Florian handed him the drink, and he leaned there with his elbow on the back of the couch sipping the orange drink and feeling the slow, light movement of Ari's hands on his back.
"Let me tell you something," Ari said softly, behind him. "You remember what I told you about family relationships? That they're a liability? I'm going to do you a real favor. Ask me what that is."
"What?" he asked because he had to.
Her arms came around him, and he took a drink, trying to ignore the nausea she made in his gut.
"You think tenderness ought to have something to do with this," Ari said. "Wrong. Tenderness hasn't got a thing to do with it. Sex is what you do for yourself, for your own reasons, sweet, just because it feels good. That's all. Now sometimes you get real close to somebody and you want to do it back and forth, that's fine, and maybe you trust them, but you shouldn't. You really shouldn't. The first thing you have to learn is that you can get it anywhere. The second thingit ties you to people who aren't family and it mucks up your judgment unless you remember the first rule. That's how I'm going to do you a favor, sweet. You're not going to confuse what we're doing here. Does that feel good?"
It was hard to breathe. It was hard to think. His heart was hammering and her hands did quiet, disturbing things that made his skin all too sensitive, the edge of pleasureor intense discomfort. He was no longer sure which. He drank a large gulp of the orange and vodka and tried to put his mind anywhere else, anywhere at all, in a kind of fog in which he was less and less in control of himself.
"How are you doing, dear?"
Not well, he thought, and thought that he was drunk. But at the edge of his senses he felt a dislocation, a difficulty in spatial relationshipslike the feeling that Ari was a thousand miles away, her voice coming from behind him and not straight back, but aside in a strange and asymmetrical way
It was a cataphoric. Tapestudy drug. Panic raced through his brain, chaotic, stimuli coming in on him too fast, while the body seemed to lag in an atmosphere gone to syrup. Not a high dosage. He could see. He could still feel Ari tug his shirt up, run her hands over his bare skin, even while his sense of balance deserted him and he felt his head spinning, the whole room going around. He lost the glass and felt the chill of ice and liquid spreading against his hip and under his buttocks.
"Oh, dear. Florian. Get that."
He was sinking. He was still aware. He tried to move, but confusion set in, a roaring muddle of sound and sensation. He tried to doubt. That was the hardest thing. He was quite aware that Florian had rescued the glass and that his head was back in Ari's lap, in the hollow of her crossed legs, that he was gazing up into Ari's face upside down and that she was unfastening his shirt.
She was not the only one unfastening his clothing. He heard a murmur of voices, but none of them involved him. "Justin," a voice said, and Ari turned his head between her hands. "You can blink when you need to," she whispered, the way the tapes would. "Are you comfortable?"
He did not know. He was terrified and ashamed, and in a long nightmare he felt touches go over him, felt himself lifted up and dragged off whatever he was lying on and down onto the floor.
It was Catlin and Florian who hovered over him. It was Catlin and Florian who touched him and moved him and did tilings to him that he was aware of in a kind of vague nowhere way, which were wrong, wrong and terrible.
Stop this, he thought. Stop this. I don't agree with this.
I don't want this.
But there was pleasure. There was an explosion in his senses, somewhere infinite, somewhere dark.
Help me.
I don't want this.
He was half conscious when Ari said to him: "You're awake, aren't you?
Do you understand now? There's nothing more than this. That's as good as it gets. There's nothing more than this, no matter who it's with. Just biological reactions. That's the first and the second rule. ..."
"Watch the screen."
Tape was running. It was erotic. It blurred into what was happening to him. It felt good and he did not want it to, but he was not responsible for it, he was not responsible for anything and it was not his fault. . . .
"I think he's coming out of it. . . ."
"Just give him a little more. He'll do fine."
"There's nothing can do to you what tape can do. Can it, boy? No matter who it is. Biological reactions. Whatever does it for you. . . ."
"Don't move. ..."
"Pain and pleasure, sweet, are so thin a line. You can cross it a dozen times a minute, and the pain becomes the pleasure. I can show you. You'll remember what I can do for you, sweet, and nothing will ever be like it. You'll mink about that, you'll think about it for the rest of your life. . . and nothing will ever be the same. ..."
He opened his eyes and found a shadow over him, himself naked, in a bed he did not know, a hand patting his shoulder, moving to brush hair from his brow. "Well, well, awake," Ari said. It was her weight that pushed down the edge of the mattress, Ari sitting there dressed and he
His heart jumped and started hammering.
"I'm off to the office, sweet. You can sleep in, if you like. Florian will serve you breakfast."
"I'm going home," he said, and dragged the sheet over him.
"Whatever you like." Ariane got up, releasing the mattress, and walked across to take a look in the wall mirror, demonstrative unconcern that crawled over his nerves and unsettled his stomach. "Come in when you like. Talk to Jordan if you like."
"What am I supposed to do?"
"Whatever you like."
"Am I supposed to stay here?" Panic sharpened his voice. He knew the danger in Ari hearing it, acting on it, working on it. It was a threat she had just made. He thought that it was. Her tone was blank, void of cues. Her voice tweaked at nerves and made him forget for a handful of seconds that he had a counter-threat in Grant, upriver. "It won't work."
"Won't it?" Ari gave her hair a pat. She was elegant, in a beige suit. She turned and smiled at him. "Come in when you like. You can go home tonight. Maybe we'll do it again, who knows? Maybe you can tell your father and get him to pass it off, hmmn? Tell him whatever you like. Of course I had a recorder on. There's plenty of evidence if he wants to go to the Bureau."
He felt cold through and through. He tried not to show it. He glared at her, jaw set, as she smiled and walked out the door. And for a long while he lay there cold as ice, sick to his stomach, darts of headache going from the top of his skull through to the nape of his neck. His skin felt hypersensitized, sore in places. There were bruises on his arm, the marks of fingers.
Florian
A flash came back to him, sensation and image from out of the dark, and he plunged his face into his hands and tried to shove it out. Tape-flash. Deep-tape. More and more of them would come back. He did not know what could come back. And they would, bits of memory floating up to the surface and showing a moment, a drift of words and feeling and vision, before they rolled over and sank again into the dark, nothing completejust more and more of them. He could not stop it.
He threw the sheets back and got out of bed, unfocusing his eyes where it came to his own body. He staggered into the bathroom, turned on the shower and bathed, soaped himself again and again and again, scrubbed without looking at himself, trying not to feel anything, remember anything, wonder anything. He scrubbed his face and hair and even the inside of his mouth with the perfumed soap, because he did not know if there was anything else to use; and spat and spat and gagged from the sharp, soapy taste, but it did not make him clean. It was a scent he remembered as hers. Now he smelled like it, and tasted it in the back of his throat.