Unwrapped by The Billionaire by Joanna Nicholson (51)

Warning

This book is intended for adult readers, 18+ years old. Please close this e-book if you are not comfortable reading adult content.

Chapter 1

Vanessa counted the streetlights as the bus roared forward on the main thoroughfare of the suburban sprawl where she was raised. Two, four, six, eight, ten. She lost count as they spattered light into the darkened bus while nightfall spilled across the sky outside. Usually Vanessa’s journeys on public transportation were limited to the sheltering light of daytime. Her six-year-old sister’s recent epilepsy diagnosis confined the convenience of the bus to times when the jittering of excess light wouldn't spur a fit or a seizure. These were the things she had to think about, the little details that swoop in to disarm you when you think you’ve got everything together. She’d had to step up in the last year, to assume the role of Mother, Father, Sister, Provider.

As Vanessa gazed out the window, she could feel shards of her old life nicking her from across the landscape of her consciousness. Independence was something distant to her now, something illusory. She’d forgotten the boundless, untethered feeling of something as simple as going to the grocery store by herself, the exhalation of autonomy swirling in the air around her. She’d taken the first twenty years of her life for granted, living as a normal child in a regular suburb with ordinary parents and a lackluster view of her own sovereignty. Now the memories of her parents being alive, cooking dinner, helping with homework, mopping floors… it all seemed jumbled inside Vanessa’s head, memories mingled with dreams in the same far-fetched, mental mirage.

It’s human nature to think that the death of one’s parents—the irreversible scorching away of a person’s fundamental support system—is the ultimate tragedy in life, especially for a young person without a life of their own yet. But somehow, for Vanessa, this wasn’t true. She didn’t know if it was just in her case or if everyone went through this—if it were some sort of rite of passage for everyone whose parents were ripped right out of their lives—but the aftermath was what really stung. Sure, receiving the news that she’d never again see her mother and father was devastating—worse than devastating, a cataclysm of every child’s worst fears rolled into one burst of anguish—but she only had to receive the news once. One time, and then it was over.

What wasn’t over? The stillness in their bedroom. The dust collecting on her mother’s books. The runaway follicles in her father’s horsehair brush. Their toothbrushes, side by side, never to be used again.

Vanessa woke up every morning hoping for the pain to ease, for reality to seem more normal, for the grief to subside, for Emma to understand. And yet every day, Vanessa was faced with more uncertainty, more bereavement, more despair. Emma was still a small child, and her disability branded her with an extra layer of frailty that Vanessa couldn’t seem to shelter. Being an orphan at the blink of an eye, being a parent, having to raise a child alone, bearing the weight of disability… these were all nearly unbearable realities to live out on their own. But for Vanessa, they were all sides of the same die thrown onto the board game of her life. She was all of these things, all at once.

Tonight Vanessa looked down in horror at an empty box of tampons staring back at her. Normally she remembers to pick up all her essentials during the day, when Emma’s in school. But these are seas that Vanessa is still learning to navigate: the uncharted waters of remembering everything all the time. Under the weight of what day the water company takes out the monthly bill from her checking account, the strain of learning to cook more than frozen pizza, and the feeling of treading water professionally, forgetting to pick up tampons on her way home to get Emma seemed like a tidal wave that would capsize the ship she’s trying to steer through the bluster that’s become her life.

Leaving Emma with her next-door neighbor, Vanessa decided to take the bus rather than ride her bike to the store. It was getting late, the darkness felt prohibitive and uninviting… and selfishly, Vanessa just wanted to feel what it was like to be chauffeured again. Her life had become so unrecognizably complicated in the year since her parents’ death that the notion of sitting in a seat and being driven to a destination felt almost unreachably luxurious.

When the stoplights didn’t beam themselves into the bus with the same speed, Vanessa glanced over at the doors of the bus. As they opened to accommodate new passengers, a face from a few years back illuminated itself in familiarity: the dimpled smile of a cheerleader from her high school named Talisha. Though they never really talked—just shared a few classes together—Talisha’s face lit up as she noticed Vanessa and approached her with what seemed like excitement.

Internally Vanessa groaned. She didn’t want to talk to anyone. She didn’t want to get wrapped in a blanket of nostalgia for a time that seemed like eons ago—a life that she can’t even remember now under the weight of her almost immobilizing responsibilities. All she wanted was to look out the window for a few minutes, to feel the serenity of solitude, the luxury of loneliness. All day long she catered to customers and all night long she entertained the babble of her kid sister. Vanessa just needed a few minutes to herself, just a little bit of privacy… but apparently that wasn’t in the cards tonight.

“Hey,” Talisha said warmly, sitting in the seat next to Vanessa.

“Hi,” Vanessa said, reluctantly picking up her head from the window of the bus and sitting up straight.

“How are you doing?” Talisha asked in what seemed like a genuine tone.

“Fine,” Vanessa quipped, unsure of whether Talisha was just making small talk, or if she knew about Vanessa’s parents.

“That’s good…” Talisha said, dropping her tone. “I, uh… I saw the news report last year. I’ve been thinking about you,” she said, looking Vanessa in the eye. “I didn’t know how to reach out, or even if I should… so I didn’t. We didn’t really know each other in school, but when something like that happens, it’s instinctual to want to do something, to say something, to let the person know you care…”

“That’s all right,” Vanessa said sharply. Talisha was picking at the scab of a wound that had taken months to clot.

“Well, okay,” Talisha said, aware of the awkward energy she’d brought with her into the bus, the vapor of social clumsiness floating between them. “So,” she began in an effort to change the subject, “you’re in law school, right?”

“I was,” Vanessa sighed. It was becoming clearer each second that Talisha wouldn’t let up, that she was too curious to realize how her meddling was making Vanessa feel. “I had to drop out to care for my sister,” Vanessa admitted quietly, rolling the corners of her paper bus pass between her thumb and forefinger.

“Oh God,” Talisha said, putting a hand to her mouth. “Oh, I’m so sorry. That must… be… hard…” Her voice drifted off and neither of them said anything for a few seconds. “What are…” Talisha began, unsteadily. “What… are you doing for money right now?”

“Well,” Vanessa began with an even deeper sigh, hoping to indicate to her socially tone-deaf seatmate that she clearly didn’t want to discuss any of this, that her entire life had become a bubbling cauldron of anxiety, that she was just trying to enjoy a rare moment of peace. “I work part-time at a restaurant. I’d like to work some more, but my sister needs someone home with her at night.”

“Oh,” Talisha said, inhaling deeply. “Well, that’s, um… that’s too bad.”

“Yeah,” Vanessa said in an attempt to sever the conversation, turning her head to the window once again.

“You know,” Talisha said, stiffening in her seat, “I’m, uh… I’m working at a nightclub now. As a waitress. It’s not too difficult, you don’t need any skills, just connections. I could hook you up, if you think you’d be able to work a few nights a week.”

Vanessa wanted to roll her eyes. A waitress, she thought to herself, yeah right. She could remember a time when the passable word was “dancer,” the word they all used to refer to the profession with a hint of playful whimsy, a lighthearted wink toward something otherwise scathing and low-class.

“No thanks,” Vanessa said, never letting her eyes stray from the window.

“It’s not what you think,” Talisha said immediately, a little too defensive to be taken seriously.

“I know what it is,” Vanessa said, turning to Talisha as the bus slowed. “I’m not interested, and even if I was, I can’t leave a six-year-old at home alone,” she replied, grabbing her purse from beneath the seat.

“Here, take my number,” Talisha said, scribbling seven digits on the back of a receipt she fished out of her purse. “Think about it, okay? It may be difficult at first, but… the money is,” Talisha broke out into a grin, “I mean, it’s insane.”

Vanessa glared at Talisha with a steely indifference, too thoroughly exhausted to give her any more attention. “This is my stop,” she muttered, reluctantly taking the receipt and crumpling it into her back pocket as she scooted out of the seat and out of the bus, into the crisp November night.

Chapter 2

Emma laid her head on Vanessa’s shoulder as she was carried through the darkness from Jessica’s house. She’d fallen asleep on her neighbor’s couch waiting for her big sister to come back for her. Even though she wanted to stay up and play with Vanessa, Emma couldn’t keep her eyes open anymore. With her legs wrapped around Vanessa’s torso and her arms hung around Vanessa’s neck, Emma floated off into a dreamy landscape of bright pink and sunny yellow as she was rocked into slumber by the lumbered gait of her big sister walking them home.

Once Vanessa laid Emma in her bed upstairs, the first part of her night was over. Then came the following acts. Tidying up the explosion of art supplies her baby sister had strewn across the living room floor. Washing the dishes that had been sitting in the sink since last night, the baking pans and mixing bowls left after baking brownies for Emma on the grounds that they needed “to soak,” though even Vanessa knew she was lying to herself. She just didn’t feel like doing anything else yesterday. Each day came barreling at her, throwing her more than she could handle, and every day she just ran on what felt like a treadmill of progress, exhausting herself with the doldrums of daily life, but never getting anywhere.

And this is how it manifested itself: a house in chaos, with dolls face-planted on the floor, their clothes in a trail of disarray behind them. Crumbs of food were ground into the floor, as the only time that Vanessa had to vacuum was when Emma was asleep. Dirty laundry piled up in heaps in the laundry room adjacent to the kitchen, moaning to be put in the wash. Clean clothes begging to be folded spilled over off the chair where Vanessa’s father used to read the paper when she was Emma’s age. Envelopes snaked across the kitchen counter in various colors: a rainbow of tension between bill collectors and Vanessa that ranged from the standard eggshell hue to an anxious, suspenseful red. With a sigh which racketed through her body, she glanced at the pile of unopened bills, not ready to face the magnitude of the final notices, the threats of discontinued service, the looming reality that utilities could be shut off at any moment.

Vanessa knew she needed to get some sleep. Tomorrow she’d have to miss another shift to take Emma to an emergency doctor’s appointment, one set up at the very last minute to assess the progression of her epilepsy. Emma’s condition sat wobbling on a threshold of increasing severity. Her health was declining rapidly in the wake of her parents’ death. A mental torment that only Vanessa could understand was rippling through Emma, causing her to seize twice as often, and at seemingly nothing. No trigger could be found, no cause could be located. One minute Emma was a normal six-year-old girl, drawing on the floor and wiping stray hairs from her face. The next Vanessa would see her trembling, unable to control her spasms, jerking and rolling.

The slow fade of Emma’s decline unleashed distressing variables into an already complicated equation for Vanessa, but there was a silver lining among the clouds that hung over their future: if Emma’s epilepsy could be proven by her doctor to be a significant financial hardship, Vanessa could apply for a government-funded grant which would pay for all of Emma’s medical care going forward. In the wake of what felt like insurmountable tragedy, this was a glimpse of hope that Vanessa couldn’t afford to let pass them by. She needed that help—in the wake of all that had happened, Vanessa could feel with every cell in her body, every firing of her synapses that finally, truly, some good luck was on the way.

She got to work washing dishes, scrubbing the waterlogged bits of baked brownie from the glass pan that her mother would always use for green bean casserole. Vanessa’s mind was dotted with the memories of Thanksgivings and Christmases, intimate family gatherings with home-cooked meals and laughs by lamplight. She still smelled her mother’s hairspray, still whiffed her father’s aftershave lotion. Despite the fact that Emma tore the house to pieces every day—astounding Vanessa with just how much mess such a small person could make—the house where they both spent their childhoods felt hollow, scooped-out. Without their parents, it was nothing more than a cracked shell of misfortune, a temporary shelter until the debts finally and inevitably swallowed her whole.

Chapter 3

Aaron Ridley was standing in a patch of sun as it stretched across the drab, gray carpet of his office. He had only just been awoken from a morning nap by Desiree, his secretary. For some reason, the mug of coffee she’d made for him when he arrived at the office didn’t seem to do the trick for his energy levels. His hands were lodged firmly in his pockets now, and he stood by the window as the sun rays danced along the tanned, caramel hue of his skin. He loomed over most people with his imposing six-foot, two-inch frame, intimidating most new acquaintances with a blend of his authoritative role in his father’s company, his laundry list of credentials, and his smooth croon like a pebble dragging across gravel. But before anyone had the clearance to reach that level of familiarity, they had to bolt through the barriers of his eyes: two sharp and sunlit lakes, glimmering at everyone who glanced his way.

Men found Aaron daunting and dispiriting, while women found him mysterious and irresistible. Aaron found most everyone—regardless of gender—to be weak-willed and uninspiring. Though he’d grown up in a whirlwind of unspeakable privilege as the son of a wildly successful businessman, Aaron always longed for a simpler life; for the raw grit of reality. Wealth felt plastic to him, as if life itself were counterfeit. He felt as though if something could be bought, it wasn’t real in the first place. Everything Aaron ever had was purchased with his father’s success, his family name, or the company card. His whole life felt manufactured, acquired by artificial sources of engineered authenticity.

Aaron thought of Charlie, his father, languishing at home, fed at intervals by a team of hospice nurses. Something had overtaken Charlie in recent months, bubbled up within him with increasing severity. Some poison had swallowed his body, rendering him mostly useless. Doctors couldn’t explain Charlie’s illness, so Aaron took over his father’s company as acting CEO. He’d always worked for Kümertech, but only in the shadows. Mr. Lee had always been Charlie’s right hand, his Vice President and clear successor at some point in the unsketched, foggy future. And yet, Charlie began to groom Aaron to take over, which he did rather reluctantly, as an only child not wanting to disappoint his father.

Today Aaron faced an impasse. The company his father built—the company that gilded Aaron’s childhood with prosperity—was tanking with unprecedented ferocity. Stocks were deflating, investors were pulling out. The company itself seemed to be imploding for reasons that Aaron couldn’t bear to accept. Staring out the window, watching the ordinary people walk on the pavement below, Aaron envied them their humdrum lives and their money problems. He’d never worried about the balance in his bank account in his life, but with that security came a certain blasé, waxy mindset. Aaron felt like he’d missed out on something, some subset of emotional intelligence that came along with day-to-day struggle. Today was the first time Aaron would have a quarterly meeting without his father’s attendance. At today’s meeting with the investors, he had a prime opportunity to undo it all, to join the ranks of the regular people, to collapse his company and start fresh in a life he’d always wanted.

Desiree cleared her throat and tapped a red-soled pump behind him. Aaron turned, not realizing she’d slipped into his office as he drifted off in his daydreaming.

“You’re already five minutes late to the pre-meeting briefing,” she barked, her cleavage trembling with every move she made. “Mr. Lee is getting into one of his moods again.”

Aaron stared at Desiree blankly, wondering why she insisted on dressing that way. She was a gorgeous woman, but she laid on this shellac of sex appeal that was almost blinding. She, just like everything else in his life, was so unnaturally manufactured.

“Okay,” he replied, his tone lackluster and bored. Sighing, he took a step toward the door, rubbing a spot on his thigh with his left hand. Under his slacks, an irritation kept pinging Aaron with nips of pain, stemming from a wound he wasn't sure how he wound up with in the first place. He winced as he patted the spot on his thigh, sparking concern on Desiree’s face. He ignored her, motioning that he’d exit the office after she did.

“Hey, Desiree,” he said lightly. “Was the coffee you made this morning decaf, by any chance?”

“Oh,” she replied, taken aback. “I’m so sorry. Mr. Lee made that pot of coffee just before I walked in. Only one cup left. I just brought it to you...I had no idea it might have been decaf, sir.”

“That’s okay,” Aaron said back to her. “Can you do me a favor and make some fresh coffee? I’ll need it after this meeting.”

“Of course, Mr. Ridley.”

Desiree was walking fast, click-clacking along the tile with her designer pumps and sashaying in her vacuum-packed dress. Aaron looked at her not with lust, but rather with confusion. Didn’t that hurt? Wouldn't it be uncomfortable to be so sucked in, so compressed?

Too lost in the fogginess of the day that loomed before him, Aaron nearly smashed right into Desiree in front of him as she gasped in disgust, her body dripping with a milky brown syrup. A girl kneeled on the floor picking up spilled lettuce leaves and tomato slices, mopping up excess salad dressing with her hands. She was wearing a uniform from Reynold’s—the restaurant that usually catered meetings with investors. Her sneakers were skidding across the floor as she jerked to clean her mess as quickly as possible. A visor covered her down-turned face.

Aaron moved Desiree aside and knelt down beside the girl. She refused to stop moving or meet his gaze.

“Hey,” he said, resting a hand on her shoulder.

“I’m so sorry,” she stammered, jolting from one movement to another, trying to erase her idiotic mistake.

“Hey,” Aaron whispered, smiling. “Hey, there’s nothing to be sorry about. Accidents happen. You don’t have to do this,” he assured the girl, who moved like a frightened rabbit in captivity. “We have custodians on staff for this.”

The girl looked up at Desiree, whose eyes were burning into the top of her head with fury. “You should really watch where you’re going,” Desiree snapped, reluctantly wiping her hands down her torso. “I hope you know that I’ll be sending an invoice to your manager for the cost of this dress. You’ve ruined it.”

“Desiree,” Aaron whispered, helping the girl to her feet. “There’s no need for that.” He was calm, his kindness balanced out the hatred that rang through Desiree’s voice and down the hall, reverberating around them in torrid tension.

“But this is a designer dress, Aaron!” Desiree protested. “What, do you think I’m made of money?! Someone has to cover this damage. There’s no such thing as a—”

“Desiree,” Aaron said sharply, interrupting her. His eyes were cutting through her, exposing her to the clot of onlookers as the shrill bitch she was framing herself to be. Aaron raised his eyebrows as if he were speaking to a small child and said in a measured tone, “It was an accident. Now if you feel uncomfortable about the stain on your dress, you’re welcome to go home and change. I don’t want to hear another word about this from you. Are we clear?”

Mortified, Desiree nodded and quickly clomped away, hanging her head. An older man in his late fifties poked his head out from a doorway to survey the commotion. “Aaron,” he bellowed down the hallway. “What are you doing? It’s time for the briefing!”

Aaron stared at the man for about ten piercing seconds. His blue eyes shot down the hallway, freezing the man with a laser beam of indifference. “I’ll be right there,” Aaron said, only slightly raising his voice. He was cool, totally free of worry or strife. “Have I met you?” He asked the girl, turning to face her. “Have you delivered to us before?”

“No,” she said, looking down at her untied shoelace, at the mess it made. “They, uh… they just put me on delivery for this week. The girl who normally delivers is out on jury duty.”

“I see,” Aaron said, taking his billfold from his back pocket. “What do we owe you?”

“Oh, sir, I can’t take your money. I dropped everything,” the girl said with panicked eyes.

“Well, that’s honorable of you,” Aaron said, slipping two hundred-dollar notes into her shirt pocket. “…but I insist.”

Unsure of how to handle the situation, the girl sighed, radiating nervousness. Finally she turned her face upwards to return his gaze and found herself visibly stirred, caught in the rising tide of the ocean in his eyes.

“What’s your name?” Aaron asked, smiling.

“Vanessa,” she replied, in a trance.

Chapter 4

The interaction was on repeat in Vanessa’s mind—reeling and rewinding, flashing back and forth in time. How could she have been so stupid? Why didn’t she check that her shoes were tied before she walked in? And more to the point, why was her shoe untied, anyway? Never in her life had that happened to her, the knot coming apart as she walked. Why then? Why at that time?

Vanessa couldn’t get him out of her head: that stunning man, his kindness, his quiet and smoldering sex appeal. It was disgraceful enough to have ruined that woman’s dress, but to make such a mistake in front of such a powerhouse of a man? The ordeal felt to Vanessa like a mosquito bite: painful and irritating, yet unable to leave alone.

Anxiety drummed through her when she thought about what she’d tell her boss. She was already on thin ice at work. Her personal life had spilled over into her performance on the job on numerous occasions, and Vanessa could feel the patience of her managers slipping more and more every shift. Each walk across the parking lot to the restaurant felt like she was walking to her own execution. How could she tell her supervisor that she’d dropped the entire tray of food to be delivered? That she’d spilled salad dressing all over a woman’s dress? And then, worst of all, that the CEO of the company gave her money for this blunder?

These were where her thoughts went—wild and torrential, unable to be contained—on the bus ride back to the restaurant from her delivery. She took the longer route, the one with a few different transfers, just to elongate her shift, to make this leisurely time of midday privacy bend in the light. Vanessa could feel the stress humming through her, but she simply had to sigh and put her fears to bed. It’s counterproductive to worry, she told herself. You already have so many things to worry about. Don’t add another one to the list.

Today was just a short shift anyway. Her sister’s appointment was at two o’clock in the afternoon, and Vanessa needed time to take the bus across town, pick Emma up early from kindergarten, and take the bus in another direction across the suburb to the doctor’s office. What should be a fifteen-minute drive turns into a two-hour debacle of transfers, waiting times, and constant stops. This is life without a car: it feels like you’re always in transit, but getting there is a sluggish lurch through time.

To make the appointment on time, Vanessa would have to leave work by noon. It was 11:45 now, and the bus was nearing the restaurant. Just 15 more minutes, Vanessa told herself. Just 15 minutes, and then it’ll be over until tomorrow. The time will fly. It wasn’t that the job itself was difficult, or even completely unenjoyable, for that matter. It was the people. Vanessa’s co-workers were harsh and unfriendly, closed-off and uninviting. They looked at her as if she had a disease, as if they’d catch some sort of plague just by breathing the same air. Her manager, too, was draconian and exacting—always chiding Vanessa on even the smallest slipups. She didn’t belong there. She knew it, her co-workers knew it, her boss knew it. And yet, Vanessa couldn’t afford to quit, and the manager couldn’t find a valid enough reason to fire her.

Vanessa walked back into work, puffed up by the miniature pep talk she gave herself on the bus. It was 11:55 now. All Vanessa had to do was walk in the restaurant, piddle with something for a few minutes to look busy, then leave. Only five minutes, she thought again to herself, walking across the foyer and through the dining room of the restaurant, where she was immediately face-to-face with her manager, a hard-faced, stern-looking woman named Christina. “Come to the office,” Christina quipped, shooting daggers of anxiety through Vanessa. What was happening? Was she in trouble? Christina couldn’t have possibly known about the delivery. There’s no way. Fear flitted through Vanessa’s mind as she followed wordlessly into the office behind Christina, awaiting whatever axe was about to swing down on her.

“I just got a call from a woman named Desiree,” Christina said sharply after closing the door to the broom-closet-turned-office-space in the back corner of the restaurant. “Is there anything you want to tell me?”

The clock was ticking on the wall behind Christina, the hands dancing with each other in the solid and unending march of time. Vanessa needed to leave in exactly one minute. Tension gripped her. What if she couldn’t get out of work in time? If she missed even one bus connection, the entire afternoon would be ruined. Emma’s doctors were clear about their schedules: no latecomers to any appointment. If Vanessa couldn’t get Emma to her appointment on time, it would be canceled and rescheduled for weeks in the future. Everything hinged on this moment, on Vanessa being able to leave work, catch her buses, and get Emma to the doctor for her evaluation. That was all that mattered.

“Do you have anything you want to tell me?” Christina demanded.

Vanessa gulped, glaring at the clock behind her manager. “No,” she said, deciding that whatever punishment she received was going to have to happen. She could only stand here for thirty-seven more seconds until it was too late. Vanessa didn’t care if Christina yelled at her, gave her an undesirable shift, cut her hours, or wrote her up. None of that mattered. Only Emma mattered. Only this evaluation.

Christina sighed. “Are you sure there’s nothing you want to tell me?”

Vanessa glared at her, willing the time to stop. “Christina, there’s nothing to say. The delivery went fine. I don’t know who this Desiree person is. I don’t know what she told you that makes you think I did something, but you’ve got to believe me.”

Christina locked eyes with Vanessa, sighing again. “You’re lying to me,” she sliced through the air with a voice like razor blades. “Desiree is the personal secretary to the CEO of Kümertech. That’s our largest and most loyal customer. Do you know how many years we’ve been delivering to them?” Christina shouted at Vanessa, who watched in horror as the clock struck 12:01.

“No, but Christina, you’ve got to believe me,” Vanessa stammered, noting each passing second with agony. “Whatever she said I did, she’s lying!”

“She wouldn’t lie to us. She’s been ordering catering from us for four years,” Christina snapped back, getting in Vanessa’s face. “You, however, have only been working here for a few months. I never should have hired you. You’re lazy, you’re inconsistent with your work, your mind is always elsewhere. You’re always asking to leave early, and you never work the night shift. What good are you? What else could be so important to you? Why even have a job if you’re not going to give it your all?”

Vanessa held back tears. She never wanted to tell her manager about the untimely death of her parents, that she’d had to care for Emma, that she dropped out of law school to work in a restaurant because it was her only choice. Vanessa didn’t want the pity. She didn’t want the scarlet letter of weakness. She didn’t want to be The Girl With The Dead Parents. And yet, the pressure mounted up around her; suffocating her with the vapor of demand in everyday life. One day, in a swirl of tension, she cracked. The truth came bleeding out, confession by confession, to her manager’s face. Christina glazed over with nonchalant indifference.

Today, and every day since she’d revealed her plights to her manager, there was no winning in Vanessa’s situation. She’d either be the girl everyone pitied, or the girl everyone considered lazy.

“Christina,” she sniffled, the mental dam blocking her tears on the edge of bursting, “you know my situation. How could you say I’m lazy? Don’t you understand how hard each day is for me?” It was no use to hide the tremors that snaked through her vocal folds at this point. She was collapsing again; keeling over in the ocean of her own anguish.

“Vanessa,” sighed Christina. “It’s hard. I know. I understand that your parents died last year, that you are the sole caretaker and guardian of your little sister, that you are doing it all on your own. I get it,” she lectured. “But there comes a point in time when you have to just move on. You have to grow up, you have to do what’s required of you. You can’t play the victim forever. It’s not the company’s responsibility to cater to you. You’re here to work.” Her words were jagged and blistering in their cruelty.

Vanessa couldn’t hear anymore. Her mind was melding shut with the glue of this malice that Christina spewed so effortlessly at her. It was now or never to get Emma to her appointment on time. That was the only thing that mattered.

“My shift is over,” Vanessa said, forlornly looking at the clock. 12:05. The bus comes at 12:06, on the dot. “I have to go. Right now,” she said, her voice quavering.

“Of course,” Christina roared back at her. “When things get hard, you just want to leave. Let me tell you something, Vanessa. You’re not cut out for this job. Go ahead, but don’t bother coming back. We can find someone much less lazy and more personable than you. Get out.”

Vanessa didn’t have time to process what she’d just heard. What mattered most was utilizing the minute or so that she did have, the precious time that she needed to catch this first bus from work. It ran every fifteen minutes, meaning that if she missed this one, she’d most certainly miss her transfers across town. There was no choice but to make it on time. Emma’s appointment would come and go if she couldn’t manage to take this specific bus.

Running maniacally, Vanessa could see the bus as it rolled to the small glass hut at the stop across the street. She could hear the hissing of the door opening. She took in the rumbling of the engine as it sat idle for a few seconds, passengers creeping on and scanning their tickets. Cars were racing across the four lanes of traffic, so fast and unstoppable that Vanessa couldn’t manage to run across to the bus stop. She clenched her fists and waited with billowing impatience for the light to turn red, for the walk sign to illuminate, for even the tiniest beacon of good luck. Maybe the card reader on the bus would malfunction. Maybe an elderly person would move slowly getting on board, causing the bus driver to wait until everyone was seated to pull away. Maybe a line of passengers snaked along the side of the bus that Vanessa couldn’t see.

As Vanessa wrapped herself in fantasy, hoping and wishing that she could magically transport herself across the street, she heard the grumble of an engine waking from a temporary nap. The doors whirred to a close and the bus began to shake with motion. Cars slowed to a halt on the street and the walk sign lit itself, but it was already too late. The bus—Vanessa’s one hope toward a possible reprieve of her financial woes—was rolling off, away, into the distance.

Sighing, Vanessa’s eyesight began to blur. Tears bloomed in her eyes, clouding everything around her in nondescript, unshakable despair. She missed the bus. She’d miss the appointment. She’d have to shoulder the already impossible burden of her little sister’s medication for even longer while she waited for the appointment to be rescheduled. Now, because of all of this—all of the weight she had to carry, all of the responsibilities that she couldn’t handle alone—Vanessa was out of a job.

Fishing around in her pocket for her phone, Vanessa reached into the back pocket of her unwashed jeans, where the receipt from last night still sat. She fumbled with the buttons on her phone and called the number as cars began to speed up around her, jetting off under the trail of green lights on the street. The air smelled like gasoline, and it felt like she was breathing in red dust from the tires of the cars.

“Talisha?” Vanessa asked into the phone, her voice shaking with desperation. “It’s Vanessa.”

Chapter 5

Mr. Lee did most of the talking. “You’ll have to excuse our new CEO,” he gushed to the investors in his fake, buttery tone. “His father, the founder, is incapacitated right now.” A hush of sympathetic noises scissored through the air of the room as investors nodded in Aaron’s direction, offering their condolences on an event that hadn’t even occurred yet. Aaron said nothing, glaring at Mr. Lee.

As the meeting churned along, Mr. Lee’s charisma and charm saturated his words. His talk of stocks and profits were lustrous with wild and fantastical claims that Kümertech would see an upsurge in prosperity in the near future. Mr. Lee illustrated a picture of success that only existed in his mind: this whimsical, sunny view of the company’s expansion that thoroughly bored Aaron, almost conspicuously so. He was thinking about that girl, about the way she had only one dimple when she smiled, about the curve of her face and the tattoo behind her ear. Vanessa, she said her name was. Vanessa from Reynold’s.

A surge of energy raged through Aaron. It felt like someone had injected him with a drug, a pang of euphoria gone intrinsically awry. He was sitting at the head of the table, toward the back wall of the conference room. All the investors were paying attention to Mr. Lee, who was too wildly concerned with promoting this idyllic fantasy of where the company would be in the next fiscal year to notice that Aaron had begun shaking. Trying his best to minimize his distress and not completely foil the meeting, he brought a hand to his face, only to discover that his nose was beginning to drip blood. As his shivers grew into full-body convulsions, heads began to turn toward the back of the room, much to Mr. Lee’s chagrin. Aaron was jerking and jolting, barely retaining the strength to sit up anymore.

“He’s seizing!” one of the investors cried out. “Someone pry his mouth open!”

Just then, Aaron thudded to the floor, unable to understand what was happening to him. Mr. Lee walked over to where he was writhing on the ground. “Let’s all give Mr. Ridley some privacy. Please, everyone, clear out of the room,” he said, his voice caked over with gentility. “I’ll call 911, and stay with him until the paramedics arrive.”

Dutifully the investors obeyed, immediately evacuating the room and pooling outside the closed door with a cloud of curious murmuring, whispers about what could have possibly overtaken Aaron so swiftly, and at seemingly nothing at all. In what felt like just a matter of moments, Mr. Lee appeared again, a smile dotting the landscape of his genteel face. “Mr. Ridley has asked that we all reconvene sometime next week,” he said in a saccharine tone. “I’m sure you can all understand.”

The investors puffed out and away, awash in concern for Aaron. Behind the closed doors of the conference room—in what felt like a completely different world—Aaron’s eyes were clenched shut. An empty syringe lay on the floor besides him, and his face was white with pressure. It felt like a watermelon was growing inside his stomach—gripping his insides and expanding with rapid force—and all Aaron could do was lie down and take the waves of discomfort.

* * *

Aaron didn’t know what came over him. His thigh radiated pain from a small wound he didn't remember sustaining, but aside from that, he was fully functional. To have been disabled on the floor during the investors meeting seemed incomprehensible to him, so much so that he wondered if he’d just daydreamed the whole ordeal. He was totally fine now, to the point that he actually wondered if some part of him was slipping, going insane with the grief of his father’s slow and unending decline. He was sitting at his desk, completely exhausted. “Desiree,” he said into the phone on his desk after dialing her extension, “please bring me some black coffee.”

A few moments later she appeared with a mug, the steam dancing through the air and around her as she walked toward Aaron’s desk. “Anything else?” she asked him, getting a little too close. She smelled like chemically engineered flowers.

“No, just… thank you. Oh, please hold all my calls. I need some privacy right now.” He said, sipping the coffee, not looking at her.

“Okay,” she said, her pumps clicking along the floor as she walked. “Oh,” she added, turning around to face him. “I called Reynold’s to cancel the invoice and let them know about their employee’s ineptitude.”

“You did what?” Aaron snapped, nearly spitting out his coffee.

“I… canceled the invoice,” Desiree laughed, incredulously. “We weren’t going to pay for food that ended up all over the floor, were we?” Her face was twisted into a look of unmatched skepticism, her eyebrows raised with a skeptical smile across her lips.

Aaron inhaled, looking around his desk in agitation. “I specifically told you that we’d talk about it later,” he said, controlling his anger. “And you undermined me.”

Shocked, Desiree put a hand to her billowing cleavage. “Sir, I… I didn’t mean to undermine, you, I just… I wanted to save the company some money…”

“And yet you did undermine me. You deliberately disobeyed what I told you. You went behind my back, you called Reynold’s, and you probably cost that girl her job,” Aaron whispered, his voice laced with muted rage.

“Sir, I… you know I never meant to—”

“Desiree,” Aaron cut her off, shaking his head. “Desiree, you’re finished. If I can’t trust you in a situation as small as this one, how can I trust that you’ll carry out more important tasks for me?”

“Mr. Ridley,” Desiree began, more skeptical than worried. “Sir, you’re not thinking clearly. After your seizure earlier, I think it’s best that we just take a little bit of time and revisit this issue later. Now, in the meantime, I’m very, truly sorry for what happened.” She walked over to him, behind his desk and placed a hand on his shoulder. Leaning over to put her face to his, smirking her glossed lips, she continued, “I’m very, truly sorry. It’ll never happen again.” Her breasts quivered in front of him with every word she spoke.

Aaron turned away from her. “That’s incredibly unprofessional,” he quipped.

Desiree kept smirking, “You’ve never had a problem with it before.”

“I’ve always had a problem with it,” Aaron said, getting up from his chair and turning to the window. “I’ve never said anything about it, because to acknowledge it is part of the problem. But Desiree, it’s gone too far. Pack up your desk and go downstairs to HR. I’ll call them now to get your termination paperwork ready.” His hands were in his pockets and he had his back to her, lost in the air outside, in the to and fro of people walking on the sidewalk below.

“Mr. Ridley… I… I can’t believe this,” she replied in a voice shaken by consternation. “How can you do this to me? And just because I snapped at one girl? Why do you care so much about her? I’ve been your secretary for almost five years now. Shouldn’t that be significant to you?”

Aaron turned to face her. “Desiree,” he began in a lackluster tone. “Your incessant flirting with me, your subpar work performance, and your inability to follow even the simplest directions has led me to this decision. Don’t make it worse for yourself. Stop crying and follow directions for once.”

Desiree raced out of the room as her voice was swallowed by sobs. The sound waves ricocheted down the hallway as her weeping grew further and further away. Aaron sighed, standing in the silence of his office for a solid minute before picking up his office phone and dialing the number for Human Resources.

After the paperwork to terminate Desiree had been squared away, Aaron lingered at the window, realizing he didn’t have very long before his paperwork began to pile up and his meetings went unscheduled. Should I take a leave of absence? He pondered to himself, thinking of his father wilting in his hospital bed.

Aaron banished the idea almost as soon as it slipped through his mind. There was no way he could leave the entire company on Mr. Lee’s shoulders. Though he’d been working with Charlie at Kümertech since before Aaron was born, it was simply too much to ask that he should take over right now. Aaron didn’t have the budget to increase Mr. Lee’s salary, and there’s no way he’d take the job (even just temporarily) without a raise.

Sighing, Aaron took his cell phone from his pocket. Following a quick Google search, he placed a call and held the phone to his cheek, smearing mid-afternoon grease over the glass display.

“Thank you for calling Reynold’s, this is Christina, how can I help you?” a woman answered, flatly and rushed.

“Hello,” he replied, not knowing how to begin. “I… uh… is Vanessa there?”

The voice on the other end hesitated for a moment, faltering between keeping her professionalism in the forefront and decreasing her bubbling agitation. “Employees aren’t allowed to take personal calls at work,” Christina replied. “And anyway, we had to let Vanessa go today. What can I help you with, sir?”

Disconcerted, Aaron pressed on. “Oh, I’m… sorry to hear that. Listen,” he said, leaning to hold his phone with his shoulder and grabbing a pen from his desk, “…is it possible to give me her contact information? It’s imperative that I speak with her.”

“Sir, I’m sorry, but that’s a violation of our company policy,” Christina spat at him.

“I see,” Aaron replied, crestfallen.

Chapter 6

Vanessa’s misgivings about the job she’d signed up to do were on full blast in her mind, parading themselves across her brain with unyielding clarity. She had become nothing more than a stereotype, a monstrous hyperbole of the person she always pictured herself to be. With two dead parents and a small, disabled sister to care for, Vanessa turned to the only way she knew to get ahead in life: playing on the sensualities of men who have nothing better to do than to ogle at women on poles.

What choice did she have at this point? Her spat with Christina (or rather, the other way around) and the subsequent passing by of the bus she needed to catch caused her to miss Emma’s appointment. No evaluation from Emma’s pediatric epilepsy specialist meant no application for a grant. It struck Vanessa with such violent force of injustice that a simple piece of paper held so much relief; and the lack thereof caused an insurmountable bulk of strife. That piece of paper meant that she’d not only be able to equip her baby sister with the medical care she needed, but to fill her stomach with nutritious food, put clothes on her back, shoes on her feet, and heat her home in the winter. A flimsy piece of paper, at this point, spelled out the difference between prosperity and poverty.

And because Christina took the time to berate Vanessa, her fate toppled toward poverty.

Grappling with the reality that she was too late for the appointment, Vanessa realized at an instant that she’d be forced into this underworld of a profession alongside Talisha and her unsavory cronies. Before her first night on the job, Talisha had warned Vanessa that she probably needed to buy some new lingerie. The upfront expense would be a hit in the wallet, but it would pay for itself after a night or two of dancing.

“These men are hungry,” she told Vanessa, whose vague expression of distaste didn’t convince Talisha that this was the job for her. “They’re starving, and you want to be their favorite food.”

Vanessa still had the $200 that the CEO of Kümertech had slipped into her pocket two days beforehand. Standing on the street corner, just before she called Talisha, she’d had the idea to use it for a cab across town. She’d be able to pick up Emma from school, then take the busses to her appointment as planned. But then, of course, there was the empty refrigerator at home, mocking her. The bills, layered in various shades of pink distress, were covering the dining room table where the family used to sit down for dinner every night. Vanessa didn’t know what to do with the money, how best to spend it, or if she even had a right to keep it.

In the end, she realized that no decision she made would be the correct one. Vanessa’s life, at this point, felt like a steady stream of lose-lose situations, a lexicon of wrong answers to complex questions. The money wasn’t hers, but the CEO didn’t take no for an answer. She felt bad about keeping it, but then again, a part of her didn’t care. After losing her parents, losing her adulthood, becoming suddenly crushed by the weight of the responsibilities toppling onto her, two hundred dollars falling into her lap was the least of what she deserved. She wasn’t a martyr, not now, at least. Vanessa went shopping for a few cheap pieces of lacy lingerie she could wear on stage: flashy reds and smoldering blacks that would beckon men to slip money in the waistband much more than her ratty old underwear from her teenage years would.

Vanessa had worked out a deal with Jessica, their neighbor, to keep an eye on Emma during the nights that she’d have to work. The arrangement was shaky for the time being, not even Vanessa knew whether she’d be able to keep the gig. Would she be good enough? Would Talisha’s generosity be slammed back in her face by inadequacy? Vanessa felt ordinary, more like the girl who’d clean up the empty tumblers than the woman twisting herself sensually around a pole. With a head full of doubts converging into the tectonic plates of her insecurities, Vanessa made it seem like Jessica would only have to watch Emma for a few nights before the inevitable burnout, the unavoidable firing.

Riding the bus to the strip club where Talisha instructed her to be—the only one in town—at nine o’clock, Vanessa felt more unlike herself than she ever had. It felt as though the sharp, lacy lines of the lingerie were jutting through the simple boundary of her t-shirt, protruding in a way that was obvious to everyone. Her makeup was over the top, her hair was curled in bouncy ringlets. The glitter on her cheeks seemed to spell out HELLO, I AM A STRIPPER to all the bus passengers who snickered her way. Disgusted with herself, with her dead-end decisions, with the house of cards her life had become, Vanessa just glared out the window, counting the street lights once more, hoping that the constant stop and start of the vehicle wouldn’t totally expel her bike from where it was hooked onto the portable bike rack on the outside of the bus.

* * *

The lights seared Vanessa’s skin. The pole was smeared with the grease and shame and grit of other dancers, all cavorting to the tune of their own desperation. The way the men gawked—mouths agape—felt like a different kind of light all its own, casting shadows across her body. It began as a sheepish, timid foray into an underworld that was unknown to Vanessa, a world where sensuality collided with power. In her first few moments on stage, she faltered in how to move, forgetting almost how to walk. But then with a few notes of a new song, something awakened in her. Vanessa harnessed all the pain, the grief, the agony, and the anger of her parents being gone, leaving her with this life, and used it to propel herself forward. She was a powerhouse, turning the tables on the men who felt as though they were the ones who held the lightning bolts in the dynamic.

“Where did you learn to dance like that?” Talisha asked, astonished, in between dances during Vanessa’s first night on the job. “The club’s owner nearly fell over, she was so shocked that I hadn’t brought you in sooner!”

“She?” Vanessa replied, perplexed. “A woman owns the strip club?”

“Oh, yeah,” Talisha said with a smirk. “Don’t get too excited. She might as well be a man, if you know what I mean.”

Chapter 7

Aaron felt stale inside. He felt as though he’d been cut along his spine in his sleep and flipped inside out, his insides roasted under the California sun. Between the seizure in the boardroom, Mr. Lee’s swift intervention, having to fire Desiree, and swirls of Vanessa permeating his mind, Aaron needed a break. He needed to make something happen. Something to shake him up inside. Something to take the power back. Something to regain control over his life, which was tumbling ever faster out of his hands.

He needed a woman. He needed to feel the dips of her waist, the meat of her ass in his hands. It didn’t matter who. Aaron would be fine with a mannequin at this point, a doll, some faceless icon that he could use and throw away. He was too busy to date anyone, too mentally blocked to feel anything for anyone. That left him with the scraps of the ready-made sex industry: pornography, strippers, high-class escorts. This, too, tarnished Aaron’s mental landscape. If sexual contact was only a few crumpled banknotes away, then what was the point?

Normally, he would call an escort service and wait for a girl to show up. He’d pretend—in every way he could, every way he wanted—to love her for a few hours. He’d do whatever he wanted, wherever he wanted, however he wanted. He’d be so enraptured with this prostitute in a mask of elegance, but not because of her as a person. Because she was a walking, talking, breathing variable. He could configure her in any way he desired, filling any gaps he had in the equation of his life.

Tonight though, Aaron needed something different. He needed wind on his face. He needed to reactivate the dull, blunt tips of what used to be a sharp and glimmering lifestyle. He was fading, somehow, into a lesser version of himself. He needed to get out of this rut, to get his lust for life back.

Kümertech was headquartered in the suburbs outside of Los Angeles due to zoning restrictions and cheaper property rates back in the 1970s when Charlie Ridley founded the company. The Ridley family never bothered to move the company into the city, despite the fact that they lived in high-rises looking out over Manhattan Beach. Aaron spent most of his time in the suburbs, especially since his father fell ill. He couldn’t stand the sterile feeling of his father’s impending death seeping into his nostrils every time he went for a visit.

Thinly veiled by the guise that work took precedence, Aaron stayed in hotels close to his office building, living as the suburbanites did. He took his meals at family-style chain restaurants, filled his car with gas at one of the local mom-and-pop gas stations, and walked around the outdoor sprawl of shops that constituted a mall by suburban standards. He wanted to live like these people did. Aaron longed for normalcy, for ordinariness, for a life devoid of quarterly reports and million-dollar revenues and designer suits and year-end galas.

After the events of the day, Aaron didn’t want to talk. He didn’t want to pursue. He didn’t even want to pick up the phone. He couldn’t quite understand what it was that he wanted. It was as though there was some kind of mental barrier between him and everything that he craved, all the dancing and glimmering happiness that he just didn’t have the mental fastidiousness to imagine. Driving aimlessly around the residential areas near his office in a suit that was at least three times the cost of the most expensive piece of menswear owned in the social climate of this place, Aaron saw a strip club in a parking lot off the main drag. Feeling like he had nothing to lose, he pulled in.

Immediately he recognized her. On stage, lilting around a pole with a smirk of steaminess across her face. What was she doing here? He wanted to go up to the stage, ask her to come down, to have dinner with him, to go back to his hotel suite and stay the night, but his reason took over. Who was she? And more importantly, why did he care so much?

It was late, already about half past midnight. The club was crowded for a Wednesday night, full of regular guys wearing wedding rings that glimmered under the strobe lights. Aaron kept second-guessing himself, questioning whether he was actually seeing the woman who kept flitting through his mind or whether it was some hallucination of her, some personification of the daydream haunting his reality.

She shimmered in the spotlight, and with a switch of her body around the pole, Aaron could see from across the room that this was the same woman from before. The timid, mortal girl who spilled salad all over the floor of his office building was now a goddess in the center of the room. Aaron saw the tattoo behind her ear—the one that had branded itself into his mind only a few hours earlier—and understood instantly that this was Vanessa, parading before him in full authenticity. A fantasy sprung to life.

Turning to get a drink, Aaron shouted an order to the bartender. “Whiskey sour,” he shouted over the pulse of the music through the club. With a nod, the bartender got to work, pouring and mixing, silently crafting a tumbler of overpriced, liquid courage. “Do you know where I can pay for a dance in a private room?” he added to a bartender who could barely hear him.

“You want a dance in a private room?” The bartender yelled back, distracted by the task at hand.

“Yeah, how do I arrange that?” Aaron bellowed across the bar.

“I’ll call the manager for you. She’ll be right here and you’ll organize it through her. Here’s that whiskey sour in the meantime.” He slid a napkin down in front of Aaron and placed the tumbler—already sweating in the dank muskiness of the club—in front of him.

With resolute eyes piercing across the distance to Vanessa, Aaron could barely contain himself. He had to keep switching positions, his pants were becoming tighter by the moment, with every new sway of her body. He wanted to drink her in—all of her—with a ferocity that he didn’t think he had the strength to feel after being in such a funk for so long. She had reawakened something in him this morning that was roaring even louder still right now, some piece of himself that he hadn’t encountered in years.

Aaron tapped his fingers on the bar when Vanessa’s song was over and she faded back into the wings of the stage, out of public view. Another girl was dancing now, but she (like the vast majority of women) bored Aaron. He downed his drink, feeling the instant shock of the whiskey plunder through his veins, the slick grease of relaxation sliding through his extremities.

The bartender returned in between songs, when an eerie stillness fell over the club and the patrons were left to reckon with their own whooping and hollering until the music blared again. “My manager will be right here,” he said with a nod. “Want another?”

“Sure,” Aaron replied flatly.

“What can I do for you, sir?” A husky voice melted through the air behind Aaron, who turned around to see a stocky, no-nonsense woman with greasy hair and ill-fitting jeans, which looked like they’d cut off her circulation if she sat down.

“Are you, uh, the manager?” Aaron asked in a futile attempt to mask his disbelief.

“Yes sir, I am. Ben told me that you wanted to organize a private dance?” The woman had a clipboard in her hand, as if she were a waitress asking him what he wanted for dinner.

The music pumped up again, engulfing them in an ocean of sound waves, vibrating the world around them and drowning out all logic. With a mind that was slowly eroding in the static of the alcohol, Aaron found himself inelegantly blurting, “That girl. The one who danced before. Vanessa.”

The manager frowned. “She’s off the clock, I’m afraid. That was actually her last dance for the night. I can put you down for a dance with Amber if you’d like.”

Aaron fished his money clip from his wallet and tossed a hundred-dollar bill onto the bar. “Keep the change,” he said to the bartender as he slammed his tumbler down and brushed past the manager, saying nothing more to her. He had to find Vanessa, to talk to her somehow, to breathe in her essence. Something about her was electrifying to him, the way that she gazed or moved or something. Aaron couldn’t place what it was, but she had cursed him somehow. He’d become addicted to her—in a way that didn’t even make sense to him—in the past few hours.

Chapter 8

"Want a ride home?" Talisha asked after their shifts were over.

"No, that's okay, but thank you. I really like riding home late at night. It's peaceful and breezy," Vanessa said with a smile. In actuality, she just wanted to be alone, if only for a few minutes. She wanted to inhale the freedom, the seclusion, the feeling that she was still a young woman whose life wasn’t crunched into a catastrophe she no longer recognized. She wanted the wind to whip along her back, propelling her forward as nothing else in her life seemed to be.

Vanessa wanted to escape Emma—even if just for the duration of a ride home—and she resented herself for it. Caring for a six-year-old was a full-time job in and of itself. Her constant need for attention and stimulation was overwhelming. Her little personality was so formidable that Vanessa needed to always walk the line between sensitivity and discipline, being on high alert at all times that anything she said or did could be picked up by her little sister. Vanessa always had to be ON. There was never a time to slack off, to rest, to relax.

Then of course, there was Emma’s epilepsy, piled high on top of all the other ways that immediately having to care full-time for a kindergartener was weighing down on her. The missed doctor’s appointments, the cost of medications, the heart-palpitating fear that one day Emma might have a seizure in her sleep and choke to death: these were all ghosts that haunted Vanessa, day in and day out, hissing at her during still moments when the dust settled in her mind.

She mounted her bike—her main form of transportation after the bus stopped running for the night—and rode off into the royal blue night. The commute home was pleasant, as she’d expected. There was something about using her own strength to propel her from point A to point B in the wake of her lifelong reliance on a motor vehicle back when her parents were alive and before she’d had to sell their cars to make ends meet. She felt somehow superior, biking along in her endorphin-fueled high of smugness past rows of cars whose drivers have a pulse that's slowly just creeping along, and a disposition to match. Riding a bike felt like some well-kept secret that, even in the throes of poverty, Vanessa was able to cash in on. The wind blew and the sky was clear. Despite the looming threat of 1 a.m., the sky was still blue, and not completely black. She wore her headphones for the duration of the ride in spite of the muddled law around impaired hearing while cycling. As Vanessa sped through the navy nighttime nonchalance, "Rock Me Now" by Metric just felt right leaking into her ears.

She turned onto the street where she grew up, ignoring road signs and speeding through a neighborhood intersection that, in daylight hours, is usually occupied by minivans and sport utility vehicles but now, here, in this light (or lack thereof) looked like an abandoned strip of suburbia whose glory was lost with the setting of the sun. The lights of the gated entrance to Vanessa’s neighborhood were glittering measurably through the bars that separated it from the scathing outside world. Against the golden teasing of home beyond the gate, a shape was cast in shadow. Wheels were outlined and a body was sketched across the peripherals of the night, lurking in the lack of light in a way that pricked at something inside of her, some little plastic bag of bravery out of which dread and terror and trepidation spilled out, drop by horrified drop.

Vanessa got closer, her hopes resting in both the actions of the person on the bike to speed away kindly and the benefit of the doubt on her own part: there was nothing to fear here. It didn't matter that she was wearing a helmet and he was not. It didn't matter that she was in athletic wear and he was in jeans and an oversized, ill-fitting t-shirt. It didn't matter that she was on a $500 mountain bike (a relic of a past time, before all this tragedy) and he was rolling around on a kid's bicycle, flocked in neon colors and mock-cool graffiti letters. They were simply two human beings doing the same thing at the same time.

And yet, all girls are made to fear anyone more masculine than them. They're simply engineered to feel this way. From the moment they are born, they are instructed to fear the man. There are various shapes and sizes of men, and women are programmed to fear them all. They all want to hurt each and every woman, or so women are told. They all want to take a piece of the dainty femininity, to rob women of something, to engage in a sort of New Age scalping. They want to do women harm and should never, under any circumstances, be trusted.

Vanessa was mulling it over in her mind, in the span of the six or so seconds it took for her to roll down the street toward the gate to her neighborhood, toward the man on the other bike, toward a force field of danger and uncertainty that she wasn't entirely aware was there. She knew, sure, but she wanted to deny it, to write it off as fiction for her own sanity’s sake. Vanessa was so steadfast in her denial, so stubborn in her manual reboot of character analysis, that she didn't notice at first when he spoke to her. And then, in a slick spreading of the lips that she knew instantly would haunt her every time she rode home in the dark, he smiled at her with a set of teeth the color of the sky on an overcast day. The smile wasn't just a smile. It was an offer. A business deal. A proposition. It was every fast-talking, pinky-ring-wearing, New England car salesman rolled into a sinister gesture of the mouth. This smile wasn't the smile of a polite stranger. It was the smile of a man who liked what he saw, a man who stumbled upon a good fortune, a man who—regardless of any rapidly perishable clamoring of decency—wanted to cause Vanessa harm.

"Hey, girl," she heard the man shout at her through her headphones as their bikes passed each other in a perfect parallel. Vanessa ignored him, putting him in a category of irritating people that a person’s brain tricks them into believing will go away if they don't make the effort to respond. To Vanessa, in that moment, this man was just another bill collector or charity fundraising cold-caller. And yet, he didn't go away. Her failure to respond to his shouting only spurred more shouting, more anger, more intent to harm. With an innocent swerve of her leg in what she believed to be an ordinary stride, Vanessa had kicked a bee's hive simply by walking along, minding her own business.

"Hey, girl, you live here?" he shouted at Vanessa as they both circled the cul-de-sac where she lived, the literal and metaphorical end of the road, the place where she needed to make a decision on where to go and what to do. She could input the access code to the gate, but it takes about a full minute to open and another to close, scraping away at its viability as an actual deterrent against intruders when a person is being pursued. He still had that smile draped across his face, that grin that hinted to Vanessa what absolute carnage was being broadcast through his mind. The smile of force. The smile of degradation. The smile of evil.

"Hey, girl, you don't have to be afraid," he continued, almost laughing. The words were caked in cruel intentions, saturated with sinister rawness. Vanessa could hear that evil smile drizzling itself over the words as they emitted from his mouth. It was as if he said this to only heighten her fear, to only reinforce the unspoken fact that yes, she did have to be afraid. Vanessa wondered—as they both circled around her safety like vultures on their bikes—if that was the modus operandi of all men: to say exactly the opposite of what they mean, to lie and cheat, even when it's blindingly obvious, just to snag a piece of some girl. Vanessa didn't want to believe it, wanting so much to preserve her asinine belief that people are inherently good, but the evidence was mounting over the years in the opposite direction.

The whole time, she was pinned under the weight of her own social appearance. If she was afraid of this guy, this man in a t-shirt riding a child's bike and harassing her outside of her residence after she’d had a long night at work, it seemed rude to her. But why, Vanessa realized, is it rude to be afraid of a stranger blocking the entrance to your home and shouting at you? If he were a woman, she would be just as afraid, she rationalized to herself in her head. I'm not a racist, she replied to her own internal moral compass, which is forever ticking and clicking to make her justified in everything she does. I am an equal-opportunity employer of fear. In Vanessa’s mind, she’s terrified of everyone.

Screw seeming rude, she realized, and pedaled off at full speed in the opposite direction. Who cares if some grown man on a child's bicycle screaming things at me in the middle of the night gets his feelings hurt that I'm riding away from him? This was the difference, she thought to herself as the wind streaked itself through her hair and the straps of her backpack rattled along behind her in the crisp whisperings of night, in women who get hurt and women who don't. All women have the potential to be victims. Vanessa’s anger at the plight of the modern female was fueling her getaway, and she didn't dare look behind her for fear of the man there, following her, elevating this from a simple elbow-rub with danger to a full black-tie-gala of peril and vulnerability.

Vanessa reached the far edge of the street—her headphones still hooked into her ears—romancing the world around her in jovial juxtaposition of the danger that just materialized in a puff of proverbial smoke. There was a streetlight shining on the corner ahead and the darkness of the residential area behind her was quenched, somewhat, by the flashing headlights of passing cars on the high-traffic intersecting street in front of her, a major vein in the little body of suburbia that she was raised to call home. She made sure she was alone in a swatch of cars whipping by, solo in a sea of people, and called Jessica.

Three rings. Three rings of Vanessa wondering whether or not she would answer, whether or not she was busy wrangling Emma back into consciousness on the floor of her home, whether or not danger was still lurking in the darkness behind her. In those three rings, Vanessa’s panting normalized. Her heartbeat diluted from the monstrous roar of a fearful woman to the passionless pulse of a disappointed cynic. She calmed down, the furious tsunami of her soul simmering down to naught but angry waves in the wind, not because she was any less scared and not because she was any more safe… but because she simply had no choice. Time was seeping through the cracks that had been set before her, and it was through this time—the seemingly mediocre three rings—that Vanessa was forced to garner all her strength.

She heard rustling behind her and turned to see those two glimmering rows of sinister squares, caked with his saliva and gleaming at her like headlights. "Hey, girl," he sneered with a smile on his face and evil in his voice. Like a mosquito drawn relentlessly to the ocean of blood just below the surface of the skin, he wouldn't just go away. He wanted something more, and apparently, in his mind, he was entitled to it.

Vanessa poured herself onto her bike gracelessly, sloppily, and in sheer terror. She sped off into the obscurity of night—charcoal now from the intermittent illumination of the street lamps—feeling her pocket quake a few times with the angry vibrato of Jessica calling her back, and her fear mounting with every moment of restraint that she practiced in not looking over her shoulder. Not checking to see if he was there. Not giving him the satisfaction of knowing that he'd rattled her. Not letting him see how he'd affected her, how he'd changed the course of her evening, how he'd inserted himself into her routine. If he couldn't manage to physically insert himself into Vanessa, at least he could do this to her: the emotional rape of fear.

As she pedaled at full force into the distance, unsure of where she was going or what her next move would be, Vanessa heard a screech ring out through the darkness. Unable to contain her curiosity, she peeked behind her at the scene unfolding just over her shoulder. A figure—dark and chiseled—bounded through the neighborhood on foot, a monstrous being that was just surreal enough to her to believe that now she was actually hallucinating. Had someone drugged her at work? Had they slipped something into her drink? It was wild enough that she was put on this detour because some man couldn’t move out of her way or let her go home without making a comment. Now this—now seeing this beast running behind her—was too fantastical, too hyperbolic to be unwrapping itself in real life.

The beast hissed and screeched, tackling the man on the child’s bike with torrential force. The two tangled with each other on the pavement, ripping hairs and strangling each other, gurgling and panting. Punches were thrown, arms were bound. The onslaught of brutality clashed in waves, with the muscular figure roaring and pinning the man on the sidewalk, rendering him useless. Vanessa, too unnerved by the presence of just the first man (let alone the second, more threatening figure), sped off into the night, away from the danger that had nearly overtaken her.

Chapter 9

Every business in Vanessa’s small, sleepy town closed early, when nighttime was more of a fun idea than a pair of purple lips smothering whatever purity one thought they possessed. Finding a place with people and lights and the ensuing safety was more of a game of hide and seek than a regular task. Vanessa could see lights and signage illuminated through the darkness of night but no people or protection in the windows. There was a fast food restaurant which appeared to be closed, but the lights were still on to illuminate the half-hearted, sighing close-up tasks of the employees still inside.

It didn't seem real: the workers inside, hemming and hawing about their humdrum lives, every mundane wipe and sweep of their occupational duties and Vanessa outside, pedaling for her life away from someone who has displayed a longing to cause her harm. She was just minding her own business. She was just trying to go home. She wasn't bothering this man on the bike. She couldn't get it out of her head, this stabbing, shanking idea that a woman is always—whether in high heels and a dress that hugs her in all the right places or grubby old workout clothes that are begging to be washed—prey for some man lurking close enough to worry but just far enough to be hidden in the shadows.

Vanessa stood against the grimy stucco of the outside of the building and, with shaking hands attached to quaking arms, dialed 911. She was able to hold it together. She was safe now. The man wasn't there. She had shaken him off in the threat of light and safety. The only people near Vanessa at this point were a couple of bored-looking girls cleaning up inside and a man, semi-conscious, slumped over a stone table outside.

The operator picked up immediately and it was disorienting to hear someone speak without the thin ringing of the phone. It knocked Vanessa off her axis mentally, made her forget what she was going to say, or that she even had an issue.

"911, what is your emergency?" The voice of the operator blared through the line as Vanessa recalled, hauntingly, the reason for her call. She was tugged back into the moment, snapped into a horrifying reality of cat-callers on bikes who harass women, because to them they're nothing more than curvy, painted bags of meat.

"I… was on my bike," she stammered, not knowing where to begin. Where could she begin? What would she say to convey the terror of the absolute uncertainty that just unfolded rather than its passive twin, nonchalance? How could she phrase the unease of being followed? How would she articulate the injustice of being sent on some wild goose chase away from danger that lurked right outside of her home, blockading her out?

"There was a man," Vanessa continued. "He was on a bike, too, and he followed me—"

"So, there was a man following you on your bicycle while you were riding at night," there was a cut-glass tone to her voice. She was professional yet curt, adding in connotations that suggested, menacingly, that this was all Vanessa’s fault. That she shouldn't be riding at night. That she brought it on herself. She expected this from a man, a person of the lucky gender who never had the shiver of self-doubt when walking alone at night, who never had to think twice about wearing what he wanted to wear when he wanted to wear it, whose existence from his time of birth wasn't meat-mallet pounded with warnings and disclaimers that the world was at the ready-set-go mark to swallow him up whole. And yet, from another woman? Maybe she's done this too long, washed up on the shoreline of human empathy a different form, her once jagged edges of morality and compassion smoothed over by the mundane nature of the work into something spineless, soulless.

"I was riding home from work. I was just trying to go home," Vanessa broke in, trying to create something human, something tangible to this person who heard the battle cries from countless people all night in exchange for money to pay her car insurance and buy her groceries. "I was just trying…" and that's where Vanessa became totally, senselessly unhinged, crying into the phone and into the ears of a person who was paid to care, and probably not enough. Why is this our world? That's the only thought that came to mind, ringing out like church bells through a foggy, shameful Sunday morning, waking up the world from its collective slumber and the residual immorality of Saturday.

"Okay, it's okay," the operator interjected curtly, dispensing a plastic sense of humanity as if she were reading it from a script. "So, I need the facts. What's your name and where are you?"

"Vanessa McCarthy," she managed to choke out as she regained her composure. "I'm at the corner of Martin Street and Pendleton Road, at Burger King. I was just trying to get home when a guy blocked my way into my neighborhood’s gate and started shouting at me." Vanessa found herself in a swirl of unforeseen calmness, an invisible hand resting on her soul, soothing her, and allowing her to give the operator the information she needed. "I was afraid, I didn't know who he was or what he was going to do to me, so I just rode away as fast as I could. I came to a busy traffic area at the end of my neighborhood, and I was standing at Martin and Jackson for a few minutes while I called my neighbor, and um, she basically couldn't make it to come get me, so then I saw the guy again behind me when I heard a noise and I rode away again because he was following me still, he had caught up to me, and I was just pedaling through the dark as fast as I could until I saw this Burger King down the street with lights on—"

"Okay," the operator cut in again, saving Vanessa from her suffocation by what seemed, at the time, like the world's longest run-on sentence. There was silence, then there was the clicking of keyboard keys, there was the whooshing of late-night traffic, and louder still than all of that was the booming uncertainty that she felt bubbling up through the phone line. "So," the operator piped up finally, "what is it that you're wanting to do? What action do you want to take?"

Everything—the wistful women working inside, the drugged and drunken man draped over the outdoor table, the cars clamoring—it all seemed to stop and dissipate into the late-night listlessness of the air in that moment, the moment where Vanessa was forced to actually ask herself what she wanted done, how she would solve the issue, the concrete steps that she wanted taken to resolve this matter. What could be done? What did this operator have in her power to do for Vanessa, here, now? The guy on the bike was gone. She was alone and, in the eyes of a casual observer who was unbiased to the situation, relatively safe. No one was approaching from the obscurity of nightfall to cause her harm at this exact moment. Something about the question, the operator's tone while posing it, and Vanessa’s own crippling anxiety about being a burden on other people made her freeze up inside, feeling like she was crying wolf. What did she expect? What, actually, did she think could come of this phone call, this lifeline for help?

"I… don't know…" Vanessa stammered, searching somewhere in her fear-laden brain for the right answer. What was she supposed to say? What did people, women, anyone do in this situation? She called for help because she didn't know what to do, because she felt scared and needed assistance. And yet, the person who was paid to help her, the person who represented a string of numbers that have been pounded into Vanessa’s brain for as long as she had the power to form cognitive thoughts, who was a liaison for safety, was asking this pointless, demeaning question. If Vanessa knew what to do, why would she have called? Why would she be standing here under the spotlights of desperation as the night inched along to its raw and vulnerable middle, crying to a stranger?

"Vanessa," the woman said, unsure if she was still there, still paying attention. "Vanessa, do you want to just go home, since you stated that the man on the bike behind you is no longer there?" The operator’s voice was even and rich, not spindly and skeletal like Vanessa’s. Did she think this was some sort of game? No, Vanessa didn't want to go home. The man knew where she lived. He knew she was afraid. He knew she was trying to escape from him. How would this woman react if this situation were happening to her? How would she want to be consoled here? A stranger whose capacity to inflict harm ranged from innocuous catcalls to relentless, ripping fatality, and the person employed to help in this crisis was responding as if she had called to complain about breaking a fingernail? Vanessa’s fear was giving birth to an anger she hadn't quite felt since her parents died, a fury unique in its bubbling hatred that broke her reluctance to be an imposition in the world like hailstones on a car's windshield.

"No," Vanessa said in a voice she didn't recognize, a tone matching the operator's. "I don't want to go home. He could be there. Or near there. I've seen him twice already tonight. Why would he just leave me alone now?" She turned the spout of difficult questioning on the operator, putting her in the hot seat, making her feel the pressure of having to answer for all the horrible people in the world.

"What do you think his intentions were? Did he try to hurt you?" she asked, and Vanessa’s soul sank a little before puffing up in livid loathing.

"I don't know," Vanessa spat back, her arms beginning to shake and her face twisting with contempt. "I can't read minds, and I wouldn't talk to a stranger in the middle of the night while riding my bike. I wouldn't even ride my bike at night if I didn't have to. This man screamed at me, objectified me, and took away my feeling of safety in my own neighborhood. Now you're telling me to just ride back there, through the darkness, and accept the fact that some creep knows where I live and can come back and hurt me? No. I don't need to know his intentions, because whatever they were, they weren't good."

Vanessa was growling in tones low and menacing, just a hair above a whisper and leaving an impression that she hoped scraped across the operator’s soul like gravel. She was unlocking a new piece of herself, unearthing a different side to her soul that had been dormant in the soil of her own solace for so many years. If this person wouldn't stand up for Vanessa, she had to stand up for herself. The transition from a person who always tried to float in the waves and adapt to the tides to someone who now defiantly lashed out in swimming strokes was exhilarating in a way that left her wondering what sort of out-of-body experience she was having. She felt like, for the first time in her life, she was grabbing a surfboard instead of striving (and failing) to grow gills.

Chapter 10

Aaron could barely control his breathing. Plastered in sweat to the seat of his Porsche, his memory of the last hour had been wiped clean from his mind’s eye. The time on the clock didn’t seem right. There’s no way it was almost 1 a.m. What crept up on him—haunting his newfound consciousness—was that there seemed to be a lurid, almost evil sense of danger hovering in the air. Was he, himself in danger? Did someone try to hurt him, only to fail and slink away?

Against his better judgment, he started the car and drove forward through the residential area where he woke up. He felt shaky again—queasy with confusion—not unlike the way he felt the morning before after his sudden collapse in the conference room. Aaron knew he shouldn’t be driving, but a part of him didn’t care. His father was dying, his business was tanking, health problems were now creeping up on him as well, and he’d spent a good chunk of his day chasing after some wild ideal of a woman he’d only just come to know. What struck him as even more disgraceful was that he didn’t even know her. They exchanged only a few sentences, and she was so embroiled in her own embarrassment that Aaron knew he caught the subpar side of who she is.

And yet, even the subpar side was ambrosial. She was a book that Aaron couldn’t put down, hungry (for reasons even unknown to him) to turn page after page. He wanted to know her. He wanted to see how she looked after getting out of the shower, the direction her hair flopped in disobedience in the sunlight of morning. He wanted to know how she stretched, how she moaned. Vanessa was an enigma to him, a language in which he dreamed but couldn’t yet understand.

And somehow, as if this were actually all a dream—as if Aaron’s reality could bend to the whims of his own mind—there she was. Aaron pulled into the parking lot of a closed Burger King where Vanessa stood with her back along the chalky, stucco wall and a phone in her trembling hands. She looked lost there, shaken by a world that wanted to hurt her. Not knowing how to approach her, or even if he should, Aaron kept his distance, only to watch her face contort into something agitated, something powerful. Seeing her like that—seething into the phone—called him back to life again, shook off the dust that had formed on his psyche.

Without thinking, he zipped his car around to where she stood. “Do you need help?” He blurted out through the open window, as if they were old friends. In his mind, they were already entangled together, losing track of which pair of legs belonged to whom.

Looking up, her face glimmering with recognition, she hung up the phone. Vanessa chained her bike to a nearby pole and wordlessly got into the car. For the first time since high school, Aaron was nervous around a woman. She suddenly evoked this sense of inadequacy in him. The way she danced earlier left him unable to form cognitive thought, especially when juxtaposed against the relatable clumsiness, the humanness of earlier that day. And here she was again, sitting in his car in silence, controlling the aura. She was stoic and stern, a mountain his muscles were aching to climb.

“Hi,” he started, unsure of what to say, gripped by a panic that felt indissoluble.

“What are you doing here?” She asked defensibly, yet kept her position inside the car.

“I… saw you,” Aaron began, not wanting to divulge just yet that he’d been watching her dance. “I saw you here alone.”

The silence racketed in waves between them. Neither knew what to say, what to do, how to respond to the other.

“I don’t want to go home yet,” Vanessa said, finally, slicing the stillness that had fallen over the car.

Without a word, Aaron revved the Porsche and drove them away from Burger King, toward the direction of his hotel.

Chapter 11

Vanessa, at her wit’s end, knew she was making a mistake. She could count all the ways that what she was about to do was wrong, braiding them through each other like strands of singular missteps all their own in a rope of regret. And yet, there she was. She was on her way to a hotel room with a rich man she didn’t know, sloughing off her responsibilities to her little sister just to be able to get out of her own head for a while. Just to take back some of the life that had been stolen from her. Just to put some gas back in the tank.

Jessica finally got in touch with Vanessa as she stood there under the fluorescent lights of Burger King. “Emma is asleep with my kids,” her voice grumbled through the phone, groggily. “It would do more harm than good to wake her up now just to take her home. You need some sleep, too. I’ll take Emma to school tomorrow.”

She knew her neighbor was right, but it stung to capitalize on another person’s overwhelming generosity. But why? Why did Vanessa feel so stingy about taking Jessica up on her offer? What was stirring in her soul that prevented her from taking an outstretched hand? Why did she feel like she had to do everything alone, like life had to be more difficult than it actually was?

Vanessa was tired. Vanessa needed a break. Vanessa needed the rain of life to stop—even for just one night. Her soul cried out for sunshine, for hope, for relaxation. Even just a little bit of room to breathe. Her mind was overtaken by the stress of every day and converged into something she didn’t recognize anymore: a compacted mound of hardship and strife, operating on safe mode at all times.

As this man whose name she didn’t even know sped down Main Street in her sprawl of suburbia, Vanessa rescinded a promise she’d made to herself when her parents passed away. She’d resolved to abstain from sex for the foreseeable future. It didn’t seem like such a lofty goal at the time. All her emotion was thrust in the direction of her grief, and her energy was primarily sucked dry by Emma’s constant, unwavering needs.

And at the time, Vanessa thought back on her ex-boyfriend, the only guy she’d ever slept with, lanky and awkward, inexperienced, and unwilling to please. She managed to believe the fallacy that a mediocre sex life was all she’d get, that to experience actual, electrifying orgasms as a female was nothing more than a fallacy used to sell makeup and heels to women across the world. To Vanessa, sex felt more or less like cleaning her ears with a Q-tip: pleasant, but nowhere near orgasmic.

And yet, this man appeared. She mistook his interest in the office building for mere kindness, as rogue as it was. Vanessa could tell through his energy—through the way his voice reverberated into her ears, through the tenderness that bounced between them—that he wanted something more. But why would he? What did he see in her? To admit that there was something there was to deal in cards of fantasy, and Vanessa didn’t operate on wishful thinking anymore. She needed something concrete, something undeniable, and here it was. She was riding in this man’s Porsche, pulling up at his hotel, riding in the elevator, and walking through the door to his room.

“What’s your name?” She asked him once they got inside.

“Aaron,” he said softly, easily.

Vanessa sat on the bed, not quite knowing what to do next. She wanted him. She wanted to see how he looked under the three-piece suit he was wearing. She wanted to see how she could contort his face in ecstasy. But she only just now learned his name. He didn’t exist on the plane of her imagination until this morning. Vanessa couldn’t allow herself to go through with it. And yet, here she was, biting her lip. Not leaving, being compliant, complicit.

“Do you have any wine, Aaron?” She said authoritatively with a glint of seduction in her voice.

Smoothly, saying nothing, Aaron retrieved a bottle of unopened Pinot Grigio from the mini fridge and two glasses from the cabinet. His jacket was off and his sleeves were rolled up. Vanessa glared with intention as he jammed the corkscrew into the cork and popped the bottle with a satisfying click through the air, the muscles in his forearm rippling with each movement.

Vanessa lay on the bed as he poured, keeping silent. In a world where noise was constant and pleasure was nonexistent, Aaron’s hotel room acted as a haven for her, a reprieve from reality. He took a long drag directly from the bottle before pouring both glasses, keeping his eyes on her the entire time.

Aaron leaned across Vanessa strategically, placing his wine glass on the table next to her side of the bed. With his face turned toward her and a smirk streaking across his mouth, he kissed her, his lips still dripping with a sip of white wine. Her hands felt unsteady as she gripped the stem of her wine glass with one hand and felt around for the table with the other. Sensing her awkwardness, her scrambling, the way her body tensed as soon as his lips met hers, he pulled away.

“Do you not want to?” He asked sincerely.

“Oh, no, I do,” Vanessa said with a downward glance, her sweeping lashes taking her emerald eyes hostage. Setting her wine glass on the table next to Aaron’s, she sighed, sitting up against the pillows lining the headboard. “I do, Aaron. I want to. I just…”

“What is it?” Aaron replied, concerned. He sat up to match her posture, facing her. “Talk to me, Vanessa,” he said, turning her face toward his.

Vanessa wanted to talk. She wanted to gush about how she was overwhelmed simply by waking up in the morning, how the eviction notices kept piling up on her kitchen counter beside prescriptions for Emma that she couldn’t afford to fill. Vanessa wanted to bleed the words out of her: that she was lost in the world, that she couldn’t focus on how much she wanted him, that she was too twisted in the swirl of adulthood crashing down on her before she was ready. And yet even more than all of this, there was one piece of the puzzle that haunted her even more. One more detail, as adolescent and sophomoric as it may seem to someone as established, as powerful, as utterly impressive as Aaron: she hadn’t had sex in two years. In a strange way, she felt like she’d forgotten how, as if they’d begin and she’d find herself utterly clueless on how to move, how to moan, how to slip away into the ecstasy of it all.

“I’m…” she said finally, inhaling sharply, “I’m… nervous,” she admitted, deflating. With eyes steeped by anxiety, she glanced up at Aaron, her stare bathing him in emerald-hued longing.

“Vanessa,” he said, curling one of her hands into his. “There’s no reason to be nervous. This is a place where you can feel comfortable. You can be yourself. I want you,” he said, shining his own neon-blue gaze at her.

Neither said anything for a moment, too lost in the juxtaposition between the emotions they’d already experienced together, and all the ways they had yet to explore one another. Finally—with a slide of his hand along the backside of her neck in a way so perfect it seemed almost rehearsed—Aaron drew her closer to him, pulling her face to his, kissing her with a torrent of lust that rendered her almost immobile with desire. Her mind was thinking of nothing now except him: how his muscles buckled across his abdomen, the way his biceps felt as she gripped them in euphoria, the way she craved his dizzying, gravelly voice whispering in her ear.

Their lips were magnets: the force between them too tenacious to be pulled away. Vanessa took her time unbuttoning his shirt, going one by one from the top to the bottom, intoxicating Aaron with the sensuality of restraint. He was rock hard by the time she reached the middle of his shirt, but her tantalizing meticulousness—her poised moderation—made him feel as if he were going to explode before she ever laid a hand on him.

Aaron flung his shirt across the bed and concentrated on Vanessa, who had already taken off her shirt and unzipped her jeans. With a hand wrapped around his cock, Aaron watched with intensified observation as she wriggled herself into nudity, bunching the denim in a pile at the foot of the bed, out of sight beneath the covers. He wanted to feel her immediately; he wanted the contours of everything she kept hidden away to wrap around him like a warm, wet hug. He wanted to feel her in secret, unshared places. He wanted to thrust into her, joining their bodies in the delirium of elation.

And yet, it wasn't quite time for that. He could tell that she was apprehensive, even before she confessed it to him. She was skittish and inexperienced, a newly minted adult trapped in the web of teenage know-how. Their age difference meant that Aaron would need to go slower, cater to her, create an atmosphere where Vanessa could grow into her sexuality. As much as he wanted her, Aaron understood that finding the specific combination to the lock of her orgasm was the top priority.

Vanessa lay down on the bed and Aaron moved to straddle her, his boxer briefs jutting out in a pyramid from his body. She felt him graze along her leg, concrete and gargantuan, immense in his excitement. Looking down at her, Aaron traced along the perfect, youthful lines of her cleavage with his index finger. With a maddeningly slow sensuality, Aaron laid a line of light kisses across the mountains of her breasts, stuffed into lacy red lingerie, jutting up at him just as he jutted out at her. He kissed along the milky softness of her skin as goose bumps began to form in the trail of where his mouth had journeyed. He nibbled around her lacy thong—black, not matching her bra but mind-numbingly sexy nonetheless and soaked through—and slowly pulled it with his teeth, exposing her to him now, gleaming and dripping with desire.

Aaron changed positions, wiggling between her legs and wrapping his arms around her thighs, pulling her onto his mouth. Vanessa tensed as each warm breath hit her, buckling and stiffening with every short inhale of her own. Looking up at her from his vantage point, her face painted the picture that she was utterly terrified, ashamed somehow, awash in her own anxiety. But from what Aaron could see directly in front of him, this wasn’t the case. Vanessa was constricting her pussy involuntarily to control how wet she was, how he’d saturated her already.

“I can stop, if you want,” Aaron whispered into her, the sound waves rippling through her body like electricity. Vanessa bucked her hips, letting out a guttural moan that filled the room and Aaron smiled, running his tongue along the gates of her ecstasy.

“Is that a yes or a no?” He teased, whispering into her once again as she jerked in euphoria. “I can stop, Vanessa. Do you want me to stop?”

“Don’t stop,” she gasped, and fluttered in her exhilaration as Aaron took her into his mouth—voracious and hungry—as if he hadn’t eaten in days. She wrapped her hands around his head, holding him in place, and looked down at him. He was wearing her legs like a scarf, drinking her in. He was dehydrated and she was a fountain, bubbling and squirting into his mouth. Vanessa could feel her orgasm mounting, building on itself, stacking up from the pit of her stomach, beginning to sizzle and radiate into her arms and legs. No, not yet, she thought. Not so soon. Vanessa wanted more, she wanted this feeling to last all night. She never wanted to leave this aura of warmth and dizziness. It was all too much, swirling in a tornado of fervent tension. Her legs were vibrating, she was losing the grip on Aaron’s head. Her hips were jolting and bouncing, alive with the sensation bubbling up within her. In what felt like a snap of rapture through her body, Vanessa’s eyes rolled backwards and she gasped, caught in a riptide of ferocious energy electrocuting every synapse before short-circuiting into a wave of bliss all over her body.

Aaron pulled away from her, taking off his boxer briefs with one hand and wiping his mouth with the other before smearing her essence all over his cock. He was ready to burst. Just the sight of her hips bucking and pulsating, the sound of her moaning, the way her hands forced him to keep drinking from her turned him on more than he could’ve imagined. Aaron took his middle finger and swabbed it over her pussy—glazed with liquid euphoria—and Vanessa’s whole body pulsed with pleasure. Aaron gripped his cock and felt Vanessa, felt what he’d done to her, looked at her voluptuous curves as he stroked himself, kneeling over her.

She was content, worn out from the fury of her own orgasm. He could see it in her eyes, dreamy and faraway, her smile crooked on her face. She was lightly panting in blissful gratification. Aaron could barely control himself now, and he didn’t want to disturb her post-orgasm satisfaction. His arm motioned wildly as he leaned his head back, succumbing to euphoria, clenching his teeth as he fell into the tidal wave of his own orgasm crashing through his body.

Silence clung to the air between them and Aaron looked down at Vanessa. Her face was a fantasy, an almost romantic abstraction of pleasure and gratitude, and her hands drifted to the puddle he’d made on her stomach. She glanced at him playfully, not knowing what to say or how to act, as she’d never been in this position before. The only boy she’d ever had sex with had always used a condom. Vanessa had never even seen what semen really looked like before. It was so gelatinous, so slimy. Somehow, this discovery energized her. It was as if she were checking some sort of box on her to-do list toward real adulthood, turning a page in a book she was required to read before being able to wear the label.

Aaron grinned at her and inhaled, crashing beside her in bed, worn out. With his last drops of energy, he grabbed his shirt from where he’d tossed it moments before and rubbed her stomach clean, sending the soiled shirt flying toward the hamper once all that was left were streaks on her skin. Exhaustion gripped Aaron, who nestled an arm across Vanessa’s body and fell asleep with her by his side nearly instantly.

Chapter 12

Aaron roused himself as the sunlight streamed in across the emptiness of his bed. She was gone. Was it all an illusion? Was Vanessa an intricate stitching of all the other odd events that had befallen him in the last twenty-four hours? He could barely remember what happened last night before she’d taken over his night, that inexplicable stretch of time when the clock sped up, when reality faded away, when he lost himself in a whirl of confusion.

Work began hours ago. Aaron’s absence would absolutely be noted by Mr. Lee, who seemed more like an old-world spy than Aaron’s Vice President. Dreading the lecture he’d get from this man who held the mystifyingly strange position of subordinate even though he’d been working at Kümertech since before Aaron was alive, Aaron sighed and padded off to the shower, racking his brain for some excuse he could give. Not unlike a teenager caught skipping school, he decided to use the age-old alibi that sickness had gripped him while he slept.

* * *

The first bus departed at dawn from the stop down the street from Aaron’s hotel. The sky was purple fading to pink, which blazed into a robust orange as Vanessa stepped off at the stop closest to the Burger King where she left her bike. She raced home to shower, to get away, to look at who she was and what she’d done. Shame crawled across her like ivy on a brick façade. How could she have done this? What was she thinking when she merely took a glass of wine from a stranger, let alone crawling into bed with him?

Disgusted with herself, with her behavior, with everything she’d allowed her life to become, Vanessa wailed through her empty house. Her sobs ricocheted off the walls where family portraits used to hang, where her mother used to mark her height as she sprung up through the years. She acted rashly, jumping the gun and muddling herself in the process. Girls who behaved that way—jumping into cars with strange men, blacking out in ecstasy in hotel rooms—had no self-respect. Vanessa didn’t have much anymore, but at least she had that.

* * *

Aaron didn’t know what time her shift began, or whether she was even working that night, but he knew he had to see her again. He craved her. He wanted to discover every bit of her body with his mouth. She was flitting through his mind, zipping through his stream of consciousness, rendering him useless and swimming in a sea of his own lust. Aaron waited at the strip club from 7 p.m. onward, scanning everyone who walked through its doors.

 

After a few hours of examining a stream of middle-aged, thoroughly bland men with cowboy boots and pickup trucks, Aaron saw her ride up to the front of the club around 11 p.m. Quickly bolting out of his Porsche, he strode toward her with a sense of urgency. She winced and cowered, not realizing who it was. Or perhaps, maybe she had realized it was him, he thought with a sinking sentiment as she skidded out of his path, away from him. She didn’t seem to want to have anything to do with him, locking her bike furiously, maniacally, and scuttling off toward the doors to the club.

 

“Vanessa,” he hissed after her.

“What do you want?” She said, turning around. Her face was twisted in grief. What had he done? Aaron scrolled through his mental Rolodex of memories to ponder whether he’d lost more time, if something in him took over, if he hurt her. Nothing came to mind, which haunted him even more.

“I want… you…” he faltered, not knowing what to say. For all his money in the bank, for all his swagger in business, for all the ways he could make a woman melt with just a stare in her direction, he never did learn the art of communication.

Vanessa stood there, willing him to say more. He didn’t know what she needed to hear, what she was trying to cull from the depths of his mind. After an unbearable minute of silence, of staring into the abyss of each other, she sighed. “I have to go to work now.”

“No,” he lunged after her. “No, no you don’t. Come with me instead.”

Vanessa smirked incredulously. “Come with you where?”

“Back to my hotel room. Out to dinner. Hawaii. Anywhere. You haven’t left my mind since I met you,” he gushed.

“I have bills to pay,” she said, turning away from Aaron again.

“Let me pay them,” Aaron replied, a little too quickly. “Just… come back with me. You don’t need to work here. You don’t need to do this.”

Vanessa, awash in confusion, paused. She was being pulled in all directions. Emma needed medications. The both of them needed a secure roof over their heads and food on their table. Her shift began three minutes ago. And most grievously, this man who pulled back the curtain on arguably the most sensual night of her life—a night where she actually felt desired, sexy, like a woman—wanted to take her away from all of this.

He is just exaggerating, Vanessa thought to herself. There’s not a chance that he’d go out of his way for me. It’s just a ploy, just a way to use me for a night. And yet, looking at him from head to toe, one would assume that he had a full repertoire of women on reserve. The way his suits fit, the way his Porsche revs, the way he can cut steel beams with his eyes: bright and cerulean against a rich, earthy skin tone. He could have any woman he wanted, and yet… he was here.

And it was true that as the day wore on, as Vanessa’s mind drifted ever backwards to the events of the night before, she began to soften. She remembered the tenderness he’d used to touch her, the warmth of his breath along the insides of her thighs, the way he made her entire body vibrate with euphoria. She wanted to feel shame, because logically, that’s how she was supposed to feel. But what she couldn’t quite expunge from her mind was the fact that the world of sexual pleasure was seldom logical.

“Let me take you to my apartment,” Aaron said slowly, softly, “in the city.”

“I…” Vanessa sighed, walking toward him. “I… can’t do that.”

“Why?” Aaron asked, genuinely.

“Look, this isn’t the time or the place to talk about this,” Vanessa could feel the truth bubbling up beneath her skin, right there in the parking lot. She felt as though she were about to burst, to break open in front of him, spewing the reality of her life across the perfect image of her that he’d concocted in his head. He didn’t want to hear about Emma. About epilepsy. About poverty. About dead parents. He wanted nothing to do with any of that, she could feel it. All he wanted was to experience her, to taste her, to feel her.

“Tell me,” he whispered, taking her hand. “Why can’t you join me tonight?”

“I can’t go to the city tonight,” Vanessa sighed. “But I can go with you to a hotel.”

Chapter 13

A different bedroom. Another set of sheets. A contrasting view of the ordinary, lackluster suburban landscape. Aaron and Vanessa were shadows dancing in the recycled illumination of streetlights flowing in from outside, moving in a choreography that they each somehow knew yet never actually learned. He laid her on the bed, ripping his shirt off, too lost in the moment to practice patience. She had poisoned his mind with her hips, with her moans, with the way her supple breasts were stuffed into her bra and shoved in his face. She was all he could imagine—lingering through his mind like cigarette smoke dispersing through the air, haunting his every moment with the way she smelled, the way she tasted. Tonight, he had to have her.

The darkness was both friend and foe. It hid their inhibitions yet cloaked their bodies. Vanessa wanted to let go, to relax, to spread out into the haven of safety that darkness offered. Aaron wanted to see her face as the electricity flowed through her, how she contorted as the pleasure spiked through her. But still, he restrained himself, this was still all about her. She called the shots, so he dutifully obeyed.

Aaron ran his hands frantically along the contours of her back, unclasping her bra with manic intensity. Her breasts spilled out and he cupped them, squeezing with passion as she fell over him and leaned her head toward the ceiling, gasping with bliss. Vanessa was naked, straddling Aaron, dripping all over him, ready for him to plunge into her. And yet, she was still apprehensive. For all the ways he had warped her mind over the past twenty-four hours with flashbacks to her euphoria, she felt him along her skin. She ran her fingers along his shaft, elongated and imposing, wondering how badly he’d hurt her if she succumbed to what she really wanted—what they both really wanted.

Aaron was lying flat on his back, cupping and massaging Vanessa’s breasts with wound up excitement, his knees pulled up and his feet flat on the bed. Vanessa leaned back on his thighs, using them almost as a chair and lightly moved to touch herself, massaging her clit before his eyes from where she straddled Aaron’s chest. She could feel his cock stand straight up along her back, besieging her with the notion that he would rip her apart if she tried to accommodate him.

“I want you,” Aaron whispered, lightly twisting her nipples. She jolted with pleasure and bit her bottom lip, looking at him sensually.

“Let’s try something different first,” Vanessa whispered back, scooting her body backwards to straddle his cock, pulsating now with passion.

She was now transported back in her mind to the first few times that she discovered these parts of her body, the accidental encounters which led to euphoric afternoons behind locked doors. After school, Vanessa would bound up to her room and shut herself inside, blasting the radio to drown out the sound of her body moving in ways she couldn’t control, the sound of the first few yips of ecstasy rippling through the body of a newcomer to the club of sexuality.

Here, in Aaron’s bedroom, Vanessa mimicked her old strategies. She flipped him upward—an arrow facing north—and slid herself along the bottom side of his cock. Already soaking wet, Vanessa held his hands where they were, cupping her breasts, playing with her nipples. Moving along his shaft, she rocked as if he were inside of her, flipping a switch somewhere inside of her to release an orgasm almost immediately. She held off, not wanting to shut off the sparks that his cock was creating through her body. Again, she felt the pit of her stomach churn with the wattage of her orgasm, her body pumping up the voltage a little more with every slide across Aaron’s rocklike cock.

Vanessa opened her eyes, and as they adjusted to the shadows in the darkness of the spare bedroom, she could see that Aaron was perplexed. He looked curious in his arousal, and fascinated by Vanessa all the same. Her voluptuous breasts overflowed from his grip and her bliss was apparent, yet it was clear that this was something completely new to him; sexual contact in a way he could understand despite not knowing the language in which it was spoken.

“Is this okay for you?” she whispered in a shaky voice, her orgasm billowing within her despite her efforts to suppress it.

“Take… what… you… need…” Aaron moaned, feeling Vanessa shiver as she moaned and gasped, holding onto his biceps for support while electricity buzzed through her. She threw her head back with the titillation of his cock along her clit and gasped once more, a full-bodied, husky inhale that morphed into the gushing sigh of utter contentment.

“That… was incredible,” Aaron said, running his fingers along the contour of her hips as she sat on him, leaking and panting.

Wordlessly, Vanessa touched herself—wincing in pleasure—and smoothed her liquid desire down his shaft. Trepidation replaced euphoria as anxiety crept through her. How could she handle a cock this large? How badly would it hurt? Would she bleed? Would she cry?

Aaron could sense that something was off, that Vanessa had lost the appeal she’d just had. Her strokes were limp, faltering with a kind of dissatisfaction.

“What’s wrong, baby?” he cooed in his voice like asphalt.

“Nothing,” Vanessa said, stroking again halfheartedly, wondering which method might hurt less, her pussy or her jaw.

Sitting up, Aaron took her cheeks in his hands and kissed her deeply, whimsically. His hands jutted upward, running themselves through the roots of her hair, massaging her scalp lightly with his nails. He needed her. He needed to burst inside of her, to feel how tightly she would wrap herself around him, how she could strangle him in the most desirable way possible. “Vanessa,” Aaron whispered into her ear, so softly that she began to shake. “Get on your back.”

She did what she was told, unfolding her legs and widening them to let him in. Aaron stroked his shaft lightly for a moment, rubbing the tip along her labia, drawing imaginary lines of feverish passion along the opening where her lips met. He hesitated. Aaron knew that once he thrust himself inside of her, that was it. He could never take it back, he could never undo it. Once Vanessa let him in, some light would flip in her head, a wire would be cut, a line would be drawn. He’d had her for dinner the night before, she just used his cock as her own personal sex toy, but this was different. They were writing their own truth, and now something indelible was going to occur. Once he shot himself inside of her, it could never be reversed. The truth would be written in blotchy black ink, not erasable pencil lead.

The tip of his cock was pressing into her now, an open door to a warm house in a winter forest. She was tight already. Her muscles were clenched and he would have to force himself inside, break through the tension and make himself fit. Aaron was standing on the edge of unspeakable pleasure for what felt like hours, all he had to do was fall in and allow it.

Aaron forced himself—throbbing with the thrill of finally feeling her—into Vanessa, who was taut and firm, unyielding in her constriction. He let out a gasp and so did she. They were connected now in a way they hadn’t been before. Aaron lost control of himself, maniacally pulsating inside of her, feeling the curves and dips of her core envelop him, stroke him, manipulate him until he felt the spurts and bursts of his own erotic electricity ripple through him and blast into fireworks of intoxication throughout his body.

Vanessa gasped as Aaron was at the pinnacle of his orgasm, compressing her muscles around him, taking him to an even higher level of euphoria. He grabbed a lock of her hair and tugged, letting the energy flow freely as he pumped into her, feeling the rapid tickle of bliss emanate through every cell in his body.

“Vanessa,” Aaron moaned in a whisper before showering her neck with a spray of light kisses.

“Yes?” She smiled at Aaron, pleased with herself.

“That was amazing,” he whispered between kisses. “You are amazing.”

After a few quiet moments, Aaron slithered out of Vanessa, rolling over in slumber. She stayed up, facing the ceiling, stroking his back until she knew he was asleep. Then she got dressed, scribbled her phone number onto the pad of paper embossed with the hotel’s logo on the nightstand, and left without saying goodbye.

Chapter 14

The disillusionment of ethereal sleepiness washed over Aaron almost immediately. Vanessa had worn him out; he could almost feel his energy reserves rattling with vacancy. With immense purposed, his mind lumbered toward a celestial landscape of dreamy serenity. The bounds of reality were frayed; the humming of indistinct change through his body was simmered into silence. For the first time in a long while, he felt at peace; reveling in a sublime world of make-believe that felt as stark in his mind as reality itself.

In this intangible, dreamy panorama, Aaron found himself on a catamaran. He was floating in a river with other people, some he knew, some he didn’t. Old acquaintances from high school were there and a stray handful of people he’d known in passing during the transit between all the people he’d been. He was socially lubricated by some wine he’d snuck onboard inside an opaque water bottle. The gulps he took were hot and stale. It was afternoon and the tidal wave of impending drunkenness felt, at that particular moment, like velvet across his mind. 

Aaron was, for some reason, trying to get to know the people around him. That was the first tip that something wasn’t quite right. His crippling boredom with most other people had somehow lain dormant within him. After a few minutes of strained and forceful attempts at meaningful conversation, Aaron (rather characteristically) grew tired of the surrounding idiots and their babbling, so he sat in the sun with his wine and his knock-off, imitation solace. He wasn’t in a river, actually, but it wasn’t an ocean, either. It was a bay, Aaron guessed. He and everyone on board were far enough from land that they lost sight of the shore, yet they were close enough to understand, without question, that it was still in reach.

In a moment of silence amid the mingling chatter, when the world was doused in a gasoline of yellow, mid-afternoon buttery luxury, Aaron leaned his head back and took a long drag from the bottle, pulling the liquid heaven into himself, staring up at the sun. 

“It’s so weird,” a voice chirped beside him. He was about the same age as Aaron, same build, also by himself.

“What?” Aaron replied, genuinely curious, his voice husky with the remnants of a truly remarkable sip.

“The sun… and the earth. The sun is hollow. The earth is full. The sun is so mighty, so life giving, and yet, there’s nothing inside. It’s a great big ball of fire on the outside, and that’s it. It’s hollow, and the earth, where we are, it’s full of everything. Hollow, full. Hollow, full. Hollow, full.”

Aaron took another pull from the bottle, neglecting to offer the man any. He needed every last drop of the wine to process what he’d said. Aaron was sliding into the cozy state of drunkenness where everything feels deep and thought-provoking, even if it’s idiotic. His drunk mind was astounded while his final grips of cynical sobriety were setting off alarms that whatever this man was saying was probably just maniacal ranting.

And then, it happened.

There was, eerily, no sound. It felt as if the explosion would have been too deafening for human ears to hear, so instead of a blast, an otherworldly silence fell over the landscape around them. It was almost like Aaron’s mind couldn’t conceptualize what the end of time truly sounded like, so it muted it instead. (An afterthought, of course, as it all unfolded, he had no reason to believe it was anything other than bleak reality.)

Blackness seeped from the sun like ink squirts from a broken pen, floating and billowing through the sky and toward him with a speed fast enough to be cause for alarm, yet slow enough to make everyone on board the boat fidget, make them insecure, make them marinate in their terrifying realization that within a few moments, they would face a certain and undeniably painful death. A blotch of murkiness bleeding across the atmosphere from the sun, heading toward the planet, and they all watched in nervous laughter as it rounded off and landed somewhere behind the curve of the earth—on some other continent, in some other land, terrorizing some other people. 

Aaron and the people on the boat thought they were safe. They thought it was over. They were too concerned with celebrating their own survival trumping the mortality of other, less fortunate souls that they didn’t notice the splatter of black death rocketing toward them in a menacing encore of the first horrifying act. The sun was like a tiny ball of lemon candy in the sky—bitter and angry—and Aaron couldn’t quite conceptualize the size of the shadow coming at him until it got closer and closer still, encompassing all light, painting everything everyone saw with the color of death, swallowing them without chewing. 

Water. Darkness. Confusion. Weight. That insidious, idle wondering while one is gripped by death of how, exactly, they’re dying. Was it drowning? Was Aaron being crushed by the pressure of the blackness? Was it a fire stronger than the standard red flames? A military-grade incendiary force, which chars a person to a crisp before it ever hits the skin? Was he choking on ash? Was he simply in the process of being scared to death?

All that Aaron knew was gone, all the emotions he felt were overridden. It didn’t matter who he was, how many books he had read, or how many pairs of lips he kissed in his youth. It didn’t matter whether he had traversed foreign soils or locked himself in the artificial light of a basement all his life, because this was his life now. This creeping, seductive dance with death was all that Aaron could understand.

Aaron was pulled under the surface of the water with a force he knew he couldn’t survive, and the sloshing of fellow human desperation was weakening his hope bit by bit. He resigned himself to death, which now threw itself at him, over him, into him. Aaron was rendered useless by this black sickness spewed from the sun, and it was either taking him too long to die or this suffering was all part of the plan. He stopped fighting. It was over. Aaron lost, Death won. His mind was slipping away, into its own darkness.

And yet, somehow, it wasn’t. He wanted to fall asleep forever. He wanted to dissolve into the water. He wanted to solidify into the sand. And yet, there was that goddamned unwavering positivity — whispering caramel-colored and velveteen lies of his untapped grandeur into his waterlogged ears — keeping the blood flowing through him.

Aaron woke up on a cot in the air, under an indignant sun. He didn’t realize that he’d received the luxury of repose until he snapped out of it. Human beings never do. The legs of the cot on which he was splayed were jutting up from the murky water. He was on a cargo barge now. On one side, where Aaron was strangled back into life, he saw rows and rows of cots just like his — some lowered into the water, some rising out of it. Past a partition, people were sitting around in shocked, strained silence. He was afraid to look at the sun, almost as if staring at it would cause it to bite again and release another cloud of venom… almost as if everyone else on the barge with him didn’t have the exact same thought process and subsequent course of action. Aaron glanced tentatively upward to see a smug, golden ball of simmering fire hiding behind a cloud, as if nothing had happened. 

Aaron joined the side of the barge with all the people. Everyone was soaked and sodden from the ordeal, cradled in thick, woolen blankets despite the tyrannical August heat. The only audible sounds were that of the barge, carrying them at a maddeningly lackadaisical speed away from the horror that had just befallen them, the water from the bay lapping innocuously along the sides. Aaron tore through the tarnished air with a hoarse whisper and a motion to the cots, “Are they all…?”

“Yeah,” croaked the man whose untoward comment about the sun launched this whole catastrophe. He didn’t realize it, though. He was oblivious to his own sense of blame, and Aaron somehow couldn’t decide whether that was reprehensible, or for the best. “The ones above the water are breathing. Just not awake, though. We decided as a group to preserve the bodies where they died, in the water.”

It made sense. It made too much disturbing sense. It made Aaron sick to be alive. He didn’t see the foggy faces he knew from his past lives. He didn’t really feel much of anything… and the lack of feeling spurred an avalanche of guilt, but that’s all. And then, more guilt, because guilt is a selfish notion, not unlike self-pity and idle complaining. Guilt roars though a person, serving no purpose other than a snide, glum gloat about how practically it can julienne-slice someone’s soul. Aaron stopped thinking about it—his head lodged squarely in the sand of the issue—and he swayed to numb shock instead. 

Regardless of the fact that the world around him had ended, that Armageddon had just taken place and he had, idiotically enough, survived it, Aaron was still bored while he waited for whatever his life was becoming to happen. Aaron noticed in his boredom that the population of the barge was a ratio of 80 cots to 20 people. There was a solitary huddle of gray-skinned, dazed zombies breathing and silently crying. And, looking over the partition, he could see that most of the cots were sunk below the surface. How many of the people in the semi-circle where he sat essentially raised themselves from the dead? What odds did he have while he was baking in the odious glow of the serial killer sun? How lucky was he?

An old colleague of Aaron’s from his early days of learning the ropes in his father’s company walked over to him and broke the clamor in his thrashing mind. Aaron got up, hugged her for a long time, and they both fell into a shiver of silent sobbing. She pulled away and opened her mouth to speak, but before there were words, Aaron jolted awake in a fluorescent hell of beeping and buzzing that smelled like Lysol and loomed with death. He was throttled back into the torturous grip of reality, his skin saturated and glistening with sweat. He was alone in a hospital bed, at 9:27 a.m., wishing he could throw up. And yet, a part of him felt paralyzed, totally incapacitated, not having the strength or the resolve to let go and fall into his own sickness. 

Chapter 15

Aaron was lost in his own consciousness, feeling more at home in dreams than reality. What is happening? How did I get here? Was the catamaran real? Was the explosion, the flirtation with death…

Was all of this Aaron’s true dimension? He was alone in a hospital where confusion seemed to reign supreme; where it seemed like everyone was speaking in low tones of a language he didn’t understand.

Aaron mashed the button for help above his hospital bed, maxing out his strength on the first try. It felt, internally, as if someone had detached all his organs—snipped his veins and capillaries—and rearranged them somehow. He felt all stirred up inside, like his brain was jostled into pieces and scattered all throughout his frame. His heart was no longer in his chest, but somewhere else, somewhere frozen and untouched by light. Aaron felt intrinsically and thoroughly as though he were, for the first time in his life, someone else.

No one answered his call for help. No one came to answer his questions. All he could hear were the shrieking beeps of machines, stoic and unchanging in their monotony. Every now and then, a rustle of hospital scrubs or sneakers squeaking across the linoleum would permeate the sound waves around him, but Aaron felt as though he were slipping deeper and deeper into a comatose state, a trance of quiet bewilderment that fogged over his mind and muddled his tenacity.

In his final grips of consciousness, Aaron pulsed his brain—whirring in the turbulence of disorientation—trying to remember. He found himself lunging toward the final shreds of his reality before everything unraveled, thinking back to the last real, tangible picture his mind could paint: Vanessa. She was with him, rocking softly across the ecstasy in the same rhythm as he was, in the same frequency. Just the thought of her blanketed his body with serenity, calmness radiating through him now just as she’d sent electric spikes through him the night before.

Where is she? Is she in danger? Could she be as close to me as the other side of this wall? Was she waking up from a gripping nightmare as well, chained to a hospital bed with no answers? Aaron’s mind felt overheated with a fiery internal dialogue. He began to shout, but the sound of his voice was lost in the ether, disappearing into an invisible vortex as soon as it left his mouth. He was trapped in some kind of vacuum, menacing in its ordinary stillness.

Physically paralyzed and clutched by mental turbulence, Aaron began to harness all the emotion within him. Like a battery on a charging station, he pulsated internally, rearing back in preparation only to burst forward, out of the prison inside of which he’d awoken. A deluge of physical strength surged through him and his muscles began to pump with energy, emboldening his biceps and quads until finally, his entire body was rippling with newfound expansion. With a simple jerk of his forearm, Aaron snapped the now-flimsy chain of the handcuff that had previously held him prisoner to the hospital bed.

Aaron raced out of the hospital room with unmeasured bemusement. His field of vision was doubling, tripling, warping and folding on itself. It was as if the rage bubbling up inside him served as his only fuel, that without it, he’d still be comatose and trapped within the cage of a nightmare. He could see people, but their faces were scratched away, vague and utterly lacking distinction. Every time he looked in a new direction to solve the mystery of where he was, what he was doing there, and what happened to him, more of the same confusion was revealed.

Eventually, as less and less was making sense around him, Aaron made the decision to simply run away. His muscles were still vibrating with a sort of electrical current that had seemingly been turned to full blast by his own will to escape. And yet, running wild through unmarked hallways that twisted and turned in his limited vision, Aaron caught sight of himself in a pane of glass. Fear overtook him. What he saw wasn’t a man, wasn’t himself, wasn’t the person he knew himself to be. He screamed again into the void.

What Aaron saw when he looked at what he believed to be his own reflection ripped through him, singeing away at his sense of security cell by cell. Looking into the monstrous red eyes glaring back at him, seeing the way the saliva dripped from rows of jagged fangs, taking in the view of the talons he’d sprouted from his knuckles, Aaron wanted to collapse in terror. This was no mortal man, and for a moment, Aaron believed that he was looking at a screen, a picture, some kind of film designed to horrify him. It wasn’t reality. It simply couldn’t be.

And then, sinking under the weight of the realization, everything began to make sense. All the pieces to the mysteries of the past few weeks were clicking together, connecting in Aaron’s overrun mind. His father’s sudden illness. His own unfounded seizures. The feeling of untapped energy bubbling up within him, coercing him to morph into something he doesn’t recognize. The urge to protect. The craving for hedonism. The kiss of sybaritic temperament.

Nothing was as it seemed. And yet, beneath the gray veil of the surface, all the clues fit together. He was poisoned. Someone did this to him; someone infused his bloodstream with some sort of toxin. Suddenly, Aaron’s board room seizure rippled into his mind under a new lens of clarity. The wound in his leg throbbed before his episode; just after he’d drifted off on the sofa in his office. She came to wake him up, the remind him of the meeting, to see if he needed anything. She did this to him. She made this monster.

“Desiree,” Aaron growled, his voice finally rumbling out toward the air in front of him.

It had to be Desiree. She was the only one close enough to both Aaron and his father to be able to harm them. The fog was being wiped away in Aaron’s mind, and he couldn’t believe that he’d been so blind before. Of course his father had been suddenly harmed. Though he was reaching his elderly stages of life, Charlie was always known for his go-get-’em attitude, his utter defiance of the takeover of time. Aaron felt the stupidity billowing up in his mind for not being able to see it before. Poison was the only answer to this equation. Poison, given slowly and succinctly, perhaps over a long period of time. It could have been a few drops in a cup of coffee each day. It could have been an abrupt dosage, meant for lethal effect. Whatever it was, she had done it, slowly and surely, to both of them.

Was it her intention to create a beast? Was it Desiree’s intention to transform Aaron into the mythical, otherworldly creature that stared back at him? Was she as conniving as she seemed now, illuminated in Aaron’s memory with such malignant intentions? With memories of her bleeding back through his brain—the flirting, the cleavage, the disgustingly sweet banter—was it all a grand distraction? Was she really edging her way closer to him, to Charlie, to the seat of power?

Aaron could feel his heartbeat normalizing, simmering down after broiling under the weight of his transformation. The fangs that hung threateningly over his teeth began to incarcerate themselves inside his gums once again. The tufts of fur that had blossomed all over his body began to hibernate inside his pores. His muscles had folded over on themselves, compacting his body into its usual frame. The hospital gown no longer felt taut and stretched across his mutated body but now fluttered in the wind of people walking by. The faces normalized, and Aaron could now make out the features of every nurse scurrying past, every doctor ambling along.

Mr. Lee turned the corner of the hallway and nearly dropped his cup of cafeteria coffee. “Aaron,” he croaked. “What are you doing out here in the hallway? And… how did you break your arm restraint?”

Aaron stared down at his right arm, encased not by a busted metal handcuff, but the unraveled strips of standard rope confinement. He knew—with every synapse firing—that he was handcuffed. That spurred his initial feeling of terror: the illusion that someone had a hold on him. How could he have been wrong? How could he have imagined something so concrete, so undeniable?

“I…” Aaron began, dizziness now buzzing through him. “I… don’t know. I don’t know… anything.”

“Let’s get you back in bed,” Mr. Lee said in a voice streaked with concern as he took Aaron by the elbow and led him back down the hallway to his room.

Chapter 16

Vanessa was spilling scrambled eggs onto her sister’s plate—plastic and sectioned off in bright colors so that the foods wouldn’t touch each other—when her phone began to buzz. The eggs heaped over one section into the other on purpose, as it was Vanessa’s secret way to mask the fact that multiple foods at breakfast time was a strange luxury from a bygone era. Setting the plate down in front of Emma, who wouldn’t stop drawing at the table, Vanessa clicked the green button on her phone screen. It was a number she didn’t recognize, however the area code was local, so the chances of this person being a bill collector were slim. Still, a pang of terror ran up Vanessa’s spine as she moved the phone to her ear.

“Hello?” She sounded tentative, unsure.

“Hi, good morning,” a cheery woman perked into the phone. “Am I speaking with Vanessa?”

The unease took a tighter hold. Skeptically, Vanessa replied with a gulp. “Yes. Who is this?”

“Hi Vanessa, this is Rebecca from Human Resources at Kümertech Incorporated. Do you have a few minutes to talk?”

Bewildered, yet still with some sort of shaky understanding of the root of her newfound connection with Kümertech, Vanessa eyed Emma over her shoulder. “Emma,” she said as she tilted her head away from the microphone. “Can you be a good girl and eat your eggs? I need to take this call in the living room.”

Emma nodded theatrically, her sandy blonde hair coming loose from the lopsided ponytail that Vanessa had haphazardly thrown together on top of her sister’s head.

Walking in to the living room, Vanessa said into the phone authoritatively, “I’m here. What is this regarding?”

“Well,” Rebecca said in a disarmingly cheerful tone, “I have a direct order from our CEO to reach out to you on whether or not you’re interested in the position that has just opened up.”

Vanessa raised her eyebrows. “I’m sorry,” she began, trying to be as polite as possible. “I don’t think I’m sure what you mean,” she stammered.

“Oh, I was… under the impression that you and Mr. Ridley knew each other well. He… didn’t tell you?” Rebecca sounded confused.

Vanessa was silent. What could she say? It felt like she was unexpectedly barging into a lion’s den, and the lion was worried about not having set an extra place at the dinner table.

“Let’s back up,” Rebecca started again. “There’s a position open at our company to be the secretary to the CEO. I have been instructed by Mr. Ridley himself to give you a call and offer you the job. Now, I thought he’d already discussed this with you, so I apologize for my candor. Would you like me to go over the salary and benefits with you now over the phone, or should we meet in the office to discuss and negotiate?”

Vanessa’s voice was long gone, floating along a river of surprise in a far-off yonder that she couldn’t see. She was only 21 years old. An uneducated stripper caring for her disabled little sister in the wake of her parent’s death. A cushy office job seemed like it was galaxies away, in another dimension where the social tiers weren’t so bold, so stringent. And a salary negotiation? Any job that paid a salary instead of a measly hourly wage was a dreamy, distant reality for Vanessa, whose mind still calculated things in terms of minimum wage at a panicked moment’s notice. Insecurity pumped through her veins. Why was she being considered for this? Youth aside, she had no marketable skills. What did she bring to the table?

“L-l-let’s…” Vanessa stuttered, “Let’s arrange to meet.”

“Okay, no problem. How does today at 1 p.m. sound?”

“Oh, can it be earlier?” Vanessa asked, the talons of her daily responsibilities shanking her as they gripped her. “I need to pick up my little sister from school, and the bus route calls for a few transfers. I’m worried that a meeting that late will cause me to be late getting her after her classes are done.”

“Oh, I completely forgot to mention,” Rebecca chuckled. “Pending acceptance of the position, a company car is available for you to drive today. As soon as you sign the onboarding paperwork, you're free to take the keys.”

Was this a joke? It had to be. Vanessa reasoned that if she just stayed silent, listening ever fervently to the other end of the call, the breathing would transform into giggles, and whatever insensitive idiot whose mind hatched this plan would shout, “GOTCHA!” into the receiver before hanging up.

And yet, Vanessa hadn’t told anyone about her lurid trysts with Aaron. Not even Jessica. The last time she saw him, Jessica watched Emma while she thought Vanessa was working. Filled to the brim with shame and disgust, Vanessa didn’t tell her that she’d blown off her shift at the strip club. How could she? It would be deplorable enough if there was a good reason for it, but this… this sneaking around with a wealthy man twice her age? No. Vanessa could never confess that to anyone, much less the woman who so graciously watched after Emma night after night without asking for a dime.

“Vanessa? Are you still there?” The voice boomed into the phone, drowning out Vanessa’s billowing thoughts.

“I… yeah, I’m here. I'm sorry. There’s a car? I wasn’t… um… I wasn’t expecting that.”

“It is quite a perk, yes,” Rebecca said in a voice that translated to a smile over the phone. “So, can we expect to see you at one today?”

“Well… sure. Okay,” Vanessa’s voice was still tinted with hesitation, but she couldn’t turn this down. Her callow naïveté was in full bloom in the past few days as she burned bridges and shirked responsibility, all for the sake of physical contact.

“Great! Hey, real quick before I let you go,” Rebecca was speaking to her as if they were already colleagues, old pals who passed each other in the hallway and commiserated in the ladies’ staff bathroom after changing their tampons during the workday. “What’s your last name? The email from Mr. Ridley only says your first name.”

“It’s… McCarthy.”

“Okay, perfect. I've got you in for a meeting with me here in Human Resources at one o’clock p.m. today. Make sure that you bring your social security card with you, as well as any photo ID you have and a copy of your birth certificate if you have that, too. We’ll see you a bit later!”

“Thanks,” Vanessa replied in a daze. “Bye.”

* * *

Once Vanessa had dropped Emma off at kindergarten, she walked upstairs with what felt like blocks of lead for shoes. Each step seemed to melt her feet into the floor, dragging her down, preventing her from making the pilgrimage upstairs for the first time in over a year. Her room and Emma’s room were on the ground floor, and all that sat on the top level were her parents’ rooms: a home office, the master bath, and of course, their bedroom. Gulping, Vanessa turned the handle on the door to reveal a ghostly, ethereal memory. The smell of a life she used to know came whooshing toward her, drowning her in nostalgia. Everything is as it was: all the trinkets her mother collected were in perfect order on the bookshelf, and all her father’s books were stacked on his bedside table. The only thing separating their room from its lively counterpart in the past was dust, blanketed over every surface and populating the air. The dust was a thick smog inside this forgotten room, preserved in time.

Vanessa knelt down beside her father’s side of the bed. With hands that trembled in the ocean of sentiment that poured through her just by walking through his door, she managed to spin the dial on the lock of the safe where he kept all his important documents. Tears blinded Vanessa momentarily as her mind flashed back to the day he died, three days after her mother, to whom she never got to say goodbye. Her father’s injuries in the car accident were just as severe, yet he wasn’t killed on impact. For him, death came slowly and methodically.

The last three days of his life were stretched out by a metaphorical medieval torture device, which maimed him to death in creatively anguished ways. He whispered to Vanessa the code to the safe, instructing her to memorize it, in the final hours she spent with him—before he was put into a morphine coma to pass away peacefully. He was dying—being slowly chipped away by the knife of death—and he hissed at his daughter to memorize a code for a safe. Nothing important was even in the safe, just birth certificates, social security cards, scarcely used passports and bank statements to accounts without a substantial amount of savings. There were no heartfelt confessions of unconditional, parental love, no tear-stained goodbyes. Just three numbers whispered in a hoarse tone for a daughter who didn’t know how to march out of the room unassisted, much less into the next phase of her life.

Here, now, in her parents’ empty room, Vanessa found her documentation: two little pieces of paper over twenty years old that signified who she is. That’s all she had to do to prove her identity, flash these two documents. We’re all just piles of paperwork, she thought to herself. Is this all I am? Is this all anyone cares about? While Vanessa was certainly far from her own biggest fan, she couldn’t help feeling like she meant more to the world than two fraying, decades-old sheets of paper.

Chapter 17

“You’ve made a miraculous recovery, Mr. Ridley,” Mr. Lee said with a genial smile across his face.

Aaron sat up in the chair next to his father’s home hospice bed. “Which one?” he asked.

“Well, both, of course,” Mr. Lee grinned a little too wide. “I’m sure Mr. Ridley, Senior is excited about returning to the company. Am I correct?” He was speaking to Charlie as if he were in grade school, successfully sleeping through the duration of nap time.

“I don’t know,” Charlie croaked, hacking. “Retirement sounds nice right about now.”

Aaron said nothing, looking at the floor. He’d stayed by his father’s side since he was released from the hospital after his hallucinations stopped. He screened every call that came in and interviewed every prospective visitor. There was no evidence, of course, that Desiree had unleashed some destructive poison on the both of them, but Aaron was determined to sniff if out and go to the police. First, though, he had to be sure.

“Well,” Mr. Lee said a little too pleasantly, “You are the pro, aren’t you? Aaron, can I have a word with you outside?”

It infuriated Aaron to his core that Mr. Lee, despite having known him since he was a baby, refused to call him Mr. Ridley. This was his subordinate, but he acted more like a sovereign ruler than a Vice President.

“We can speak in here,” Aaron said with authority in his voice.

“Oh,” Mr. Lee replied sharply. “Well, I wanted to ask you how you’re doing with your diagnosis,” he replied softly.

Aaron leaned back in his chair, sulking. The day after his latest rendezvous with Vanessa, he didn’t come to work. Worried, Mr. Lee found him in the hotel where he always stayed, in the midst of a seizure. The closest hospital was a military treatment facility. Once Aaron regained full use of his mental faculties, a doctor informed him that he had been given a rare serum over time which diminishes the effects of the central nervous system, and can have transformative, beast-like properties in the body. It explained the mental fogginess, the superhuman strength, the hallucinations, and the seizures. This serum was used only in military operations and was by no means available to the public, which alerted the attention of the FBI. It was suggested to Aaron that he leave the country while the investigation take place as to keep him out of potential danger from further poisoning.

Sensing the awkwardness that he’d unleashed in the room, Mr. Lee piped up with, “And also… I want to remind you that you have the investors’ morale seminar in the Maldives next week.”

“How could I forget?” Aaron replied, smiling.

“Yes, well,” Mr. Lee said, smiling obnoxiously. “Unfortunately, I’ll need to tie up a few loose ends here at the home office. However, I think it would be a nice way to welcome your new secretary to the company if she were to take my place.”

Blood pumped through Aaron at the thought of Vanessa, sprawled out naked on some bed that smelled like coconut oil, the cyan sea behind her, the sun high in the air over a straw roof. He couldn’t harness his thoughts, he could barely contain them within his mind.

“Aaron?” Mr. Lee said, disrupting his daydreaming.

“Yes? Oh, oh… well, we’re sorry that this has come up, Mr. Lee,” Aaron stumbled verbally, strategically moving his briefcase onto his lap. “But I certainly commend you for your hard work and dedication to this company. And you’re right. I think she’d really love the opportunity to go on a business trip to such a relaxing atmosphere. Thank you for that suggestion.”

Mr. Lee beamed in a way that seemed inauthentic. “Very good, sir. Rebecca in Human Resources wanted me to relay to you that your new secretary was coming by to sign her paperwork after lunch, at one o’clock.”

“Today?” Aaron jumped out of his chair, his briefcase clattering to the floor. “I… I need to be present for that.” Without saying goodbye to his father, brushing past Mr. Lee, Aaron bounded out of the room and outside toward his car, thinking only of hooking his hands around the curves of her neck and pulling himself into her once again.

* * *

Documents blanketed Rebecca’s desk. Vanessa felt her hand cramp as she signed paper after paper, so many times that her own signature began to look warped and corrupted like a word that someone says over and over again. Rebecca had counseled Vanessa on her new salary, her health insurance benefits, her company car insurance, and her 401(k) options. The idea of a retirement account completely evaded Vanessa, whose mind only swirled with how Aaron’s tongue felt rolling across her skin, how he whispered inside of her as he made her explode.

“Okay, that’s everything,” Rebecca said suddenly, as Vanessa was drowning in her own personal sea of dreamy nostalgia. “I’ll walk you down to Mr. Ridley’s office. He’s going to handle the issue of the car with you, if that’s okay.”

Not knowing who this Mr. Ridley was, Vanessa nodded blankly. Rebecca’s smart flats padded down the linoleum hallway along the same floor that Vanessa had tripped and spilled salad on a week before, in what felt like another universe. Approaching a door marked Aaron Ridley, Chief Executive Officer, Vanessa felt her heart clomp through her chest. She’d been dreaming about him—about his eyes, about every part of his body—for two days now, since she’d left him in his hotel room last.

After a brief knock, Aaron yelled, “Come in,” from the opposite side of the door. With a sort of professional, easygoing hesitance, Rebecca let the two of them inside. “It’s just us,” she said with a light chuckle.

“Excellent. It’s good to see you again, Vanessa,” Aaron said, sitting behind his desk, beaming. “Thank you, Rebecca,” he said, with a motion toward the door. “I’ll take it from here.”

Excusing herself with a smile, Rebecca shut the door behind her without a word.

“Vanessa,” Aaron whispered as a grin slithered across his face. “Lock the door,” he said with a wink.

Chapter 18

“I hope you have your passport handy,” Aaron said with a smile, zipping his pants. Vanessa was sitting on the couch in his office, hooking her bra in the front and shimmying it around the back. She could feel Aaron inside of her still. The memory permeated her mind and lingered in an amorous fog over her brain. She almost didn’t hear him over the flashbacks streaking across her mind, but his words seemed to cut through all of it with unmistakable clarity.

“What?” She looked up, wanting him to repeat himself. She wanted to hear it again, hear it from his lips, hear with remarkable precision that he was whisking her away.

“We’re going on a trip,” he said, his smile widening across his face.

Possible destinations swirled through hear head. Would it be Mexico? The Caribbean? Europe? Vanessa had only ever been to Canada, and only to drive up to Alaska with her parents. The thought of going on a vacation after the year she had had was intoxicating. The smells of a new country, foreign accents chirping in her ears, local wine and traditional food started to entrance her there, in Aaron’s office, before she ever knew where she was going.

And then, a sledgehammer. Everything she dreamt just now, all the ambrosial sights and sounds smashed apart in her mind, as if they were just travel brochures that someone ripped in half right in front of her. That someone was Emma, so small and so needy, reaching out to Vanessa for everything she needed. She wanted to scream. She loved Emma. She wanted to give Emma everything in life, but she began to hate the fact that her parents left her in charge. Vanessa wasn’t Emma’s mother. She didn’t want to be. She hated herself for feeling this way, for harboring these thoughts toward her handicapped little sister who, for all intents and purposes, didn’t ask for this life either. Vanessa wanted with all her might to run away with Aaron, to leave all the tragedy behind, to start fresh and build a life with the man she felt herself falling deeper and deeper for every day.

Vanessa couldn’t control her tears. Like a busted fire hydrant, she sat on the couch and spewed emotion, sparking a sort of fear in Aaron. A flash of confusion rose through him as he scrambled toward her, asking her in a panicked tone what he did wrong.

“Did I say something to hurt you?” he said, locking eyes with her.

“I… I… I need to tell you something,” Vanessa squeaked between sobs.

“You can tell me anything,” Aaron said, taking her hand. She held onto him, but loosely. Without feeling.

“I have… a little sister,” Vanessa managed to tell him. “She… is six. And I am all she has. That’s why I began stripping. That’s why I can’t stay with you overnight. That’s why I do everything that I do. I am all she has,” Vanessa repeated.

“That's… very admirable,” he said, squeezing her hand. She didn’t squeeze back. “Where…” he began, treading lightly. “Where are… your parents?”

Vanessa’s sobs turned into full-bodied wails, and Aaron knew immediately that he shouldn’t have asked. Her torso quaked with the sobs and she kept gasping for breath as he took her into his arms and rocked her slowly. Up until this point, Aaron found Vanessa to be standoffish, devoid of most human emotion, and that was a huge chunk of his attraction to her. She was a challenge for him, a high wall to scale. And yet, here and now, she was damaged and real, swimming in her own humanity. She was beautiful in a way he hadn’t seen yet, opening up to him in a way he hadn’t expected.

“Listen,” he whispered into her ear. “You don’t have to talk about this now. I’m sorry I asked, okay? Can you forgive me?” He bent his head down and looked into her eyes, glassy with never-ending tears. Vanessa nodded solemnly.

“Okay,” Aaron continued. “It’s up to you, but I can arrange for care for your sister. If you’d rather not go with me, that’s fine. But I think,” he said, a new smile brimming from his mouth, “that you need a vacation. Am I right?”

Vanessa’s tears had dried on her face now, white-hot with the grief he’d accidentally evoked. More than anything, she wanted to get away. She wanted to follow him wherever he went, feel his hand squeeze hers, hear his voice whispering in her ear. He was more than just a sexual side dish to her now. She’d spilled her weakness to him and he didn’t flinch. Maybe this is what it’s like to be with a man, Vanessa considered to herself, realizing that the boys she’d dated in the past held her to a disgusting standard. They expected her to be supremely angelic while they, themselves, were allowed to wallow in their own filth.

“Where are we going?” Vanessa asked timidly.

“The Maldives,” Aaron replied, pulling her lips into his.

Chapter 19

The room was darkening around the two of them, fusing together in the cocoon of coitus. Their skin tones swirled together in the fading light like the exact moment that milk hits a robust espresso. Aaron and Vanessa lay there in his bed for hours as the world carried on. The day darkened and the people piddled around in rooms just a few walls away, and yet the two of them were the only people alive. It felt post-apocalyptic in nature, the way that she kissed him with a tantalizing softness that made him dizzy with desire, the tenacity with which he grabbed her breasts and awakened an animal in her that, all her life, she never knew could exist. It felt as though they were alone in a newly extinct world, a world all to themselves, a world where no one could judge them and there was a sense of urgency about the act: dire, imperative.

They were ferocious with each other at first, shaking in passion pent-up by mounting days of effervescent impatience. Their hands were desperately deliberate, twisting all over each other's skin like a time-lapse video of lush ivy sprouting up a garden wall. She nibbled on his bottom lip, took it between her teeth and gently sucked on it, mentally citing a blurb she read in an issue of Cosmopolitan she stole from her mother's bathroom when she was eleven that stated that such an act would "drive him insane," and ensure that "he'll think about you long afterward." She had kissed like this with every boy before, never questioning the validity of the article. It always seemed cemented in her mind as a sexual gospel of sorts. It couldn't be wrong. She read it in Cosmo at such an age that Cosmo was lauded as a kind of coming-of-age Kama Sutra, a sensual bible for the sexually inept.

Once it was all over—once the two of them thoroughly fatigued themselves, their batteries drained—they lay together as the last shreds of Tuesday bid them farewell. Aaron lay on his back and closed his eyes, watching the color blue float around his mind in several different shades: a whirring rainbow of sapphire behind his eyelids drifting him under a cobalt sky, down an azure river, into a cerulean sleep. And yet, Aaron couldn't sleep, not yet, anyway. Not only was it too early, too premature, too infantile to drift off at this hour, but the primary reason still glimmered beside him. Vanessa was here.

They never talked about Vanessa staying over, never discussed such formalities. In the Maldives, it was all very casually cloak-and-dagger. She would sneak over when the coast was clear, after all the board meetings, after the investors retired back to their own rooms, before dinner would be served and eaten with strained pleasantries in the company of dull colleagues. After all the work of each day was done, Aaron and Vanessa would instantly fall into his bed and begin. No foreplay, just brass tacks. The passion would unfurl as soon as the door to Aaron’s suite shut behind him. They would do something quick, something that felt almost cheap, something that lasted no more than ten minutes.

And then, for the proceeding two hours, they would explore each other's body with their eyes, with the skin-to-skin contact that made every touch feel more charged just because they were there, they were naked, and they were together. They would always do this and, at some point in the afternoon (it was always the afternoon), Vanessa would sigh sharply, almost as if she were expecting something, expecting Aaron to ask her to stay, and of course he never did.

He couldn’t, not with the company hinging on the tightrope of collapse with every passing month of lost revenue. Not when all eyes were on him to turn the profits around. Investors and employees, of course, would flippantly wave off Aaron’s feelings for Vanessa as uncontrollable lust, getting his dick wet with minimal effort. And admittedly, to the casual observer, it seemed that way. But no one knew about Vanessa’s life being snatched away from her just as she stepped over the threshold from adolescence to adulthood. But Aaron recognized that from the unbiased perspective, Vanessa seemed like a hot little side dish, a stereotype in disgusting clarity. As much as he hated himself for doing it, he had to keep his affair with Vanessa a secret until he could turn things around at work. For now, she was his behind closed doors, after the lock clicked itself into place, once the curtains were drawn.

Vanessa’s sigh would always fly out into the air and linger between them, her head resting on his chest and their legs intertwined. She would always make one last-ditch effort to subtly woo him—to make him realize that she couldn't possibly leave him in bed alone—by blinking a few times, her head tilted sideways in schoolgirl naïveté. Butterfly kisses along his chocolate skin.

At first, he was staunch and resolute. No one can find out, he demanded internally. And yet, Vanessa persisted on this Tuesday afternoon as four o’clock loomed over the ocean outside. She didn’t want to leave, she didn’t want him to make her leave, so away her eyelashes fluttered, the tickling across his collarbone radiating through him like an aftershock from the way she’d made him burst in ecstasy just moments before.

“Just stay,” he mumbled into her hair—honey-colored and spilling across the pillow beside him—as he flung his other arm around her, pulling her to fuse with him once again. Afternoon had danced across the electric blue horizon of the sea, painting the skies a different shade of orange with each passing hour. Aaron and Vanessa lay there, limbs tangled together and breaths synchronized below the lapping blades of the ceiling fan, the waves whispering below the deck. Flip-flops clacked against the floorboards outside of the room as hotel guests scuttled out to the impossible blue of the sea. Sleep fell over them, their bodies clean and hollowed out by orgasm, their minds alight with the essence of one another as the orange faded to fuchsia and bathed the sea below in glimmering serenity.

Chapter 20

“I have a secret for you, too,” Aaron whispered as the sun rose across the sea. It illuminated behind Vanessa’s head like a halo as she lay there on the opposite side of the bed, fresh-faced and recharged.

He woke up an hour before she did, pulsating with nerves. Should he tell her? Should he wait? What if she found out? What if he couldn’t control himself? What if he transformed in front of her? Or worse yet, what if he confessed to her what he really was, only for Vanessa to cower away in fear and disgust?

This kind of dilemma was no stranger to the tightly guarded borders of every new relationship, but it felt different in Aaron’s case. He wasn’t confessing to alcoholism or a gambling addiction, or any other recognized personal flaw. It wasn’t even a vice, it was a vandalism of sorts. Someone had systematically eroded him to this periodic monster, this werebear. What if Vanessa couldn’t take it? What if she ran away screaming, out of his life forever?

And yet, she told him what had been done to her. She gushed everything over sun-splashed days pounding along the water: her parents’ car accident, their lack of life insurance, the bills piling up, the epilepsy diagnosis. Then, of course, the day-to-day hardship of being a single parent to a six-year-old, especially at the age of twenty-one. She entrusted Aaron with all of this, setting the stage for a beautiful exchange of information, a dance with shared secrets.

Vanessa nuzzled her face into his chest. Aaron sighed and pulled away, looking her in the eyes.

“Someone… poisoned me,” he began, and her face contorted into a look of pure concern. “Someone poisoned my father and me, both, to infiltrate our company.”

“What?” Vanessa demanded, sitting up. “Are you okay? When was this? Who poisoned you?” Her mouth was spouting questions, unspooling like a roll of thread dropped on the ground.

“Everything’s all right,” Aaron said, calmly. Vanessa lay back down next to him, pulling the covers up over her breasts. “I don’t know for sure who it was,” he continued, “but I think I know who. I’ve placed Mr. Lee in charge of my father’s care while we’re here. He should improve. As for me… though…” Aaron sighed.

What made the situation so much worse was that it was utterly nonsensical. Aaron had become a walking parody, a mythical being that he thought only existed in fairy tales. How could he tell Vanessa such an absurdity? It sounded asinine even when he thought it. How could he convince her that it was real?

“I was given a rare, military-grade serum,” Aaron belted out. “This serum causes me to… transform…”

“Into what?” Vanessa cut him off, intrigued.

“The military doctor called it a… werebear,” Aaron said, gulping. “As in, a werewolf bear.”

Silence fell across the room, and only the lapping of the waves could be heard outside as the landscape of the Maldives revved up for another day, totally unaware of the confession made within these walls. Aaron let his head fall into his hands, hopeless, wondering how to salvage the morning. He’d ruined the conversation, unleashing this venom of a secret to someone who—rightfully so—couldn’t take it all in.

Something stirred inside Vanessa; curling up around her soul. Her mind sizzled with a mix of fear and confusion bubbling up together in tandem with one another. What is a werebear? Her mind spiraled with the question, over and over again, until it no longer sounded ridiculous in her train of thought. It was intriguing somehow; overpowering in its allure. The notion of being craved by this beast of a man with rippling muscles and overflowing appeal. His confession felt more and more normal with each wave of realization across her mind; so much so that Vanessa didn’t even feel the need to sour the moment with her own commentary.

“Aaron,” Vanessa broke the stillness. “What do you want out of life?”

Shock drizzled through him. “What?” he asked, lifting his head to face her.

“What do you want out of life?” she asked again. “Have you already achieved your dreams? Are you still searching for something?”

He let his eyes wander outside to the cyan sea, and the way the sunlight glimmered across the surface of the waves. All he wanted was normalcy, to be average, to not be considered such a commodity.

“I want… to be a regular guy,” he confessed. “I want a house, I want a wife, I want to barbecue in the backyard and drink beer with my friends. I want to talk about sports, not stocks. I want to fix things in the garage. I want to read all the newspaper sections, not just the finance and business parts. I want… to be average,” Aaron said, looking into her eyes.

“Have you ever told anyone before?” she questioned, curiously.

“No one’s ever asked me,” he replied.

Chapter 21

In the months following his trip to the Maldives, Aaron was informed that his assumption about his former secretary’s involvement in the case was false. His father was still deteriorating, even after a quick jump in his health. In what felt like a move of ultimate betrayal, Mr. Lee was taken into federal custody on two charges of attempted murder, having stolen the serum from an unknown merchant on the black market.

“Why did you do it?” Aaron said into the phone as he stared into Mr. Lee’s eyes, sunken and gray, across the plexiglass barrier. “Why would you do this to us?”

“You never respected me,” Mr. Lee hissed. “I had worked for your father since before you were born. I should have owned the company by now. I should be in charge. I was loyal for decades, but Charlie never cared about me. I was stuck, unable to move up, wasting my time. I wanted him gone. I wanted you gone. I wanted to win.”

“How did you inject the poison into me? How did you make me into such a monster?” Aaron was desperate for answers; his brain seemed to turn itself inside-out in longing to understand how all this happened.

“I spiked your coffee,” snarled Mr. Lee, his eyes somersaulting in their turpitude. “The morning of the meeting with the investors. I placed a tasteless sedative in a single serving of decaf coffee and poured it into a mug as soon as I saw Desiree coming. Once you were knocked out, I injected you with the serum...the same serum I plunged into your father’s bloodstream in sustained, nearly-lethal doses. I kept him alive just long enough to name me as his successor. And yet...he never did...” Mr. Lee’s wicked confession trailed off, leaving Aaron with the constricting depravity of his words.

“My father could read people,” Aaron said slowly, measuredly. “He could have sensed this behavior in you, Mr. Lee. That’s probably the reason that you never moved up in the company, not me.”

Hatred emanated from Mr. Lee’s pores as he spit at Aaron’s face across the windowpane. The two guards supervising the visit immediately snapped to action, dragging Mr. Lee back into the dingy recesses of the federal prison where he was held, awaiting the death sentence. Sighing, Aaron held his thumbs tightly within his fingers for a few seconds before getting up to leave. This was his coping mechanism, this helped him calm down. Over time, Aaron learned the value in stress-management strategies, always testing and trying new ways to prevent a transformation. In times of intense anxiety, Aaron could squeeze his thumbs at the pressure points to release dopamine through his body to create waves of contentment.

Behind the wheel of the Tesla he’d traded for his old bachelor’s Porsche, Aaron took in the fields of unending green across the rural California landscape. Mountains sketched themselves out across the brilliant blue of the southwestern sky and birds flitted through the wind gusts, chirping and singing a soundtrack of inextinguishable joy. He sold Kümertech to a rival company, which absorbed his albatross with open arms. Now, Aaron did what he wanted, when he wanted, and didn’t have to keep up the masquerade of detached indifference.

Aaron pulled into the driveway of a house he’d bought shortly after his return from the Maldives. Emma ran out to greet him as he closed the car door, bounding across the yard only to be swooped up in his arms and spun around until they both fell in their dizziness on the landing pad of the grass. Vanessa watched from the window, spinning in her own form of dizzy joy at the sight of the two of them together, giving each other companionship they’d never had before.

For Emma, Aaron was a big brother and a father figure rolled into one. For Aaron, Emma was a window into a life of joy, of compassion, of innocence, of hope. For Vanessa, they were bridges to a family she didn’t think she deserved, the new and improved version of the family that was ripped away from her. She was nearing her twenty-third birthday, and her life had painted itself in ways that she lacked the artistic ability to imagine. Watching Aaron gaze up at clouds with Emma in the grass, pointing out cloud formations and giggling at the possibilities, Vanessa’s heart was bursting. This was her life now.