April sat like a bundle of sticks strung together with wires until Jay pulled her up against him. "Go on. Just let the words out."
"It's not so much. I saw other women who had worse, a lot worse. I was payment for a gambling debt. To...them. You know."
He nodded, knowing she'd feel it even though she couldn't see it. Oh, it's not so much, really it's not. Just a bit of human trafficking and repeated abuse. Holy shit.
"Who did it?"
"My...well, boyfriends don't do that, do they? I thought he was my boyfriend. But he loved his gambling problem way more than me, I guess."
"And just how much debt buys a slave these days?"
"About 16 million yen."
"Fuck. He didn't have a gambling problem, love. His problem was with not gambling."
She nodded. "And I was the solution. To the debt, anyway."
And then here you are. And I still don't want to know what was in between. But it's the reason for all this. "And you started a life as an unwilling trainee."
"Unwilling and not very good. But I don't want to doesn't cut a lot of ice with them."
"Did they hurt you to make you want to, or to drive home that you'd better just do what they said anyway?"
"They wouldn't ruin not wanting to. Someone might be into that. Funny thing, though...the scars were kind of a gift. Unintentionally, but they were."
"How?"
"None of the men they sent me to ever...They got a look at my back and were too repulsed, I guess. One of them threw me out in the hallway naked. I made him that sick."
He wanted to hurt something that wasn't her. Fucking near anything that wasn't her. But he had a better idea.
"I'm going to tell you something. I don't want it to sound the wrong way, and I know it's going to, but you need to know it. I thought they must have put you with me because you speak English, right? I'm sure that's part of it, but..." He took a breath, steeled himself for the worst possible reaction, then ran his fingers down her back where he knew the scarring was.
She tensed; he could feel her joints lock with the strain. He kept stroking, lightly, down and back up, until she started to relax as if in spite of herself.
"I think they sent you to me because I like this."
"Like what?"
He slid his hand under her shirt. Contact. Skin on skin. He willed himself to not get hard. He didn't think that was going to work for long, though. "This."
She sat up enough to stare at him, eyes enormous. He pulled her back down against him.
"The whole Switchblade thing was kind of a rib on me. A joke, I mean. Someone backstage found out I'm into some things, and they couldn't resist, I suppose. I'm being kink-shamed in a really public way. The best part is, I tried to go full on and get what it's really about in there just once, and they backed off in a hurry. The sponsors would have wet themselves. But now they're stuck with what I made out of their little joke."
"Which is...?"
"Their version is I like knives. But I like what knives do. Pain, pleasure, blood. Scars. I'd like them better if I'd put them on you myself, and I don't like the people who put them on you unwilling, not even a bit. But your scars don't repulse me. Not at all. The opposite, in fact. Warriors have those."
"If you want - "
He pulled her up tighter against him; she recognized it as a hush. "We have a problem. One they created as surely as those marks on your skin. How am I supposed to know what you want and what they made you say you want?"
"You're going to have to trust me."
"Now you sound like me."
That little hint of a smile came back. "Not even close."
"I need to know the rest. You know that."
She nodded again and burrowed back up against him. It made her difficult to hear, but she was finally talking. He wasn't about to interrupt.
Later, he'd wish for whoever was the first to say it's never as bad as you imagine to magically appear so he could kick their ass. It was worse than he'd imagined, not so much in what as in how much. Over a year of what they called training and he could only call torture. Indoctrination, rape, more indoctrination, beatings and what felt to him like cigar burns when all the rest didn't break her. Again and again and again, until they'd decided she was ready for what all of it had been done to break her for.
I don't think it did, though. Not entirely. They got you far enough that you started to want to be what they were trying to make you, but not all the way there. The woman they'd done all this to was still in there; he got to see her for a moment now and then.
"Who was the bastard with the cigar? Do you know his name?"
"It wasn't a cigar."
His fingers found one of the spots again - almost perfectly round, about the right size. "What, then?"
"A fuse."
"What?"
"A fuse. Like in a fusebox. One of them - I don't know his name; they never used them - liked to do that. He'd put a paper clip in somehow so a fuse would overheat, and..."
"Fucking hell."
"We didn't get to see each other very often - the women, I mean - but you learned not to make friends pretty fast, anyway. If they saw you had a friend, they'd punish her and make you watch when you did something wrong. The thing with the fuse...that was the worst to watch someone else take. And I fucked up so much. It was like I couldn't do anything right. I stopped even talking to anyone. They had to just do it to me if there wasn't anyone else."
It was a bad idea. Absolutely horrible. He fully intended to do it anyway. He cradled her face in his hands, enjoying how neatly it fit there, and tilted her head back. She never hesitated or drew back from the kiss. He knew she wouldn't hold back from anything else, either...but not yet. On top of everything else, her leg still clearly hurt her. Perfect might be too much to ask for from this situation, but he wanted it all to be as good as it could be. As much as he would rather have gone on, he broke it off as gently as he could. "You could use another pain pill. I saw that limp. And until I won't hurt you every time I move even the slightest bit..."
She nodded and started to get up. He held her still. He could have her this close for a bit longer, and there was one more thing. "You live here. Not any other things, just that. What anyone else thinks or doesn't is their concern, not ours."
She kissed him this time. There was so much to like about it, he didn't even know where to start. But he knew where they'd better stop. "Go lie down. I'll get you a pill, and you just sleep as long as you need to."
She'd been out like a candle for four hours when he decided to go out and get more food. She hadn't eaten a lot of breakfast; it had to catch up to her sooner or later. Maybe getting all that stuff out where the light could hit it and kill it would help. He could see her not having much of an appetite with telling that hanging over her.
She was awake and reading when he got back. He was absurdly happy to see that she was doing it on his dime. "I brought more noodles to amaze you. What are you reading?"
She tapped something on the screen and held up the reader to show him the cover. He glanced at the screen, then went back for a longer look. It didn't help. It still said Immanent Distance: Poetry and the Metaphysics of the Near at Hand no matter how long he looked at it.
"I don't think this has ever happened to me before."
"What?"
"I know what every one of those words mean, but I don't have a fucking clue what they mean together." And just what were you out there in the world before you got in all this shit? Besides really, really smart, apparently? "But you know, don't you?"
"Yeah, but I also know the secret."
"What's that?"
"Always read the back cover, too." She tapped again and handed the reader to him.
He read it three times, and his mind still produced the same translation: Nope. "Well, that's done it, then. My brain's on fire."
"It's a lot of words to say the guy wrote some stuff about how nobody agrees how poetry works because it works a whole bunch of ways at once, and here it is all in a book."
"If I memorize the last two sentences of that thing and use them the next time there's a microphone in my face, the translator's going to snap and try to murder me halfway through."
He really did like seeing her laugh. Maybe it could happen a little more often now.
