“Is it?”
I say nothing. Shiver. Close my eyes to balm the slow hammering in my head. This is all normal. Just a normal day at the office, and Mr. Abel is just another colleague, or a stranger chatting me up in the deli, or a dog-walker who smiles at me in the park. He has a brain and a heart and they function perfectly, the way brains and hearts ought to do.
Please.
Please.
“You were always going to be last,” he tells me with reverence. “Lucky number four.”
Tears grow fat in the corners of my eyes, and I squeeze hard to keep them from slipping.
“Why?” Why any of them?
“Just something I have to do. You shouldn’t worry.”
“But what? What did you have to do?”
He kneels and shuffles forward until his face is just inches from mine. Twisted Aeron, skewed and false. Though he gropes around on the floor, pulling things around in scraping fistfuls, he never once drops eye contact and never lets me feel like I can look away. Just a dog-walker, smiling in the park.
Please.
Finally, he presents me with a pair of panties that look like mine—pink satin, almost raspberry, the waistband threaded with lilac ribbon—and scrunches them carefully into a ball while he takes long, loud breaths.
“Open up,” he murmurs. “Come on now, Cock Sleeve. Do as your daddy tells you. Isn’t that what you do?” He scrubs the balled-up panties against my closed mouth with increasing frustration. When that fails, he pinches my nose between his finger and thumb and pushes the tissues so hard together that even the cartilage throbs.
My lungs burn. I can’t—couldn’t hold—
Just another guy, a decent guy, a guy who’ll even help me get away from the monster who has chained me up—
Ahhh—
The moment my mouth snaps open, he shoves the panties in. Dry fabric grates against the dryer roof of my mouth, and when I try to breathe in, I suck down only stale, smothering satin that makes me retch and cough. Panic scissors through me until I lie in two quivering halves.
“I hold no interest in a smart mouth. I won’t indulge you the way my boy does. Do you understand?”
I promised myself a lot of things in those first few moments with the clone, but I never promised I wouldn’t cry. My tears harden in their ducts, swelling like bullets in the hand-warmed guts of a gun, and when I lose my grip on the trigger, they shoot through to heat my cheeks. Wet. Hot. A mockery of arousal.
“Because if you don’t understand, we have a problem. And problems…well, they’re just begging to be solved.”
Perhaps this is all Aeron’s doing. He brought me here for this; I walked right in, sat down and practically threw my arms out, screaming, take me! That strange look on his face this past week, it wasn’t apathy—it was smothered anticipation, and any second now, he’ll breeze through with his slick little scalpel in hand to finally take the liberties I’ve denied him.
Perhaps.
Anything to make sense of the macabre clone braced over me, panting sour air into my face.
My boy. Oh, God.
“And problems, they’re begging to be understood,” the clone says with quiet reverence. “I’ve worked very hard to understand women; they don’t want to come quite as much as they want to come apart.”
A beat.
I watch him through the distorted skin of my own tears. His eyes bug out when he leans in.
“I’m glad we understand each other.”
I gulp and gag. Nod.
“Sleep tight now, Cock Sleeve.”
He titters as he exits, rolling his shoulders like the agile serpent he is.
***
This time, when he comes, he brings another man’s voice.
“Leo…?”