Her Pretty Liar

The folder smelled like baby powder and lemon polish, and my hands would not stay still.

I had told myself in the car that I would walk in, say what I came to say, and leave. Margo had something of mine. A video, thirty seconds, my own voice on it doing a voice I had sworn no one would ever hear. She had named a price that was not money. She had named this. A Tuesday evening at her house, the back room, the rules she emailed in a numbered list I read four times and then deleted so I would not have to keep seeing item six.

She opened the door before I knocked. Of course she did.

“You’re late,” she said. She was not angry. That was the worst part. Her voice stayed level, warm even, the way you talk to someone who is going to do what you want no matter how long they stall on the step. “Shoes off. Coat on the hook. We have a lot to get through.”

My body went ahead of me. My fingers found my laces. I crouched there in her hallway working the knots like a man defusing something, and the blood was already moving wrong, pooling low and hot before she had touched me, before she had even fully looked at me.

Stop, I thought. You are a grown man in a stranger’s hall on your knees over your own shoes. Get up.

I did not get up. I lined my shoes against the wall, heels even, because some part of me wanted them straight for her. That want had crawled in from somewhere I did not keep it, and I hated it, and my cock was thickening against my zipper anyway, traitor, fat and stupid and quick.

“There he is,” Margo said, watching my face do whatever it did. “You always go pink right here.” She tapped her own cheekbone. “First thing. Every man I take goes a different color. You go pink.”

“I’m only here for the file.”

“I know why you think you’re here.” She stepped back to let me in. “Through to the back. You remember from the email.”

The back room was soft. Thick carpet, low light, a wide padded table along one wall with a roll of paper across it like at a doctor’s office. A chest of drawers in pale wood. On top of it, folded squares of white, a tub with a screw lid, a bottle of powder. My stomach dropped at the powder. My cock did not get the message. It pushed up harder, and a bead of wet started at the tip, and I stood in the doorway of that warm clean room hating both halves of myself.

“Take your trousers off,” Margo said. She sat in the armchair and crossed her legs. She wore a soft gray cardigan and her hair was up and she looked like somebody’s calm aunt and somebody’s worst nightmare at once. “Shirt stays. Just the bottom half. Fold them.”

I should walk out. The thought came clean and sharp, a cold little voice that sounded like the man I was at work, the man with the corner office and the firm handshake. Walk out, call a lawyer, let her post the thing, survive it. People survive worse.

But I was already opening my belt. The buckle clicked. I heard myself breathing through my mouth.

“Slower,” she said. “I like to watch a proud one do it slow.”

So I did it slow. I pushed the trousers down over my hips and my cock came out tenting my shorts, obvious, shameful, and her eyes went there and stayed and she made a small pleased sound in her throat, and that sound went down my spine and curled my toes into her carpet. I folded the trousers. My hands shook. I set them on the chair arm she pointed to and stood there in my shirt and my shorts with my face on fire.

“Look at you,” Margo said, not unkindly. “All that fight in the emails. Three messages telling me what you would never do.” She rose out of the chair and came close, and she smelled like the powder, and she put one finger under my chin and tilted my face up to hers the way you’d tip a kid’s face to check for a fever. “And here you are with a wet spot already. We haven’t even started, sweetheart. What does that tell you about yourself?”

Don’t answer her. The voice again, fainter now, losing.

“Nothing,” I said. My throat clicked. “It tells you nothing.”

“Mm.” She did not argue. She reached past me to the chest of drawers and patted the padded table. “Up. On your back. Bottom at the edge.”

I want to say I refused. I want to say there was a long brave pause. There was not. I climbed onto the paper and it crackled under me and I lay back and the ceiling had a water stain shaped like a country I couldn’t name and I stared at it while she hooked her thumbs in my shorts and drew them down and off and dropped them on the floor.

The air on me was cool. I was hard and leaking and bare from the waist down on a stranger’s table and I had never in my life felt so seen. My hands came up on instinct to cover myself.

“No,” she said, and caught both my wrists in one of hers, and pressed them flat to my chest. Her grip was nothing, I could have broken it, I am twice her strength. I left my hands where she put them. “We don’t hide from Mommy. Mommy has to see everything to take care of you properly. That’s the whole point of you being here. You do understand that’s the point.”

Mommy. The word landed in me like a key in a lock I did not know I had. My cock jumped, visibly, a fat twitch she watched with her eyebrows up, and a fresh bead slid down the side of me, and the shame of it was so bright and so hot that it stopped being only shame somewhere in the middle and turned into the thing the shame was wrapped around. I made a noise. A bad noise. Small.

“There,” she breathed. “There he is. The real one.”

I had a thought then that did not belong to the man on the table or the man at work. It was worse than both. It went: she is going to be so gentle with me and I am going to let her, and it arrived with no resistance attached at all, just a kind of falling, and I shut my eyes because they were stinging and I would not, I would not, in front of her.

She let go of my wrists. I kept them on my chest.

“Good boy,” Margo said softly, and reached for the tub.

The lid unscrewed. Two of her fingers came back cool and slick and she touched them to me low, behind, in the crease of me, slow circles, nothing inside yet, just there, claiming the spot, and my hips lifted off the paper before I could stop them, chasing her hand, offering. The cold voice tried one more time. It said my full name. It said the job title. It said you have a mortgage and a reputation and a spine.

Margo’s slick fingers pressed a little firmer and her other hand spread the powder over the front of me in slow strokes that were not trying to get me off and got me close to it anyway, and she leaned down over my burning face and she said, in that level warm voice, like the kindest thing in the world, “Knees up to your chest for me. All the way up. Hold them there yourself, like a good big boy, and let Mommy get you ready.”

And God help me, I reached down, and I took my own knees in my hands, and I pulled them up to my chest, and I opened myself for her on the crackling paper, exposed to the cold air and the low light and her steady patient eyes, holding myself there because she told me to, because I wanted the next thing more than I wanted my own name.

She picked up the folded white square from the chest. She shook it open one-handed.

“That’s it,” Margo murmured, sliding it under me, smoothing it flat against the small of my back, her slick thumb still moving in that slow circle that had me shaking. “That’s my sweet boy. We’re going to do this properly, you and me. And after, when you’re all snug and you can’t do a thing about it, when your hands are nowhere near yourself and you’re begging me through it.” She paused. She looked right at me, and she smiled like a door closing. “Then we’ll talk about what you’ll do to keep that little video to yourself.”

Her hand pressed flat over the front of me and held me there, throbbing, leaking, pinned, with my knees still up in my own fists and the paper crackling under my back and the powder thick and sweet in my throat.

“Now,” she said. “Let’s get you into your first one.”