A Traitor to Memory

She would have preferred France—she had a major thing for croissants, although the less said about that the better—but a few days in London had provided her with a wider range of eating experiences than she'd anticipated, so she'd managed to settle in happily, out of the reach of her parents and, more importantly, thousands of miles away from that living example of human perfection, her older sister. Equality Neale was tall, thin, intelligent, articulate, and disgustingly successful at everything she did. And she'd been elected homecoming queen at Los Altos High School, which was enough to make anyone blow major chunks into the next time zone. So getting away from Ali had been priority numero uno, and London had made that possible.

But in London, Libby had met Rock Peters. In London, she had married the creep. And in London—where she hadn't yet got round to scoring anything closely resembling a work permit or a permanent resident's card despite her marriage—she was at Rock's mercy, whereas in Mexico, it would have been “kiss my ass, Jack,” and money or not, she could have gotten away from him. She still wouldn't have had the bucks to do it, but that wouldn't have mattered because the thumb spoke a universal language and she wasn't afraid to put herself out on the road and use it. Which was something she couldn't do from England since hitching a ride across the Atlantic to get away from Rock wasn't exactly possible.

Rock had her … well, he had her by the balls, figuratively speaking. She wanted to stay in England because she didn't want to go home and admit defeat when every letter she got from California was filled to the brim with Ali's latest success. But to stay in England, she needed money. And to get money, she needed Rock. True, she could have made some bucks even more illegally than she was already making them, but getting caught would have meant getting deported, which would have meant back to Los Altos Hills, back to Mom and Dad, and back to “Why don't you go to work for Ali for a time, Lib? In public relations, you could—” blah blah blah. No way in hell, Libby told herself, was she going to put herself anywhere near her sister.

So when Rock wanted something, she was basically his slave. Which was why she was back to screwing the shithead two or three times a week upon demand. She'd try to avoid it, usually by pointing out that there was a delivery needing to be made and since she was the most reliable of his couriers, shouldn't she make it? But that usually didn't work because when Rock wanted sex, Rock wanted sex, and it never took him much time to ride the train to the station anyway.

That was what had happened this day, back in the Bermondsey hovel above the grocery store where, if she concentrated on the traffic noises below, she'd always been able to avoid hearing Rock grunting in her ear like a constipated pig. As always, she'd been so pissed off after screwing him that she wanted to amputate his cock with a saw. That not being possible, she'd gone to her tap-dancing lesson instead.

She'd tapped herself into the sweat of the century, shuffling, chugging, flapping, and spanking till she was dripping wet. The instructor kept yelling, “Libby, what are you doing over there?” above the strains of “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” but Libby had ignored her. It hadn't mattered whether she was in step, out of step, in line, out of line, or even in the same hemisphere as her fellow tappers. What mattered was doing something hard, something fast, something that was demanding and physical in order to put Rock Peters from her mind. If she didn't do that, she'd end up in front of the closest refrigerator, and approximately six billion calories later, she'd find herself recovered from Rock's brand of blackmail.

“Think of it this way, Lib,” he'd say when it was over and she lay beneath him, defeated again, “It's tit for tat, pardon the pun,” and he'd offer that grin she'd first thought so cool and later learned to recognise for the sign of contempt it actually was. “You scratch my itch and I scratch yours. 'Sides, you're not getting any from the fiddler, are you? I know when a bird's been rogered proper and you've the look of someone who hasn't had a decent shagging in more'n a year.”

“That's right, I haven't, you total dickhead,” she'd snap. “Think about it, Rock. And he's not a fiddler. He plays the violin.”

“Ooooh. Pardon my French,” he'd say. And it mattered exactly zero to the former Rocco Petrocelli that she'd put down his ability as a lover. To him, success in bed meant getting his rocks off. What happened to his partner was left to self-stimulation or coincidence.

Libby departed the dance studio in a better frame of mind, her leotard and tap shoes stuffed into her backpack and that outfit replaced by the leathers which she wore when she made her courier stops. Helmet under her arm, she strode to the Suzuki and she used the kick starter instead of the electric ignition, the better to think about tromping on Rock's face.