"Let me take care of you." It wasn't a question and she didn't refuse. She knew the house better than I did and led me to the guest bath, stocked with condoms, dental dams, morning after pills, laxatives, various deep heating rubs that obviously weren't there to soothe tired muscles. There were analgesic pills and analgesic creams, disinfectant wipes, bandages of all sizes and shapes, and a treasure trove of toys still in their wraps.
This was becoming a weirdly new normal. Though the caretaking with Marilyn had been because of an accidental injury, this girl I'd meant to hurt. But aftercare is supposed to be a part of it.
I wondered about my new companions, whether their kink went 24/7 or was hauled out for events. I wondered if they were Doms or Masters, or if any of them matched me for sexual savagery. I was a sadist first and foremost.
But I cleaned her nipples carefully, wearing gloves as I did so. "Are you bleeding anywhere else?" There was only one other place she would be.
"Do you wish to check?" she asked. She met my stare.
That was disconcerting. "If I check, it will mean a second time."
She continued to hold my gaze.
"Bend over the sink," I told her, reaching for another condom. Fifteen minutes later we’d learned she wasn't bleeding. I led her into a shadowy guest room and made her lay face down on the bed. Whatever she was expecting, it wasn't to have warm oil poured on her back and her shoulders and back massaged gently.
Until she fell asleep, a fleece throw pulled up to her chin, both hands fisted in it, keeping it over her. There was a smile on her face and one on mine that surprised me. I leaned down and kissed the top of her head, then turned the light off and left the room.
In the dining room the activity was drifting away. Leo Stark and John Fleet were smoking cigars and drinking bourbon.
"St. Martin," Fleet hailed me. "Have a seat. Have a smoke. Let's do some business."
The air was blue and hazy with good tobacco. I sat down, went through the ritual, lit up and puffed, poured two fingers of top of the line bourbon and sat back.
"Tell me about the day spa idea," I said.
It was the best I'd felt in weeks. I wasn't certain if it was talking business, drinking bourbon, a fine meal, a couple good fucks, hurting the girl and then comforting her –
Or having not thought about Annie for something like two hours straight.
7
Annie
By the second week of September I had the routine down. I could find my way between classes, and I'd read the text books cover to cover, making paragraph notes in the virtual margins to later study. Not because I was a great student but because if I left ponderous tomes to be read later, later would never arrive.
My best class was Constitutional Law with Stan Barnhill. He was a used-car-salesman-looking man of indeterminate late middle age, fat the way older men get and kind, curious about everything and fascinated with the mob. Anything mob got his attention. I got in the habit of carrying a paperback to class with me to read before it started. I was about the same age as most of the students, but it didn't feel like I had anything in common with them. Since I'd tested out of basic classes, I didn't have a background with them. They were nice enough, but it was like sitting through endless in-jokes.
Barnhill would come in every day and nudge the book I was reading upward until he could read the cover. When I started reading John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series, he was excited and spent five minutes talking to me about it before he started class.
He was never as enthusiastic about the Jenny Crusie romances.
My other classes were corrections, all about the prison system, by a man older than God, it seemed, who gave interesting assignments in the real world like walking through the local prison. Interesting if it hadn't been your career for several years already.
The third CJ class was Procedure, taught by a local judge who wore immaculate suits and told funny stories about cases that had happened in Clark County. The following semester I'd have Principles of Investigation from the department chair, and a different constitutional law class from one of the retired heads of the GOP.
It was new, it was exciting, and it was just enough to keep my lusty thoughts at bay during the day. I could forget about St. Martin and his anger issues and my "training" and the fet and my father and Mark and everything else for entire minutes at a time.
Since evenings were long and there was only so long I could loiter in the gym before my muscles turned to suet, I joined the law club. Most of the students in it were headed more toward paralegal careers or on to law schools, but there were enough of us law enforcement types to make for some interesting conversations.
We'd meet at the Student Union's on-campus Starbucks and drink coffee and talk until our throats were raw. We raised money to have the district attorney come talk to us as September started to wane. We studied together and exchanged stories if we were already working in the field.
That was questionable from a common sense angle. What sounds harmless is sometimes information best left unshared. I talked very briefly about Seattle PD, and it probably didn't matter. I didn't talk about being undercover or what had led me to Las Vegas. Most people assumed the story went as far as I told it: I wanted to apply for the DEA while I looked young enough to get away with undercover in colleges if not high schools.
Two guys assured me I could pull off high school.
Two girls hmm'd and haw'd and pretended I needed night cream and eye cream and – dissolved into giggles.
Maybe I didn't have that many female friends ever because I found them confusing and inexplicable. But I liked Jenna and Julie and the guys in the club, and it was nice to be part of something, especially since they didn't probe deeply. They were on a trajectory from high school to college to law enforcement or law school or paralegal studies. They knew I was heading to the DEA. It was obvious I was in the program so I didn't have to hide that, and I was hell and gone from Seattle – it seemed okay to say I'd been a cop. It was also nice that saying so didn't seem so overwhelmingly Wow! that there were a lot of questions.
The whole thing suited me.
Then James asked me out.
8
Annie
I couldn't stop pacing. Two hours until my date and everything I owned was spread across my apartment as if my closet had blown up. There were shoes, skirts, shirts, dresses, things I couldn't remember buying but must have worn in my real life. Because I seemed to recognize everything I'd worn when I was with Jesse and the Brotherhood did that make me a bad fiancée? That I remembered times with a man who sold drugs and had once dislocated my jaw?
But I already knew I was a bad fiancée. And now I wasn't any sort of fiancée and that was okay.
I considered calling one of the girls in my classes but I didn't want anyone to know I was dating someone from our program. Partly because it might not work out. Partly I suppose because I thought he had more at stake than I did. I could do school without people around, I just enjoyed having company for a change.
In the end I called my sister Emily. Maybe Emily because I kind of got along with her sometimes. None of my three sisters were anything like me. I was the outlier in polite speak, and the family black sheep in reality.