Page 12 of Wanted
Pony stood under the spray until her skin stopped reading the lukewarm heat of the water as scaldingly hot. Her shivering eased, but she was still trembling. Hanging her head, her throat so tender she could barely swallow, she waited for him to come storming back.
It felt a small eternity before he returned and when he did, he wasn’t angry anymore. He came back to the shower and just looked at her.
Shaking too hard to keep her posture perfect, pretty sure it didn’t matter anymore anyway, Pony hugged herself and waited to be condemned.
Marcus didn’t speak. After a moment, he put his fingers into the water above her head, then bent to adjust the temperature, making it warmer. When he was done, he drew the shower curtain between them, but he didn’t leave. Sitting down on the closed toilet instead, he said, “Do you want to wash up?”
She shook her head, only belatedly realizing he couldn’t see that through the curtain. “N-no, s-s-sir,” she rasped, wincing and catching her throat. “I-I mean… no, Marcus.”
He let the slip go. “Wash up, Anna.”
Finding a bar of soap on a set of corner shower shaver racks, she lathered up both her hands and washed herself.
“Do you want to wash your hair?”
She hesitated in the midst of rinsing. “Do… do you want me to wash my hair?”
“What I want is for you to acknowledge that the last time you washed your hair was long enough ago that it needs it again.”
Menagerie girls weren’t allowed to wash themselves without permission any more than they were allowed to dress themselves. While her master had been in prison, they’d gotten around that order by showering together and washing each other. Puppy had washed her hair last. What had that been, two days ago?
What had it been since she’d last washed her hair without Ethan allowing it?
She shuffled around on legs that still felt unsteady, found the shampoo and began lathering up her hair. She didn’t know Dove made a shampoo for men only. The smell of menthol wafted on the steam as she rubbed her scalp, the short hair feeling spiky and gathering the longer strands until it was piled in suds on her head. She didn’t feel clean so much as she felt as if she were getting away with something terrible and wrong.
That Marcus remained sitting in the room with the shower curtain pulled a little more than halfway closed, didn’t bother her. Her body, clothed or not, hadn’t been hers for so long that neither privacy nor nudity registered anymore.
“Rinse,” he told her, and she did.
Backing up under the spray, she let the warm water pour over her. The trail of suds slipped over her skin, caressing her small breasts like whisper-soft fingertips. The coil of her long hair followed the pouring water off her head to spill down her back until the tips brushed the swells of her ass.
“Conditioner next.”
It had been so long since anyone had commanded her like this. Stepping out from under the full rain of the showerhead, she applied conditioner to her hair and worked it in. It was falling out, but then it had been for months. No longer the thick, full mane she once had been proud to be admired for, her hair was so thin that it had become hard to pull back into her customary ponytail without showing swaths of bare scalp. As careful as she could, she combed the conditioner in with her fingertips, but she still lost a lot to the gentle pull of the water. The drain was starting to clog and the bottom of the tub was filling up with water, now rising over the tops of her feet.
“I’m sorry,” Marcus said.
Pony stopped. She wanted to look out at him, to see if he’d really just said that to her, but he’d drawn the shower curtain and she didn’t want to challenge his will.
“Did you hear me?”
“Yes—” Her sore throat convulsed and she stammered as, needing desperately to fill that void where ‘sir’ ought to go, she added, “Marcus.”
“I’m sorry,” he repeated again. “A few years back before I retired, I had a girl with an eating disorder. What I did tonight was one of the punishments I used to give her. Well... the sundae. Not the movie or the couch, or the cleaning,” he added, his tone taking on a vaguely amused note. “She wasn’t a service submissive.” That thin note of amusement was gone when he added, “And you’re not an anorexic with a body image disorder. I did not mean to make you sick and if that was the catalyst for what sent you out to the barn, then I am truly, deeply sorry.”
It was and it wasn’t. Pony looked at the white tile wall dead ahead of her, with no idea of what to say. She ought to apologize too, but she couldn’t make herself do it.
“I’d like to start over.”
She looked at the shadow of him through the curtain, her stomach already tightening.
“We have thirty days to get you ready to counter the hospital and the State’s claim that you can’t be trusted to take care of yourself and that hospitalization or an assigned legal guardian is your best solution. I’ve been that guardian. I know exactly what it entails, so believe me when I say you don’t want to have to live like that. Not if you can help it. So, I’m going to ask you a question and I want you to consider your answer carefully. Were I to offer my dominance long enough for you to learn how to shut out his voice and develop your own, would that help you or would that only make things worse?”
Frozen under the spray, Pony hardly daring to breathe much less move. “I don’t understand.”
After a brief heartbeat of silence, the shadow of Marcus on the other side of the shower curtain stood up and faced her. “Look at me.”
Did he want her to move the curtain or lean over far enough to look at him around the edge? Her chest heaved as she quickly tried to calculate the consequence for choosing the wrong one. Her hand shook, but she slipped a few inches sideways and peeked around the curtain.
