“What was his response?” she asked, voice quiet, eyes soft on my face.

“He just came back with, ‘Does it matter?’  That was it.  That’s all he’d say, but if I had to guess, I’d say he hated me because he hated himself.  He saw what life had handed him, and what it had handed me, where I was going, and I became the literal punching bag for his rage at the unfairness of life.

“His hostility bothered me, it messed with my self-esteem for sure, but it’s always been easy to bury myself in my studies, and so I did.  I avoided conflict as much as I could, and looked forward to the end of the year, because he was graduating.  It was an awful year.  To this day, it was the worst time of my life, and that’s including my divorce last year, which was hellish.

“He’d been laying off me during the last month of school, and so I figured he’d gotten bored tormenting me, or hell, was too excited about getting out of high school to care anymore.  It was all unfortunate, because I let my guard down.  I just wasn’t expecting him to come at me the way he did.  I’d have been more careful, I guess.  See, that’s my low self-esteem talking.  Even after all the things he did to me, I feel guilty about what happened.”

Her eyes were wide, as though she could read me well enough to know the worst part was coming.

“Well, to get to the point, he cornered me alone after gym one day, beat me nearly unconscious, and then used my T-shirt to try to hang me by my neck from a locker door.  No one else was around, and he left me like that.  I had to stand on my tiptoes to keep from blacking out, but even then I couldn’t get much air in my lungs.  To this day I don’t know if it was an accident to rig me up that good, if he was trying to kill me, or if it was some miscalculation on his part, but the only thing that saved me was the basketball coach just happening by.”

“That’s awful,” Iris said, still rubbing my hand, sympathy in her eyes.  I’d always assumed I was the type to hate pity, but coming from her it felt somehow gratifying.  Soothing, even.

I found that odd, to say the least.

“Yes.  Everyone thought so, especially the coach and the school’s principal.  And my parents.  And the judge.  He was a few weeks shy of eighteen and was charged as an adult for attempted murder.  Ten years, no parole.  If he thought his life was bad before, well, I suspect life showed him much worse after that.  I hated him, but to this day, I still feel sorry for him.  What did I do to drive him to that?”

She made a tutting noise, but that was all.

“I felt very helpless back then, and it was about that time I started working out a lot, like I do now.”  I couldn’t think of one time, in my entire adulthood that I’d ever admitted aloud the true reason I felt the need to workout the way I did.  Until Iris.  “I just wanted to be strong enough to defend myself.”

“Well, you’re certainly that.  I’ve said it before, but you don’t do anything half-assed, do you?”

That brought out a smile and lightened the mood.

Working me, affecting me, soothing me, managing me, whatever you wanted to call it, she seemed to have a natural talent for it.

As we talked, she openly admitted to being pragmatic about nearly everything.  I should have been more troubled by this, because she presented herself as a wild thing, and chaos and pragmatism weren’t an easy alliance.

Not without motive.

I knew I should have been more worried about her motives.

No, I wasn’t an idiot, and the logical answer to Iris wanting me was pretty obvious.

The thing was, I just didn’t care.  That, and I had the most naive, optimistic, completely ludicrous hope that she would come to feel something for me, even if she had only approached me because she’d been able to spot me as some kind of a loaded mark.

And frankly, bringing some joy into my life seemed worth a little money on my part.  Because, hell, I had money, and I could use some joy.  It would sure as hell beat trading half my life’s earnings for twenty years of misery, and the past year of humiliation I’d already experienced.

That night, as we got ready for bed, she called out to me from the master bathroom.  The door was slightly ajar, but I’d been giving her privacy.

“Alasdair,” she called again.

I shuddered and felt myself getting hard.  I loved it when she said my name.

I’d just been standing there, staring at the door, but that got me moving.

She was sitting at the vanity, watching me in the mirror, still in her thin white tank top with no bra, and as I moved closer I couldn’t fail to notice that she’d stripped down to just panties.  Tiny, transparent panties.

I was just about to grab her, for obvious reasons, when a few soft words out of her mouth stopped me.

“Will you brush my hair?” she asked.

It caught me off guard, but I agreed readily enough, taking the brush off the counter and setting to work, very tentative at first.

I watched her face, hating the thought of drawing so much as a wince from her, but her expression was peaceful.  Her eyes closed and her head fell back as I became more confident, raking the bristles firmly against her scalp, my other hand rubbing at her neck.

It was nice.  It felt more than a little unnatural, but nice.

None of this was natural for me.  Simple physical affection was a new development for me.  And the fact that I enjoyed it was a revelation.