AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘I am exactly like Madeline!’
He surged to his feet. ‘You are nothing like her! How can you say that? You saw how Karl Reiner was getting Louise drunk, drugged—whatever it would take to get her into bed with him without her realising it was happening!’
A hand slashed in front of him. ‘I am not Louise! Don’t think of me as her, or anything like her! I knew exactly what I was doing! And I knew exactly how much money I was being paid for it!’ Her eyes were slitted like a snake’s. ‘Because fixing a price for sex is the first and most important thing any prostitute does!’
* * *
He froze. His brain froze. Stopped working completely. He just stood there, immobile.
She was not, though. She was swaying, very slightly, and there was a look on her face that was entirely and totally blank. As though she were no longer inside her body.
Yet her voice was still speaking. He could hear it coming from a long way away. An endless distance.
‘So now you know,’ she was saying. ‘I am exactly like Madeline. I made the same choice as she did. I wanted money—fast. And I did what she did.’
There was silence. An agonising silence that stretched for eternity. Then into the silence Rafael spoke.
‘I don’t believe you.’ His voice was flat. His denial absolute.
She rounded on him. ‘Believe it! Believe it, Rafael, because that’s what it was! Prostitution! Nothing else—just that. Sex for money.’
‘No—’ There was horror in his voice.
‘Yes! It was prostitution—exactly that!’ Bitterness and self-accusation scored her words. ‘Oh, I tried to tell myself it wasn’t—but it was! It was.’ She took a ravaged, heaving breath, making herself remember—making herself tell him what she had to tell him. What he had to know.
Her voice changed. Stretched thin, as if a wire was garrotting her.
‘I’d only just started modelling, and there’s very little money in it to begin with. It came as a shock, because I’d assumed—like so many other teenagers—that once I’d been scouted I’d be swanning around in luxury like a supermodel from then on. The reality was different.’ She paused, swallowed. ‘Sometimes we didn’t even get paid—not in money, just in clothes from the collection we’d modelled. So I was...short of money.’
Her voice was flat now, with no emotion.
‘But money was what I wanted. Badly. So—I made a decision. I found a way to make...easy money.’
She took a breath, like a razor in her throat. Her eyes were dead now—quite, quite dead.
She cast those eyes at Rafael, not seeing him, seeing only the past, seeing the choice she had made, the decision she had taken.
‘Have you ever heard of something called “summer brides”?’ she asked, her voice as dead and as expressionless as her eyes. She paused, her eyes still resting on Rafael.
Did he shake his head? He didn’t know. He knew only that something was gripping his entrails, his heart, like pliers.
She went on in that calm, dead voice. ‘They are quite common in the Middle East. In some places local culture bans all sexual contact between men and women outside marriage. So what they do...wealthy men...is buy themselves a bride. A summer bride. Temporary. Just to provide them with what they want.’ Her voice was emptied now of all expression. ‘They pay her a bride price. Enough to...to compensate her for the fact that the marriage won’t last more than a few weeks at the most. That once the man has...finished with her she’ll be...discarded.’
She was silent a moment. Her eyes slid past him, looking into a place that was very far away and yet as close to her as the agonising synapses in her memory. Then she went on, in the same expressionless voice.
