Contract Gifted (Contracted Book 4)

by Aya DeAniege

  Who could focus with him inside of them?

  His hand suddenly tangled in my hair, which he had freed from the braid so that he could pull. He changed his angle and slowed, touching every bit of me in a different way.

  I whimpered, fighting off that wave because no man without a vibrator should have been able to strum my strings like that.

  I was awash in heat and pleasure. I was uncertain which way would send me stumbling over that edge. He broke off the kiss, turning his teeth to my neck with a growl.

  The bite turned the thrum of pleasure into that something more. My heart began to race as the tingle of pleasure seemed to shudder through me. The waves of that new pleasure would reach no further than my chest as if his teeth were an invisible line drawn in the sand that the physical feelings he was granting me could not pass.

  He let out an angry sound and pulled away. His angle changed again.

  I reached back, and he released my hips to take the hand in his own. When he thrust, I moved forward under the weight and speed of the motion and slammed into the edge of the counter. It was almost painful, a real pain, not a taunting one. The new angle bounced my hips off the side of the counter with each thrust he made.

  I clenched my hands, writhing under it. He was relentless when he wanted to be.

  Suddenly, he stilled, but my body tried to continue with the motion. The anticipation, the expectation of what should have happened, was what finally did it.

  The hot, wet pleasure rolled over me like a tidal wave. I was completely unaware of what my body was doing as the waves crashed over me. All I knew was that it was the best sex I had had in months, possibly even years.

  And then he was moving again, apparently not done with me. He timed his thrusts just so, piercing me to my core each time I thought I had finally gained control over my body once more.

  He stilled, settling against me with a little sound.

  “Now that, woman, was not fair,” he grumbled against my shoulder.

  I let out a little chuckle.

  “Fair? If that’s what pleases rich elite these days, my god, what is the world coming to?”

  He pulled away, bending as I stood and pushed my skirts back down, settling them into place. I turned and looked down, then felt that wave of panic.

  He hadn’t put on a condom. My contraceptive had lapsed months before.

  That cost money and it had been… a while, so long that I had given up on taking the pill.

  My body didn’t run like clockwork, but that extra bit of income meant that I could pay down my debt faster. Paying down debt meant more money sooner, so I made that sacrifice.

  “Contraceptive,” he said. “No accidental babies from the indebted traitors.”

  Relief washed over me.

  “Why contraceptive instead of outright sterilization then?” I asked.

  “Because our debt would have to be forgiven. After our term, if we survive, we will be required to have children. To pass on our debt and the new debt to pay for our prison sentence.”

  “I had best go clean up,” I said.

  He almost said something but bit it back. I could only guess what he had wanted to say, but it was my birthday, and he was not going to dictate anything to me that I didn’t usually enjoy.

  I went to the bathroom and relieved myself, cleaning up and then pulling on a pair of underwear, just in case. Walking back into the kitchen, I found he had done something similar, though he was only wearing a pair of pants. He had the wine glass in one hand and a physical book in the other.

  “Did you bring that with you?” I asked, looking at the bookshelf. “He doesn’t like people reading his books.”

  “It is mine, yes,” he said. “Mr. Wrightworth told me not to touch the books, but I do not make it a habit to snoop. Feel better?”

  “I don’t like the feeling of wet down my leg,” I said.

  He made a little face. It was neither approving nor disapproving as he set the book behind him and motioned to my wine glass. I walked toward it and then picked it up and sipped. I leaned against the counter, which had already cooled to the touch.

  “I don’t like my women cleaning me off them,” he said. “I was told to be honest if something felt like it was a thing and I feel like that’s a thing.”

  For a one-night stand?

  I glanced at my phone, but then focused back on him. There was suddenly an urge to contact Mr. Wrightworth, to see if he had decided to use me to break a stud in. I didn’t necessarily mind. A breaking in meant he would revisit me and he didn’t perform poorly, just strangely.

  Working with that thought, I sipped my wine glass and watched him for a moment.

  “What was with the changing rhythms?” I asked.

  He smiled.

  “You seemed to be enjoying it too much,” he purred out.

  “Wait, that was on purpose?” I asked.

  He shrugged, motioning to the oven.

  “We used up most of the cooking time thanks to that, and you did seem to enjoy yourself. Why don’t we set the table?”

  “You evil, evil, man.”

  I set the table as he finished the last bits of dinner. He pulled something from the freezer, then retrieved the plates I had placed on the table. He then plated the food in the kitchen. I retrieved our wine glasses, brushing up against him as I did.

  He brought the plates to the table as I sat, timing it just so.

  I don’t know how he managed it, but he had somehow cooked the chicken to perfection while not overcooking the vegetables. The man was either a genius or had re-heated the chicken while cooking the vegetables. Either way, it looked and smelled fantastic.

  “You can cook,” I said as I picked up my wine glass.

  “I can,” he said. “When you don’t have a wife in the slum, you need to learn to cook for yourself. I’m glad it happened like that, learning to cook. Women like it, and I like food.”

  “Couldn’t you just buy meals like other single men?”

  “Single rich men can buy food,” he said. “Debtees are never out of house or home. My mother cooked for me until the day she was murdered. If I hadn’t been arrested, the local women would have stepped in, or one of my sisters. Although, they were executed because I was unruly.”

  “So, you learned how to cook,” I said.

  “I did,” he said. “The others resolutely refused to cook, a woman’s job they said. But, damned if they didn’t enjoy eating my food.”

  “You going to become a cook after this?”

  “No, cooks don’t get paid good money,” he said. “I’d be going back to labour, where I worked before. In sixteen months, I will have paid my debt to society, but I haven’t been allowed to pay down my debt. It’s been frozen. The money from the contracts doesn’t go to me. I was told it paid for our way, but not out debt.”

  I picked up my fork and tasted a bit of the food.

  “This is good,” I said.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I suppose proper dinner talk doesn’t revolve around riots and imprisonment.”

  “I’m a doctor, I’m pretty used to all sorts,” I said. “And, uh, well, you might be dropping a little. The body releases certain hormones, you see.”

  “The Master explained it to me,” he said. “He also said that you are very good at lancing emotional scars.”

  “The,” I made a motion to my mouth and away.

  He gave a little nod and picked up his wine. He sipped, then set the glass back on the table.

  The verbal vomit could be caused by lancing an emotional wound. He could no more control what came out of his mouth than he could his heartbeat. I wouldn’t judge him for what he said because I knew it happened, and he had yet to say something to be ashamed of.

  “The things which were done to me have always weighed on my mind. The others, they’re not so pretty, as the Master puts it. They also seem to enjoy the women selecting them for sexual gratification. We all keep fit, but they are typically used as guards.”
r />   “For them, it’s a good thing.”

  “Hot women wanting their attention? Yeah, it’s a wonderful thing. Either those other things don’t happen to them, or they lie about it. You can’t talk about that there. That’s what happens to women, not men. A man, to them, can’t be abused by a woman, can’t be hurt by them.”

  “Have they been educating you all?”

  “We were mainly of maturity,” he said. “There’s only the one kid. He’ll be twenty by the time he’s released.”

  “What? But that’d make him like twelve when the riots happened.”

  “Tried as an adult because he killed a military man. Big kid, has a disability, mental problems. The Master told me what, but now I can’t remember the name. If he had been a rich kid, above the poverty line? No way would he have been tried as an adult.”

  “He never said anything to us,” I said.

  “Mr. Wrightworth has been good to us. Before he stepped in, we were contracted out for fights and shit like that. Down and dirty and just bad. We don’t have a lot of leeway on things like them abusing the wording of our contracts, but he’s helped us avoid a few trickier ones.”

  “In between contracts you live in housing?”

  “Yeah, most contracts have been a day or two at most. I had one woman take me to the dead-belt, just on the edge of it where they say it’s like the old tropical islands. My job for a week was to drink and lay beside her on a beach. Besides this contract? I have to say that was probably my favourite. How many debtees can say they’ve been to the edge of the belt?”

  “I haven’t even been there,” I said. “Is it true you can feel it?”

  “Yes,” he said. “It’s this dry heat, and the wind smells like death. They think it’s great. They talk about the invigoration of that scent, but… it’s death. Carried on the wind. Gorgeous though, the tropics are wonderful, and the people who grow up in the area carry the burden of the belt, but they’re a happy bunch. Scientists constantly. I was there when the first snow fell.”

  “And the world stood still,” I said.

  “I missed it, that’s my only regret.”

  We talked about the belt over our meal.

  The dead belt sounded like one of those places that only the rich elite would like to visit. The belt had stopped growing thanks to the tireless work of terraformists, but it had been a stuttering sort of motion.

  The changes were fought every step of the way by religions who believed the world should be allowed to die as a human would.

  Even if our ancestors were the ones to kill it in the first place.

  Trees and green, that was my kind of place. Someplace where it rained, and one could go outside in it, during the rain. Tropical on Earth was no longer tropical. It was more like two steps away from irradiated death.

  He picked up the plates once they were empty and cleared them into the dishwasher.

  “You’re a, uh, doctor, yes, that’s what you said, a doctor?” he asked as he opened the fridge.

  He paused to look at me, and I made a motion.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Don’t stand there with the door open!”

  He reached into the fridge and pulled out a box, then closed the door quickly.

  “Grew up poor?”

  “My parents taught us that just because we can afford to be wasteful, doesn’t mean we should,” I said. “That’s how this all happened in the first place.”

  “The collapse would have happened whether the planet had begun to fail or not,” he countered as he set the box on the table. “But I can understand that. Waste not, want not, that old adage goes.”

  I made a sound as he opened the box, revealing a chocolate swirled cheesecake. Seeing that, I swallowed as my mouth began to salivate.

  “Don’t tell me you can bake too,” I said.

  “I’d like to learn, but, no. I bought this from a Gaian bakery. Well, he did. Said it had to be Gaian, but I’m not allowed to ask the question.”

  “I’m not Gaian,” I said. “But, since you asked. Are you?”

  “Am I what?” he asked as he went to the kitchen.

  I watched him retrieve plates and knives and waited until he returned to the table. He looked at me expectantly, waiting for me to specify what I meant.

  “Are you Gaian?” I asked.

  His hands hesitated. His jaw gritted, and he cut into the cake before he answered.

  “I’m not anointed,” he said.

  “You ate without giving thanks.”

  “Giving thanks is for God,” he countered. “Being thankful is a constant motion. You are thankful the air you breathe is not poisonous. You are thankful that the food you eat is good and whole, and you never support non-Gaian methods if you can avoid it. My religion does not change who I am. Those beliefs were always there, but Gaia also allows for the human factor. I can use the contraceptive, which is made of silicone by the way, because it is more effective at preventing children in an already overburdened world. When I am forcibly married and have to breed, Gaia will allow it because my death will not serve her. She is about compromise, just as any ecosystem is about compromise. Now you.”

  “Now me?”

  “Why aren’t you Gaian?”

  “I’m a doctor, half the tools I work with are against the beliefs.”

  “No, you are aware of Gaians from the extreme reaches. The live as hermits and never reproduce, must be sterilized at eighteen and work the belt tirelessly planting trees. Or the terrorists. As a doctor, you would be expected to make choices based on Gaia, yes. You don’t inject silicone into a woman’s chest.”

  “Not into plastics,” I said with a shrug.

  “Where and when possible, you don’t use non-Gaian items. What people don’t understand about that is that Gaian items are all manufactured from renewable resources and cause as little strain on the ecosystem as possible. The laws of the nation are practically Gaian. You don’t cut down a forest to save the life of one man.”

  “There are forests?”

  “In some places, yes. There are even old forests that stood before the collapse. They’re barely hanging on, but they are.”

  “Are you trying to convert me?” I asked.

  “Our main tenet is to convert everyone,” he said. “Maybe not to turn them into Gaians, but to convert them as close to as possible. Talk a man out of littering, and you’ve done well. Help someone set up recycling and get them in the habit of doing it, and you’re a freaking hero.”

  “And why does Gaia apply to this, here and now?” I asked.

  He set a piece of cake before me, then settled with one for himself.

  “Gaia says on our birthday we may splurge. Full on, drugs, alcohol, huge party with glitter, splurge. As long as we recycle everything the next day… or the day after that, if we’re too hungover to function. So, why the Gaian cake?”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said. “And I’m allergic to a couple of preservatives. There’s one that they put it in some lunchmeats. No smell to it at all, but the moment I put it in my mouth, I start puking. Like projectile vomiting. One of the fake sugars they use also makes me sick. They like using it in things like cheesecake because it isn’t overwhelmingly sweet like most sweeteners are.”

  “And you like cheesecake.”

  I gave a nod and ate a bit of the cheesecake with a little moan.

  “Love it,” I said with a little smile. “Gaians make their baked goods without any processed items. So, it has to be Gaian so that I don’t end up throwing up or in misery. I only get it on my birthday because it’s expensive to buy all real stuff for cheesecake.”

  “It’s my understanding this bakery raises its livestock. It is popular with rich elite.”

  “Your contract is expensive, so I figured he’d not flinch at the price of a cake.”

  “True.”

  “But I still have to kill him,” I said with a little nod. “Buying all this, doing this for me. It’s way too much.”

 
“That is, perhaps, something that can wait until tomorrow.”

  “But tomorrow, it’s no longer my birthday,” I said. “I’m not allowed to be wasteful tomorrow.”

  He chuckled and picked up his fork.

  “I do like to pray in the morning,” he said. “It’s something that isn’t required, but it helps make me feel more connected.”

  I didn’t understand why that might be important to tell me, as he’d only be spending the one morning in my apartment. I decided not to bring it up, however.

  “Okay,” I said. “How would you like to spend the rest of the evening?”

  “You’re asking me? It’s your birthday. You’ve had wine, so, play is out of the question. Unless it’s a little light spanking. Normal people do that too. We could go out. Find a bar, do some dancing?”

  “No, I have this thing where people annoy the fuck out of me,” I said.

  “We could stay in and watch a movie. Popcorn, maybe some cuddling and making out on the couch?”

  “That doesn’t sound so bad,” I said. “More wine, too.”

  “Of course,” he said. “If that bottle is still full tomorrow morning, I think we’ll have a problem.”

  I picked up my wine glass and sipped again, but the taste of cheesecake was still on my tongue, altering the flavour of the wine. I set the glass back down and ran my tongue around the inside of my mouth. It was different, but not necessarily in a bad way.

  “How old are you today?” he asked.

  “I’m thirty-four,” I said.

  “I’m thirty-two,” he said. “My birthday is in the fall, though, so there’s not that much time between us.”

  “I’ve been with both older and younger men,” I said. “Age has little to do with maturity of the male species.”

  “True,” he said with a nod. “The rich do this whole wrapping of presents and then unwrapping them after cake, but I don’t see any presents.”

  “You were my present,” I said.

  “No little gifts from others?” he asked.

  “No,” I said with a shake of my head. “The family exchanges gifts in person. If you have a wrapped gift and they aren’t around, you being the exception, of course, then you’re not a part of the family. No one just drops presents in someone’s place, that’s rude. And we typically return the wrapping paper, Izzy insists.”