Page 39 of The Seller

He’s gone.

Actually gone.

I don’t know what to make of that. I guess some part of me never thought he’d actually go. I thought he was nothing more than his role. He isThe Seller. He is notThe Man Who Respects Womens Feelings.

He told me he loved me. Was that true? Was it a lie? Was he trying to get me back? Was it revenge? There are too many questions to answer. All I know is that the only safe place for me is alone.

Chapter 9

Siri

For weeks, I alternately celebrate and grieve having turned Stavros away. I watch my little business grow, product seeping out into the European market where it enjoys popularity in a wide range of venues. I might be young, but I have been trained in the fundamentals of business since near infancy.

My father made it clear that everything was a potential product to be sold. He and Stavros are similar in that regard. I don’t think my father ever sold human flesh, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he had, especially in the beginning. Son of a Greek mother and an Italian father, born into one of the most ancient and powerful family names, he always understood that the riches he enjoyed had not been earned through common work, but through the systematic crushing of the weak. He continued the tradition without any qualms. We were rich and we were powerful. We enjoyed the kind of life most people dream of. I had closets full of clothes. I had anything and everything I wanted. I didn’t even had to ask. I just had to ask one of the servants to get it for me.

What I didn’t realize was that everything I was getting was payment in kind for a service I didn’t know I was expected to perform.

On my twelfth birthday, I was made to realize that I was no exception to the product rule.

It had been an amazing birthday, a big party with dozens of friends and the crowning glory of all of it was a palomino pony. I wanted to go out riding right away, but my father called me into his office, and I knew better than to refuse even on my birthday.

Don Corelli was old, even then. I did not pay any attention to him, thinking he was some associate or friend of my father’s. My memory of him is as a heavyset man in a suit which didn’t quite fit him. He was sitting in an old arm chair, filling it to the brim, and when he looked at me it was with an expression I didn’t understand and didn’t like.

“Sirios,” my father said with a casual wave of his hand. “Meet your husband to be. In six years, you will be married.”

I didn’t understand then, not fully. I smiled because I was confused, and I asked if I could go and ride my horse.

He nodded and dismissed me.

It was a short meeting. Nothing untoward happened. I was never touched, but from that moment on, I was expected to conduct myself as though I was already married. I could not have a boyfriend as a teenager. I couldn’t even be seen with one. I tried once, formed a relationship with a cute guy when I was fifteen. He was seventeen. After we were seen together, he disappeared. His body was found several weeks later. Nothing was ever said directly to me about it, but the implication was obvious.

I have lived my entire life in fear, owned by one man or another, and I refuse to now. No man is ever going to command me. I used Stavros to escape, and perhaps he thinks he is better than Salvatore Medici or Don Corelli, but he’s not. He’s precisely the same as they are, a man with a brutal ego who will rage against all creation when he realizes that everything was not put on this planet just for him to exploit.

I remind myself of that over and over again as I lie alone in bed and play the carnal memories we made together through my imagination. I am lonely. I miss him. But this world is too large, and freedom is too important to me to give myself to any man, let alone one who wouldn’t know morality if it slapped him in the face.

* * *

Iwake in the middle of the night.

There is somebody in my bedroom.

I can’t see them, but I feel a presence which was strong enough to reach through the veil of sleep and draw me into consciousness without so much as touching me.

“Stavros?” It’s his name on my lips, just like it is his name always on my mind. I do not know how long it will take for me to stop thinking about Stavros, but I know my heart rises at the notion that he has returned, perhaps for some nocturnal sexual delight. Maybe he’ll be gone in the morning, but the shadows will provide cover for our lust, which almost always took place in the dark. Our love is a twisted thing, and I am beginning to think I will never be free of it. He is an addiction from which there is no recovery.

“Sirios.”

It is not Stavros’ voice which answers me.

It is my father’s.

Ifeel as though an abyss has opened up and I am falling into it. For a moment, I can almost convince myself that this is a bad dream. If I sink down below the covers and close my eyes really tight, maybe I’ll go back to sleep, wake up and discover that none of this really happened at all.

My father turns the light on and I find myself looking into his grave, disappointed face. “So it is true,” he says. “You fled Athens and sold yourself into slavery just to end up peddling narcotics.”

“You sold me, father,” I spit, my fear rising. I have never spoken to him like this before. I have barely spoken to him at all. We are not a close family. We do not talk. And I would never have ever dared to defy him before now, but he has me cornered.

“Sold you? I organized a suitable match,” he says gruffly.

---