Don't Be Shy 20 (Patreon)

Kara felt empty with Lena gone. She went to get something to eat, but she knew almost immediately that wasn’t the problem. She was just eating because she was bored, which she was usually better than, but this was deeper than boredom. She felt incomplete and the food tasted like if wax fruit were somehow edible.

She switched to a pint of ice cream, which got through to her tastebuds, but Kara still promised only to allow herself a few bites. She was supposed to be getting in shape for Lena. It was worth five thousand dollars per diem for her to be in the best shape of her life. She couldn’t stress-eat with that on the line… or whatever she was doing.

She took another bite of Chunky Monkey. How many had that been? Kara looked at the pint. It’d been pretty much full when she’d started. It was still pretty much full. Pretty much.

It was funny. All her worry about pleasing Lena, her anxiety about being Lena’s… about just being Lena’s… and now she’d managed to wiggle out of doing what she was hired for. It was a paid vacation, really. The adult version of playing hooky. So why was Kara still eating ice cream?

It couldn’t be that she was horny. Not just that she was horny. Sure, she hadn’t lied about wanting to masturbate after fingering Lena—doing that to her Mistress had aroused her more than most sex acts Kara’d had done to herself—but… but… but-but-but! She knew horny! She wasn’t horny! If she were horny, she would simply masturbate; Lena had even given her permission to!

Things had been so… fucking… pleasant. Just sitting on the couch, watching a movie with Lena, touching her, being touched by her. It hadn’t been sex, though it wasn’t not sex. It was like the room had been full of something that was gone now.

‘Something’. As if that fill-in-the-blank was so hard to fill in. Love. The word needled at Kara. It couldn’t be that—but what could it be? Some mixture of care and attention and effort and concern and, yes, sex… what was missing, the X in the equation between the L word and what she had with Lena?

Because it couldn’t be love. Kara could not be in love with the woman who paid her for sex. Her mind, her body, her soul could not work that way. The method by which they’d met, the way they’d been brought together, the path that had led to Kara stroking Lena’s pussy to completion… it precluded the very idea of…

Kara stopped, closed her eyes, and rubbed her temples—as if she could jog loose whatever stubborn notion of sex and love being intractably intertwined was up in her brain. Or maybe find the entry point where this idea of romance had started boring its way into her skull and pluck it out before it could get any further.

She needed a reset. She needed to stop this maudlin, emotional overthinking and be practical. Basics. Brass tacks. Sex for money and money for sex. It couldn’t be that hard. Boys did it all the time.

It would probably be a lot easier to dispel the daydream fantasy of Lena and embrace… that is, accept… the real thing if Lena weren’t so staggeringly perfect. Even without Kara having seen fully half of her face or, now that she thought about it, much of Lena’s body, she was beautiful. There was no mistaking that. The luminous green eyes, the exquisite eyebrows… even her hairline, even her eyelids, even the distance across her nose from one eye to the other, it was all staggeringly right.

And then there was her body. Lena had that thing for tailored suits, sports jackets, Oxford shirts, God help her, skinny ties. And those little pipe-cleaner trousers. And the shoes: from brocade-pattern ballet flats to workout Doc Martens to full fuck-me pumps. It was only a matter of time until Lena asked for her to go down on all fours and kiss, lick, demean herself with her feet. For the first time, the thought struck Kara as not so much degrading as…

Kara squeezed her eyes shut tighter. She massaged her temples like she could drive her fingers into her skull, trepan a hole that would let out whatever had her virtually getting off on the thought of being Lena’s bitch. It was one thing to enjoy what they did together. People should enjoy their jobs, shouldn’t they? But to anticipate, to drool over what Lena might have her doing next… oh, that was sick. That was next-level sick.

Maybe that’s why she picked you, something in Kara whispered to Kara. Because she knows that when she makes you lick her boots clean, you’ll like it.

She had to stop this. It didn’t matter why Lena had hired her. Kara had taken the job for the money, not to get laid. She was tall, she was blonde, she was bisexual—she could get laid in fricking Marrakesh.

Groaning at her own weirdness… not that there could be a way to be normal about this… Kara looked down at her ice cream and realized she’d thoughtlessly eaten half the carton. In a flash of anger, she flung her spoon into the sink. What was the point of being naughty if you couldn’t enjoy it?

She picked the ice cream up, carried it to the trash bin, about-faced, and put it into the freezer. Then she dug it out to put the lid back on it before shoving it back into place.

I’m losing my mind, Kara thought. Maybe this is why they call it fucking your brains out.

Relieved a little by the thought that she wasn't some sort of freak, she was just mentally ill… maybe they had a pill for her… Kara went back to her own room, where she took down a print of water lilies to get to the room safe. Inside was fifteen thousand dollars. She hadn't even taken them out of their three envelopes.

Now she did. Daring to take out each thick stack of cash and add them together to make one towering… tower of twenties, fifties, and hundreds. It was too big for her to hold in one hand.

She ran it over her lips, along her pretty face: imagining herself as a seductress, as Lena would see her. She'd probably get a kick out of Kara using real cash for this little sex show. A woman like Lena would know, as Kara knew now, that nothing felt like cash and even less felt like a lot of cash. Not papery, not clothlike… it was just cash. She smeared bills down her chin, laughed as they went into her cleavage.

“You like that, Mistress?” she asked her imaginary watcher. “I like it more. You can't really like being rich until you've been poor. I've been very poor and now I feel very rich…”

She brushed thousands of dollars against her breast and shuddered. Even through her clothes, her nipple responded.

It felt good. It felt very good.

“You wanna see more?” she asked Lena, wherever she was. “I wanna show you more…”

Kara undressed quickly then lay on her bed. Nothing felt like cash, but she'd only touched it with her hands. It felt almost wholly different on her body, her naked skin.

Her breathing quickened. She wished she had a mirror to look into, see herself, but she also knew it couldn't compare to how she felt. She skinned the money of its rubber bands and threw it all into the air, letting it flutter down on her until it embraced her with a million kisses. Covering her bare body in promises.

“I'll never be hungry again. I'll never crash on a couch again. I'll always know where I'm sleeping, what I'm eating. When my clothes wear out, I'll buy new ones. Maybe I'll buy new clothes just because it's fashionable. I'm going to have a beautiful life. I won't let myself have anything less. If I have to be Lena's bitch for a while, I'll be the most beautiful bitch she could ask for.”

***

I drove up to the roof of the parking garage, Sanders in tow. Not literally. He got to enjoy himself, sleeping off his head trauma, while I chauffeured. Up top, I parked, then lugged him onto the big fat concrete railing that protected lousy drivers from a twelve story fall. I gave Sanders his vaccination. After I tucked away the syringe, I took out my knife.

I feathered it over the insides of his forearms a few times, making him grumble in his sleep. Then I dug it in deep. A cut across the left wrist and across the right. He woke up to blood foaming out of opened arms.

I covered everything on his face but his panicked eyes.

“I've given you a paralytic,” I told him. “It'll wear off in forty-five minutes. You don't have forty-five minutes. If you do as I say, I'll dial 911.” I took the burner phone from my pocket. “Do you understand or would you like to waste more time being gagged?”

I took my hand away. He talked like he wasn't expecting to be able to. “You're crazy. You're fucking crazy. I'm bleeding. Call an ambulance.”

“You understand it's pretty rich to call me crazy while you're trying to reason with me?”

“Call the ambulance!”

“I understand you're a mobster. I take it you have people you can call if you want other people beat up.”

“Yes, Jesus, fuck…”

His blood pooled under arms he couldn't raise, looking like the cut strings of a grounded puppet.

“Give me the number for whoever the next guy on the totem pole is. Tell him you're going to text him the names and addresses from the same number.”

“Okay, yes, the number is 555-1878.”

I tapped in the number. “Take a deep breath. You're a gangster scumbag, remember? You order beatdowns all the time.”

Sanders sucked in breath until he reached a sort of acceptance with sitting in his own blood. “Okay, okay-okay-okay, call him.”

I hit send, then held the phone up to Sanders. It was set on speaker.

“Who the fuck is this?” someone answered with a gruff goomba accent. “Unknown caller mother fucker…”

“It's me, Joey, ya retard,” Sanders cut in. “Listen up, I need some guys programmed.”

“Got it, got it. Who needs it?”

“I'm gonna text you the names. Same number as this one.”

“You sure? What if you misspell someone's name?”

“I ain't gonna misspell nobody's name, ya dumb fuck. Now get ready, I'm sending the names soon as you hang up… I mean I hang up.”

I pressed disconnect for him. “You might have a future in improv. That wasn’t bad for a beginner.”

Browbeating ‘Joey’ had given him some stone. “Alright, you got your fucking programming done, now call 911.”

“Relax.” I showed him the phone as I pressed the 9 once and the 1 two times. “I'm a man of my word.” 

The phone only rang three times before the call was connected. “911, what's your emergency?”

“Hi, I'm at the Met Gen and I think someone just jumped off the roof of the parking garage.”

Realization took over every last pore of Sanders’ face before I put my hand on his sternum and pushed.