Pleasure Unbound

HARPER

The drier buzzes again. A signal that someone should be coming for the clothes very soon. James taps me on the shoulder but I don’t look up or acknowledge him. All I see is a long, sticky strand of saliva that is dripping down the front of my tank top. He taps again. “You can go away now,” I say quietly. “I’m sorry for keeping you.”

He bends down and grabs my hand, then urges me to stand.

I do. But I keep my head bowed in shame. I can’t believe I just gave my first blowjob to a stranger in a hallway. I’ve never had any illusions about my life. I’ve never bought into that whole knight thing you read about in girl magazines. I’m not the wannabe princess. But this?

I snatch my hand from his and turn away. I stare at my feet the whole way back to my door. His hands grip my shoulders before I can enter the apartment, and then he twirls me around. “Just go,” I say, ready to cry. “I’m over it. Thanks for the good time.”

His fingers dip under my chin and try to force me to look at him. But I’m done. I’m in shut-down mode. That pliable girl who opened for his dick is gone. I’m pissed.

“I’m sorry if I hurt you.”

I nod, but keep my eyes on his shoes.

“I hope you have a nice life, Harper. I won’t tell them I found you.”

My head shoots up at that admission. “You are here to kill me!”

“No,” he says back, his green eyes betraying a lost and desperate person inside. That person who hides behind this beautiful face and godlike body. Behind the man who walked hand in hand with me to the beach and pretended to like me so he could get oral sex from an amateur or whatever the hell it was he wanted.

I stare up at him and he moves a little so that the light from the hallway above his head turns him into nothing more than a dark hovering shape. The symbolism is so appropriate. “Is that what we are?” I ask him. “Just dark

shapes with no features? Is that all I’ll ever be?” He says nothing and I have my answer.

“When you were little did you have a dream?”

“No,” he says, turning his head so the light comes and goes. He’s human one moment, the dark amorphous killer the next. Then human again as he steps back and shifts his body, no longer facing me.

“Well, I had one. We had one.” He turns back when I say we and it hurts me so bad that he knows what that means. “We were gonna escape in the tender boat and say fuck them all. And we were going to live a new life.” I wait for some kind of acknowledgment. Or maybe an apology. For what? I’m not sure. He’s not responsible for what happened to us.

“And now I have no we, James. There is no us. And I guess if I had been the one to pull the trigger if I had been the one to make that decision to pull the trigger… like you did to your brother”-this gets his attention, but by the way his lip curls, I know immediately that’s not the kind of attention I want from James Fenici-“then I’d have nothing to be so pissed about. But that’s not what happened. I had a dream, James. And they took it away. So I dreamed of a new one all alone. And if you get in my way…” I straighten my back and tip up my chin-accepting who and what I am in this defining moment. I wait for him to look me in the eye. “I’ll kill you.”

He gives me a little nod. A professional courtesy, perhaps. Or maybe it’s a ploy to keep me calm as he considers his options. “I know who you are,” he says. “All ten of us were briefed last summer. I know what you did. I know what happened to make you run. And I know what you have, even if I didn’t find it in that little room with your money and your key.”

He pauses to see if I’ll react, but we come from the same place. We were poured into the mold as children and then popped out as adults. We’re the same, maybe not equals, but still the same. So I know when to hold the cards tight. He’s gonna wait a long time for that reaction.

When I don’t give him what he expects, he continues. “I’m supposed to turn you in, but I won’t.”

“Why?” I laugh. “Because you’re an assassin with a heart? You fancy yourself a good person deep down inside?”

He shakes his head slowly, his eyes never leaving mine. “I’m not a good person, deep or otherwise.” And then he turns and walks away.

“And that’s why you just did that to me?” I call after him. I don’t want him to leave. This small taste of human interaction is like a drug and it’s been so long since I had a companion. “Is that why you humiliated me like some worthless whore?”