Sabine only had one client on Fridays. He was neurosurgeon with enough money to buy her a million times over. They had to finish up early because his daughter had an orthodontist's appointment and couldn't drive herself. As they redressed, she thought about her time at one of the state-run boarding schools for abnormally-abled children. A fuzzy memory of picking wildflowers by an electrified fence fogged her mind.
The abnormally abled—"abs" was the newest, lest offensive shorthand—were superhumans born out of chance. The men were too powerful to be with normal-abled people. Their love gave them cancer and bruised their insides. But abs women, an extreme rarity, could be with any person, which was why Sabine's client list had some of everyone. Smart, gifted abs who had useful abilities got to be superheroes, military personnel—people like her Friday client. Those like Sabine sold sex.
He left the money on the bureau and went out through her apartment's side-door like she'd told him to. She showered and put on a wrinkled housedress from the laundry basket. For breakfast, she had a boiled egg wrapped in cheese.
Sabine ate standing up, thinking of how the boarding schools were still in operation in spite of all the recent protests. All her life, she'd wondered why the schools existed. Her mind held a loose constellation of answers: Cold War politics, domestic terrorism threats. Fear. Her rage grew so large until it imploded into eroticism, a bearable emotion. She thought of her first client ever, an abs navy officer who'd purchased her for a half-an-hour the summer she turned nineteen. Though she hated his kind, her body orgasmed anyway, bleeding underneath the weight of his bulk like a squished peach. She was so young then. He told her he would've preferred a real working girl, but that he also took wicked pleasure in fucking the meekness out of the new hires. The thought of him made her rub her thighs together before she even knew what she was doing. She looked down at her nails and saw that they'd gone blood red again. Red, the color of sex and violence.
Sabine was the only abs member of her family. Her abnormality was that her emotions made her nails change color. The government had caught her later than usual, in grade school rather than at birth. All her life, her mother made her wear gloves, telling teachers she had psoriasis. The school nurse started testing kids for signs of super-abilities because of a new law. Sabine had to strip down completely, which made her nails turn pink, then grey, then crimson, then grey again. When he left the room, she told herself that she would be okay, that she couldn't possibly be in danger if she wasn't a danger herself. Why would anyone bother going through the trouble of reporting her? It wasn't like she could fly through protected airspace or explode oilrigs with her mind. Though she couldn't yet explain privilege, she believed having blonde hair would somehow help, and if not that then certainly her dad's presidency at an investment bank.
The memory of childhood ruined Sabine's appetite, blunting her desire to eat while leaving behind her hunger. She threw the half-eaten egg into the trash. Her stomach's emptiness screamed out at her.
Her neighbor Dave Temples slipped something under her door as she got ready for her second job at a law firm. She heard the familiar clunking sound of his clogs and the wrinkling of paper. When she got down on her knees, his feet had already disappeared from small slit underneath the door. He'd left her a note. His handwriting was spidery like the lines on an EKG machine.
What you're doing is wrong, from Dave Temples
.
The scold wasn't anything knew. Her family still wasn't talking to her because of her lifestyle. She hid his letter in between the pages of a cookbook she never used and headed off to work, already late. She did breathing exercises on the train. Her head swam like it had the day armed men escorted out of her old preparatory blindfolded. Why me? was the only thing she could think. Why is it always me?
#
Dave had trailed behind Sabine for what felt like forever, their paths running parallel to each other without intersection. At twelve and thirteen respectively, Dave and her went to the same boarding school, a converted Gilded Age mansion in the mountains. At eighteen and nineteen, they were staying at a flophouse just outside the city. Dave studied something impressive-sounding at an engineering college while she hustled at Plaisir just a block away. Sabine wasn't surprised when they both wound up moving into the luxury apartment. His room was across from hers. He shared his place with a tall, reedy woman who stopped showing up long before Sabine became aware of her absence. They'd talked, Sabine and the woman, but only in passing, greeting each other in the stairwell that smelled like rancid garlic. The woman was a bohemian. Her nipples poked through the fabric of her loose-fitted tunic.
The boarding school teachers said that the road to success for people like them was a narrow one, so Sabine thought it was only natural that she and Dave would wind up bumping into each other forever. Their relationship existed in a liminal space where they knew each other's names and odd bits of gossip about the other despite never having talked. Sabine had heard that Dave was always trying to ween himself off unfiltered cigarettes; that he had super strength, an abnormality that belied his boyish frame; that he only smiled when left alone; that his coffee-black hair was actually blonde because he dyed it to appear mature. Sabine was pretty sure he did something with computers for a living. He was scrawny. He wore a tiny cross necklace and smoked on the fire escape.
He knew about her secret job, no doubt collecting evidence against her. Now he might report her to the police for prostituting without a permit. She'd made it so obvious, dressing in fishnets during the work week. Even when she wore coatdresses, people seemed to know. Her family found her out immediately, right after she'd tried moving back in with them. She meant to tell them about her life eventually, but never got the chance. One of her sisters—either Serena or Sally-Jo—went through Sabine's purse while she was in the bathroom, taking out Plaisir's calling card and placing it on the coffee table for all to see. Their parents called her a cab. They made her wait in her old bedroom, which looked the same as when she left it: pink and lace-trimmed, the tiny village of Madame Alexander dolls peering down at her from atop the Queen Anne dresser. Sabine quit Plaisir to hook on her own soon after, desperate to make her exile complete before anyone else could do it for her. She ended things with Oona, a black redhead who worked as her madame, wore 36F silk bras, and liked watching Sabine dutifully service her most overendowed patrons from behind. Sabine had grown tired of Oona never giving her more than a few appointments a week, instead keeping her for herself. Though Oona had many special girls—pixyish tomboys of every color—she'd come to like Sabine most, pinning clothespins to her tits when she fucked her with a strap-on.
What angered Sabine most was not knowing how much information Dave had on her. He probably wanted to blackmail her into marriage or bondage, desperate to exploit her beauty. Rich abs hired bounty hunters to steal abs women and turn them into whores, surrogates, housewives, personal sex slaves. A woman in her line of work had to know her value, and hers was high. She was a rarity: a young abs woman with a round ass and a face that was TV-beautiful. In a world overfilled with abs men, she would be in demand even in her late forties. Sabine was only twenty-three.
Worry colored her whole world. Sabine felt something heavy growing inside of her when she went to happy-hour with a good-looking manager from accounting. The manager fucked her in his studio apartment for free as she imagined Dave writing the letter. His tongue made gentle circles around her clit, which, even after all the people who'd come before him, still made her excited and fearful. He asked her if she was a virgin, and she lied and said yes because that was how he wanted her, and she wanted to please him.
The manager was a normal-abled ex-jock whose continued dedication to his own body was almost religious. She hadn't meant to have sex with him, still sore from her morning appointment. She dug her fingers into his back, making half-moons in his muscled flesh. She tried to come for him, but the memory of Dave froze her insides. He squeezed her tits, which hardened and made her breasts feel like overfilled balloons.
"Fake innocence is sexy," he said after finishing too soon. "But only when it's fake. The technique's what counts the most. You're good in bed. How many boyfriends have you had?"
He'd finished inside of her, but her body was still wound-up. She looked down at her nails and saw that they'd gone from their typical salmon color to red.
"None," she said.
"Don't believe that, sugar."
"Well, it's true."
