by Amy Faye
“You okay?”
“Fine,” Kate answers. She turns away from the door and leans on the stair banister.
“If you need a minute,” I start. She doesn’t wait for me to finish.
“Just a minute, and then I can go.”
Her shoulders rack as she does… whatever she’s doing. Thinks her private thoughts.
“You look good,” I offer.
There’s a long moment where Kate doesn’t answer, doesn’t seem to have much of anything to say.
“Thanks,” she says softly. “You look good, too.”
I look down at my clothes. They’re nothing different than what I wear most days. But I’ll take the compliment if I can get it, I guess. I didn’t spend all that time in the gym so I could ignore compliments.
“Thanks. Are you okay to go?”
“Do I have to?”
“I’m asking you to,” I say. If she pushes back, then the answer is ‘no.’ I don’t know if she realizes it, but it’s not my job to spell everything out for her. If she doesn’t want something, she’s going to have to stand up to me about it at some point. That’s how life works.
“Then I’m okay to go.” She straightens and rubs at her face again. Like she’s preparing for battle or something.
“Good. We’re a little late,” I say. Then I start moving without her. Another chance for her to walk away, if that’s what she wants to do. But she doesn’t.
“Where are we going?”
“I told you. Dinner.”
“Just the two of us?”
“Just the two of us,” I say. “I’m tired of being cooped up in this house.”
I hope that I’m echoing her own thoughts. I know that it’s a big house, but no matter how big it is, never going out can drive someone crazy.
She follows behind me silently. I get into the car and slip the seat belt across my body. She slides in beside me and rubs at her eyes again. There’s no sign of tears, but then, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen tears on her face.
“You’re going to be fine,” I say.
Part of me wants to be sympathetic towards her. Part of me wants to wrap her up in my arms and tell her that I’ll take care of everything. But those aren’t the terms of our arrangement here, and I don’t know if I’m prepared to think about changing them.
“I know.”
“If you want to talk about it, though…” I leave the thought unfinished as I slowly pull out of the garage and into the road. It’s still early, but even now the gray sky is darkening more and more. There will be rain before the end of the night.
“What, are you going soft on me?”
“Why? Do you want to find out how soft I’m going?” I try to put a threat into my voice, one that my words only halfway imply.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I’ve been an awfully bad girl.”
It’s the first overt hint that she’s given that she’s teasing me on purpose. That she’s every bit as interested in being punished as I am at punishing.
Part of me, the part just below the waist, reacts immediately. It tells me that I ought to pull over right here and now and give her a swatting that she won’t soon forget.
Another part isn’t happy with that instinct. What is it about her that’s got me so tied up? I don’t want to ask myself. It’s a bad idea to even be thinking about it.
“You’re a real tease, aren’t you?”
She looks at me until I take my eyes off the road to shoot her a questioning look. She’s got a smirk on her mousy face.
“Who says I’m teasing?”
Her hands move in her lap and lift the hem of her skirt up, and up, and up, revealing inch after inch of peach-colored skin. Skin that keeps going up, and up, and up, until it ends in a neatly-trimmed strip of hair over her entrance and she stops pulling the skirt up.
I tear my eyes away. “You shouldn’t distract the driver,” I say. I ease the car off the road. “You’re going to have to be taught a lesson.”
“Oh yeah? What about us being late?”
“We’re just going to be a little more late, I guess,” I say, my voice hard. “Which is your fault, by the way, so I guess you’re going to have to be punished for that, too, aren’t you?”
She smiles at me, daring, her eyes full of lust. “Oh yeah? You’re going to have to punish me quite a lot, aren’t you?”
“I’m not sure that you’re ever going to sit right again,” I growl.
I can see her squirming in her seat as I pull around behind a building. I’m imagining what sort of trouble we could get up to back here, out of sight of the road. Out of sight of almost anything, unless someone were standing at the attic window of the house just visible over the fence.
Even then, it wouldn’t be long enough for the cops to come, I suspect. They’d take their sweet time, and I’d be finished long before they got here twenty or thirty minutes later.
I put the car in park and step out into the evening chill. She’s already getting out before I can tell her to.
“Tits out,” I growl. She pulls the neckline of the dress I gave her down. It doesn’t take much to be able to have her breasts spilling out the top. “Now bend over.”
She does as she’s told, and I lift the hem of her skirt until I can rest it, bunched up, at the top of her ass.
“You like this, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” she says. I bring my hand down on her ass and she squirms away from it. Her breasts press against the cold car window and she jerks back just as my hand comes down a second time.
“God,” I growl. “You are a slut, aren’t you?”
A third slap comes down. She lets out a yelp of mixed pain and pleasure.
“Yes, sir.”
Eight
Kate
I wake up again, and for the hundredth time, I feel like I’m going a little bit crazy. I need to get out of here.
There’s no reason that I need to leave. I’m not being violently attacked or anything. I enjoy what little “attacking” is going on.
And it’s not as if I need some excuse to stay. I have perfectly good reasons, on top of everything else. But I can’t help thinking that it’s a mistake, regardless. A mistake that I could easily avoid if I just had a little bit of sense in my head about everything that I’m dealing with.
I can’t rely on Luke for everything. I don’t want to rely on him for everything. Not because he’s him. Because he’s anyone. I’m smarter than that.
There are hard points in my life. There have been for a long time. Things that I wish I didn’t have to think about, wish I didn’t have to deal with. But that’s just not reality for me. Some things I have to accept.
My father is always going to be who he is. There’s no getting past that, no matter how much I want to. But I can try to make that problem as minimal as possible. I can try to make sure that he can’t cause any trouble for me.
But that doesn’t mean that I can make all my problems disappear, no matter how much I might wish that I could. Luke makes a lot of problems disappear. All he asks for it is to add a few others. Problems that I don’t have any desire to complain about. They’re easier than the problems I had before.
Except for one, the biggest problem of all: the softness. I can feel myself getting weaker, getting dumber, getting slower, every day. And every day, I can feel myself getting more complacent. Every day I feel myself getting more tired, sleeping longer. Thinking less and less about what I’m going to do when I leave, and thinking more and more about what I’m going to be able to do when I stay.
But I can’t stay, no matter how much I might want to. And I need to keep that in mind, no matter how much I might want to pretend that I can ignore it forever, until I’m old and gray.
Eventually, things are going to go sideways again. I’m going to be stuck back at Dad’s place, making sure that he doesn’t drink himself to death. Making sure that he doesn’t get himself murdered by a guy like Luke when I’m not there to make sure that he doesn�
��t.
I don’t know that Luke would have killed him. He can be perfectly decent, when he wants to. But when he doesn’t want to be decent, he isn’t. I need to get the hell out of here, before he decides that he doesn’t need to be decent to me any more.
I need to get out of here before he decides that he’s going to be anything more than decent to me. I need to get out of here before I start to get an opinion on which is scarier.
I get out of bed and check my phone on the other side of my room. The mere fact that it bothers me so much is as clear a sign as I could possibly get that I’m getting soft. No amount of spankings is going to change that.
No matter how decent Luke is, nothing smells like roses forever. At some point, you’re always going to struggle. If I rely on him, I’m not going to be able to fight through that trouble. It’s a crutch that’s going to kill me before I know it, and the way I’ve felt the past two weeks, the way that dinner went last night, or rather, the way that it didn’t go, after we spent thirty minutes in that back alley, I’m enjoying letting it.
No messages. That’s good. If there’s nothing to respond to, then there’s not going to be any way to notice I haven’t responded. By the time that Luke gets home, he’s going to find me long since gone, and I don’t believe he’d follow me if he really thought I wanted to leave.
I don’t have a suitcase. I have a handful of grocery bags that I ball up my clothes into, until it’s so much weight that I can practically feel my arms threatening to fall off.
For a moment, I want to bring the dress he gave me. But that wouldn’t be fair. It wouldn’t be fair to him, and it wouldn’t be fair to me. I have to make this a clean break, and that means leaving behind anything that’s going to connect me to this life.
Deep breath. I ask myself if I’m serious about this. I can leave any time. There’s nothing stopping me. I’m alone most of the day, most days. There’s no reason I can’t leave again later. I can always give it another few days.
Or I can give it a few days and realize that I don’t have the guts to do it, not any more. The strength I can feel sapping out of me, the ability to just suffer through the pain, might not be enough any more. I might finally be unable to tell myself ‘no’ when I want something.
My eyes close, almost of their own volition. There’s a lot of trouble that I’ve got to go through. A lot of worry that I’ve got to put myself through. And when I come out the other side, maybe I’ll be able to make someone understand why I had to do it. Maybe I’ll be able to make myself understand.
I take a step towards the door. Outside, a car engine roars. The garage starts to open. I try to take another step, and my feet refuse to move. I think about going back. The feeling of relief that floods me tells me that I need to keep moving towards the door. Towards freedom.
The temptation is too much. I turn around, dump the clothes out again and sort them into the dresser, half-heartedly folded before being stacked into the drawers. I lay down on the bed and pull the dress into my arms.
The fabric feels good against my skin. It smells gently of sex, like the whole room tends to. I press my face into it as I hear Luke’s boots walking across the floor downstairs, as I hear him starting to approach the steps.
“Kate?”
I’m not going to cry. I’m going to keep control of myself.
“I’m up here,” I call down. It’s just routine. I have to stick with routine, and not let myself get distracted.
His steps come up the stairs slowly. Slow enough to give me a thousand years to think about my decisions and how bad they are. I need to get out of here. I need to start thinking independently. I need to start being tough and solitary and smart again.
But the truth is, all I want is for him to call me a dirty slut again and keep me here until I’m too over-sexed to care what’s changed. Until I’m too dumb to think about what’s going to be coming along on the horizon.
The door to my bedroom opens, and I don’t need to take my face out of the soft, smooth fabric of my new dress to know that Luke is standing there, filling the doorway with his broad shoulders and straight back that seems to give him an extra inch on top of his already large frame.
“Is everything okay?”
I can’t stop seeing everything that’s going to go wrong. Everything that’s going to tear us apart. Every weakness that I’m going to develop between now and then, that’s going to turn me into the kind of woman who is ruined when he leaves.
“Everything is fine,” I say, turning off my feelings as much as I can. I may be growing weaker by the day, as I grow to think of Lucas as someone who’s in charge, someone who I can lean on.
But I’m not so weak that I’m going to let him see me crying.
Nine
Luke
I’ve got where I am today by not being an idiot. It might be easy to pretend, but most of the time, I don’t. It’s much, much easier to just be who I am, and sometimes that means not acting like a God damned fool.
In this case, though, I think maybe I’d be better off just letting sleeping dogs lie. There’s no reason that I need to let Kate know that I’ve seen her upset. There’s no reason because then I have to accept it as my problem.
Kate Ashley isn’t supposed to be my problem. She’s supposed to be a check worth ten thousand dollars. I’m still quite a ways away from getting ten thousand dollars worth of use out of her, even if I ignore the mounting costs.
I don’t know why I need to keep reiterating that in my mind. As if I have something else to think about. The fact is, I don’t. I shouldn’t and I don’t. I’m not stupid enough to catch feelings.
“You want something to eat? I can call out for a pizza or something.”
“If that’s what you want,” she says. There’s a quaver in her voice that I ignore. If I want to be I can actually be perfectly good at ignoring whatever is upsetting her.
“Sounds good to me. You know, you still haven’t given me a list of anything you want in the house.”
“I’m fine,” she says. It’s probably a lie. I can see it in her eyes. Something’s upsetting her. I just can’t figure out what it is. And I’m not going to ask her, because asking her means admitting I noticed. Admitting that I noticed means admitting that I was concerned about it.
Since I’m not concerned about it, or at least doing my level best to imitate not being concerned about it until I can figure out what would make me possibly think about being concerned, that whole train of thought cuts off early and leaves me standing there holding the bag.
I walk out and leave her to whatever her thoughts are. She’s got to deal with her own problems. Same as everyone else. Eventually, she’ll have to pull her own weight around here, and I’m not in a position to just charitably hope that she can cope with it.
We’re both stuck with each other. I let out a long breath. If we’d met in slightly different circumstances, then maybe there would be more to it than that. Maybe she’d be a good woman. A good girlfriend. A good lover.
But she’s not. As disturbing as the concept sounds, she’s basically property at this point, as horrifying as that sounds, and I’m not going to sit here and treat her like some kind of doll I can put up on the shelf. She’s a woman, and that means plenty of things.
First, of course, it means that I need to think about her needs, at least enough to try to meet some of them.
But second, it means that I can expect certain things of her. She’s capable of dealing with shit. If something came up that she couldn’t deal with, she could come to me.
If she doesn’t like it, she can leave. I pull the phone out of my pocket and press the speed dial for number eight. It’s a new addition, so I have to take care to keep using it until it’s second nature. We’ve been having a lot of pizza lately.
Kate comes down a minute later to join me. It’s a little bit unusual, but I’m not going to question it. She’s got free reign of the house, these days, and I’m not going to take that away from her now.
<
br /> “How can I help you?” The voice on the other end of the line is a young woman. I don’t recognize her, but I usually don’t eat this early, either. But I’m starving, so I’m not about to wait around for the regular guy to come in.
I start giving my order. It’s the same every time. Large pizza, half pepperoni, half everything. They used to call it a garbage can when I was a kid. Maybe they still do. But here, they don’t call it that. Got looked at like a crazy person for trying to order one. Or maybe I’m just going to the wrong place.
But I’m only halfway paying attention to that conversation anyways. There’s other things going on that I’m more concerned about. Kate’s standing in front of me like she wants to say something. I raise my eyebrows, hoping that she gets the idea that I want her to tell me whatever it is.
Instead, she sits down on the couch next to me. Well, ‘next to’ isn’t totally right. She’s on the other side, but there’s nobody in the space between us, so I guess that’s sort of ‘next to.’
The order finishes up. I’ll pay cash, same as I always do. The price is the same as it always is. I hang up the phone and slip it back into my pocket.
“Something wrong?”
Kate lets out a long breath, like something is. But she shakes her head. “I’m fine.”
I’ve just about had it with the theatrics here. I’m not trying to be a bastard, here, but if she’s not going to tell me what the fuck is wrong then I’m not going to worry about it. Call me whatever you like.
“What did you do today? Anything interesting?”
I don’t want to talk about work, but there has to be something to talk about. Something interesting, at least. But one can only hope. Between the two of us, there’s usually something, but it takes a while to figure out what it is going to be most days.
“I don’t really want to talk about it,” she says. I never get an answer to the question. I think she sleeps most of the day, to be honest. But I’m not about to say that to her face.
But usually, there’s a certain air to her response. A lightness, maybe. Today, it’s not there. She sounds like she genuinely doesn’t want to talk about the thing she actually did, rather than not wanting to talk about the things she didn’t do.