Page 20 of Control

“Really, it’s OK.” Reyna was going out of her way to be kind to me. “Sometimes things go sideways and we don’t see it coming.” She smiled at me and stroked my hair. “If anything, at least this can turn into one hell of a first date story.” I was genuinely surprised by her comment and looked back up to her. I tilted my head at her, quizzically so.

“First date?” I said through my anguish, realizing she was trying to use humor to help calm me. “Is the slave auction a secret dating service that I was never aware of?” Reyna smiled with amusement.

“If you really think about it,” she said, “that’s kind of what happens with the slave auctions.” Reyna laughed a little which caused me to also laugh. “You see it’s all role play anyway so when you’re purchased by someone you’ve never been with before, it’s kind of a trial run to see if either of you likes it. If it’s not so great, both of you part ways amicably. But if you like it, then you add them to your friends list and probably spend more time together or have another session. That’s how I’ve come to understand it.”

“That actually makes sense,” I said to her. “A trial run…that’s a good way to put it. I’d never thought of it that way.”

“It’s really fun at times,” she said. “I’ve met a few nice people there…and some terrible ones.”

“How terrible?” I asked, genuinely wanting to know. Reyna’s attempt to distract me from my melt down was starting to work.

“You were my 4th time doing it,” she said, giving me much more insight into the whole “Slave Auction” role play scenario that I’d never really thought of. “The first one was pretty good. We had fun for a time. The last two though were not so good. I just didn’t get along with them. I didn’t mind the degradation or the name calling. I’m fine with that sort of thing. They were just…not good! Was like they had no idea what I was trying to accomplish with my time here even after we discussed it.”

“You mean what was in your bio?” I asked, having looked over her profile briefly. “I think I remember something about ‘Forget Latina Pride, Suck White Cocks?’” I had to hold back a laugh as I recalled it.

“Yeah,” Reyna said, confirming that that was indeed what was in her profile as strange as it sounded. Still being paired with Reyna, she was able to share her HUD with me and brought up her profile and sure enough, there were several photos on it that read almost those exact words or something close enough to them. In the text fields, she also went into great detail about her controversial and often frowned upon kink known as “Race Play.”

“I can’t say I’ve ever seen that sort of commitment to a kink before,” I said, still looking at her profile through the shared screen. After thinking for a moment, I looked over to her. “So…is this kink…is it real? Is this something you’re really into or is this just part of the role play?” Reyna looked down and smiled for a moment as if she’d been asked this question before.

“It’s real,” she said, looking back up to me. “People ask me that all the time.” I gave her a half-hearted smile to try and ease any tension my question may have induced.

“It’s something I’ve never really seen much of,” I said. “Even in my line of work it’s pretty rare to see something taken to that level.”

“I get that a lot,” she said firmly. “People…like to give me shit about it. They think it’s stupid or they figure I have to be trolling or lying. They call me all sorts of things and the whole time I have to let it go.”

“I don’t judge you,” I said which seemed to calm her some. “My clients…they often come to me and ask that I do certain things for them. Some of them just want sex and others want me to treat them a certain way or say certain things, act a particular way.” I felt Reyna drop her arm from behind me and immediately reacted to it. I turned my body and watched as she sat across from me and shook her head.

“I don’t get people sometimes,” she said, resting her left shoulder against the wall and still holding my gaze. She rested her hands in her lap. My eyes followed her fingers, her nails covered in a cream white polish. Her hands moved slowly as if they were meant to convey a message to me, but I couldn’t figure out what at the time. “Some of them are just….” Reyna’s voice trailed off.

“Cruel?” I said which caught her attention. I looked back up to her eyes and felt her looking over my face and body.

“Yeah,” she said, the disdain in her voice apparent. “I’ve always been so open with it. I put it in my profile so when people look to engage me they know exactly what they’re getting. I don’t want them to be surprised when they come talk to me, we get to know each other, and then I hit them with ‘So do you wanna slap me around and call me a border bunny while I suck a white man’s dick?’” The room fell silent for a moment. I wasn’t sure what to say. Reyna looked back up to me and saw that I was still staring into her. Slowly, a smile began to break out across her lips and I felt one coming across mine. We sat there in silence a moment and let the weight of her words sink in.

“I have this thing I say to my clients,” I said as fought the urge to reach out for her hand. “When they come to me and ask for some of the strangest, most out there stuff…and I don’t mean the obvious things. I mean the really specific things…like wanting to call me Mommy or asking me to treat them as if they were my son. And no, not that diaper-wearing stuff. I mean an adult man talking to me as if I were his actual real life mother. A 36 year old representation of his mom.” I looked back down to her hands. “We all have our things. We all have these…kinks that we seek and often times crave. If we don’t get them, often times we feel this emptiness inside us like something isn’t where it should be or something doesn’t seem to work right.”

“I know that feeling,” Reyna said as she noticed me looking at her fingers. “We all have those things that look insane to others but make perfect sense to us.”

“We all have out kinks,” I said, giving into my urge and taking Reyna’s left hand into my right and running my thumb over her fingers. “We all have our things. And often times those ‘things’ are birthed through trauma.” I looked back up to Reyna, her hand still in mine. “Our traumas shape us more than any of us would like to admit. Because of them, we find solace in the weirdest places.” Reyna broke out into a small laughing fit which culminated in her sitting there with me, stoic and solemn.

“They really have no idea,” she said, a broken smile masking her pain. “They always think they know. They give some bullshit blanket answer and think ‘this is it! This is how the world works and everyone fits inside one of two definitions! Everyone else is lying!’ God damn it.” Reyna looked down again and shook her head. “They think we’re all the same and just assume they know what’s best for us. They think they know how we should handle our trauma. Like they’re the fucking authority on how we should all react.”

“Like they fucking know us,” I said as I could tell Reyna was getting worked up, a mass of rejection and ridicule coming to the surface that she had been pushing way down into herself for some time.

“Do you wanna know why I do this to myself?” she asked, knowing I would say yes. “All my life I’ve been talked down to by white people. Not all of them. Some of them are good, but some others…they just don’t care that I’m a person. They just think of me as some ‘illegal’ that’s feeding off the government and living off their tax dollars. And now with all this stupid Donald Trump shit, it’s like it went into overdrive. Almost every day I run into some ‘DT’ Republican and they’re like ‘Where’s your ID? What are you doing here? Get out of my country!’ It’s like fuck you! I was born here! My mom was born here! I have just as much right to be here as you do! Where they fuck do you get off telling me I don’t belong?”

“Racists,” I said, having felt the sting of racism before in my life growing up in the Southwestern United States. “They’re so insecure about themselves that they feel the need to talk down to others.” Reyna shook her head again and continued.

“Every day I hear hate thrown at me for simply existing. I didn’t ask to be Latina and I didn’t ask for my skin to be this dark. It’s just who I am and my heritage, be it Native American or Mexican or whatever people want to call it, it’s just me. It’s what I know.”

“It’s what we both know,” I said to her, bringing up my profile in our currently shared HUD. “I make it clear on my profile who I am, too.”

“I know you do,” she said. “Ana…when I saw you there at the auction, I saw your skin and I just had this feeling so I looked at your profile before I went on stage. I saw you had marked that you were Latina. Nowhere near as dark as me, but still. I knew you were like me. You probably knew. You knew what it’s like to have to deal with this crap.”

“I do,” I said. “I grew up in Texas and I’d get some of it thrown my way from time to time.” I chuckled a little as I thought of the things I used to be called when I was still there. “The used to call me a ‘White Mexican.’ From a distance I looked white, but once you get up close and take a good look you can see my features are pretty different. Dark thick hair, wide hips, thick legs, a little bit of an accent when I’d get upset.” Reyna laughed at this remark and I could tell she knew exactly what I meant. “You’re right about the ‘DT’ thing. I was still in Texas when all that started and it really did get worse. It was as if him being president gave all these racists permission to crawl out of the woodwork and just be awful people because they thought ‘oh, there’s one of us in office! Now we can say whatever we want!’”

“I always get asked where my bag of oranges is,” Reyna said, remarking on a common racist trope that Latino people often sell fruit on the side of the road as a form work. “I’m like…fuck you. I ate them, bitch!” Both Reyna and I laughed hard at her joke, it finally having broken the building tension of such a heavy topic. “And then the ones that are like ‘learn to speak American! Learn English!’”

“Oh,” I said, steadily bonding with her on the common racism we’d both faced. “They always say that crap when I speak a little Spanish. The whole time I hear them talking all I can think of is I speak far better English than they do and they want to get after me for speaking a 2nd language?”

---