Total pages in book: 66
Estimated words: 63282 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 316(@200wpm)___ 253(@250wpm)___ 211(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 63282 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 316(@200wpm)___ 253(@250wpm)___ 211(@300wpm)
After a few minutes, I can’t take it anymore. I break the silence with another round of the Q-and-A game from this morning, starting with a silly question.
“When Peter asked you to ‘take care of her,’” I say, drawing air quotes with my fingers, “are you sure he meant me and not, let’s say, one of the cats spending the night at the clinic?”
The corners of Luca’s lips curl up. “He said your name.”
“Why do you hate me?” I ask.
Luca seems taken aback. He glances at me. “I don’t hate you. Why would you think I do?”
Ten words. At least he’s actually trying to convince me, which means he cares what I think about him.
“Because you haven’t said much to me since this morning.”
“I’m just not in a chatty mood. I’ve got a lot on my mind,” he says. “But if you have any questions, let me know. I’ll answer anything.”
“Anything?” I ask.
“Anything.”
He’s going to regret that.
Because once I’m at Luca’s home—a cute house with dark green siding and a glossy black front door—I get kind of bored. Luca hides away in his studio, playing terrible music loudly and painting his convoluted thoughts on canvas.
At dinner, I ask him, “Luca, what’s the distance between the Earth and the moon?”
He shrugs without even taking his eyes off his food.
I’m ready for this reaction. “You said you were going to answer anything. Or are you a liar?” I challenge him.
“I don’t know the answer.”
“You can Google it.”
I keep bugging him until he puts down his fork and pulls out his phone to find the answer to my question.
After dinner, Luca goes back to his studio, which I’m forbidden to enter. So I come up with a master list of questions to ask him during our rides to and back from the animal clinic, as well as during dinner.
The next morning, I get Luca to tell me where he lived before coming to Ashbourne (“San Francisco”), what he was doing there (“doing tattoos”), and why he moved here (“I just needed a change”).
Over the next few days, I compile Luca’s short answers together and try to piece together a blurry, incomplete picture of Luca’s past. Luca does verbally answer every single one of my questions, but sometimes he gives me vague non-answers.
Luca grew up with a family of uncaring parents and cruel siblings. As soon as he turned eighteen, he walked away from the family farm and never looked back.
“Ooh, a farm?” I ask on our third dinner in the house. “Did you ever bring a girl home from line dancing and do it on a pile of hay in the barn while your favorite horse looks away in disgust?”
Luca stares at me like I just said I saw UFOs. “I didn't live in a cowboy romance novel. How do you think farmers live?”
Sure, it's a stupid question. But it gets Luca to give me a relatively long answer and ask me a question, too. If something works, it's not stupid.
On the fourth day, when Luca drives me home from work, I ask him, “Why did you need a change when you decided to move here from San Francisco?”
“I was just tired of the city life,” he says. Another vague answer.
“What was so tiring about it?”
“Have you seen homeless people casually shitting on the streets there?” Luca asks.
Fair enough. But hundreds of thousands of people live in the city, and presumably, they don't care where the homeless choose to defecate.
It's a believable answer, of course. I just can't shake the feeling that there's something more to the story. Still, it's clear Luca’s not going to just tell me what happened, no matter how many questions I ask or how I phrase them.
By the fifth night, I’ve abandoned that line of questioning.
But it's not because I’ve decided to respect Luca’s privacy or something equally noble. It's because I keep hitting a wall with the one thing I want to know most about Luca’s life, and I’m growing bored of this lame game that I invented just because Luca doesn't want to talk to me.
Maybe Luca's right. Maybe I am an addict. Because as soon as those questions and answers cease to be a distraction, my mind goes back to thoughts about letting a man use my body for his pleasure.
My pussy tingles so hard I have to rub myself into a frenzy to fall asleep. When I dream, it's about Luca as PuppetMaster. He's manhandling me, throwing me around, making me suck his thick, hard cock before he shoves it up my ass.
When I wake up, I wonder why I didn't realize it before.
The way Luca treated me the moment he found me in the alley that night, there's no way he wasn't into it.
His movements were too precise; hard enough to immobilize me, but not hard enough to hurt me.