Page 30 of His Pet
“We had a few investments together. But he bought me out.” Beyond giving information to Zaid, my interest in Eric had been to keep an eye on him. He had been one of my projects; was he pure evil, or did he have weak spots too, moments when he wavered? The only way to find out was to keep him close. To prove that I was capable of violence, like he was. To hurt Lisa, to scar her. Until that had gotten out of hand too.
We stared at each other for a moment, both of us willing the other to say something. It was my turn to ask a question. “What’s with the bag?”
“The book bag?”
“The bag in the locker.”
“Oh,” she said. “It’s not really a fun or sexy story.” She blushed. “I’ll tell you about it some other time.”
I would let it go, for now. Needing a change of scenery, I ushered Mara and led her to an upstairs walkway around the edges of the dungeon. The metal grating creaked beneath us, offering a bird’s eye view, what the Afterglow members liked to call the Voyeurist Balcony. A few strong men were up there, no doubt Zaid’s old crew. I nodded to one of the men, and he returned the gesture, then crossed his arm and watched below. They were the only types of people who came up here regularly.
“Are they security guards?” Mara asked. I nodded. That was a simple way of putting it. “Is that your security specialist friend, then?”
“Zaid couldn’t make it.”
We leaned against the railing. Different couples delivered beatings, some gave commands, and others obeyed. Mara’s eyes lingered over a woman on all fours, being led by a leash. Mara was struck, fixated on them, how the man pulled the leash, beckoning the woman forward, how she followed him.
“You mentioned that couple had a master and slave relationship,” she said, her voice airy with thought. “What about you? What have your relationships been like?”
An open-ended question was hard to negate with non-answers. Mara never had any problem asking what she wanted to know, nor doing what she wanted to do. She was straight forward. I wasn’t used to that.
“You want to know?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said immediately. “Why else would I ask?”
“It’s a personal question.”
“If it’s too personal, then don’t answer.”
It wasn’t that I wanted to hide my past from her. But I knew that if I went through with it, if I told her the truth, it would bridge that space that I needed to keep with her. The canyon between teacher and student. The age gap that made us worlds apart. Everything was simple to Mara. Simple to the point of wisdom beyond her years, and to the point of naivety.
“I haven’t had a dominant and submissive relationship, or anything close to it, in a long time,” I said. I turned back towards the railing, watching below.
“Why not?”
I couldn’t tell her about Lisa yet, not now. But my first girlfriend? That I could do. “When I was your age.” I concentrated on the past, my eyes glued to a single-tail whipping over a Saint Andrew’s cross. “We were the same major. But she knew the material better than I did. It was a dream to have her. She was the first woman I dominated.”
I tried to think back to those days when that memory had been mine. I couldn’t remember her face clearly anymore, only the feelings. Flashes of images. The control over a strong woman with a mind of her own. Seeing her on her knees for the first time. Bowing her head, then looking up at me.
But when my memory looked up, it wasn’t a ghost from the past that I saw. It was Mara looking up at me, with those honey-colored eyes.
I had only imagined Mara because she was next to me. It meant nothing.
“She said she needed my help on this essay. So I showed her mine, and she was blown away, inspired, saying she was excited to write her own essay, grateful for my help, all of that. She ended up stealing my idea and flipping it, sentence for sentence. Even with opposing ideas, the professor knew one of us had plagiarized. And my ex pretended like she didn’t know who I was.” It was funny to look back at how insignificant it was now. It had seemed heartbreaking at the time. “Hearing her say that, that she didn’t know who I was, after what we had done together? I realized she never actually believed my words. And I didn’t believe my own ideas after that either.” I shook my head, then looked at Mara. “She was never actually mine.”
Mara was silent, studying me as I spilled my heart. Suddenly, I felt stupid for admitting that. I hadn’t spoken about it to anyone in years, hadn’t had the need to, and yet Mara pulled it out of me easily. “Your thoughts?”
“I get it.” She tilted her head. “That’s why you decided you’d never take a side again. Why you’re always saying that there is more than one way to interpret something.”
When she said it like that, it made the whole thing seem trivial. But it was. I knew that now. But that didn’t change the fact that it had shaped me forever.
“It’s a habit,” I said.
“I get it,” Mara said again. “I don’t agree with it. But I get it.”
She smiled and that smile made me believe that she was telling the truth. Mara didn’t flip sides because of the probability to win; Mara could tell it like it was, and still understood where you were coming from. She was curious. More than curious. She wasn’t a kiss-up, nor a bandwagon jumper. She wanted to know, and that was it. There was never more than one way to interpret her. She was just Mara.
“Do you want a master and slave relationship?” she asked. I laughed.