Burning Choice (Trevor's Harem #3)

by Aubrey Parker

  “I’m sorry. I was just a kid.” I don’t know whether to feel terrible or guilty or defensive. These skeletons were buried more than a decade ago, whether my sins were paid for or not. There must be a statute of limitations on adolescent cruelty.

  “But then one day, we went rock climbing. A bunch of cabins together, with a group of counselors in charge. You sneaked off with Sandy, and I followed when I could. I watched, hating that it made me even more confused. I wanted you more than ever, but in a new way. I wasn’t mad at you — I should have been, but wasn’t. I just wanted to know what made you tick. What made everyone tick. I wanted to know how you could be so cruel to me and so soft with Sandy. It’s probably why I went into psychology. To solve the mystery of my preteen crush.”

  He lets go of my arm. I’m sitting here naked, a storm of conflicted emotion stirring inside me.

  Daniel reaches out, takes me by the leg instead of the arm, and draws his finger along a subtle, barely there scar on my right shin.

  “When you slipped that day, I remember how you bled just like anyone else. I remember how you cried like a thirteen-year-old girl. Two of the adults crouched down and held you up under your arms then helped you walk back after you’d calmed down, after they’d cleaned you up. Once you were gone, a kid in my cabin named Chuck laughed hard and made a smartass comment to the group about how the Iron Bitch finally got what was coming to her. I don’t know why, but I jumped on him. And somehow — I don’t even know how, given how I was — I broke his nose.”

  This last part stops me.

  “Why?” I finally say.

  “I hated you so much. Even as you kept turning me on and I kept trying to see you naked off somewhere with your boyfriend, I hated you. It’s why I never really lost track of you. If I understand myself as much as I try to understand others, it’s probably the reason I joined my first gym. And it’s why, once Eros started talking about the twisted, unethical shit that’s underway now, I desperately wanted you involved. So I could show you how much little Gerald had changed. So I could take what you’d never let me have, once I was the one with the power. So I could humiliate you. So I could break you. Our first times, Bridget, were all a grudge. I didn’t want to love you. I wanted to hurt you, make you pay for what you did all those years ago, and prove I was worthy of your attention, even if only by causing you pain.”

  I’m not sure what to say. I want to hate him back. He held a grudge all this time, and he stalked me, pulled me into this with the intention of hate fucking me into a quivering pile and leaving me broken. But somehow I can’t hate him, even though I want to. All I feel is regret. All I feel is terrible.

  “I meant, why did you jump on Chuck and break his nose, if all he was doing was laughing at the Iron Bitch you hated?”

  Daniel looks right into my eyes.

  “Because,” he says, “I’d earned the right to hate you, but Chuck hadn’t. You’ve always been mine and only mine, Bridget, in one way or another.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Daniel

  It’ll rouse suspicion if I let Bridget anywhere near a network connection, and recent realizations have me thinking that some of the beta screen technology we use here might be tied into Halo — meaning the system will account not just for messages sent, but the face of the person sending them. So I handle Bridget’s most pressing errands for her, sending more pacifying emails to Brandon (who almost sounds ready to initiate a police investigation) and Jenny (who reports that Linda is recovering well, though she worries what will happen after Linda returns home to her brutalizing mafioso husband). I send them from Bridget’s account, doing my psychological expert’s best to mimic her tone and personality. As usual, I say nothing. I tell both of them that I, as Bridget, am simply “away on a much-needed break.” Jenny might be buying it, but I sort of doubt that Brandon is. I see why. No matter how much I study Bridget, he’ll always know her better. And she’s not the kind of person to take breaks for her own good. Bridget spent her childhood being selfish as a means of defense, and seems hell-bent on martyrdom now to make up for it.

  Something in Jenny’s recent email prickles my scalp, and I decide on reading it that I shouldn’t tell Bridget. Jenny mentioned that her father is becoming “very seriously interested” in one of his mistresses. I’m sure he’s interested in all sorts of other women, but the way Jenny wrote it, I can’t help but wonder if this interest is different. If it might be a new-wife scenario in the making, thus turning Linda’s situation — as the leftover with too much insider knowledge — into something even more precarious.

  I walk away from the computer feeling watched. And that’s ridiculous because I’m sure I am. But I, unlike Bridget or any of the other girls, am allowed to send emails, even (and sometimes especially) to troubled friends and family. So I’m careful about what I say. I keep every door open and hold back when emailing Brandon, technically not doing my job as well as I should. Instead of working my hardest to convince him Bridget is fine, I imagine him scratching his head at my latest and allow that itching to happen. Bridget’s and my situation isn’t dire like Linda’s, but we may need an out at some point, and a suspicious brother is a handy ace to be holding.

  But too much is happening too fast. I don’t have the outlier brains the girls here do (well, except for Bridget), but I’m great at shooting from the hip. And learning, predicting, thinking things out before they happen. Strategy is one of my talents — and if she didn’t have the advantage gleaned from rote-memorizing thousands of openers and entire games, I could probably even beat Jessica at chess. And so after talking to the board — after seeing Bridget’s head on the next chopping block, knowing my own destiny is now tied to hers and her survival here — I’d come up with something I thought would work.

  But then I saw Bridget.

  I thought of the scenarios that would likely confront her. The ways she’ll need to prove herself.

  And something snapped.

  Now that I’ve shown her the dead room, the game has changed. Now that I’ve reignited the spark that had finally been cooling between us by taking her in that room, my plans have been altered. Now that she knows who I am and why she’s here — and perhaps suspecting why the others are here, by contrast — her behavior will change. You can’t tell the subject they’re being tested. It taints the results.

  Caspian sent Trevor a message. He’ll be here in two weeks. Whether we want him here or not, the cat is now decidedly out of the bag. The girls know he’s involved, and of course he’s somehow found out that they do. Maybe Kylie told him, seeming to contradict her own best interests in facing him, playing a longer game than everyone else — as usual. It doesn’t matter. Now that everyone here knows he’s inking a deal with Eros for a data trade, he’s content to dip his toe in the pool and see the machine chugging along. And possibly try to dip something else, if I know Caspian.

  Two weeks. We’ll have two eliminations before he arrives, meaning only four contestants instead of six. The odds of him zeroing in on Bridget as the anomaly will be that much better, and he already suspects something amiss. And of everyone in the world, I’d wager Caspian is most likely to untangle my careful manipulations to see the truth.

  I push it out of my mind. And vent the strange, charged air between me and Bridget. I didn’t need to tell her any of that. Worse: I knew that telling her was a mistake. That was obvious in the platonic safety of my office. This thing will be over in a handful of weeks, and whether Bridget stays or goes or hates me or loves me, I could have told her then. But now, her new way of approaching me — every glance and expression and affect fed from the cameras right into Halo’s calculations — will make manipulations that much harder to hide. So why did I tell her, other than that in the post-coital moment, I felt that I should?

  I think of how affection makes us drunk.

  I think of how oxytocin bonds our brains and gives us a farce of natural monogamy.

  I think of how the right script, spoken by the right artist,
will manipulate another person into doing something he never thought he’d do.

  And lastly, I think about drugs. I think about how, biochemically, love and addiction are identical. Both make a person stupid. Both take hold of the reins of consciousness and make us do things we know we’ll regret even at the moment we’re doing them.

  I think this as I’m walking down the hallway toward dinner. I think it as I walk down to breakfast the next morning. I think it at lunch, which I eat in my office, suddenly sure I’m a danger to myself. I’m like a psychotic mental patient whose hands are tied in a straitjacket for his own good. I’m a drug addict, and the drug that makes me lose my mind is Bridget Miller.

  I think it all at dinner, when Trevor choses Ivy, Kat, and Roxy for a group date. Except that it’s Bridget, not Kat — a selection I made before the last elimination: Contestant Six — she who ranked lowest according to Halo — would be on this date. But I can’t let myself think about it because I’ll walk down there and take her away if I do. It’s not hard to know what a man is thinking while surrounded by beautiful women, but this is worse. I know exactly what Trevor is thinking, down to the tiniest detail. And worse, I know precisely what he’s trying to do.

  This competition was never meant for twelve contestants. Six was always the goal, and the individualized tests designed to sift through our outliers, with their mental abnormalities, searching for the trillion-dollar needle Alexa has always believed is waiting for us to find.

  The tests start tomorrow, and somehow Bridget must pass, even though I’ve practically been ordered to make sure that she fails.

  What have I got us into?

  CHAPTER TEN

  Bridget

  Ivy is such a conniving little cunt.

  I can’t even respect her. Kylie is beyond horrible, but at least she’s an evil genius, like Lex Luthor or Vlad the Impaler. But Ivy is only a bitch. Transparent and obvious. And what’s worse is that she doesn’t even care if we all see right through her. She’s pretty and sexy with a tiny, compact appeal that my lanky-ass frame will never — thanks to the cruelty of physics — ever be able to pull off. Guys can pick Ivy right off the floor to screw her, and they do; I’ve seen it whether I wanted to or not. She has an olive complexion, brown eyes, and this small smile that manages to be saccharine despite all the things that mouth has done. I think it’s the sweetness that men find most appealing. Each time, they feel like they’re the first to defile something pure. Each time, Ivy’s a virgin.

  Gap-toothed Roxy’s the opposite. Enough that between the two of them here with me on what’s hilariously called a “group date” with Trevor, it’s like someone set this up to test our three extremes against one another. I’m not like either Ivy or Roxy. We could practically be a girl band, our hang-tag identities are so obvious.

  Ivy is the innocent with a wild streak.

  Roxy is the cum dumpster. And that’s cum with a U, because she’s not even reserved enough to consider a dumpster filled with ejaculate as a c-o-m-e situation. I don’t know if I’ll leave this competition before Roxy, but I’ve had visions of how she’ll go when she does. It’ll involve saved jizz, I’m sure. She’s going to present that shit like a trophy, stored and kept in a giant glass jar. Everyone will throw up a little. Then she’ll probably pour it all over herself like a coach getting a Gatorade bath at the end of a big football game, and then they’ll call the police to take her away. Or shoot her.

  And me? I’m the prude.

  We’re at our own table, in a room away from the others. Kylie, Jessica, and Kat are presumably in the normal dining room, and I get a strong feeling they’re not allowed to eat in their rooms to escape each other this time. After Daniel called our time here a “study,” my perception of everything has changed, and now I wonder if the only judgment happening tonight isn’t happening here, with Trevor, figuring out who’s supposedly his best match. I’d wager Daniel and some invisible others are watching my three fellow contestants as much as they’re watching us — just to see what will happen in such an uncomfortable trio. I feel bad for Jessica, but at least she has Kat on her side. Besides, Kylie might be a manipulative fucker, but she’s horny like the rest of them. Stick dicks in her, and she settles down, like calming a horse by gently stroking her mane.

  I’ll find out what happened with the other group later, from Jessica and Kat. Right now, I can only focus on the uncomfortable trio I’ve been shoved into.

  Right now, Trevor’s attention is on me, here in the couch-filled private dining room. This hasn’t escaped Roxy, and it’s not settling well because she’s such an attention whore. She keeps yammering on and on, saying the joke about sucking a golf ball through a garden hose isn’t really a joke — it can be done. She’d be happy to show him — and hey, if he’s interested, there’s no golf ball or hose necessary.

  She touches Trevor’s pants. Not subtly. And still, Trevor’s eyes are on me.

  One by one, we’re separated, and what happens next is like private conferences while the other two wait. Trevor pulls Ivy aside first. Roxy and I watch them talk quietly while I try to avoid Roxy’s stare. I know she hates me; she’s said as much. And still, she’s eyeing me like meat — as if hate, for Roxy, goes hand in hand with pelvic wetness. I swear, everyone here is bisexual.

  Ivy and Trevor talk in barely a whisper, but I’m doing my best to read their lips. Trevor’s gestures are somehow gentle, though Ivy doesn’t look bothered. He’s like a teacher, giving a pep talk to his promising but discouraged student.

  “So do you Kegel?”

  I turn. Roxy must think I didn’t understand because she holds up one fist, loose, and makes squeezing motions as if milking an invisible cow.

  “You know. Jazzercise for your pussy.”

  I ignore her.

  “Figured,” Roxy says. “Listen. I won’t lie. I think you’re a real uptight bitch.”

  “Thanks.”

  “But I’ll still say this to you, as a favor: you keep your hole sloppy, nobody’s going to want to go in there.”

  “Okay.”

  “You just squeeze your pussy like you’re crushing a can. Like this.” And she seems to flex because her face takes on this intense look of concentration. I’m sure for a moment she’s deliberately shitting her pants.

  “Visuals are so helpful,” I say, still trying to watch Trevor and Ivy.

  “I’m pretending I’ve got an orange up my snatch, and I’m trying to squeeze that fucking thing like a brunch buffet,” she says, still clenching.

  “You’re sure you don’t have an orange up there?” I ask.

  “You have to build it up, like any muscle. You know Tony?”

  “No,” I say. Because obviously, of course I fucking do.

  “The other day, I told him to lie down right there in the middle of the goddamned dining room, and to get his dick out and hard. Then I took my pants off and squatted on him and just kind of squeezed, without going up and down. But not flat squeezing. When you get really good, you can squeeze your pussy like an esophagus swallowing.” And this time, she holds up both fists end to end and squeezes a peristaltic wave through one and then the other. “You learn to do that, it’s like you’re stroking him without even moving. And I just squatted there for, like, five minutes and squeezed him up and down, and when he was about to come, I got off and let him fire that shit all over my face. It totally went up my nose.” She says the last part like it’s an achievement. A herculean feat like Robin Hood managing to split one arrow already in the bull’s eye down the middle with the next arrow.

  “Impressive.”

  “Fuck your mother, it’s impressive,” Roxy says, leaning back and recrossing her legs, smiling at me with satisfaction while her tongue plays with the gap between her teeth.

  “I heard about this condition once, where people don’t seem to understand social cues and what’s appropriate to say out loud,” I tell her.

  “Hmm,” Roxy says, not getting it.

  On impulse, I say,
“Do you have a jar of sperm you’ve been saving?”

  “What, you mean here?”

  Trevor appears over us. He’s holding Ivy’s hand, and he raises his arm to thread her between us to sit on one of the couches. It’s a surprisingly gentlemanly gesture to offer a whore.

  Ivy smiles at Trevor until his attention and offered hand turn to Roxy. Once she’s no longer basking in Trevor-glow, Ivy turns a glare in my direction. Roxy eventually takes Trevor’s hand, although I’m momentarily positive she thinks she’s supposed to sit on it. A moment later, our positions are the same but shuffled, with Ivy and I on the couches.

  “I’m going to fuck him later,” Ivy says.

  “Good for you.”

  “He begged me for it.”

  “I’m sure he did.” I’m thinking back to what I just saw. It didn’t look like begging to me.

  “We fucked last night.”

  “That’s aerobic of you.”

  Ivy uncrosses and recrosses her legs. She’s wearing a short little dress, and although I’m not going to look closely enough to be sure, I think she may have Basic Instinct’d me. It might be a come-on, like Roxy’s hungry look earlier. Or it might be that she wants to kill me with an ice pick.

  “You don’t like me very much, do you?”

  “I don’t know you, Ivy.”

  “Hmm. But you don’t have to know me to not like me, right?”

  I look away. This is one of those exchanges you can’t win.

  “I know you didn’t do it,” Ivy says.

  I have to assume she’s referring to the whole Caspian White pseudo-espionage situation. The scandal that almost was, then really wasn’t at all. “Did Kylie tell you that?” I ask.

  “You’re not smart enough to do something like that.”

  I could turn away, but before I came here, I was an edgier Bridget. I’ve stuffed a lot of my personality in a shoebox for my stay in the mansion — a low profile is better than being a bigger target than I already am. But fuck this. I have more scars than the one on my leg from rock climbing. Growing up, I learned the best way to protect myself was to get good at drawing first blood. At being crazier than those who tried messing with me.