I brought her some water. She smelled it before she took a drink as if her finely tunes Spider-senses would pick up any drug I might have slipped in it. I don’t think pure H2O had touched her tongue in months so it was funny to watch her reaction as she almost choked.
“Hey, come over here.” I said, jerking my head in the direction of a darker corner of the warehouse. “Are you ready to have some fun?”
As expected, she didn’t say much.
I was kind of glad. Velvet wasn’t really a talker. The girl I was with last night that was a different story. She wouldn’t shut the hell up. But Velvet was a little more cautious.
“Don’t worry.” I coaxed her. “I told you, I’m not some serial killer. I’m just a little eccentric, that’s all. I’ll admit it. We all have our little quirks and ticks, right?” I smiled at her but she barely met my eyes.
When I flipped the other switch she saw that there was just a chair there. One single chair. No long table of surgical instruments. No yards of rope and chain but just one little harmless chair.
“Have a seat.”
“Just sit there?”
“Yup. Just sit right there.”
She shuffled up to the chair and sat down on the edge.
“Get comfortable, honey. We’ve got some talking to do. Tell me,” I walked up to her, squatted down and took on of her disgustingly boney hands in mine. Her nails were all chewed and the dark blue polish was chipped.
“Tell me when you lost your virginity.”
“What?”
I took out a roll of money and watched as she practically began to salivate.
“Tell me.” I said, peeling a twenty-dollar bill off the roll.
“It wasn’t anything special.” She said, clearing her throat and flipping her stringy brown hair behind her. “We knew each other in high school. We went out a couple times and one night his parents weren’t home and we did it in his bed.”
I looked at Velvet, tilting my head to the right and smirking at her. Squeezing her hand just a little I pulled her forward and whispered.
“You know I don’t believe you.”
Her eyes blinked and shifted nervously.
“It’s the truth.” She said defiantly.
“I don’t think you’d know the truth if it came up and slapped you upside the head.” My hand found its way to the side of her skull where I had to crack her a little forcefully. “Now, let’s try this again.”
I peeled off another twenty dollars and laid it on the floor on top of the other one. Velvet swallowed and began her tale of woe.
As I had guessed, she had been molested when she was ten or eleven by her mother’s boyfriend. He would slither into her room at night while the old lady was sleeping. This vile piece of shit got at her a couple times a week for a couple of years. She was over eighteen now.
“So, your dreams of becoming a lawyer or a doctor were pretty much blown.” I interrupted her tale.
“I didn’t want to be a doctor or a…”
“What did you want to be, when you were a kid? I don’t think you grew up wanting to be a strung out twenty-dollar hooker?” I said, chuckling just a little.
Her eyes began to water. She didn’t speak.
“Tell me. What would you do if you saw your mother’s boyfriend now? Now that you aren’t a little girl anymore?”
She shrugged her shoulders. I guess Velvet didn’t have much of an imagination. Some girls go crazy when I ask them what they’d do to the blokes who put them on this path. They scream and cry and talk about ripping balls off and watching them choke on their own gore and whew…enough to make a civilized boy like me blush.
Velvet was a little different.