by Kayti McGee
I’m losing the sharper edges of reality, I can only hold this breath for seconds longer. When I pass out, he’ll let go.
Unequal proportions of opposite colors, mixed together, become broken tones. If I am submissive to him, I will lose myself in it.
I will not want this.
Someone should tell my body that. It’s betraying me with its responses, and the low chuckle that elicits shows me he knows.
If I surrender to this, I’m surrendering my life.
It sounds melodramatic and maybe it is, but the fact remains that I can’t get my hands on Rhapsody if I’m tied up in his bathroom. And if I show him how good it feels, he’ll want to show me more and I’ll let him because giving in is so easy.
If I fail in the assignment, God knows what happens to me. Michael doesn’t have a reputation for being forgiving, despite the fact that I’ve never failed before. It isn’t an option. I will fight this.
I will not come for him. He asks me one more time.
I come for him, a tidal wave that never ends, water displaced all over the floor by my movement.
I keep my eyes closed and my body pliant as he unlocks my handcuffs and carries me back to his bed. His now-familiar scent of tobacco and clove envelopes me as closely as the sheets. I made a mess for him, though, and he has to clean it up.
The second I hear his footsteps retreating back around the partition to towel up the water that cascaded from the tub, I toss off the covers.
I’m done freezing. Freezing is submitting.
I’ll leave the heels, I’ll leave the dress, my clutch is by the door already. Naked or not, I’m out of here. And if I grab a few of these candles to set on the stairs behind me, there’s a good chance he’ll break his neck before I can find Rhapsody and a place to hide while I call a car and figure out how much you need to tip for them to drive you home nude without expecting favors.
The closer I get to the door, the more my body reacts. The hairs on my neck stand on end, as though there was a storm in the air. My arms are covered in gooseflesh.
I’m moving away from Hank, but my nervous system is behaving as though I’m walking towards him.
I open the door, and the taste of danger floods my mouth. Waiting for me on the other side, the last person I want to see before I figure out a way to salvage this fucking assignment. My boss.
Chapter 7
“Michael?”
“Fancy seeing you here,” he says, in a tone that makes it very clear I am exactly who he expected to see here.
“What are you doing here?” My mind is spinning. I haven’t failed to complete the job—yet. And he wasn’t being quiet, so he is obviously expected. What kind of setup was this?
“I’m afraid that although your price was exorbitant, Mr. Jaydee was able to meet it.” My price?
“I’m not a canvas. I’m not for sale.”
“Of course not. Of course not.” He pauses. “Of course, I know everywhere you’ve been. I know everything you’ve done. I can dress you up exactly the way you looked each time you stole and present you to the people you took things from. How well do you think men like that will take coming face to face with the woman who took their toys away? What do you suppose they’d do to you then? Jail would be the kindest option, really. So it seems to me that you are for sale. Either I am the arbitrator of your freedom, or he is.”
“But… why?” I’ve been perfect. Professional. I’ve made him so much money.
“There’s nowhere left for you to go in this town where you haven’t burned a bridge.”
“I only do a few jobs a year. There are plenty of doors still open to me. I’m good at this job. It’s maybe the only thing I’m good at.”
“Just think of this as a changing of the guard, of sorts. Isn’t it time?”
“Fuck you. My time belongs to me.”
“Actually, my little thief, I believe that belongs to me as well.” I hadn’t heard him walk up behind me, but now Hank’s hand slips around my wrist as immovable as the cuffs he’d used earlier.
This time I won’t submit. This time I will kill that motherfucker Michael.
I am a contract employee. I am not an object. I am not a slave.
I am also powerless, as my wild kicks and punches connect with nothing before I’m pinned against a wall with Hank’s hand at my throat. I could kick him in the balls and take my chances with Michael. I could spit in his face and try to make him mad enough to lose control.
But I don’t. Like he knew I wouldn’t. Because he can read my body, and it makes my choices more readily than my brain. At the insistent pressure at the base of my neck, I freeze, still panting.
And then he winks.
It’s fine. I’ll stab him later. He deserves it. Then I can do… oh, I can do all sorts of things to Michael. From the outside, I imagine I look quite docile, but its only because I’m allowing my imagination free reign to do the most painful things possible to my former boss.
I’m so glad my ex introduced me to Game of Thrones.
Even if I am a submissive at heart, I am certain I will derive all kinds of pleasure from inflicting pain on the man who just sold me like a fucking Renoir.
“I assume my payment has cleared your accounts?” Hank asks Michael, who’s still grinning cheerily over my failed outburst. He nods. “Then its been a pleasure.” The dismissal is evident.
I’m so pissed off. Before I thought I understood what frustration felt like— when a client dragged his feet on a payment, or a mark thought they might rather remain faithful to their wife. That was nothing compared to this impotence.
Hot tears spring into my eyes, which makes me even more mad. I don’t want to cry. I want to scream, I want to hurt people, I want to burn this whole city to the ground where it belongs.
“So what are you going to do with me now? I’m all yours.” I lace my voice with enough sarcasm to chasten a lesser man.
He doesn’t answer, and it pisses me off even more.
“Go ahead. Hurt me. I don’t care. I can take it.” Maybe if he hurts me badly enough, I can forget that I am now a prisoner. I can forget who I am altogether. I can go numb.
“It isn’t about pain,” he says finally.
“Sure it is. You keep on inflicting it. It must get you off.”
“No.” Said so simply and assuredly, I can almost believe him. Yet I’m still pinned to the wall, his hand wrapped around my trachea, which kind of defeats his argument.
“Then why do it? You’re just a regular sadist, not a sexual one?”
“It’s for you.”
“Yeah, yeah, you can read my body. I know. But you own me now. Who buys a person? Which, by the way, does not include my assets. I worked really hard to restore my building and you can’t have it for some fucking bondage art thing, or whatever it is that you people do. You might be able to have my body whenever you want, you might even be able to make it respond to you, but know this—it’s mechanical. It’s no reflection of what’s happening inside me. I will never, ever enjoy belonging to you.”
At last, he registers that I’m daring him. He’s pulling me from the wall and tossing me over his shoulder before I even realize the pressure’s off my neck.
Back on his bed where he deposits me, I kneel and wait while he rummages around.
“So do you believe that life should be enjoyed?” he asks me, opening and closing another drawer in the bureau.
“No.” I don’t even have to think about it. “It’s to be endured. But there’s enough pain to go around without romanticizing it in kink.”
He finds what he’s looking for, a length of rope, and I don’t even bother to hide my eye-roll. After all, he can’t really punish me for it now that he’s made the claim that this isn’t about hurting me.
“Have you ever known anyone who self-harms?” He kisses the bracelet of black and blue hematoma on my wrist tenderly before wrapping and knotting the rope around it. It throbs, but not as badly as I would have expected.
“My college roommate used to pull her own hair out. It freaked me out to watch, but I couldn’t stop. When she was really stressing hard, she’d even get down to her eyelashes. This rope isn’t scratchy at all.”
“It’s more like webbing than rope. I want the pressure, not the discomfort. Why did she do that?” He holds me carefully as he leans me all the way back, so that my lower legs are still beneath me but my back is now on the bed as well, then he begins to knot my wrist to my ankle.
“Some kind of OCD mixed with a desire to externalize her stress?” There’s very little as tiresome as someone trying to rationalize themselves through psychology, but I can play.
“Imagine all of the things you’ve experienced with me in that light.”
“My stress belongs more to the fact that you are currently knotting your way up my leg as though trussing a turkey and immobilizing me. To free me from my stress, perhaps you’d like to stop doing that?”
He chuckles, and keeps twisting, knotting, twisting. Beside the fact that it is gradually restricting my movement like a python, it doesn’t feel bad.
“Do you work best under pressure?” He changes tack.
“No. Don’t most people hate it?”
“Not everyone. But you really dislike the rush of having your neck on the line.”
“Yes.” The rope, having reached my stomach, is beginning to cross up to my breasts, then down again.
“You don’t want your neck on the block. The feeling of the boot on your neck. Of having your boss breathing down your—”
“You know a lot of idioms, what’s the—oh.” The choking. He lets me sit with that one for a moment. Lie with that one might be more accurate, as he knots down my other leg and finishes off by tying that wrist in.
I say I don’t like pressure, but I actually got off on it, literally, when Hank put it on me.
“Sometimes kink is about externalizing the things you fear, and discovering you desired them all along.”
A second rope is knotted between my breasts and looped through a ring I hadn’t noticed on his ceiling. A few tugs leaves me nearly suspended, back curved, face to God.
And then he leaves, closing the door behind him.
Chapter 8
At first, I’m pissed all over again.
Always with him, its thinking he knows best. I might have daddy issues, but that doesn’t mean I want to be told what to do or how I feel.
Each individual knot has created a web of sensation that I can begin to unravel by focusing on one at a time, but I can’t hold them all in my mind and they become indistinguishable again.
Sirens in the distance get closer and louder along with my thoughts before finally shutting off just in time for me to wonder:
Did I want this all along?
Was giving up my power actually some sort of tacit acknowledgement of it? Surely not. Power comes from money. From control.
I’ve known that for as long as I’ve lived in Los Angeles, and I was born here.
But even Van Gogh, the king of my heart, painted holiness into peasantry, into the drudge. The Sower depicts a farmer with the setting sun as his halo. He’s found divine meaning in back-breaking labor. If this isn’t sacred, then neither is that.
I spend a long time pondering that and trying to soothe the crick in my neck.
If there is no labor, there are no fruits.
Are people who get into this kind of life more well-adjusted than the rest of us as a result?
If the starry-eyed angels of LA didn’t experience the hells of capitalism and overpopulation and high rent and obsession and the motherfucking 101, could they possibly enjoy the heaven of possibility in this city?
This is why religion works.
He was right. It isn’t about pain, it never was. It’s about acceptance. It’s about getting off on fear and finding the want underneath. There were never three cities. There was always only one, pulsing with unfulfilled desire.
Like me right now.
I can’t move and I don’t have to. When Hank reappears, he’ll know exactly what I need. I surrender to the feelings, to the pain and pleasure, to the space-out-of-time eternity inherent in submission.
When he finally re-enters the room, I’m so ready for him all he has to do is look at me and I’ll explode. Mercifully, he takes the edge off with his tongue, and it only takes a moment before my first orgasm washes over me. I don’t even need to hold my breath to bring it on.
The bonds are enough for me to let go.
Then he’s kneeling upright in front of me, guiding my thighs onto his so that he can fuck me even while I’m still encased in rope and hanging from his ceiling. His eyes are on mine and his fingers work my nipples, my clit, bringing me to the edge again even this soon.
“I remember the first time I saw you. You couldn’t have been more than twenty-one. So young, angel. Your hair was red that night and so was your dress, and you went home with the biggest asshole in the room. I thought maybe I’d gotten the wrong impression of you, maybe you were a ladder climber, but then I heard a whisper about his Gauguin no longer being on display and I laughed out loud because I knew it was you.”
I remembered that night, my first real job. Michael had been reluctant to take the chance on me, preferring to use hackers to disarm alarms and men with tasers to do the dirty work. My way was better, and after that it was just me and him. And so much money.
One more hard thrust and the insistent movement of Hank’s thumb on me and I’m soaring again, higher than I ever did after a big score, shuddering through another gasping climax.
It takes a minute before I remember he was talking.
“I was always so careful about changing my appearance. Even Michael didn’t recognize me sometimes.”
“He’s not an artist. But you are. And watching you work was a performance I deeply enjoyed.” His words are punctuated by sharp breaths, and watching him get close starts yet another tightening in my core.
“When I heard that Michael was recruiting your replacement, it was time. You were going to be broken when he pushed you out. I wanted to teach you how to fly.”
His body stiffens in anticipation. Inside me, I can feel him thicken and as he growls out my name, he comes, and so do I. At long last, I think I’m sated.
Finally, then, he releases the rope and lowers to me to the bed, where the unraveling process is blessedly shorter than the knotting was. He massages the blood back into my extremities, pausing whenever I wince at the pins and needles it entails.
“I can’t tell if that’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me, or the creepiest.” His dimples reappear.
“What, no other man’s ever hired you to steal from them before buying you?”
“I can honestly say you’re my first.” The feeling’s come back into all ten toes, and I sigh contentedly. “I don’t know what to do now. I don’t need money, but I hate being bored.”
“Hate it, or want it?” I use one of my newly freed arms to hit him for that one.
Then I groan. He’s fucking right. If I don’t spend some long, boring hours examining what I want to do with the rest of my life, I’ll just turn into a lush or end up running forever, trying to avoid being alone with my thoughts. The problem I keep returning to is that I simply adore the life I had before this weekend. I like stealing. I like fucking with people who make a living out of fucking over other people. And as Hank pointed out, I even secretly like the threat of failure, of being caught, of worse.
He didn’t just know my body, he knows my heart. Hank could be my father. Right now he’s maybe more of a priest.
He’s given me the keys to the world, the city be damned. And we all probably are. One of his dress shirts appears, and I put it on gratefully. The thought of shimmying back into my gala dress right now is too exhausting. He looks out the window while I belt it into a dress that will keep me from looking too walk-of-shame in the early dawn.
“I have one more gift for you, if you want it.” I do. I’m
greedy. I accept the small object he gives me. A phone? He nods to the window and I look out.
“Is that… holy shit. Holy fucking shit.”
Lying in the street far below, surrounded by various law enforcement officers and a surprisingly small pool of blood, is Michael’s body. This is his phone I’m holding. I don’t feel much about it. Maybe I will later. Maybe if someone beats it out of me. Right now, I just feel something like relief.
“Did you…?” He was gone for a while. And his eyes, though they’ve thawed toward me, still speak to the kind of cold blood that could kill a man.
“I didn’t have to. When you are indiscriminate about who you accept money from, you’re bound to upset the kind of people who do it easily. Although I’m not exactly innocent. When I knew he’d be here, I may have been a bit indiscreet with the exact time.”
I could kiss him, and so I do.
When our lips meet and part, when our mouths and tongues and breaths become one, when I feel that I might die without more, then and only then do I finally understand art.
Because only this feeling is worth starving for, worth stealing for, worth cutting off an ear for.
And in a thousand lifetimes, no one can ever capture it in oil.
He unlocks the front door, and waits, but I’m not going anywhere. I finally know what I want.
I want to stay with him.
Then I want to call every contact in Michael’s phone and tell them who they can submit to now. I’m not just a thief.
I’m the queen of the underworld.
