92: Teaching?
**Chapter 92**
So let me paint the picture that hit me last night.
Mira had been in my room talking about being bi and needing a favor related to that. No details. No names. Just that tone she used when she had already decided I was coming with her. Later, after dinner and Sara’s cold shoulder, I was in bed taking care of the daily count, trying to bleed off enough lust that the system would stop breathing down my neck. My hand was moving. My mind was not on my hand.
It was on Mira’s wording.
What was missing between two women?
A dick.
If she was asking for a favor like that, was she asking me to fill that gap? Stand there while she and some girl used me like borrowed equipment? The thought should have stayed a joke. It didn’t. My body answered first. I came so fast it was embarrassing, and the only witness was the ceiling.
I actually let myself believe it for a minute. That my life had turned into the kind of porn story where a cousin knocks on your door and the next scene is two women and no consequences.
Reality, of course, refused to be a porno.
Whatever had been happening with the women in that house had the system’s fingerprints all over it. Luck had nothing to do with it. The proof was sitting in front of me now in an unfinished building that smelled like dust, rain, and rusted rebar.
Tiffany did not look like a fantasy. She looked like someone watching her life catch fire. Red-rimmed eyes. Nose rubbed raw from sniffling. Shoulders pulled in as if she could make the dress smaller by shrinking herself. That outfit was doing work she didn’t want it to do. If this had been a different night, a different reason, I might have made an idiotic remark about her figure. Reddish-brown hair. Deep brown eyes. Milky skin. A chest that was too much for the neckline, double D at least, cinched over a waist that would have made a weaker man go crazy.
None of that mattered with her face like that.
Yeah. That was not a woman here for sex.
“What am I here for again?” I asked.
“She’s Tiffany. She’s my biology teacher,” Mira said.
Biology. It suited the body, at least on paper. It did not suit the way she kept wiping her eyes with the back of her hand like she was angry at herself for still crying.
I glanced at the dress again. Mira caught it.
“She’s not wearing that out of choice. They’re making her do that.”
“They?”
“Actually…”
Then came the story. I only needed the short version, even if Mira told it like she wanted me to understand every bruise on the way here.
Tiffany used to model. She made a mistake young. Pictures. Videos. The kind of files that never really die once they exist. She got what she could taken down, moved states, started over, became a teacher because a classroom felt farther from that old life than a runway ever would. Two months ago she and Mira started fooling around. Mira initiated. That part, the part I would have paid attention to on any other night, got skipped like Mira knew my brain would go there and refused to feed it.
Two days ago another student in the class, Brett, got hold of the old pictures. Yesterday he showed up at Tiffany’s house and told her to come to this abandoned site dressed like that or the files would go public. Mira offered to come with her. Then she remembered the mall, the bikers, the way I had ended that without asking permission, and she asked me instead.
So here I was.
Not between two women. Not filling some gap in a relationship. Standing in a half-built floor of concrete and exposed steel, in front of about ten confused young guys from Mira’s class. Eighteen. Maybe a year past it. Old enough to vote and still dumb enough to think a teacher’s past was a coupon they could cash.
They looked at me like I was the wrong delivery.
I understood. They had been promised a crying beauty and an empty building. Instead, they got me. Taller than they wanted. Calmer than they liked. The kind of face that made insecure boys jealous before they decided whether to be afraid.
Okay. A little narcissistic. Still true.
“Who the hell are you?” one of them asked. Mood already ruined. He had the posture of somebody who had practiced this conversation in a mirror.
How do you deal with wannabe tough guys?
You show them the difference between talking like a criminal and standing in front of one.
I reached behind my back and pretended to draw from my waistband. The gun came out of inventory instead. The room forgot how to breathe. Somebody’s shoe scraped. Somebody else stopped breathing through their mouth.
“Wh-what the hell? Wh-who are you?”
Fear moved faster than bravery. It always did.
I pointed the gun at the cluster of them and kept my voice level.
“Who’s Brett?”
Nobody answered. Ten seconds of eye contact and betrayal math. They looked at each other like loyalty was a group project and nobody had studied.
I sighed and picked the loud one.
I didn’t shoot near his feet.
I shot him in the foot.
“Aahhhhhh!!!!”
The scream tore through concrete and empty elevator shafts. The others dropped like the floor had vanished. Panic first. Then noise. Then the kind of begging that had not found words yet. One of them tried to run and only made it two steps before the rest of them blocked him by accident, a pile of bodies too scared to be useful.
I put a burst into the ceiling. The panic died into whimpers and wet fabric. One of them did worse than wet himself.
“Ugh.”
Disgusting.
“Now here’s what’s going to happen,” I said, walking a slow half-circle so they all had to turn their heads to keep me in sight. “I’ll pick one of you at random. I’ll pick a spot at random. Could be you. You. Or you.”
I pointed as I spoke. Each of them flinched like the finger itself could fire.
“It could be something you walk away from. Ear. Leg. Hand. Or it could be something you don’t. Heart. Head. Or your balls.”
That last one pulled the loudest sound out of them. Of course it did. What did a man fear the most? Losing his arm or his testicles.
“Now. Who is Brett?”
I already knew. Mira had described him before I came in. This was not information gathering. This was a lesson. There was a worse world than schoolyard blackmail, and they had walked into it wearing the wrong kind of confidence.
Every hand that could still move pointed at the same guy. Even the one clutching his foot pointed, teeth bared around a groan.
Tall. Blond. Tanned. Dressed like a bad boy from a catalog that sold rebellion in sizes. Exactly Mira’s description.
“Stand up, Brett.”
He stood. Legs shaking. He wasn’t stupid. They had expected Tiffany in that dress and an hour they would brag about later. They got me and a gun and a friend screaming on the floor. The conclusion wrote itself across his face.
“I-I’ll delete the pic-pictures and eve-everything. Ju-just do-don’t hurt m-me.”
Mosquito voice. Tears. Snot. I could have pitied him if I wanted to lie to myself. He had gone to a woman’s house with her old life in his pocket and called it a date.
“Raise your hand, Brett.”
He hesitated, sure I was going to put a hole through the palm. I told him I wouldn’t shoot him. The relief on his face was pathetic and immediate, like those five words had rewritten physics. He thrust his left hand up like a kid waiting to be called on. Pity. That was the hand he was going to miss using the most.
“Palm out. High five. Fingers apart.”
He did it. The fingers trembled so hard the gaps kept changing.
“Good boy.”
Tha!!!
“GAAAAAHHHHH!!!!”
“And that’s one middle finger gone.”
I was more pleased with the shot than with the morality of it. Even with my stats, I couldn’t help but be joyous at the fact that I could shoot so accurately.
He screamed long enough for the first boy’s bleeding to slow.
I sat on a concrete slab and looked at the rest of them like this was office work.
“I know what you’re thinking. Why is this guy doing this to us?”
A couple of them actually nodded, tiny, automatic.
“Trust me. I’m not the least bit angry that you tried to blackmail a teacher into the obvious.”
The room flinched anyway. They heard the word “angry” and stopped hearing the rest.
“No,” I said, quieter. “I’m angry because last night I cooked up a fantasy and let myself believe my life was a protagonist’s story.”
Mira being bi. A hot teacher. My brain had gone straight to the gutter and stayed there until the door of this place opened and the smell of dust killed the illusion.
“Then reality showed up.”
I let that sit.
“I’m just venting. I could have walked in, waved this around, taken the files, and left. Instead I looked at you and thought, perfect. A whole room of disappointment I can put my hands on.”
Somebody sobbed. Somebody else whispered a name that might have been God and might have been Mom.
“So. Why not?”
That was the reason I gave them.
The real reason was older. Rox had an associate for this kind of work. A man who always offered the stupidest explanation possible, so the victim would chew on injustice instead of the actual point.
The point was fear.
It worked every time.
I could see it now in the way their eyes had gone empty and bright at once. That *why are we even here* look. In this room, I was worse than whatever they had prayed to. Worse than getting caught. Worse than law.
Fear like that lasted longer than a bruise.
“Now, Brett,” I said, calm enough to make it worse, watching him cry over his ruined hand. “Would you like to feel some hot and intense penetration?”