As Things Are

"Those days are over;
You don't have to sell your body to the night."
THE POLICE - Roxanne

AS THINGS ARE by Alaric McDermott

First time ever for me. First time ever. Just the circumstances, you
know. Away from home. A one off. Feeling lonely.
Yadda-yadda-yadda.

She'd heard it all before, and too many times. Here he was in New York,
he'd never been to New York, had to get a girl. Well, any guy would
understand that. Any guy would do the same thing. Same sad, pathetic,
lying bastard yadda-yadda-yadda. The only difference between this guy
and a hundred others was that he was her first Brit, but that was a big
"so what?" He seemed to be pretty excited about fucking his first
American, but that was okay.

One problem - he had a trait which she'd always expected to find in a
Brit guy, on the few occasions she'd ever thought about Brit guys. He
was boring, with a capital BOR.

She played his conversation as background and concentrated on trying to
make him come. Get it over. Priorities. Give him what he's paid for,
then leave the tedious bastard to his mini-bar and cable TV.

She was having to do pretty much all the work. Half-and-half here was
going to turn out three-quarters and a quarter, because she'd used up
most of the time that she'd mentally allocated him in getting him hard.
"You sure you wanted a black woman?", she'd asked him at one point,
breaking off from her efforts momentarily, and he'd nodded
vigorously.

At least when it had finally stood up, it had stood up proud enough to
be saluted. At that point, unsubtly and quickly, she'd peeled off her
shorts and had climbed up above him. Then, with cool professionalism,
she'd worked on him. Tricks of the trade. Style and substance,
knowledge and variety. Best efforts, in short. She was still doing so.
And he was still talking. Yap yap yap. Yadda-yadda-yadda.

"Bet you know all about guys like me", he was saying. "Bet you've got
me pegged, as you Americans say." His hands were working on her
breasts, the fingers stubby and a little callused. Occasionally, he
tweaked her nipples, often too hard. Once, she had to warn him, but
after that she put up with it in the interests of those priorities
she'd identified.

"It ain't hard", she replied, and changed pace. His suddenly raised
thighs told her that she was getting somewhere.

"I know all about you too", he told her, almost an offhand remark. "So
we're even."

"You know jack shit about me." She was sharp. Intrusions like that had
to be cut back before they had chance to grow.

"I know more than you think. I might surprise you."

"Don't even try." She was firm, but she managed to hide the sneer.
Putting him down too strongly would only mean that she had to try even
harder.

"First of all", he stated, ignoring the advice, "your name isn't
Davina."

She was actually offended that he might think her stupid enough to be
impressed by that. "Well, shock me again, Sherlock", she said.

"Your name's Katie. Your real name is Katie." As though rewarding
himself for neat judgement with his revelation, he rocked against her
more firmly.

In startled immobility, she let him. "Now how in the world.."

"You have two children", he interrupted. "Both girls. You do this job
mainly with them in mind. Not because they'd starve otherwise. You've
got a fair bit salted away. No, for the future. College and such.
Because the idea of like mother, like daughters is out of the question
for you. You want a different sort of life for them."

With every fact, he drove up firmly, with a force she would normally
have restrained.

"For just over four years, you worked at the local K-mart", he stated,
with the ease and confidence of a man reciting a memorised speech.
"That's where you first had offers. Sex for money. And you took some of
them up. Then you met.. Just a minute, bear with me, let the name come.
Yes. Then you met Clarence Stanton."

"Clarence was a real bad man", she said quietly, the memory close to
being as frightening as the life she'd lived back then. "But he can't
have sent you. He's been dead past four years. Some meaner
motherfucker's boot went and dropped against his head."

The Englishman had stopped moving, presumably confident of her
thrall.

But he was wrong. The height of his confidence, Katie well knew, was
the moment to reclaim initiative. She would ignore the inexplicable.
The X-Files could go hang, because money was money, and escape was
escape.

She knew that she could control him. He'd pushed himself to the edge,
and he was trying to lie low for a while. But even if he could read
minds, which she wasn't exactly giving in on, she was the one in the
room who could read bodies. Those little twitches were as good as
getting the author's name.

She returned, without a word, to the hunt.

And he understood her intention. "No, don't", he pleaded, his hands
going to her hips, trying vainly to slow her, failing, because she
needed only the slightest movement, and that was a movement which no
kind of grip could suppress. "Katie, don't."

"Davina to you, friend", she told him coolly.

He yelped in protest. "I want. I want.."

"Yeah, right", she said, easy, dismissive, with a note of pride now
that she had felt his back flex.

With a cry of mingled pleasure and frustration, the Englishman
surrendered. Finally, he surrendered.

She gave him as little time as possible before rolling clear of him.
She was on her feet before he'd even come back down to the real world,
before he'd opened his eyes. When he did open them, she retrieved her
handbag from the floor and extracted a tissue, which she handed to him.
She didn't ask whether he knew what to do with it. It was already
obvious that, contrary to his claims, he'd done this many times before.
Whether giving girls the heeby-jeebies always went along with the game
for him was not an area she wanted her mind to visit right then.

"I need to clean up", she told him.

He was still shellshocked. Her assumption of dominance for a second
time had clearly startled him, and he still seemed flummoxed by it.
"Sorry. I don't.."

Business was done now. She had been paid up front. She had carried out
the task for which she had been paid. Politeness was a waste of energy.
"I need to use the bathroom", she enunciated, as though getting a
message through to a two year old child.

He waved a hand in a general direction. "Sure. Yes, sure."

*****

The bathroom was a splendid suite, offering the sort of luxury which
Katie was well used to visiting without option to linger. As she used
the facilities, she battened down her curiosity, lived with the
confusion. Magic, after all, was never very far away from her.

When she saw the jacket hanging on the door, though, a spear of
interest stabbed into her. "Who are you really, you English bastard?",
she wondered aloud.

With light fingered skill, she searched the pockets for some sort of
identification, and she found a stack of business cards. She removed
one, read it and learned that Ruston Grady was her customer's name. Not
Peter at all, as he had claimed. Well, what a big surprise that
was!

The job title confused her. Queen's Counsel. Did that imply that he was
someone who advised the British Queen? She shrugged. Whatever it meant,
it didn't give her any of the sort of clues that she needed. On an
impulse, though, she pushed the card into her purse and then continued
her search.

In another pocket, she found a small plastic bag, which contained
something very odd. After long study, she concluded that she was
looking at the severed foot of a bird, perhaps a chicken. She returned
the package with a shudder. But now she had a hint, if only that, as to
the source of Grady's knowledge.

She left the bathroom to find him fully alert again, and dressed to the
waist.

"I'd like to see you again", he said without preamble.

"No", she replied brusquely.

"No?" He clearly hadn't expected a refusal.

"What part don't you understand?", she responded icily, and turned
towards the door with a curt, "Goodbye."

As she reached for the doorhandle, she heard him say, "There are other
things I could tell you, you know. Not about your past, or your
present. I could tell you things about your future."

She stopped, alarm bells ringing. She turned to face him. "You don't
have the right", she said.

"It's a gift I have", he blustered on. "Something I've always been able
to do. Let me just tell you one thing. You don't have to do this job. I
can tell you what your other qualities are. What your other options
are. I can find you other options myself. Just give me a couple of days
of your time."

Suddenly, he looked extremely vulnerable. A man run to seed in a hotel
room beyond his means. She felt pity. "Enchantment's in my bones", she
said. "It's in my history. No good ever comes of it. I don't know what
you want from me. I don't know what you think I'm the right girl for.
But I'm not the right girl. You'll have to look again."

He didn't reply. He didn't deny her conclusions. She nodded curtly at
him, then left the room.

He called her again from the corridor just outside his room, and she
acknowledged him briefly, holding the elevator open with the heel of
her hand. "Think about it", he requested. "That's not asking too much,
is it? Think about what I could change for you."

"Oh, I'll think about it", she assured him, then stepped into the
elevator.

Her sense of relief when she heard the whoosh of doors closing and
sensed downward motion was, she knew, out of proportion to her
experience, because she realised that she had never been in immediate
physical danger. But the relief was there, nonetheless, and it was
huge.

*****

She kept her promise. She thought about it. During the time it took for
the lift to hit ground level, and for her to walk past the po-faced
reception guy and out onto the street. She thought mainly about
Clarence, remembering that he'd made some promises too, in the
beginning, and believing that it was probably easier for a clever man,
like the Englishman, to lie fluently than for a stupid man like
Clarence. And she considered the fact of her current independence, safe
in agency work, mistress of all that she needed to be mistress of. It
ain't broke, she realised. It ain't great, but it ain't broke. And if
it ain't broke.

Once she was free of the hotel, the sun hit her like a hammer blow. She
took out the business card again, tried to read it, but the paper was
white and the print was embossed. Her eyes only registered glare.

With a moue of disdain, she threw her only line of contact with Ruston
Grady into the nearest waste bin. She kept the seven hundred dollars
which she had also extracted from the wallet, because not to have done
so would have been plain rude.

"I can find you other options", he had told her.

No, Mr. Grant, she thought. Don't bother.

She would stick with the job she had just for the moment. On days like
today, it seemed just fine.