Dear Reader,
Nothing too out of the ordinary in this one, although it is a little dark, I suppose. And, no, Becca doesn't escape or any nonsense like that. I'll let you know if I ever write a story like that.
Regards,
Adam Lily
**********
"Ronny, baby, please. Please don't make me do this."
It was a little before midnight. Ronny had driven me to the stockyard district. We were parked outside the crappiest bar I'd ever seen: corrugated tin roof, half of a working beer sign, one window boarded up, the other crisscrossed with duct tape that kept it from shattering. An unconscious man slumped against the wall. Orange sodium lights made the tableau look even sicker.
"You're doing it," said Ronny. Smiling, he launched the slaver app on his smartphone.
"Baby, no, please, no." My best wheedling, desperate tone. Sometimes it swayed him. "I'm sorry the chicken was dry, please let me make it up to you-- "
"This
is
how you're making it up to me," he said. He fiddled with the app, thereby fiddling with me.
I started, "Baby let's talk about this--." But then Ronny tapped his phone, and that tingle skittered around my skull. My body sat up straight, sucked in a lung-busting volume of air, and held it. And held it. And held it. I couldn't stop holding it.
"We're not talking," he said. "You're doing. End of story."
I couldn't will myself to breathe, but I was still in charge of much of the rest of me. My eyebrows knotted, and my eyes pleaded, and my throat made creaky
nnnnn-nnnnnnnnhhhh
noises. And I thought:
You fucking asshole. Don't you fucking do this to me, you horrible evil shit.
And before I could control them came the next thoughts:
I will kill you, you shit. I will get that fucking phone away from you and--
My stomach lurched up into my throat. Nausea. I banged open the car door and stumbled into the parking lot. I tried to stand, but vertigo hit, so I dropped to all fours, banging my knees, grinding pebbles and glass into my hands. And then I puked. Everything came right up.
And I still couldn't breathe. Ronny hadn't released me, yet. My lungs burned and my raced on and my brain screamed. The world turned red, then white. My forehead banged on the ground, and I beat my fists on the cement.
Maybe this was it. Maybe I'd die. I didn't want to be free in this way, but after nearly a year in Ronny's harem, I'd take it.
But then I gulped in a chestful of parking-lot air. Then exhaled, coughing and spitting. I sucked in another chestful, then released it, less violently. My vision returned, and my heart slowed, and my brain said me
thank you, thank you
. I was going to live.
Ronny was standing beside me. "Had a bad idea, Becca? A naughty notion?"
I nodded. "Yes, sir, I'm sorry sir-- "
He dropped to his haunches. "Sssshhhh," he said, stroking my hair. "No harm done. Not to me, anyway." He picked grit from my forehead, then studied my hands. "Tch. Let's get you cleaned up. And, whew" --he made a face--"some water and then some gum. I bet even the boys in the bar wouldn't want you like this."
I tried begging one last time. "Please take me home."
Ronny shook his head. "No, Becca. We drove almost an hour to get here. You're doing it. Now be quiet. Or more puking, and maybe worse. And then you walk home."
My resistance evaporated. Not because of anything he did with the slaver app. Ronny didn't like using the app on me that way. "I've got enough brainless blow-up dolls," he'd say. And it was true. At home, he had Fifi and Babette and The Bloat. And he also had Suzi, who . . . well, "brainless" didn't even describe it. Suzi, his beta test.
I was Ronny's fifth acquisition. And in me, Ronny wanted something different than a sex-addled bimbo. Ronny wanted me to keep my brain, my sense of myself, because he liked making me give up, liked controlling me through my body. At first he used pain, pleasure, and fear to change and control me. But I'd gotten better at resisting those, so he turned to nausea. I can resist a lot, but nausea? Puking and worse? No, just, no. Do what he wants, get it over with.
"Okay. Okay. I'll do it."
"Atta girl," he said, rubbing my head. "Let's get you ready."
Five minutes later, my mouth minty, my flesh plucked of gravel, I heaved open the heavy dark door into the bar. I couldn't leave the bar until I'd finished the mission he'd tasked me with.
I scoped out the bar, and the bar of maybe a dozen guys scoped me back. What they saw: A short, fit, brunette twentysomething girl in a figure-masking black sweatshirt, moderately tight blue jeans, and black calf-high boots. What I saw: Cigarette haze, crap fluorescent lighting, cheap flat beer, lame 80s jukebox rock, a threadbare pool table, bad skin, failed marriages, drunken despair, methhead abyss. Probably more than a few STDs. And--improbably, for an urban bar like this--a deer's head mounted on the wall by the bar.
I wasn't exactly a hottie, but it didn't matter. Any woman in a bar like this was meat. I could hear their stale cocks stirring.
I was queasy from having thrown up, but I smiled broadly, brightly. That was part of my task, to make everyone think I was super-happy to be here. I walked slowly toward the bar, a dozen pairs of eyes tugging up my sweatshirt and peeling down my jeans. My own eyes roved at the bar's edges. I wanted an out-of-the-way spot: a bathroom, a beer closet, a back door to the alley--hell, even a booth in a dark corner. Anywhere I could complete the job with some privacy and dignity. Ronny hadn't said my humiliation had to be public. Not until the end.
Just before lifting myself up onto a barstool, I found it. A single bathroom, with a knob suggesting it could be locked from the inside. The door bore the stick-figures for male and female, although the bar patrons had gussied up the signs with a fat wang for the guy and basketball tits on the girl. Both figures had speech bubbles, but I couldn't make out the words.
I was sure the bathroom was disgusting, but all I wanted was privacy.
The bartender, a big pale pear of a guy, stared at me. "Whatchoo need."
"Um," I said. I munched a stale pretzel. "Tequila?"
"No girl drinks."
"A shot. No, a double-shot." Tender stomach be damned. This whole thing would be easier if I were drunk.
The bartender pursed his lips. "Pay."
I put a ten on the table. He took it, poured my cheap tequila, and walked off.
I munched on a few more pretzels, girding my stomach for the booze. Behind the bar was a mirror with which I studied the room. Some men sat by themselves; a few spoke to each other; all of them were looking at me.
Find the most pathetic guy
, Ronny had said.
The guy who skeeves you out the most. That's the one.
I found my guy, back in a corner. I tossed back the tequila, which burned like a candle on the way to my belly. I got another and munched more pretzels. I noticed that the eye sockets of the deer's head were empty, two dry holes. Creepy.