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You’re a lot of things. An orphan. Okay at school. A pretty good housekeeper.
You’re not a fucking idiot.
You look Avery up after you meet him. You don’t get far—the school’s microfiche catalog is hard to search through—but you manage to find a few stories.
Here’s what you know about him.
He’s in his early forties, probably, give or take a couple years. He graduated university twenty years ago, at least, which gives you an estimate. There’s an article about an alumni event, at which he spoke, due to his professional accomplishments.
He’s very successful. Not for no reason; he’s got a last name with a history and the school he went to didn’t hurt anything, but some of it seems to be genuinely his.
He’s got more money than God, and he knows what he likes to spend it on. When he appears in the papers—and he often does—it’s been with a string of pretty young things clinging eagerly to his arm.
He prefers blondes, although he doesn’t seem too picky about factors like gender. You recognize a couple of them. One, a girl who’d been a couple years ahead of you at the orphanage, who’d left to get married to some rich asshole—she called her fiance that every time she spoke about him—winks at the camera in the picture you see of her. There’s a boy you remember seeing win some trophy for swimming, in a slim-fitting suit, eyes downcast, expression sweet.
Still, they’re all that ingenue type—a type you yourself admittedly belong to. Lithe and lovely and legal (barely).
So—fine. Suspicious, but fine. You could tell this was a habit for him from the moment he brought you to the cafe and didn’t even look at the menu. And when the waitress—a girl you shared a math class with—had assumed he was your father, she’d been swiftly replaced by the hostess, who greeted Avery by name, apologized, and had referred to you as his ‘date.’
Quite the euphemism.
(She’d joked, when taking the bills he’d slid across the table to her, that he’d better tip you well, too, and he’d laughed, warm and bright and fake. And he had passed you £50, and told you that you ought to spend it on a less threadbare school skirt. So. You had figured out your place pretty easily. It wasn’t much different than when someone wanted you to sit on their lap instead of cleaning their living room, or when one of them decided you’d make a nice footstool. If they paid you, they paid you, and it wasn’t like Bailey would take squeamishness for an answer.)
And so, when he pulls up alongside you as you’re walking back from cleaning the flats on Saturday, feather duster in hand and that stupid little maid dress bouncing around your thighs, you know what to expect. You’re almost ready to start quoting him a price when he speaks. Asks you to go to a restaurant with him, even, and the ‘buy me dinner first’ joke dies on your lips.
That is what he’s doing.
You feel out of place in the clothing store you wander into. Usually, it’s the little outlet that’s got all the school-approved clothing, but this time, it’s one of those places you usually walk past, calling itself a boutique, and you feel so fucking out of your depth when the sales associate looks at you, winces, smiles, and immediately directs you to the clearance rack at the back of the store.
There’s a few dresses in what passes for your size—you’re not convinced that any of the sizes here are any real person’s size—and you grab them, figuring that you’ll figure out the distinctions in the dressing room.
Your reflection is someone you hardly recognize. She’s got lilac satin wrapped around her from armpit to shin, straps too thin to make any kind of difference hooked over her shoulders.
She looks young, and nervous, and there’s a really tremendous amount of bare, vulnerable skin on display. It is, you think, probably the correct type of look for this.
You pay the £120 without complaining, at least externally, and you’re on your way out of the shopping center when you pass by a shop you rarely look twice at, mostly out of shame. Well. Avery’s presumably paying for something specific, and you might as well wrap it up nicely for him.
Scratchy black lace panties in hand—shoved into the deepest reaches of your pocket, actually—you stop by the museum across the park in order to exchange the arrowheads you’ve found in the forest for nearly as much as you’ve just spent. The curator, your history teacher, seems grateful, at least, and asks you to see if you can find a silver brooch that she’s interested in adding to the collection. You say you will. You’re really not sure if you can manage it.
And then it’s home by bus, a nap, half an hour of video games with Robin, and then: the front stoop of the orphanage. Shivering—it’s not the cold, it’s the stupid dress, and the fact that Robin helped you put your hair up. You seem more adult with it off your shoulders.
Avery parks his car, and you’ve only just stood up to walk towards it when he gets out and approaches you. You stop short, unsure of what he wants.
“I’m glad you decided to accept my invitation,” he says, smiling, and offers you a hand. “That evening gown looks lovely on you.”
“You look pretty good yourself,” you say. It’s not even flattery. The green gem on his tie pin brings out his eyes, makes them seem to glow in the fading light of dusk. His suit highlights the lines of his body, making him look taller and more built than you believe he actually is. It’s a subtle off-brown shade, one you might call russet, and there’s a little bit of green and gold thread woven through in a plaid pattern. It’s a very on-purpose suit.
He laughs, and when you take his hand, he leads you to the passenger door of the car and opens it for you. “Get in,” he says. “It’s not far.”
You do, and he smiles down at you, before closing your door and walking around to his side of the car.
He’s a good driver—glances over at you a few times, but only at stoplights, and he keeps his hands on the wheel the whole time—and it’s a smooth, short ride to a restaurant you’ve never really looked at before.
Avery takes your arm again as you step out of his car, and guides you inside. The waiter, again, knows exactly who he is, and exactly what you are. Your table is set for two, already, and there’s two wine glasses provided, and the waiter rushes off to bring you the bottle, like Avery just gets everything he wants, and only asks if he’s feeling particularly courteous.
He pours for both of you, movements elegant and practiced, and he hands you a glass that you take, trying to mirror how he held it.
“It’s good,” he says, nodding at the wine, glowing golden in the glass, and so you take a sip. He watches you carefully, as if trying to make sure you comply.
There’s something off about the wine, you think. And it’s not like you’ve never tasted any before. Earlier this year, you and Robin had stolen a bottle from an older orphan’s stash, sharing it sip by sip on the floor of Robin’s bedroom until all you wanted to do was lie there and hold hands and talk, very quietly, about everything you were afraid of.
This wine is… different. It could be that it’s more expensive—you aren’t looking at prices, and anyway, you don’t think that this is a restaurant that lists the prices, because if you have to ask, you can’t afford it.
You suspect it isn’t just more expensive, and you’re offended—what, does he think you won’t put out if you’re physically able to refuse him?
You feel warm already, despite the fact that it’s chilly, for late September, and you’re already antsy when the waiter returns with the menu. He hands it to Avery, not you.
“Not for me?” you ask, raising an eyebrow at him.
Avery laughs. “You’ve never been here, have you?” he asks. “I know what you’ll like, girl.”
You lean back in your chair. “Impress me, then.”
He orders you salad. You don’t really want to say what you’re thinking, and so you don’t, but honestly. He picked you up to help you get the lichen. He can guess how well Bailey feeds you at the orphanage.
You thank him, once the waiter has collected your—one—menu, and he smiles, picking up his wine glass and drinking deeply from it.
“This is just what I needed after the week I’ve had,” he says, sighing. “You wouldn’t believe how difficult it is for people to handle a change in regulations. We’ve been updating…”
You, although you don’t want to admit it, tune him out. It’s not something you can follow—industry regulations changing, recalcitrant manufacturers, and customers refusing to listen and demanding that the product they’re given be exactly the same as what it was before—because you’re, frankly, trying to handle the way you’re fixated on him. His voice, even while he’s complaining like this, is warm and intoxicating, deep in a way that itches something in your brain.
You smile, nod, make agreeing noises when there’s a break in what he’s saying, and continue to take sips of your wine.
Avery stops for a longer moment, and you realize he’s waiting for you to ask a real question.
“What do you do for work?” you ask, curious despite yourself. Avery smiles.
“Nothing you need to worry about, girl,” he says, shaking his head. “It’s a pharmaceutical company, but I really never have to touch anything we make. I’m much more of a people person, and that’s a good thing, because I was really never any good at chemistry.”
You nod. “I like our biology lessons better,” you add, and only realize the innuendo when Avery winks at you. He’s prevented from making you blush further by the arrival of your food.
The salad is annoyingly good. The greens are fresh, and there’s small bits of cheese and thin slices of apple that add variety. It’s not particularly filling, but the vinaigrette is sharp, sparkling in your mouth, a flavor almost like the wine. You recall a line from one of your housekeeping lectures about pairing wine with food. Damn it, Avery probably chose this on purpose.
The two of you eat quietly, focused on your individual dishes. Avery pours more wine into your glass twice, and you hardly intend to drink as much as you do, but they haven’t given you water and the salad is dry. It’ll be alright, though. You’re trying to remember how much alcohol River said was in a glass of wine, only you can’t remember how big a glass is.
It’s making you warm, and wet, which is taking the lace against your crotch from scratchy to dragging, catching on everything sensitive and rubbing at it until you’re shifting your thighs against each other in your seat. You feel like you’re leaving a wet spot on the chair.
Avery watches you, and smiles, and pays the bill once you’re both finished with your meals. He takes your arm on the way out of the restaurant, helps you into the car—you’re not drunk, but you’re unsteady on your feet, school shoes not fitting the way they’re supposed to because you decided that your gym socks didn’t match your evening gown.
He drives you home, still smooth and quick, and parks outside the orphanage without unlocking the doors of the car.
“Thank you for the pleasant evening,” he says, close to your mouth, voice a hot, low rumble across your lips, and, knowing what comes next, you kiss him, clumsy and drunk, less an attempt to please and more of an attempt to eat him whole, pull the fillings out of his teeth with your tongue. He catches you part of the way in, holds you back, tugs you up and halfway over the center console of his car, so that you’re almost straddling the gearshift, and you grind against it, letting it slide against your soaked-through lace panties. Avery’s mouth tastes like wine, but less like wine than yours does, and a little savory, light, creamy, and if this is how you get to find out what his soup tasted like, so be it.
You scramble with his clothes, tugging at his tie, the buttons on his shirt, and he laughs into your mouth and guides your hands down to his belt. While you’re working on it, because the wine is making a belt buckle much more of a task than it needs to be, you hear him reaching for something else in the car.
This is real, you think, mind running at half speed. This is happening.
You work his belt open, and then you sit and stare at the fly of his trousers. Zippers seem a bit complex for you right now, which, fortunately, Avery realizes. He hands you what he’d picked up—a condom—and undoes his fly himself. And tugs down his boxer-briefs.
His cock is hard.
Fucking obviously, you think to yourself, but it is. It’s hard and big, bigger than you realized while feeling him up through layers of fabric. He has to adjust himself to pull it all the way out of his underwear and through his fly, shift in his seat, and you can tell you’re staring at it open-mouthed when a gob of drool lands on his thigh. You cannot afford the dry-cleaning bill for anything he’s wearing, and you hope he doesn’t realize what you did, or that he doesn’t care.
Somewhere above your head, Avery chuckles, and takes the condom back from you. A blessing. You don’t think you could have operated it, like this, drunk and whatever else is happening to you. It can’t be just the sex.
He rolls it down his cock, exactly like how Sirris showed you in science class, and you giggle a little bit, imagining her in the car with you, telling you what you’re supposed to do. You realize you’re not supposed to laugh at his dick, and so you lean down to lick it instead, craning your neck awkwardly, managing to maneuver the tip between your lips.
Avery sighs-moans, a relaxed, pleased exhale. Like he was expecting this. “Careful with your teeth, girl,” he says, shifting his hips to give you better access.
The angle is weird, and you have to climb back into your seat, knees up and bent over the console and with one hand on his chest for stability, which he kindly allows you.
You’ve done this before. Twice, technically—even if you hadn’t made it to the into-the-mouth phase on the first, disastrous attempt—but it’s still new, and you feel clumsy with your lips on it, your tongue attempting to play with the head without abandoning its duty blocking it from your teeth.
His cock feels too big for your mouth, but your mouth doesn’t make very much sense right now, anyway, everything expansive and sensational and dizzying. There was something in the wine, had to have been, except you’re not of much of a mind to care, because even through the faux fruit flavor of the condom you can swear you can taste him, feel him pulsing and needy and hot on your tongue.
You play with him, sucking and licking, and when you get your hand on the base because you aren’t quite that ambitious, Avery groans and thrusts the barest bit up and you do choke a little, and the worst part of that is that you can feel yourself get even wetter.
The noises are fucking obscene, wet and struggling-to-breathe and the tiniest bit fleshy, as the head of his cock pushes against the entrance of your throat in a way that makes it clamp down in rejection. It’s not putting him off, at least, if the pleased tone of his groans—the “fuck, your mouth” that you force out of him is going to play in your head on repeat for months—is anything to judge by.
You drag the straps of your evening gown, stupid filmy purple bit of nothing that it is, down off of your shoulders, exposing your small breasts, nipples so hard they hurt, and fuck it, fuck anyone who sees you, anyway, because Avery moans, and shoves his hand into your hair, and you’re so high on the feeling of success that you almost don’t notice when he comes, until he drags you off his cock by your bun, now coming undone in his fist.
“Good girl,” he gasps, stroking his thumb over your temple. You shiver, a full body roll that feels like it spins directly down your spine and into your gut. You move to kiss him, remember that his cock was just in your mouth, and pause, hesitate looking up at him, before he smiles and tugs you up to meet your mouth with his. You’re tempted to climb over into his lap, see if he can go another round, but he breaks the kiss, lets you sit back down.
You smile at him, unsure of what he wants next, but he seems done enough for now, so you give him what privacy you can while he removes and disposes of the condom. Your lip gloss, you realize, is smeared on your hand where it touched your lips, wet and shimmery and pink.
“This should be what you owe for this week,” Avery says, pulling bills out of his wallet like he isn’t lounging in the front seat of his car with his cock out, soft, lying slightly sideways across the front of his suit trousers. It’s not like he doesn’t have the money to pay off the cops if they get mad at him for public indecency, anyway, you think, catching a glimpse of the rest of his wallet. “Plus a little extra, just in case. Buy yourself something nice with it, girl.”
He hands you the cash, and you thank him, and hurry into the orphanage on unsteady legs, and you even make it into the bathroom before you’ve got the skirt of your evening gown yanked up around your waist and two fingers shoved into your pussy, and you’re coming with half of your other hand shoved into your mouth as if it could ever try to be his cock.
You get yourself off twice more in the bath, whatever he’d given you waning but still very, very present, making you feel like the hot water is one and the same with your body as you come around your fingers, yanking at your surprisingly sensitive nipples. Avery’s voice hovers in your head the whole time, “good girl” rasping like sandpaper against the sensitive parts of your brain.
You don’t bother re-dressing in your gown, instead wrapping yourself in a towel, and leaning over the sink to brush the chemical taste of the condom out of your mouth.
It’s a better taste, you think, than the previous time you tried this. The lithe man, the one who’d offered you £60 last Saturday night, when you’d been tidying his living room and he’d been sat on the couch, and he’d looked over at you, palmed himself, and made an offer that you, who needed £50 before the next morning, had immediately agreed to, hadn’t used a condom, and you’d gagged on it when he finished, sent some out your nose and the rest out your mouth. He had laughed at you, but not meanly, and given you tissues, and tipped you an extra £10 when he’d heard it was your first time.
And now, Avery’s the one who’s paid your rent just in time.
There’s still something odd about that, you think, steadying yourself on the edge of the sink. How’d he know what you owe? Who could have told him? If it wasn’t you, then it must have been Bailey, and…
And then you remember. Bailey has a computer. You’ll need to catch him while he’s logged on, but he’s usually in his office in the mornings, and if you can arrange a distraction… hm.
By the time you drag your aching, spent body into bed, you’re already deciding not to worry about how early you wake up tomorrow morning. If you make it into Bailey’s office on time, fine. If you don’t, fuck it. That’s what Mondays are for.
Your sleep is easy, but not dreamless—he’s in all of them, big and hot over and under you, inside and around you, mouth on your tits, your cunt, your lips, cock somehow bigger and hotter than it is in life. Your pajamas are clinging to your thighs when you wake, although it’s at least half from sweat. When Bailey barges into your room, you want to curl up, as if hiding the evidence.
You can tell he can smell it, and your face goes hot with shame, but you hand him the bills anyway. Avery paid you more than enough, at least, and Bailey leaves you, making sure to specify that he’ll need more next week. As if you didn’t know that.
You eat breakfast before you go to his office, so it’ll be less immediate. He’s sitting at his computer, working on something, and you tell him the lie you’ve prepared, about a man trying to climb over the fence, and he buys it, storms off without turning off the computer.
You sit in his chair, feeling small inside it. It takes you a moment, but you’re able to pull up the file he was looking at, just because he didn’t want you to see it.
It’s a spreadsheet, and it has names on it. Names of the orphans. You find the row with your name on it, and—yes, there’s a column with ‘Avery; special permissions,’ which isn’t chilling at all.
Robin’s got a line next to yours, with no one’s name listed.
But there are lines with names. Leighton is on a couple, which is information you didn’t want. A few of them say the same thing about special permissions, and you’d look to go check, but you don’t think that’s information Bailey would write down.
Still, it confirms what you suspected. Avery is up to something. He’d got a reason to seek you out, and he’s probably paying Bailey directly for you.
But also, you’re in front of a computer, and the internet is available, and you’d like to know more about Avery.
You find nothing special, when you search for information about him. News of a separation, and then a divorce, a few years back. He’s got two kids—although apparently not custody of them—maybe six years younger than you? He’s unmarried right now, which you didn’t care about, but it’s nice that that isn’t a concern.
He works, as he said, for a pharmaceutical company. Something fancy, his job title is just letters. They’ve got an announcement of a recent business deal with a DE Chemical that’s in your town, though. No information in the article, unfortunately, but it could explain why Avery’s in town so much.
Little else about his personal life—again, there’s the standard bits where he’s listed as attending certain events, but no names of anyone else he’s dated. No major connections, other than the divorce you’ve seen.
That relationship was listed as his second marriage, though. You go back again, looking at the names and dates more carefully. And—yes. There’s a fiancee in there, and then a wife, and then—a pregnancy announcement. Wow.
You check the timing. The kid would be your age, and that’s pretty… look, it’s one thing to know that Avery is old enough to be your father, and yet another to know that he could be, if you weren’t an orphan.
But this article has the name of the mother, too, if not the child.
You highlight her name, copy it, and go back to the search engine. Maybe there’s something that’ll explain it, and why the hell she would have skipped out on something so cushy.
Ah. Divorce—accusations of infidelity on both sides, tempers running high. Rich people shit. No need to stay together for the kids when the kids aren’t even born yet. Well, okay, maybe she kept the baby. Maybe Avery’s got the opposite of daddy issues, where he’s obsessed with fucking people who could have been his kid. Gross.
And then there’s another article. A little one, just barely. An obituary, the kind they publish when someone’s life wasn’t long enough for a proper one. The standard stuff—dead in a car crash, survived by one child, in lieu of flowers please send donations to Domus Street Orphanage Charitable Fund.
Huh.
Your mother died in a car crash. You’ve got a scar on your leg from it—apparently that’s a big part of what you owe Bailey for, given the number of surgeries you needed.
You check the date on the article. You would have been two.
It’s an old scar.
He… Avery could be… You don’t want to finish the thought.
“What the hell are you digging through my computer for?”
Shit. Bailey.
“Nothing,” you say, which is so obvious a lie that you can’t even blame him for marching over and grabbing you, pushing you further into the chair as he leans over to look at the screen.
It takes him maybe a second to find what you were looking for, and a second more for anger to rise up within him.
“You little brat,” he hisses, dragging you up and throwing you over his desk, shoving your chest down into a pile of paperwork. His big hand lands across your ass with a hard crack, and you cry out in pain before you remember to stop yourself.
It’s too late, Bailey’s already flipping up your sundress skirt and yanking down your plain panties, letting them catch around your knees as you struggle. He keeps spanking you, and you know your ass is going to be red when he’s done, and he knows…
He knows. He knows. He knows. It’s sickening, boiling up inside you, threatening to spill out of your mouth and into the world, and somehow, you manage to keep it inside in favor of swearing, and claiming you’re sorry, and begging Bailey to stop.
You’re not sorry because there’s nothing else in your head. Whatever it is that you know about Avery, Bailey knows it too.
Above you, Bailey is still lecturing. “Avery pays me good fucking money for you, and here you go trying to ruin it,” he says. “Wasting all my hard work.”
“I wasn’t going to tell him!” you insist, which—now that you mention it, you weren’t.
Fuck, is the money really that good? Is he really that good? Is this what you want?
Bailey snorts. Spanks you again. “You think I believe that? You’re a damn liar, kid,” he says, and hits you harder to punctuate it.
“I could have looked it up somewhere else,” you say. “There’s a computer in the head’s office at school.”
“You think Leighton has access to my books?” Bailey asks, and oh, he’s talking about the spreadsheet.
“Maybe!” you say, squirming a little bit to reduce the pain. “I don’t know!”
Maybe he doesn’t know, if that’s what he’s saying, if that’s why he’s continuing to spank you. Maybe he’s just talking about the money. You swallow something that feels dangerously close to a laugh. He’s Bailey. Of course he’s just talking about the money. He turns off the power in the kitchen at night to save money. He doesn’t let people use bandages unless their injuries are serious. Of course this is about the money to him.
“You’re not the only one who wants to get paid,” you say, fighting the urge to start crying. Fuck, your ass hurts, and your hips are getting pushed into the sharp corner of the desk something awful. This is going to leave a mark. Maybe a bruise. “Please,” you say, sounding a little more desperate, voice straining past the wetness in your throat. You’re not going to cry. “I’m—it’s good money, and he’s—” your father? “—been okay to me.”
Bailey listens, or at least decides he’s done, because he lets you go, lets you stand up and tug your skirt down over your ass. He’s not even breathing heavy. Bastard.
“You’re not going to tell him,” Bailey says. “Or I can do things that make this look like a fucking picnic. You think Avery’s nice?” He stares you down. Waits till you nod. “Consider this a warning, then. Stick with nice.”
You stare up at him. Nod again. “I will,” you say, and then a little daring, “and he is nice. Nicer than you, anyway.”
“Aw,” Bailey says, voice dripping bitter sarcasm. “Little girl’s got a crush?”
“Yeah,” you say. “Let’s call it that.” And then you walk out of the office before he can drag you over his knee again for sass.
You’re shaky, a bit, and you play video games with Robin before she goes to set up her lemonade stand at the beach, and you help her with that, too, before you walk across the sandbar to the chalets to clean.
You need, you decide, elbow deep in a pot that’s got something starchy cooked onto the sides, more evidence.
You grew up in the orphanage. You’re familiar with the stories, the vain hope, the “my parents are coming back for me.” It even happened, a couple times. Sometimes, it was because the kids’ parents were older orphans, who didn’t—maybe couldn’t—have their own place to live. Once, someone’s dad had gone missing on a sailing voyage, and turned up years later speaking a language no one had ever heard, his English rusty from disuse. But he’d come back.
But for every parent who’d returned, the long-awaited savior, there’d been more who hadn’t. More kids who’d sat there every night hoping someone would pull them out of it. It got desperate. It got ugly.
You’d been lucky to have Robin, who, if not a sister, was the closest thing to it that most people ever got. You’d told each other the other type of story, the “where we’ll go, what we’ll do” ones, which were sustaining enough for… this. For this not to break you.
The hours of cleaning go quickly. It’s a nice enough day that most people are outdoors, enjoying the beach and the boardwalk, and so few of them are inside to bother you. The one who does is just a tourist, and all she wants is for you to sit on her lap while she watches television. Fine! Fine! The show’s even interesting!
You help Robin carry her things back, too, when you’re done, and she tells you about a family that traded her some of their ice cream for a cup of lemonade. You’re feeling warm, expansive, like taking an early night, and Robin lets you lie with your head on her lap while she plays video games.
You take another bath before bed, although you can’t bring yourself to masturbate. It’s a startling change, your desire a flickering ember in comparison to the fire it was last night. You towel off instead, brush your teeth and spit into the sink, and change into your pajamas. It’s not enough. You’re still alien in your body, and it takes you too long to get to sleep.
You know, before you go to sleep, what you’re going to do. You’re going to see him again.
Avery doesn’t approach you for the rest of the week, which is fine, because you have shit to do.
You plan for it, this time, head back to the stores on Monday afternoon and find a pair of kitten heels on clearance, and a choker and bra and garters that match your panties. Those last ones you shove into your backpack, walk out with, because you can’t fucking handle looking the store clerk—a boy you recognize from school—in the eyes because you can tell he’ll know what you’re doing.
There’s more dance classes, and homework, and the science project to complete, and you have to sneak into school early one morning because your shirt tears almost irreparably while you’re running in the park before school, and then your skirt rips, and you’re stuck hiding behind the counter in the library until Sydney can get in and help you find a new one, but at least he gives you a discount on it.
You pass your exams, and you get into a fistfight with Whitney when you try to leave the school and you go to Sirris’s shop and try to find out exactly how bright a shade of pink Sydney’s face can turn.
And then on Saturday afternoon, after a morning that isn’t worth mentioning, Avery finds you again.
He pulls up his car alongside you as you walk. You’re on your way back from the lake, hair still damp, clutching your plastic baggie of lichen and a dagger you found in the forest. Winter has promised to pay for any antiques you find, and this is definitely the type of thing she’ll want to look at.
The added benefit, that clutching it makes you feel safer, almost makes you want to keep it.
You won’t, though. You do need the money.
But you are keeping the lichen. Have to, after you went through to get it—your ass is raw and hurting from the stretch of the tentacles, and you can still taste the acrid, bitter slime in your mouth. It’s going directly into your science project, and you had better fucking win the science fair.
Stupid, shitty, awful science fair. And—and whatever that was. Low oxygen, you remember, can cause hallucinations. Your reflection. Shiny rocks, water warping light—although there really shouldn’t have been any light down there.
“I’ve been invited to a party tonight,” Avery says, eyes flickering over your soggy form. “I can bring a partner. How about it?” He smiles, although it doesn’t feel like it’s about anything other than your bedraggled state.
“I’d love to go,” you say, and Avery’s smile grows broader.
“Wonderful,” he says. “I’ll pick you up at eight, then? And—” his eyes flick to your hair, and you go hot all over with shame “—do remember to dress formally. There’s a dress code at the party.” You nod, and, satisfied, he drives off.
Winter exclaims over the dagger, and shows you a page from a book in the museum, and tells you that based on the carvings on the dagger’s hilt, it was likely used for religious rituals rather than any actual fighting. She pays you, too, and lets you wring the worst of the water out of your hair over the sink in the museum’s employee bathroom.
So instead of going home to soak in your misery, you make yourself stand up straight, and you walk to the chalets and you clean, and you carry Robin’s lemonade stand back home for her, and you allow yourself some time playing games with her before you go take the bath that is, at this point, necessary.
When you dress for the date, it’s alone, with shaking hands. You’ve heard enough from the girls in the locker rooms at school to know that you should put the panties on over the garter belt, in case he wants to fuck you while you’re wearing the garters. You’re not going to let Robin do your hair again, and risk her asking questions and risk explaining it to her, so you put it up in a bun and hope that that will be enough.
It’s harder to get the evening gown on without help, because you can’t reach the zipper without pulling, and it takes looping one of your hair ties through it as a makeshift handle. Well, it’s alright.
If Avery wants it off, he can take it off.
You look at Avery, really look at him, in the car on the drive to the party.
It’s nothing like looking in a mirror. He’s older, more masculine; his hair is a much darker shade of brown, although there’s thin threads of silver at the temples; and he’s taller, but not by much. But he’s got the same green eyes as you do. The same long fingers. There’s something about the shape of his nose, maybe, the angle or how it joins to his face.
He could be. If you looked at him the right way. If you tried to make him.
You forget to look away when he pulls the car to a stop at a light, and his eyes meet yours. “Like what you see?” he teases, tone knowing. Proud. He likes how he looks. Does it on purpose.
You nod, because you don’t want to give a real answer. “You’re really handsome,” you say, because it isn’t not true, and it hides how you feel about it. Do you like how he looks, when it could mean that you’re—that you’ve already gone on a date with—and you do like it. It’s—it makes this easier.
“I try my best,” he says, and the light turns green in front of you, and he steps on the gas. “Appearances may not be everything, but good impressions certainly are.” His tone seems pointed. A be-on-your-best-behavior-don’t-touch-anything-I-swear-to-God that you’re more familiar with from Bailey.
“I’ll try my best,” you promise, and you hear a little catch of laughter in his next breath.
This time, the car pulls up outside a mansion on Danube Street, and you’re only passingly aware that he’s taken a roundabout route. Maybe he doesn’t want anyone to know where he got you.
He offers you his arm again and you take it, settling your smaller hand comfortably into his big one.
“Smile for the cameras,” he murmurs, and you do, gazing up at him almost as much as you’re looking towards the front door of the mansion.
Avery’s in his element at the party, once you’re inside. He finds the hostess quickly—a woman in an elegant pale grey ballgown and an updo larger than her head—and introduces you, making sure to mention that you’re quite the little scientist, don’t you know, when he found you you were researching lichen! Of all things!
She laughs, a little showy. Knowing. You wonder if it’s just as obvious to everyone else what you are—a student, too young, Avery’s—but you aren’t. Not necessarily. There’s no proof.
She swans off after a moment, directing you and Avery towards the food and drinks scattered around the room. You’re looking hopefully at the food—sure, it’s plates of little snacks, but you can manage a few of them before you’re noticed—but Avery guides you away, towards a man carrying a tray of glasses.
“Why don’t you try some of this, darling?” he asks, and takes two wine glasses off the tray. “I’ve heard it’s divine.”
You watch his hands when he gets you the glass of wine, this time. It’s subtle—it’s practiced—but you see a shower of something pink fall into it. It sparkles for a moment, fades.
“What do you think of the wine?” Avery says, and you hurry to take a sip. It’s—it won’t be that different than the stuff from last week, and—you think, face hot—that the side effects might even be beneficial.
“It’s good,” you say, although you’re not so sure that it is. It’s the same subtle wrongness as before. Maybe herbal? Sweet and bitter both, definitely, on your tongue in a way that makes it noticeable. “It’s….” You try to think of a word. “It’s very smooth?” It’s wet, at least, given that it’s a liquid.
Avery sighs, and looks between you and the glass. “It isn’t,” he says, smiling. Superior. You have to concentrate to avoid the way you’re tensing up, preparing to argue. “Do you know how I know that?”
“You haven’t had any,” you say, looking at his untouched glass. Avery nods.
“But you cringed when you sipped it,” he says. “That means it’s rough, or dry. If it was smooth, you’d have taken a bigger sip than that.”
“Well,” you say, uncharacteristic daring clutching your throat, “I can’t very well taste how dry the wine is when you’re putting that sugary pink stuff in it, now can I?”
Something not entirely unlike fear washes across his face, for a moment, before it’s replaced with that resolute false amusement. “What sugary pink stuff, darling? Are you sure you’re alright? The heat at these parties can often be too much…” He places one hand on the back of your neck, as if to check your temperature, and really to grab you, hold you, pull you closer.
“All I’m saying,” you say, quietly, because you don’t want to embarrass him in public, “is that if you want me to identify how the wine tastes, you’ve got to let me taste the wine.”
“Very funny,” he says, equally quietly. Almost like he believes it.
“It’s not like I don’t know what you’re paying for,” you whisper. “I’m only going to say no if you want me to.” Your wink is clumsy, but you hope it gets your point across—“I’m a good little whore, you can trust me, please, please trust me.”
“Good,” he says, breath hot on your ear. “I don’t want you to.”
“Of course,” you say, and smile sweetly up at him. It’s—fuck, you do need the money.
But worse than that. You want him.
You’re not even thinking about who he is—who he could be, you correct yourself—as he flags down another waiter, and holds out the glass he gets from them.
“It’s a different kind,” he says. “Try it.”
You do, taking a sip. “It’s different,” you agree. “Um. It’s less sour?”
Avery nods, pleased. “And now take a sip of this,” he says, holding his original glass up so you can do so.
“Oh,” you say, and you try another sip. “It’s like… orange peel? That must be what you mean by dry.”
“Exactly,” Avery says. He takes your original wineglass, sets it neatly on a tray at the side of the room. “And now you won’t have to make things up. We’ll make a socialite of you yet.” He smiles. “Ah, I’ve just noticed someone.”
You take his arm as he leads you across the room, back near the entrance. You lean on him, listen to his introductions, smile when he smiles, laugh when he jokes. It feels natural, it feels good. You don’t want him to be anything but this—a man whose hand you can hold, who brings you to events like this and—it’s the wine again, isn’t it, these warm, thorny feelings tugging into your mind as you try to pull out of them. Heat and attraction and distraction, one neat little package.
He’d said he worked for—you try to remember the exact name and fail. Something with science, you think. Chemicals.
“What does the company you work for make, again?” you ask, as Avery’s leading you away from a woman he introduced as a colleague. Casual. It might not even matter, you hope he thinks, if you get an answer, so why not say something?
“Nothing you need to concern yourself with, girl,” he says, not bothering to sound polite. Like he’s already said too much.
You know better than to press the issue, and attempt to take another sip from your wine glass, and discover it to be empty.
“Oh,” you say, surprised you’ve managed to drink this much. “Ah—I?”
Almost without a sound, a waiter approaches from a corner you hadn’t seen him in. He nods to you, exchanges your empty glass for a full one—not that you’d asked for that—and vanishes again into the recesses of the mansion.
Avery chuckles. “Thirsty, are we?” he asks, and doesn’t bother waiting for an answer before he’s drawn into a conversation with another couple about a charitable effort to increase dog adoptions in the town. You try to follow it, give up, and end up—not that this was the plan—sipping your wine further.
Fuck, at this point you’ll end up passed out on the ground before you get back home.
You have to try not to sway as Avery approaches an older couple, who smile genially at him and especially at you, darling little thing, Avery, where do you find them?
“I’ll never tell,” Avery says, and he winks at you, despite the fact that you know where he finds people like you.
The orphanage. The list on Bailey’s computer. He knows what desperate is. Probably likes it, too.
But so, it seems, does everyone else in this town.
Shortly thereafter, the party starts to wind down. Guests start making excuses, waiters begin clearing away the food—which you never got a chance at, thanks, Avery—and Avery nods to the exit.
“Shall we?” he asks, although the question is a formality, and he’s already leading you outside. His car has already been brought to the gate by a valet, and he even opens the door for you, which is very kind of him, seeing as how you’re not quite sure you can make the mechanism work.
“Thank you for inviting me,” you say, fumbling with your seatbelt, as Avery steers the car away from the drive.
“It was a pleasure,” Avery says, almost honest. “You were very charming.”
“I hardly said anything,” you say, before nearly biting your own tongue. Fuck, the wine.
But Avery just laughs. He must be in a good mood. “Well, that’s never a bad way to go about it,” he says. “And they did like you.”
You watch him drive, steering the car through dark and quiet streets with a speed you don’t ever expect. Soon enough you’re at the orphanage, on the street just outside, and you’re waiting for his instructions.
“I’d like to see more of you,” Avery says, smiling across at you, already reaching for his wallet. “Strip for me?”
Oh, God, you think, eyes going wide, anyone could see, and you must make some sort of sound, because Avery chuckles.
“Just strip,” he clarifies. “I’m feeling like taking an early night tonight.” And so you do, although it takes you a moment to remember that it’s easier to take your dress off if your seatbelt is undone.
You tug your evening gown off—you’re terrible with zippers, even sober, but Avery’s just lounging back and watching, not even volunteering to help. The lace panties go on top of it, with the bra that you went and bought to match, and then the kitten heels and the stockings and the garter belt. You’re soaking wet down to the tops of the stockings, and the panties are just… they make a sound when you set them down, sloppy and proof that you’re a desperate enough slut you’d be doing this even without the payment. Your thighs are shiny with your slick, your pubic hair—growing out, you need to shave again—damp and sticking to itself with the moisture.
Even with how big Avery’s cock is, he could probably just slide in, no pain, no fuss, just one smooth solid stretch all the way inside you. You can feel your clit twitch at the thought, him inside you—all the way in, filling you, stretching you out. You hope he can’t tell what you’re thinking. You hope he can.
He doesn’t move to do anything, through, just looks you up and down—hard nipples, hard clit, red line across your chest where the bra band pressed into it, the same on your hips from the garter belt, thighs covered in the evidence of your arousal. He’s—you glance down to check—hard in his trousers, the shape of his cock outlined in the golden glow of a streetlamp. He notices you looking. He smiles.
“You’re really not supposed to wear the same dress to two events in a row,” he says, opening his wallet. “I’ll throw a little extra in—how much are they charging for dresses these days?”
“Five thousand pounds,” you say, promptly, and he laughs, and hands you five hundred, in crisp new bills, because he obviously knew the answer before he asked the question. “Come on,” you add, a little whinier, pouting. “I don’t even know what you like to see me in.”
“Nothing at all, sweetheart,” he says, watching you set the bills on the dashboard until you can get your bra on and have a safe place to put them. “Purple does fit well with your eyes, though.”
“Yeah?” you say, and not, it goes well with your eyes, too. They’re the same eyes. “I thought you’d want me to branch out a bit. Offer you a little variety.” You’ve got your bra and panties back on, and—oh, shit, the garters. Well, those can go next, then. You aren’t going to bother clipping the stockings up, because they stick to your skin so well you’re not sure you’ll be able to take them off.
“I’m already enjoying this change,” Avery says, eyes shamelessly on your legs as you roll up the stockings. He can’t be, you think, because no one would—no one could do this.
“Well, if there’s anything you do want to see me in,” you say, and shimmy into the dress, snaking your arms through the holes, “I’m at your service.” And fine, yes, if this is what it appears to be, if he’s paying for a pretty face and a body to look at and touch and fuck, and all you are is the most convenient option—you can do this. He’s even being a gentleman about it.
Avery hums. “The gown is nice,” he says. “But it’s a bit conservative for all occasions. Maybe something with a bit more character.” He looks you up and down. “And you could certainly stand to show off your legs. No one would begrudge you that.”
“Wow, you’ve got specific plans,” you say. “Planning to take me shopping someday?”
Avery laughs, hands you the wallet. “Take a little extra, then,” he says, and you pull out a couple more bills. And something else. A photo—a little one, tucked into one side like an afterthought, but when you see the woman’s face your blood runs cold. It’s like the second half of the mirror has just snapped into place. This is—but for the eyes—you. Now. The shape of the face, the hair, the—in the articles, the news about her, she’d always been wearing makeup, had her face half-covered by her hair. The photo is old, easily a school photo, given the uniform. It’s dilapidated. The kind of thing that’s only in his wallet because he can’t put it anywhere else. Like he’s ashamed of it.
This is what he’s looking for, you think, and this is my mother.
You shove the photo back in, wave the bills in the air cheekily, and kiss Avery on the cheek as you hand him back the wallet, only it’s not you doing that at all, it’s whatever is piloting your body while you’re screaming into a mental pillow.
The same thing carries you upstairs, into the bathroom, where you tear off your clothes again like they’ve hurt you. You need to scrub your skin off, your bones out.
He’s—he’s definitely your dad. He has to be. He looks like you, has the history, had the God damn photo, and he—you don’t know if he knows. You can’t decide if it’s worse if he knows.
If he picked you specifically.
There wasn’t a date on that file in Bailey’s office. He’d paid Bailey at some point, sure, but was it before or after he met you in the park? Had it been a chance meeting, and then he’d gone home and decided he just had to have you?
Or had he gone to Bailey and said—what?
“I want an orphan, any orphan?” and Bailey had just decided that it would be funny to give him his own daughter?
Or had Bailey given him the option, and he’d said yes?
Or had he known all along, and only asked for you back when he’d decided he wanted to fuck you?
You feel, abruptly, sick, and you have to drop to your knees as the wine—the only thing you’ve eaten all night—reverses course through your digestive system. You make it to the toilet in time, puke clear and burning and scraping your throat raw, and when you look at yourself in the mirror you’re still seeing them, Avery and your mother, faces swimming in your vision.
You’re not going to go back, you decide, staring at the mirror. You can’t. You can’t do this. He can’t make you do this, you think, and you’re not sure if you’re thinking about Avery or Bailey.
You need the money, though, you think, back in your bedroom and thumbing through the bills in the inside zippered pocket in your backpack.
But there are other options. Maybe nowhere will hire you without experience, but Sirris still wants help with her shop. She might even write you a reference, if you do good work. There’s a cash prize for winning the science fair, and—the drains and the temple can’t be worse than the lake.
You go to sleep still thinking of your options.
The next day means asking around about how to get into the ocean drains, which means going to the museum as soon as it opens and helping Winter carry a box of silverware out from storage. She does tell you about the manholes, and about how it’s actually fairly easy to navigate in the drains, as long as you follow the flow of the water.
And so then you climb down a ladder, and it’s going great, you’ve even got a good-sized sample, when you’re knocked off your feet by a sudden rush of water and swept away into tunnels you don’t recognize.
You end up sprawled on your back on stone, aching and cold and wet all over. You avoid screaming for help—not in this town—but it’s hardly any use. Before you can drag yourself, up, check for injuries, a man—or a shambling heap of trash in the shape of one—leans over you.
“Charlene!” he cries, reaching for you, and he frowns, apparently deeply upset, when you flinch back. “What’s wrong? Daddy’s here, you can tell me. Don’t worry,” he adds, as you try to push yourself to your feet and fucking run, “Daddy’s going to make it all better.”
“You’re not my dad,” you say, absolutely certain. “I’m not Charlene.”
He grabs your arm, preventing your escape. “You aren’t injured, are you, Charlene? They must have lied to me—you’re here, you’re alive—did you lose your memory?”
And then he reaches up your skirt, and his fingers are brushing the hem of your panties by the time you finally force yourself to snap out of it and shove him as far away as you can, and you’re around the corner into a pile of trash by the time he screams in rage.
You manage to lose him in the sewers, hiding in a pile of rubbish, but—fuck, Charlene. You knew a Charlene, for a few months. Maybe three years older than you? She graduated from the youth ward pretty quickly, though, and the rumors from the kids who managed to get messages back in were that she went off the deep end, that whatever had gotten her stuck in the orphanage in the first place had finally done its work on her.
Maybe he’s what got to her.
That’s almost worse, you think, shivering, wet and shivering in an alleyway as you trudge back home. To have a father who… fuck. He’d reached up your skirt. There’s no good explanation for that.
At least Avery might not know.
But Charlene… fuck, she’d been younger than you when she’d come to the orphanage. She’d been jumpy. She’d had nightmares—her roommates had complained bitterly about that.
And she’s—somewhere else now.
You keep poking at the thought like a bruise as you describe the lichen for your report. You make sure to mention how much trash ends up in the drains and the sewer system, and how the rats could use the lichen as an additional food source. You don’t mention the man you found. You can’t.
The temple, as it turns out, is easier. You let Sydney drag you along after school on Wednesday, and you agree to attend prayers with him if he’ll help you find lichen. Or, since you walked by the temple on your way to school that morning and saw it on the outsides of the towers, help you get up to it.
You point one of the towers out to him as you approach the temple, explaining that you need a sample of the pink lichen, and his face falls. “I’m only an initiate,” he says, apologetic. “I’m not allowed everywhere in the temple—I mostly clean, and help Sister Jordan prepare for mass. We could ask someone else?”
“Who would let us in?” You look around the temple as you walk in. Dark wood pews line the main hall, facing an altar where a figure kneels, and you’re preparing to go up to talk to them when Sydney grabs your elbow.
“We shouldn’t bother Sister Jordan,” he says, looking concerned. “She’s—she focuses on—big things. Preparing sermons. Managing the initiates and the monks. Ah—helping us maintain our vows.” His face is a shade of pink that makes his hair look amateur, and you think back to what you’ve learned about the temple in history class. Oh. You try very hard to keep your eyes off of Sydney’s lap.
“Okay,” you say. “But is there someone else we should ask?”
“The monks and nuns should have access,” Sydney says, looking around at the robed figures strolling through the temple. He glances behind you, and his face brightens. “Brother Gregory?”
A man you hadn’t noticed before approaches from behind you. “Ah, initiate Sydney,” he says, nodding at him. “And who might your companion be?”
“She’s a friend of mine from school,” Sydney explains. “She’s doing a science project and she wants to research the lichen on the temple. We were wondering if you could help us get up there?”
“Of course I can take her,” Brother Gregory says, nodding to you. “Why don’t you get back to work? The living quarters are a disaster right now, I was just looking for someone to ask about that.”
Sydney seems unsure. “I did promise to help her,” he says, although he’s looking at a door on one wall like it’s a threat to him now. Does he really hate cleaning that much?
“Don’t worry about it,” Brother Gregory says, all smiles. He nods at you. “I think we can handle this by ourselves, can’t we?”
You nod. “It’s fine, Sydney,” you say. “I can handle collecting the lichen without help.”
Brother Gregory waits at the door as you wave goodbye to Sydney, and ushers you up a flight of steps. The door at the top is locked, but Brother Gregory pulls a ring of keys out of his pocket and rifles through them for a minute before he finds the correct one. The lock clicks open.
“Safety issues,” Brother Gregory explains, waving a hand to let you through. “Is this where the lichen is?”
“Yeah,” you say, already seeing a large patch of it on the window, and reaching for the bag in your pocket. “This is perfect.”
“This is going to be a real treat,” Brother Gregory says, and you hear the sickening click of pins shutting in a lock. “They never let me near girls unsupervised.”
God. Fuck. And your only way out is the window. Hundreds of feet off the ground, probably. Or dozens, which is a smaller type of hundreds, but it won’t matter to your body when you fall. “Please,” you say, backing against the wall, trying to put as much space between yourself and him as possible. “I can’t—stop!”
You shove at his chest, trying to push him away, but he’s much stronger than you are, and you’re pinned against the wall with nowhere to go, and he’s fumbling with the ropes tying his habit closed, and you’re shrieking now, forgetting words in place of just getting him away.
And fuck—even if you do fight him off, how are you going to get the key? They’re in his pocket, and you’re never going to find the right one, and you—a ripping pop hits your ears, and you feel, rather than see, the buttons begin to snap off your school shirt.
You scream again, louder, half-desperate, and Brother Gregory curses, makes a grab for your mouth, and you bite at his fingers and he slaps you instead.
But you’re half on the floor and half-naked and there’s a man on top of you and the metal of his chastity cage is digging into your stomach, a sharp threat, and you’re screaming your head off, and then you aren’t, because his mouth is over yours, desperately trying to keep the sound in.
And then—a noise from across the room, a wooden door flung open to hit a stone wall hard.
His mouth is on yours and, suddenly, it isn’t. He’s been hauled off the ground by his hair, and Sister Jordan is standing behind him with a look on her face that you’ve only ever seen on Bailey. Rage and something else, something almost mindlessly possessive. Not on my watch. Not in my fucking house.
“Brother Gregory,” she says, the name coming out like an invective. “You will remember your vows.”
Sydney stands behind her in the doorway, an expression of naked fear on his face, two monks flanking him. They’re big, bigger than he is despite his height, and they look like they’re there to hurt someone. You’re grateful that it’s probably not you.
Brother Gregory is blubbering, crocodile tears, I don’t know what I was doing, honest, and Sister Jordan looks at him like he’s a puppy that’s just wet the bed. In trouble, yes, but also something worse: helpless. “We’ll handle this,” she says to Sydney. “If you’ll take her to my rooms? Third door on the left in the cloister. Someone downstairs will know to let you in.”
As soon as he’s given permission, Sydney rushes in, tosses his school cardigan around your shoulders. He helps you up, walks with you down the stairs and across the hall, standing protectively between you and onlookers. A woman in a robe lets you through another door, and Sydney leads you up a short set of stairs and into a room you never noticed was in the temple before, and he sits down next to you on the couch as you collapse.
“I’m so, so sorry,” Sydney says, hand hovering over your hair as if he wants to stroke it. “I—I had no idea he would do anything like that. I’ve never—I didn’t know, I wouldn’t have let you go up there with him if I’d known,” he says, and he’s sounding nervous and pathetic enough that you push your head into his hand, letting him run his fingers over your hair.
It’s hard to tell how long you sit like that for, head turned into Sydney’s shoulder and tears—oh, you’re crying—soaking the front of his shirt. To his credit, he doesn’t try to push you off.
He does sit up, though, when the door unlocks, and so you copy him, and look over.
Sister Jordan enters the room, dusting her hands off like she’s trying to shake some invisible taint. “We’re going to be examining Gregory’s actions more closely,” she promises, and you don’t miss that she’s eliminated the ‘Brother’ in front of his name. “He’s not going to be allowed to have keys to any room in the temple, and we’ll be having our specialists work with him to rectify his behavior. You can rest assured that this will not happen again.”
“Thank you, Sister,” Sydney says, smiling honestly. “I’m so glad you were able to find her in time.”
“So am I,” Sister Jordan says, and she walks over to you. “Are you all right? Uninjured?” You nod, because you are, and she smiles. “I’m very glad he didn’t manage to hurt you,” she says. “And if there’s anything else the temple can do to help, please, just let me know.”
You’re about to stand up and thank her, and say, no, you’re just fine, thanks, when you remember something. “Actually,” you say, and her eyes flick directly to your face. “I still need to get the lichen?”
It’s the final piece of your project. It fills the rest of your poster-board, and you write out your conclusions that night, alone in your room, straining your eyes to read by the light of the streetlamp.
The prize should be good enough, you decide, curling up in bed and going to sleep. You’ll start looking for work after the science fair on Saturday. And if Avery comes up to you…
You can tell him no, you think. That you feel like he’s just too old for you. That you can handle the money. That the prize from the science fair will cover what you need.
On Wednesday, though, Robin slips into your room as you’re trying to sleep.
“I’m really scared,” Robin says, wrapping her arms around her knees. “Bailey’s making me pay him, but it’s… it’s so much, and it keeps getting higher, and I don’t know what to do.” Her voice quavers as she says it, wet with tears she’s trying to hold back.
She’s strong. She’s been strong. When you were children, sharing a room in the youth ward, she was the one who took care of the little-little kids, the new orphans, the ones who still remembered having things like parents and big sisters who loved them. This isn’t your first time with someone crying next to you in the middle of the night.
It’s just the first time it’s been her.
You sit up in bed, wrapping an arm around her shoulders, and you rub her back as she tries not to cry.
“How much do you owe this week?” you ask Robin, reaching for your backpack. “I might be able to lend you something.”
“Seven hundred,” Robin says, and you manage to control your flinch. “But, um, I’ve got three hundred, and I’m probably going to make a couple hundred more on Saturday? And if I can get Bailey to wait until Sunday evening—”
“He won’t,” you say, knowingly despite not knowing, and you pull out the bills Avery let you take, the extra that you were supposed to use to buy a dress and that you haven’t been able to touch without that nausea swelling up inside you. It’s your last £300, but—but you can make more. Probably the entire seven hundred that you owe for this week.
It’s just that there’s only one way you can make it.
“I can’t take this,” Robin says, eyes wide and fixed on the money. “That’s—I could skip school tomorrow and sell lemonade all day, instead—you need this.”
You do. “I’ve got a plan,” you say. “I’ve been collecting arrows and coins and stuff in the forest, for Winter. She’s trying to fix the museum’s collection. With the money from the science fair, I’ve got plenty.” It’s a lie, but it’s one Robin evidently believes, because she relaxes, takes the bills.
And leaves you flat broke. Not that you would have told her, because you don’t tell her these things, but now… you check the notes on the form Sirris handed out.
Five hundred pounds. Not nearly enough. Bailey’s been getting worryingly clear with his threats about what he’ll do if you don’t pay, and… well.
You’re going to do it. Bailey keeps asking for more, and—and with Robin to pay for, you’re going to need the money. Avery… Avery is the devil you know, insofar as you know him.
And it’s fine. And Avery—you can pretend he isn’t, at least. You can force yourself to ignore it.
You remember the articles about the divorce. If they were both cheating, there’s a possibility that Avery isn’t.
That it’s fine if you give him what he’s paying for.
And maybe he’ll not ask for the thing you’re worried about. That he’ll be happy with your mouth, or with… well, with the other things you’ve overheard other girls talking about in the locker room. It’s worth thinking about your options.
Still, you go to the hospital after your work at the chalets the next day. The pharmacist walks you through the instructions for the packet of birth control pills you buy, explaining the side effects, telling you when and how to take them, and making sure that you know that they don’t prevent all pregnancy, especially with less-than-perfect usage.
Well. You’re just going to have to be perfect.
You give up on buying a new dress—well, on “buying” a new dress. You slip the leather dress on under your school uniform, ignoring how it creaks when you walk, and you pay instead for a pair of panties. You walk out of the shopping center, and no one even tries to stop you, and Sirris only gives you a curious look at the noise you make when you try to pick up a heavy box in the shop and realize that you’re not nearly as mobile in this as you’d like to be.
Sirris lets you change out of it in the shop’s back room, and you stuff your stolen items into the bottom of your bag and pretend they’re not even there.
“Was there ever a girl named Charlene in your class?” you ask, while Sydney is busy in another corner of the shop, up a ladder with a light bulb. Sirris pauses as she’s assembling a shelf.
“…Yes,” she says, and the hesitance is audible, the first part of the sentence. “Have you… heard anything about her?”
You take a moment to think. There’s got to be a better reason. “I saw the name on some graffiti in the orphanage,” you lie. “And Robin thought she remembered her.”
“Oh,” Sirris says, and she swaps out her hex key for a larger size. “Yes, she was. Only briefly.”
“Did she leave town?” you ask, although you’re beginning to suspect she didn’t. “I mean. Is she okay?”
Sirris sighs, looks towards Sydney, and gestures you closer. “It was… I don’t like to spread rumors,” she says, voice quiet. “There were signs, in retrospect, although the other teachers and I brushed them off, because we assumed they were reactions to leaving a difficult situation at home.”
“Home?” you ask. “The orphanage, or where she lived before?”
“If someone’s been… inappropriate towards you at the orphanage,” Sirris says, nearly whispering. “There are resources. I understand that you don’t live with parents, but your guardian still has a responsibility. I can find—”
You laugh, louder and meaner than you wish you had, and Sirris looks hurt. “I—no,” you say, trying to console her, “Bailey hasn’t—I mean, shit, what is inappropriate?—Bailey hasn’t touched me or anything.”
Sirris, at least, seems a bit mollified. “Then it could still have been because of her father,” she says, clearly speculating, and you’re becoming increasingly aware that all of the teachers are going to know about this development by Monday. “I—I failed to look out for her. She… wasn’t able to continue attending our school, not with our level of supervision.”
“Oh,” you say, the full picture forming in your head. “I’m sorry.”
And it’s not like you have anything to apologize for, even, but those are the only words left in your head. I’m sorry, and maybe it’s directed towards Charlene. I’m sorry your father did that to you, and you’re about to let yours do the same thing. I’m sorry no one could stop it, but anyone who could have stopped any of this chose to step back a long time ago.
You think about Robin, sitting on your bed, not even aware that she had something more valuable to sell than fucking lemonade.
You’re doing this for her.
“It was difficult for all of us,” Sirris agrees, clearly trying to change the subject. Sydney must be coming over, you realize. She doesn’t want him to know.
The three of you finish up work for the day quickly, although you’re still distracted. Charlene had… done something to herself, or tried to, because of what that man in the sewers had done.
What her father had done.
Probably the same thing you’re going to let Avery do to you.
“I’ll see you at the science fair tomorrow, right?” Sirris asks, handing you the usual £20. “I’m excited to see your lichen project.”
“You got it done?” Sydney asks, brushing dust off of his hands. “That’s great! I was worried that because of what happened at the temple, you wouldn’t want to.”
“What happened at the temple?” Sirris asks, and you realize that you don’t want her to know either.
“One of the monks assaulted her,” Sydney says, even though you’re making don’t talk about this don’t talk about this eye contact with him.
“I’m okay,” you say, before Sirris can say anything. “I—look, he was just creepy. I’m okay. Like… if I’m going to get mad every time some guy tries to take my clothes off, I’m going to get forever detention. I’m fine.” You smile, make it look as real as possible. “I’m just going to stay with Sydney next time I’m at the temple.”
“If you’re sure,” Sirris says. “I—let me give the two of you a ride home today, I’ll just finish up in here.”
She does, and you and Sydney climb into the back seat of her car. You have to shove aside a pile of papers in order to buckle your seatbelt. One of yours is in there—graded, you notice, with a big green smiley face drawn on the corner.
Sirris drops you off at the orphanage directly, even though Sydney says he’s going to the temple, and that’s way closer to the shop.
She’s clearly worried.
It’s nice that she’s trying.
In the morning, you go sit with Robin while she shows you the level she’s trying to beat in her game, and you smile, and nod, and pretend you can focus on anything except the ticking countdown timer in your head saying eight o’clock, eight o’clock, eight o’clock. Twelve hours until you finish this. One until the science fair.
“You should set up on the beach early today,” you say, after Robin beats the level and pauses the game, triumphant. “I can help you, but I’ve got the science fair, so I have to be there at nine instead.”
“Sure!” Robin says, brightly, setting the controller down and grabbing the big tote bag from beside her bed. “I… I know it’s a lot for you,” she adds, shame clearly both making her speak and holding her words in. “So thank you. For everything.”
“It’s nothing,” you say, because for her, it is. Simple as. “I’ll get my poster board for the science fair.”
You do, and the two of you make the walk to the beach together, arms laden with bags and pitchers.
“You seem… worried,” Robin says, as you cross over a bridge. “Are you—do you want to practice your presentation for the fair with me?”
“I’m good,” you say. You aren’t. “I think the nerves will go away once it’s too late to turn back, you know?”
“Yeah,” Robin says. “I—you just seem like you’ve had a lot on your mind lately.”
You sigh, a bit, almost wondering if you can tell her. “Remember when we used to talk about our parents coming to get us?” you ask.
“Yes,” Robin says, and then she brightens up. “I would—oh, this is going to sound so stupid—I would always hope they were like. You know. Rich. And that I’d be able to, like—go anywhere I wanted. Fancy parties. And that they’d introduce me to all of their friends. I—I know!” She laughs a bit, hoists her tote bag further up onto her shoulder.
Your heart is a stone in your stomach. Robin could have—Robin could have handled this, you think, glancing at her. She could have—maybe she would have told Avery the second she even wondered about it. Or even hoped.
Or she could have ignored it, like she ignores everything else about this stupid fucking town.
“Yeah,” you say, eyes on the road. “And now, I just—meeting anyone who isn’t a fucking creep would be a victory.”
Robin sighs. “Don’t get me started,” she says. “I—this one guy kept trying to ask if he could buy my other lemonade, and I kept telling him I didn’t have any drugs, and then he told me that he meant—that.”
“That?” you ask, as the ground gets sandier. “Like… oh.” Well. It’s also yellow. “Did you say yes?”
Robin shrieks with laughter, shoves your arm. “Oh, my God, of course not!” she says, as if the answer is obvious. Maybe because she would never. “Do I need to worry about how you’re making your money?”
At this point, her worries aren’t going to do anything. “No,” you say, honestly. “Is this where you want the stand?”
“Yeah,” Robin says. “Right next to the main access point. I’ve got a plan.”
And half an hour later, you leave Robin with her plan, and head out to the town hall to attend the science fair.
Your poster board looks clunky and amateurish next to those of some of your classmates—the library copiers only do black and white, so you’ve had to go over the diagrams you copied from the textbook in marker instead, tracing them to make them stand out. Your lichen drawings are good, at least, colored pencil capturing the shapes of the little lobes and thalli and apothecia. The title spreads out across the top in bold black block caps, Environmental Adaptations In Lichen, and your neat handwriting fills the board underneath.
It’s good. It’s organized, your information is accurate, and your conclusions are sound.
On the other side of the room, Sirris and Leighton are walking around the other booths, judging them. One of the girls in your science class is standing in front of a clearly half-finished board on bird calls. She hadn’t had the time to finish it, or maybe she hadn’t cared to, and you feel vicarious anxiety as you watch the judges approach her. She looks half-dressed, too, her school uniform missing the tie and unbuttoned halfway down, and—oh.
She’s dropped something, the pointer she was using to explain the photos of birds on her poster, and she bends down to pick it up, giving you—and, clearly, Leighton—one hell of an eyeful. She’s not wearing a bra. And, although you’d say this more politely if you could, there’s no way that that’s an accident for someone as well-endowed as her.
She straightens up, laughing and shaking her head, mock embarrassed, and you don’t miss the way that Leighton’s hand lingers on her shoulder as he tells her not to worry, that everyone is clumsy, especially during such an important presentation.
You aren’t losing to a fucking—you’re not going to let yourself think the words that float into your head, because all of them are words for what you’ve already done—but if this is what it takes to get ahead…
You sigh, and step discretely behind your table. You don’t have anything up top that’s worth showing off, but… Avery said he liked your legs.
You’ve seen the other girls at school doing this in the bathroom and the locker room after swimming, and so you roll over the hem of your skirt, once, twice, and perhaps three times is overdoing it, but the girl across the room wasn’t wearing a damn bra. So you feel perfectly fucking fine taking the length of your skirt from the uniform-suggested two fingers above your knees to being the same distance below your crotch. Maybe a bit shorter. You’re probably not going to be showing ass when you bend over, but…
Really, that might improve your chances.
You explain your project to a few other people—parents, mostly, here with their own kids. There’s one who likes your project enough that she offers you a gig tutoring her son in science, once a week, and now your Wednesday afternoons are going to be occupied. A few students stop by, but everyone’s… competitive. They’re watching the judges.
The offer of a cash prize matters to everyone, even if it matters more to you. There’s no room for error. You need this.
Sirris and Leighton approach your table. Sirris smiles when she sees your project, clearly happy that you’ve followed her instructions. You’ve spotted a few projects already that were… probably not in the school’s curriculum.
“What do we have here?” Leighton asks, and you don’t miss the way his eyes flick down and stay there.
Your voice doesn’t waver, though, as you explain your project. The underwater lichen is better at absorbing nutrients from water, and it doesn’t have to commit as much to photosynthesis, which means that it appears to be completely different shapes and colors from lichen that grows above-ground. The park experiences much more traffic than the temple, and also has many more species of lichen, so there’s more competition and stress on the plants.
Sirris is nearly beaming with pride when you get to the details on your diagrams and the labeled sections of each lichen. Leighton is also paying close attention. Especially to the way that your skirt flares when you pace in front of the poster-board.
Yeah. You’ve got him.
You finish up your presentation quickly, making sure to mention that you collected samples of each of the lichens, and to point them out. And then you’re done. You just need to wait for the results.
Leighton tells you that he provides ‘hands-on tutoring’ for ‘gifted’ students. Sure. Gifted in one or two specific areas. Hands on—fine, that joke is too bad even for you. You’re saved, fortunately, from having to respond to that by Sirris faking a cough and tugging him towards the next student’s display. Thank God.
You can’t do this for two people.
The rest of the judging goes quickly, now that you’re no longer paralyzed with anticipation. You watch them move around the room, head back to the stage, and confer briefly.
And then you win. You win. And maybe it’s just the way Leighton stared at your legs, the way he looked at you like he was going to find excuses to give you detention, but… you’d like to think there was actual scientific merit to your work. That you’ve made Sirris proud.
They call you up on stage to accept your prize, and oh, God, you haven’t rolled your skirt back down.
Your heart pounds as you shake hands with Sirris and Leighton, and accept the envelope with the prize, clutching onto it like it’s a lifeline. There’s a reporter for the town paper, and you understand perfectly what she’s doing when she gestures for all of you to move a bit closer to the edge. The angle’s arguably worse, if she’s trying to get a photo of the little gold-plastic plaque they’ve given you.
That’s clearly not where she’s aiming the camera.
You try to make excuses, but Sirris urges you to be polite, and Leighton… Leighton wraps his arm around you, a quasi-paternal side-hug, and uses his hand to tug the hem of your skirt up further. Shows you off to the camera.
You rush outside as soon as they’re done with you—the reporter takes more normal photos, too, one with you and your poster that you’re hoping will be the one used for the actual story—and find yourself standing on the street, clutching an envelope full of cash, and so fucking relieved you could cry.
You’ve done it. You have it. You’re not quite to the £700 Bailey wants, but there’s two green gems rattling at the bottom of your backpack that’ll make you a good bit of headway.
Cliff Street is full of students after the science fair, milling around in little groups, splitting up to head to the beach or the arcade or the lake. And there’s a familiar car parked outside the town hall, and oh, that’s right.
You’d met him when you were working on this project. Of course he’s here.
And your fucking skirt is still short, and you can’t pull it back down as he waves you over, because then it’ll make it even more obvious that you’re just—that you’re just a fucking slut who’ll do anything for cash. Anyone for cash.
“You look lovely today,” Avery says, looking you up and down as you approach. Eyes lingering on your thighs, exposed as they are.
“Thanks,” you say. He looks hungry.
“I’m going to book a hotel room tonight,” Avery says, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel. “For business.”
“Cool,” you say, stomach plummeting. You know what a hotel room means.
“A room for two,” Avery adds, as if you haven’t gotten it. “Would you care to keep me company?” A smile, a pause. He’s clearly not used to waiting.
You swallow. Force down the urge to vomit. You remember the way Robin shook when she cried in your arms. You think about the texture of new bills in your hand, crisp and more than enough.
You’ll do this. At least this time. The £500 from winning the science fair will pay a good portion of your debt this week, and you can probably make up the rest at the museum, but…
You know Bailey, as much as you think anyone can know Bailey.
He’s not going to be satisfied at £700. He might not be satisfied ever.
“Yes,” you say, and you watch Avery’s smile turn genuine. He wants this. He wants you.
“Good,” Avery says, clearly satisfied. “I’ll pick you up from Domus street at eight.” He pauses. “And do be sure to wear something formal. There are dress codes to observe. You were able to get another dress, weren’t you?”
“Yeah,” you say, still monosyllabic. “You’ll like it.” The skirt’s short, after all.
“I’m sure I will,” Avery says, and then he drives off.
You go to the museum, instead of going home. Winter takes the gems you found in the forest, and she exclaims over them, and she hands you £200 for them, which means that you’ll be able to replace your fraying school shirt, maybe buy an extra one so you can swap them out. There’s already a thread pulled out of your tie that’s making it impossible to get it to hang straight, and it feels messy and childish.
And it’s stupid that it feels messy and childish. Really, you think, standing there, Avery is getting to you. You’re thinking like him. Wanting to look more like him. You should be happy with the tie that you already have. You shouldn’t—you shouldn’t need more than one dress. You shouldn’t need a second school shirt.
The money could go to Bailey, instead, and you could stand Avery up. Pretend you’re busy washing your hair. You really shouldn’t even want a second school shirt.
And you still stop in the store to buy one, and you let yourself walk past the others on your way out, looking at the other mannequins. Planning your next dates.
You could pull off a suit, you think. If he—if you can keep doing this—you will. He might even like the way you look in it.
Robin accepts your help with her stand, which you’re thankful for, because you can’t be alone right now. You don’t want to be alone. You’re going to do something stupid.
Back at the orphanage, you start getting ready well before you need to. The underwear first, the lace set and the stockings and the garter. Panties on over the garters, again, just in case. And then the dress.
Short, blue-grey leather, with a single zipper up the front. It’s form-fitting, hits just above mid-thigh, and makes your tits look—well, it makes them look like they actually exist. Your thighs are bare, below your panties and above your stockings, and the leather catches uncomfortably on your leg hair.
Hm.
That won’t do.
You strip down again and grab your razor, and you tell yourself you’re only shaving your legs so that the dress is comfortable. That you’re only shaving between them so that the hair doesn’t try to poke through the holes in the lace. So that he’ll offer you more money, maybe, if he wants to fuck you enough, but since that’s the real reason, you try to avoid thinking it.
You’re entirely bare by the time you dress again, face flushed and hair loose around your shoulders.
You’re going to have to do something about that.
Robin answers the door when you knock, and you see her eyes go big and bright when she realizes what you’re wearing. “You look,” she says, trying to avoid staring and instead looking everywhere. “Wow. You’re, uh, going on another date?”
“Yeah,” you say, forcing yourself not to wrap your arms around your body and hunch over. “I, uh. I’m not as good at doing my hair as you are.”
She has you sit on the floor in front of her bed while she puts the pins in, tugging and twisting. There’s some old cartoon playing on the TV in front of you, but she’s got it muted, in favor of asking you questions about Avery, and you’re forced to find safe things to tell her.
You tell her mostly what you told her two weeks ago, when she asked what the event you needed her help with your hair for was. That this is still the guy who met you in the park, that he took you to a fancy restaurant on your first date, that you went to a party with him last week. You tell her all about those, when she asks—the food you ate, the food he ate, the dresses of the guests at the party. She drinks in the details like she needs them to live, and… she might be right. She needs dreams, and you need her dreams.
Robin’s always been the one with the dreams of running away, of your family coming to find you, of making it out alive. She used to talk for hours in your shared room in the youth ward, letting you lie down on her bed with your head on her stomach and just listen.
Your hesitation hits a wall. Falls to pieces in your mind. You’re doing this for her, you decide. It’s worth it, if it’s for her.
You do tell Robin, though, when she asks you where you’re going tonight, and she drops the hairbrush on your lap when she hears that it’s a hotel.
“A hotel room?” she squeaks, through hands obviously pressed to her mouth. “You’re—no, don’t move your head, I’m not done—you’re going to a hotel room with him? Alone?”
“I hope we’re alone,” you say, thinking of the conversations you’ve heard students having in the halls. “I don’t think I could handle two at once.” And without any distractions… someone else could see the resemblance. You can’t risk it.
Robin shrieks with scandalized delight at this, and nearly pins the next lock of your hair directly to your ear. “Oh my God,” she says, “I can’t believe you’re going to—you know—with him. I—how old is he?”
“I don’t know,” you say, although what you’re thinking is, old enough to be your father. “I mean. Older. But he’s… probably experienced.” Definitely experienced.
Robin, at least, is loving this new development. “You have to tell me—not everything,” she says, as if she’s just remembered that sex involves, you know, sex. “But, um. You’re coming back tomorrow morning?” You almost nod before her hands in your hair remind you that that’s an impossibility.
“I think so,” you say. If you can handle spending the night with him without saying it.
“I bet the bed’s going to be really soft,” Robin says. She actually sounds jealous, and maybe she is.
Avery should have chosen her. She would have eaten it all up—the fancy dinner, the fancy car. She would have liked it all up until the moment he asked her for sex, and then she would have tried to make excuses, and then—you feel increasingly certain—he would have made her give him what he paid for.
No. Better you than her.
Robin finishes with your hair, then, and makes you spin around to make sure it’ll hold. It does. There’s no more putting it off.
Except…
No, you decide, looking in the mirror. The lip gloss you’ve been wearing, the candy-pink stuff that you got on clearance last Halloween… it’s not right for this, and you hate that Avery has made you think this way. You should show up to this hotel in the same glittery pink lip gloss you’ve been wearing. It’s not like you’re—like you want to impress him.
That doesn’t explain why you go scrounging through the bathroom cabinets, assembling a small collection of abandoned makeup. You’ve tried it before, at least, and your hand only shakes a little with the eyeliner pencil. There’s blush, too, and a half-empty compact of silvery eyeshadow. It matches the dress.
There’s a lipstick in one of the cabinets, although you’re less certain about it. It goes on a soft, sweet red that makes your lips look like it’s still summer and you’ve been wandering around in the woods picking berries. They look wet and shiny and like you should lick them. They don’t taste half as good.
Your reflection, once again, is a girl you don’t know. You wouldn’t talk to her, if you knew her in school, because she wouldn’t talk to you. Her eyes and her mouth are big and wet, and her cheeks are flushed, and the overall effect is that of… well, of sex.
You know what you’re doing. That doesn’t make it easier.
Robin stops you before you leave the orphanage, running down the stairs nearly out-of-breath. “Here,” she says, shoving something into your hand—sharp corners on a piece of sweaty foil the size of your palm. “Um. We got these in science class, and, I… figured you might need them more than I do.”
Oh, God, she’s giving you condoms. You manage to thank her, somehow, and shove them into your bra, which makes Robin make an even higher pitched noise and spin around on the spot.
But condoms! From Robin!
Well, if Avery doesn’t bring any of his own…
Avery said he would pick you up, despite the fact that the hotel can’t be very far away, if it’s still in town.
That thought invites the question of why he’s even bringing you to a hotel, if he lives in town. You’re sure that the answer has something to do with the reason he took you to the party and introduced you to people. You’re a prop for him. The latest model in a line of pretty toys.
When he arrives, he proves it, stepping out onto the sidewalk and leaning against his car as you approach.
The once-over he gives you is showy, blatant. “I shouldn’t have asked you to get another dress,” he says, sounding pleased. “I’ll have so much trouble keeping you to myself like this.”
“I hope you do,” you say. “It would be. Stressful.”
Avery laughs, and opens your door. “Threesomes are never worth the trouble, regardless of the appeal,” he says, when he gets in. “Too much risk that someone will share… personal information. But two can keep a secret.” The car starts with a smooth, expensive purr. “Can’t we?”
You think about how there’s a chance that Bailey told him nothing, and think, two can keep a secret if one of them doesn’t know, and nod. “I don’t kiss and tell,” you add, and he makes an approving noise.
The hotel is in town, it turns out, right in the middle of High Street, and it’s one of the taller buildings, too. Avery drops you off, complaining that the valet service is busy, and that really, he shouldn’t be expected to park his own car, what with what he’s paying per night. But he gives you the room key, and tells you to wait for him inside.
The lobby of the hotel is almost as extravagant as the outside. There’s an atrium, extending up through the center of the building, filled with hanging chandeliers and a large, central fountain. It’s a more historical piece than the rest of the hotel’s décor, which is thoroughly modern, and you find yourself staring at it, wandering if they relocated it from elsewhere. The figures carved into it are worn down, hard to see, and they slip neatly from your mind when you look away from them. It’s uncomfortable. You understand why so few of the well-dressed patrons milling around the lobby are looking at it.
The room, you realize, once you get into the elevator, is on the top floor. Nothing else would do, for Avery.
You go through the suite while you wait for him. No personal belongings, at least not in the obvious places, but the hotel has supplied you well. You unwrap one of the chocolates from the dish on the table, popping it into your mouth and folding the foil up tightly so that it doesn’t look suspicious in the little wastebasket under the sink in the bathroom. It might, anyway, if Avery counted, but if he hasn’t left anything here, he probably hasn’t been here long enough to count them the way that Bailey does.
One nightstand drawer has one of the little books of scripture that the temple hands out to potential converts, the green one with the cross embossed on the cover. It creaks, unopened plastic newness having stuck the pages together and stiffened the spine. The standard lines about eternal peace, holy purpose, and protection against evil and impurity fill the pages. You flip through it, just to make it look like someone’s read the thing, and set it back down.
The other drawer has a strip of condoms and a small, sample-sized tube of lubricant.
Well, they know their audience. You make a note to take them with you when you leave, if you can manage it, since whoever stocks these hotel rooms clearly expecting them to be used.
A click at the door of the room draws your attention, and you hurry to shut the drawer and sit on the edge of the bed, leaning back a little, like you’re so relaxed, actually, and you haven’t been picking over the entire room and fantasizing about scrapping it all for parts.
Avery steps in, carrying a briefcase, and you catch the moment when his eyes find you and he smiles, satisfied. “I see you’ve made yourself comfortable,” he says, crossing the distance to the bed in a surprisingly small number of steps. The briefcase goes somewhere on the floor near the bed, and his hand goes onto your chin, tilting your head up. “And what a picture you make. I should keep you in dresses like this all of the time.” His other hand is wandering up the side of your thigh.
“I bought it for you,” you lie. “I’m glad you like it.”
“And I’m glad you’re learning to show off your assets,” Avery says. “When I saw you outside the town hall, in that little skirt… do you know how to sew?”
You nod, uncertain of what he’s getting at. “We’ve been doing a unit on mending in our housekeeping class,” you explain.
“You should hem every one of your school skirts to be this length,” Avery says, plucking at the hem of your leather dress. “I’d pay for the needles and thread myself. There’s no way you can be naive enough not to know how you look in this.”
“Maybe I like pretending not to,” you say, only because it’s true, and this gets you a surprised laugh and a sharp pinch on your ass.
“I was thinking we would order dinner up to the room,” Avery says. “But you look almost good enough to eat.” You freeze, stock still. Not yet, you think, not until he’s fed you whatever it is that makes you want him like breathing. “Someone’s excited,” he says, and playfully pats your thigh. “But what I’m excited for is a chance to enjoy the other amenities at this hotel. I do adore hot tubs.”
And he swans off towards the phone on the end-table by the couch, waving you over. “Yes?” you ask, a little uncertain.
“Dinner, doll,” he says, sounding impatient. Like it’s meant to be obvious.
“Oh,” you say. “I—there’s no menu.”
“I’m sure I could have one brought up, if you need it,” Avery explains, already reaching for the phone. “But really, can’t you think of anything you’d like? The hotel’s restaurant does Italian very well.”
You prickle at the condescension, because of the emotions it makes you feel, annoyed is the easiest one to express. “If you know so much about Italian, why don’t you order for me?” you ask. You’re pretty sure, also, that the cuisine served doesn’t mean that you’re allowed to order without a menu.
“Doll,” Avery says, and you’ve clearly played directly into his scheme, “I thought you’d never ask.”
He doesn’t let you listen to him placing the call, declaring that he’d rather leave it as a surprise for you, and so you use the bathroom instead, check your makeup. Not that you need to—and really, you’re about to eat, so it might be an after-dinner activity—but you can feel the tube of stolen lipstick and the condoms pressed into your breasts where you’ve tucked them into your bra. You stash the lipstick, at least, in the console of soaps on the bathroom counter.
The condoms, you might need before you can sneak back in here.
Avery’s got his shoes off and his feet up on the couch by the time you get back out of the bathroom. He’s shed his suit jacket, too, leaving him in a slim-fitting olive shirt that’s rumpled along the sleeves from the day’s wear.“Come here,” he says, drawing his feet back for you to sit. “Are you any good with your hands, doll?”
“I try to be,” you say, settling yourself gingerly into the vacated seat.
“Good enough,” Avery decides, and he places his feet directly into your lap. “Picking you up was the first chance I got to get off my feet all day. The investors I was meeting with decided that they wanted a tour of the entire factory, and then they kept talking each other out of committing.”
“How did you stop them?” you ask, raising your hands to his feet when he nudges one with his toes. You have limited massage experiences, which is to say that when Robin asks, for the fifth or fiftieth time, what could possibly make her back hurt so bad when all she’s done to it is sit hunched over in front of her console for hours, you rub her shoulders until she complains much more quietly.
But Avery seems pleased enough with your attempt. At the very least, he sighs, and continues his story. “They kept going on and on, and I checked my watch, and if they didn’t let me leave, I was going to be late for our date,” he says, tapping your chest with his toes. “So I finally had to allow them to test the product.”
“Is that legal?” you ask, pushing particularly hard into the sole of his foot with both thumbs. “Since it’s, you know, drugs?”
“Legally,” Avery says, and you get the feeling that this is his favorite thing to say, “I have the absolute pleasure of letting you know that there is nothing illegal about consuming a plant that grows naturally, even if it has been distilled into a concentrated form by industrial machinery.” He winks. “That, and the fact that no one who’s tried it has seen an incentive to snitch.”
You roll your eyes. Squeeze the ball of his foot. “How concentrated?” you ask.
“Careful,” Avery says, “I might think you want to steal trade secrets.”
“Can’t steal them if you don’t tell me any,” you half-agree, and Avery laughs.
He likes talking. He does it at length, going on about the contrasting personalities of the three investors he was meeting with, and the ways he had tailored his sales tactics to each of them. You suspect that you’d be learning something, if you’d ever had any desire to sell drugs to the people legally allowed to buy them.
The waiter doesn’t knock, which catches you by surprise, but is apparently so standard that Avery doesn’t even startle, simply stands up and offers his arm to you. You make your way out to the balcony, where there’s a table with two chairs and a hot tub, bubbling away and steaming in the evening air. The table on the balcony is quickly set from the cart that the waiter is pushing, and there are honest-to-God silver domes over each of the two plates that you sit down in front of.
Avery has actually ordered the same thing for both of you, this time, a pasta covered in a creamy, buttery sauce and flecks of herbs. The smell alone is enough to make you wish that both portions were for you.
The waiter sets a bucket, filled with ice and a bottle, and two glasses down on the table between you. It’s wine, again. You swallow, staring directly at your plate. You haven’t touched it, waiting instead for Avery’s lead.
He doesn’t pour any. Instead, he simply waves a hand to dismiss the waiter, not bothering to check if the man has actually left before he reaches for his silverware.
“I would ordinarily have ordered wine with dinner,” he says, which raises many questions about the bottle in the bucket. “But I felt that this is truly a dish that stands on its own.”
“High praise,” you say, reaching for your own fork, and Avery laughs before he brings the pasta to his mouth.
The two of you eat, and surprisingly, you manage it mostly without talking. Avery’s attention is off of you and directed to his meal, and with the reprieve, you’re able to concentrate on getting as much butter and carbs and oh, God, garlic into your mouth as possible.
“Do you like the linguine, doll?” Avery asks, a few minutes in, and you remind yourself to slow down. No one here will get mad at you for taking up a table that someone else needs to use.
“I do,” you say. “It’s… the sauce is so creamy.” You don’t say that it’s the best thing you’ve ever eaten, although, privately, you’re certain that it’s in the running.
Avery smiles. “I thought you might like something with a little more energy,” he says. “You might want it, later.”
You can feel a flush creeping into your cheeks at his words. You will! Of course you will! He’s going to—well, there’s a bed in the room. The thing he’s going to do to you is obvious.
You turn your focus back to the linguine. Maybe you can suggest seconds, and Avery will be too satisfied to think of taking it out on you.
When you’ve finished, Avery finally reaches for the bottle in the bucket, and he checks the label in a rehearsed way, like he already knows what’s in it. He pops the cork, a little more aggressively than you expect.
“Champagne?” Avery says, raising the bottle, and you nod, letting him pour it into your glass. It’s golden and light and bubbly, and you stare at it as Avery pours his own.
“Thank you,” you say, apprehensive, and you reach for your glass.
This, at least, will make the whole thing easier.
The night you saw the photo, after you’d thrown up and brushed your teeth and climbed into bed, you’d lain there, trying to ignore it. Focused on counting the cracks in your ceiling, on running he’s your father, your father, your father through your head over and over.
And you’d given up, rolled onto your stomach, and humped your pillow through two shame-filled orgasms, the memory of Avery’s hand on your waist turned into his phantom hand holding you down, making you take it.
In your fantasies, he hadn’t been your father.
It hadn’t mattered.
You take a sip.
The champagne is light on your tongue and tastes… not like the wine he’s given you previously, and you pause to examine the glass.
“It does ruin the flavor,” Avery says, and winks. “Besides. You have no one to impress up here other than me, and I think I’d rather you learn how to tell what good champagne tastes like. Your behavior does reflect on me.”
You take another sip. “It’s actually dry,” you say, and you get a pleased nod. “Can I—can I say it’s bubbly?” It’s not drugged. It’s not fucking drugged.
Whatever he does, you’re going to have to—to handle whether or not you want it on your own.
“You can also call it fizzy, but not frothy, that would be for prosecco,” Avery continues. “The bubbles tend to be much smaller in champagne, as it’s made at a higher pressure.” He takes another, gentle sip. “There’s notes of almond and green apple,” he adds.
“I can’t understand how you can figure these things out,” you say. “I can barely pick up on the dryness. And the… acidity?”
Avery chuckles. “You know, you’re also allowed to just drink it,” he says. “Having opinions is its own hobby.”
“I might just drink it,” you decide. If you can’t have the drugs he’s been giving you, you’ll have to—to remove your inhibitions in other ways. Avery laughs, and refills your glass. He pours generously, at least, so either he’s showing off, or he feels the same way about your inhibitions as you do.
You’ll take either, you think, as you continue to drink and listen to him discuss more of the finer points of wine. He cares about it because of how it makes him look, old-money sophisticated and rich enough to afford both the wine and the hangover. And you drink, and do your best to let the champagne weigh down your thoughts.
“Shall we?” Avery asks, after he’s fallen silent and you’ve stopped making agreeing noises, gesturing to the hot tub.
“I didn’t bring a swimsuit,” you say, face flushed from more than the wine. You know what he’s about to say before he says it, as his eyes twinkle and his smile widens.
“Neither did I,” Avery says, and his hands go to the buttons on his shirt.
Okay.
It’s happening. It’s going to happen.
Well. He’s seen you naked already. And it’s not inherently… there are any number of cultures where people bathe, swim, whatever naked. You strip, and you have to force yourself to do it, but Avery seems not to notice, treating it as a strip-tease instead of what it is. He even chuckles as the condoms, in their sweat-damp foil wrappings, fall out of your bra.
“Planning something, doll?” he asks, even as he drapes his belt over his chair. “How very forward of you.”
“Not that forward,” you argue, even as you slide your panties down your legs. If you pretend, if you suggest it isn’t happening…
Avery’s trousers join his shirt on the chair, and then he’s reaching for his underwear. “Would you rather I believe you carry condoms around with you everywhere you go?”
You feel yourself blushing even harder, if that’s possible. You want, almost instinctively, to argue against it, to say that you aren’t that kind of girl, but… you are. You’re exactly that kind of girl. Just because you’re being wined and dined doesn’t make this anything but an exchange of goods and services.
One very specific service.
Your garter belt and stockings join the rest of your things on the ground, and you’re—you’re fully naked, on the balcony of a top-floor hotel room, and you’re going to get into a hot tub with a man who could be your father.
And he’s naked too.
You can’t say you’re not looking, because, well: you are looking. You can say that you’re only looking because he expects you to look, which, if not much better, is a much less bold lie.
He’s looking at you, too.
You can tell that he likes what he sees.
But he doesn’t touch, and climbs into the hot tub, leaning back into one of the built-in seats, back facing the hotel. And, with the bubbles, you can see a little less. That’s… maybe something you should participate in.
The water is hot, in a way that makes the persistent soreness in your legs from hours of walking fade away almost instantly. Fuck, this is unfair. You think of the baths in the orphanage, where hot is a word that you only see written on the tap, and above room temperature is an indication that you’ve gotten lucky.
And Avery can just have this whenever.
Whatever.
You’re going to enjoy it. You’re going to get Avery’s money’s worth out of this, since you’re not sure he has nearly enough appreciation for it.
You fumble around a bit, finding the ledge around the rim of the tub and parking yourself on it, not sure whether or not to face Avery. On the one hand, that’ll put you as far away from Avery as possible. On the other hand, you’ll have to look directly at him.
The third hand happens to be Avery’s, reaching out for yours to tug you closer to him, so that you’re sitting next to each other.
The view from here is incredible. It’s almost a straight shot from the hotel to the ocean, and without other buildings in the way, you have a perfect view of the harbor.
“I’ve really spent too much time talking about myself,” Avery muses, fingers tracing over your shoulder as you settle into his side, forced closer because that’s the best way to watch the lights of the ships as they bob around the docks. “You’re still in school, aren’t you, girl?” You nod. “And you’ve been keeping up with your work, haven’t you? I’d hate to have to send you to bed without dessert.” The waiter hasn’t come back, which means—dessert is… that. He thinks he’s so funny, doesn’t he? “Or to have to punish you in… other ways.” Ah. A lose-lose scenario. Page one of the Bailey playbook.
You tell Avery that your grades are excellent, and he seems genuinely pleased. “I’m glad you’re so dedicated,” he says, smiling at you. “Not every girl your age would put so much time towards her science projects.”
“Thanks,” you say, trying not to let it bother you, the way he’s being so casually insulting. “I really do think it’s my favorite subject.”
Avery mms. “Have you ever thought of pursuing it as a career?” he asks, running a finger down your arm. “I’m sure my company has internships available, especially for someone as… eager to please as yourself.”
You shiver, to avoid laughing, because fuck, he’s managing to reinvent nepotism without knowing it. “I can’t be qualified,” you say, “I’m not nearly an advanced enough student. I just like it, is all.”
“Well, if you’re interested, you should just let me know,” Avery says. “I’m sure I could find you a position directly under me, where your qualifications wouldn’t matter half as much as your passion for the work.” He winks, just to confirm that yes, the staggering amount of innuendo in that was intentional.
“School’s been keeping me awfully busy,” you say. “It would have to be part time, and I’d have to get permission.” It’s not true, but you’re willing to bet that Avery doesn’t know, or maybe just doesn’t care.
“We’re just going to have to wait until you graduate, then,” Avery decides. “And then we can find you work as my personal assistant.”
“I can’t imagine what I’d be assisting you with,” you say, although you absolutely can. It makes Avery laugh.
The conversation continues that way, Avery’s hand rubbing over your arm, not to make a point, just casually, like he’s forgotten that you’re even there. He asks you questions about school. You answer. There’s a little flicker of something mean and happy inside you when you tell him about the math contest and he shakes his head before you’re even halfway done explaining the problem. Glee at knowing better, twisting your lips into a smile that you’re glad he can’t see.
But the water is hot, and there’s only so much to say about school, and the ships are far away.
And if you’ve had dinner, and used the hot tub… you’re not a fool. There’s only one more point of interest in this suite.
Avery knows it too.
“What do you say we take an early night, doll?” Avery asks, shifting away to face you and holding out one hand, the offer written clear across his face,
Well.
This is what you’ve been waiting for, isn’t it? You know what he’s asking for. You can just say no. You can push his hand away, tell him you’d like to look at the stars a bit longer, hope he takes the rejection with, if not grace, diplomacy. That he doesn’t kick you out, money not in hand.
It’s such an inherently ridiculous thought that you swallow, place your hand in his. “That sounds lovely,” you say, and follow him out of the tub.
Avery towels off as you wrap your own around yourself, guarding against the chill, and stare despondently at your leather dress. At least an early night means he’ll let you sleep here until you’re no longer damp enough to get stuck halfway into it. But the thought of re-dressing…
You just grab your clothes, instead, stepping into your panties for the barest hint of modesty, and continue to work on drying yourself off. Your skin is flushed pink, warm, and tacky with the water that’s clinging to it.
“I should go freshen up,” you say, gesturing to the bathroom. “I’ll only take a moment.”
“Be quick,” Avery says, eyes lingering on your panties. “I’m already looking forwards to seeing you again.”
So you’re quick as you use the bathroom, brush your teeth, tug pins out of your hair. The bathroom light is warm, nothing like the cold, underwater tones of the orphanage bathroom, and you stare into an unfamiliar reflection. At least your hair only got damp, and you don’t have to worry, because it’s going to keep getting damp, from sweat. Perhaps tears.
You brush it out, anyway, because the hotel has provided a brush, and you want to draw it out a little longer. The steam appears to have removed the blush on your cheeks, although it doesn’t matter, because the heat—and the champagne—means it wasn’t really necessary.
Are you going to do this?
He doesn’t know. To him, you’re just another girl who needs the money, who’s happy to give up a night and some pleasure and exclusive access to her body. It’s the type of thing that men like him pay for all the time.
And you—there’s a chance, a good one, that he isn’t your father. You have to make yourself remember this. You’re biased, obviously, a lifetime of wanting a family running ruts into the paths your thoughts take. Conspiratorial thinking, Sirris called it. Expecting something because it agrees with your beliefs.
If only you hadn’t made a fuss at the party about the wine, you think, sourly. You could be blissed out, high as a kite, riding his dick in the hot tub and probably moaning so loud the whole town would hear.
Avery’s anger, when you’d confronted him about the drugs in the wine, flashes through your mind.
He’s not going to let you tell him no, is he? He hasn’t rented a hotel room, brought you here, for you to refuse to let him fuck you. He didn’t slip you the drugs tonight because he doesn’t need to. You don’t need to want him. You just need not to stop him.
You can do that.
You can not stop him.
You tug your panties and your bra back on, although you give up fully on the leather dress. The thought of the texture is just…
And arguably, if you don’t wear it, you’re being seductive.
Speaking of seductive.
The garters are right there, and you bought them so that he could fuck you in them. Maybe they’re a necessary part of the equation.
So the panties come back off, obviously, because this has turned the corner from an idea into a fixation, a rut your mind has gotten stuck in, the thing that needs to happen.
You reapply your lipstick. You’ve seen that in the magazines that get passed around school, too, a rim of slick red wrapped around a cock. It might tempt him into a repeat. That, at least, won’t mean you give up more.
Avery’s lounging on the bed when you get out, feet bare, belt off, looking barely dressed in his button-down and trousers, despite the fact that almost all of his skin is covered. He really is handsome, unfortunately, clear-eyed and clean-shaven and features placed like God was asked to use them in a sentence. His mouth twitches, as he looks up at you, waves you over to him.
“That’s quite the outfit, doll,” he says, as you pause, uncertain, at the edge of the bed. “Spin around for me, won’t you?”
You spin, the heat of his eyes on you. “You like it?” you ask, trying for flirtatious and ending up somewhere in the neighborhood of hopeful. You shouldn’t want him to want you. You need to stop this.
“I can’t deny that I’d like to see you in it more often, but…” Avery trailed off, let you complete your turn. “Why don’t you change into something a bit more comfortable?”
He gestures at the wardrobe, and you reach for it. You open the door.
The babydoll in the wardrobe is your size. It’s lilac and lacy. It’s achingly soft.
There’s another pair of pajamas, a similar shade and a similarly feminine style, next to it, but you know what you’re being instructed to do. You strip out of the bra, and, after a moment, the panties. It’s—they don’t match. The thought makes your brain itch, the knowledge that you shouldn’t care almost as strong as the knowledge that you do.
It fits like a glove, and you have the horrifying thought that it was made for you. You hands slip on the strap, and it snaps against your shoulder almost hard enough to make you jump. It doesn’t share the same… defining effect on your tits as the dress, and it’s loose enough that they’re even half-hidden under it. You look younger, in the mirror inside the drawer of the wardrobe, with your hair down and in this close-to-shapeless garment.
The disgust isn’t enough to keep you from looking back towards the bed.
When you turn around, Avery has stripped down to his boxer-briefs. They’re black, silky, and you can clearly see the outline of his cock inside them. He’s hard. From watching you.
The reality of what you’re about to do with him slams into you, and you follow his motion for you to sit down as if in a dream, less sitting on the bed and more preventing yourself from falling onto the floor.
You settle yourself near the center of the bed, which feels the least risky to your swooping stomach, and try to tug the babydoll down to cover as much as possible. It’s not much. You almost miss the imagined modesty of your pubic hair.
Avery’s eyes rake down your body, like he’s collecting leaves to burn them. Remove everything that covers you and destroy it.
“Is it cocky of me to admit that I asked you to wear that just so I could take it off?” he asks, rolling over towards you, steam-dampened hair falling out of its typically controlled style. It hangs into your space, pushing you further back into the bed just to get away from him.
“I don’t know,” you say, trying to fight back the urge to roll away from him. You want to see him coming, you think. You force yourself, instead, to flirt. To look down his body, eyes clearly aimed at his erection. “Looks like it, though.”
“You are a delight, doll,” Avery says, and then his lips are on yours. He didn’t brush his teeth, but all he tastes like is linguine and champagne, not the bile that you’ve been scared is creeping into your mouth all night.
You make yourself, or let yourself, kiss back. His tongue presses into your mouth, his hand presses into your side. Possessive, strong, determined. His stubble rasps against your chin, his nails scrape on your ribs. He pushes you down, pushes himself up, and you go, borne down into the bed.
Robin was right. It is soft.
He breaks the mouth-to-mouth contact, scrapes his teeth along your jaw, your neck, your ear. You gasp, authentic even as it’s playacted, the pain doing something fizzy to your breathing.
Your hands scramble for purchase on his back, and you almost hope your nails are leaving little scratches on it, marking him up, making this as permanent for him as it will be for you. He deserves it, you think, a little vindictive, as he bites your earlobe and runs his hand up your side.
He reaches for your tits, shoving the neck of the babydoll under them, tweaks your nipple until it hurts. Gets his other hand on your thigh, pulls them apart, settles himself between them, and oh, God.
“Your heart’s racing, doll,” he says, hand on your chest, voice concerned. “Are you sure?”
No, you want to say, you’re my father, you can’t do this to me, you want to say, except you’re almost certain he knows, more and more by the second. “I’m—I’m a virgin,” you say instead, stutter artificial. “I’ve never—I’m scared it’ll hurt.”
Avery smiles, a small, private thing, one you’d call mean if you hadn’t seen real mean. “Oh, doll, it’s really not going to hurt,” he promises, voice sugar-sweet. “What do you think you get wet for?” It’s so condescending that it hurts, and worse, you want him to keep going.
“I’m just,” you say, trying to find a reason. The amount you do want him to fuck you—not only desire, but a need to secure safety for yourself, get whatever payment he’ll offer for this, and oh, you just told him you’re a virgin, so whatever extra that’s worth—is fighting a battle in your mind against your need to not do this, not do this thing that you know is not only a wrong thing but the wrong thing.
Worse, it’s winning. “I’m nervous,” you say. “You’re just… so big.” Maybe he’ll… what, ask for your mouth again? It’s not incest if you’re just sucking his cock? You need it in your mouth, as a gag if nothing else, because if you keep being able to talk you’re going to tell him. “I don’t know if I’m ready.”
You don’t want to tell him. If you tell him, he might say:
Oh, God, get away from me, and give me back everything I’ve given you.
Worse. He might say:
I know, doll. What, did you think I didn’t? Did you think that wasn’t what I asked for?
Avery, though, seems to have a solution, because he’s rolling off you, back onto his side, and he’s reaching for his briefcase. “Why didn’t you say so earlier?” he asks, opening a zipper. “I have a little something for this.”
The bottle is little, round, suffused with a purplish pink. The reflections of the light in the room catch on it, make it seem like it’s glowing in his hands. Avery winks as he sees you looking. “Perfectly safe,” he says. “It’s what I used, to demonstrate our products to the investors.”
You still hesitate. “I don’t… I shouldn’t…”
“It’s alright to need it,” Avery says. “I know this can be intimidating, for girls like you.”
“Girls like me?” you ask, staring at the bottle.
“Good girls,” Avery says, and you aren’t going to roll your eyes at the superiority in his tone. “This is romance, for you, not a career, and it can be… well, it’s probably hardly what you expected for your, ah, first time.”
You nod, decisively. “Well, if you recommend it…”
He unscrews the lid before he hands it to you. “Not too much,” he warns. “It’s… experimental.”
You bring it to your lips. Sip. Swallow.
The rush of heat hits you before the flavor does, and it burns, more than the wine ever has.
You—God help you—recognize the taste. This concentrated there’s something bitter to it, floral, herbal. But it’s the same thing he put in the wine.
It’s a little easier, then, to know you’ll want it, to lie there as he plays with your tits, let out little sounds as you wish, squirm when he does something with his mouth to a sensitive spot on your neck. The heat spreads heavy throughout your body, pulls you further down into the mattress, pushes you open.
“It’s good,” you say, mouth a little fuzzy. “Thank you.” You try to recap the bottle, fail, and just hand it to him with the cap half-on.
“I’m glad I could do something to help,” Avery says, and he sits there, strokes your hair, sets the bottle aside on the nightstand forgotten, and he’s—he’s waiting for you to make the first move.
You have to.
You have to be the one to touch him, this time. And if you don’t he’s going to fucking know.
You make yourself reach for his hand, tug him closer, and maybe the sip you took wasn’t as small as would be advised, because skin contact, what the fuck. It’s good even as his hand is in yours, and you bring it immediately back to your tits, out of pure fucking need. Avery sounds pleased, though, climbs on his knees into the valley, wide-open now, between your thighs.
The fucking sound you make as his cock, hard but still covered by his underwear, rubs up into your cunt is something out of a 2 a.m. back alley, half yowl and half moan, a sudden intrinsic awareness that that’s the part of him that goes inside you slamming into you at fifty over the speed limit. You’re totaled, wrecked, a wet smear on the pavement.
You’re wet in every other sense, too, hair still steam-damp and sweat pouring off of you and your cunt is just… well, if your body is pouring sweat, your cunt is gushing, like when that delinquent had pulled the safety shower in science class last month.
It would be embarrassing, if you could think about it, and if Avery wasn’t also dripping, salty droplets falling off the strands of his hair and onto your neck, right above where he’s sucking a hickey into one of your tits.
“Fuck,” Avery groans, voice rough with arousal, “I’ve got to get in you.” He shoves down his boxer-briefs, enough that his cock can spring out, and the image of it would be comical if not for the icy shot of fear it sends through you.
“Wait,” you say, reeling from the kiss and the contact and the drugs, “I—we need…” You trail off as your hand fumbles around for the condoms, abandoned somewhere by the nightstand when you’d taken off your clothing. Your scrambling hand catches on something slick and sharp, and—Avery catches it, unwraps your fingers where they’re clutching onto the condom and he’s not going to fucking make you do this—
“Relax, doll,” Avery breathes, a little more pissed than he probably intends to sound. “Good lord, from the sound you’re making you’d think I’d stabbed you.” He sits up slightly over you, looming, and you can hear him breathing. Deep, slow. You think he might be counting to ten. He takes the hand he’s still holding, and brings it to his cock.
“I’m sorry,” you say, already starting to stroke, placating, trying to find an angle for your hand where it can close around his cock. He’s not massive—you’ve seen over your classmates’ shoulders, at their phones, and you know there’s bigger, but—the way your fingers barely reach your thumb is upsettingly hot.
“Do you think that these—” he waves the condoms he took from you, before tossing them aside “—are going to fit me comfortably? Be serious.”
“Sorry,” you say again, shame and relief flooding your face. “I just—it could. I’m…”
Avery laughs. “I certainly don’t want you to get pregnant either,” he says. “I don’t know you that well, doll. And marriage would be…” he hisses through his teeth. “A complicated negotiation.”
“No kidding,” you say, watching as he reaches a hand out to the other nightstand. “Hah, literally.” Avery doesn’t laugh at your joke, just picking up a much fancier looking packet and ripping it open.
The efficiency with which he rolls the condom on is practiced, careful, a smooth slide down his cock that reminds you that he does this all the time, that you really aren’t anything special to him.
It hurts, in a way, the idea that he doesn’t see a difference between you and anyone else he’s ever fucked. It helps, at the same time. If there’s nothing special about you, he won’t go looking, and if he doesn’t go looking, he’ll never have a reason to push you away.
You need the money.
You need him, a much smaller thought suggests. Or—not smaller, exactly. Smaller as in how things look small from very far away, maybe.
It’s getting a lot louder as he maneuvers himself back over and lines himself up. The way he rubs at your pussy is perfunctory, less foreplay and more reassurance that you’re plenty dosed up, that you can take it. If you can’t take it, though, he’s paying you enough to pretend that you can.
You feel heated, you feel fuzzy, and Avery, your dad—You close your mouth with a snap, realizing with dread that you’ve spoken, you’ve spilled the beans, it’s out it’s out he knows—
Above you, Avery laughs, at you instead of with you, and he rubs the head of his cock against your slit. You can feel the reservoir tip of the condom, thank goodness for small mercies, but it’s close, almost in you. “Calling me daddy, doll?” Avery asks, voice amused.
“No,” you manage, no, no, that’s—
“I don’t mind it,” he says, grinning down at you. “It’s cute. You can say it again, if you want me to make you come.”
You shake your head, too afraid to let yourself speak, and Avery laughs again. Meaner, this time.
“You will,” he promises. “Just wait.”
And Avery—despite what he may be to you—slides his cock deep into your pussy, pushing slowly, inexorably forwards. And then he pauses.
“What a wonderful gift,” he says, sounding very pleased. “Saving your virginity for me?”
“I told you,” you say, still trying to adjust to the size of him within you. It’s pressing against things you didn’t know could be pressed. Places your fingers have never been able to reach.
Avery chuckles, rolls his hips a bit. “Everyone tells me that, doll,” he says. “I was just surprised that it was true.”
You’d answer, but then he actually draws back, thrusts in again, and that’s the thing that steals your breath, makes the stretch real. Like trying to blow up a balloon that just won’t blow, and your cheeks burning with the pressure against them, only now it’s your pussy.
The pain is almost a relief, in that it saves you from enjoying it. It allows you to focus on the fact that he was surprised, that everyone tells him that.
That you’re no different, to him.
He doesn’t know.
You shove your fist into your mouth as he moves inside you. Squeeze your eyes closed. You don’t want to see him, because you know you’ll say something, to stop him or to hurt him or both.
Avery just laughs again, rolls his hips more, groans as you try to flex your muscles around him, get back a bit of control.
It hurts less, moment by moment, and he’s gentle with it, too, in a way you realize you hadn’t expected. He’s a generous lover, or he wants you to think he is. Not much of a difference, in any case.
And worst part is—it’s good. It is. His cock is big and blood-hot inside you, and he’s clearly playing with you, rubbing it back and forth in a way that strikes you as just for your benefit. It is, you admit to yourself, ashamed, everything you wanted.
You did want it. Dreamed about it, fantasized about it. You came twice thinking about it, minutes after finding out he was—could possibly have been—your father.
And it might just be the drugs. Probably is. Hopefully is.
When you don’t think about who he could be, what’s really happening to you is that that an attractive man is spending exorbitant amounts of money on you, and looking very carefully at the way your legs look in short skirts, and—oh, yes, fuck!—apparently, now that you’ve satisfied whatever esoteric criteria he’s operating under, speeding up his thrusts at the same time he reveals that no, actually, he wasn’t balls-deep before.
The sound you make must be horrifically lewd, even around your spit-wet fingers. You have half a mind to complain that it’s too big, that he’s hurting you, but you don’t know what’s going to come out of your mouth when you try, and you’re not too sure he doesn’t want to hurt you.
The other half of your mind is saying things like ‘big!’ and ‘cock!’ and ‘hnghhng,’ although that last one may just be your mouth, and have nothing to do with any thoughts at all.
Avery’s breathing has gotten heavier, at least, thick with desire and pleasure. At least he’s having fun.
You’re not sure if it’s good, exactly, that he likes fucking you. On the one hand, he doesn’t know. On the other, it feels like he should, as if some internal instinct should tell him something is wrong, and let him go soft in you and make his excuses. You remember, though, Charlene.
You can’t exactly pretend that she liked it the way you do, with everything you’ve heard. You can’t pretend that you and she had the same thing wrong with you.
The thing wrong with you that’s making your hips tilt, and your cunt clench; some flywheel within you beginning to pull fuel into cylinders, that film you watched in science yesterday pinging around in your brain like all of your inessential knowledge is getting knocked loose, in favor of high-resolution sensory imagery of everything that’s happening to you right now. The specifics of the internal combustion engine are just… going to be lost to you, replaced with the way you can tell that Avery’s balls are hitting your perineum. Another thing from science.
Distracting yourself isn’t working, because there’s other truths at play here—fuck anatomy, it’s time for physiology, you’re going to come.
The realization itself pushes your orgasm closer, your pulse faster, the up-down rock of your hips more rhythmic. Your body chases your orgasm, even as you dread it, a deer in headlights knowing the oncoming taste of destiny.
You’re going to—you have to—and then he stops. Holds your hips down, when you try to grind on his cock, force it back further in, where it feels good.
“You want to come, doll?” Avery asks, pausing, smiling down at you. His hand is playing with your nipple, pinching it almost sore, and it’s a welcome counterpoint to the warmth building in your cunt.
You nod, frantically, and he reaches for the hand you’ve still got half-shoved into your mouth. Pulls it gently away. “Please,” you say, voice catching on what you’re surprised to discover is a tear. “Please, oh, please,” you add, because he’s still not doing anything.
Avery smiles. Cruel. “What did I say you’d have to do for that?” he asks, and your fuzzy, sex-drunk brain tries to remember.
Fuck.
You can’t.
Only… is this really the thing you won’t do? Is this your limit, or did you pass that weeks ago? Or, worse, is it still somewhere ahead, a paradox like the one River told you about where an arrow can never hit its target because it first has to reach the halfway point?
You’re so fucking stupid. You’ve been justifying this to yourself with the money; the fact that he could, possibly, not be your father; the fact that Robin needs you.
But the one thing you’ve wanted, for so fucking long that you can’t remember not wanting it, is for a family to want you as much as you want them.
And the expression on Avery’s face right now, beneath the thinks-he’s-funny-for-being-mean smile, is nothing else as much as it is want.
And if he is your father… he still wants you to say that.
“Please,” you say, all dignity and pretense of not wanting it gone, “I want to come, Daddy, let me come, let me come please!” You break off into a wordless shout as he shoves into you hard, tugs one nipple and bites the other, trying to writhe under the pain and the pleasure and the—
You tip over into orgasm, back arching, legs wrapping haphazardly around him, cunt clenching on his cock, and so much for it’s not a sin if you don’t come.
He doesn’t pull out, even when his thrusts turn from stimulation to overstimulation. You cry, but he doesn’t seem to care that you’re crying, just playing with your nipples until they’re red.
The worst part, though, in an evening that has been nothing but one worst part after another, is that it was good. Still is, even, aftershocks ricocheting through your body with the movements of his hips.
“Want to see if you can come again, doll?” Avery asks, thumb teasing your clit. You make a noise—horror? Desire? Both?—which Avery evidently interprets as a strong no, because he laughs, and backs off, hands off of your cunt and your tits. “We’ll see if you can,” he announces, and, once he’s found support for himself among the blankets, done something subtle with the angle of himself above you, resumes his thrusts.
He might be right about that—but only might be. Like this, chasing his own pleasure, it becomes evident that he was trying to make you come earlier, that he actively wanted you to get off, and the idea makes your head spin, even as the roughness of his movements is some paradoxical relief.
You moan theatrically, anyway, through the loss of arousal’s fog. He likes that, likes the way you’re mostly just petting his back, now that your hands are up, the way that your legs are pushing back, just a little, because of the angle he’s pushed them into.
He’s bigger than you. He could have done this whenever he wanted. You have to catch the noise that comes out of your throat at that, force it back down towards sexy.
There’s a bit of it building again, and you’ve made yourself come more than once in a night, before, but Avery’s also reaching his own peak, much more quickly, suddenly, even.
It’s an event that needs to be demarcated, somehow, and so you hold on with arms and legs, moan. “Yes, Daddy, come inside me,” you manage, hating and loving the term and the way that you know he gets off on it, and there’s something a little frenzied in his eyes as he redoubles his pace.
He likes it just as much as you do, which sends cold shame coursing through you just as he starts to come.
He grunts a final time, hips pressed as far into you as they’ll go, and you go lightheaded as you realize you can actually feel the twitch of his cock inside your cunt.
The mental image that accompanies that is horrible. You wish you were only imagining the condom gone out of fear, but you know that isn’t the case.
He’s still, above you, for those long moments that it takes him to come down from his orgasm, hips moving aimlessly into you. It’s odd, unfamiliar. Avery, in anything other than control.
And then he pulls out, rolls off, moves for the bathroom door, and you’re lying there, soaked in sweat and your legs still spread. You close them. You’re a little bit sore.
You did that. You let it happen. It might have always been going to happen.
“Aw, you couldn’t come,” Avery says, returning to the bed condomless and with a towel he’s using to wipe the sweat off himself. You grip the sheets in an attempt to resist the horrible urge to hide your face in your hands. It’s fine. He’s already seen everything. “Did you want to? I don’t mind if you finish on your own.”
“I’m good,” you say. It’s a lie on every count. You tug the babydoll back into place. “I. Already came.”
Avery chuckles. “We’ll make a proper hedonist of you yet,” he says, climbing onto the bed and reaching for the covers. “Not going to get cleaned up, doll?”
“The bed’s soaked,” you say. “No point.” The one benefit of the position, and the size of the bed, is that you’ll have the wet spot between you as you sleep.
Unless he makes you sleep in it. Gross.
“Hand me those garters,” Avery says. “And your babydoll. I’ll set them with the things to be cleaned before we leave in the morning.”
You didn’t think it would be possible to flush deeper, but apparently… “And I’m just supposed to sleep naked?”
“If you’d like,” Avery says, carelessly. “There’s pajamas in the wardrobe.”
And so you change, again, which involves a brief detour when you discover the necessity of a towel, when the reality of pulling pants onto sweat-damp legs rears its ugly head.
Avery’s already asleep when you climb back into the bed, on your own side. At least the wet spot is in the middle,
Robin was right about the bed. There’s what feels like a dozen pillows up at the head, and you pull them around yourself, enjoying the novelty. And if the nest has the effect of keeping Avery out of your vision… no one has to know.
No one has to know any of this. Robin is going to want details—or as close to details as she can handle—and you’ll offer them up. You’ll keep—you won’t tell Robin you let Avery pull that—you shouldn’t have called him that. Shouldn’t have reacted the way you did when he made fun of you for almost saying it. Shouldn’t have drunk anything, let it loosen your tongue. Shouldn’t have come on this date, shouldn’t have gone on the others, shouldn’t have asked him to help you reach the statue in the park.
Shouldn’t have gone on Bailey’s computer, really.
Would it make a difference, if you hadn’t known? If he was just a man who paid more, who liked nice things?
Philosophically, you know it shouldn’t. There should be something keeping you from him, and him from you. There shouldn’t be attraction there.
There is.
You want to be a nice thing. You want to be his nice thing, and his daughter, and the sickening gap between them is trying very badly to eat you.
You want a connection, and a reason for him to care.
You want too much. And you know that the only thing he’s going to give you is money.
And you’re just going to have to live with that.
You’re tired, and sore in new ways, and you haven’t slept in the same bed with someone since you and Robin would crawl into each other’s twin beds, back when you shared a room, limbs all over and trying not to breath wetly in each other’s mouths.
But there’s… something.
You shouldn’t have taken the drugs, you think, rolling onto your side and facing away from Avery. He’s asleep, you think. His breathing is steady.
He might not be able to tell.
You roll further, onto your stomach, hoping that you’ll be able to hide the evidence.
He doesn’t need to know, you think, fingers finding your clit.
It’s biology. It’s a hormonal response.
It doesn’t matter.
It does.
This won’t be the last time. Why would it be? He likes you, as much as that describes his feelings towards you. You basically confirmed that you’re good for it, what with that new dress you bought. You’ve said yes to this.
And no one has to know.
If it took you this long to figure it out, and you’re one of the people involved…
You muffle a bit of a gasp. You’re wet, still, the slide of your fingers slick and easy over your clit. Avery’s are larger than yours, and his fingers are softer. He doesn’t really touch you during these, but if he did…
You shift. If you were home right now, in a bed alone, you’d be rocking your hips into your hand. As it is, you’ll have to satisfy yourself with only your fingers, picking up the pace. Avery’d be rough with this, too. He takes what he wants. When he wanted you to come, he took that from you too.
He’d probably use his fingers to fuck you, too, but you’ve never been quite that coordinated, and you’d rather just—
You bite one of your (many) pillows as you come, slipping easily over the edge. It’s not quite like your orgasm from earlier, but it’s a weight off your shoulders. There’s the crushing regret of realism, the knowledge of exactly who you just got off to.
It’s fine, you tell yourself. You needed it. And Avery wasn’t paying attention.
And if Avery notices, he doesn’t say anything.
You sleep poorly, although it has nothing to do with the comfort of the bed. Your dreams are hazy, in and out of nervous wakefulness, and it’s only the last time that you crack your eyes open that you notice that the bed is empty.
Avery is sitting on the couch, doing something with his laptop, and he looks over at you as you sit up. “Someone’s certainly enjoying the accommodations,” he notes, and he gestures towards the balcony. “Breakfast?”
Breakfast was delivered before you woke up, along with your leather dress and your lingerie, freshly clean and smelling of, if anything, soap, rather than sweat and anxiety.
Breakfast itself smells nothing like anxiety; the bacon is still hot, shimmery with crisp, dissolving fat and crumbling in your mouth as you bite into it; the eggs are poached, and although that’s not your favorite way to eat them, the yolk is warm and jammy when you dip the toast in. There’s cold orange juice for you—and you’d bet anything it’s fresh-squeezed—and hot coffee for Avery.
You trade off turns in the shower, afterwards; Avery makes an exaggerated after you gesture that you’d feel pissier about if you didn’t also feel so fucking gross.
You manage quickly, shampoo your hair and then dry it, because there’s a hair dryer in one of the drawers, and you might as well not look like… like what you are. You brush your teeth again. It’s a pity Avery is going after you; you were going to steal all of the fancy little single-use products in the bathroom.
You dress as much as is necessary in the bathroom, pulling your dress—and the fucking godforsaken garters—back on, but you leave without worrying about your hair, because Avery clearly also needs a shower. And his absence will give you time to complete your ransacking of the suite from the night before.
The condoms and the lube from the drawer get tucked into your bra with the others, you eat three of the chocolates from the little dish on the table, and one of every kind of tea in the little caddy goes directly into your cleavage. It sort of crinkles. This isn’t an outfit built for carrying anything with you. You’ll manage anyway.
Avery takes longer in the bathroom than you did. When he emerges, he’s in a different suit than he was wearing yesterday, and his hair is entirely dry. You duck, self-conscious of your own towel-wrapped, still-damp braid.
He looks around the room, before gesturing to the lingerie on its hanger and pajamas you left on the bed. “There’s a bag in the dresser,” he says, and you open it to reveal a glossy paper shopping bag with a logo that tells you that he put effort into dressing you up. “You ought to keep those—you looked divine in them.”
“Thank you,” you say, clutching the bag and trying not to look like you’re clutching it. “I—I like them.” Avery smiles, and then starts, as if he’s just noticed something.
“I do believe we have something to settle between us,” Avery says, pulling out his wallet. You’re a bit jealous. You should probably get one of those. “I’m certain this is a fair price.”
The stack of cash in your hand is all hundreds, new bills, like he gets them from the bank just for you.
Enough to more than pay your rent. He did like what you gave him. Enough to pay for it ex post facto.
“It is,” you confirm, trying not to stare at the money and make it obvious how little you usually have. That’s this week’s rent. That’s this week’s rent, and a start on next week’s, and… Robin can have some of this, if she needs it. Or—fuck it, let Bailey just take it out of you, anyway.
If it’s for her, it’s a sacrifice. No one has to know if you like it.
“Shall I drop you off at home?” Avery asks, a little rote, as the two of you ride the elevator down. It’s early, still, and the elevator is empty. The other hotel patrons clearly don’t have business this early.
“I was planning to go to the temple,” you say, instead, trying to angle for it instead of asking outright. You think you might need the purification, even if they don’t know what you did last night.
Avery just raises an eyebrow. “In those?” he asks, and—he has a point. Tight leather dress, thigh-high garters, a four-inch gap of skin between the two; face and hair fully bare in a tight, scrubbed clean way that doesn’t match your clothing at all; and your school shoes laced tight around the thinner layer of the stockings. “Doll, I think they have rules against obscenity. You might as well get changed at home. And when are the services?”
You swallow. You don’t want to admit that you aren’t sure, that you’d been planning on—what? Moving in?—and so instead you shrug. “I have a friend who’s a initiate,” you say instead. “I was going to—to visit.”
Avery smiles indulgently, as the elevator chimes down the floors. “So I’ll take you home, then,” he decides. “I’m sure your guardian is worried about you.”
You don’t say anything about what Bailey actually wants, not in the elevator or in the lobby, where Avery’s shoes tap across the stone floor. It doesn’t echo—there’s too much in the room for that—but it hints at it. Proof of emptiness.
The desk out front is also empty, and Avery huffs, pulling car keys out of his pocket. “Time for an adventure,” he says, winking. “Ready to go somewhere we aren’t supposed to?”
“We won’t get in trouble?” you ask.
Avery raises an eyebrow. “You really think I’m going to get in trouble?” he asks, and, okay, point. “If they say anything, I’m certain I can pay whatever fine they try to charge. And we’re only going to the car.”
So you walk down the ramp into the underground garage with him, spirals of cool concrete under your feet. The hotel shares space with at least one of the office buildings, but the areas are clearly marked, and Avery finds his way to his car with ease.
You don’t get caught. Apparently, Avery’s an expert at that.
So you won’t get caught, you think, climbing into the passenger seat with your bag of fancy clothing. You’ll need to keep it from Avery as much as you keep it from everyone else, but it’s not like he’ll ask, if you don’t let him know that there’s anything to ask about. He doesn’t ask anything, as he pulls the car out of the garage, cracks the windows to take in fresh air. He’s on the road that’ll take you home.
You can live with this. The thought hurts, and it helps. You will live with it. You have other options, but you don’t have better ones.
The money is crisp in the bag on your lap. The air, outside the cracked windows, is cold with the promise of autumn. Bailey’s waiting for you at home, but so is Robin, and Sydney invited you to mass today, and Sirris still wants your help with the shop.
And next Saturday, Avery will invite you on a date, and you’ll say yes. He has good taste, and so much money, and if he’s going to make you the beneficiary of those… well, no one ever said you couldn’t like it. There’s things you need, and things you want, and you’re going to get them from him.
He might be your father. No one ever said you couldn’t like that, either.
They didn’t have to.
That, you think, glancing over at the way Avery’s hands wrap around the steering wheel, at the way the morning sunlight wraps around his face, may have been an oversight.