Foster Care: A Marketplace Tale, Part 2

 

{Foster Care is fanfiction based on Laura Antoniou’s Marketplace series, a fictional world in which there is a large and secret market for consensual slaves who serve their owners under contract. In Part 1, we meet “fixer” Bette, who is dispatched to Costa Rica to retrieve Kelly, the human property of a former Silicon Valley billionaire who’s suspected of murdering his neighbor. Kelly is in pretty bad shape as Bette returns her to the U.S. — Lily}

At the other end, as promised, there’s a doctor. There are x-rays and a CAT scan of her head.

In the flat, sallow light of the hospital room, I have a weird thought: she looks worse than Diana did when Diana was dead.

Diana died in a car accident a year ago and except for a broken nose she just looked like she was asleep.

Kelly looked like Clint Eastwood in Act 2 of one of those 70′s spaghetti westerns where he always had to get the shit beat out of him before eventually prevailing over the bad guys.

I flip my phone open again. “Who do you have for foster?” I ask Chris.

“Nothing solid, but we’ll have something lined up for her within 48 hours. She has to stay in the hospital anyway for longer than that probably anyway, right?”

“I wanna keep her,” I say.

*********************

The fact that she’s a Canadian citizen makes it easy for me to bring her home with me. Hell, I could marry her and become a Canadian citizen myself, I think.

I’m getting ahead of myself. She hasn’t even woken up and said one word to me or anyone else yet, for fuck’s sake.

I call home and order three twin-size futons.

******************

She woke up. She passed the neurological exam. Apart from asking where she was, she didn’t talk much.

I told her that I didn’t have anything to do with MacFarlane, that she wasn’t even in the same country with him anymore, that she was in the United States and safe.

I asked her if she had anywhere she wanted to go, or anyone she wanted to see, but she just closed her eyes and went back to sleep.

**********************

Even Negel’s contracts have a foster rider — if your owner dies, if your owner goes to jail, if your owner goes batshit crazy — you are entitled to foster placement: a safe place to stay until you figure out what you want to do.

Kelly didn’t seem ready to make any big decisions. She had two more operations to put pins in her wrist, and with all the pain medication even a short conversation was often something she couldn’t stay awake for. When she was ready to be discharged, she still seemed too tired and shell-shocked to decide what she wanted for lunch, much less what she wanted to do for the rest of her life.

She could do a lot worse than my apartment in Montreal, I thought. And I like telling people what they’re going to have for lunch. It’s refreshing to not have to repress my native bossiness all the damn time.

***********

I walk behind her up the stairs to the apartment. I carry my luggage, and she carries her left arm, cradling it as if it hurts.

Inside, she stands by the door, unsure of what to do. I lead her by the hand to my bedroom, where a plain narrow futon, fresh and white, lies on the floor beside my bed.

“Take your clothes off,” I say. I help her with her blouse, and with the zipper of her skirt. She lies down on her side, facing away from me. I open the large black chest at the foot of my bed and pull out a white down comforter and throw it over her. By the time I close the chest and look back at her, she is already asleep, lips parted, breathing deeply.

There doesn’t seem to be enough hours in the day for Kelly to spend sleeping. She’s like a baby – she wakes up to eat and use the bathroom, and then goes back to sleep. I have robes for her, but she seems entirely comfortable going about the apartment naked, despite the still healing cuts, scrapes and bruises that cover so much of her body. Of course, she mainly goes from room to room where I’d placed some more small futons in places where I typically work or read — one by my desk, one by my favorite chair where I read or watched television. Each one has a down comforter, and she walks to the closest one, slides under it, curlsonto her side, and in a moment or two, she’s asleep again.

****************

Fostering in the Marketplace is a formal system — they don’t just give out shell-shocked property to somebody’s cousin Vinnie, and they don’t forget about them once they’re placed. Once a week, a Marketplace-friendly doctor would visit my apartment to check on Kelly’s progress.

I can never quite figure the doctor and her assistant out. Are they property? Is one of them an owner and the other a slave? It’s none of my business, really, so I don’t ask.

I do observe Kelly’s exams, though. The physician’s assistant always comes with a large case — something a bit like a folding massage table, only deeper, and with attachable stirrups.

Once the table is up the doctor examines Kelly, narrating her findings out loud, as her assistant makes notes, the notepad looking tiny in his enormous fist. As far as I can tell, he never talks.

“Felipe, please help me turn her over,” the doctor says. With gloved hands, she inspects the cuts and welts on Kelly’s back, and wordlessly shoots her hand out; her assistant puts a tube of gel in it, which she spreads lightly over the wounds.

The doctor bends Kelly’s leg at the knee and examines a deep cut on the bottom of her right foot that had been stitched shut. “These are ready to come out,” she says. “But we’ll do that after. Felipe, help me turn her again.”

They turn Kelly onto her back and put her feet in the stirrups. “Note that there’s no sign of sexual activity,” she says. The doctor turns to me, and I just shake my head. Kelly wasn’t even capable of dressing or washing herself — sex hadn’t even crossed my mind.

Although now that it was crossing my mind, I made a mental note to look up portable tables with stirrups. I’ve always had kind of a thing for that, but it’s one of those things that hasn’t made it off my bucket list and into my real life yet. I shift a little in my seat. How long had it been since I’d had sex? Or even jacked off?

If I’m getting turned on by furniture, the answer is way too fucking long. Maybe I should just go for the random hookup to take the pressure off, I think.

***********

I send Kelly back off to the futon in my bedroom while I speak to the doctor. Felipe, the wordless climbing-wall sized assistant, goes downstairs, and in a minute, I hear the Town Car idling out front.

“She’s lost a lot of weight. Is she eating?” the doctor asks

“Not a lot. She gets about halfway through a meal — but I’d say she’s only eating about half of what I am, and she’s a bigger person than I am.”

“But no nausea, or vomiting?”

“No,” I say.

“The pain medication may be suppressing her appetite, and it’s almost certainly causing the drowsiness. You can cut down to four times a day. Call me if her appetite does not improve, or if you see anything else you think I should know about.”

“Thanks, Doctor. See you next week.”

I watch through the window as the elegant doctor approaches the Town Car. Felipe holds the door for her. He has a handsome, dark face, kind of Aztec looking. He sees me watching, and I wave.

To my surprise, he waves back.

************

Just as the doctor had speculated, Kelly began to perk up as soon as I reduced the amount of pain medication she took.

She was hungrier, too; she’d finish her plate, and when I nudged mine at her and told her to eat, she’d eat what was left there, as well.

After we work through today’s breakfast I get up from the large teak dining table, carrying the dishes to the kitchen.

I turn to the counter and begin putting away the eggs and cheese I’d used to make some quick omelets. I hear water running in the sink and I turn around: Kelly is standing at it, naked, doing the dishes.

This is one of those little miracles that I’m always afraid will disappear if I interrupt it. I wordlessly hand her a white canvas apron and went back out to the living room. I sit in my favorite chair and smile at the falling snow.

*******************

Seeing Kelly walk around the house in nothing but an apron is doing wonders to thaw out my libido, which has been in the deep freeze since Diana’s death. Something about just the apron turns my crank in a way that even complete nudity never has.

I know Kelly wasn’t ready for that, though as her foster I am within my rights to use her to meet my own sexual needs as long as it doesn’t interfere with restoring her to health. But she’s too fragile for that still.

I cannot fucking believe it, but while I I’m sitting there cruising Craigslist Montreal, fantasizing about picking up a partner just for the night, I get a call from none other than Geoff Negel.

There wasn’t much unusual in Kelly’s file until she met Negel — she hadn’t done anything wrong to end up in the situation she’d been in; she’d just had the misfortune of running across the Marketplace’s most unscrupulous trainer. He’s a fraud who covers up his incompetence and greed with new-age, shallow-California justifications about how the Marketplace had to change.

But hey, that’s just my opinion. TL; DR – the guy’s a douchebag.

“Bette, I want to thank you for taking in Kelly after the terrible crisis in Costa Rica.”

“That’s funny, Geoff. She’s been here with me for weeks and I haven’t heard a peep out of you until now. I’m not sure why you’re thanking me when you don’t actually give a fuck.”

“Well, of course I care — I care about every client I train and place with an owner.”

“Oh?” I said. “You trained fifteen others that you placed with MacFarlane. Do you even know where the rest of them are right now?”

“Sadly, no — in the crisis, many of them fled and no one knows where they are. Of course, Kelly ended up with you as a foster caretaker, so her whereabouts are known, thank goodness.”

“Geoff, why are you calling me?”

“Well, as you know, fostering has a one year limit, and during that time, a slave’s original owner can reassert their rights of ownership.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?! You place sixteen slaves with a defective, dangerous owner and now you want to give them back?!”

“Oh, no, no, no, Bette. Of course, we can’t do that, but I still have to fill out the paperwork.”

I sit there. I really genuinely want to beat the guy with a stick. He’s sitting here talking so calmly about sixteen people — sixteen human beings! — that he handed off to an unhinged gun-nut and then forgot about for a month. How could he even be calling me?

A calmer part of myself says, in the back of my mind: why is he calling you, Bette?

“Geoff,” I say, “Now isn’t a good time. I’m afraid I can’t talk right now.”

And I buy myself some time: I hang up on Negel. What the fuck is that little shitweasel up to?

I don’t remember standing up from the chair, but now I’m back and forth in front of the bank of windows, the snow whipping against them, my bootheels striking the wood floor loudly with each stride. I turn around, and there’s Kelly, standing there in her apron looking frightened.

I’m kinda slow on the uptake sometimes. It takes me until that moment to realize that it isn’t just the principle of the thing. It isn’t just that I oppose Geoff’s ways of using people up and discarding them with every fiber of my being, although I do.

My heart is pounding and my mouth is dry and my hands are shaking because I want to keep Kelly. I want to keep Kelly, and the thought of someone taking her away has shove a cold block of fear and anger into my chest that is too big for me to hold.

I want to run across the room and grab her and hold her, but up until this moment I haven’t even touched her except to change her bandages or cover her with a blanket.

`”It’s okay,” I say. “You’re safe. Nobody’s taking you anywhere.”

She still looks scared. Of me, I realize. Negel filing an appeal for her return might be scary, but Negel isn’t in the room – I am.

I look at her chalky, frightened face and deliberately lower my shoulders, open my hands.

“You’re safe from me too,” I say. “Come here,” I say. She crosses the room, coming within four paces of me.

“Closer,” I say.

Still wearing nothing but the apron, hands clasped behind her back, she stands close enough to me that I can see the shift as her pupils dilate.

“Come sit here next to me,” I say, indicating a small meditation cushion next to my favorite chair. She folds herself smoothly on it, and I sit back in the broad leather armchair. It’s quiet enough that we can both hear the snow tapping against the windows. Slowly, I rest my forearm on the broad wooden arm of the chair, and allowed my hand to dangle over the edge.

I am just barely touching her hair and I find this utterly thrilling.

With my other hand I pick up the remote and put the game on — Canadiens vs. the Bruins, playing only a few blocks away at Bell Centre.

“We’re a Habs household, just so you know. Rooting for teams other than the Canadiens will not be tolerated.”

 

Lily Lloyd is the author of  Discipline: Adding Rules & Discipline To Your BDSM Relationship . You can find more of her writing at  The Black Leather Belt .