What I Did for Love (12 page)

“It’s still a major risk,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Are you willing to make a bargain with
me
to go ahead with investing in this deal?”

“In other words, a bargain so that you keep
your
bargain,” I retorted.

“Bredon knew that I hadn’t made a final commitment. We
agreed that I could opt out if I didn’t want to continue. He just assumed that I would go ahead, that his golden touch would work this time too. But this one is very tricky, Dray. It’s a major risk for me too.”

His family was so rich, I doubted that he was telling the truth. But then I thought of the emergency that had torn us apart that first night. “Did you manage to pull that last set of irons out of the fire?” I asked.

Again, his surprise that I knew what had summoned him on Monday night.

“Yes. Everything is okay now.” He got up and went over to the fireplace, looking at the pieces on the mantle. “So that leaves
our
bargain, the one I’ll make with you, and that will give Bredon all the money he needs.”

“And that is?”

“You. Are you willing to sell yourself to me to save your brother?”

“Sell myself!”

“In a sense. I want five nights with you, five Friday nights into Saturday morning. My terms are simple: sex and other things, any way I want. And from you, total compliance, and total silence. From sundown to right before sunup each time.”

“So, a whore. Bought with money that will close the deal with Bredon.”

“Yes, a whore.” He looked at me so coldly I felt my stomach knot.

“No.”

“Then he’s done. His whole financial empire collapses.”

I had other thoughts in my mind, but I did not correct him. I just looked at him. And I saw that he still wanted me, that the lovemaking we had done still had power over both of us. I thought, well, I want him anyway. I can take a man’s point of view: sex just for sex, sex that doesn’t mean anything. So I said, “I
will
bargain with you, but not on those terms.”

“The bargain is your body for money.”

“Yes.”

“So you
would
do this for him,” Rand said, almost contemptuously. “You really love the guy. It sounds a bit unnatural.” He said it with the hardest, coldest tone of voice, making me more furious. How dare he, this arrogant bastard, and how could I have had such tenderness for him? My eyes must have been on fire, but I looked down, hiding my anger, deciding to match the cold and cutting knife his question was. He did not know this part of me. I could be as stony and unforgiving as he. I felt like Antigone who screamed at the man she loved, that her parents were dead, and could not give her another brother. But rather than answering him angrily, I looked at him with a bored expression.

“You have older sisters, Rand. Did they use you as a sex toy? Is that why you are thinking such disgusting things about me and Bredon?” My comment startled and infuriated him, his color rising as he began to lift himself from his chair. I think he wanted to slap me.

Then he stopped, shocked into stillness, realizing the affront he had thrown at me, and that this was the road to hatred. Something in him must have warned him off, although he was furious over my remark.

“I shouldn’t have said that, Dray, I’m sorry.” His voice was shaky with a mixture of coldness and true apology. I just nodded and turned my head away from him, willing my own pounding anger to subside, and my heart to calm. Between desire and fury, I felt hot, I wanted to lash out, to scream, but I clamped my emotions down, and waited.

I thought he would walk away, thinking, “Oh, well, I thought I’d give it a try.” Instead he said, “What would
your
terms be? Mind you, they would have to include the sexual part.” He shifted in his chair and gave me a cool stare. “Except for one thing. For some reason, unlike most men, I find the thought of a
man’s penis in a woman’s mouth too disgusting for words. However, nothing else is off the table.”

I was relieved more than I could believe. Stories of oral sex were like stories of last night’s television dramas among many of my college classmates, their boyfriends demanding and pleading for fellatio, and when positions were literally reversed, how inadequate the men often were in using their tongues to pleasure the women.

“It doesn’t mean that I don’t get to taste you,” he said slyly, cynically.

That didn’t bother me. Go for it, I thought. At least I would be spared some of the more nauseating accounts of boyfriends who insisted on trying, at least, to come in their girlfriends’ mouths.

“Okay, I’ll make a bargain with you,” I said, coolly, as though I were not feeling dirtied, yet fascinated with the thought of having him, of sex with him, because being this close to him caused a heat in me that was like the ultimate sexual itch. My desire for him still had me stunned with its power. Fleetingly I wondered again at the strange suddenness of Monday’s ardor. Outwardly, I looked indifferent.

“You want no talking. I’ll agree to that,” I told him calmly. Play-acting.

“No sound,” he corrected. “No moan or groan or anything. Silence.” His eyes were cold, but amused. I wanted to smack him. I wanted to resume our interrupted night.

“No sound.” I nodded, my expression conveying that I found the condition tedious. “Agreed. But
one
night, not five.” He shook his head no, vigorously, no, no, no.

“Two nights, then,” I countered. “But that’s it.” And that really was my limit. I suspected he had many kinds of sex games in mind, and was not so stupid as to think it was going to be a time of valentine sweetness.

“Two nights.” He nodded. “Agreed.”

Ah, I thought, that’s what he intended anyway.

“And you have to wear, and do, what I say, or what I tell you I want for each night,” he repeated in a cautioning tone.

“Such as?”

“No bra, no panties, no stockings. I’ll let you know what else. The second time too, you wear what I tell you to wear. And in between, some other things I may tell you to do before we meet for the second time.” He recited this in a hard voice. He had thought about it, I could hear. No hesitation, just condition after condition. I wondered what experiences he had had with other women, how “creative” his sexual encounters had been.

Whatever, I thought.

Now it was my turn.

“I’m making one unbreakable condition,” I said. “Bredon must never know. Not ever. I swear, I will find a way to kill you if he ever finds out.”

I said it very quietly and calmly, but although his eyes grew wide with shock and amusement, he simply said, “I believe you. I agree.”

“Your word?”

“My word.” He looked at me. “You put such store by that, by your word, and by mine?”

“Yes. It’s absolute. My word is my word. I assume the same about you.”

“Agreed,” he nodded, very serious now. Then he added, “And in case you don’t know what this bargain entails, some of it may be painful.”

“I had assumed that,” I lied, praying that whatever he had in mind, he would not be carried away with making me suffer. I was also wondering whether he had been careful, having read so much about herpes and AIDS and STDs. Was I letting myself in for a lifetime of payback with controllable, but incurable diseases?

“I assume this will be safe sex,” I said, again pretending indifference. I had finished my period right before we had made love
on Monday. I did not want to become pregnant, but there was not time to get fitted for a diaphragm or get an IUD, and it took time for birth control patches or pills to work. Maybe the end of my period was tied to my lust. Nature is no fool, and desire rises when all is most ripe for pregnancy.

He was watching me. He knew he had me on this one. “Oh, no,” he said, “not if you mean using condoms. No, this sex will be raw.” His tone was both cruel and lustful.

Oh, God, I thought, steeling myself, continuing to pretend indifference as I nodded, as though to say, “of course, that’s to be expected.” In my heart I did not believe he was fooled, but I did not care. My first concern was Bredon. I would take my chances, and deal with whatever the outcomes later.

Now I had to make sure about the foundation of this whole preposterous agreement. “I have one last condition,” I said, “and that’s the condition for everything else.” I finally looked up at him, a serious, disinterested look. “Before the banks close on Friday, at least half of the money has to be wired into Bredon’s account. Once I see the confirmation, I’ll come here.”

“How will you see the confirmation…?” he started to ask, but then realized that my brother must have given me every necessary code to access his accounts. “You’re very young to know so much about the financial world,” he said, maybe disappointed that I was not living in some stupid haze of ignorance about money. “You
are
eighteen, yes?” he added, half seriously, half rhetorically. But I took his question for what it really asked.

“Yes.” I smiled my own cool smile. “Eighteen. Legal.”

“I want to see you tomorrow night, our first night,” he said.

“Yes, okay.” I nodded, cool, as though growing impatient. Time was growing short for Bredon. I would have said yes to this very night if that had been necessary. As it was, though, this brief delay gave me time. I had my own urgent preparations to make before tomorrow night.

Slipping quickly out of Rand’s, I got back to a subway station
and ran down the stairs onto the first train to Times Square. A fast ride and I was there, up the steps to the street, going into a large drug store, a chain with stores all over Manhattan. Making my way through the aisles to the pharmacy at the back, I pretended to be studying something next to the counter that held an extensive condom display. Hoping I would be able to use them despite Rand’s refusal, I pulled a box of three condoms from the peg. There were bigger boxes, holding more than twenty, there were colors and ridges and one had feathers on the bottom, clearly shown on the front of the box. A French tickler, I thought. Randy literature had its uses. I purchased the ribbed latex ones, thinking he would at least be intrigued and try, and besides, these were the only ones in the small three-piece box. They didn’t cost much more than a dollar each, though the last thing I wanted to do at that moment was comparison shop.

When the pharmacist nodded that it was my turn, I was thankful for the “privacy” panels on either side of the counter. “Plan B,” I said. The “morning after” pills, to prevent pregnancy after unprotected sex.

He did not ask to see identification. Sizing me up in ten seconds, he got the pills for me. You had to be eighteen to buy the pills without a prescription, a stupid law since the sixteen-year-olds would likely be the ones who often needed it. In my Internet searches I had found the information on Plan B, and saw that coupons were offered to bring down the price from the forty or so dollars the pills cost. I was hardly going to print out the coupons, but the information on dosage and type had been useful.

I put the condoms on the counter without looking at the pharmacist and he quickly rang up the sale. The Plan B he gave me was generic but still would be expensive even for middle income people. Even so, it was far cheaper, financially and emotionally, than having a baby. I took three of the twenties in
my jeans pocket, a cash sale with no record beyond the in-store cameras. I hoped my disguise and dark glasses would obscure my identity from the cameras that were everywhere now, stores and streets.

I emerged from the store amid noisy horns, rivers of people moving across the pedestrian areas in the middle of Broadway, the Times Square rush hour in its classic incarnation. It was getting cool and breezy, so I pulled the hoodie on and kept one hand in my pocket, over the small bag with the pills and condoms. No one looked at me, a city figure happily unremarkable and in fact not at all attractive. I walked northward, skirting the long-haired groups of girls and the satellite groups of worldly-wise boys orbiting around them, saying cool, flirtatious things. I was no older than they, yet I felt I had lived for a century.

At Columbus Circle I found a relatively quiet spot to phone Marilisa. “Please have a meal delivered for me,” I asked her, “Turkish food if you can.”

“Yes, I’ll order it now. And a note was delivered for you.” She said this as though this unusual event were the most ordinary thing in the world. My surprise at the note kept me silent. She did not miss a beat. “Shall I put the food and the note inside for you?” She always asked, even though the answer was always yes. Maybe she noticed how much the “do not enter” light had been on these two days.

“Yes, please, Marilisa, thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” she said in her wonderful light voice, soft and happy. Her sweetness made me smile, lifted my spirits as I found my way back home by subway.

Once I got into the back entrance of my building I ducked into a janitor’s area, a “blind spot” with no security cameras, and pulled off the wig and cap, tucking them inside my hoodie. My hair came down neatly as I unpinned it, and I looked more like myself when I got on the service elevator. Thankfully, no one else
was around anyway. The janitors had gone to night shift and were elsewhere now. It felt wonderful to be home.

I could smell the aromas of the Turkish food on the dining table where Marilisa had set a place for me. I was so hungry, but first I had to see the note, which she had placed on my desk. The plain white envelope was sealed, my name in small block letter on its face. It was from Rand.

A note sent this way, probably delivered by Tom, was the perfect way to avoid electronic records and surveillance. So many figures, to their disgrace, had been publicly exposed in all meanings of the term, their texts and e-mails detailing their private lives and their naked bodies. Rand was as adept at avoiding discovery as I was. And it was all so ironic. Had he simply put in his share of money for Bredon, I would gladly have jumped into his bed, open to any sexual adventure with him. But now sex was his way of shaming me, in his anger that I chose Bredon over him. I sighed, for us and for his brief note:

“Silky long summer skirt, elastic waistband, front-button blouse. Flat shoes or sandals.”