Chapter 6

Friday June 23

I spent a long time talking to Kevin and Brie, and their friend Mary, at the coffee shop today. We pass each other in the halls frequently, but it seems we only have time to talk over lattes.

They’re going to a show tonight, and asked if I wanted to come along. It’s a midnight showing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. I told them that I had seen clips and it always looked stupid to me. Mary - the only one who’s seen it “the proper way” - says that that’s part of the fun. There are all these amazing traditions of audience participation that make seeing it in the theater unlike any kind of entertainment you’ve ever experienced before. All three of them were super excited for Kevin and Brie’s first time going.

“It’s almost Shakespearean - a show within a show,” Mary said excitedly.

“Please come!” Brie begged.

They made it sound interesting, but evenings are when I’m on-call for my job, so I told them, “It sounds fun, but evenings are the only time I get to spend with my boyfriend.”

Kevin and Brie looked at each other like they were both thinking the same thing but didn’t want to say it. “It’s okay,” I told them, “you can say whatever it is.”

Brie’s thoughts started gushing out of her mouth. “I mean, honestly, what’s the appeal? Why are you with him? Wouldn’t you rather be with someone your own age?”

I was actually ready for that question. “I should be - that would make more sense,” I said. “But who can explain love? I know that it looks pretty sleazy to everyone else. I know what people probably whisper about us. But the way he makes me feel when we’re alone together - talking, or in bed - there’s just no one else who could come close to that.

They believed me. They thought I was in denial or too inexperienced to know what real love is, but that’s pretty much what I was going for. Maybe I should be an actress.

Still, if I had met them back at home where I didn’t have to worry about Paul, I would definitely go on their little adventures with them.

Sunday June 25

Today Paul and I visited his family in Greenville, South Carolina. Usually when we go places Paul drives, but since Greenville is a two and a half hour drive, he got us a limo. We both just worked on our own stuff on our laptops on the way there, and Paul made a few phone calls.

I wasn’t really sure what I should wear. I asked Penny - she said a modest dress, with light makeup and one or two pieces of jewelry. That didn’t feel right, though, so I asked Paul. He said to wear something I would wear to class, so I went with nice jeans, a billowy top, and my cross pendant. Paul smiled when he saw me and said that I should dress like that more often. Of course, as usual with Paul, I wasn’t wearing my glasses.

Paul’s mom Karen is a retired teacher, so she loved hearing about the educational apps that my company makes at my part-time job back home. Paul’s dad is Warren. I didn’t catch what he did for a living, but he was nice and actually pretty funny in a “dad joke” way. He asked lots of questions about what college is like these days. He says the news makes it sound like you can’t walk ten feet without running into an angry hoard of protesters.

Paul’s brother, Levi, has a mental disability. He lives at home but he has a job assembling medical technology in a clean room somewhere. (“He helps save lives,” Karen gushed.) I didn’t know what to expect, but before long we were getting along just fine. Talking with him wasn’t difficult or anything, he just sees things from a different perspective. It was kind of like talking to a twelve year old.

His family loved me. I had to wonder how many of his other escort “girlfriends” they had met. It’s hard to imagine that they would have been this warm and welcoming to me if this were a regular occurrence.

Levi was obviously attracted to me; he stared and smiled at me a lot. I confess it felt a little bit uncomfortable, but I knew that he didn’t mean any offense. After lunch and another hour of socializing, Paul said that he and his mom and dad had some legal papers to go over. “Alexis, why don’t you entertain Levi while we work through the details,” he said. “Levi, why don’t you show Alexis your collection?” He added.

Alarm bells started ringing in my mind. “Entertain” - that was the same word he had used a week ago when he basically ordered me to fuck Mike. Was I wrong to think that Paul had learned from the Mike situation? Would he really loan me out to someone like that again? To his brother? And then there were the moral questions about having sex with a mentally disabled person: how capable do they have to be before they can give meaningful consent?

I was kinda panicking when Levi led me to his bedroom. We sat down on his bed and he started showing me pictures of him with celebrities from sci-fi conventions. He was clearly proud of the pictures and wanted to impress me, often telling me detailed stories about when they were taken. I didn’t know who most of the people were, and I’ve never understood the appeal of collecting autographs. Ultimately, despite staring at my breasts a lot, Levi never made any moves, and I certainly wasn’t going to. If Paul expected me to fuck his brother, I figured, he needed to tell me much more clearly.

As we were leaving, Karen said she couldn’t wait until we visited again. I told her “me too” even though I knew that my contract with Paul would be over before that happened.

On the drive home Paul looked at me with a sort of wonder. “All that stuff,” he said, “about your job writing software, putting yourself through college, that was all true?”

“Yeah,” I said with a shrug.

“So, you don’t need this job,” he said curiously.

“I don’t need it,” I said. “It’ll certainly help me graduate sooner.”

“So is it just about the money?” He asked. This was so weird. We almost never broke the boyfriend-girlfriend illusion even when it was just the two of us.

Time to make something up. “I was raised Catholic,” I began. “So there were always all kinds of rules - especially about sex. Like everyone, as I grew up, I had to decide what the church’s teachings meant to me personally. Obviously I had sex, and I enjoyed it, but there was always the guilt and doubt. Was I really choosing on my own, or was it peer pressure, or rebellion. I guess ... this job was a way of challenging myself. There was no way that doing something this out-of-bounds could be anything other than my own conscious decision. Does that make any sense?”