Page 44 of Blue Velvet

“I don’t want to bore you.”

“I’ll stop you if it gets to that point,” I say, winking at her. A gesture that obviously puzzles her. “Go on. Long version.”

She swallows her food and and takes a deep breath.

“The long version is that I really wanted to go to college,” she begins. “But my parents didn’t support that decision. We weren’t a family of means. Or no, that’s putting it too nicely. We were fucking poor. Like, we were as poor as you can get without becoming homeless. Blue collar working class would have been a huge step up.”

She pauses. Her eyes wander around the room, a veil of sadness casting a shadow across her face.

“I never imagined I’d ever find myself in a place like this,” she says somberly. “It may be a cage, but at least it’s gilded.”

She redirects her attention to me. “There. That may give you another explanation why I don’t fight this as much as you want me to. Being the captive of a rich as fuck man like you beats the environment I grew up in.”

“A rich as fuck man like me?” I repeat.

She blushes.

“Come on. It’s obvious that you’re loaded,” she mutters, shyly lowering her eyes before adding, “It’s also obvious that I’m attracted to you.”

I feel flattered by her words, but refuse to let it show. It shouldn’t surprise me. I’m well aware of the effect I have on women, and I’ve seen the way she looked at me from the start. It’s more than simple attraction, and I want to think that it’s more than the early signs of something like the Stockholm Syndrome. She went with me because she thought I was her client and had no choice but to come with me, but I could’ve just as easily picked her up and taken her home from a club or a bar like a normal date.

Only I didn’t.

And she still says these things.

“What did your parents do?” I ask, diverting the subject back to her upbringing. “Work-wise.”

She scoffs. “You mean when they worked at all? They were both unskilled and had the worst work ethic you can imagine. They weren’t smart, not even street smart, and they didn’t try to make up for that with hard work.”

The way she speaks about her parents reminds me of my own. Her voice is full of contempt and repulsion, lacking the soft undertone of understanding and affection that’s usually apparent when someone speaks about their family, even if they’re annoyed with them.

“They jumped from part-time job to part-time job,” she continues. “Their ability to hold even the most basic jobs was... limited. They were fired more often than I was able to count. And they always blamed their superiors or their coworkers or the work environment—anything and anyone but themselves. They didn’t bring anything to the table, but they still saw it beneath themselves to take the jobs they were offered seriously, not even for our sake.”

“You have siblings?” I interrupt.

She nods. “Yes, an older sister. But I haven’t talked to her in a long time. I respect her because she turned out way better than our parents, but she’s very different from me.”

“How so?”

She looks at me, and the expression on her face cuts through my heart like a knife. She looks... hurt and sad in a way that I haven’t seen with her before, but it’s mixed with a hint of wonderment.

“You don’t want to talk about this,” I say, verbalizing what was meant to be a question as a simple statement. “But I’m unwilling to lay off just now, even if it hurts you, my toy.”

This is all part of it. At least that’s what I keep telling myself. Unraveling her, baring who she is, exposing the person underneath. To me, that means more than fucking her senseless.

“No, it’s fine,” she says, lowering her eyes before she adds, “It’s just that... no one has ever asked me that before. About any of this. No one ever wanted to learn about... me.”

Her words and the sorrowful way in which they’re spoken fills me with guilt.

I feel guilty because I know why she’s saying this, why she never met anyone who showed a real interest in her, why she’s not used to being allowed to talk about herself. The men she’s been with during the past few years were clearly interested in only one thing: her marvelous body.

I know, because I was just like all the rest.

I’ve been one of those men for as long as I can remember.

25

Ruby

---