Page 26 of Crushed
“And?”
“Isn’t that wrong?”
She shook her head. “It’s no one’s business what you do. And you can always tell him no. I’m sure there are other ways to get him alone. Or, you could see if you can get the help of one of the other servers.” She shrugged. “There are ways around it.”
But that didn’t answer my question. “But is itwrong, Lizzy?”
“What?”
“The spanking.”
“Why would it be wrong?”
“Because I liked it?”
She leaned over the table and patted me on the shoulder, then ate a chunk of potato, thinking her words over carefully. “Sometimes, in positions like ours, you might find that it’s rather freeing to be in a submissive position.”
“A submissive position?”
“With him in power like that, when you’re so used to taking control, it would be natural to enjoy that change in dynamic.”
“Natural?”
“Yes, natural.” She wrinkled her brows at me. “You should really start dating when this is over.”
Dating? How could I date when my job required that I put myself in danger on a daily basis? “Are you serious right now?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“I can’t date.” I motioned to her. “And you don’t date!”
“I’m seventy-eight. You’re twenty-one.”
“So?”
“Do you want to be my age and wonder why you never had any grandchildren? Or even children for that matter?” A bittersweet smile crossed her face. “Taking care of you has made me wonder about that.”
“But I thought you never cared about that stuff.”
“Things can change.” We ate in silence for a few minutes. Finally, Lizzy added, “I’m sure your parents would have wanted you to date.”
Dating another assassin would be fine. At least they would know what to expect of me, and I would know what to expect of them. We could both die, so there was no reason to get attached. We could use each other for sex.
“I thought my parents met on the field,” I said.
“Actually, your mother worked for me, and your father was an associate of one of her targets. Once he found out about her, instead of killing him, she, well, you know, fell in love. Despite her better judgment.”
“And then he came to work for you too?”
“Yeah. He ended up finishing that assignment for her.”
It was kind of dreamy to think of falling in love with your life partner while making the world a better place through discreet elimination. But a story like that made the job seem easy. There was nothing easy about it. You could die suddenly, leaving your partner alone. You could disappear, leaving your leader to wonder where the hell you had gone. You could abandon your child in a world they weren’t prepared for.
It was easier to be distant, to never really put yourself in that kind of position.
“If you liked being spanked,” Lizzy started, gesturing at my last taco, “then try that. There are dating apps for spanking, right?”
“I guess,” I muttered. But it wasn’t only the spanking that intrigued me. It was all of it.
It washim.
I bit into the last taco. The synthetic sun shined down in long beams of light, and the ripples made it look like a modern art piece at a museum. It was strange that Lizzy had brought up dating when I was talking about Cormac. Was it a subliminal message she was trying to send me? To remind me that I could never fall for a target, because he was going to die soon anyway? Or was that my own consciousness at work? He was a target. I couldn’t let myself be truly attracted to him when he was a bad person at his core. A man who liked to punish me. A man who made me powerless.
But it didn’t matter. He would leave the world soon.
