"Is she getting … what do they call it … is she in remission?"
Ryan's face contorted for a second before he squeezed out the answer he didn't want to give. "No. But she will. She's going to have it all."
I reached out and pulled him towards me, holding his head against my chest as we fell backwards along the couch. "Shhh, it's OK."
Holy shit. What an emotional can of worms I'd forced him to open. This poor guy was just doing the wrong thing to try to do the right thing. He was a good man.
I will keep you safe. I'll say it's entrapment, we can still use the information to work up your supply chain … just not against you. And it could take years. That's a long time for us. Whatever "us" is.
I stroked his hair for a while until he was breathing normally again. "Sounds like we've got some things in common then," I said.
"Like what?"
"I'm an only child too, and I never knew my dad. Of course, I never knew my mom either. I was adopted, but then the adopted family were deemed unfit to parent and somehow I ended up in the foster care system. A broken system if ever there was one. I bounced around for a while, each family worse than the last until I ended up in a home with a guy that sounds a lot like your dad. Um … I never tell anybody this either."
"Well, it seems fair … " said Ryan.
I gulped. "I guess so. This guy … one night he was so drunk … beating the shit out of his wife right in front of me. "Teaching respect" he called it. Well, something … snapped inside me, you know?"
Ryan nodded, without looking up at me.
"I was like … "You want to hurt her? You'll have to go through me." So I got right in there, in the middle of it, and, boy, he went straight through me. Feel this."
I reached down and picked up Ryan's hand, aiming the fingertips at just the right place on my scalp.
"That's from when he gave me a black eye and I flew backwards and hit my head on the edge of the kitchen counter. I was just waking up when he was done with my foster mother and I saw him coming towards me. That's when the cops arrived, kicked the door down and dragged his ass off to the holding cells."
That's when I first decided to become a cop, I thought.
"Sounds like he needs to get in touch with his feminine side," Ryan mused.
"Yeah. Well, instead he got in touch with a lawyer, and he was back in the house by the weekend. But no lawyer in the world could keep me there, so I bounced around a bit more until I ended up with a family that wasn't awful for a couple years, until I turned eighteen. I don't keep in contact with them, though. Living there was like living in a hotel, you know? Clean, reasonably safe, but impersonal. So, that's why I took those self-defense classes, why I saw that guy in the club coming at you with a knife and I thought "You'll have to go through me." I'm not a fifteen-year-old girl anymore and I can fight for what I care about. For who I care about. For some reason, I cared about you from the moment I saw you, Ryan."
Ryan looked up into my eyes for a while, as if he was lost and finding himself in there. "Does that mean you wanna … "
I nodded and smiled. "Ryan and Sarina. Has a nice ring to it, huh?"
Ryan turned towards me and moved between my legs before kissing me. I wrapped my arms and legs around him, holding him tight as I kissed him back.
There was no rational and objective argument for what I was doing … but I felt like I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
Ryan
With Sarina's coursework piling up, we didn't get to spend as much time together as I would have liked over the next few weeks after making it official. It seemed like the "high school" relationship did some pretty quick growing up during that talk.
Every touch was still the embodiment of excitement when I was with Sarina, but I'd never touched anybody that I'd shared that deeply with. In my world, I couldn't let anybody know my vulnerabilities or they'd just use them against me. It was both liberating and terrifying that Sarina had that window into my inner workings.
Tonight, we'd had a chance to celebrate that quick maturing of our relationship, and I'd given her a day to remember. Starting with flowers delivered in the morning, a sexy little cocktail dress delivered and waiting for her when she came back to the dorm for lunch, and then an expensive bottle of perfume, with a note to avoid the cafeteria dinner like the plague because we had plans for tonight.
She looked like a movie star coming out of the dorm, when I picked her up in the town-car, rented complete with driver, and she smelled like an angel while we rode to the restaurant. All eyes were on her as we ate, as was only fitting for the sexiest woman in the room.
However, the whole time it seemed like there was something on her mind, and it took me until the ride home to drag it out of her. Safely behind the privacy panel so the driver couldn't hear us, I leaned in and kissed her.
"Spit it out, I can tell you've got something you want to say."
"It's … it's just embarrassing … "
"More embarrassing than leaving your panties on my bookshelf like they were a best seller?"
Sarina blushed and slapped my arm with the back of her hand. "Shut up, you. And yes, in a way, it is."
"Well, what is it?"
"It's just … I haven't managed to get a job to pay for my tuition and accommodation yet. The club got back to me and said they had a huge list of applicants with a lot more relevant experience than me. I should have spent more time looking, applying everywhere, but somebody has been keeping me busy. Not that it's your fault," she added hastily, "but everything I paid in advance is going to be running out soonish, so I need to get on top of this or you'll be dating a homeless dropout."
I shrugged. "This is no problem, just tell me what you need and I can cover it-"
"No." She shook her head. "No … I can't do that. I wouldn't feel right. I know we've been moving pretty quickly, but that would just feel like charity and I'd hate that feeling. And don't you dare say it would be for services already rendered."
She waggled a warning-finger at me and I shelved the obvious joke, holding my hands up in surrender. Dropping my arms after a second, I rested one hand on her inner thigh and she clamped them together as if giving my hand a kind of hug.
"So what are you going to do?"
"Well … I did have this one idea … "
"And this is what's been on your mind all night?"
"Yeah … um … I was thinking, you know how you said you could get some F?"
I narrowed my eyes, glanced at the privacy screen and then back to Sarina. "Yeeeaaaaahhh … "
"Well, would it be possible for me to get some to sell? I could pay you back once I sell it, and then it wouldn't be just you paying for my whole life. You already give me too much." She gestured at her dress.
I pressed my lips together into a thin line and turned my head to look out the window on the opposite side of the car. There wasn't much to see there, on account of the tinting, but a blank canvas to stare at while dealing with this potential drama-bomb was probably for the best anyway.
Giovanni had been pretty specific about clamping down on the distribution of F at our last meeting, a point he would no doubt reiterate next week. As a result of that, and of meeting Sarina, I hadn't taken any F from the lab or even visited any of my regular on-selling haunts since then. But I did still have a modest amount tucked away in my apartment.
I had no other use for it, having no particular need to take it myself. It was essentially a really inconvenient and inefficient paperweight, if it wasn't bringing in any money or the kind of respect and lifestyle I'd grown accustomed to.
The Acardis would frown upon it, to put it mildly, if they found out, but it wouldn't take that much F to cover her expenses for the rest of the academic year. After that, well, life was going to be pretty fucking different anyway. For "us" and the Acardis both. If there was a version of "us" that could even survive the entire truth about what I was.
The way she accepted the first part of my story, my initial reasons for going down this path before I got my taste of the kind of power I could take from the Acardis, gave me a lot of hope. The idea of having Sarina at my side when I took control instead of a string of meaningless, and ultimately inferior, lays was all kinds of seductive.
I turned back to Sarina. "OK. I can get you some. Not much, but you won't need much. Just make sure you don't go out on the streets selling to dangerous people. Sell on campus, small amounts to people looking to have a one-off party. Understand?"