Mindgasm - A Bad Boy Romance With A Twist (Mind Games Book 3)
Page 49
I laughed.
“You’ve been watching too many horror movies,” I said.
She started to cry. Then all at once, her small body was twisting and squirming. She dug both her heels into the soft ground and tried to drop down, to wriggle me off. She was stronger than she looked – yanking hard on her restraints, she tried to fold up her hands and pull free. Her elbows thrust out as she tried to stab at me with them. I held her easily, though, wrapping my chest around her as she kicked and fought.
“Why don’t you surrender?” I said smiling into her ear, once she had stopped for a moment to gain her footing and her breath.
“What?”
The breathiness in her voice was seriously turning me on.
“I said, why not surrender? To the Lord’s will. Clearly, he wants you to die here, in this forest, with me.”
“You’re crazy!” she spat and started kicking again, flinging her blonde hair from side to side. I held her with scarcely any effort. She was tired again in no time. Her entire body crumpled easily in my arms.
“I’m not crazy. And you said yourself, you don’t have to understand it. Just comply. Just surrender…”
“Untie me right now, you asshole…” she hissed, and I loved the extra kick of energy it seemed to give her to swear out loud.
“Tell me, Penny, why don’t you just submit to God’s will?”
“This isn’t God’s will, you idiot! This is just your will!”
“Yes! Exactly! But how do you know the difference?”
She stopped squirming. A tendril of her hair was snaking over my cheek. It smelt of powder and privilege and prettiness. Her chest rose and fell as she panted for breath. I liked her like this, with a little fight in her.
“Are you seriously trying to make a point right now?” she asked. Her voice had lost its girlish politeness. I wondered whether she would scream.
“Well, maybe it’s just not for you to question these things!” I said and laughed.
Grabbing the makeshift knot on the leather strip, I found the tail and clasped it like a dog leash. When I pulled it, she staggered backwards. Like this I led her to the mango tree, then trussed her up on one of the lower branches; it was low enough that she had to bend slightly at the knee, but high enough that she couldn’t collapse entirely. She squeezed her knees together and glowered at me, and something in the gesture alone sent electricity through me. I could do whatever I wanted to her. Anything. It was just me, her, and my tanned thighs against hers.
“You’re going to be in so much trouble because of this. I’m going to tell everyone” she said, through disheveled hair. It amazed me how even now, completely powerless and at my mercy, she was still biting her tongue, still unwilling to lose her cool too much. “Just because I surrender to God’s will, it doesn’t mean I don’t have my own will. Let me go.”
“Nope.”
“Oh for heaven’s sake. This is dumb. What are you trying to prove? This is totally stupid…”
I said nothing.
“So, what, you just tie me up here and now what? What happens now?”
I picked up a crooked stick and scratched idly in the sand as she yelled at me. There was no doubt about it: righteous indignation was a good look on her. I crouched down on my haunches and played with some leaves with the tip of the stick.
“And? Are you even listening to me? What are you going to do? I’ll scream, you know. What are you even thinking about?”
I looked up at her. Her face was flushed and her chest thrust forward. She was still cowering a little at the knee, unable to sit, yet unable to stand.
“Oh, I’m just thinking about what I’m going to do next” I said.
“Well?!”
I smiled.
“I have a theory about girls like you,” I said. I scratched lazy circles into the sand.
“Well, that’s interesting, I don’t want to hear it” she spat.
I got up and sauntered over to her. Slowly. Taking my time, dragging the stick behind me like it was a weapon I just hadn’t figured out how to use yet.
“What’s it like, being tied up there, completely unable to move?”
“What do you mean, what’s it like? It’s awful, obviously. What a stupid question” she said.
“Hm. You can’t go anywhere. You can’t do anything…”
“Because you’ve tied me to this damn tree” she said, raising her voice and yanking at the leather strip one more time.
I snaked a line in the sand and traced a wavy, swirly shape that landed at her shoe tip. I bounced the tip off the rubber of her sneaker and drew little loops around it, like her foot was the center of a strange, misshapen sunflower. She looked down at all this with fire in her eyes. Then I brought the lines up and over her shoe, then traced them further so the tip of the stick scratched a little at her sock, then at the bare skin just above it.
“Please just let me go. I’m so scared. Oh God,” she said, fresh panic in her voice, her eyes going wet again.
“I won’t hurt you.”
“Then what? Why are you doing this?”
I traced the stick higher up still, over her bare shins and up to her knees. The stick left thin white welts on her already pale skin, which rose up in goosebumps, even in the midday heat. I swear I could almost hear her heart beating, wild and fluttery. Like a rabbit’s.
“Don’t you want to hear my theory?” I asked.
She scowled at me. But she couldn’t look away. In one lingering, juicy moment, she let me stay there, in her eyes, looking straight at her. Straight through her.
“Well, my theory is that you like being told what to do. That it’s not hard for you to surrender to God’s will at all. In fact…” I dragged the stick tip up a little higher, over the mound of her knee. She made no effort to squirm away. “In fact, I think that you really like surrendering to other people’s will. God’s or otherwise.”
Her face was stony. But I had her attention. At that moment, she was focused on nothing in the world except me. And that crooked stick. And the naked flesh on her thighs.
“Am I right?”
Her eyes looked as though they could burn a hole through my head.
The stick reached the hem of her little skirt and lingered there. We both stared back down at it.
“I bet you’re wet right now” I said, quietly. The tip of the stick caught on the edge of her skirt. I lifted it. Just an inch.
The forest whispered and rustled all around us. For a moment, I almost felt sorry for her. I smiled and flung the stick aside, shrugging.
“Come on, I’m just messing with you!” I said, laughing.
Her eyes followed the stick as it skidded across the ground. Her mouth twisted.
I sidled up to her again, close. Real close.
“Unless I was right?” I whispered, my cheek nearly touching hers.
“They warned me. They told me to stay away from you. They said you were involved with bad things. Oh God I wish I had listened to them. You’re crazy. I just want to go home. I hate it here, I hate you and I hate this place…”
Instantly she was sobbing, but before I thought about what I was doing, I leaned in and pressed my lips to hers, all soft and wet with tears, and to my surprise, she kissed me, enthusiastically, straining at her wrists to kiss back at me. She had squeezed her eyes shut, sending tears rolling down each cheek, and she went desperately after my tongue, a little hungry baby bird, strung up and still flushed in the cheeks from telling me what an asshole I was.
I trailed a hand down and found the hem of her skirt again, lifted it, and slid my hands onto the soft cotton of her panties. My fingers didn’t even have to pull aside the slip of fabric to know that she was soaking wet underneath. I dipped the ends of two careful fingers into the sweetness and smeared them out against the gloriously smooth skin of her inner thigh. Her flesh there was the softest thing I had felt in months – maybe years. Supernaturally soft. The kind of softness you wanted to protect …and then defile.
“See? Just as I thought. I was right after all!”
I reached behind her and began to work out the knot at her wrists.
“What are you doing?” she said, panicked.
“I’m untying you.”
I could tell she had to stop herself from saying, “why?”
I flung the thin leather strip off to the side and it went curling into the dust. For the first time, she looked genuinely unhappy.
“I …I don’t understand” she said at last, rubbing the raw skin at her wrists, searching my face. I started back towards the cabin.
“Well, I tied you up, but now you’re free to go. Didn’t you say you wanted to go home, and that you hated me and hated this place? I suspect you’ll want to call your boyfriend as soon as possible and let him know.”
“Fiancé” she whispered.
“I’m sorry, what?”
“He’s not my boyfriend, he’s my fiancé” she said again.
“Ok, cool. Whatever. Have a safe flight home.”
“You …you’re just going to leave me now?” she squeaked. And holy hell if it wasn’t the most adorable fucking thing I’ve ever heard. I could have done it there and then. I could have swooped her up, kissed the tears off her cheek and made sweet love to her, and then not-so-sweet love, and she would have cried and kissed me and thanked me all the while.
But that would have been too easy. Besides, I wanted her even hungrier still. She wanted me, but it wasn’t enough yet. I needed her to come crawling. I needed her to lose her pretty little mind and beg me to fuck her. And she would. If I played this right.
“Yeah. Unless there was something else you needed me to help you with…?”
She looked like she didn’t know what to do with herself.
“I don’t know how to get back to the village” she whimpered.
“Oh, if God wills it, you’ll figure it out…”
Her lower lip quivered.
“You’re a monster.”
“And you’re free to leave.”
“I’m going to tell everyone what you did to me today” she hissed, trying a different tack.
My hand was on the door to the cabin. I turned to look at her dead on.
“Sure, but if you tell anyone …then this never happens again” I said. Something strange flickered over her expression. I went inside and closed the door behind me. Once my eyes adjusted to the light in the cabin, I could make out the slender, naked form of the rabbit, hanging to cure on the far wall, where I had left it a few days ago. It was a full minute before I heard her footsteps crunch on the stones outside and she left.
She was back within a week.
Chapter 9 - Penelope
Fish skin. Some guts, but mostly dried and shriveled. A few heads, but that was just carelessness. It was mostly scales. Flaky, stinky scales winking blue and yellow at me. And no matter how long I stared back at the bright plastic buckets of it, it still didn’t look much like a “solution”. Nutritious, abundant food was going to come out of this? I looked harder. If this is what God had in mind for me, then fine. Maybe it was a lesson in humility. I’d certainly had enough of those lately.
Valerie and I had been on a ridiculous fish guts mission for the last few days. She drove Mama Tembi’s broke down old pickup and I plonked down on the back, lying flat in the open air and looking up into the clouds. At least the clouds still looked like clouds.
We negotiated with fishermen all along the river and even right to Lake Malawi, for every last scrap of rotting wish we could wrangle from them. It was thankless, ugly work. Bartering in a wasteland for waste material, and paying a worthless currency for the privilege.
It was our fourth stop this morning and I had long since stopped converting each trade into its equivalent in Starbucks coffees. By the time the back was too full of buckets and too rancid, I moved up front to sit beside Valerie and we chatted a little. The entire load was approximately $1.25. I tried to figure out what proportion of a coffee that worked out too, but it was hot and my head was fuzzy. Maybe Valerie was right and I should just start eating meat. Just a little.
“Well hello, don’t these look like some fishy gentlemen?” Valerie said, eyeing two figures in the road, off to the distance. She was surprisingly – irritatingly – chipper this morning. We pulled over and the car bounced on its aging suspension. I could just feel the fish slop lurching and sliding around in the plastic buckets in the back. The two men stopped and had a good look at us. Valerie bounded out to talk to them, but I stayed in the car, slouched down and played with the sunlight in my eyelashes.
Valerie was …buxom. She was so damn healthy, so optimistic and cheerful all the damn time. It’s not that she was pretty or anything, but it was nice to look at her face, and people seemed to respond well to her. She smiled. A lot. I watched the plastic beaded bangles click on her wrists as she gestured to the pickup, to them, back to the fish buckets. They smiled and seemed eager. She came back inside and banged the door shut.
“Fantastic! These fellows say they have a bunch of fish stuff, and they stay just down the road, and we can have it for free, they just need a lift.”
I turned to see them both perch expertly on a tiny rim of remaining space in the back. They smiled and waved, but I pretended I hadn’t seen and turned around again. Valerie started the engine and we bounced back onto the road. In the rearview mirror I could make out two bobbing heads.
We drove on in silence, Valerie turning her sunny attention to the scraps of song she could find on the radio. I turned it off.
“Valerie, do you ever wonder if you’re really making a difference? You know, if any of this is actually worth it?”
She didn’t answer immediately. Her long arms draped over the steering wheel and she navigated a stretch of potholes.
“Well, I always think it’s just a matter of perspective, you know? You may not see what effect your actions have, maybe not immediately …but everything we do has an effect on the world. Even the small things.”
To me her answer smelled almost as bad as the fish in the back.
“But doesn’t that mean that your actions can also be bad? And that you can’t really ever tell? Maybe what we’re doing right now is rippling out, and we won’t know immediately but it does have an effect …a bad effect.”
She smiled easily and gave me a quick glance before returning her eyes to the road.
“Well, I don’t know what to tell you. I know it counts for something to act in the best way you know how. My intentions are good, you know?”
I looked out at the potholed road and tried to remember that old saying, the one about hell and the road to it. This road wasn’t paved at all, I thought, and smiled wryly to myself. We must be headed somewhere way worse than hell. Maybe Zambia.
“Why does everyone think Vik is such a bad guy?” I asked.
She stopped smiling.
“I just mean, as an example, you know. Isn’t he just doing what he thinks is right? Doesn’t he have good intentions too?” I said quickly, seeing the slight kink in her brow.
“Vik is …a complicated person. It’s good that you’re staying away from him” she said finally, then twizzled the radio knob again. But I liked the channel we were on.
“But back to my question, you know. Maybe he’s right?”
“What are you talking about exactly?” It suddenly occurred to me just how icy cold her British accent could sound.
“Nothing, forget I said anything. I just mean that …well, he seems to be living by his own principles. Like, he’s not different from us. He’s just got a different set of principles, right?”
She looked as though the topic was exhausting to her. I think it was the first time I had seen her not smiling.
“Sure, fine. I don’t think they count as principles if they’re wrong
though.”
I sat back in my seat and chewed over this. Something about the incredible flatness of this stupid country made this kind of thinking seem more natural somehow. As if your brain had to invent some moral dilemma, just to keep things interesting. I felt a heave in my stomach and then immediately realized that the pickup had grown lighter somehow. Valerie’s eyes shot to the rear view mirror and then she slammed on brakes, confused.
“What…?” I began, but the tires had barely stopped squealing when the two men were suddenly at either side of the car. Valerie cried out and threw her hands up, and I saw the glint of silver as one of them held up a knife up to the window, banging its blunt end on the glass and gesturing for her to open. The man at my window had no knife, but his face alone turned my guts to jelly. We were being hijacked. They weren’t fishermen. They had lied.
I choked on a hot, angry lump in my throat as I tried to protest. How could they do this? Why on earth target us, the people who were trying to help? We had so little already. My mind raced. Not only had we wasted the entire morning hauling rotten fish guts through the dirt, we were now going to have it all taken away from us, and Mama Tembi’s pickup with it.
What happened next unfolded in syrupy slow motion. I turned to see Valerie’s big, fearful eyes and could see it all in that moment. And I can’t explain it, but something from deep down inside me snapped, and I felt, really felt it with my whole body, that I was done being a pushover, done with letting other people push me around and hurt me and laugh at me, done with Dylan and his threatening texts and his hate and his disgust for me and my body – what’s wrong with my body? Is it really so bad, to have one? To have needs? – and done with Valerie prancing around without giving things a damn thought and I was just done. Just one hundred percent completely at the end.
“No!” I screamed out loud. From the pit of my stomach I screamed, and Valerie’s jaw fell open. The face beside the window drew back a little, startled.
“Just fucking NO!” I yelled again, this time slamming my fist onto the dashboard and sending the cross round my neck swinging.
The guy next to my window looked amused, but, and I’m proud to say it, also a little scared. Good. I liked that. And he should be scared. Why not? Why am I something to take less seriously? What about my principles? What about what I want? Ignoring Valerie’s horrified look, I leant over her and furiously wound down the window, staring my own daggers at the guy. If he had wanted to fight there and then, I would have done it, I swear to God I would have torn him limb from limb. My head was buzzing, knuckles white on the door handle.