Beg Me

by Lisa Lawrence

  “Oh, God, that’s horrible,” I said, playing along.

  “Yeah, but it’s like Isaac says, Teresa. To be a prince or princess means having dignity. Self-respect, self-restraint, respect for your brothers and sisters…We ignored the warning signs with Anna. We made mistakes. I look at you, sweetie, and I know I never have to worry.”

  We hugged on that note, and as I smiled and thanked her, I pictured doing my best mawashigeri roundhouse kick upside her head for slandering and murdering my friend. Clock’s ticking, bitch.

  I went back to “work.”

  “Yeah, I knew Anna a bit,” Violet told me later in our dorm room. “I joined, and then she was gone a few weeks later. I thought she was real nice. Couldn’t believe it when they told me all this stuff about her, like, going nuts and dissing Isaac.”

  “That’s what Danielle told me.”

  “Wow.” Violet threw up a hand and let it drop. What are you gonna do?

  “She used to give massages to some of the princes and princesses. That’s what she did before she came here. She was a massage therapist. I had one from her. She was really good at it too. She saved the life of one of the guys once.”

  “Really? How’d she do that?”

  “It was Jimmy, but I don’t know all the details. He had an allergic reaction to something—I don’t know what—and so, like, she’s giving him a massage, and first he starts complaining about his heart beating too fast and then he’s got cold sweats, and then he stops breathing. So Anna does CPR, and she calls for an ambulance. Isaac and Danielle rushed right back from the city.”

  “They were out of the house at the time?”

  “Oh, yeah, a lot of people were. I was at the public library. Isaac and Danielle had to go take care of some business, and Gordon and Trey had tagged along. So there was nobody but the junior princes and princesses left. Must have been really scary.”

  “I bet,” I said.

  “But Jimmy’s okay.”

  “Yeah…”

  You’d think Anna saving Jimmy would make her a bona fide heroine to Danielle and Isaac. The ultimate servicing and caring for a junior Nubian prince of the sarcophacan temple.

  Instead, Anna got led to her death a couple of months later.

  In front of the mansion, a good three acres away from the road, Gordon led all the princes and five of the girls in kihon—Japanese karate basics—on a Sunday. Rows of bald black men in white gis threw punches and kicks as he stood at the front counting off in Japanese: “Ichi!…Ni!…an!…Shi!…Go!…Roku!” And so on. An army to go with the empire.

  I stood on the mansion’s front balcony, carefully checking them out. It didn’t surprise me at all that Gordon was their sensei. I suspected that he was Isaac’s new enforcer, with Andrew Schacter inconveniently dead. Or maybe he was Danielle’s preference.

  The classes were mandatory for all the Nubian princes but voluntary for the girls. I thought it would be better to keep my own fighting talents a secret. For now.

  “What do you think?” asked Violet at my shoulder. “Are they sexy like that?”

  “Some,” I laughed. I didn’t want to tell her what I was thinking.

  None of the students wore colored rank belts, just simple white ones, but I was relieved that most looked to be about purple to first brown level. I could take ’em. Danielle was in there, setting an example. Sloppy blocks, no recoil in her front snap kick. Good. But Gordon was a third-degree black belt, easy, and he’d give me trouble. Oh, man, I hate guys who know karate. Puts us on an even playing field.

  “You and I both have free time,” said Violet. “You want to come with me and hang out?”

  She said there was a nice spot in one of the fields where we could get some sun, read, talk, and be left alone.

  I gestured to the self-defense class. “You don’t go in for this?”

  She pushed out her bottom lip and frowned. Uh-uh. Her face reverted to its sunny smile as I laughed. “I don’t like violence.”

  Now was not the time to tell her that violence wasn’t what the art was supposed to be about, or that it had all the spiritual stuff that had probably attracted her to the temple. Hey, lots of people think BDSM is violence.

  In the wrong hands, anything is.

  We walked for close to an hour through long pastoral fields that she said were all the mansion’s property. It was supposed to be converted and added to the farm one day, but for now it was her private sanctuary, the place she went to when she needed time alone. I thanked her for sharing it with me. Two long deck chairs were folded up against a tree, so we stretched out on them and relaxed. I had brought along a novel, and Violet had a textbook and notepaper in case she got some new ideas on the great megastructure.

  I watched her strip off her blue robe and rub sunscreen over her naked body. Tried not to stare. Read, Teresa. Read.

  “Hey, how was it with Anwar the other night?” She asked me like she wanted to know how breakfast went.

  “Intense.”

  “Good intense?”

  “Violet! Okay, yeah. It was wild.”

  “Anwar’s a sweetheart. I’d rather him take me any day than, say…” She stopped herself.

  “Than who?” I prompted. “There’s no one around. Go ahead.”

  “I shouldn’t. Complaints erode—”

  “Violet, there’s just us, darling.”

  She looked at me a moment, trying to decide whether to invest her confidence. “All our temple brothers are all right, they’re cool. But Trey, sometimes he can be…” I gave her another look of Come on, out with it. “He can be cruel. I know we don’t use safety words, but it’s a prince’s responsibility to know, right?”

  Not the way the game was supposed to be played.

  “You speak to Danielle about this?”

  “I don’t think I can do that. You’ll see how things are, Teresa, after a while. Trey is…It’s just better I keep my mouth shut. I stopped letting him see he hurt me, you know? I go robot, and that turns him off, and he loses interest.”

  Oh, my God.

  “It’s my problem,” she mumbled, biting a nail.

  “The hell it is!” I said. “If it goes too far—”

  “It’s our duty to—”

  “Violet.”

  Her face was pensive more than troubled. It was as if she couldn’t reconcile two sides of an equation. Such weird dynamics. If she were away from this group, she never would have put up with sex rougher than what she wanted. Perhaps he singled her out because she was young. Perhaps the other girls had a higher threshold, not that that mattered—it’s what she felt.

  No safety words. No talking out a scene beforehand.

  I wasn’t sure how to handle this. My first instinct was to tell her to get on the ferry and leave, and that abuse should never be tolerated. But I ran the risk of blowing my cover. And she made it sound like she had suffered in silence but got past her crisis point.

  Trey could, I realized, be doing this to other girls.

  “You’re a good friend,” she said to me.

  I thanked her. “Good friends are supposed to be easy to talk to.”

  Then she gave me this look, strange and yet familiar, and all at once I knew why she enjoyed my company so much, why she sought me out.

  She crouched near my chair and leaned in very close. Her fingertips on my shoulder were electric. Her mouth hovered close to mine, tantalizingly close but not closing in, as if there was an invisible connective field of two opposing magnets. I was abruptly, powerfully conscious that she was nude.

  “I like the guys, I do,” she said as if offering an apology, “but…they don’t…I’m sorry, I’m sorry, what am I doing?”

  “Violet.”

  I had my hand on her arm, stopping her from moving away.

  “It’s always discipline with them,” she said. “It’s not like they hug you or hold you or ever do it vanilla, you know what I’m saying? Like they forgot or something. It can be great, but sometimes I want…more. You
are so beautiful. Oh, God, I’m sorry…”

  “Stop apologizing, it’s okay.”

  Tenderness, she wanted tenderness. I flashed back to the first time I was with a girl, which was only last year, how it screwed me up for a while and I had to come to grips with my own tastes.

  “Teresa, I like you…”

  Mesmerized, I let her small fingers open my robe. After the days of strutting around the mansion in my birthday suit, becoming objectified by the guys, I didn’t care anymore what the princes saw. Now here was Violet, lips hovering, almost close enough for her eyelashes to brush my cheek.

  “Have you been with a girl before?” I asked.

  “When I was sixteen,” she confessed. “I thought I was being immature or something. God, I’ve never told anybody.”

  “It’s okay.”

  She stared into my eyes, and distantly, as if it were happening on a second’s delay, her right hand cupped my breast and began to massage it, squeezing and playing with it until my nipple was a jutting point, the pad of her finger circling the areola. I convulsed with pleasure once, and there was an embarrassing instant of my juices squelching. Violet’s hand slid silkily down my stomach to caress the rise of my mound.

  I shuddered. My eyes demanded she kiss me, as if I couldn’t lean forward myself to complete the transaction of our lips. I could smell her breath. I could feel the faint pant of her on my chin.

  And then I relaxed a moment, deliberately slowing myself down to pause and delight in what was happening. I had noticed her beauty before. How could I not? But I had repressed my desire, that same ol’ demon of thinking girls mean complications (as if men didn’t!), putting away my interest in a disciplined compartment of my mind.

  She was so young, and that disturbed me too. I had never gone out with someone so young, man or woman, and here was Violet with that adolescent signature of open mouth framed by her generous lips, still a bit of puppy fat around her belly and hips, no age in her fingers. Little princess. Beautiful girl who knew what she was doing as she urged me with a hand to rise up on my knees, her mouth forming an O as she slowly, achingly, breathed hot on my chest. She laid her head gently against my stomach, and her left hand came around to grip my ass. She caressed my buttock, and my arms held her in a loose embrace. Oh, God. I couldn’t take it anymore and tilted her chin up so that I could kiss her hard.

  We moved onto the grass and our fanned out robes and must have kissed for minutes on end. Her thing with the guys was being flogged, and I traced my fingertips along the healing scars of her back. Then we embraced tightly. All at once, I panicked. I stammered an apology that I was taking advantage of her. I felt foolish. She looked at me, briefly confused, and then showed she was smarter than me—or at least wise when it counted. She shushed me like a child. Gentle strokes on my face, gentle caressing strokes. Tenderness, I thought. I want tenderness too, after all this.

  I felt a low-amp orgasm just by kissing her, our tongues playing, and when she nuzzled me and brought her mouth down to suck my breast, my body felt the rush of familiar spasms. I had never come with something as simple as that. Oh, God…God…And I thought I knew what it was. Little by little, stimulus and response, the bloody training had actually worked in a profound way, but not as expected. The princes could manufacture orgasms but not ecstasy, and my body was responding to making love, not sex. Affection all the more sweet because it was like a guilty secret.

  Her fingers dipped into me with reverence, with the skill born of knowing. “If you’re loud, bite me when you come,” she whispered. “Bite me here.” And she gestured to her breast.

  I kissed her feverishly and let her drive me mad, my back arching, sweat pooling between my breasts, tossing and turning my head until the fluttering began, the all-encompassing wave from her fingers inside me, until I let out a sob that could have been mistaken for anguish and sank my teeth around her areola. She moaned with pleasure, and my hand strayed between her legs. She was sopping.

  She came in high-pitched whimpers that relentlessly turned me on, but the best, the very best, was to hold each other afterward. To caress each other and feel each other’s breath, to have afterplay and whispers.

  “We can’t tell anyone,” she whispered.

  “Jeez, who would we tell?”

  “No, really,” she said with a note of fear. “They really hate gays, and Danielle’s always talkin’ trash about how lesbians can’t be feminine. She says playing it up with a girl for a prince is one thing, like doing a scene, but if you have feelings for a girl, you’re confused or mentally ill. She says it’s a stage of sexual immaturity.”

  Oh, really.

  Of course—it undermined their whole deal of women submitting and directing all their sexual desires to a prince.

  “So I guess she made a real mistake putting us in the same room,” I laughed.

  “I don’t know what to do,” said Violet.

  “About what?”

  “About this. Do you like me?”

  “Very much,” I assured her.

  “But we’re not supposed to focus on one member of the temple,” she countered. “Let alone a…”

  “Do you regret it?” I asked.

  She smiled. “No.”

  “Look, I could probably have chosen a better moment, but do you think you can trust me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Not everything we’re told here is true, okay? You’ll have to take my word for that, Violet, but keep it to yourself for now, all right?”

  “Teresa, what are you saying?”

  I blew a long stream of air out of my cheeks and collapsed back into my deck chair. I didn’t want to dump so much of a load on her that she started to draw suspicion through her own worries and concerns. I knew what they did to Anna, to Oliver, to Craig Padmore. I had to protect her.

  “We’ll figure it out, darling. We’ll keep us to ourselves for now, okay?”

  She rose up and kissed me. She said okay.

  I kept burrowing away in the library, still thankfully undetected, combing financial records and trying to piece together the background of Isaac Jackson and Danielle Zamani. Well, more Danielle than Isaac. On him, I kept finding nothing.

  Okay, so what did I have?

  Danielle had a master’s in chemistry from Princeton, which she had apparently never used in her professional life. She had worked as a real-estate agent, done a lot of homework on incorporating yourself and limited partnerships and blah, blah, blah, and just as the holding company managed the finances of the mansion (which was technically a church, thus avoiding a whole slew of taxes), it also ran a couple of other things in upstate New York. The most baffling of those was a small but apparently profitable insecticide manufacturer. Weird.

  What would you want to own that for? Of all the places to invest your money. Not only that, but it was a franchise operation. In a franchise, you put out bug spray like your Uncle Ken might sell fries under McDonald’s or Burger King. Unusual, but perhaps it made sense from a corporate perspective. I don’t know. To me it said: dodgy.

  Because if cops wanted to snoop into an operation, they would look at the big picture, wouldn’t they? Right to headquarters, to look at the books on everything—the assumption would be it’s top-down guilt. Ah, but the beauty of franchise outlets was they had different owners. So if you wanted to hide something criminal, you might indeed hide it better by using a smaller, single operation.

  Okay. Danielle knows chemistry. Insecticide involves chemicals—

  How do you get heroin with insecticide chemicals? Maybe you don’t.

  Sigh. I didn’t know where to go from there. I needed my own chemistry guy. Back in London, Jiro was my computers expert. Helena was my guide to all things posh and the latest scandals. My go-to guy over all things bubbling and fuming was Allen Walker, a prof pal of my dad’s who was at Cambridge.

  I went for a walk with my cell in those nice private fields beyond the mansion.

  As Allen came to the phone, my mind
enjoyed a picture of him resting his sizable bulk on one of his lab stools, rubbing his square nut-brown jaw and adjusting his Coke-bottle spectacles. His voice had this musical quality, so that any question sounded like a hooting owl.

  “Where are you?”

  Right. A scolding. My dad’s friends continued to treat me like a fifteen-year-old runaway.

  “In America,” I replied. “On a case.”

  That sounded ridiculous to my ears. If I said that to my friends, they’d shoot back: Ooooohh!

  “America is so dangerous these days, Teresa! What are you thinking?”

  “If it makes you feel any better, I was shot at a few weeks ago in Bangkok.”

  “Very funny,” he sang. I knew he wouldn’t believe that one. “You know, Paul was asking about you this week, Teresa.”

  “Isn’t he your research assistant?” Lord help me.

  “He has a very promising career ahead of him, and he’s quite stable. Your father’s met him.”

  I stifled a laugh. Allen did not say, Your father likes him—just that Daddy met him. My father wants security for me as much as any father, but he’s impatient with anyone who’s dull. Maybe it was why my brother and I had grown up quite determined to live full, exciting lives.

  “Well, it’s kind of hard to go for drinks with Paul when I’m here and he’s there, so it’ll have to wait,” I said.

  Like when Halley’s comet comes around next. I bet Violet knew when that was.

  “In the meantime, I need your help,” I added.

  I gave him a quick summary of how I figured the bug-spray plant must be a cover for something else.

  Allen did consulting work for the police from time to time, so he was a good person to bounce around ideas with (I got teased during three dinners with Carl and his wife after he and Allen realized they both knew me, and Allen told him some very embarrassing tales of my childhood). I listened to Allen humming at so-many-ridiculous-pence a minute on the international call, and then he said, “I’d only be speculating.”

  “Allen. Please speculate.”

  “What you need is a list of their permits for hazardous controlled chemicals. And unless you know a good attorney who can—”