Anjali's Red Scarf Ch. 11

"Yes, thank you, Miss Dorn."

I kept going until it was all the way in, my hips pressed against her and the deep hum of the cock rippling through us both. Then I bent over her, my chest against her back. Gripping her hair, I turned her face sideways, and nipped at her ear. "You are such a nice girl, Lily, always thinking of others. It's time somebody did something nice to you for a change." And I began to move, enjoying my possession of her, and she sighed happily and started to match my tempo, pressing back.

"See? Your body knows how this works." I tugged her underwear down just a fraction, so it wouldn't snag uncomfortably, and picked up the pace, but only a little. "This feels so nice, doesn't it? I could do this for hours."

"Oh, please, Miss Dorn... I can't miss the meeting."

"I suppose you can't. What is the—oh dear, only eighteen minutes to go! I suppose we'd better do something about that." I clicked the little button on the strap-on, and the hum intensified. Reaching around, I slipped my hand between her thighs from the front, and sought out another little button. "Shall we get you ready for it, then?"

"Please, Miss, please..."

"It's my pleasure." I held back no longer, taking her fast and rough, thrusting and grinding as my fingers worked her. From all our time together, I knew the responses of her body well, knew just how far I could bring her without quite letting her over the edge, fingers easing off and slipping away to less sensitive zones every time she was close to the point of no return.

Every time I did, she chased my fingers, hips tilting and plunging. Perhaps at first she thought I hadn't quite got it, but eventually she must have realised that I was toying with her, and she began to whimper.

"Fourteen minutes..."

"Oh please, miss, please let me..."

"You want to come?"

"Oh, so much...please, mistress."

"What about 'please, boss'?"

"Oh... oh... please, boss."

"There you are." And with a subtle movement of my fingers I pushed her over the edge where she'd been dangling for minutes, until she screamed and ground back against me, hard enough to make the vibrations thrum through my pelvis, almost hard enough for me to come myself.

Almost.

I held her quite gently as she came down, stroking her hair, her cheek. "There you go, Lily. Feeling all relaxed and ready to present?"

"Oh, yes, yes...I'll just need to straighten myself out, first."

"Mmm. Well, we do have eight minutes left. The thing is, though, Lily..."

"What, Miss Dorn?"

"Well,Ihaven't come yet. Don't you think it's only fair that I should, after all I've done for you?"

"But I... eight minutes..."

"So you'd better hurry up." I ditched the harness and sat back on the lounge.

"But I've never..." said Lily, who most definitely had, quite a few times of my knowledge.

"You've got eight minutes to figure it out... well, seven now."

She knelt, looking up at me for one moment before her hands and tongue were on me.

"Oh, yes, Lily, that's good...I think you're a natural at this." And then I did something stupid.

I held up my phone, pointed at her, and said "click".

She looked up, and froze, and like an idiot I continued with the scene. "Just a little something to remember this moment by, Lily..."

Her mouth worked silently for a few seconds—not on me—and then she said, "Schwarzchild."

For a moment I couldn't remember what it meant. The word was familiar, but we'd never used it until now.

"Safeword," she added, just as it clicked for me, and her face crinkled and her eyes began to leak, and I dropped the phone like a hot potato.

"It's okay, it's not real." I leaned forwards to grasp her shoulders, reassure her. "The phone's switched off, I'll unlock it and you can see."

"I know, Sarah, it's just...too close, too much like..." Anjali trailed off into inarticulate hand-waving, but I understood what she meant. Too much like having her phone hacked, having somebody spy on her private life. Our games of control had become overshadowed by creepy reality. "That guy has been following me for months. I keep telling myself if he'd seen anything, I would have heard about it from my parents by now, I know he can't get into the building, but I still feel like I'm being watched. It feels dirty."

"Oh, Anjali, I'm sorry. I didn't think." I pulled her up and held her, and she sobbed in my arms, and for the second time that week all I could do was be present, quiet and still, until the thunderstorm in her head had subsided to manageable proportions.

When she did speak, she said, "You should probably put some clothes on."

"Uh, yeah." I had to hunt for my underwear—it was under the couch, of course—but I didn't mind playing comic relief for Anjali's benefit. I pulled my gear on and sat beside her once more.

"I really am sorry. My fault entirely, I should have known."

"It's not your fault. It sort of snuck up on me. I just, I just..." She swallowed. "Sarah, I'm eight hundred kilometres from my parents, and it's not nearly far enough."

"Yeah."

"At first I thought it was like...everybody has fights sometimes, it's just one of those things you have to get through. Or it's an Indian parent thing, and sometimes you just have to put up with them being a bit conservative. But I've been talking with some of my friends"—I knew she meant her desi friends—"and I'm realising, this isn't just some parents are a bit more conservative than others, this is wrong."

"It is. You shouldn't have to feel like this." A long-ago memory caught at me. "Do you know, one of the first things I remember when I was teaching you, they wouldn't let you have a phone until you were seventeen."

"Yep. And Mahesh got his on the same day even though it wasn't his birthday and he was two years younger...you know, I always thought that was them finally letting me grow up, but now I wonder if it was so they could call me and check up on me any time." She chuckled bitterly. "And then when they gave me this new one, I thought they were trying to make up, and instead...I don't know if I can ever trust them again. If they find out I've figured out the phone, I expect they'll try something else instead. Sarah, I don't know if I ever want to see them again."

I considered my words carefully. "You have every right to make that choice, and plenty of reason, but it's a big decision. There are other possibilities we can work through."

"Sarah, I'm...not really coping. I haven't been able to work at all this week. I just go into the office and stare at the screen and think about this all day long. I read some stuff about establishing boundaries and it's very Anglo, I'd have to work out how it translates to a Hindu family. Maybe if I applied that stuff I could get somewhere with my parents, to something we could live with."

"Oh, well, that sounds hopeful—"

She held up her hand. "But. It would take so much of my focus. For weeks, maybe for months. Sarah, if I do that, I think it would mean dropping out of my PhD."

"Oh, but you've come so far on that, you're almost there!"

"I know. And I don't know for sure if it even would work out with my parents... and even then, if it does...I'm not giving it up! It's not fair. I've worked too hard for this."

I hugged her tight. "You shouldn't."

"And the other thing is...I don't know if you'll understand, but...sometimes when I was a kid I hated being Indian. I wanted to fit in with the other girls, you know how it is. Fat chance. And as I've grown up I've been trying to get past that and be comfortable in my skin. We go back every year but it still feels like I'm going there as a child. Some day I want to be able to go to India as an adult and understand more about where I'm from. I know I'll never really belong there but I'd like to be...less of a stranger to it? Do you know what I mean?" She was flapping her hands feverishly.

"I think so?"

"But whenever I think about India, my parents are in the way. I just end up angry and resentful. I keep bringing everything back to the way they treat me, and I hate that. I want to be able to have a relationship with it without it being through them, I know that doesn't make sense."

"No, it does. I mean, not the same thing, but...I used to think of my stepdad as the guy who was marrying my mum. Which I resented. And then as Cassie's dad." I touched my ribs from reflex, the way I always do when I remember Cassie. "And then after she died, suddenly I had to start thinking about him as John, an actual human being, not just my mum's husband. Sort of like that?"

"Sort of."

The silence stretched out, and it might have stretched out longer if my tummy hadn't gurgled absurdly loudly. "Sorry about that, no sense of decorum. Get you a drink?"

"Thank you. Water, please."

When I came back with the water, Anjali said, "Am I a bad person if I choose my degree instead of my parents?"

I shook my head. "No. That's a really hard decision, but I don't want to think of you giving up everything you've been working for for...people who don't appreciate you."

She reached out for my hand, squeezed it. "I think the worst part is not knowing what they know. If they find out about us..."

I nodded. It was not a good thought. "Did you hear back from Lucy's phone guy?"

"Yes, I took it in on Tuesday and he sent a report back yesterday. He confirmed the GPS tracker and he also found they'd installed a keyboard app with a logger, so it would have been recording everything I typed in."

I started to say "Oh shit," but Anjali held up her hand. "I only used it for a couple of days. It wasn't very good so I installed SwiftKey instead. So they would only have had what I typed during that time, but, that probably includes my passwords."

"Uh oh."

"He didn't find anything else. No sign of voice, camera, or SMS access, thank heaven for small mercies. But the passwords are...bad. I changed them, of course, and in case they notice I told my parents I got a virus and had to change everything, but I don't know what they might have."

Anjali had changed instant messaging services every few years, following her friends from one platform to another. At the time I'd grumbled—if I had my druthers we'd still be on IRC, change is bad, get off my lawn—but now I was glad of it, since it meant the late-night chats where we'd talked about her autism and changing her degree were now safely buried. The GPS data was intrusive and creepy but in itself, not too incriminating; the main thing it would tell them was that Anjali came over to visit me every couple of weeks and usually stayed over, but that part they already knew; as far as her parents were concerned we were hanging out to talk academia, have dinner, and watch movies.

The main liability was email. Anjali had been using the same webmail account ever since she started her undergrad, and in that time we'd sent one another more than a thousand emails. Thanks to Kate's good advice, she'd set up a burner email for her sugar-baby profile, which she hadn't touched in more than a year, and we had mostly avoided discussing our arrangement on the regular account. Mostly. The vast majority of our exchanges were perfectly innocuous: programming and mathematical discussions, cat memes, holiday snaps.

But not all of them.

Somebody who read through our correspondence closely might have noticed us mentioning "Lily" here and there, and perhaps wondered why Anjali was so familiar with this person who was never mentioned outside our conversations. Chance remarks like "I'll be away next weekend so I'll pay Lily in advance" might become a real problem if somebody with a record of Anjali's movements happened to notice that her visits coincided with Lily's.

And then there was the checklist Anjali had sent me eleven months earlier. It wasn't particularly conspicuous—she'd tacked it onto a reply in an ongoing email chain, and all she'd written was "here's that checklist, as discussed". But if anybody was curious enough to open the attachment it would be very clear how the two of us were spending our time during Anjali's visits.

At that point, we had to pause our discussion, because Anjali had gone quite green about the gills. It took her five or ten minutes of deep breathing before she was ready to go on.

"Of course, we don't know that they actually have this. Just a thought, can we check your account history?" I said, although I couldn't imagine that they'd be obsessive enough to put a logger on her phone and then not use the information they got.

And there it was: on February 14th, a few days after Anjali had started using the phone, somebody with a Sydney IP had downloaded an archive of her mailbox. Nothing since, but that didn't mean they hadn't been reading new messages when they came in.

I heard a choking noise beside me, and I turned to hug Anjali tight, but stopped when I saw her face.

"Do you know...do you know how many times they've called me for tech support? Dad got a virus a couple of years ago and I was up all night recovering his files and cleaning it off. And this. This is what I get in return. I suppose they paid somebody to do it. Arseholes! I'm done with them, Sarah, I'm done."

But were they done with us?

"If they knew about us," I said cautiously, "do you think they—"

She considered it, then shook her head tentatively. "I'd have heard the explosion from here. And my mother still chats to you on Facebook, yes?"

"Yeah, not much, but she asked me for recommendations a couple of weeks back for a friend whose daughter needs tutoring."

"Let me think." She shut her eyes, pressed her fingers to her forehead. "When I go somewhere new, they sometimes phone me up. Just to ask what I'm up to."

"Like at my place."

"Exactly. And when I've been emailing with people, they've been making excuses to ask about that. 'Do you still talk to that boy Jyoti?', that sort of thing. They don't ask about you much, and when they do, they seem to be happy with me hanging around with you. As far as they're concerned, you're a responsible adult. But any guy I email with, it's Spanish Inquisition time. So, no, I don't think they've figured it out."

"Yet."

"Yet. For what it's worth, they gave me a lecture once on how to spot lesbians, and I'm afraid you don't fit the bill. Not nearly butch enough. And I don't think it's ever occurred to them that I'm bi."

I nodded. My Facebook presence was very bland; it's not that I keep my orientation a secret, but I hadn't been serious with anybody since Ed, so there was no reason why they would have known from a casual look. "But as long as they have those emails..."

She nodded. "It is unpleasantly Sword-of-Damocles-y. If they ever do get suspicious, they might look more closely."

That gnawing in my gut again. "Yeah. I don't like it at all. Have you talked to Lucy's lawyer friend?"

"No, I haven't. I know I should, I just hate the idea of telling all this to a stranger. I just feel sick at the thought."

She sounded so miserable and exhausted that I judged it best not to press the matter. "All right. Well, think about it, okay?"

"There's something else." She was speaking slowly now, reluctantly. "Sarah...I was going to tell you about this last week but then everything blew up and I didn't get a chance. The group in Bern, they've offered me a postdoc. Conditional on visas and completing my PhD of course, but it seems pretty solid. Language is going to be an issue but everybody in the team knows English and I still have a little bit of French from school."

"What? That's great news! I'm so proud of you. Guess I'd better dig out those German books for you. Let me know if there's any info you need translated—"

She held up her hand. "They need me to start in April. Something to do with a funding deadline, they had another student but he pulled out. So I'd need to be submitting my thesis in February."

"But you were due in...May, yes?"

"That's right. I think I can do it. I have most of my results. I talked to Professor Cheng and he thinks I can go for it, there are a couple of bits I can cut if I don't have the time. I really want this, they're doing some fascinating work with collapsed-matter physics. But there's still so much to do in these six months and I'm going to be flat out, even without my family playing stupid games..."

"Oh." And suddenly I understood her hesitancy. "You mean..."

"Sarah, I think I need to put our arrangement on hold. No, strike that. I do need to put it on hold. For a while, at least, until things are less crazy."

That sudden churning in my stomach, a feeling of loss. Of course I had known that things would change when she completed her doctorate, but that had still been nine months in the future. Not now...

"How long do you think you'd stay in Europe?" I asked.

"Honestly? I'm not sure if I'd be coming back. Perhaps to visit, but I think...if it goes well, it might be a permanent move."

"Oh. Wow. Is this about your family?"

"Partly. But they have a really good group there, I'd really like to be part of that. And, yes, there are a couple of Indian-Swiss staff in the team who have never heard of my family."

"Well." I didn't know what to say. "It's been a long day and you're sounding pretty wrecked." And I'm not coping. I don't want this. "What do you say we call it a night and cuddle up under my quilt?"

"Sarah, you're a lifesaver." She managed a wan smile. "I can't imagine Miss Dorn would be this gentle."

I lay awake for hours, long after Anjali was asleep, trying to think my way out of the sudden shock to my plans. And eventually, somewhere around four in the morning, I came up with an idea. It was a terrible idea, as so many four-in-the-morning ideas are, but to me at that moment it seemed quite perfect.

* * * * *

I hadn't seen much of Lucy since that unhappy evening at Anjali's place. I didn't think much of it; I had plenty to occupy me with the cleanup from our Schiphol bug, rigorously testing the new setup, chasing up how it had happened, and writing an Incident Report. As if I didn't have enough distractions, our government chose that week to announce a national survey on whether people like me should be allowed to marry our loved ones. Lucy and I said hi to one another in passing, but she didn't organise any lunch outings and I didn't push the matter; if I thought about it at all, I guess I supposed she was busy.

It wasn't until the following Monday that she stopped by my desk to drag me out to lunch. It was cold and windy, one of those bleak August days that demands comfort food, and Lucy and I ended up sharing an HSP in a park while several gulls looked on in hopes of leftovers.

For several minutes we grumbled to one another about the survey over mouthfuls of meat and chips, and then Lucy abruptly changed the topic. "So you know, I had a chat with Anjali about your arrangement. Not the saucy details or the money, just wanted to be sure you weren't taking advantage of her."

"Oh. And am I?" It was meant as a joke, but it fell flat.

"Tell me again how the two of you got into this situation?"

"Well, uh, escorting was all her idea. Not something I ever would have suggested to her. But it was a difficult situation and I didn't have a better alternative to suggest. So we talked through it, got advice from a friend of mine, worked out how to make it as safe as she could. But she wasn't having any luck and she was getting a bit down about it. So I thought I'd look at it from the guy's side, created an account and went to look at her profile from that perspective."

"From the guy's side? But she said you had a female persona."

"Oh, yeah, I did. Miriam Blaylock."

"Miriam Blaylock? As in the Catherine Deneuve character from The Hunger?"