Fresh Meat

Angie watched, without really seeing, Benji exuberantly jumping into the biggest puddle he could find in all of Aston Park. It was Sunday again, barely more than a day since Angie’s illicit liaison with Victoria. Doubt had gnawed at her ever since.

It had rained for most of Saturday. Stuck indoors in her frenetic household, Angie had no mental space to think things through. She had done her best to take her mind off the events of the previous week by taking care of homework and playing with Nate. Now that she was out in the park and free to think, her mind hovered over a yawning, qualm-filled chasm.

What am I getting myself into? Angie wondered. I must have been crazy to meet Victoria. But I survived, and I’m in one piece. The question is, am I crazy enough to go back? I have to make up my mind before Friday.

Benji returned, all wet dog smell and pleased with himself. His enthusiasm was hard to resist. Angie began throwing the ball for him while her thoughts continued to unfold: She wants to take me as a lover. What does that mean? We’d be going out? No, not if we only meet at the house. Would I be her girlfriend? I can’t imagine introducing Victoria as my girlfriend or, in fact, the concept of having or being one in the first place.

A cringe-worthy vision came to mind of Angie introducing Victoria as her girlfriend and coming out to her mum and stepdad in their living room. Would it ever come to that? Was she really gay just because of one kiss and the things that it led to? What if it was just Victoria? Was she in love with her? Angie instinctively rejected the idea, not that she knew what it was like to be in romantic love with someone, but she didn’t know Victoria well enough to feel that way.

Angie’s thoughts dwelled on the concept of ‘coming out’. She didn’t feel the need, given what little she had done. She didn’t ‘feel’ gay, if there was such a thing. She thought that in the event that she found herself drawn to more women, her grandma would be supportive, her mum grudgingly accepting, her sisters scathing, and her stepdad disappointed. She wasn’t so worried about Brian’s opinion; if Mum accepted her for who she was, he would tow the line out of a well-honed survival instinct.

Angie collected the sodden dog and ball and began working her way out of the park and towards her grandma’s house. She wondered what Victoria really wanted from her. Was it just the sex? If she didn’t want to go out with her, didn’t want to be seen in public dating a 16-year-old, what else could there be? She had said she wanted ‘genuine passion’ and that it was something she couldn’t buy. If it wasn’t for all the money Victoria must be spending to support their incipient affair, if that’s what it was, then Angie might feel like she was being exploited. It didn’t seem likely given the lengths to which Victoria had gone. Where would be profit be?

Was Angie, then, just an expensive toy to be played with in the bedroom? She wasn’t sure how she felt about that: being used but put to such stimulating uses, she shivered at the memory. Victoria had said she wanted to watch her enjoy everything for the first time. But where would it end? When Victoria ran out of ‘first times’ to show her? Either she would get tired of it, Victoria would, or they would end up as a couple? The latter didn’t seem likely. In fact, Angie felt it more likely that she would arrive at the house on Albert Drive one Friday to find it unexpectedly empty and up for sale. After all, Victoria could afford to drop her just as quickly as she picked her up. Would that be so bad?

Angie thought about how she felt about Victoria, and a slow smile involuntarily reached her lips. She had certainly been every bit the lioness: powerful, confident, in control. Angie had let her touch her in the most intimate of ways, but that familiarity had been reciprocated. She realised she didn’t feel threatened by this lioness but protected in her company, part of a bedroom pride of two.

Victoria was hard to read, though, Angie noted. When she had been charming Dr Evans and Mr Humphries, she had smiled a lot, red lips and perfect white teeth signalling charm and familiarity, but once they were in private, she didn’t smile at all. Not that she didn’t express pleasure; she just did it in subtler ways. On the one hand, that was good. For Victoria, it seemed as if smiles were false, a tool used to sway people she wanted to exploit. When she was genuinely pleased, she displayed a look of intense satisfaction, like the cat that got the cream. More like the lioness that got the gazelle, Angie thought with an inner chuckle.

She sighed as she began the familiar logistical shuffle of turning a wet dog outside her grandma’s house into a dry dog inside. There were so many unanswered questions that she hadn’t had time to ask on Friday. As Benji bounded off into the house, Angie followed. She didn’t realise she was wearing such a troubled look until her grandma greeted her, in Polish, as usual.

“Are you OK, chick?” Angie’s grandma asked, a look of obvious concern on her face.

“Sure. Why?”

“You look,” Grandma frowned for a moment, “distracted. Has something happened?”

“No,” Angie flushed, her denial all out of proportion.

Grandma retreated to the lounge and enthroned herself on her floral sofa, perhaps to allow Angie to collect herself. “Is there a boy?” She asked casually.

“No,” the fading colour returned to Angie’s cheeks once more. It seemed impossible to hide things from her grandma. “What if there was? Hypothetically, I mean?”

“I’ll take hypothetically,” Grandma smiled.

“I don’t know if I should,” Angie trailed off.

“Hypothetically,” she leaned heavily on the word, “you should go with it, as long as you can be yourself. If he doesn’t like you for who you are, he isn’t worth keeping. Just because you’ve caught your first fish doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty more in the sea.”

It was Angie’s turn to frown. “I can’t tell yet.”

“That’s OK, chick, there’s no rush. Take your time to be sure.”

It sounded like good advice to Angie. “Thanks, grandma.”

“Have you tried that meditation I showed you last week?”

“No”, Angie felt guilty. “There’s nowhere quiet to do it. There’s hardly a moment’s peace between Shania and Robyn going on at each other, homework, and Nate wanting to play.”

“Maybe it’s something we can do here then,” Grandma suggested sympathetically. “Why don’t you sit on the rug, and we can try some guided meditation?”

Angie seated herself comfortably opposite her grandma on the worn rug in front of the gas fire with the egg timer placed between them.

“Close your eyes and think of a place that’s calm and safe. A place with you in it,” Grandma began, her voice calm, steady and Polish.

Angie thought of her living room when the house was empty. Familiar but quiet in a way that it seldom was in reality.

“See yourself doing an activity. Something simple, easy, calm. Making something, perhaps.”

Angie imagined Nate had been added to the scene. They were building his wooden railway together. Her little brother was highly focused on the task, as he often could be, and Angie passed him pieces and filled in the gaps. The overall effect was calming, tranquil even, without being still. Nate made little sounds of pleasure or effort, but they worked so implicitly well together, there was no need for words or signs to pass between them.”

Grandma’s voice entered the visualisation to move things on. “Now, visualise yourself somewhere you can retreat to, cosy and warm. A place away from the world, it’s noise and bustle.”

A grimace appeared on Angie’s face as she tried to think of such a place in her life. Unbidden, the memory of lying with Victoria came into her mind. It was as she came down from the first orgasm Victoria had given her. They had lain together, spooning, prickled with perspiration, the touch of skin on skin, sultry. Victoria had been stroking her arm gently, not to illicit pleasure as such, but it was such a feeling of intimate relaxation Angie couldn’t deny it was a cosy scene to mentally retreat to.

Angie’s slow breathing was interrupted by the harsh clatter of the egg timer. She blinked to take in her grandma’s living room and the fact that a small glass of sherry had once more appeared before her. Delicately, she picked up the little glass by its slender stem. “This is becoming a bad habit.”

Grandma shrugged. “There are worse vices, chick.” Arduously shifting herself to the sofa, she gestured with her glass. “I don’t know where you were just then, but you certainly had a big smile on your face.”

Angie flushed a little but was unrepentant. “I found a good place. Thanks, Grandma.” She raised her glass, and they clinked together in a mini salute.

---

“Who do you think is the best-looking girl in our year?” Angie asked, sounding vaguely bothered.

For Freya, it was an unusual question to hear from her friend. She was used to being the one posing off-the-wall questions to Angie. Freya gave the inquiry the due diligence Angie always gave her left-of-field questions.

“Well, Kelly’s pretty good-looking, but whenever she smiles in my direction, I get the feeling it’s because she can see something I can’t, like the road roller about to squash me or that I’m about to be mauled by a bear.” Freya cast her eye around the playground the pair found themselves skirting, as was their habit. “How about Teresa Ross?”

“Tessa? Really? How so?” Angie raised a bemused eyebrow.

“Big boobs, nice face, not too vacuous. I think she’d be in the running.”

Angie nodded grudgingly. “How about Aisha Singh?”

Freya looked and found Aisha in the crowd. “Go on, I’m listening.”

Angie seemed to be struggling to put words to her thoughts. “She’s got that whole Asian beauty thing going on, good skin, elaborate hair and doesn’t dress like a slut,” she managed eventually.

Freya turned to her friend. “You don’t think slutty is a good quality?”

Angie hummed in deliberation. “If there were no boys about, would you want to go with the haughty looker or the slut?”

Freya chuckled at the proposition. “The slut, obviously, because she’d be a pushover.”

“You’d go with a slutty girl because she’s easy?” Freya’s friend sounded surprised, her voice tempered with an unexpected admiration.

“If there were no boys about, why not go for an easy lay? She’d probably put out. Don’t they say there’s a bit queer in everyone?”

“I hadn’t heard that.” Angie nodded, sounding genuinely fascinated.

---

Zofia Peterson clacked her needles together as she fenced with her knitting. Nate was safely settled in bed, and Shania and Robyn were in their room together, which meant she had a rare window of relative peace where she could sit in front of her favourite soap opera.

“Mum?” Angie got her attention. Zofia couldn’t help but smile, realising that her eldest daughter had waited for the ad break before engaging her. She appeared uncertain, which had become Angie's default state as she entered her middle teen years, a situation not helped by the recent loss of her best friend, Milla.

“What’s up, bab?” She asked in English, a concession to the fact that her husband, Brian, was seated next to her on their worn sofa.

Angie seemed pensive. “Is it OK if I go over to Freya’s after school every Friday and stay for dinner, like I did last Friday?”

Zofia was surprised. Angie rarely asked for anything, certainly not for herself. Her sisters were a different matter in that regard. If she had to hear one more whiny argument about their perceived human right to a smartphone each, she was going to blow her stack.

“Your friend from school? Where does she live again?” Angie’s mother wanted to sound attentive rather than discouraging. Her teenage daughters could be ever so sensitive to anything, up to and including subtle intonations of the voice.

“One of those newer houses up from the fire station, but her Mum promised she’d give me a lift back around 9. Is that OK?”

Zofia was struggling to read her daughter. On the one hand, she sensed the enthusiasm to spend time with her friend and, on the other, an undertone of reluctance, like she wanted her request to be denied. “Every Friday?”

Angie nodded, embarrassed.

“It’d be one less mouth to feed at tea time.” Brian put in, not even turning from the TV. Zofia gave him an angry scowl. He could often be insensitive when it came to Angie’s feelings, but afflicting him with ‘the look’ was usually enough to get him to realise. This time, however, he was focused on the TV and missed her expression entirely.

“It’s fine, Angie,” she declared as she turned back. Zofia took a moment to visualise the local geography. “Just as long as you're not walking home after dark from over there. You’ll be back around 9?”

“Yes,” Angie seemed pleased despite her uncertainty. “Thanks, Mum.”

---

Krystian Janik stood flanking his employer as she took her seat in the cramped office. So often, his work for Victoria McCarthy involved solving problems using his own unique set of skills, but other times, like this, they mostly involved being in the background and providing a certain ‘menace’. He didn’t like this room. It was at the back of an ugly concrete office block which housed numerous questionable businesses which required at least the look of respectability. These were the kinds of places where he performed many of his more interesting tasks, but this wasn’t one of them.

The private investigator, Angus Scott, was eyeing him nervously, which suggested he was having the desired effect.

“So you have what we agreed upon, Mr Scott?” Janik’s employer asked with a slight edge to her voice.

Scott refocused his attention on Victoria. “Aye, she wasn’t such a tough nut to crack, although I was pretty thorough, just in case.”

Janik could hear the air of a man covering himself, trying to convince his customer he was worth the money they were about to pay him. Janik was disgusted by his lack of backbone; his work should speak for itself. At least he was sure that Scott was capable enough at the task they had given him; Janik's contacts had been quite sure of that. He betrayed none of this to the other two inhabitants of the room and continued to watch the exchange impassively.

“Could you give me an executive summary?” Victoria enquired.

Scott opened the tan folder on his desk with one podgy hand and began to scan the page to remind himself of the particulars. “Angelica Stephanie Peterson, daughter of Björn Aaronson, who died before she was 1 and Zofia Peterson nee Petrov. Zofia re-married Brian Peterson a few years later and seems to have changed Angelica’s name with her own.” Scott turned the page over and continued. “Zofia and Brian have given Angelica two sisters, twins aged 11 and a brother, aged 3. There is a surviving maternal grandmother who lives nearby, but she is retried. There are no other grandparents, aunties, uncles or cousins in the picture.”

“You haven’t found anyone who is likely to take legal notice if Angelica’s social status is suddenly elevated?” Janik could appreciate that Victoria’s question was, on the face of it, a ruse but certainly pertinent given her intended scheme.

Scott shook his head, “they’re pretty unconnected and hard up. If you pluck this girl out of obscurity for a big modelling contract, the immediate family might get dragged along in her wake, but I doubt there will be any real problems.” Scott sat back and stared at Janik suspiciously as if to challenge Victoria’s cover story. Janik was very good at staring back dispassionately, giving nothing away.

“Good.” Victoria pulled the folder over to her side of the desk and tossed a Manila envelope containing banknotes back. Scott scowled at its contents. “Consider it a discount for paying cash. I won’t report it to the tax man if you don’t.” She got up to leave.

“Is that it then?” Scott called to his retreating customers.

Victoria looked over her shoulder. “I have what I need; our business is concluded. I will study the dossier and act accordingly,” she declared coldly as she swept from the room, Janik moving in her wake.

A professional, Janik remained silent until they were on the street and well on their way back to the car. “If what he says is true, we could just take girl off street and cut long story short.” Janik’s broken English was not due to any lack of linguistic skill; he just preferred to assert his cultural identity. Sometimes, being the foreigner in the room could be just as menacing as anything else.

“Acquiring her would be easy. Doing it in such a way that no one comes looking for her requires more finesse.” She flicked through a few pages in the folder before continuing. “I want her to voluntarily let me train her according to my personal tastes before we take her, and in the end, if we do it right, she will submit to all we need in order to make a clean getaway.”

“Expensive. Will take long time.” Janik observed. He had seen the girl from afar already. He had to grudgingly admit she had potential, but he was impatient to have her under Victoria’s control and, by extension, under his own. There had been far too few perks in his job since Fiona had bumped off Victoria’s previous two playthings, and the remaining one wasn’t worth considering.

As they reached the car, Victoria turned and smiled back. “Ah, my dear Janik, the pleasure is in the journey, not just the destination.”

Though he disagreed, Janik held his tongue. The girl would be his, eventually.