Her Contract Enatails Ch. 01

Carla tried to imagine the life that would be hers, reduced to the status of a plaything for Aubrey Lister in his own tropical paradise. She glanced down at her legs and found that she could not even begin to conceive of what losing them and gaining a mermaid's tail would feel like. But if she was sure that he had kept his side of the bargain, then perhaps she could learn to live with the changes to her body.

After all, the man could not spend all of his time at the estate he had mentioned. There was a good chance that she would be alone for extended periods of time as his affairs took up his time. If she were allowed to spend that time as she desired, discovering what her life as a mermaid might hold, then she was sure that she could come to terms with the strange hand that fate had dealt her.

"Alright," Carla looked him in the eye, "I agree...make me into your mermaid."

Aubrey Lister leaned back in his seat and clapped his hands together, his laugh filling the air like a cry of triumph.

Carla simply stared at the floor, eyes downcast as if in defeat.

The light that streamed in from the open windows and the aroma of the food on the plate before her seemed to be proof positive that staying at home and watching movies was a poor way to see the world. Carla had expected nothing more than grey skies and endless plates of stodge, but the weeks she had spent keeping a low profile in London had left her wondering what else became distorted and distant from the truth once in the hands of Hollywood.

Had the circumstances been different, she was sure that the city would have suited her quite well. But then she had not crossed the Atlantic for a simple holiday, and so no matter how charmed Carla may have been by the capital and its bustling atmosphere, she was never more than a moment away from the sad reality of her situation.

"Do me a favour," Carla looked up at the sound of the voice, "pick your chin up for me, eh?"

The man who was looking down at her as he squeezed into the seat opposite had a pained smile on his broad face and a tiny cup and saucer in one of his ham fists.

"For you," Carla tried her best to smile, "not for anyone else, Henry."

The way in which the huge man's face lit up when she managed a small grin was enough to make Carla wonder not for the first time, how he had ever come to work for a man the likes of Aubrey Lister.

She knew him only as Henry, honestly the largest man she had ever seen in the flesh and possibly the most gentle at the same time. Where his employer had come across the massive Londoner was a subject that she had never broached in the time they had spent talking, but it had been Henry's idea to hide her away in his native city while the preparations were made back home. In Lister's presence he had been a quiet and sombre giant, but in his native environment Henry became a fountain of knowledge and a charming gentleman into the bargain.

Balding and with the remainder of his hair in braids, Henry wore a suit that struggled to keep his massive body contained and ate his meals with a gusto that had to be seen to be believed. Carla had almost died laughing when she had seen the serious way in which he took his tea from a fragile china cup, relishing every drop. The only thing that had silenced her amusement at the bizarre contrast was the puzzled look of hurt on Henry's face at her reaction.

"This came in the post," Henry placed a disc on the table between them and reached down to pull a laptop out of his neat leather bag. The compact computer was so thin that it could not have been anything but prohibitively expensive, looking almost ludicrous in the hands of a man so large. But despite the disparity in scale, Henry flipped the thing open and powered it up with a few quick strokes of his fingertips before turning it around to face Carla on the other side of the table.

There really was no point in either of them speaking as she opened the drive and slid the disc into the laptop. Both knew full well what the contents of the thing were, they had been waiting for more than a month for it to arrive. Now the tense time spent in London that had begun to turn into an uneasy relationship of forced but tentative friendship was about to come to an inevitable end.

Beginning to play automatically, the screen displaying a scene of an urban street that Carla was half certain she recognised. The camera panned to the left and zoomed in on a man in a business suit, hurrying down the pavement, weaving around slower pedestrians in his haste to reach his destination.

She covered her mouth with one hand as she recognised the face of her husband, the surge of emotion at the sight of him seizing her bodily. But there was something different about Jared Largo, as if he had changed in a subtle manner since she last laid eyes upon him. His face was now clean shaven and his features set with a sad look of determination rather than the hollow look of defeat that she had become so used to.

Carla had no frame of reference to compare his expression with, but she supposed that he now wore the face of a man who had been forced to steel himself against the loss of his partner for the sake of his now motherless children. Lister's machinations had offered Jared a lifeline in the form of new employment and he seemed determined to grasp it with both hands and hold on for all he was worth.

Abruptly the image cut off and Carla was left with more questions than answers. She wanted to know how he had reacted to the news of the car accident that had supposedly killed his wife, what he had said and done at the funeral where he had thought he was burying her and how he was now making a new life for himself.

She wanted to ask the questions, but she knew at the same time that there would be no answers for her. She had agreed to a deal that removed her from his life and him from her own. She had bound them both to a contract, and breaking the agreed terms would result in far greater suffering than they had both endured thus far.

Whatever emotions had surfaced with the sight of her lost husband, they were intensified tenfold by the sight of tall railings and the unmistakable sight of a schoolhouse when the image on the screen returned. The grounds of the school were filled with children in uniform, milling around and engaging in what might have looked to the eyes of an adult to be play. Again the camera searched for a specific face amongst the crown and finding faces familiar to Carla's eyes, closed in on them so that they could be seen in exquisite detail.

At the sight of Jada and May, she could not keep her emotions in check any longer.

Carla openly cried as she watched her daughters mixing with the other girls in the schoolyard, swapping words and smiles with what she hoped were new friends. They seemed healthy, the visible signs of Water's Disease she had been sure she could see in their faces now no longer stretching the skin of their cheeks or sinking their eyes back into the sockets. But most importantly, they looked to be as happy and well as a pair of girls recently deprived of their mother could have been.

She closed her eyes and pushed the screen of the laptop down, tears streaming down her face.

Carla had tortured herself so many times already with the terrible thought of what her girls would think of her, how they would come to regard a mother who had left them at so young an age that she simply could not go over it again in that moment. She knew that there was no way to make them understand her actions and no comfort for herself as they would never be able to tell her whether they forgave her or loathed her for what she had done to them.

Henry had remained typically silent as she watched the footage, but now he placed a gentle hand on her arms and proffered a napkin for her tears.

Carla was struck by the way in which he mirrored Lister's actions on the night he had made her his terrible offer. But at the same time she noted the difference between the two men in their motivations as they did so. Now she knew that Lister had showed her kindness only to coax her into opening up to him, whereas his underling seemed incapable of acting out of anything but genuine sympathy and concern.

She took the napkin and tried to make herself look vaguely human.

"We've got the confirmation," Henry spoke in a calm and low voice, "that means we have to go make the drive out to the clinic. Mr Lister would be very angry if I didn't make sure that you were keeping to your side of the deal when he's kept to his."

Carla nodded, resigned to her fate.

She tried to hold the image of three faces in her mind as Henry called for the bill, alarmed by the speed at which they had begun to slip from her memory in the space of mere minutes and worried about the effect that longer periods of time would do to her precious ability to recall each of them.