The ute was eating up the road at a good speed.
“We’ll keep this one.” Until I grew bored with it. The bronze color was nice.
“Okay.” Red adjusted her hands on the steering wheel, and I took the opportunity to study her – my muse? Tutor? What did she regard herself as? It was amusing how her natural need to diagnose, decipher, and solve had emerged more and more once I lifted the… what did I call it? The subjugation? The suppression of her personality?
I liked this more. She was wilder but still controllable.
And more of a challenge, which made her more fun. Yes.
Fun. I’d missed fun.
The wind fluttered and rustled in, lifting my hair and hers, toying with her dress at neckline and hemline. The glow of her skin in the flickers of sunlight pleased me. My hand strayed to my chest where a strange warmth hovered. It was not simply desire. I rubbed at my chest, thinking.
That list of hers was ridiculous. I wanted to feel complete and to lose this bleak absence of emotion and to fill it with more of what made me happy.
Strangely, happy with this drug in me wasn’t the same as the happy I’d felt when in full-on mesmer mode. That created an incandescent joy. It was also an empty joy. Nothing remained when it was gone, except for the need to do it again.
Mesmer equals addiction. How had I not seen this?
“Are you due to take another of those?” Red arched an eyebrow at me. “A pill?”
“You want to dole them out? To be my little pill timer, like I’m some geriatric who forgets?”
She side-eyed me. “Sure. But not because I don’t trust you to remember… because I think maybe you’ll decide not to take it.”
I grunted. That was honest, if reckless.
She side-eyed me again, with more worry in her glance.
She was right. Half of me was at war with the other. Not always but as the drug wore off, I had to wrestle more and more. I wanted the effects, until I did not.
Why?
The mesmer part of me loved controlling me, that’s why. And that didn’t make a whole lot of sense if I turned it over in the light of day and studied it. I also wanted more of what this was right here, right now.
I stretched my hand out the window and watched the wind tug at my hand, felt the coolness of the rush.
I didn’t want to do good deeds, or less murder, or whatever. I wanted more feelings. Mesmer dulled my senses and made me one-tracked.
I wanted more from Red. More of her. I drew my hand inside the ute.
“Okay. Deal. You remind me about pills.” Maybe with her and my better half… hah… telling me to swallow it’d come easier.
“Are you due now?”
I cracked open a pill packet and popped out a pill, snapped it and swallowed the half.
“Every twelve hours seems to work.” I leaned my shoulder on the door so as to see her better. “Pull your dress higher. Let me see you.”
Her exhalation was audible.
“The agreement,” I reminded her, intrigued by how an annoyed Red was more exciting than when she was zombified.
Her hand sneaked downward, and she inched up her dress until the edge of her ivory-colored lace panties showed.
Almost a strip show, in slow-mo. I smiled. “Panties?”
“You never said to—”
“Shhh. Take your time but roll those under your butt. Let me see you put your hand on your pussy. Play with yourself. Turn yourself on. We have some distance to travel before we stop. And keep to this outside lane.”
The lanes were double here, the road straight and flat. We’d gone over a mountain range earlier.
As if to emphasize the exposure she risked, a semi-trailer was overhauling us. The driver would be too far over to see in. Red looked worried, glancing at the truck even as she hoisted her ass a little off the seat and obeyed me – pushing the butt area of those panties to thigh-level.
The curious thing about this? I was deliberately keeping my mesmer powers on simmer. She was obeying me automatically, of her own volition.
Interesting. My dick liked the idea of this. This was closer to consensual than I’d ventured in years.
“The next one might have a passenger who can see you.”
“If I get arrested for indecency—”
“What trucker would report a girl half-naked and masturbating?”
Her brows knitted; her mouth puffed out.
“If they stop and stare, you keep going.” I’d risk this just to tease her. How quaint that this troubled her, after all we had done. All she had done. Group sex was not new, neither was having her asshole reamed while I’d kept her tied to a wall.
Why now? This minor thing?
A thought trickled in. “You’ve done worse. A bit of exhibitionism shouldn’t be fucking with your head.” Her shrug was dismissive. “Is it because this is your own doing?”
“It’s not!” Her blush was mild but visible, then Red shook her head. Her hand paused in its work between her legs.
“It is our agreement. Which is your doing. You agreed. Keep going. Keep fucking yourself. Do it!”
She jerked and pinched her lips together as if rethinking this. Then… then I watched as she slowly inserted her finger inside herself. Watching her do that on my command was as fascinating as the first time I’d made her come in that alleyway in Cuba. My dick throbbed.
“Good girl. You see, Red, no matter what I can make you do, right now I am not. Not the
