1. “hold them down for me”
“Jesse, darling, I need to borrow you for a moment.” Maharet says it like anyone would and mean ‘come tell me if this frame is straight’ or ‘hold the cat while I take the trash out’, perfectly casual, like her claw-tipped fingers aren’t covered in blood, like Jesse has a choice.
Maharet slithers into Jesse’s skull; makes her body rise. It stumbles over to Maharet and the thing on the floor, the weeping, broken body. Jesse’s crumples gracelessly, and Maharet does not control her mouth, so she cries out. Then: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” as her hands pin it down.
2. forced turning/forced to turn another
“All right. So what’s this ‘surprise’?” Daniel asks. He’s tired of being toyed with, and he’s tired of being alive. In love with death, Louis called him this morning. Not an easeful one, you said. Louis smiled, all soft. No, he agreed.
Louis smiles now, all teeth. “Arun?”
Your stomach churns. You’ve never—you never wanted—
(oh, don’t lie to yourself)
—but it is demanded of you, and so you shall. It is not a sin to be forced.
“Hey,” says Daniel, hands raised, panicking. “Hey now. We don’t need to—”
You freeze him. “Maître?”
“Go on. He’ll want it.”
3. interrupted by concerned 3rd party
It’s three in the morning in Dubai. Just about dinner time in New York. Daniel underslept yesterday on purpose, in the hopes of passing out as soon as he was settled in Louis du Lac’s penthouse, but turns out it’s hard to sleep in the lion’s den. Every sound makes him flinch: the eerie groan of the building, the AC clicking on with a burst of foul-smelling air (“For your comfort,” said Louis’s endlessly accomodating, bug-eyed assistant, seemingly unaffected by the oppressive heat), a series of sharp, impossible-to-place sounds, almost but not quite rhythmic. A quiet moan of pain.
Phone camera ready in a shaky hand, Daniel follows the sound of human misery to the source, feeling like the first to die in an A24 flick. Finds Rashid, the PA, on the dining room floor, at the foot of some ancient, priceless painting of Jesus. He’s naked and prone—Rashid, that is. Pale scars cut across his thighs. Old scars, layers and layers of overlap from his ass to the insides of his knees. More on the soles of his feet. His back is so much shredded meat. Louis du Lac stands above him, a bloody stockwhip in his hand.
Louis snaps his fingers, making Daniel flinch from his hiding place in the doorway. Rashid pushes himself up to his knees with a whimper, sitting back on his ankles. The little red dot in the corner of Daniel’s screen pulses away, the seconds ticking up as Louis circles his prey. Runs a gentle hand over the broken skin, tips up his chin. “Good boy,” says Louis. “You still want this?”
He palms his dick through his designer sweatpants. It’s unexpectedly vulgar; heat churns in Daniel’s belly.
“Please,” Rashid manages, voice tear-thick. “Use me, not Mr. Molloy. I can be good.”
4. coerced/bad touched by david talbot
“What do you say?”
“My niece will not be attending this ‘school’ of yours.”
“But Aunt Maharet—” The boarding school Mr. Talbot represented sounded just like Hogwarts, for witches and psychics, other kids like her! Jesse had never met anyone like her, except Maharet.
“No.”
Mr. Talbot acquiesced, brushing off his tweed trousers. “Well, it was lovely to meet you, Miss Reeves.” He held out his hand as if to shake, but took Jesse’s to his lips instead to kiss the back of her hand. His thumb lingered. His eyes. “And remember, the Talamasca would absolutely love to have you.”
5. marital rape
Seventeen. Sixteen. Fifteen. It hurts, in the dull way being underprepared always does.
“You should,” her husband says, breathless on the thrust. Fourteen. “Make yourself feel good.” He grabs her wrist and pulls it between their bodies. Alice doesn’t particularly want to have an orgasm right now, but it’ll hurt less if she likes it, any idiot girl knows that.
Thirteen, twelve, eleven. She circles her clit with a dry finger, a little unpleasant the way his cock is, but it wakes something up inside her. Her cunt pulses; Daniel moans. “That’s nice,” he mutters. Of course it’s for him.
6. fantasy/intrusive thought
She’s spirited. “Gutter trash,” Santiago calls her after she and her brother leave the theatre that first night, really meaning ‘dark’, “but she cleans up nice enough.”
Amadeo cleaned up nicely, Bianca told him once—you could earn a scudo a night these days, if you were a woman. They weren’t minting scudi when Marius found him, but it was a simple enough calculation: he’d been bought for four and a half. Of course, Bianca sold her nights for six. Amadeo held up one of Bianca’s gowns to his chest. Imagined tearing out her throat, as his master might have. Can’t I pass? he asked, smiling sweet.
Claudia can pass for a woman. Fourteen is the perfect age, really: both young and old enough most any man will want you. Marius sometimes looked at his earliest sketches of Amadeo, when he was still all bones and dull, snarling teeth, and bemoaned that he hadn’t been ready, then, to receive the Dark Gift. Armand wished he’d done it anyway, given that feral creature fangs, as Lestat had given Claudia. Or ‘Bruce’ had given her, he should say.
Is she untouched, Armand wonders? Oh, how lucky that would be. You could rape her every night, have a virgin again at sunset. You could be forever pure. He imagines having her, ruining that lovely lady’s dress and revealing her for the little girl she’ll never grow out of. Pressing open her thighs and showing her what her body can feel, unmaking her with that dirtiest of kisses. He imagines being her, small and weak in the blood, the perfect victim. She’s probably as ungrateful as Amadeo was, kiss-bitten lips begging for the lash and then crying abuse. Insatiable things, aren’t they, children? Were he Claudia, were he Amadeo again, he would be perfect.
7. memory alteration
For years, you thought nothing of it. Your history. It was only unique, really, in that you survived long enough for it to become history. But Lestat, who so greatly expanded your horizons, wished for you to expand his in turn. What were you, he wanted to know, meaning no ill will; where did you come from? It is only when you told him to find a map and you would show him that it all fell apart.
Was it ignorance? Indifference? East is east, you suppose. A merchant ship sets out from Delhi. A red-cloaked man shows you kindness.
8. mind gift harassment
Maître and his American beau were in the office again, the record player’s dial turned up all the way like it’d bury the sound of Louis du Lac’s belt, or Maître’s sweet cries. Then again, the blinds were still half open, so perhaps the music was for Maître’s benefit, drowning out the sound of them in the green room. Let him pretend he was not on display.
You’ve been holding out on us, Maître, Eglee pouted. They watched him flinch through the dirty glass.
Not Maître, Santiago corrected. Not anymore. Oh, come now, Arun. You can do better than that.
9. consensual encounter turned non-con
It starts with a kiss. Well, really, it starts weeks earlier, with a hand on his cheek, brushing away a fallen tear. “What has you so upset, my darling?” Bianca asked, and then she listened, and Amadeo was helpless against her charms. His master adored her, he knew; had painted her dozens of times, as much as he painted Amadeo, perhaps even more. Of course he loved to paint Bianca—that was no mystery. Look at her! Her round, pale face, her golden hair styled in its perfect ringlets, her breasts—perfect handfuls pressing through the gaps in his fingers.
In this painting, she is Inanna, an ancient goddess—more ancient even than Amadeo’s master—and Amadeo is a boy called Šukalletuda, a gardener who, when he happens upon the goddess asleep in the garden he is meant to be tending, rapes her instead. In the painting, it has not gone so far—Amadeo has been instructed to cup Bianca’s bare breast, but no further. “Tasteful eroticism,” his master calls it. So perhaps you could say it starts with this: Bianca’s breast in Amadeo’s hand to be painted, while Amadeo imagines being permitted to rape her.
And then, amazingly, he is. “Please,” Bianca says between kisses once they are alone. “I’ve been thinking of nothing else.” (Why, Amadeo can’t quite fathom—often when Bianca calls him beautiful, he thinks it is a joke.)
“I can’t,” he says, and she must understand because she is touching him there. It feels good, but it doesn’t stir.
“Your hands,” says Bianca, and then she is taking his wrist and pulling it between her legs, and— and—
Amadeo is somewhere else. Amadeo is not Amadeo yet. “I don’t—”
“Don’t be coy, Amadeo,” Bianca snaps. So he buries himself in his flinch, and rapes her.
10. no negotiation/retraumatization
A dinner club in Cairo, 1951. Louis smiling at the man across the table. An art broker, Armand thinks, or perhaps just a hobbyist. A white man with a great deal of money, is the point, and they’re short on that these days, without Lestat’s—Magnus’—endless pockets. Armand isn’t paying attention to the conversation; he’s only looking at Louis’ smile. Dimmer than it used to be, but this is the first sign of joy Louis has shown since—
“Arun.” The name startles him. “You’ll show our friend here a good time, won’t you?”
Will he? For Louis’ smile, yes.
11. bartering with desire
The rats portend him: their chittering, the scrabble of claws on stone. Amadeo unfolds himself from the corner, kneels before the bars of his cage a pretty face and inviting body, soft cock cradled by his thighs. He cannot make himself clean or rid of the corpses, but Santino hardly cares about those things.
“Master,” Amadeo calls as Santino draws near, breathless like a girl in the Rialto. “Oh, can’t I tend to you, master?”
Sin, he calls it, but he’ll accept. Holy men always do, when they’re alone. And bloody spend will stave off the worst of Amadeo’s hunger.
12. character doesn't know it's rape
The woman who’s going to die on stage tonight is about your age—not your body but your real age, I’ll be thirty eight this year, thank you very much, you want to snap at everyone who asks why you’re out so late at night, where are your parents, little girl? The woman—you don’t know her name, if anyone bothered to tell you in the first place, and you don’t really care—has the faintest of wrinkles in the centre of her forehead and the corners of her eyes. She’s got stretch marks etched in silver on her breasts.
You’re not doing anything wrong, stripping her. Most of the coven’s new clothes come from victims; when something’s too blood-stained or ragged to wear out, it gets sent out on stage on a sacrifice, and the cycle continues. It’s just, usually you tell them to change and either they obey or you make them—following Armand’s example, getting called a brown-noser for it, ha-ha. But Eglee, she’s always hands-on with the pretty girls, and nobody cares. You want this woman’s body, and even if you can’t keep it you can have it for a little while. So.
“You’re in your bed,” you tell her. She’s standing listlessly in the wet room in skirt and hose and nothing else. “You’re having a dream. It’s a real nice dream.” A nice dream, she echoes. “You’re aching, down there. Thinking of a lover. You wanna touch yourself.” You unzip her skirt. She’s so obedient, stepping out of it for you, and then her hose. In her panties there’s a cotton pad, oh. “Go on, baby,” you tell her, lisping. “Make yourself feel good.” You lick the inside of her thigh. You climb inside her brain and become a grown woman for a while.
13. sex magic
It’s abhorrent, what they’ll do to children these days. Marius has had eunuch boys before, of course, with their pouch and chickpea, but it was only the cultists who would make an ektomios, and they do it to themselves as men or women grown. His Amadeo, poor thing, has only ragged scar tissue between his legs—nothing to give him pleasure at all, except by way of bloody kiss and borrowed sensation. Each time Marius leads him to completion thus, it takes hold of his limbs like a seizure, his hips arching to seek out more of an impossible touch.
14. abuse of authority
“Me?” says the vampire in the middle of your flat, impossibly so, because the papered windows glow yellow and he was not here when you took to coffin. “I am your maker’s master, Francis Noughton—which means that you belong to me.”
He looks young but feels ancient, oppressive power making you shrink against the wall. “Francis Maurii servi servus. Know you your Latin?”
Your mouth is dry. You nod.
The vampire is smiling. Dull teeth. “Heel.” Then: “Obedient! Perhaps something good can come of this mess after all, hm?”
His fingers press against your lips, and you admit them.
15. safeword ignored
In the home of a vampire so ancient it makes Armand feel the mayfly, he meets his master again. His master, miraculously alive; his master, who used to joke, ever fond, Ab testamento te manumittam—I’ll free you in my will. He meant it as a promise to keep his love by his side forever. Amadeo at thirty thought it romantic. Armand at five hundred feels sick to his stomach.
He submits to his master’s affection with a toy’s stoicism: his kisses, his wandering hands. He sometimes catches Louis’ eyes upon them across the room, unsurprised and something like disgusted.
He must have heard Armand call this man—this stranger, for why would Louis recognize a man centuries dead in this modern gentleman’s face?—‘master’, the only word he could choke out, and thought, ah, Armand is at it again. Armand tries not to feel any more about that than he feels about his master’s lips on his throat.
When the meeting adjourns, his master says, “Amadeo, Armand, come and visit with me a while,” already leading him along by the wrist. Armand imagines saying no, his master none the wiser; always he bemoaned the privacy Amadeo did not earn.
He imagines saying it again in the bath. Again, in the coffin. His master would hide his hurt behind laughter: who are you and what have you done with my Amadeo? he’d ask, letting Armand go.
His master takes him roughly, holding the back of Armand’s neck in a way that makes him feel small. Almost growls, “Sen ‘la’ dyk agaro bolsang…” and Armand doesn’t understand. The words, yes. But why this forgotten piece of boyhood? Every calamity will befall you, it finishes, should you become twisted as ‘no’.
Unless. But if he had…
No. No. He’d let him go.
16. incest
“He ever have you call him daddy?” Louis’ voice is muffled: his lips drag against the wound he’s made of Armand’s clavicle. His hand cups Armand, fingertips playing at his swollen rim.
“Hm? Who, the boy?” He means the corpse beside the bed. “No. I thought you were watching the whole time?” Did he leave at some point? It would’ve had to have been after—
“Not him. Marius. You call him daddy when he was fucking you? Or when he wasn’t?”
Armand frowns. “No. He was my master.”
“Didn’t know that was an either/or.”
“It isn’t always, I suppose.”
17. genderplay/disguised identity
| He’s still unused to the face looking back at him in the mirror. Her face, rather. Looking at her? Perhaps; perhaps not. It’s strange, to embark on a new life without someone saying: this is what you are now, this is what you will answer to. Not unwelcome, but strange. | She’s half in love with the face looking back at her in the mirror. Hers, now. All hers, like Louis. Louis, who thinks she’s fucking dust and has the gall to go on living. Thinks Armand let her die, and here they fucking are. His lips, his hands, his love. |
18. noncon body mod
The boy is on the very cusp of manhood when Marius finds him in that fetid brothel, praying for death to come with gentle hands. Hermaphroditus about the face, that perfect androgyny of the unsexed child, and hairless still upon the upper lip, but above the necessary part a little crop of dark curls is coming in, framing a phallus that would be ideal if only it had not been mutilated in the way of the Egyptians and their backward fellows. Soft, at least, it seems the perfect handful, neither a little boy’s thumbprint nor the bulk of a man.
He’s proven right when he takes the boy home. Responsive little thing, hedonism in his bones. So readily he blooms once all that unfounded fear is kissed away: you’re safe here, Amadeo. You’re loved. You’re loved.
He really is perfect, all smooth dark skin and glossy curls, long-limbed in a delicate, doe-like way. Even starvation looks alluring when Amadeo wears it. Marius considers bringing him into the blood this very night, freezing him forever in the springtime of his youth like Eudoxia’s boys so long ago. But Amadeo is a fearful thing, half wild. It would be cruel.
There are other ways to keep a boy from becoming overripe. Let Amadeo put meat on his bones, learn to speak a civilized tongue, forget entirely the terror Marius drowns with the Mind Gift; then he will be ready for eternity. So Marius puts him in the bath, hot water making Amadeo melt into his arms, and he wrings his pleasure out of him, still clear. Sweet water on Marius’ tongue, now and forever.
He thumbs the little coinpurse, massaging its contents. A kiss to Amadeo’s trembling belly; love, love, love to overwhelm the fear. Now pinch down until there’s nothing left.
19. gangbang. rapebang. whatever
The chair creaks. One of the children kneels atop it, knees bracketing him in, curling down. Greasy hair tickling his face; teeth in his throat. In the tenderness of his inner arm. At his ankle—for the first time, a flinch.
One hand is still unmolested; he brings it up to his own mouth, murmuring with a mouthful of foul blood dripping down his chin: “For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed.” Not his faith, but someone’s. Skittering rats. He that eateth thy flesh and drinketh thy blood dwelleth in thee, and thou in him.
20. intoxication/drugging/poison
In the brothel, they used milk of the poppy to keep the children pliable. Mixed it in water with sugar to cut the bitterness and let them have nothing else to drink. Arun watched it kill a girl, once. Watched her kill herself with it. One and the same, really.
Towards the end, Bianca made Amadeo the same concoction. Armand cannot recall if he asked her for it, or if she took it upon herself to free him. At night, his master’s blood, prolonging his death drop by drop; by day, Bianca, leading him down into the garden of Proserpine.
21. underage/revenge rape
When Daniel saw the kid lurking in the doorway, he said what was probably the obvious thing: “You must be Claudia.”
The kid—mid-teens, maybe, perfectly androgynous with shoulder-length curls and a flat chest, dressed in quiet luxury chinos and a half-tucked button-down—blinked at him with big, bright orange eyes, and then let out a laugh.
“Arun, did I give you permission to eavesdrop?” Louis bit out, and Daniel could vividly imagine the man who held a knife to his own brother’s neck.
The kid ducked his head. “No, maître.”
…Okay. Daniel flagged the timestamp on the recording. “Your, uh, ‘fledgling’?” he asked after the kid slunk off with his tail between his legs.
“No.”
“Another one of Lestat’s, then?”
Sharply: “Arun is not your concern, Daniel.” And that was that; back to New Orleans, 1917, until around 2AM and Daniel’s third yawn, and Louis saying, “We’ll pick back up tomorrow.”
Daniel went back to his room, took his meds and a caffeine tablet. You never found the truth letting your subject lead you by the hand. Opened the door to—
“You will kill him.” The kid, Arun, right fucking there, eyes glowing.
“Jesus Christ—”
“You cannot write this book. It will be his death. If not the interview itself, then the festering of the wound it will inevitably leave. If not that, other vampires will come, smelling the blood in the water. I cannot allow it.” His eyes were rattling, and Daniel was on his knees, he was in two places at once, watching two different screaming matches fifty years apart. One ends with the slamming of a door. The other…
“What part of ‘no’ don’t you understand, huh? You need a refresher?”
“Louis!”
“What’s that?”
“...Nothing, maître.”
“Uh-huh. Thought so.”
Then, bitter: “It won’t bring her back.”
22. somno
Eight years they’ve been together now, five since Louis chose him over Lestat. Chose him. It still feels unreal. Armand does not know why Louis did it; he suspects Louis may not know either. But what’s done is done. Armand is his, and he Armand’s.
Not that you’d know it. Oh, no, certainly it’s clear Armand has a new master, but only that: not a lover, not a slave to his affections. Not like Marius. Eight years of Louis drinking Armand dry, never allowing him a taste of himself. But now he sleeps soundly, and—is Armand not owed this?
23. babytrapping
Is this not precisely what he did to Lestat? Armand thinks bitterly, and quashes it at once. It isn’t. Claudia was made to glue Louis and Lestat together; she was meant to stay with them, and the family fell apart again when she left. Armand will bring Madeleine into the blood so as to remove the wedge between them. ‘Imagine me without the burden of her.’ Claudia is too small; she cannot make her own. Not for the first time, Armand envies her so strongly he feels sick with it.
“You having second thoughts?” Louis asks.
Armand flinches. “...No, maître.”
24. ritual sex/hazing sex
Amadeo does not know where his clothes have gone. Perhaps into the fire, with the children. He does not know where his mind has gone, either. Perhaps into the fire. With the children. They are not screaming any more, but still he hears them.
Half his face is burnt and blackened flesh. He cannot feel it, but bringing his fingertips up to touch his cheek he comes away with char, and wetness from his eye he knows is not just tears. “The beautiful ones, we steal away from God,” the vampires’ leader whispered into his ear once, on the boat, “and having given them eternity, again and again we may steal them. Did your master ever flay you, little one? I think you would be just as pretty without a face.”
A fat black rat perched upon the vampire’s shoulder stares at Amadeo with greedy, hungry eyes. The other vampires close in around them and stare too. “Please,” Amadeo manages. “I’ll be good. He—” and this, somehow more than anything, more than watching him die, feels like a betrayal; this thing he was never to speak of “—he taught me how to please men well. Women, too. Whatever you want. Please don’t hurt me.”
If they do, he will like it; he will make himself like it. Amadeo has very few skills in the end: no gift for languages, no interest in painting or sculpture, a beautiful singing voice, but it dies in his throat. But he is beautiful on his knees and beautiful suffering, and he can make himself go so far away from the pain it becomes just another sensation, and his master showed him how to respond to sensation. “I’ll be good,” he repeats. Dread settles in his belly and burns there like pleasure.
The vampires descend.
25. disciplinary/marius flavored
Amadeo awakes from a nightmare in his new master’s bed to find the man sleeping as heavy and still as the dead, and his master’s hair, which he wears cut short, curling around his ears like the ancient busts standing guard in the palazzo’s halls, overnight grown long and sleek. Amadeo falls back asleep with his fingers tangled in his master’s hair, and wakes a second time to a cruel fistful of his own, and then the lash.
When Amadeo is bloody and weeping, his master’s hand falters, and he weeps too. Kisses him better. Cuts his hair short again.
26. flashback
Sometimes when Doris kisses her way down Keves’ body, Keves remembers impossible things. Those same lips, those same teeth, but when Keves brings her hand up to her mouth there’s a dozen of those rubber bracelets kids used to trade at school around her wrist, and her chest is perfectly flat beneath her cotton bralette. Trying to grow up too fast, Doris said.
But the first time they kissed, Keves was nineteen and crying off a bad breakup. The first time they fucked, still nineteen, still teary, I’ll treat you better than he ever would. That’s true. Not… not this.
27. kink boundary violation
They’ve never talked about it, not explicitly, not in so many words, and it is not Armand’s place to forbid Louis any part of him he wants besides, so, really, he has no business being upset when they go to bed late several weeks into Armand’s fast and Louis’ hands wander underneath his pajama top, pads of his fingers travelling up Armand’s soft belly. Foreplay, entirely fond, but Armand cannot help but feel like some small and furry creature cringing away from fang and claw, frozen whilst the predator above him plays with his food. Ridiculous, to feel that way beneath someone so young in the blood still as Louis, and with the only gift given to him by his maker the urge to flinch when Armand raises his voice. Armand could stop him easily. He could kill him.
He takes in a shuddering breath and bears the touch. Louis must read the unevenness for arousal. “Get these things off,” he says, warm in comparison to Armand when his lips brush the shell of Armand’s ear. His thumb snaps the band of Armand’s pajama bottoms.
Armand obeys. Louis means no cruelty by this, he knows. He is sure. Louis is disconnected from humanity of late at the best of times, and he has little reason to mark the turning of a calendar he does not follow, a diurnal practice whose impact on Louis’ life is some tired servants and Armand colder than usual. For Louis, it is April 27, and that’s all.
He bites the meat of his palm, then gets his hand around Armand’s cock. If Armand does not think, it’s nice, so he does not think.
Later, when Louis is sated and asleep beside him, Armand’s phone lights up. It’s time to pray Dhuhr! He closes his eyes.
28. necro
They leave the body, a fact for which Amadeo is grateful and furious for in turns. He doesn’t want to see it. Him. What he’s done to him. He doesn’t want to be parted from him, doesn’t want his final resting place unknown. Just another dead slave, nameless and forgotten.
He eats what he can. Makes himself sick, but mostly with grief. Buries his hands in his chest, curling his fingers around Riccardo’s ribs and sobbing. Buries bone shards beside his own bones. Presses Riccardo’s fingers together and forces them inside himself.
Riccardo never did hurt him. He should have.
29. forced to watch
“Pretty little thing, isn’t he?” the bright-eyed woman from the master’s paintings says, holding Amadeo’s chin and turning his face this way and that. Her hands are cold marble. “Wherever did you find him?”
“A brothel in the Rialto.”
“Hm. You always did have a type.” She plays with a coil of Amadeo’s hair. “Does he know what to do with a woman, or is he only good for buggery?”
Amadeo has never seen his master wear discomfort before. “I didn’t expect he’d be to your liking.”
“Oh, come now, Marius, I shan’t keep him. And you’ll watch, of course.”
30. free day
—It’s not rape.
—Okay.
—It’s not. You’re my master. It can’t be rape.
—I didn’t say I disagreed with you, Arun.
—Okay.
—This is important to you. I get it. It’s my right to do whatever I want with you, because you belong to me. I’m not doing anything wrong.
—Exactly.
—And you aren’t doing anything wrong, letting me fuck you, because it’s not your choice.
—Right.
—Can I… ask something?
—Of course, maître.
—If it’s my right to do whatever I want with you, and you have to submit to me, and none of that’s a sin, is it a sin for you to have a good time? To want it? I mean, you don’t have a choice anyway.
—No. It’s…
—Take your time.
—It’s not a sin to like it. But I don’t. Or I do, but…
—Breathe. That’s an order, Arun.
—I’m sorry.
—‘S all good, honey. You ain’t done anything wrong. I’m the one making you have this conversation.
—It’s not funny.
—It’s a little bit funny.
—Fine. I. I like it. But I made myself like a lot of things, before. Or my— or Marius did. Make me, I mean.
—With the Mind Gift.
—Perhaps. Or perhaps he simply awoke it in me. I like it. I always like it, one way or another. It just… feels worse, sometimes, when I… enjoy myself. Or when you try to ensure I do. He always prioritized my pleasure. A, a ‘corrective experience’. But only on his terms. When I sought it out, sought him out, he’d beat me for it.
—He wanted a whore, and then he got mad at you when you acted like one?
—I was insatiable. Out of control. Dirty. I still feel…
—I get it.
—So please, just… enjoy yourself. With me.
—Okay.