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I went straight to the door of the truck and reached for the handle, so that he couldn’t see my sudden nervousness.
“You’ll have her back in the morning?” I heard Shelly call from behind me. She must have come out onto the porch just this second, when she saw me headed for the truck.
Cal had hurried around me, though, and he hastened to open the door for me, which made my face even hotter for some reason. At the same time, he called back to Shelly, “Sure thing, ma’am.”
Nothing more than that—no further details on the assumption that I would spend the night at my accepted suitor’s house, or of what would have changed about me when I returned ‘home’ the next morning. I swallowed hard, feeling my fists clench and unclench with conflicting waves of emotion and sensation, as I settled into the seat of Cal’s truck.
Cal managed to make me forget about most of my misgivings, on the ride to the restaurant and during dinner. To my astonishment, he turned out to have a really great sense of humor, or at least a sense of humor that matched mine. I remembered that he had made me laugh once or twice on our first date, but I guessed I hadn’t really paid attention since so many serious—and mortifying—things had happened on that date. Tonight, with an hour-and-a-half each way in the car, and a whole very nice dinner, to spend together, I felt like I could actually get to know him, and the way he liked to poke fun at his friends and neighbors, and at the whole world, really, without any real nastiness but in a sometimes side-splittingly funny way.
“What the heck do you think crawled up that Mrs. Brown’s butt and died there?” he asked, while we waited for dessert. My belly felt pleasingly full of the best Caesar salad and the best spaghetti carbonara I’d had in my life, and that feeling of satisfaction seemed to have warmed the rest of me, physically and emotionally. Something about the look on Cal’s face, and the way he emphasized died there caught me off guard, and I started to giggle. Every time I looked at Cal, and saw the smile on his face that seemed to widen with each passing moment of my irresistible laughter, another fit of giggles came out. The idea that my accepted suitor thought just as disdainfully of the New Modesty administrator as I did seemed to draw me closer to him, and to push away the dark thoughts attached to my compulsory enrollment in their courtship program.
“Got you good with that one,” Cal said with satisfaction, once the chocolate cake had arrived and I had stopped laughing. I tried to pretend for a moment that I had no idea what he meant, but the smile on his face was too open, too genuine, for me to resist. I didn’t admit in words, but I knew my own answering smile told him everything. Yes, you did.
The backlash inside me started to happen during a long silence on the ride home. I could recognize the signs, the thoughts that sought to undermine my happiness. Part of me tried to stop them, protesting that this thing with Cal was real despite it having happened under the supervision of a megacorp’s crazy social engineering project.
But the truck, turned toward Grasskiln, kept rolling down the highway toward Cal’s house. We would get there by eight o’clock, I felt certain. Plenty of time.
For… For it. For the claiming of my body by the suitor approved, and accepted, as the man to train me for his bed.
I looked over at Cal. The stupid, defiant words came out reflexively.
“What exactly do you think is going to happen when we get to your house?”
CHAPTER 26
Grace
Cal kept his eyes on the road for a few seconds after I had made my sarcastic demand for information. I watched his brows knit and then relax, and I thought maybe I saw him, for the second time, control his temper. That made me angry, so angry that when he turned to look at me with a sort of evaluating expression, as if he felt the need to figure out what had gotten into me, I snapped at him.
“Well?”
“I think,” Cal said slowly, as if he were talking to a child, “we’re going to see what happens in the way of intimacy.”
In the way of intimacy. The way you would talk about it with a child. The anger rose higher in me. Again, I understood—somewhere—that my reaction wasn’t fair. Really he hadn’t spoken to me like a child at all; he had spoken the way a careful, considerate man would speak to a woman he’s interested in getting close to, emotionally and physically. A girl he’d kissed, and who had kissed him back.
A girl whose bottom hole he’d put his thumb in, and made her come, over and over. As a punishment, for her negative attitude and her bad language.
I shifted in my seat, trying to dispel the mortifying memory of that sensation: the helplessness, the unwelcome pleasure that was really unwelcome only because I couldn’t help actually, deep down welcoming it. Wanting it.
The way I want it now. I felt my forehead crease. Squirming in my seat that way hadn’t helped at all; it had made the problem much worse instead.
“I think you should take me straight home,” I said. “To… I mean, take me to the Carpenters’ house.”
Not home. Jake and Shelly’s house of shame and insanity. Grasskiln would never feel like home.
Except that it did. I had said home.
“I’ll take you home to Jake and Shelly’s if that’s what you really want,” Cal said, speaking slowly and carefully once again. The words were straightforward. They should have made me feel better. They absolutely didn’t; I told myself that I could hear in them Cal’s disdain for my immaturity alongside his frustration with not getting what he wanted.
He’s the one who’s acting like a child. He wants to get in my pants… do all that weird-ass ‘training’ shit these people are always talking about. He wants to take my virginity and make me his obedient fuck toy fiancée or some shit.
I had started down this track and I had no way of stopping the runaway train of my negative thoughts. The fact that underneath my anger I could feel how much I wanted, insanely, to have Cal train me to make him feel good, teach me to take his rigid cock exactly as he chose to give it to me, in all my holes, until I could hardly walk… that only made it worse.
“Are you saying you think I don’t know what I want, you fucking asshole?” I demanded. The words spilled out of me before I could even think about what they meant.
I watched his chest rise and fall. He had his gaze fixed straight ahead, on the road ahead of us. I felt my eyes widen as I saw how tightly he seemed suddenly to have gripped the steering wheel. My heart, already beating a good deal faster than normal, started to seem like it would thud its way out of my chest.
“I… I…” I stammered, the fear of the consequences of my behavior finally penetrating my mind. “I… sir… I didn’t…”
