Chapter 48

“Pai—”

Valerie coughed, almost choking on the bite of sandwich that she had been in the middle of chewing. She took a swig of water, swallowing down the half-eaten lump of bread and peanut butter.

Lucca sipped from a can of beer while they watched Valerie struggle to remember how to eat and drink. They seemed amused, once they had decided that Valerie was not actually choking.

“Paid?” she repeated, mouth free of sandwich.

“Of course. Whatever you play at with Dana, you’re not actually slave. I don’t expect you to work for free.”

“I—”

The suggestion of pay had caught her off guard. For a moment it seemed like a door had opened for her, at least a sliver. A kind of bitter sadness washed over her as she realized it was illusory, false hope. There’s no door for me.

“I can’t get paid. The contract says it all just goes to Dana.”

Lucca looked back at her with an expression that seemed a mix of disappointment and, to Valerie’s surprise, deep sympathy. They were silent for several long moments. Valerie felt a burning sense of humiliation crawling up the back of her neck, the same as when Lucca had asked about her bags an hour before. The sympathy felt worse than the disappointment, and she stared down at the counter and her half-eaten sandwich.

“We can work around that,” Lucca said, eventually. “I’ll hold the money for you until you’re past all this contract nonsense, and then it’s yours.”

Valerie felt a chill, and her skin goose-bumped. She took another bite of sandwich, carefully, and washed it down with a sip of water. Hope and luck had never been her friends, but she found she was not yet quite so jaded to not try. Life had not been kind to her up to that point, but if she meant to give up, there were much easier ways to go about it.

“How much?” Her voice was barely louder than a whisper.

“Let’s see..” Lucca started, their eyes going a bit far away while they calculated numbers in their head. “Three weeks, forty hours per week, that’s one twenty, at standard contract rate for an engineer two.. Let’s say twenty to twenty-five?”

“Twenty dollars an hour?”

Valerie did her own math. It was not a lot of money, a couple thousand; much less than she made even working for the startup. Dana had promised to provide her somewhere to stay, if she left, and that couple thousand would pay for gas and food and cell service, for a couple months. She had lived on much less in college, but small towns in Oregon were much cheaper than San Francisco.

She wondered if Dana had left her credit cards active; a couple thousand would cover quite a few minimum monthly payments.

It might be enough time for her to find work, if she was lucky— which meant it was not enough.

“I— I’m not…” she started to say, at the same time as Lucca started to speak.

“Girl. Twenty to twenty-five thousand.”

Valerie almost choked on her words, even without a mouthful of sandwich. Twenty thousand. If she was careful enough, she could live on that for a year, without any other income. Without going into debt. She could find a room to rent, eat way too much instant ramen, and not feel every day like she was slowly suffocating.

The number felt like a large sum— she had never had twenty thousand dollars to her name all at once. It was not large in the way that Dana’s promised million dollars was large; but she could conceive of twenty thousand. The idea that she might ever have a million dollars increasingly felt like an embarrassing, childish fantasy.

She looked away from Lucca, taking in and releasing an uneven breath. The offer sounded good. It sounded like luck, and it sounded too good to be true.

“Do I need to interview? Apply?” What’s the catch?

Lucca shrugged.

“I’m convinced, but we’ll see quickly enough if you can’t cut it. You’ll still be paid for the time it takes to find out, if it comes to that. What do you say?”

“I don’t… I think…” She paused, taking another careful breath. “Yes. Okay. Yes.”

A wave of near-panic washed over her; agreeing to the idea felt like she was doing something wrong or underhanded, and she was not sure why. She slowed her breathing down, willing her heart to stop trying to crack a rib as it tried to hammer its way out of her chest.

It was the first time in months she had thought about what life after Dana’s contract might look like.

“Cool. We’ll get you set up on Monday. Do you have a laptop?”

They didn’t give Valerie a chance to answer before replying to their own question.

“No, no. Of course you don’t. Okay, it’s fine. I’ve got an old one around here somewhere we can wipe.”

“Monday. Yeah.” Valerie slowly chewed and swallowed another bite of sandwich. “Are you going to tell Dana?”

“What? About the work?”

“No.. I mean.. I know she knows about that. About the pay?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. You think she’ll be upset?”

Valerie thought about the burning cold of Dana’s anger and blanched. She could feel anxiety start to build in her chest just contemplating it.

“I… I…”

“Look, it’s fine. We’ll keep it between the two of us.”

Valerie nodded; the fear didn’t vanish but she stopped feeling like it was a tidal wave that meant to drown her.

“Any other questions?” Lucca asked, after giving her a minute or two to calm herself.

“Mx— I mean, Lucca.” She paused, embarrassed by the question. “What day is it?”

Lucca blinked at her silently for a few heartbeats.

“It’s Thursday.”

“Okay. Yeah.”

She finished eating her sandwich while they made small talk, mostly about the drive from Berkeley, and her good fortune that traffic had been light. Valerie insisted on clearing the dishes, over Lucca’s objections that she was a guest.

The two of them relocated to the living room under the pretense of watching something, but the TV stayed dark and silent as they sat on the opposite ends of the couch.

“Is Dana sending your things separately?”

“I… don’t know. She told me not to pack?”

Lucca muttered something that Valerie could not make out, and shook their head.

“How about this— we’ll head into town and pick up some things for you, and grab dinner after. You’ll have plenty of opportunity to eat my cooking, later.”

Valerie blinked at the suggestion. The idea sounded so ordinary that that she had a momentary out-of-body experience. The moment passed, reality settled over her again, and she shook her head.

“I don’t— I can’t pay for anything. I can just…”

She trailed off, uncertain what she could just do. She had only the literal clothes on her back, and they would, at least, have to get laundered at some point. Nothing Lucca owned would fit her in any kind of reasonable way, short of wearing one of their t-shirts as a dress. Just go naked, she supposed.

“Just?” Lucca replied mildly, giving her a skeptical look.

“I don’t know,” Valerie replied, after a moment, with a defeated sigh.

“It’s fine. We’re not going anywhere fancy. You can buy me a couple drinks some day and we’ll call it even.”

Valerie added another item to the mental tally of favors she owned the enby. They didn’t seem inclined to take no for an answer, and despite the writhing shame she felt over the situation, she did not imagine she could actually stop them.

“You can take it out of the pay?” she offered, tentatively.

“We’re talking about maybe a hundred dollars. Another pair of jeans, some tops, some underwear.”

“I can help out with some chores?”

She had done enough cleaning in Dana’s home that it felt slightly strange to suddenly not have those responsibilities.

Lucca laughed, and shrugged.

“Sure, girl, whatever you want. Let’s go while there’s still daylight to burn.”

Valerie nodded quietly. After a long moment, she hesitantly cleared her throat.

“Can I also get some workout gear?”

Dinner was barbecue from a roadside restaurant on the way back from their shopping expedition. The food was richer and heavier than anything she had eaten with Dana in the past several months; she mostly picked at sides, but the few bites of meat and cheese she ate rested heavily in her stomach, adding a tinge of queasiness to her emotional disconcert.

She had a lot of conflicting feelings, staring at the receipt for the clothes Lucca had purchased for her. Gratitude was there, somewhere, and she felt guilty that it wasn’t foremost. More than that, she felt like a failure; whatever the twists and turns that had brought her to this point, it was nevertheless the case that she could not even afford a few basic, cheap garments.

Lucca had been apologetic that their shopping options were largely limited to big-box superstores. Valerie did not tell them that most of her clothing had come from the same sort of place. Even those had been out of reach after Heather had drained their bank accounts, and her financial situation had become so precarious.

She also felt deeply conflicted about Lucca; the hurt and abandonment she had felt over the previous weeks had not dissipated. The help they were offering her was genuine, and in a sense life-saving… but it also seemed like an afterthought, and in some ways only offered for Lucca’s convenience.

Kindness when it was easy and suited the other person was better than nothing, she was sure; but it felt less like care and more like she was some kind of problem that was most easily solved with money.

She carried a lot of positive feelings for Lucca; and while it may be the case that they did not care for her specifically, they nevertheless seemed like a good person.

She also thought that the evening Lucca had pierced her had been one of the hottest experiences of her life. Even thinking of it stirred something in her.

However, these positives sentiments amplified the hurt and fear she felt rather than neutralizing them. She was afraid of Lucca’s capacity for violence, which they had amply demonstrated on her back, which still showed faint traces of their whip. She also feared that letting her fondness for the enby grow would only mean a longer and harder fall when they stepped out of her life again.

The drive back to Lucca’s property was not nearly long enough for one side or the other to win this internal debate.