Two Good Girls

Morning came gray through the blinds, and Jade was already awake in the way a cat is awake — perfectly still, watching, the hunger banked behind her eyes and stoked again the moment Lisa's opened. She was propped on one elbow, her hair loose over her bare shoulder, and her hand was already between Lisa's thighs, two fingers resting there without pressure, just the weight of them, just the claim of them, waiting for Lisa to remember where she was and whose bed it was.

"You came so pretty against that wall," Jade said, low, thumb drawing a slow circle. "Woke up twice thinking about it. Second time I almost woke you to do it again."

Lisa's face went hot before her body could answer, and that was the whole strange arithmetic of her now — a year of collars and counting and being shown off like something worth keeping, and still the embarrassment arrived first, a full-body blush that started at her collarbone and climbed, so that she pressed her face into the pillow and felt Jade's laugh go warm against her neck. The laugh was not cruel. That was the terrible part, the part she had stopped trying to explain to anyone: the cruelty had been burned away somewhere in the winter, and what was left was appetite without malice, and it undid her more completely than the beach ever had, because there was nothing in it to fight. Jade hooked an arm under her hip and rolled her onto her back and settled between her thighs, and the first press of fingers made Lisa's breath come out in a piece she could not reassemble.

"Don't hide," Jade said, working her open slow, deliberate, watching Lisa's face the way a jeweler watches a stone. "Blush all you want. That's the part I keep. You do every single thing I tell you, and then you go red about it after, like your body didn't beg me for it in the dark." She curled her fingers and Lisa's hips came off the mattress and Jade held her there, hovering, no mercy, until Lisa's eyes went wet and her mouth fell open on a sound she would be mortified by in an hour and would make again by noon. "There she is," Jade said softly. "There's my girl."

Afterward she dressed her the way she dressed her for the world now — standing behind Lisa at the foot of the bed, choosing from the drawer with the same careful attention other people gave to wine. The tank was thin white ribbed cotton, no bra, cut so the fabric grazed her nipples with every breath and showed the dark of them plainly through the weave. The jeans sat low on her hips, nothing beneath, the denim rough against skin still slick from Jade's mouth. And then the small black box opened on the mattress and Jade knelt — Jade, who knelt for no one but her, and only in this, only in the taking — and worked the plug into her slow, one hand splayed flat on Lisa's belly, feeling the fullness of it seat through her skin like a second pulse. The remote went into Jade's pocket with the casualness of keys, and the low hum woke Lisa's whole middle and turned her knees to water on the bedroom rug.

They went out into the cold bright day. That was the design of it now — not the dark club, not the hidden booth, but the ordinary daylight of a Sunday strip mall, where families pushed strollers past the windows and the sun lay flat and honest on the asphalt. Jade walked her into a coffee shop with her hand riding the bare skin at the small of Lisa's back where the tank had ridden up, and sat her at a table by the window — not hidden, never hidden — and fed her sips from her own cup and put her hand between Lisa's thighs under the table, over the denim, finding the seam, pressing until Lisa's knuckles went white on the edge of her chair and the hum of the plug rode up her spine like weather coming. A woman at the next table looked over, and Jade met her eyes and smiled, slow and sure, and did not move her hand, and Lisa felt the mortification crest and break inside her like a wave and leave something strange and quiet underneath it: this was what she was. This was who she had become, in the only country that had ever granted her citizenship. The woman looked away, and Jade leaned in and kissed the corner of her mouth and said, low, "You're the prettiest thing in this room and everyone in it knows whose you are," and Lisa believed her, and the believing was its own surrender.

In the parking lot, with the cold air biting the heat off her skin and the plug a live thing inside her, Jade walked her to the far row, where the cars thinned out, and turned her and bent her over the hood of her own car — jeans around her thighs, the cold metal jumping against her belly — and spanked her bare in the open daylight, ten of them, hard and loud, the sound of each one carrying across the empty rows like a handclap. Two cars over a man sat in his truck with the engine running, and he was watching, and Jade let him watch, and Lisa counted into the cold air with her voice shaking and did not stop counting, because stopping was the one country she no longer knew how to live in. Jade pulled her up and turned her and thumbed the tank down off one shoulder, baring her small breast to the daylight, to the man in the truck, to the whole bright ordinary morning, and the cold hit her nipple and she gasped and Jade held her there a long moment, looking at her the way a person looks at the thing they have wanted longest and finally own.

"See?" Jade said, soft, tucking the fabric back up, adjusting the collar at Lisa's throat with hands that were suddenly, impossibly gentle. "He wanted you dead to him. And here you are. Alive in the daylight, wearing my name, everyone who looks at you knowing exactly what you are."

And Lisa stood in the cold with her ass stinging and the plug humming and the collar warm against her pulse, and across the far end of the lot, past the last row of cars, she saw the sedan again — the same make, the same idling patience, the same small glint of glass catching the sun where a lens would be — and she felt the old stone settle into her chest where she kept it, and she said nothing, and she let Jade help her into the passenger seat, and the belonging, even with the watcher at the edge of the lot, was the only freedom she had ever been given.