“But I don’t know if I’m still—You had a gun to my head, you threatened to kill my family. It was pretty clear what it was the first time. But you’ve confused me. I don’t know if I’m being victimized or courted,” she finally blurts.
I don’t know if my uncontrollable grin is at how horrified she looks at having said that to me, or how appropriate a thing that is to be confused about. Logically, my brain sends several appropriate responses my way, reminders that I don’t want her to get more comfortable with me—I want to make her hate me. I should say something mean in the interest of furthering my own agenda, but it’s fucking funny.
“They’re not necessarily mutually exclusive with me,” I tell her, wryly.
That doesn’t answer her question, so she keeps trying to work it out on her own. “On one hand, the fact that you want to kill me should help clarify that,” she reasons.
I shake my head. “Not necessarily. I told you, it’s not personal. Just business.”
Covering her face with her hands, she shakes her head. “You’re insane.”
“So I’ve been told.”
“I’m never going to tell on you. If I live to be 150 years old, I will never tell any of your secrets.”
“Right,” I drawl, really emphatically, just to be a jerk.
Narrowing her eyes at me, she says, “Can’t you just tell me what you’re doing to me so I know what I’m dealing with?”
She’s literally asking me to control her. How am I supposed to resist this?
Smiling faintly, I say, “So you know which boxes to put your experiences in?”
“I guess I need boxes,” she states.
We’ll fix that.
I frown at myself, since no, we most certainly will not have time to fix that. My own (ordinarily sturdy) brain keeps misfiring, so I guess I shouldn’t be too hard on hers.
I bet she considers this bizarre, since she’s so confused by everything else, but as I hold her in my arms like a lover, I tell her, “It’s simple. Do you have a choice in any of this? Try asking me to stop one of these times and see if I do. Maybe I didn’t hold a gun to your head today, but the threat didn’t have an expiration date, did it? If I tell you to do something, do it. You do what you have to do to get by. If you can find some physical pleasure in that, you should. Why deny yourself? For whom are you doing it? Not for you. Not for me. It’s no one else’s concern.”
“It is for me. I’ll feel guilty.”
“Why?”
“Because… that’s fucked up,” she says, a bit at a loss.
“Says who? Furthermore, who cares? Who’s keeping score, Mia? Is there an invisible judge somewhere, critiquing you on how you respond? Embrace a world without boxes. If it feels good, let it. Who cares what other people expect you to feel?”
After regarding me with a narrowed gaze for a moment, she finally says, “You have an interesting mind, don’t you?”
“It doesn’t work quite the way most seem to,” I admit.
“I’m intrigued,” she tells me. Then, smiling more playfully than one would expect given the conversation up to this point, she adds, “You should tell me more things so I can have a bigger glimpse.”
I roll my eyes indulgently. “Which soul-deep question would you like to ask next? Which superpower I’d pick, my perfect first date, or my dream vacation spot?”
Mia pokes me in the chest with her index finger. “Don’t mock me. I didn’t know what I was allowed to ask. My questions seemed safe.” She misses half a beat, then asks, “But actually, which superpower would you pick?”
I catch a lock of her hair and wrap it around my index finger absently. “The ability to read minds. People aren’t terribly difficult to figure out, but just being able to listen in on their thoughts would save me a lot of time.”
Mia nods. “I can see how that would beneficial, given your position. I don’t think I would always want to know every unguarded thought people have about me, but I can see why you would. I would choose healing powers.”
“That’s a good one. That way I could try to kill you over and over but it would never work. Look at you, thwarting my plans.”
She pokes me again and I catch her finger, trapping her hand beneath mine and pinning it to my chest. She doesn’t seem to mind. “Could we go one night without revisiting your horrible plans to kill me? Just one?” she asks. “And that wasn’t what I meant by healing powers. I didn’t mean I’d be invincible. I didn’t think of that, actually. I meant I could heal people. Like, if someone got hurt, I could just wave my hand over the wound and magically heal them.”