Fatima

"What's going on?" he asked.

"Sit down," she commanded. He moved to sit next to her on the bed but she stopped him with a gesture. "On the floor at my feet."

He knelt before her, keeping his body low to allow her to look down on him. A small facial charge confirmed that this gesture pleased her.

"You wanna know something interesting?" she asked. "Ask most Islamic scholars and they'll say that slavery is haram, evil, and so on. But if you move away from the Qu'aran and check out some of the more obscure Hadiths, you come across the idea that the righteous, ie Muslims, are slaves o f Allah, and that if the nonbelievers won't render themselves slaves to Allah, they must be slaves to the Muslims. There are other passages about using slaves in different ways, including sexually, and-"

"Why are you telling me this?" Callum interjected.

"I'm telling it to myself," she snapped. "I'm trying to reconcile the idea of keeping true to my faith and making you my slave. No chance of justifying it to anyone in the community, but maybe, just maybe, I can justify it to my God. Do you understand?"

"Yeah," he said. "But wow, okay, let's talk-"

"You want to go home and think about this," she said flatly. "You want us to meet for coffee in Mayberry a week and talk about it. Doesn't work like that, sorry. I don't fuck about." She paused for a second. "Okay, how about this. I'll give you a chance to think things through. At the end of my road, there's a T-junction. Literally a crossroads. On the left is a bus stop, they're pretty frequent and can get you to the tube station quickly. You take that offer and we terminate this now. We stay out of each other's way and never tell anyone about tonight."

"Okay."

"On the right of the junction," she continued, "there's a Halal pizza place. If you want to take this to the next level, get two pizzas, spicy beef for me, margarita for you. Medium, that's for you, and once large, that's for me. I like my boys skinny, and I know you like a big girl. Bring those pizzas back," she said, looking him directly in the eye, "and you're mine. No fooling around, no play it by ear, you're my slave, permanently. Or at least until we graduate."

"Okay," he said. "Should I leave now?"

"Yeah," she said, handing him keys. "Get your clothes on."

He did so quickly, getting fully dressed in less than a minute. His brain wouldn't even let him think about what to do yet, not before he reached his crossroads. She hailed his departure without a word. Once he was out of the front door, he found himself on the junction in thirty seconds. The bus stop was on his left, across the road, as described. There was also a takeaway place on the right with 'Pizza Milanese' on a neon sign.

He found himself unable to move in either direction. If he went to the bus stop, he would be putting a glass over a flame that had every chance of burning him. He had no idea in what direction this strange, almost certainly fucked up relationship situation would go, but it had every chance of eing a bad one. This situation reminded him of films he watched, wherein the hero would be offered a horrible choice: become the villain's slave and help them take over the world, or die. The hero always picked the second option, of course, and managed to escape the subsequent death trap he would be placed in. He didn't even have to face the prospect of death in refusing Fatima's offer, just a slight tinge of regret at what could have been. No contest.

But the problem was, sometimes the villain giving the ultimatum in those films wasn't a guy. Sometimes they were a cold, domineering woman. And when this happened, Callum would hope, often with a slight erection, that just this one the hero of the film would throw down his weapons and accept such a generous offer. He thought that that was something he'd much rather do. He sighed. He realised with faint amusement that he'd been standing at the T-junction for a good few minutes, stuck in suspended animation.

Fuck it,he thought. Life was about taking chances rather than regretting the ones you bottled out of. Wherever his relationship with Fatima went, he would not bring it to an early conclusion. He turned the corner down towards the pizza place.