She gulped air until she burped, laughed, and disengaged from his hug. “We’d better get back to this floor. We’ve only done one refrigerator so far.”
“Okay.” And boom, he was back to picking ancient popcorn fragments out of the primordial ooze.
This gave her the space to calm herself. They scrubbed companionably for two more hours. At noon, the contractors clanged down the metal stairway to eat their lunches on the basketball deck, and Beth and Reg made giant sandwiches out of bollitos—Mexican baguettes—and every kind of leftover in the fridge: meatballs, chow mein, sliced papaya, french fries, sushi rice, cold tamales, wilted salad swimming in dressing, with jalapeño slices and sixteen kinds of mustard left behind by the previous team of sex demons. Reg was no succubus, but he could definitely pack it away.
After all that emotion, Beth desperately wanted a beer or six, but she wasn’t sure how little it might take to get Reg tipsy, or how he might behave while tipsy in her company, and she didn’t know if she’d even want to tell him no if he got inappropriate, and she didn’t feel she could refuse him a beer while she was guzzling them the way the succubi had taught her, right in front of him.
So she scrubbed silently at each refrigerator-sized footprint of evil, sharing the work with Jee’s love slave, thinking about love.
He’d hit the nail on the head. It wasn’t getting love that was so important. It was getting a chance to give love. Everyone was born wanting to give love, weren’t they? She remembered now with searing clarity watching her babies grow, thinking that even if Blake wasn’t home—”Blake wasn’t home” being the code phrase, the excuse for “Blake doesn’t love me”—eventually, surely, her babies would look up at her and show her some sign that they, too, felt this agonizing burden of love that flowed out of her like milk from a leaking breast. And she would know that someone was there to receive it. But the babies were too busy, focused on growing. And then they were running, squealing, whining, laughing, playing, either wanting something with all their hearts, or contented.
She’d settled for caring for them. Love was giving. She had people to give love to, love in the form of meals and clean clothes and a lovely home and all her many services to them, and that ought to be enough. Had Blake trained her to give, like a cow that’s just thankful to get milked every day, to the point where she couldn’t tell if he and the kids were aware of her presence?
Because that was what was eating away at her insides now. That Blake would betray her was no surprise anymore, and Darleen had called her on that. Beth knew. She’d always known about Blake, deep down.
But she’d expected more from her children.
She still had hopes that they would come around somehow. That her disappearance would trigger some concern, as it obviously had when Darleen reported her missing. That their abandoning her was just a mistake somehow. A misunderstanding.
At four o’clock, the construction shift changed over in the bathroom. Beth declared the floor-under-the-fridges project done for the day so she could go over the punchlists. The upstairs crew went downstairs to work on the ancient communal shower-tub in the old locker room, and the steam room, and the big cold tile showers that hadn’t worked in decades. A finish-carpentry crew came up to help Nando with the drywall and start installing bathroom cabinets. She began to imagine that someday they’d be able to take more than a ten minute shower per person.
When the contractors were back at work, she sat down with the Regional Office’s laptop and Googled “sexual dominance.” Apparently it was very popular. She skimmed manuals for subs. She read manuals for doms rather more closely. She dipped into fiction, her cheeks burning and sweat trickling down between her shoulderblades.
Just when Beth felt like her skull couldn’t hold any more, Jee blew in looking fresh and rested from her “interviews.” Beth couldn’t wait. She took her rage mentor aside, in her bedroom, while Reg curled up on his dog bed in the kitchen with a beer.
Jee was not receptive to the word.
“Look, I admit he was a jerk when he showed up,” Beth said. “He did need a reality check.”
“And he’s a saint now?” Jee said, removing makeup with a big moisturized pad, eyeing Beth in the mirror.
“Uh, not entirely, no. But Jee, I’ve been reading the literature, and it says the sub has to feel cherished and appreciated. You have a responsibility to reward him for good behavior, not just punish him for disobedience.”
“What about the other night? We took him out and let him play pretend-pimp for a whole evening, the four of us. You were there. Ministering to his ego,” Jee added scornfully. “Besides, Reg’s punishment doesn’t bother him as much as you think it does.” She smiled.
Beth pushed. “But does it make him feel loved?”
Jee turned on her. “Look, fuck off, all right? Do you want to be Jerk Whisperer around here? Are you asking me to give him to you?”
Blinking at the ferocity and hurt in Jee’s tone, Beth backed away. “Of course not.” Wow, is she jealous because I had a heart-to-heart with Reg?
“You want him licking your shoes clean and eating your pussy and begging you for punishment, is that it? Shall I call him in here? See how you like it?” Jee turned her head as if to holler for Reg.
“No! No no no!” Horrified, Beth waved her hands. “No, I don’t. Please. No. I—I’m sorry.”
Jee’s dark eyes returned to the mirror, and her reflection drilled a warning through Beth. “All right, then.”
“I’ll—I’ll just go start dinner,” Beth babbled. Anything to get away from Jee’s unleashed anger. This couldn’t be jealousy. But it sure was something.
“We’re going out. Unless you want to stay home with your pet,” Jee said, sounding less angry.
Light broke on Beth. She took a deep breath. “He’s your pet,” she said.
“Long as we’re clear,” Jee said.
Beth said bluntly, “Do you mind if I keep helping him scrub the floor under the refrigerators?”
“Is that what you did all day?” Jee laughed. “I guess he did a number on you. Did he give you the big eyes?” It wasn’t a relaxed laugh. Beth wasn’t fooled.
“Actually, I cried on his shoulder, and he convinced me that you were right,” Beth said, going for full disclosure. At Jee’s startled look, she added, drooping, “About me being a slave. When I was married.”
“Sit down.” Jee turned in her chair and looked directly at Beth for the first time. She seemed completely focused and calm at last. “Talk.”
Beth slumped onto the bed. “I was never sure I was loved. I was always looking for ways to...make Blake love me.” Every time she said it, that word hurt like broken glass in her throat. She pinched up her face. “When Reg told me he loves you and you—” She gulped, realizing she was returning to a sensitive topic. The words came out in phrases over the broken glass. “How much he prefers living here to living—hic—to living with his mother. I realized everything. How he gives service, hoping for reward. And that was me. Only my kitchen was nicer,” she smiled feebly, “excuse my saying. And he gets paid and I didn’t. He says—” she began, and then, warned away by the look in Jee’s eye, she kept it to herself. He says he feels loved. But I never did. I never really did feel loved.
As if she saw that thought in Beth’s eye, Jee looked away, her perfect, bronzy complexion darkening.
Desperate to turn the subject away from Reg again, Beth said quietly, “I fooled myself for a long time.”
“That’s a little harsh.” Jee turned back to her mirror and resumed cleaning her face. “I prefer to think of it as dealing with reality as it comes. Just because you weren’t living in a cardboard box doesn’t mean you weren’t trapped.” To Beth’s startled look in the mirror, she said, “It turns out you weren’t fooling yourself, though. You got tossed out on your own. You couldn’t find work. You really were entirely dependent on his willingness to support you. You had to please him. I know how that works.”
Beth didn’t prob
e. An old tight place began to ease inside her. “I didn’t mind the work,” she offered. “I like work. I get restless and miserable if I have to sit down. I sprained my ankle right after Jeff left for college and I couldn’t do a thing for three weeks and I nearly went crazy.”
“So we’ll find you some work that keeps you sane,” Jee said. “Now go get dressed. We’re on the prowl tonight.”
Released, Beth scurried back to her room, kicking herself for having spent the two hours after the plumbers changed shift reading about sexual dominance when she could have been taking a shower. Suddenly she felt sticky and grubby from scrubbing the kitchen floor. She heard the shower running and, incredulous, went down the hall to see what was happening.
Pog was in there, showering.
A naked Amanda stood at one of the newly-installed bathroom mirrors, makeup spread out on the new long vanity in front of her and a screwdriver in her hand, tinkering with one of the sidebar lights. With her back turned, showing her broad shoulders and high, narrow hips and rough-cut mane of blonde hair, she looked like an androgynous Viking. She glanced up as Beth came in. “Aren’t you dressed? Pog, get out of there. Beth’s not dressed yet.”
“Where are the contractors?” Beth said.
Pog turned off the shower and came out, dripping. “Downstairs, fixing the old locker room showers. This one’s not fully functional yet. They’ll get the downstairs stalls working, and then, while the carpenters finish the fancy bits in here, for one day we’ll have to go down there to shower.”
“Speaking of, get cleaned up, will you?” Amanda said. “I’m starving.”
The two of them bickered and shared makeup at the mirrors while Beth showered.
And under the hot spray, Beth thought about her astounding insight. Unless she had imagined it, Reg might be totally right about how Jee loved him. And of course she couldn’t mention it. Jee would never admit to loving anyone. Maybe, because she’d really been a child slave, she now had to have total control in order to trust Reg with her feelings.
I’ll have to be careful not to let on that I understand all that. But how? She’d just have to try to pretend that Reg was the houseboy. And stay away from sensitive topics with him. For a jerk with Tourette’s-level verbal impulse control, he saw way too much.
That night they took a cab to Chinatown at 22d Street and cruised for tourists. To Pog’s delight, they walked into a huge group of conventioneers from McCormick Place, which was only a few blocks away. Dinner came on waves of trolleys, and Beth sat at the table, blushing hotly, while waiters slid fresh plates in front of her, and her roommates disappeared to the downstairs restrooms with the customers for five minutes at a time, the whole evening.
Beth felt horribly conflicted. She herself had screwed Nando the drywall guy standing, only this morning. The weird thing was, she hadn’t hated it. It was fine. She’d even had a quick orgasm like a nice fat sneeze, and so what? She was surprised at how little she felt about it. At the time, she’d even been glad to get another name for her own monthly report.
Had she lost her morals when she lost her old body? Or was consensual sex between strangers just...not that big a deal?
Eventually the whole team settled down to eat enough Chinese food for twenty.
“That’s my bonus taken care of,” Amanda said with satisfaction, between bites of Three-Treasure.
“Mine too,” Pog said. She eyed the platter of Ginger Tree Ears. “Guys, I don’t want to jeopardize my union card, but I think I’m full. Beth, do you want to score? They’re easy pickings.”
Beth mumbled something at her plate.
“Didn’t think so,” Pog said calmly. “‘Kay, guys, we’re going home. For once I’m gonna catch the creature feature.”
Beth got up quickly.
When they were nearly home, she decided to try to explain to Pog. “It’s not like I don’t. I mean, I do want to score. I mean, eventually.” She couldn’t mention the drywall guy to anyone just yet. “I’m just having a little trouble adjusting.” She hoped that Pog, the succubus most likely to have some familiarity with conventional thoughts, would understand.
But for once Pog was no help. “What are you asking me exactly? Should you feel bad after fucking some guy who liked it? Exactly how bad should you feel? How do you measure how bad you feel, based on what criteria? I’m just trying to get a handle on your rules here.”
“I suppose,” Beth said slowly, “A married woman should only have sex with her husband. But I’m divorced.”
“Score! Dingdingding! You noticed.”
“Sarcasm doesn’t help.”
Pog said, not sarcastically, “Well, what do you expect me to say? I’m a succubus. I used to be a fat whore. A broke, aging, fat whore. And not the cutest one at the lamppost, either. I had plenty of reasons to feel bad about myself and what I did. Want to know what ultimately made me feel good?”
“Sure.”
Pog dug a finger into Beth’s ribs. “Getting paid a sickeningly huge amount of money for doing it. That’s what made me feel good.”
Beth frowned. “Doesn’t that feel icky?”
“No. What feels icky is not getting paid for it, or being paid very little, or being punched in the face and having the money taken off me by a john or a pimp or a cop. What feels icky is not being able to pay for food or a doctor. Not being able to pay for a taxi when I’m caught in the rain. What’s icky is realizing that every stitch I own is secondhand and always will be, and it’s getting torn and stained, and I have to replace it soon or I can’t charge even the pittance I’m getting for sex. Poor is icky.”
Beth was silenced.
They got out of the cab and went into the Lair together, their perfect blonde hair swinging in time with their long legs, their high, high heels making a racket on the wooden basketball deck.
Pog stopped abruptly at the drum containing basketballs. She threw her handbag on the floor, took a ball out of the drum, and kicked off her shoes. “C’mere.”
Beth got barefoot too and followed her to stand at the free-throw line.
Pog bounced the ball a couple of times, then held it, narrowing her eyes. “Look, can you just put the moral thing on the side?”
“Thing?” Beth said.
Pog threw her free-throw. The ball bounced off the rim. She tsked and ran after it. “Men are allowed to fuck around but women aren’t. That thing. Just put it aside. Try to imagine a universe in which women get to fuck, too. Who, when, and how much they want. When a man charges for it, he’s glamorous. When a woman does it, she’s dirty. That thing. Put that aside and imagine that maybe she has a right to the same privileges a man has.” She retrieved the bouncing ball and tossed it to Beth.
“Go ahead,” Beth said, feeling like this was Feminism 101 with crazy on the side. She measured the distance to the basket.
Pog said, “I’m not being paid to kick puppies or give drugs to children or double-cross my best friend. I’m just being paid for sex. I don’t have to kill the President of Paraguay with a fork. I don’t even have to break the law, unless the law figures out how to track payments from hell and can prove that I got that money for having sex.”
Beth began to see a glimmer of Pog’s point. “I guess it isn’t so bad.” She let fly. Her ball teetered on the rim and fell away, no score. She ran after it and handed off to Pog.
Pog jeered lightly, “You guess it isn’t so bad. Hoo-fucking-ray. Let me ask you something. Of all the things you did or failed to do as a mother, which ones stand out in your memory as the most painful, awful, unforgivable errors that still make you cringe and feel guilty and will follow you to your grave?”
She shot. Her ball tipped off the backboard and fell with a swish through the net.
Beth swallowed. She could bear thinking about her kids now. Having a brand new body and a bounced settlement check was part of that, but there was some distance from her children, too. That made her sad, but it didn’t stab her with guilt.
“I know what you mean
.” The incidents that stabbed her with guilt came readily to her memory. “Once, when Jeff was nine, I kept him home from a Little League game, and his team won for the first time all season. He’d been sick. I felt I had to keep him home. But he wasn’t that sick. He could have played. And he always felt like the reason the team won was because he wasn’t there. He quit Little League as soon as Blake would let him. I felt horrible. I ruined Little League for him.”
She threw one-handed, half-blind with tears, and missed the backboard altogether.
Pog retrieved the ball. “Fifty lashes, and make ’em draw blood. Next?”
“I told Darleen she looked ugly in a dress.”
“Oh, you’re going straight to hell.”
“Yes, I thought so too. She was crushed. But I didn’t want her wearing it. It was slutty. That was the only thing I could think to say to make her not wear it, that she looked ugly in it.” Beth paused, remembering the crying behind the shut bedroom door, and her dreadful feeling of remorse.
Pog shook her head. “That the worst?”
“No.” Shame burned Beth’s ears and pain pinched her heart. “Blake’s brother is a coke addict. He had a son, a cute kid, but a real handful. Blake’s brother was jailed for dealing, and then he lost his job. I could have taken the boy into my home. Instead I let him get sent for foster care. He ended up in juvie. Eventually he died of heroin addiction himself.”
Pog stood still. “Sins of omission. The worst kind.” She dribbled slowly, looking at the basket.
“That’s not all.” Beth swallowed. “When Jeff started smoking pot in high school, I looked the other way. How could I? I knew what could happen. It was in his genes. What if he had gotten into the hard stuff? What if he had ruined his life with drugs, too? Would I have had the—the courage to handle it? Or would I have dumped him in some kind of rehab and pretended he wasn’t there any more, the way I did with little Fred?” Her throat tightened until she couldn’t speak.
Coed Demon Sluts: Omnibus: Coed Demon Sluts: books 1-5 Page 20