My New Girlfriend
Chapter Eleven
 
It was freezing cold outside when I left my apartment; my phone said it was hovering just below zero, with the wind chill even lower – unseasonably cold for our area with spring only a few weeks away, but my recent experiences were living proof that stranger things had happened. It took me a few tries to get the car to start, but it finally groaned to life and I headed for our diner. There, I would meet Courtney, maybe for the last time.
The public place had been her idea, and her rationale had been chilling. “With what you know about what I’ve done, I’m sure you’d feel safer around people,” she’d said. Amazingly, with all that I’d learned in the past few days, the question of my own safety never even occurred to me.
When I pulled into the lot a few minutes later I saw I’d beaten her there, so I took a booth in our usual spot. It was as ideal for this kind of discussion as one could get, I supposed, in a side room that didn’t get as much foot traffic or seating, so we’d have a modicum of privacy while still not being alone. I’d never before worried about being alone with her – unsurprisingly, I generally looked forward to it – but maybe she was right to caution me.
I kept my eye to the window, and before I’d finished sipping through my first glass of water, a bus pulled in to the stop across the street. When it left, I saw her standing behind it dressed as ludicrously impractical as ever for the season, a brief dress with a thin jacket over the top. (The jacket was open across the chest to maximize display of her cleavage, and I’m pretty sure she didn’t own any clothing that hid much more.)
She saw me looking and gave me a timid smile as she made her way over. All my openings and arguments and strategies flew right out the window as I watched her make her way over to my table and seat herself across from me. The woman of my dreams, the love of my life, the source of all the pain and doubt in my universe.
Some kind of physical greeting was so much a part of our relationship that the absence of one was jarring as she sat down, folding her hands demurely in her lap. “Hi, Courtney.” My mouth had become parched in an instant, and I took a long sip from my glass.
“Hi, Drew. I missed you. I’m so glad you agreed to meet me.”
I shrugged. “I didn’t want things between us to just end without at least talking them out.”
A look of despair flashed across her features. “So that’s it then. You’ve made up your mind.”
“I didn’t say that. I don’t know. After what I saw… what I heard… I don’t know what else there is to do. Hell, even just with the way I’ve conducted myself this past week I’m wondering if I’m fit to be with you for my own self.”
“You are. Erika told me… well, pretty much everything, I think, and I don’t care about any of that.”
“But that’s just it, Courtney, of course you don’t. You can’t. Something was done to make you this way, so that you feel like you love me no matter what.”
She frowned. “So that I feel like I love you? So you’re saying you don’t think I love you. Is that it? How can you think that?”
“It’s not a judgment – it’s just the truth. If someone hit me in the head and I woke up thinking I was Samuel L. Jackson, it’s not my fault I think it, but it doesn’t make the feeling true.”
“That’s not how it is at all. I love you, Drew. I love you so much that losing you would be like losing my leg, or like a lung or something. I might be able to survive without it, but it wouldn’t be living.”
“Courtney… that’s just the drugs talking. You don’t love me. You’re… chemically bonded to me.”
“No!” She pounded her tiny fist the table and I jumped in spite of myself. She seldom raised her voice except in pleasure or to plead. “You may have learned some things this past week, but you don’t know what’s in my head or my heart, Drew. I know what it feels like to be compelled to act a certain way. Most people do, really, even if their reason for it isn’t something you can exactly point to like you can with me.”
“What does that mean?”
“You think the people who hand you your fries really give two shits about you having a nice day? Think the lady you hold a door open for is sincerely grateful, like she can’t open a door on her own? I’m just saying – we all act the way other people want us to sometimes. For some people it’s how they were raised, for some people it’s social convention, for some folks it’s a paycheck. For me, it just so happens to be a chemical compound brought to the U.S. by Afghani heroin smugglers.”
“It’s not the same thing,” I protested. “You think Erika would have ever become someone’s harem slave because of social conventions?”
“It’s not… just because we might obey doesn’t mean we love. They’re not the same.”
“I don’t see the difference here.”
Our waitress came over to impose an awkward break in our talk; we just asked for a cup of coffee apiece and a little space.
“Drew, honey,”  she began once she’d walked away, “whatever you think about my feelings… that’s not what brought us here. It’s what I’ve done. And right now you don’t know everything, and some of it isn’t at all what you think, and some of it is probably worse.”
“Worse? It’d have to be pretty damn bad.”
She fell silent a long moment, looking down at the table, ashamed. I didn’t feel good about it, but I couldn’t let pity sway me here. Our waitress poured us each a cup and we added our usual (two creams one sugar for me, three sugar no cream for her). We were just sitting there in silence but for the clicking of our stirrers against our mugs until she finally continued.
“Maybe you’re right, and maybe I’ve set the bar that low. But still, I want to tell you. So at least, whatever you decide to do, you’re deciding with all the information. And because… I need you to know I love you, and I don’t know how else to make you understand except this.”
“You really don’t have to – I’ve dug up enough dirt as it is.”
“I want to. If you’re willing to hear me, that is. Just… just promise me, you’ll let me finish. That’s all I ask.”
“How do I know I can trust you? How do I know you won’t just say whatever it takes to convince me because that’s what the drug makes you do?”
“Because if I just wanted to convince you to keep using me and emotion was no part of it, I would’ve met you at your apartment. I would have come in naked, fallen to my knees and worshipped your cock until I sucked a piece of your soul out with it. I’d have asked you to use me like I was a household appliance, like a dishwasher for your dick. I’d make you see me like nothing but some beautiful Thing with tits and ass and the most wet and willing cunt you’d ever felt, and made sure you knew that they all existed only for your pleasure. I’d let you put me in a cabinet when you weren’t using me, loan me to your neighbors like I was a pair of garden shears, tattoo your name on every part of me so that everyone would know who this little sex object belonged to. Because you might take me back under those terms, and because I’d do anything to make you happy.
“But as much as you know I want to provide you all the pleasure in the world… you deserve more. You deserve love. And so do I. And even if I’d settle for you without it because yes, I’m fucked in the head in some pretty serious ways, I love you too much for you to settle for me as just some piece of flesh you feel nothing for.”
I gave her a long look. I’d seen this woman begging me for relief and release a hundred times, but I’d never heard her sound so disconsolate over it. “All right. I’ll listen.”
 
 
 
“I moved here from a small town out west the summer after I finished high school. I never really told you much about my life growing up. Not because I was hiding it, just that it wasn’t happy, and not in some sob story kind of way that makes me make sense. It was unhappy the way most people who leave home as soon as they can are unhappy.
“So I came out to the city with a few hundred bucks in my pocket and no real plan. I had some ideas about falling into something glamorous – modeling, acting, trophy wife to some tech billionaire. Instead I wound up with a few part-time minimum wage jobs, made some friends – Erika, Gina, Morgan, some of the folks you met at that party. Some others.
“I met Arman. He was a dealer then, so far as anyone knew. That’s how I met him – one night we were out clubbing, and somebody introduced us. I wasn’t exactly a saint where drugs were concerned, but it was my first time doing H. Arman paid me a lot of attention, and at the time I was pretty flattered. He’s not a bad-looking guy, obvious bad boy cred, threw money around. The kinds of thing that impress girls who don’t know better yet. I wasn’t into him, not really, but I liked that he was into me. I decided to chase that feeling.
“So he gave me his number, and I called it a couple days later. Honestly I didn’t really want to buy any more from him, but I’d never actually called a guy to ask him out before. So I used the H as an excuse. Arman remembered me though, took me out again. And again, and again. He said he liked me, started hooking me up for free.
“Of course, it wasn’t until a good deal later he told me what he’d been dosing me all along. By then, it was way too late. The stuff he was handing out was partially heroin, but cut pretty heavy with something else. Muraqaba, he told me one time as I was dosing up. I didn’t even hesitate to pump the shit into my veins – he’d asked me to do it, and it felt so good to just give him what he wanted.
“Which, obviously, is what the muraqaba did. The stuff’s like a kind of psychoactive syrup, sticks to certain parts of the brain. Dampens centers of creative thought, willpower, and spikes the hell out of the parts that release endorphins and dopamine. Some stuff I frankly don’t understand, but the end result is your brain makes you feel good when you do what you’re told.
“By the time he’d told me what it was, I was already in his pocket. I’d been fucking and sucking him on command, then he’d loan me out to “friends” – paying customers, in actuality, but I didn’t care at the time. Then he told me to just hang out at his place – not where you met him, but a precursor to that setup – and just suck and fuck whenever I wanted to. And I wanted to all the time, because the drug made me obey, and obeying got me more of the drug. A fairly typical scheme, a pimp using drugs to conscript his girls, just with a more effective drug.
“There was a lot of conditioning involved in Arman’s method. I’d taken a  basic psych class in high school, and it’s pretty much exactly what I read about there. Obedience was its own pleasure, but there was also the orgasms, the actual drugs… The other girls and I knew we’d become Arman’s whores, but we didn’t even care. We felt too fucking good all the time. If we ever got off the muraqaba too long we’d start to fade, but that took days. The conditioning helped, but without the stuff in our systems it only went so far. He made sure we were dosed at least every other day, griping all the while about how it ate into his profits.
“So long as he kept us dosed and gave us orders to obey, we could care less about our work, or our working conditions. Most of us hated him, but it didn’t matter. Arman had the drug, which meant doing what he wanted got us more of it. He’d laugh in our faces as we fought for the opportunity to suck him off, call us his weak dumb sluts, cum in our faces and have the others lick us clean – and we thanked him. Sincerely. Then asked how else we could please him. I can still remember some of the scowls on those girls faces as they did what they had to for their fix, then grinning like the cat that got the canary seconds later when they got it.
“Here’s where my story starts to diverge from the other girls. I suppose I don’t need to tell you, but I’m a bit of a people pleaser by nature. Hell, even when I was just some trailer trash girl from the boonies, I got off on getting guys off. My first boyfriend honest to god broke up with me because I was pestering him too often to suck his dick. Story for another day.
Courtney flicked my hand with her thumb and index finger. “Don’t judge – I was just a girl who loved the thrill of watching someone lose it over me. It was kind of inverse power trip. So when Arman got to working on me, melting my brain with the muraqaba, I guess I sort of went above and beyond. The more he let me serve him, the more important I was. Twisted probably, but that’s just who I was.
“You see, I knew he was making major money off of us. I saw how much he liked having a bunch of hot girls at his beck and call. That shit-eating grin on his face as he told his latest bitch what he’d done, how he’d done it, then let her beg him to fuck her until the rest of her free will dribbled out her cunt… It burned into my mind.
“So I told him I could find him more girls.”
“You volunteered?” I asked.
“Please, just listen. I came to him and said I was good at making friends, had some ideas on where I could meet more good candidates. Made a pitch. While he was fucking me, actually – Arman didn’t like to waste time chit-chatting with his whores, so it was the only time I could get his attention.
“See, up until then, he did all his recruiting himself – went to places he thought he could meet girls of a certain age and look, girls who’d shoot up with his laced dope. The thought of having a bitch who’d actually multiply his investment, a slave who could make more slaves with no risk to him… I could literally feel the idea getting him harder inside me. My willingness to betray my fellow women turned him on like crazy, which turned me on, until we were both just exploding with orgasms.
“I think part of me even felt… I dunno. Benevolent? Is that the word? Like I was doing these girls a favor. I looked for girls who were in total shit situations – junkies, loners, people who nobody and no one, and I gave them purpose and happiness and a reason to get out of bed. Or to wake up and then stay in bed, at least.
“So I did it. I’m not proud of it, not any more, but I did. One of my part-time jobs was modeling at the art school – that was a good place to find prey. Clients too – guys who’d pay top dollar from their trust fund to pound the shit out of the cunts of those frosty bitches they’d sketched in class. I met Gina there again, working, and brought her to Arman.
“I found other places, other johns, other bitches. Week by week Arman’s stable grew, and while I don’t think I was necessarily his most gifted whore, my above-and-beyond service made me his favorite. His bottom bitch. He didn’t even sell me to clients any more – I was his exclusively. Which only made me try harder. I convinced him to let me help train the other girls, and I did everything I could to make sure they served him as hard and as selflessly as I did.”
“Take Erika for instance. I hadn’t heard from her while I’d been all busy with Arman’s work. So I followed her for a while, arranged a chance meet-up. I knew she was a user, and that was my in. I spent the whole week with her – and then her roommate, Morgan – just dosing them and training them, non-stop. I barely stopped to sleep. If one of them wasn’t eating me out, it was strange. I had them take turns inviting over every guy they knew who’d want to fuck them, and charged the guy at the door before turning him loose to act out whatever gutter fantasies he’d had about them. I had them sell videos and photos of themselves on the internet. Sell their underwear as trophies to the men who’d fucked them. Empty their bank accounts in exchange for another dose of the very thing that had fucked them up so badly.
“Needless to say, it definitely made me feel a lot less charitable. I made Arman over $40,000 off those two cunts that week. I could tell Erika was kinda pissed at me, but every time I saw her starting to glare I’d just snap my fingers and point to my pussy and she’d be muff-diving into me like I was Maine lobster.
Courtney took a long sip from her coffee to lubricate her drying throat. “Arman got to the point where he’d confide everything in me. In truth, I think he was a little bit in love with me. To the extent a sociopath can be in love. I never really loved him back, though. He thought I did. But really, I just loved the high I got from the drug, and the power he put in my hands. It was intoxicating. After the week you’ve had, I guess you know a few things about how it feels to take someone and completely and utterly rule their universe. Even if it’s wrong, I’ve never met the man or woman who can honestly say it’s not the ultimate turn-on.
“As for Arman, he told me all about the drug – things I hadn’t even known before. About his frustrations with its limitations – that he had to keep up a constant supply, so that a bad month in profits could mean barely being able to keep all his bitches dosed. How getting the stuff through customs was pretty hard sometimes.
“How it wasn’t really turning the girls into slaves. Now this interested me, because I’d always thought that’s how he saw us. Being his slave was certainly a major part of my own self-image by that point. But he went on about how really the girls were addicted to the drug, and he happened to have it. If they were really his, they’d be addicted to him and not to it. He wouldn’t need the doses. He wouldn’t have to worry we could be conditioned wrong, or be corrupted by someone else with some muraqaba on hand.
“It sounded like he had something specific in mind as a remedy, so I asked and he said he did. Haymana, he called it. The muraqaba was old tech, developed by the CIA or somebody like that back in the 70’s. Haymana was cutting edge, not even on the radar yet, something his rich relatives back in the Middle East had paid top dollar to top biochemists for.
“It worked about the same way, only rather than just a psychoactive chemical that affected the brain so long as it was in the bloodstream, there was something in it that bonded permanently to the nerve stem itself. It gave that same jolt of pleasure, and within minutes formed a permanent bond to the person who kept that pleasure going. One orgasm, and the person who gave it to you rules your world forever. I know you’ve had a few orgasms so intense you thanked me… the haymana was basically feeling like that, like you’d just had your mind blown and were overwhelmed with gratitude and lust and a need to reciprocate. Except it never went away – or if it did, not for a long-ass time. Years, at least, but he said the scientists who’d made it hadn’t had time to do that kind of study.
“It was right about then that I bailed.”
“Bailed?” I interrupted. “You were there two nights ago!”
“Drew… let me do this chronological, OK? I don’t want to screw this up, leave something out.”
I shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
“So, like I said, I bailed. And I wish to god I could say I did it because I’d finally reached a bridge too far. That my conscience caught up with me. That I looked at these women I’d once called my friends who I’d then gone and sold off as pieces of meat to a bunch of horny strangers.
“But I didn’t. When Arman told me about the haymana, all I could think of was myself. I thought about my life, never again even having the limited freedom I’d had. Not ever being able to quit that life, or to get a little power trip on how much he needed me, or being able to fudge some of his commands when my dosage was running low.
“With this shit… I’d just be his fuck toy. A thing with two boobs and a pussy that could understand and follow orders. That’d be it for me, forever.
“I told him I didn’t want that for myself. That I’d gladly keep on being his bottom bitch, but I wouldn’t take the haymana. I don’t know if my dosage was low or my resistance was just that high, but even so it took all I had to tell him off.
“Arman… he flew into a rage. I guess when a guy gets used to every woman he interacts with being his devoted subordinates, seeing one – his favorite – tell him no was just too much for him. For a moment, from the look on his face, I thought he was going to kill me. Instead, he held me down and injected me with the haymana.
“It felt… amazing. Like the stuff I was used to times ten. Every nerve ending in my body was firing on all cylinders; just his breath on my neck got me halfway to O-town. Only I knew if I did, that would be it. I knew him well enough to know he wasn’t bullshitting the symptoms he’d described. So as he took me, I fought with everything in my head not to get off. I thought about baseball, then what baseball would look like if the field were littered with dead kittens, and all the players were my mom’s next door neighbor who’d always thrown away my toys when they went over the fence into his yard. And so on. I fought.
“Eventually I realized he could keep going until I lost it. Resistance by itself was pointless. So while I wrapped my mind around some things so revolting I can’t repeat them in a place I ever want either of us to be able to eat again, I faked an orgasm.”
Right then, Courtney duplicated the feat right there in our booth. It was like that scene out of When Harry Met Sally, only the man sitting at the table down the way looked much more interested in having what I was having.
“Convincing, right?” she said, and after wetting my own parched throat, I conceded it had been a pretty good performance. “Yeah, so… Arman thought he won, and I made like he had. I smiled and simpered and obeyed unhesitatingly. All the while my body was aching for release – even just the fabric on my nipples, on my clit… it was hard just to walk without losing the battle.
“I don’t know how long I was lying around his brothel like that, on the cusp of an orgasm that would seal my mind away to whoever gave it. Thinking was hard, but I put it together that the longer I stayed there, the better odds that Arman would come back for another round, or that he’d give me to some random client for a romp. But Arman had told me to wait there, and I couldn’t leave without breaking cover – so I thought up a reason to leave.
“I texted him and asked if I could start recruiting with the haymana. I knew his preferences in women, so I found a picture on the internet that fit it pretty well and told him I had a great opportunity lined up, said how I couldn’t wait to give him this gift.
“He bought it. I was given two doses – one for the target I’d made up and one, he said, in case my expert eye for talent spotted someone else. I almost felt bad. Almost. For what he’d told me this shit was going for in the black market, I fleeced him out of more money that night than I could earn in a year. Then he pulled me onto his lap and gave me a nice long goodbye grope, hump, kiss, squeeze…”
Courtney’s eyes shut, and I saw she was trembling slightly. Could the memory be that powerful?
“I didn’t come. Not quite. Still, I could feel it at work – every little jolt of pleasure, my brain hard-wired itself to think this came from Arman. Please Arman. Serve Arman. I blurted out some excuse and ran out the door before he completely owned me.
“So I left. The dose I’d been given was halfway set in, halfway to making me a permanent sex toy for that prick. I had nowhere to go – every friend I’d made in the city had either written me off as a junkie, or I’d already recruited for Arman. I was afraid to go to the hospital. I got on the bus I usually took back to my apartment, but I knew that was one of the first places Arman’s goons would look for me, if they looked for me… So I just sat there on the bus, all through the night, hoping for a miracle to come.
“And then, there you were.” She took my hands in her and gave them a little squeeze.
“What do you mean, there I was? I didn’t do anything.”
“I guess you kind of have to walk a mile in my shoes to get it, but… Look. I remember that day really well. I was wearing that ridiculously small tank top – I think I stole it from Gina – and that tiny little schoolgirl skirt, my high beams full on, and so wet I bet people could smell me the second they got on the bus. I’d been sitting there for hours, fending off perverts and assholes who wanted to harass me for kicks or the bold ones who actually thought they had a shot at taking me home.
“Then you sat down. And you said, ‘mind if I sit here?’ all polite and gentleman-like. And I was kind of rude to you, because you were another guy.”
“I didn’t think you were rude.”
“Well I meant to be – I do a pretty solid frosty silence when I want to.”
“I’ll have to take your word for it – I’ve never seen you frosty. Not since then, I guess.”
She smiled. “So yeah, you just sat there, and you were looking everywhere but at me in this way that made it SO obvious how bad you wanted to check me out. And it was a little cute, in a dorky kind of way. At least to a girl who was used to having guys just rip off her clothes without invitation.
“And then… Hector. That schizophrenic guy? He rides that route a lot.”
“Yeah, I know Hector.”
“Yeah, and you remember, he just started going crazy with that ‘fuck him, fuck him’ stuff. And trust me, my mind was already in a bad place. I had a wild libido before I turned myself into Arman’s whore, and with the stuff in my system, I was in a bad way. Hell, just from that goodbye feelsky, if it had been Arman saying it I would’ve stripped naked right and fucked you right there on the bus.
“And as I’m clenching my thighs shut, trying not to think how bad I needed a cock, or how fucked I’d be if I got one (pun intended), I offered myself to you. I forget exactly how I said it, but I remember it was basically an invitation to fuck me.”
I remembered it from my dream that she’d jokingly asked if Hector was talking about us, and wondered if I’d just been too nervous to consider that she’d propositioned me. Probably.
“But no, you were all cute about it, deflected it away and made a little joke out of it. Flirty, sure, but not pushy or sleazy. And I thought… this could actually be a nice guy. And yeah, I could’ve totally been wrong. You could’ve been some serial killer or bondage freak who’d wrap me up in chains and whip me. But I saw your smile, and it made me feel safe. Safe, in a way I hadn’t known I needed to feel.
“So I waited until you were looking away for a second, and I reached into my purse to where I had a syringe full of the haymana ready, and I injected myself right there, just stuck it through my purse and right into my leg while you made chit-chat with me.
“And the rest, as they say, is history.”
“Wait, you injected yourself – with more? Weren’t you already on it?”
“I was just going by what Arman had told me, and by what I was feeling. I could tell I was already… compromised, I guess you could call it. And I was dead sure the stuff was still in my system, but I thought… if half had already gone to making me Arman’s, I didn’t want to an even split between him and someone else. I wanted away from him, for good. So I figured if I put a dose and a half, or whatever quantity, and threw myself at someone else whole hog…”
“… then you’d be too devoted to your new guy to want to go back to the old.”
She nodded. “And lucky for me, the new guy was you. The sweetest, most thoughtful and loving man I’ve ever known.”
I pulled my hands away from hers. “That’s just the chemical making you think that.”
She shook her head. “I’ve had plenty of time to observe how it works, trust me. It doesn’t make me love you. It doesn’t even make me like you. It just over-powers my other instincts when it comes to making you happy. If you beat the hell out of me, I’d hate you for it, but the drug would still make me want to allow you to do it.”
“So then tell me this – if this haymana stuff is so potent that you’d stand there and be some guy’s piñata, then how come it let you lie to me and refuse to tell me about it in the first place?”
“Well, three things there. For one, it definitely wasn’t easy. When I know you want something, you have no idea how good it makes me feel to give it to you, and how bad I feel when mess up. Like all the light in my soul just gets snuffed out in an instant.
“For two, the drug makes me want to please you, not necessarily obey you. Now it happens that the two are one and the same 99% of the time, but this was one of the exceptions. Obviously telling you this would upset you. I know what I am, and what I’ve done. I sold people out who trusted me, I helped a bad man do bad things just because it gave me some shitty high.
“I can see it’s upsetting you now, and it’s killing me. Not literally,” she added quickly, “but I know you hate hearing all this. Only with what Erika told me you were thinking, the truth had to be better than that.”
I wasn’t nearly so sure this was the case. “What’s the third thing?”
Something flashed across her face then, and she looked down at the table. “Arman.”
I felt myself tensing as she gave voice to the answer I’d most expected and most dreaded. “Go on.”
“Between the conditioning and whatever happened with that haymana, there’s some part of me that still wants to please him. And I hate it, and I’ve tried a million times to tell myself it’s insane and horrible and illogical and unnatural, to just forget he ever existed… but I can’t. It’s not a big part – if my feelings for you were the sun, he’d be a half-moon at best. But he’s there. And since I didn’t want you to know who I really was, what I’d really done, and I knew he wouldn’t want you to know either… I used that to give me the strength to tell you no. And I’m so sorry. I wish you never had to hear any of this, that we could’ve just gone on as we were and been happy.”
“So, you wish you could’ve just kept lying to me.”
“No! No, I just–”
“Save it. That’s all a pretty wild story, but you kind of skipped the part where we became a couple but you kept working for Arman.”
“What? No! I’ve spoken to him exactly once since you and I got together, and that was to tell him I wasn’t his any more and I wasn’t ever coming back.”
“Bullshit!” Now it was my turn to smash a fist into the table. I hit it so hard it nearly knocked over my empty mug. “I heard you, Courtney! I was there, and I heard you rutting away.”
She had the audacity to pretend confusion. “What? You couldn’t have – I haven’t been there in months!”
“You don’t think I know what you sound like by now? Damnit, Courtney – I gave you a chance to come clean and you’re still just feeding me bullshit!”
“You don’t believe me?”
“I believe your story – with what I’ve seen the past couple weeks, it’s the only thing that makes sense. But I’m not letting you weasel out of the ending of it.” I stood up, snatching my coat.
She didn’t look at me – her eyes were darting around the table, as if puzzling over some unseen equation. I didn’t have time to hear what new fabrication she was concocting. I turned on my heel and strode away from that table, never intending to look back.
“Oh yeah, fuck, that’s the spot… deeper… yeah, all the way in… so fucking full right now!”
I paused, turning to look at her. She was looking right back, her face completely neutral as she continued her dirty talk. “Oh god… oh fuck yeah… stuff my slut cunt so good…”
What the hell was she doing? Trying to lure me back by getting me hard? Which I was, and no doubt every other guy in the restaurant was too as she continued, this time with a bit more flattering description of the size of her lover’s cock, punctuated a by a long wailing moan that rendered the words into gibberish.
Our waitress rounded the corner into our nook of the restaurant, aghast at what she was hearing. “Miss! This is a family restaurant – I have to ask you to stop that.”
“That’s it… oh fuck, no one’s ever gone that deep before… don’t stop now. Yeah – yeah yeah FUCKING YEAH, oh GAW-AW-AWD that’s IT, YES!” Courtney replied. Her face didn’t change though. She just looked right at me.
 “Miss, you and your companion need to leave. Right now, or I’ll have to call the police.”
“No, you can’t stop now! Don’t stop! Don’t you fucking dare stop drilling my pussy! More! Please, please I’ll do anything, just don’t…. oh GOD don’t STOP!”
The waitress left, presumably to make good on her threat. “Courtney, stop – what are you doing? Is this supposed to change my mind? Because all you’re doing is reminding me of the slut I heard fucking some stranger in that warehouse the other night.”
She stopped, and gave me a meaningful look. “So it sounded familiar, did it.”
“You know it did. What, is that some rehearsed script you have? Giving me the same show you gave your john?”
“It’s a script all right.” She pulled her phone out of her purse and dialed a number, gesturing for me to wait a moment. In spite of myself, I complied. It rang a few times, then someone picked up. “Hey, Gina… yeah, I heard you two met… No, he didn’t tell me how good you were, but I’m sure you were great… Good, good. Say, I wondered if you could do me a solid and send me the mp4 of the training video? … Yeah, just trying to train Erika – you remember her, right? – yeah, breaking her in, trying to show her the ropes… Nah, still freelance, not planning on coming back to work for Arman…”
Courtney’s eyes suddenly closed, and she inhaled sharply. “Yeah, I know he misses me… I’m glad you’re enjoying being his sex slave… hey, I’m kind of in the middle of something right now – could you just send the video? Great, thanks… Yeah, I hope I see you soon too… Uh huh, I’ll tell him. OK, bye.”
She hung up. “Gina… that’s the one always showing off her midriff, right?”
“That’s the one. Erika said that Arman told her she gave you a heck of a good time the other night.” I blushed. “She said to tell you you’re a pig and a pervert and you better never come use her like a sex toy again. But I think she meant it playfully.”
“Um, yeah, about that…”
“I don’t care what you did with her. You were only there because I made you go there by lying to you. Water under the bridge. Hell, if you wanna fuck her again sometime I’ll get her a cab.”
“Well… yeah, maybe you’re OK with a relationship where we’re both in and out of other people’s beds all the time, but I’m not.”
Her phone buzzed, and she started fiddling with buttons. “One second.”
“Courtney, no – there’s nothing more to say.”
“Just… ah! There it is. Here, you should see this.”
I walked over to our table. I don’t know why, except that there was still something in me that couldn’t stand the thought of not seeing her again. It was small, and quiet, but it got me to the table.
Where her phone was streaming a video of Courtney, lying on her back on a silk-sheeted bed buck naked. After a moment, a dark-skinned man – Arman, I suspected – crawled on top of her and mounted her. “I told you, I helped Arman train the new girls. So we made a few training videos where I (and some of his other veteran sluts) demonstrate the basics. I’ve probably seen this like a hundred times by now.”
She thumbed through the timeline of the video, jumping ahead to the midway point, then placing the phone underneath the table, pressed against the underside. Through the layer of wood, I heard those sounds again – No, you can’t stop now! Don’t stop! Don’t you fucking dare stop drilling my pussy! – and she mouthed the words in time with the video.
“Arman was fucking with you,” she said as comprehension dawned. “He knows I’m yours now – I told him what I did – and there’s no way I could come back if you’re in the picture. So he did what he could to get you to dump me. I bet he didn’t charge you or anything, right? Just made sure you heard this and showed you the door?”
“Yeah. He just said… just said to tell you he missed you, and if I did that, he’d call it even.”
Her eyes squeezed shut again. “Yeah, the fucker. That was one of his trigger phases when he was conditioning me, to get me to come back to him when I’d gone too long without a dose. Even second-hand…” She shuddered. “What a prick.”
I didn’t know what to say. I did, however, see our waitress glaring at us from the doorway to this side room. “Look, I don’t know what happens now, but we at least shouldn’t stay here to get arrested. Let’s get going.”
She nodded, stopping the video and returning the phone to her purse. We walked out, every eye on us. On her, really. She was as radiant as ever. She followed me out into the parking lot, and I stopped to lean against the front of the hood. Courtney stopped in front of me, goose bumps forming on her exposed arms and chest. It had begun snowing while we were inside, and the softly falling flakes alighted on her blonde tresses.
“I don’t know what to say.” And I didn’t.
“Say you’ll give me another chance.”
“I’m not sure I can. For everything you explained away in there, you replaced it with something else just as bad.”
“I know. I told you, back when you first confronted me, that if you found out how I came to be with you that you wouldn’t want me any more.”
“Yeah… I guess you did. Damnit, why couldn’t I just leave it alone.”
“It’s not your fault, Drew. I lied to you, and I muddied the waters. It’s all my fault… but I still want you to give me another chance.”
“Courtney… you sold out your own friends.”
“I did. I thought they’d be happier like that, and they probably are, but still. I did.”
“You… had sex… for money.”
“I didn’t keep the money. But yeah.”
“You enslaved Erika!”
“To make you happy!” she protested. “And because I knew if I didn’t, Arman was going to. He’d already been conditioning her, and I thought she’d be better off with us than with him. But yeah. I did it.”
I sighed, my breath misting out into the chill air. “Damn, why does this all have to be so confusing. It feels like all the evidence and reason in the world is telling me to get in my car and never look back, but… I can’t make myself leave.”
Courtney took a step toward me, and my hands found her hips and pulled her the rest of the way up against me. “I love you, Drew. And I know I’ve fucked up in so many ways, and done so many things I wish I could undo. But all that stuff is behind me – I’m done with that life, and I’ve got no more secrets to hide. All I want is to be with you.”
She leaned in to kiss me, but I pulled back. She remained at that proximity though, speaking in a whisper. “I wish I could make it as easy for you as it is for me.”
I released her so suddenly she almost slipped in a patch of snow and rushed to my car. There I found it, the little baggie Erika had given me yesterday. “Here!” I said, holding it out to her. “Here – this is the stuff you used on yourself. Right?”
Courtney shook off her surprise after a moment, then held it up in the wan light of the street lamp. “I think… yeah, this is it. You can see those little blue-white spots in it, that’s the haymana. Where the hell did you get this?”
“From Erika – Arman gave it to her to give to me. I think he meant for me to use it, then have it bind me to Erika so I’d lose interest in you and he could have a shot at getting you back.”
“That son of a…”
“It’s not exactly the worst crime he’s guilty of, babe. And it doesn’t matter. Look. I can take this, and then we can… you know…”
“It’s so freaking cute that you can’t even say the words.”
“…and then I’ll be yours, just like you’re mine. No more doubt or confusion or judging – just perfect love.”
“Drew, this is a big decision. You don’t have to do that for me. I don’t even want you to do that.”
“Courtney, I’ve never been happier than I was with you these past months. I don’t want to lose that. You did it for me, and I should be willing to do the same.”
As a squad car appeared down the street, we hurried into my car. No sense ruining the moment with legal hassles. Courtney lay down across the back seat, and I lowered myself on top of her – out of sight of the cop, yes, but mostly I just couldn’t wait to taste the most delicious lips I’d ever kissed.
We lay like that for a while, making out in the back of my car, the windows steamed within and frosted without. This. This was what I’d missed – not cheap sex with her slut slave friends, but my Courtney. The touch of a woman who really loved me, in every way a woman could.
Some time later, long after the officer had left, I pulled back. “We need to do this, Courtney. Before I lose the nerve.”
“And you’re sure this is what you want?”
“I just want us to be us again. I think this is the only way for me to get out of my own head and move forward.”
She gave me a long look, then a soft nod. “All right. We’ll need some water… I guess the snow will do. Stay here, let me get it ready.”
I remained in the car, watching the blur of her body go out into the snowy evening. She knelt down near a patch of the white stuff, and a minute later came back. The syringe was full, and its contents were a liquid with a faint blue sheen.
“Are you ready?” she asked gingerly.
“Maybe we should head home first?”
She nodded. “OK. Let’s go home.”
I tried to start my car, but there was nothing doing. After a couple minutes of futile grinding, we gave up. “Feel like taking the bus?” she asked with a little grin.
I gave her a little kiss. “You know, I meet the most interesting people riding the bus.”
Timing was on our side, and before long the bus arrived. It was the dead of night, and we were the only people on board save for the driver, who looked relieved to have someone to ferry around the city.
I took a seat, and with a little shiver and a questioning look from Courtney, I patted my lap. She accepted the invitation with a little squeak of triumph, and with my arms around her, we proceeded to warm one another up. She was here with me, and I found myself growing pleased with my decision.
And, of course, with her perfect butt wriggling against me in search of warmth, it wasn’t long before something else started to grow. Courtney, ever perceptive of the position and status of my cock, noticed immediately, which only served to focus her wriggling into a more pleasing and rhythmic form.
“Making it hard to wait until we get home,” I gently accused.
“So don’t.”
“Don’t… what, you wanna get it on right here?”
“Drew, I’ve wanted you inside me every second of every day since the day we met. If I had my way, we’d have done that whole terrible talk at the diner with my legs wrapped around your waist and your cock so deep in my pussy that it tickled the back of my throat.”
I slid a hand up her bare thigh and under her skirt until it met with her panties. Sure enough, they were good and wet in the middle. “Might’ve been easier on both of us.”
“You know me – I love making things easy for you. Except that one thing I love to make hard.” With impressive dexterity, she had my pants undone and my cock fished out into her hand in a flash. I didn’t even see her take her mittens off, but as she began stroking the length of me, it was for certain they’d disappeared somewhere along the way.
I enjoyed it for a long moment in silence. “So… if I– when I take this… are we just going to turn into two crazed nymphomaniacs? Like, we’ll just wind up two homeless weirdos who never stop screwing each other in an alley somewhere?”
“Nah, Erika would take us in.” She grinned. “And no – you’ll still be you. You can still do your job and function as a person. I manage all day while you’re at work, remember? And you still don’t have to do this.”
“I was this close to losing the person in my life who’s made me the happiest I’ve ever been. All this… you… it’s a lot to take in. I don’t want to wake up one day and let some those doubts make me fuck things up. And I want to love you like you love me.”
She nodded. “Then let’s do it. And I know you don’t like needles – I’ve never seen someone be such a baby over a flu shot – so… let me help take your mind off of it.”
Courtney stood up, and with dancer’s grace began stripping right there in the aisle. Her jacket went first, then the buttons up the back of her dress. By the time she got to sliding the top down to reveal a white lace bra underneath it, the bus driver finally felt impelled to say something.
“You can’t do that, miss – this is a public bus.”
Courtney walked right up to him, her dress slipping down inch by inch across creamy white hips all on its own until she just stepped out of it, leaving it on the floor near the driver’s seat. “You can watch – hell, you can record me if you want. Just don’t stop.” She took her bra, then her panties off right in front of him, depositing them in his lap. “Hold onto these for me, will you?”
He looked down at them, then up at her, then threw on the brakes as he nearly ran a red light at a major intersection. Courtney, likely on purpose, landed in his lap, rising with a little giggle as the vehicle recovered. “Yes, ma’am,” was all he said.
By the time she got back to me, the injection was already done with. A little tingle was still running through my arm from where I’d inserted the needle at the elbow as Courtney stopped in front of me.
“You did it.”
I nodded. “Any requests?” From now on, I supposed, I’d be taking all her preferences as commands, so may as well get myself used to it.
“Just one,” she replied. “I want you to do me exactly how you know I like it.”
I’d been with a variety of women in my life. Some liked it hard and fast and others wanted to take an hour. Some expected to be wined and dined to be put in the mood; some expected the romance to come from a tenderness shown in the bedroom. Some women liked to feel special, while others wanted it plain and simple with no risk of the weird happening. Some wanted all of these things from time to time without rhyme, reason, forewarning or forgiveness.
Courtney, however, only wanted one thing from me when it came to sex. To feel useful.
“I miss that pretty mouth of yours.”
Some women might’ve mistaken this as wanting a kiss, but Courtney knew full well where I wanted her. We ignored our audience of one as she laid down on the bench beside me, propping herself up on her elbows and immediately launching into an enthusiastic series of licks up and down my shaft. It was chilly in the bus, and when I said as much she did the most considerate thing she could – taking my cock into her mouth to keep me good and warm.
If ever I doubted Courtney’s feelings for me, there was no cure for it quite like this. It was impossible for a woman to throw herself so eagerly, so passionately into a blowjob unless she absolutely loved it. Her whimpers of delight were barely audible over the humming of the bus engine, but I felt every one of them through my skin.
It had been two days since I’d gotten off, which was by a wide margin the longest I’d gone since I’d met Courtney. I hadn’t realized the stamina and libido I’d developed until noticing how that slight disruption had left me irritably horny. As such, Courtney’s glorious tongue-lashing didn’t last nearly as long as we both wanted it to, but I knew there were plenty of reserves.
“Paint yourself with it, Courtney – show us all who you belong to now.”
“I’m yours,” she said, sliding to her knees in front of me and pumping feverishly with her hands. “I’m all yours, every inch of me. My mouth belongs to you. My tits belong to you. My ass belongs to you. My cunt belongs to you. My heart belongs to you.”
I came. I came so much it was more accurate to say I drenched her rather than merely sprayed, coating her tits, her belly, her chest, neck and chin.
“I guess that means I belong to you now, too,” I said. My heart was racing, and truly, I couldn’t look at her without feeling my heart swelling at the sight. Even this cummy, drippy mess I’d made of her, I still loved. My Courtney, who’d never hesitated for an instant to do everything she could to make me happy.
Now, neither would I. She wanted to feel useful, and I would use her. I was already hard again just from looking at her. “Titty fuck me, babe. Show the nice bus driver what those jugs of yours are good for.”
“For pleasing my boyfriend, of course.” She rubbed my jizz into her boobs like it was a lotion, and with so much of it there it may as well have been. When she slipped my cock between them, pressing her tits together firmly with both hands, it was as slick as if she’d used lube.
“Well you’re doing a good job of it.”
She moaned. “Thank you, but you don’t have to say that.”
“I mean it. I’ve fucked a lot of your protégés’ tits, and none of them compare.”
She looked up into my eyes while she worked. “Better than Gina’s?”
“Oh please, she’s barely even got tits. Hers are nothing compared to yours.”
She flushed with delight, or arousal, or probably both. “But Morgan’s… I mean, come on. If there’s a girl with better tits than me, it’s her. And I know she gave good service – she’d do it just to spite Erika. You can’t tell me fucking Morgan’s huge tits wasn’t at least this good.”
“She was good all right – you really turned her into a top quality piece of T&A, I gotta hand it to you.” Was it bad of me, to feel proud at how well my girlfriend had trained some other woman to be a sex object? If it was, then I guess I’m bad. “Still, she didn’t love it the way you do. She did it to get me ready for her, not because she’s a hot babe who just wants to use her tits to bring me pleasure.”
She grinned, obviously pleased at how well I understood her. “What about Erika’s? I gave her very specific instructions to give you her absolute best effort with everything she did.”
“And she did – she obeyed like a good little slut slave, but she’s still just a walking talking fuck toy. Before I said it, she had no intention of doing it. She’s not like you, who wanted to already and was just waiting for my permission. She obeyed me, but you love me.”
From the way she shuddered, she might have been having a mini-orgasm of her own. She didn’t ask for any more as she continued. Glancing over, I could see the driver watching us in the rear view mirror, licking his lips at the sight of the stacked naked blonde tit-fucking a guy in the aisle. If I’d been in my right mind, I’d have worried he was going to get us killed, but as it was, I just wanted to enjoy my girlfriend.
“Ride me. I need to be inside you. It’s been so, so long, and I need someone to do me right.”
I didn’t even have to move. She just released her grip on her tits, the chill air of the bus attacking my erection only as long as it took her to rise to her feet, stand with a foot on either side of my hips on the bench, and sit herself down on my cock.
It was divine. Like it always had, her pussy wrapped itself around me like it was made for me. Maybe it was.
And with her arms around my neck, she began to ride. There was no hurry, no concern for anyone watching us, no thoughts about what would come after. Only my girlfriend and my girlfriend’s boyfriend, and the bond between us strengthening even now.
“So what do we do with Erika now?” I asked.
“We use her however and whenever we want. It’s all she wants now.”
“Should we think about… you know, setting her free?”
“Erika was a wreck before I took her. I told you, I looked for girls who are vulnerable – nothing going for them, no one caring for them,  no one who’d notice or be surprised if they were gone. She’s better off with us, trust me.”
“Sure it’s not just you not wanting to give her up?” I teased, adding a little upward thrust of the hips.
“That too,” she admitted straight-faced. “And you look so fucking hot nailing her. I wish I could’ve seen you with Morgan and Gina too.”
“Not too late – I know where to find ‘em.”
She grinned. “Me first, though.”
“Always.”
The sun still wasn’t up by the time we’d worn each other out, but it was threatening to rise, the eastern sky fading from black to dark gray. I think even the bus driver was tired by then. Though we were happy, we were still cold, so we gathered our clothes and dressed (though Courtney let the guy keep her underwear, her way of giving him a tip I suppose).
“I don’t feel all that different,” I said as she nestled in beside me. “Am I supposed to be able to feel that my brain’s been messed with?”
“Well, how do you feel?” she asked. “About me, that is.”
“I love you. And I’m happy you’re beside me and happy we didn’t break up and happy I get to keep being with you.”
“What about those doubts?”
I studied the pools of her eyes. “I… don’t really care. You never betrayed me, and only kept things from me because you were afraid to lose me.”
“And what I did, to those other girls?”
I shrugged. “Honestly… I work every day alongside people who are a lot less happy than they are, and with a lot less reason to be. Maybe… maybe it’s not so bad. I mean, we have Erika now, and I think she’ll be pretty happy with her situation.”
“So… you still love me?”
“I do. I love you.”
“And you trust me.”
“I do.”
And we kissed. Not our usual kiss, that curled my toes and ignited my blood. But we spoke to one another without sound, our lips expressing our love to one another in a way that words would fail.
When we pulled back, I noticed we were in my neighborhood. My stop would be coming soon, and I hit the button to alert the driver it was time. “You know,” Courtney said, picking up her purse and making ready to leave as she noticed the same, ”before you go all in on the trust thing, maybe there’s one last little secret I should tell you.”
I made a stern face, but could only hold it for a moment before a smile brushed it aside. “And what’s that.”
She reached into her purse, pulling out a thin piece of packaging and putting it in my hand. “I might’ve modified the recipe. Just a little.”
I turned over the wrapped; it was one of her flavor packets she used in her water. “Wait, why would you…”
“I also might’ve left something out,” she interrupted softly, then opened her purse to show me where the haymana packet sat undisturbed at the bottom of her purse.
“Wait, so… what I shot into myself, that was…?”
“Blue raspberry. Delicious, but its powers to warp hearts and minds haven’t yet been proven to the satisfaction of the FDA.”
“Courtney!”
“I’m sorry! I just… I love you the way you are. And I didn’t want to keep you only because you were forced to. You deserve to make up your own mind about what to do with your life. Just like I did. Please don’t be mad.”
The bus pulled up to my stop. I pulled myself to my feet and made for the exit, Courtney watching me walk away from her in dejected silence. As the door opened, I turned back to her. “Are you coming? C’mon, you can’t make it up to me from all the way back there.”
In a flash, she was at my side, holding my hand as we stepped off the bus. Just like that very first day together, only now I wasn’t some awe-struck horndog blinded by the flirtations of a pretty girl.
I hadn’t been lying about my feelings on the bus. I really did love her, more now than I ever had before. When she’d just been my hot new girlfriend, she’d just been a shell of a person to me, a body that was there for the very eager taking. I’d been happy, but you can’t love someone you don’t really know.
Now I knew it all, and while it was certainly a mixed bag, it was real. She was a total person now, flawed and scarred and radiant and whole. I could love that. And I did.
“And here you told me you’d put a stop to the rogue mind controller on the bus that day.”
“I know, I know, she’s incorrigible.”
You know,” I said as we strode down the snowy sidewalk, “maybe I better hang onto that stuff.”
“What, you don’t trust me?”
I squeezed her mittened hand.