“Come on,” he urged as he pulled me up the steps of the house. “I want you to blow me off in the toilet.”
I forced myself not to jerk away from him in revulsion. I pushed down the blind rage I felt inside and answered him as calmly as I could. “Can we wait until we get back to your house, Salvatore? I have a headache. I need to take a couple of tablets now, but I’ll be good to go in an hour.”
He stopped and looked at me, a sly expression on his face. “You seem to be getting a lot of headaches these days.”
I took a step away from him and his hand fell off my body. “I guess I worry about my father too much. I think he might need more tests done again.”
His eyes narrowed. “Are you asking for more money?”
I shook my head. “No, I’m just telling you why I’m worried.”
“Good. Because I have no intention of giving more when I haven’t even been paid back for what I gave the last time.”
That made my dam of fury burst. “Actually, you have. Our agreement was for one month and you’ve dragged it out to more than two now. When is this arrangement going to be over, Salvatore?”
“I never said the arrangement was for one month. I said, it usually takes a month for me to get bored of a woman. You assumed it would take a month for me to get bored with you. I’m not bored with you yet.”
I swallowed the bile that rose up my throat at his words.
He had tricked me into becoming his sexual slave indefinitely, and I knew it was my fault. I should have got a contract drawn up, put something down on paper, but I was so desperate to get the $120,000 for my father’s treatment.
When the owner of the Italian restaurant where I worked said he didn’t have the kind of money I was asking to loan from him, I had asked him to help me locate a loan shark. He told me a loan shark would be sheer madness since I would never be able to pay back the loan in time. He suggested asking his friend Salvatore who sometimes gave out loans and was kinder about the repayment time frame.
Salvatore, it turned out, had a different payback method in mind. He wanted me to be his mistress for one month. In fact, he reckoned, most probably he would need me for even less time than that, since he was easily bored and liked to change women more often than he changed his shirts.
I didn’t even have to think about it. I agreed immediately. My father’s life hung on the balance and nothing was more important than saving him. And because my boss had said Salvatore was a friend it never crossed my mind that Salvatore would cheat me.
I could almost bear it during the first month, when I could count the days when it would be over, but now that the end was no longer in sight, I actually felt physically ill at the thought of going to bed with him. Especially, as I had begun to notice recently that his sexual demands were slowly but surely taking a nasty twist. The other day he shocked me by talking about branding me with a hot iron, or getting his name tattooed on both my breasts.
The freezing cold night air was making goosebumps rise on my arms and I folded them around my waist and tried to keep my voice level. “When do you expect to get bored, Salvatore?”
He smiled that sly smile again and let his hand sweep down in front of my body. “I don’t know. I mean what man can be bored with all this beauty? Because you are one smoking hot beauty, Skye baby.”
My hands clenched. “You have to give me a date, Salvatore. I can’t go on like this forever.”
He chuckled. “You know what’s wrong with you? You’re too uptight. You need a drink.”
“Please, Salvatore,” I begged, my voice breaking. “I just can’t go on like this-”
“Hey… what’s all this about? I’m good to you, no? I bring you to nice parties. I don’t beat you up. I buy you expensive dresses. Hell, I treat you like a queen.”
I gritted my teeth. “I know you’re a good man, and I know you treat me well, really well, but our arrangement was for one month, and it’s two months and five days now. I need it to end.”
He shrugged. “Why?”
“Because I want to be free again,” I cried passionately.
He threw his hands in the air in a gesture of incomprehension. “You are free.”
“But I’m not, am I? I have to come to your house whenever you call me, which is almost every night.”