Yet she found herself trusting him enough to tell him. Even wanting to tell him. She wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was because he treated her like a lady, like a person. That felt good, and it only made her resent his ruining things all the more.
“You won’t tell me how you lost your hands,” she pointed out, hoping to derail him that way.
He grinned at her over the top of his glass. “Yes I will. I had a run-in with the Manicurist from Hell.”
She snorted derisively. “Right. Well, I became a whore because instead of being curly, all my pubic hair’s shaped like dollar signs.”
His grin got even wider. “Really? That’s most unusual. You must show me later.”
She gave him a smoldering look. “I’ll show you everything I got right this minute.” Not that the translucent skinsuit she wore hid all that much. Still, nothing distracted a man like sex. She reached for the sealtab nestled between her breasts.
He reached out and gently closed a silver hand around hers. His metal fingers rested so lightly on hers they might have been foil butterflies.
“Please tell me,” he said, looking her straight in the eyes. “You can trust me.” He released her hand. “At least I hope you can.”
Merry looked away, stood up abruptly. “I need another drink.”
She retreated toward the bar, her gait somewhat unsteady. Part of that came from three glasses of wine on an empty stomach. But not all of it. Not even most of it.
To survive as a whore you had to keep your head on straight. Always be the one in control, even when playing the submissive. Keep your emotions out of the transaction. Remember that no matter how nice the juan seemed, he had paid for the use of your body and nothing more. When you lost your handle on all that, you were just asking for trouble.
She knew she was skating on the thin brittle edge of trouble now. Slipping closer and closer, almost as if she wanted to go over it.
Why?
Because this man she had sold herself to for the night was trying to seduce her, and she was liking the way it felt.
Not seduced in the sexual sense, that was already bought and paid for. This was being seduced in the sense of being enticed into dropping her defenses and letting him inside. Of being subtly drawn into the vulnerable nakedness of letting him see the private places she kept hidden by the Merry face she showed the world.
Keeping her back to him, she picked up the scotch bottle and topped off her glass with that instead of wine. Her hand shook, splashing liquor over the rim of the glass, reminding her how rock steady that hand had been once upon a time.
Yes, once upon a time. Didn’t stories which started that way always end with They all lived happily ever after?
She leaned heavily on the bar, keeping her back to this strange juan who refused to follow the rules.
Tell him this, and the next thing she knew she’d be telling him her real name!
“I was a microtech,” she said softly, eyes on her traitorous hands. “Most tech work is troubleshooting and mod-swapping. But sometimes, most often with special purpose equipment, the mod itself has to be rebuilt or reconfigured. That calls for a microtech. The parts are so small and delicate, the circuiting so intricate, it calls for someone with a really fine touch, like a—” she hesitated, searching for the proper comparison.
“Like a surgeon,” he supplied quietly from behind her.
She nodded. “Yeah, like that. I had that touch. I was good. Damn good.” She had been, too. The best on Vespa and within thirty thousand kilometers of it. She’d made serious money and her rep was solid gold.
She took a swallow of whiskey and grimaced, steeling herself to tell the next part. The hard part.
“One day I was working on setting up the controller-mods of an industrial circuiting machine for Iolus Fabrique here on Vespa. Some clown on the crew accidentally left the bolts off a substrate roller collar. Or they had been left out at the factory where it was built. Whatever the reason, that two-hundred-and-fifty-kilo roller broke loose and came crashing down inside it, flattening the modbox directly under it. A modbox I just happened to have my hands inside.”
Retelling it, she shuddered at the remembrance of that sudden blinding burst of pain/surprise/confusion/horror, of stumbling backward, a bubbling scream plugging her throat when she saw the terrible ruined things at the ends of her arms, flopping bonelessly and spurting red in every direction…
The juan, Marchey, was silent. But she could feel his attention wrapped around her as he waited for her to continue. And she would. Now that she had started this there was no turning back. It had to be replayed to the end, just like when you began falling there was no stopping until you hit bottom.
“Both my hands were crushed. Almost every bone in them was broken, and the muscles turned to mincemeat.”
The foreman had taken one horrified look at her, turned white as a sheet, and puked all over his shoes. They’d had to put plastic bags over her hands to keep from losing pieces of them, holding the bags in place with tourniquets to keep her from bleeding to death.
She wheeled around to face him. “You know, I really shouldn’t trust you,” she said in a dead voice.
“Why is that?” Softly, not in challenge. His face solemn, but not forbidding. Willing to accept whatever she said. A bitter wave of spite rose up inside her.
“Because you’re a doctor. Don’t worry, you’ll be fine, they told me.” Her upper lip curled in disgust. “Sure, they fixed up my hands so that they look all right if you don’t check too close, and I can do most normal things with them. But my career as a microtech ended that day.” She shivered. “In fact, I can barely stand to be around machinery anymore. I look at it and feel an itch I just can’t scratch.”
He nodded soberly. “Believe me, I know how you feel.”
No, you don’t! screamed the shrill voice of frustration, but the words never made it past her lips. A glance down at his silver hands silenced it, telling her that he just might understand after all.
“So you blame the doctors for not fixing you up the way you were before. First with your hands, and then with your face after the embolism.”
Merry’s thin shoulders slumped. “No, not really,” she admitted. Oh, she had for a while, but had gotten over it.
“Why not?”
“I know that not everything can be fixed. Some things just seem fated to end up on the scrap heap.” She shrugged. “I guess I’m one of them.” The worst part was how long the trip took.
“Why do you say that?”
Merry had to wonder what he was after. Why he cared, if he really did. Yet she couldn’t keep herself from answering. It had been so long since anyone had just listened to her, had been interested in her as anything other than something to get their rocks off with when nothing better or free was available.
It was true that some men wanted to talk as much as they wanted to get laid. More of them than an outsider might think. But what they really wanted to talk about was themselves. Any questions about her were either nervous chatter, a form of voyeurism, or in some cases a desire to get their money’s worth by sticking themselves into her life as well as her body.
She spread her hands. “Isn’t it obvious? I knew I’d never again be the tech I had been. My lawyer warned me that it would be years before I got any sort of settlement. I needed a new career because I needed the income. When my landlord offered to eat my month’s rent if I screwed him, I heard opportunity’s bastard cousin knocking. Even though I was getting a little old for the trade, I was still doing okay until I got caught in a blowout a few months ago.”