Coed Demon Sluts_Beth

by Jennifer Stevenson

Jee was not receptive to the word.

  “Look, I admit he was a jerk when he showed up,” Beth said. “He did need a reality check.”

  “And he’s a saint now?” Jee said, removing makeup with a big moisturized pad, eyeing Beth in the mirror.

  “Uh, not entirely, no. But Jee, I’ve been reading the literature, and it says the sub has to feel cherished and appreciated. You have a responsibility to reward him for good behavior, not just punish him for disobedience.”

  “What about the other night? We took him out and let him play pretend-pimp for a whole evening, the four of us. You were there. Ministering to his ego,” Jee added scornfully. “Besides, Reg’s punishment doesn’t bother him as much as you think it does.” She smiled.

  Beth pushed. “But does it make him feel loved?”

  Jee turned on her. “Look, fuck off, all right? Do you want to be Jerk Whisperer around here? Are you asking me to give him to you?”

  Blinking at the ferocity and hurt in Jee’s tone, Beth backed away. “Of course not.” Wow, is she jealous because I had a heart-to-heart with Reg?

  “You want him licking your shoes clean and eating your pussy and begging you for punishment, is that it? Shall I call him in here? See how you like it?” Jee turned her head as if to holler for Reg.

  “No! No no no!” Horrified, Beth waved her hands. “No, I don’t. Please. No. I—I’m sorry.”

  Jee’s dark eyes returned to the mirror, and her reflection drilled a warning through Beth. “All right, then.”

  “I’ll—I’ll just go start dinner,” Beth babbled. Anything to get away from Jee’s unleashed anger. This couldn’t be jealousy. But it sure was something.

  “We’re going out. Unless you want to stay home with your pet,” Jee said, sounding less angry.

  Light broke on Beth. She took a deep breath. “He’s your pet,” she said.

  “Long as we’re clear,” Jee said.

  Beth said bluntly, “Do you mind if I keep helping him scrub the floor under the refrigerators?”

  “Is that what you did all day?” Jee laughed. “I guess he did a number on you. Did he give you the big eyes?” It wasn’t a relaxed laugh. Beth wasn’t fooled.

  “Actually, I cried on his shoulder, and he convinced me that you were right,” Beth said, going for full disclosure. At Jee’s startled look, she added, drooping, “About me being a slave. When I was married.”

  “Sit down.” Jee turned in her chair and looked directly at Beth for the first time. She seemed completely focused and calm at last. “Talk.”

  Beth slumped onto the bed. “I was never sure I was loved. I was always looking for ways to...make Blake love me.” Every time she said it, that word hurt like broken glass in her throat. She pinched up her face. “When Reg told me he loves you and you—” She gulped, realizing she was returning to a sensitive topic. The words came out in phrases over the broken glass. “How much he prefers living here to living—hic—to living with his mother. I realized everything. How he gives service, hoping for reward. And that was me. Only my kitchen was nicer,” she smiled feebly, “excuse my saying. And he gets paid and I didn’t. He says—” she began, and then, warned away by the look in Jee’s eye, she kept it to herself. He says he feels loved. But I never did. I never really did feel loved.

  As if she saw that thought in Beth’s eye, Jee looked away, her perfect, bronzy complexion darkening.

  Desperate to turn the subject away from Reg again, Beth said quietly, “I fooled myself for a long time.”

  “That’s a little harsh.” Jee turned back to her mirror and resumed cleaning her face. “I prefer to think of it as dealing with reality as it comes. Just because you weren’t living in a cardboard box doesn’t mean you weren’t trapped.” To Beth’s startled look in the mirror, she said, “It turns out you weren’t fooling yourself, though. You got tossed out on your own. You couldn’t find work. You really were entirely dependent on his willingness to support you. You had to please him. I know how that works.”

  Beth didn’t probe. An old tight place began to ease inside her. “I didn’t mind the work,” she offered. “I like work. I get restless and miserable if I have to sit down. I sprained my ankle right after Jeff left for college and I couldn’t do a thing for three weeks and I nearly went crazy.”

  “So we’ll find you some work that keeps you sane,” Jee said. “Now go get dressed. We’re on the prowl tonight.”

  Released, Beth scurried back to her room, kicking herself for having spent the two hours after the plumbers changed shift reading about sexual dominance when she could have been taking a shower. Suddenly she felt sticky and grubby from scrubbing the kitchen floor. She heard the shower running and, incredulous, went down the hall to see what was happening.

  Pog was in there, showering.

  A naked Amanda stood at one of the newly-installed bathroom mirrors, makeup spread out on the new long vanity in front of her and a screwdriver in her hand, tinkering with one of the sidebar lights. With her back turned, showing her broad shoulders and high, narrow hips and rough-cut mane of blonde hair, she looked like an androgynous Viking. She glanced up as Beth came in. “Aren’t you dressed? Pog, get out of there. Beth’s not dressed yet.”

  “Where are the contractors?” Beth said.

  Pog turned off the shower and came out, dripping. “Downstairs, fixing the old locker room showers. This one’s not fully functional yet. They’ll get the downstairs stalls working, and then, while the carpenters finish the fancy bits in here, for one day we’ll have to go down there to shower.”

  “Speaking of, get cleaned up, will you?” Amanda said. “I’m starving.”

  The two of them bickered and shared makeup at the mirrors while Beth showered.

  And under the hot spray, Beth thought about her astounding insight. Unless she had imagined it, Reg might be totally right about how Jee loved him. And of course she couldn’t mention it. Jee would never admit to loving anyone. Maybe, because she’d really been a child slave, she now had to have total control in order to trust Reg with her feelings.

  I’ll have to be careful not to let on that I understand all that. But how? She’d just have to try to pretend that Reg was the houseboy. And stay away from sensitive topics with him. For a jerk with Tourette’s-level verbal impulse control, he saw way too much.

  That night they took a cab to Chinatown at 22d Street and cruised for tourists. To Pog’s delight, they walked into a huge group of conventioneers from McCormick Place, which was only a few blocks away. Dinner came on waves of trolleys, and Beth sat at the table, blushing hotly, while waiters slid fresh plates in front of her, and her roommates disappeared to the downstairs restrooms with the customers for five minutes at a time, the whole evening.

  Beth felt horribly conflicted. She herself had screwed Nando the drywall guy standing, only this morning. The weird thing was, she hadn’t hated it. It was fine. She’d even had a quick orgasm like a nice fat sneeze, and so what? She was surprised at how little she felt about it. At the time, she’d even been glad to get another name for her own monthly report.

  Had she lost her morals when she lost her old body? Or was consensual sex between strangers just...not that big a deal?

  Eventually the whole team settled down to eat enough Chinese food for twenty.

  “That’s my bonus taken care of,” Amanda said with satisfaction, between bites of Three-Treasure.

  “Mine too,” Pog said. She eyed the platter of Ginger Tree Ears. “Guys, I don’t want to jeopardize my union card, but I think I’m full. Beth, do you want to score? They’re easy pickings.”

  Beth mumbled something at her plate.

  “Didn’t think so,” Pog said calmly. “‘Kay, guys, we’re going home. For once I’m gonna catch the creature feature.”

  Beth got up quickly.

  When they were nearly home, she decided to try to explain to Pog. “It’s not like I don’t. I mean, I do want to score. I mean, eventually.” She couldn’t mention the drywall guy to anyo
ne just yet. “I’m just having a little trouble adjusting.” She hoped that Pog, the succubus most likely to have some familiarity with conventional thoughts, would understand.

  But for once Pog was no help. “What are you asking me exactly? Should you feel bad after fucking some guy who liked it? Exactly how bad should you feel? How do you measure how bad you feel, based on what criteria? I’m just trying to get a handle on your rules here.”

  “I suppose,” Beth said slowly, “A married woman should only have sex with her husband. But I’m divorced.”

  “Score! Dingdingding! You noticed.”

  “Sarcasm doesn’t help.”

  Pog said, not sarcastically, “Well, what do you expect me to say? I’m a succubus. I used to be a fat whore. A broke, aging, fat whore. And not the cutest one at the lamppost, either. I had plenty of reasons to feel bad about myself and what I did. Want to know what ultimately made me feel good?”

  “Sure.”

  Pog dug a finger into Beth’s ribs. “Getting paid a sickeningly huge amount of money for doing it. That’s what made me feel good.”

  Beth frowned. “Doesn’t that feel icky?”

  “No. What feels icky is not getting paid for it, or being paid very little, or being punched in the face and having the money taken off me by a john or a pimp or a cop. What feels icky is not being able to pay for food or a doctor. Not being able to pay for a taxi when I’m caught in the rain. What’s icky is realizing that every stitch I own is secondhand and always will be, and it’s getting torn and stained, and I have to replace it soon or I can’t charge even the pittance I’m getting for sex. Poor is icky.”

  Beth was silenced.

  They got out of the cab and went into the Lair together, their perfect blonde hair swinging in time with their long legs, their high, high heels making a racket on the wooden basketball deck.

  Pog stopped abruptly at the drum containing basketballs. She threw her handbag on the floor, took a ball out of the drum, and kicked off her shoes. “C’mere.”

  Beth got barefoot too and followed her to stand at the free-throw line.

  Pog bounced the ball a couple of times, then held it, narrowing her eyes. “Look, can you just put the moral thing on the side?”

  “Thing?” Beth said.

  Pog threw her free-throw. The ball bounced off the rim. She tsked and ran after it. “Men are allowed to fuck around but women aren’t. That thing. Just put it aside. Try to imagine a universe in which women get to fuck, too. Who, when, and how much they want. When a man charges for it, he’s glamorous. When a woman does it, she’s dirty. That thing. Put that aside and imagine that maybe she has a right to the same privileges a man has.” She retrieved the bouncing ball and tossed it to Beth.

  “Go ahead,” Beth said, feeling like this was Feminism 101 with crazy on the side. She measured the distance to the basket.

  Pog said, “I’m not being paid to kick puppies or give drugs to children or double-cross my best friend. I’m just being paid for sex. I don’t have to kill the President of Paraguay with a fork. I don’t even have to break the law, unless the law figures out how to track payments from hell and can prove that I got that money for having sex.”

  Beth began to see a glimmer of Pog’s point. “I guess it isn’t so bad.” She let fly. Her ball teetered on the rim and fell away, no score. She ran after it and handed off to Pog.

  Pog jeered lightly, “You guess it isn’t so bad. Hoo-fucking-ray. Let me ask you something. Of all the things you did or failed to do as a mother, which ones stand out in your memory as the most painful, awful, unforgivable errors that still make you cringe and feel guilty and will follow you to your grave?”

  She shot. Her ball tipped off the backboard and fell with a swish through the net.

  Beth swallowed. She could bear thinking about her kids now. Having a brand new body and a bounced settlement check was part of that, but there was some distance from her children, too. That made her sad, but it didn’t stab her with guilt.

  “I know what you mean.” The incidents that stabbed her with guilt came readily to her memory. “Once, when Jeff was nine, I kept him home from a Little League game, and his team won for the first time all season. He’d been sick. I felt I had to keep him home. But he wasn’t that sick. He could have played. And he always felt like the reason the team won was because he wasn’t there. He quit Little League as soon as Blake would let him. I felt horrible. I ruined Little League for him.”

  She threw one-handed, half-blind with tears, and missed the backboard altogether.

  Pog retrieved the ball. “Fifty lashes, and make ’em draw blood. Next?”

  “I told Darleen she looked ugly in a dress.”

  “Oh, you’re going straight to hell.”

  “Yes, I thought so too. She was crushed. But I didn’t want her wearing it. It was slutty. That was the only thing I could think to say to make her not wear it, that she looked ugly in it.” Beth paused, remembering the crying behind the shut bedroom door, and her dreadful feeling of remorse.

  Pog shook her head. “That the worst?”

  “No.” Shame burned Beth’s ears and pain pinched her heart. “Blake’s brother is a coke addict. He had a son, a cute kid, but a real handful. Blake’s brother was jailed for dealing, and then he lost his job. I could have taken the boy into my home. Instead I let him get sent for foster care. He ended up in juvie. Eventually he died of heroin addiction himself.”

  Pog stood still. “Sins of omission. The worst kind.” She dribbled slowly, looking at the basket.

  “That’s not all.” Beth swallowed. “When Jeff started smoking pot in high school, I looked the other way. How could I? I knew what could happen. It was in his genes. What if he had gotten into the hard stuff? What if he had ruined his life with drugs, too? Would I have had the—the courage to handle it? Or would I have dumped him in some kind of rehab and pretended he wasn’t there any more, the way I did with little Fred?” Her throat tightened until she couldn’t speak.

  Her roomie sent her ball swishing through the net.

  Beth forced herself to say, “That was the worst.”

  “And now,” Pog said,”You’re only having sex and getting paid so much money that you would have to pay Blake a settlement, if the court ever found out about it.”

  Beth grabbed the ball and held it. “Really?”

  “Our thirty monthly pieces of silver comes in coins. Some of the really old coins are worth, oh, from sixteen to fifty thousand dollars apiece.”

  Beth’s jaw dropped. “Wow. And this is every month?”

  Pog rolled her eyes. She grabbed Beth by the arm and led her over to the broken lawn chairs by the gas grill, fished a couple of beers out of the round-shouldered fridge, and slumped into a chair.

  “Answer me this. If Blake knew you could earn this much for having sex with three different guys a month, and if you were still married to him, would he be horrified and morally outraged? Or would he say, ‘Honey, go put your red dress on?’”

  Beth snorted. She sat and popped the cap off her beer. “He’d be delighted,” she said sourly. “Because he’s a money slut himself. Only he does worse things than have random sex or shuffle paperwork for money.”

  “Do tell!” Pog said cozily.

  “He sends teams of guys into neighborhoods to buy up poor people’s houses at low prices, and then they do a big commercial development. Or he gets their properties condemned right before it becomes known that a redevelopment grant is coming out, and then his firm does the anchor property, which is a mall covering a city block.”

  “This bothers you?”

  Beth took a deep draw on her beer. “It did at first. He tried to make me see it was the way things are done, but I didn’t ever really like it. After a while I stopped thinking about it. The money was just there.”

  Before she could start feeling guilty about that, too, her roommate said, “Now let’s talk about homewrecking. How many guys have you fucked since you were with us? One?”


  “Two. I did the drywall guy today.”

  “Really?” Pog’s eyes opened wide. “Was he cute or something?”

  Beth tried to shrug casually. “Average. He was next on the incentives list. I thought I should do my share.”

  “Ah. Now I see why we’re having this conversation. I’m guessing the plumber was a moment of hormonal overload, after all that good basketball. But the drywall guy was a calculated act of sluttage.”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Did you ask the plumber if he was married?”

  “No.”

  “Did you ask the drywall guy?”

  “Actually, I did, and then I realized it was stupid, so I just went ahead and, uh, incentivized him.”

  “Did he answer you?”

  “No,” Beth said thoughtfully. “He didn’t.”

  “Why do you suppose he didn’t?”

  “Well, duh, he wanted to get laid.”

  “Besides that.”

  “Because...because he didn’t care. Because it didn’t matter. I guess it didn’t seem wrong to him.”

  Pog tossed her beer bottle into a dilapidated refrigerator box and clapped her hands slowly. “Good for you. You’re coming along. Pretty soon you’ll be asking yourself why something you did, something that was mildly fun for both of you, is okay for him but not for you, even though you’re legally free and you were both there doing it.”

  “You must think I’m an idiot,” Beth said, getting it. “Good heavens. This is feminism.”

  “Oh, well, that makes it okay.”

  “Now you’re laughing at me!”

  “Yes, I’m laughing at you. Because it’s better than clouting you on the ear for thinking you’re evil for having sex for money. Because I’ve been having sex for money all my adult life, and therefore, by your lights, I’m evil too. So instead of acting insulted, I’m laughing.” Beth saw that Pog was deadly serious.

  “I see,” Beth said soberly.

  “You’re lucky you asked me instead of Jee. She has zero patience with the name-calling thing. You should see what she does to guys who call her a whore.”

  “I picked you to talk about this on purpose,” Beth said with dignity. “And I do get it. But why would a guy call her a whore if she’s offering him sex? Wouldn’t he realize that she would dislike that?”