Rule 34

stranger—

—You’re sharing a bowl of organic-farmed oysters with him, he’s laughing as you pour one down your throat, lip-smacking suggestively, then he’s—

You’re rubbing your ankle against him under the table. His breath catches, and you’ve got him in sharp focus. Your mouths are flapping, but the words are unimportant. Half-eaten salad in front of you, unappealing. You don’t want to overfill yourself. His gaze has caught you: You’re the focus of his world right now. Totally centered in his gunsights. Funny, the idea of a toy salesman who reeks of danger and makes your heart pound is ridiculous on the face of it. But it’s not going to stop you playing footsie with the devil.

“Your room,” you tell him, mindful of the listeners in your own.

You know what you want for dessert, and you’re not going to find it on the hotel menu. So you lead him to the lifts and let him show you the way to the buffet, and then he feeds it to you hard and fast. Total abandon, clothes everywhere, barely time to roll on a condom before he pushes you down on the real bed. He’s very dominant, not trying to hurt you but not asking for a lead, either. No ropes or toys, but he’s somehow managed to immobilize you—not painfully, but. But. (SWM seeks SWF for edge-play . . .) He’s frighteningly focussed when he enters you: For a moment you have second thoughts, wonder if he’d hear you if you said anything, but he’s using his mouth and working a finger up your ass with a skill that is so exactly what you need that you grind back against him and begin to let go and flail around wildly as he pins you down and fucks you hard enough you’re going to have bruises. You’re close to coming when he stops: pulls out, rolls you face-down on the bed, and shoves himself up your anus. It’s shocking, and you’re trying to muster a protest—having difficulty getting enough air—then you feel him tense and shoot his load. And a few seconds later he rolls off you.

You’re lying there in frustrated confusion. Your left wrist aches where he gripped it with fingers like handcuffs, and your backside is sore. He’s in the en suite, you can hear by the splashing. What the fuck? He didn’t even stay around to use his fingers. So much for the evening— it’s not yet ten, and it’s a fucking disaster. One star review: Could screw better.

You lever yourself up on your elbows. “You going to be long?” you ask.

The toilet flushes in reply. Christie comes out, wearing a hotel bath-robe. “You can go now,” he says.

That wasn’t what you were asking about, but you could do with the loo, so you nod gratefully and dash for the bathroom. Your make-up is mostly beyond repair, but you can manage a hasty wipe-down, then back on with panties, bra, leggings, and top. You flush the toilet. You’re still trying to figure out what happens next when he calls again, “You can go now.”

What the fuck? You step back out into the bedroom. He’s sitting at the desk, back to you, focussing on a pad with the exact same degree of obsessive focus he was deploying on your tits an hour ago.

“Excuse me?” you ask, picking up your shoes and handbag.

“You can go now,” he says for a third time, his voice empty of expression. “I have work to do.”

The words sting you into anger: What does he think you are? But the lack of affect behind them suddenly chills you. It’s as if there’s something missing, something that was missing all along but you made yourself ignore.

“Was that all you wanted?” you ask him, trying to keep your voice from wobbling.

“I have to work now.” He turns to look at you irritably. “Don’t you have a room to go to?”

“Fish,” you say. Then, uncertainly: “Safeword.”

“Go away.” He turns back to the screen.

Next.

You’re standing with your back to the closing door, in the corridor. You slide your feet into your heels and shudder with an emotion you can’t name: Then you turn and walk with exaggerated self-control towards the lifts. Bastard. Try not to think about him. What might have happened in there. The afterglow is shredded and faded to rancid rags that smear a greasy patina across the memory of pleasure. You have a nauseating awareness that you’ve been used: But you went in there meaning to use him for your own ends in turn. It’s not as if you’re a stranger to ass-play. So why do you feel so wrong? As you go back to your room and deadbolt the door behind you and run a long, hot bath, you’re haunted by a simple question.

If you’d used the safeword on him, would he have stopped?

TOYMAKER: Abused

After you get rid of the bitch, you take half an hour to catch up on some admin work. You left the pad in here just in case: You pull your VM down from the cloud and write up a brief summary of your thoughts about what’s going on and your revised business plan, and send it back to the Operation’s servers. Doubtless next time you check in, there’ll be some helpful notes from Control.

Factory-wiping the pad, you shove it back in the hotel safe and pull your clothes on again. You weren’t planning to stay the night here anyway, and the Straight woman’s presence makes it all the more important to move out. So you leave the room, walk to the fire stairs, and descend to the ground floor.

It’s still daylight outside—the sun never seems to set on this fucking city—but you feel drained. It’s some combination of the dour stone architecture, the weird Scottish people, a smidgen of your own paranoia, and the fact that a fucking murderer is stalking your start-up: It’s getting you down. Perhaps you should’ve hit the meow-meow and taken the bitch clubbing first, taken the time to relax: But you’re not planning on hanging around, and anyway, she was tedious. You’ve met her type before, needy thirtysomething singles: Thinks she’s a swinger, but if you take the effort to keep her hot, the next thing you know she’ll be making cow eyes at you and expecting an engagement ring. They get desperately serious when all you want is a fuck (and why are all these Anglo hotels so uptight about room service?). The hell with that.

You walk across the plaza in front of the hotel—a barren flagstoned plinth—towards the round theatre on the other side of the road. There are some bars clustered behind it: In your Rough Guide overlay, they’re helpfully tagged as “the pubic triangle.” Maybe you should have gone there instead of scouring the hotel for desperate would-be housewives.

Five minutes’ walking brings you to a corner where yet more of the desperately grey stone shit looms over you—they have houses with fucking battlements here, stone cannons carved into the eaves—haven’t these people heard of earthquakes? You’re still a bit nervy-scratchy from the day’s events, so rather than piss around outside, you nod amiably at the bouncer and duck through a brass-trimmed door into a venue that promises two hundred kinds of whisky and beer besides.

You order an Irish and Coke, then look around for the darkest corner you can see and go hide in it. There’s a secure note-pad app on your skullphone, works with your shades. You fingertwitch under the table, working out your priorities:

• Get your DNA off the police incident database. It’s not vital, but if you can’t manage it, you’re going to have to go to extremes—find someone who’s died and get the records corrupted—do-able, but very costly.

• Find out who’s after your people and where they’re getting their information from.

The latter . . . you’d bet good money that there’s a leak inside the Operation. Otherwise, how else do they know who you’re targeting? So you’re going to set up a target. Mister family man diplomat seems like a suitable option; fat, happy, and dumb. (Move in with him, put word up the line that he’s your new COO, wait for someone to try to whack him, grab the killer, and extract names.) You do not commit this latter plan to your note-pad. You’ve got to assume that anything in your skullphone is being monitored by Control, and that Control is leaking information to the—no, they don’t exist. There are no killer lizards bleeding through from the other side of reality, the side that’s all washed-out and grainy gray and suicidal. That’s just a delusional fantasy, a side- effect of bad headmeat. And you’re not delusional, are you?

Halfway down your drink, you notice a couple of low-lifes giving you the eye-ball from across the bar. You don’t move your head, but you study them back from behind your glasses. Skinny, short hair, bad skin, track-suit-