“Do you…uh. Do you like girls?”
Jacob was silent.
My mouth went dry. I had no idea how to have this conversation. It looked so easy on television. But then, the women on television weren’t bioengineered to be toxic to the touch. “I mean, do you like girls in a sexual way, not ‘do you like girls as friends.’ You’ve always been nice to me, so I know you like girls as—”
“Okay, Bea, stop,” he said firmly. “Yes. I like girls in a sexual way. If you’re asking whether I’d ever do anything inappropriate to you, the answer is no. If I’ve done something to make you feel uncomfortable, or if you need to ask for a new driver, I’m so sorry. That was never my intention.”
My cheeks burned red. I forced myself to steal a glance at him. His jaw was set in a hard line, his hands clenching the wheel. He didn’t look angry, not exactly, but he looked cold. That, more than anything else, convinced me that I couldn’t back down and try this again later. If I left the conversation where it was, someone else would pick me up on Monday morning, and I’d never see Jacob again.
“You didn’t do anything,” I said. My voice was shaking. “I asked because I think that I…I like you. In a sexual sense. And I was wondering if you might…like me too.”
Jacob hit the brakes.
Only for a moment, and only long enough to make the car jerk around us, my seatbelt digging suddenly tight into my shoulder. Then he hit the gas again, and we resumed rolling forward.
“Bea, I don’t want you to take this as me saying that you’re not an attractive woman—you’re beautiful, please, believe that, even if you don’t believe anything else I say—but I’d die if I laid a hand on you, and you know it.”
“Not necessarily.” It was hard to pitch my voice above a whisper. I reached into my purse and pulled out the bag of orange blossoms. “We’ve been working on finding ways to turn off my skin for a little while. To make it safe for me to…touch people. To even be with people, if I wanted to do that.”
His expression went grim. “You’re getting ready for an assignment, aren’t you?”
I couldn’t speak. I could only nod.
Jacob punched the steering wheel. It was a fast motion, so abrupt that I squeaked and jumped a little in my seat. He didn’t seem to notice.
“Goddamn her,” he snarled. “I knew it was going to come to this. One little step at a time, and she’ll have you doing damn near anything to take down a mark, just to make her approve of you. Are you asking me because she told you to? Because you need to know if it’s safe before she puts you in the field?”
“No!” I squeaked, appalled. “I mean…no. Yes, she wants me to be able to take more time with this one, but she’s not making me do anything. She hasn’t ordered me to…to sleep with him. I don’t even know if he’s going to want to see me more than once. But I do know that I have a way to touch people now, and I want to touch people. I want to touch you. I don’t want the first time someone puts their arms around me to be an assignment. I want it to be because they know me, and they like me enough to do that.”
Jacob was quiet for a while, eyes on the road. Finally, he asked, “How safe are those flowers of yours?”
“I’ll need to sit with them in my hands for about an hour, and then take a quick bath to make sure I got all the oils off myself. But after that…I’ll be as safe to touch as any other girl.”
“You’ll never be like any other girl,” he said softly.
“Does that mean you will? Or does that mean you won’t?”
Jacob laughed unsteadily. “This isn’t exactly normal, Bea. You don’t know me. You don’t know anything about me. Maybe you wouldn’t like me if you did.”
“I’m not asking you to marry me, or to be my boyfriend, or to love me. I’m just asking you if you can stay with me for a little while. If you can like me enough to do that.”
Again, Jacob was quiet. When he spoke, his voice was low and rough. “Is your house safe for me? I know you’ve touched everything there.”
That was something I hadn’t considered. “Maybe not,” I admitted.
“All right, then. I’m going to drop you off, just like I do every day. I’m going to give you an hour and a half, for those flowers of yours to work. And then I’m going to come back. If you’re waiting outside when I get there, we’ll go to a motel. Just you and me and a place that’s never been too dangerous to touch. We’ll…do whatever we’ll do, and I’ll take you home when we’re finished. If you’re not outside when I get there, if you’ve changed your mind and decided this is all too much for you, well, that’s just fine. We’ll still be friends. I’ll pick you up on Monday, and I’ll never say a word about what almost happened to anyone. Not even to you. Does that sound fair?”
“More than fair,” I said, suddenly shy, looking at the curve of his jaw and wondering what it would be like to run my fingers along it with no gloves in the way. Would the little hairs that grew above his beard be stiff or soft? Would I be able to feel him breathing? There were so many wonderful things to learn, and I was eager for each and every one of them.
Jacob gave me an inscrutable look as he dropped me off. I watched him drive away. Then I rushed inside, barely waiting for the door to close behind me before I started to strip. My clothes were tainted with the poisons from my sweat: I needed clean ones. I needed a shower. And most of all, I needed to fill my hands with flowers, and make myself an ordinary girl.
Naked, I sat in my bed of potting soil and held the orange blossoms close, wishing I could feel the chemical producing cells in my skin as they turned from one thing to another. The scent of oranges began to rise from my body, light and fragrant. I stayed where I was. This was for Jacob. This was for an ordinary night. I wasn’t cutting any corners or taking any chances. Not with Jacob’s life.
He was right: I didn’t know him as anything other than my driver. I didn’t know about his life, his hobbies, what he liked to do with his time when he wasn’t babysitting for the toxic girl. But I didn’t need to know any of those things to know that I wanted to feel his arms around me, his lips on mine. Maybe it was selfish of me not to care. I just knew that if I was going to touch someone, I wanted to choose them for myself, and not because some company dossier said that they were my next target.
The alarm on the greenhouse shelf rang. I dropped the flowers into my lap and reached for an assay strip. My hands were shaking. I braced them against my knee and watched the paper fail to change colors, holding it until there could be no question that I was safe. For once in my life, I was safe.
Jacob wouldn’t be, though, unless I took some additional precautions. I dropped the orange blossoms and made my way back into the house. The shower had been the first thing I’d improved, with my very first bonus check from Limbus. The water pressure was good enough to rinse anything away. After I had scrubbed myself five times, I was sure that my skin contained no lingering traces of anything deadly, I left the bathroom for my bedroom, and my closet.
New clothes always arrived wrapped in plastic. I kept them that way until the first time I wore them, enjoying the idea that for a little while, something in my house was truly clean. I picked out a dress I’d ordered the last time I’d felt the need to indulge in a little retail therapy, careful not to let it brush against anything else as I pulled it over my head. I would have gone out to meet him naked if I could have. It seemed like the only way to be genuinely safe. Since that wasn’t an option, I just had to be as meticulous as I possibly could. I was doing this for him. I was doing this for me.
I was doing this for the chance that once—just once in my life—I could be the ordinary one. For that, I would have done virtually anything.
Jacob pulled up in front of the house exactly ninety minutes after he had dropped me off. I was standing on the sidewalk, barefoot in my new dress, waiting for him. He didn’t get out of the car. The window on my side rolled down, and he asked, “You sure?”
“I’m sure,” I said, and got in.
We di
dn’t talk during the drive. I pleated my skirt in my hands and stared at my bare knees, not allowing myself to look at him. He kept his eyes on the road. All too soon and not soon enough, we were pulling up in front of a hotel. It wasn’t as nice as the one where I’d gone to meet with Mr. Winslow, and that made me happier than I could say. I didn’t want any ghosts here. Just Jacob, and me, and a night where everything was normal.
A man in a red and white uniform opened my car door for me, and he didn’t say anything about my bare feet. Jacob was there when I finished standing. He didn’t say anything either. He just offered me his hand.
Blood singing in my veins, I took it, and we walked together into the hotel lobby. We didn’t stop at the desk, just proceeded directly to the elevators. I’d never stayed in a hotel before, but I watched enough television to know that this wasn’t the norm. I shot Jacob a confused look. He grinned, proud and abashed and a little shy all at the same time.
“I was hoping you’d be outside,” he said. “I already checked us in.”
The whole reason we were here was so I could fulfill my dream of kissing this man. I nearly did it right then and there.
The elevator carried us up several floors to a bland, inoffensively decorated hallway ringed with identical doors. Jacob led me to the one that belonged, however temporarily, to us, and unlocked the door with a swipe of the card key, revealing a paradox of a room, perfectly ordinary, smaller than my bedroom at home, but decadent beyond words at the same time. No one had ever poisoned these sheets. No toxic blooms lurked in this carpet. I was standing in a place that had never been tainted by anything. Only life walked here. Death had no place within these walls.
The door swung shut behind us. I jumped a little before I turned to Jacob, suddenly shy, suddenly terrified, absolutely hopeful. They weren’t contradictory states. This was something I had never thought I could have, and now that it was within my reach, I had no idea what to do.
“You’ll have to show me,” I said. “I trust you.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t,” he said, and his voice was thick and rough with longing and with something that resembled my desperation.
“Too late,” I said. I reached behind myself, undoing the zipper of my dress. It fell to puddle at my feet. Jacob made a small groaning noise. I hadn’t wanted to risk tainted underthings, and so I hadn’t worn anything at all.
He was still fully clothed when I went to him.
He wasn’t clothed for very long.
What we did was…complicated, and messy, and sometimes painful, and the most amazing thing in the world. At times, I thought I was more than halfway in love with him, so consumed by need and lust and longing and connection that I would have walked off the edge of the world if he’d asked me to. Then he would pull away, ever so slightly, following the instinctive steps of a dance that had been going on since the dawn of time, and hatred would surge to wipe away the love. Hatred for my parents, who had done this to me; hatred for Ms. Ng, who had never considered that this might be something I would want. Hatred for my own body. It was already betraying me anew, already forgetting about the safe sweetness of oranges, which were unfamiliar, in favor of the toxins I made all on my own.
We only had a few hours. Both of us knew that. But oh, we made those few hours count. We held each other tight and we left our marks across every inch of one another’s skin. Every time he touched me Jacob would get a wondering expression on his face, like he was privileged beyond measure. He didn’t say anything about the small scars on my arms and the inside of my thighs, where deeper samples had been taken over the years, testing the toxicity of deep muscle and bone marrow. I didn’t say anything about his prosthetic foot, not even when he removed it, letting it fall to the floor, and curled his legs around mine, the nub of his ankle digging into my calf like a secret embrace. We were together. We defined the world. We were everything that mattered, and everything that mattered was in us.
When we were done, when I was bruised and aching and Jacob was spent, we rolled away from each other. For a moment we just lay there, side by side, covered in one another’s sweat, existing in the warm afterglow of something that had always seemed impossible to me.
Finally, Jacob said, “Normally, I’d ask if you wanted to stay the night. Of course, normally, we’d be at my apartment, not in a hotel.”
“Nothing about this is normal.” I rolled over and kissed his cheek. Even that small connection was enough to send thrills racing down my spine. “It’s all right. I knew this was only a short-term thing. You can take me home.”
“Okay.” He looked at me, raising a hand to cup my cheek. “Thank you for trusting me this much.”
“Thank you for being there to trust,” I said.
He kissed me one more time that night, on the sidewalk in front of my house, with the wind tying knots in my already tangled hair. Then he drove away, and I went inside, and shut the door behind me.
*
Jonathan Disher was handsome, in the way of men who could afford to stay handsome long past the point when age should have caught up with them; money really could buy anything, if you knew where to shop. He was charming, in the way of someone who didn’t really know what the word “no” was supposed to sound like; it could sound for other people, of course, but not for him. Never for him. And according to the carefully doctored profile Ms. Ng had designed for me, he was my perfect man.
He certainly seemed to think of me as the perfect woman. His eyes crawled along every inch of my body before he even took my hand, and when his fingers touched mine, it was as perfunctory as a business agreement, like he was merely reclaiming something that had been his all along.
We went on six dates. I carried baggies of orange blossoms in my purse and took assay strips with me to the bathroom, monitoring my body’s toxicity with religious care. We never went past second base, never reached the level of connection I had known with Jacob, but his skin touched mine constantly, until it felt like he had touched me more, through sheer aggregation, than anyone else ever had, or ever could. Jonathan ran his fingers through my hair or wrapped them around the back of my neck, casually possessive, never letting go. And it felt almost…normal. I didn’t care for him the way I did Jacob, but I didn’t want him dead, either. He was a nice, ordinary man. I could have gone on like that forever.
On the afternoon of the seventh date, only half my usual allotment of flowers was delivered to the house. I looked at them numbly, recognizing my instruction for what it was. He was taking me dancing that night, at a nightclub built into the body of a decommissioned cruise ship. He’d been talking about it all week, building it up to this great romance. As I buried my hands in the blossoms, I wondered whether he’d ever stopped to consider that sometimes a great romance came at the end of the story, and not at the beginning.
We were dancing when he died, his heart giving out in his chest. He had time to look at me, surprised and wounded, like a little boy. Then he fell, and gravity took his hands away from me, pulling them with him down to the deck. He was still staring when he hit the wood. Other bodies quickly blocked his from view, as people shoved between us, anxious to help. I kept my hands pressed against my mouth, breathing my own poison, not hurting anyone else. When the tide of humanity slowed I turned and ran for the exit, leaving the body of a man who might have been a lover—leaving the fairytale of love—behind.
Jacob was waiting for me at the end of the dock, darling, dependable Jacob, with a plastic rain poncho I could wrap around myself to keep my skin concealed. He drove me home. He asked if I needed anything, eggs or coffee or company. I refused all three, and he left me there, driving off into the night. I thought he was as lost as I was. I didn’t know the words to bridge the gap.
My first killing in the name of Limbus, Inc. had been an initiation, a step which, once taken, could not be taken back. My second had been a leap, and I was still falling. The assignments came faster after that. Some of them were quick, simple things: mimic a poison and touch their h
and in a crowd, or brush a thumb across the back of an arm while I walked past. Others were more elaborate, taking longer, stretching over multiple meetings. None of them lasted as long as my time with Jonathan. That had been, it seemed, an aberration.
I killed seven men in the name of Limbus, Inc., not counting Winslow and Disher: they were my bellwethers, but the seven who followed them were the meat of my killer’s career. Seven coffins filled, seven funerals held, and I fell asleep with my hands filled with orange blossoms, dreaming of Jacob’s hands holding my wrist, dreaming of the day I could be free.
If Limbus did anything cruel to me, it was that. Once they tempted me with a real life, a life lived on my own terms, I could no more let go of the idea than I could learn to fly. So I killed for them, whenever they asked me, and I curled in my potting soil and wondered whether there was some magical tipping point past which my blood would turn as pure and harmless as anybody else’s.
I was sitting at the kitchen table, trying to convince myself to eat breakfast before I left for work, when someone knocked on my front door. I stood. Once, that sound would have been enough to send me into a panic, certain that my father’s lawyers were here to threaten me with another round of fines or another round of tests. Now, emboldened by my experience with the world and by the Limbus money that swelled my bank accounts, I walked calmly to the door, and opened it, revealing the man in the plain black suit who had come to me so many months ago. The policemen weren’t with him this time. His hands were empty.
I frowned.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. It was a relief when my voice didn’t shake. I sounded confident, secure, and adult, like I had every right in the world to ask this man what he was doing on my property. “I paid all my debts. You have no claim on me or on this house.”
Limbus, Inc., Book III Page 7
