The st day was a spa day. Ornette was lying on her stomach receiving a couple’s massage at the same time as Varner, except two girls worked on him while only one girl worked on Ornette. It made sense. His body was so rge if only one girl worked on him, she’d never get his whole body rubbed down on her own.

  Ornette tried to enjoy it, but her body felt brittle. The masseuse hardly touched her, and Ornette kept wincing and pulling away.

  “Have you had a lot of damage to your nervous system?” the masseuse asked kindly.

  “Some,” Ornette admitted.

  “Perhaps I could take you for a different treatment. Perhaps a mud wrap?” she suggested.

  Varner was quick to pull the plug on any treatment that would take Ornette away from his side. “I only get her for today, so please don’t take her anywhere.” He said it nicely, but he didn’t mean it nicely.

  “Sir, I can’t do a mud wrap treatment in here,” the masseuse ventured to say.

  “Then she doesn’t get a mud wrap treatment,” he answered firmly.

  The masseuse averted her eyes and tried to rub Ornette’s left hand, causing her to flinch every three seconds.

  The girl opened her mouth to say something, but Ornette put a warning finger to her lips, and the masseuse stopped whatever she was going to say.

  They had lunch between spa treatments. It was a sad for her. It was an oversized burger for him. Ornette picked at the sad.

  Varner tried to ask her questions more than once, but they were seated next to a very noisy fountain (a luxury item on Venus), and she begged off answering him, saying that she couldn’t hear him.

  After lunch, they had manicures and pedicures. That was a pce where they could talk. He got to ask her his questions then.

  “What was your st owner like?”

  “I can’t remember,” she answered vaguely.

  “Why not?”

  “I always throw away all my memories of the st man when I get a new owner. I can never go back to the old owner. It doesn’t matter how I feel about him. Thinking about him is a waste of time. If he was nicer than my current owner, it does no good to pine for days long past. If he was abusive, the faster I put him out of my mind, the better,” she expined like she was reading a recording.

  “Who was your best owner?” he continued like he was reading a script because he was.

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Who was your worst owner?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Will you remember me?” he asked, perhaps going off-script.

  “No.”

  “Will you remember Desmond?”

  “No. I’ve already forgotten about both of you several times. I really focus on the owner I have, and I keep getting new ones on this show. Tomorrow, I’ll get a new owner again, so there isn’t much point in getting attached.”

  His expression fell.

  What had he been hoping for?

  Varner was shooed away once it was time for Ornette to start her hair treatments. Ornette was dressed up by professionals for her dinner with Varner. Ideally, he shouldn’t be around for the final parts of the process.

  Dinner was a vish affair. Obviously, she was getting the best food, venue, clothes, and jewelry the show had to offer, but Ornette acted like a statue.

  Varner didn’t seem to be aware that anything was wrong. “Wouldn’t you like to live like this all the time?” he asked brazenly, funting what he had in front of her nose.

  She resisted the urge to tell him the truth. She had had all the wealth he was giving her a taste of. It just hadn’t sted and no one could convince her that someone had the trick for making wealth st forever. It wouldn’t.

  She smiled and agreed in her sideways way. “It’s all so beautiful.”

  “Where were you raised?” he asked, trying to make a conversation for the cameras to film, and talking about her was much better than talking about him.

  She rolled her eyes. “What happened to your questions about sexual positions and how many men I’ve gone down on?”

  “Are those questions better?”

  “No. No questions are best. You need to understand that models are not often wined and dined in this way. That’s not to say we don’t eat good food or go to nice pces. We do. It’s just that when I go out with an owner, I’m there to do something for him. I’m there to tell the people we’re with how wonderful he is. I’m there to help him navigate difficult meetings. I’m there to say nothing and be as much of a person as the helocarrier we rode in on. I’m not supposed to be a human with thoughts and feelings and a past and a future. You’re humanizing me, and I don’t like it. I’m here to do a job, and that job cannot be to arrange my past masters into categories to entertain you. You must know that I’ve signed non-disclosure agreements. If this night was about pleasing me, I’d be allowed to finish eating and then I’d be returned to the dormitory early so I could get some sleep.”

  “You haven’t slept well while you’ve been in my house?” he asked crankily like that meant his home wasn’t luxurious and she’d just accused him of having an uncomfortable home on television.

  “No. I haven’t,” she said, without backing down.

  “You could have asked for a pill or some tea,” he offered, trying to soften his tone.

  “I could not have,” she replied drowsily and could not stop herself from yawning.

  His eyes went wide. He dropped his napkin frostily. “Am I that boring?”

  “I’m that tired. I haven’t had a day off in weeks. You know that. You know the schedule, and st week was especially taxing, getting hauled all over Venus in the wind to visit factories. I’m very tired. If you want to treat me like I’m your horse, at this point, you’re whipping me until I bleed.”

  “How dare you? I have given you a beautiful opportunity,” he breathed like he was one heartbeat away from storming off angrily.

  Ornette hoped he would. She hoped he’d leave in an angry huff, and The Coordinator would escort her from the property.

  She didn’t answer, and he sat there, stunned.

  “You really don’t appreciate this?” he hissed.

  Ornette couldn’t have said if something violent was going to happen at that moment. It could go either way.

  Varner pulled the earpiece out of his ear and pulled the microphone off his chest. In a quick motion, he threw them away. Ornette wasn’t wearing a microphone, but there was one hidden in the flowers in the middle of the table, and Varner pulled that one free and chucked it away as well.

  “Off the record, what is your fucking problem?” he spat at her. The look in his eyes was wild. “I have been nothing but nice to you. I’ve even been nice to you when you deserved far less. You shouldn’t even be here. You’re here because I’m being nice, and you’re such a child of hell that you can’t appreciate it?”

  “Yes,” Ornette agreed. “You’ve absolutely given your kindness to the wrong woman. You should have eliminated me instead of Cndestine. She liked you. She wanted you to like her. It’s a shame that you cared so little for her affection.”

  “Everyone pretends to love me,” he said, in what felt like a rare moment of insight, “but they love my money. You don’t even love that. You don’t love this opportunity. You don’t love the drinks, you don’t love the food, you don’t love the room, the setting… The only thing you seemed to love was throwing yourself headfirst off my father’s tower with a bungee cord attached to your feet. What is wrong with you exactly?”

  She gred at him. “What do you have pnned for after dinner?”

  “Dress up. Don’t you models love doing dress up?”

  “You weren’t going to dress me up like Goldilocks, were you?” she asked suspiciously.

  “The show is called Goldilocks Zone. It’s supposed to be an honor for…”

  He kept talking, but Ornette had figured it out. “You want to dress me up like a little girl, and you want to dress up like Papa Bear and chase me?”

  When she said it like that out loud, he seemed to realize that it was too te to hide his secret. He had thrown away his microphone, but Ornette had heard him clearly. He had a thing for scared little girls. If they pyed dress-up, those scenes wouldn’t be aired with the show. They already had plenty of footage. The game was to reward him for being a good boy. Even if Ornette was in her forties, it didn’t change his fetish. He liked little girls.

  “Do the little girls calm down when you tell them you won’t hurt them?” she asked quietly.

  “There haven’t been any little girls,” he denied stiffly.

  “Hmph,” Ornette clucked her tongue at him disbelievingly. “If you want my opinion,” she said, leaning forward to add a little intimacy to their conversation. “When the time comes, you should bid on Starling. That is the contestant you should crown as the woman who is too hot. She’s from the Church of Voynich, and even though she sold herself as a model with Sleeping Beauty Inc., the people from that church take their church with them wherever they go. That is what you need to do if you want to look like a hero at the end of this. If you want to look cssy, you have to set her free and give up on keeping a model for yourself. There is no other way.” Ornette stood up.

  His voice went friendly. “Wait, I think I gave you the wrong impression. It’s not gross to like putting on a bear costume.”

  “No. It isn’t.”

  “It’s not gross to like reenacting stories for dramatic purposes,” he stressed.

  “It’s fine,” Ornette agreed.

  “Then why are you looking at me like that?”

  “Because I was once a little girl of fifteen who was desperate, who sold herself thoughtlessly thinking that her life was already sve bor, so what would be the difference? If I sold myself through an agency, I’d at least have jewelry. I’d at least have delicious food and get to visit nice pces. I was wrong. It has been a poor trade.” Ornette stood up. “I know I’m still doing it. I sold myself, so I’m still doing it, but I’m not doing it thinking that it’s okay or that I’m okay. And when I sit here with you and I remember what fragments of myself I can remember, I think I made a mistake. I should have stayed where I was. I should have fallen into the stars and let the stars take me. And you are everything I hate.”

  She walked out.

  “Where are you going?” he shouted to her retreating back.

  “Shock me if you don’t like it,” she yelled back as she went into the house.

  She almost ran headfirst into The Coordinator. “Get me out of here. I’m going back to the dormitory.”

  “You can’t walk out on Papa Bear.”

  “If you take me back to the dorms right now, I’ll sign a non-disclosure agreement regarding what he said to me when he removed his microphone. If you don’t, I’ll tell everyone what he said.”

  Ornette was bluffing. What Varner had said to her was nothing, but that didn’t change her impression of him or the fact that he made her skin crawl… so much so that her whole body was running from him. If she was a betting woman, and she was, she bet that The Coordinator knew a lot more about Varner than she did. She bet he had secrets that absolutely should not come out, and The Coordinator would do what he could to protect him. She stared at him with steel in her eyes and waited for his answer.

  “Shit,” The Coordinator rushed Ornette down the steps without another word and out to a helocarrier that was waiting on standby.

  That response answered her questions nicely. Varner was as dangerous as she suspected.

  Ornette didn’t know the helocarrier pilot, but she got in the front seat with him.

  “I’ll send your clothes,” The Coordinator told her before he closed the door to the helocarrier and gave the signal for them to lift off.

  Ornette did not envy The Coordinator his job. Not at all. He had to go back and face a raging bear in a man’s body. Ornette did not envy him at all.

  ____________

  Author's Notes: Thanks for reading! You guys never write me back. It sucks writing author's notes for you. See you on Thursday!