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“Are you going to show anyone?”
Her sudden question made me pause. She didn’t sound worried. She sounded…curious? Intrigued?
Did I dare to think she sounded hopeful?
“Do youwantme to show someone?” The question hung in the air, a long pause without an answer. But her silence was an answer in itself.
I prodded experimentally, “Who do you think I should show it to first? Vincent? He’ll be jealous as hell to know I have it. Or how about Manson? Every time he stands next to your locker, he’d be thinking about it. What about Lucas?”
Her gulp was audible. Her voice didn’t carry as much of her usual confidence as she said, “Very funny, Jason. Now, would you get lost?”
I left the girls’ locker room that day with a lot more than vindication for all the work I’d been doing without pay. There was more to her than I’d thought. Beneath that perfect exterior lurked a masochistic little creature longing for someone totake control. It was a side of her I could actually understand, something I could relate to.
Something I could play with.
21
Jessica
I made up a story to tell my parents once I got home. Mom thought I’d spent the night at Danielle’s again, and I didn’t correct her, but trying to explain my car breaking down and my ensuing bargain was significantly more difficult.
In the end, I settled for telling them I’d gone to a local shop and knew the mechanics from high school, so they were able to give me a discount. Dad wanted to know the hard numbers to make sure he couldn’t get me a better deal elsewhere, but I was able to deflect by focusing on Mom’s questions instead.
“Who are these boys again?” she said, narrowing her eyes at me from the end of the table. We were seated for dinner, the first full meal I’d had all day.
“Lucas and Manson,” I said, trying to keep my mouth stuffed with as much food as I could to delay the questions. But Mom reached over and smacked my hand as I reached for another roll.
“Stop stuffing your face, Jessica Marie, slow down.” She sighed heavily in disgust. Across the table, my little sister, Steph, snickered, pleased to see someone else getting scolded. “Lucas and…Manson, you said? Those better not be the same boys that got expelled for assaulting other students.”
Damn it, of course she remembered that. Both incidents hadresulted in the school sending letters to parents explaining the situations and the action that had been taken. Mom had lost it both times, convinced that Wickeston was going to hell in a handbasket and my high school was growing more dangerous by the day.
“Well, I mean…yes?” I winced, and Mom threw up her hands in exasperation, glaring at my dad as if this was all his fault.
“Roger, are you really not going to say anything about this?” she demanded. “About our daughter going to a shop run bycriminals?”
My father responded in his usual slow, measured voice, “Now, Charlene, calm down. I don’t think we need to worry much about it —”
“Not worry?Not worry?!” Mom’s voice had reached that ear-splitting pitch that usually sent me running out the door. “You want her dealing with these men? Who knows what they could do? They could be traffickers, Roger!”
“Mom, they’re not traffickers —”
“You never know, Jessica. That’s the thing, you never know.” She jabbed her finger at me in warning. “Just the other day, Jeanie’s daughter said that some couple was following her around the Walmart, probably trying to snatch her up. People have been talking about it all over Facebook.”
“Ah, yes, Facebook, the epicenter of breaking news,” I muttered, and Mom’s fork clattered on her plate. “Listen, Mom, I swear they’re fine. They’re not dangerous.”
That wasn’t exactly true. Those men were extremely dangerous, but not in the way she thought. They were a danger to my pride, my reputation, and my panties.
“One of them threatened your boyfriend with a knife,” Mom snapped. “I swear, how did I raise a daughter with no damn sense?”
I dropped the subject because there was truly no point inarguing with her, and the rest of dinner passed in strained silence.
But her words still bothered me once I’d retreated upstairs. She knew only the barest details about those men, but that hadn’t stopped her from making wild assumptions about them. Just like most of the people I’d gone to high school with, Mom was more interested in gossip than in the actual truth.
I paused to take another sip of coffee. I’d gotten through almost the entire list Manson had given me and the questions had become pretty obscure. I had to Google the definition of “katoptronophilia,” only to realize it meant getting turned on by having sex in front of a mirror.
That was a five out of five on the interest scale for me, along with dozens of other fetishes that had never even crossed my mind.
Extreme bondage. Impact play. Whips, chains, domestic discipline, marking, scarification, degradation; the list went on and on. In a weird way, it was reassuring to see things I was interested in on a list like this. It was a reassurance that someone else out there — more than a few someone’s — had the same desires I did. But it also made me feel like I was in over my head.
