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A digression from my present day.
“Why did you ask me to expose myself last night?” she asks, as the car travels through the heavy traffic. I watch the other cars around us, feeling hemmed in by them suddenly. Too much time outside the apartment, probably. I scowl at them all and try loosening my shoulders, rolling them to calm myself down. “Gray?”
“What?”
“Exposing myself?” My eyes close, agitation building at the noise around me.
“I told you. Compliance.”
“I didn’t comply. I chose to do something for myself. It amused me to think of my dead husband looking at you while you looked at me naked.” I scoff and roll my neck, unclenching my hands from their grip on themselves.
“Why?”
“He would have hated it.”
“How do you know?” I ask, still trying to drown out everything but her voice.
“He was possessive about me. Made me cover up.”
My eyes open slowly and I chuckle, head tilting sideways to look at her. “He made you cover up because he was an inadequate husband. It’s probably why he fucked other women, hoping to prove himself to himself somehow.” She frowns at me, her chin trying for superior.
She’s doing well at it. Especially considering her ass is in a seat next to me travelling to an unknown location. “Men both fuck, and fuck with people, to feel powerful, Mrs Tanner. Deborah Collier is a high-ranking member of my business, something that he would have worked hard to get inside. I can assure you, covering you up was not something he did because he was bothered about men looking at you. It was just because you were easy to control.”
“A little too blunt.”
“Reality?”
She shuffles in her seat and looks around the interior, her gaze eventually landing on the closed unit housing the alcohol.
“No, Mrs Tanner. No alcohol. Have one of these if you’d like to relax.” I take out a small bottle of mixed use pills, unscrewing the cap and shaking them into my hand. “Which type of high, or low, would you like?”
“Excuse me?”
“I don’t drink when I go where we’re going. Which drug would you like?”
“I don’t take drugs.”
“Yes you do. You drink like a fish at present. Orange is a muscle relaxant. Blue, hallucinogenic. White will space you out, slightly akin to pot. And pink will speed you up. Choose.”
“You take drugs?”
“I own a pharmaceuticals company. I research.”
Silence.
I curl my hand closed, scrunching the pills into my palm. It gives me a chance to calm myself down because of the other noises around me. I stare blankly out of the window, part of me thinking of the people we’re travelling to, and let my palm fall open again once I’ve relaxed. They’ll be lost in their freedom already, enjoying the merits of the wealth they’ve amassed and the recreational benefits I provide for them. I blink slowly, letting the memories of the last time I was there pass through my mind. Dark. Heated. A wash of everything and anything, all of it offered and willed through a connection not viable without my help.
Eventually the car sweeps through the main gates to the small airport, silence still carrying us along. I look at her reaction to the jet as we pull into the hanger. She seems intrigued rather than disturbed, some part of her imagining where she’s going I expect.
“I haven’t ever taken drugs,” she admit. She glances at my hand, watching the little pills still laying there. “You could do anything to me?”
“I could have done anything to you the other night, which you offered if I remember rightly, I didn’t.” She trades glances between me and the pills again, tongue licking over her lips. “Call me chivalrous, but I prefer my humans sentient when I fuck with them.”
“Chivalrous?”
“Chivalrous.”
She reaches an unsteady hand to the pills, knocking them around in my palm, and fishes a white one out. “I smoked pot once. It was heady. Are you indulging?”
