he lost, he was going to need my help. In order for him to fully realize this fact, I was going to have to assist him.
“I can reach him,” I said firmly. “I’ll recover the bag, and we will move forward through this together. I’ve been loyal to you, and there is no reason for me to believe that I want to change that, though if you strike me again, you’ll have to bother locating that fucking thief all on your own, and I’m pretty sure you have other things that are more important to deal with.”
“Why should I trust you?” he asked, pausing a moment, and providing me with one final test of my resolve.
“I’ll let you figure that one out,” I replied, not breaking eye contact. “As for Johnson, maybe you fuckers should learn some manners before you go busting into people’s houses. I had it under control until you showed up. Thanks to you, I’m basically homeless now, so I think you’d better show me a bit more respect.”
He took a deep breath and reconsidered his position. My words rang of truth, and in his heart, he knew that much of what I said was entirely accurate. In spite of the monetary value of the items in the bag, he did have more pressing concerns, which was why he had interested me with the bag to begin with. As for the bit about Johnson’s death, I hadn’t actually killed Johnson, which may have been my only saving grace.
I could still squarely lay the blame on my dad’s friend. The only thing I had to be careful about was implicating my dad in the theft through association. I didn’t want to make things any more difficult for that man that I had already; that much was certain.
“Your move,” I pressed, standing up to him. “Are you going to kill me, or are you going to let me take care of this?”
Presenting the question in such a direct way brought a new point of perspective to the scenario.
He laughed. A twisted, and bewildered sort of laugh. Then he smiled.
“I like you, Piper. I knew I liked you the moment I brought you onto the team. But don’t play things too cocky. You may be valuable to me, but you are only as valuable as the amount of trust I have in you, and right now, that trust is almost gone.”
He hadn’t answered my question, and I couldn’t lower myself to plead because that would be placing myself in a victim’s role once more within our little theater of the moment. It takes a firm will to be able to manage situations like this, and I knew that I had to play my moves just right in order to get out of this with any grace whatsoever.
I didn’t respond.
I met his gaze and didn’t flinch for a second.
He walked closer to me as if testing to see just how far my conviction held.
"You know it's been a while since I had a piece of that ass, he said, looking down on me like he was surveying some goods on the street.
As he spoke to me, he leaned toward me so closely that I could feel the heat from his body pressing up on me.
I knew what I had to do.
This man needed to know that I was 100% committed to him. I knew very well that meant fucking him in broad daylight, in the middle of this quiet slummy neighborhood.
I was okay with that.
I brought my hands to my mouth, intentionally placing some distance between him and myself. With a theatrical display, I brought my palm to my mouth and licked my hand. I let a great deal of spit come out of my mouth, and fall down onto my palm. It was excessive, seductive, willing, and everything that he was looking for in a lover. I saw his eyes gleam as I brought my hand down and shoved it into the front of his pants.
That fucker was already hard. He was ready to take me then and there. Damn, he might have been planning to fuck me this whole time for all I knew.
"I should've known," I said, not bothering to hide my derision.
The comment was obviously a swipe at how effectively he did or did not hide his attraction to me. I wanted to play coy, but I also wanted to come off as a bit of a hard ass.
You can be a confident person without bowing to everyone's will, or allowing people to push you around. The problem is, that if you're trying to convince someone that you actually give a shit about them, that needs to be your number one priority in communication. All forms of behavior our communication. Body language is communication, emotional expression is communication, even the varieties of disgust or acceptance — everything matters.
I had to show no form of fear. Every single emotion that I displayed had to be completely rooted in a desire for this person. What was more, was that I had to act quickly if I hoped to keep this ruse up.
Without a moment's further hesitation, I dropped myself down to my knees and unbuckled Maurice's khakis. I unzipped him and watched with an amazed expression on my face as his penis flopped out from the confines of his designer slacks.
I had seen Maurice's cock before. As a matter of fact, there was nothing spectacular about his cock.
I opened my mouth and brought the head of his cock past my lips. He wasted no time in grabbing the back of my head and shoving the length of his cock down my throat. I gagged, and dug my hands into either side of his ass, merely to hold onto something.
The thing about fucking Maurice is that he likes to be in control. I happen to like men who are in control, but he lacks a certain sense of refinement that some other men possess. Being in control is one thing, and being abusive is another. Maurice bordered on the latter, which was why fucking him was such a tricky task. You had to be committed, otherwise, there was no way around his bullshit.
When I am fucking Maurice, I am reminded every of just how much of a prick he is every single time. It seems as though he is getting just as much pleasure out of treating me with cruelty as I am wishing he would fucking cum already. He tends to get harder, the rougher he ‘plays.’ The problem is that he doesn’t keep his erection for long unless you overload him somehow. The fucker is so insensitive that it’s actually harder than you’d think to get him to cum.
I once watched him fuck a woman until she literally could not walk any longer; it wasn't a good kind of exhaustion either. He was making an example of her, and she was trying her hardest to find some kind of place within the organization. The combination of the two efforts ended up making for a spectacle of cruelty which would not easily be forgotten.
There was a moment, in that public fuck session that Maurice made everyone watch, where the woman began to stand on her own feet. She began to make some aggressive assertion toward Maurice's body. In those moments, she turned his entire paradigm on its head. I actually picked up my own methods of dealing with Maurice from her lead.
While she had the upper hand, it seemed as though she might have successfully found the way out of her situation. Unfortunately, her will wasn't strong enough to maintain that
disposition. Instead, she fell back into the passive, submissive, victim-based role, and was summarily fucked until she literally could not walk away.
The woman ended up being alright, but it had taken her the better part of the week to recuperate.
I thought about the small moments of victory that she had achieved while Maurice’s cock was pummeling the back of my throat. Knowing that I needed to accept him completely, I opened up my throat and gave him full access to my body. While making room in one direction, I opened for a more aggressive motion from behind. I dropped his pants down around his thighs, under the premise of giving myself more access to his cock. He gripped the sides of my hair, essentially using my hair as handles to hold either side of my head. Without missing a moment, I used one hand to grab his balls, and the other hand to shove two fingers into his asshole.
He was tight, and my fingers were too dry make their way inside of him.
I felt him push back harder by shoving his cock inside of my mouth and holding it there so I had to open my jaw as wide as possible just to accommodate the girth of his cock. I was drooling uncontrollably, and all I had to do was take the hand that was cupping his balls and hold it beneath the length of his cock.
Within a moment, he had pulled out, and I gasped for air. My hand went immediately for his shaft and was promptly soaked in a thin coating of saliva. I leaned forward, indicating that this was far from over and that I wanted more. He smiled and didn’t even notice what I was doing before I pushed two fingers firmly inside of his asshole.
It should be said, that Maurice is a tight ass. I mean a tight ass in every sense of the word. He was even too stingy to let me keep my fingers up his ass long enough to manage an explosion from his prostate.
He slapped me with the flat of his hand, and I felt the sting of his strike against my face. I refused to back down and plunged my fingers deeper into his asshole. I was up to the knuckle, and massaging intensely toward his prostate with one hand, while the other hand was pulling tight on his balls.
My mouth was wrapped tightly around the head of his cock, and my hand slipped up from his balls to around his shaft. Having fingers in his asshole seemed to act like a pressure release switch to manage his bullshit. He was wild at first, like a bronco, but now that I had him where I wanted him, I looked up at him with total admiration in my eyes. His attentions toward me ended up being softer, and more compliant.