Chapter 27: Bargaining with God
The chapel air was cool and still, thick with the ghosts of whispered prayers and extinguished candles. Chantelle hadn’t prayed since she was a girl, forcing her knees onto the hard wooden kneeler in her grandmother’s church. The motions came back with a rusty familiarity. The bend. The clasp of hands. The burn in her thighs.
She didn’t look at the crucified Christ. She looked at the floor, where a slant of red and blue from a stained glass window pooled like a wound on the polished stone.
“Just let him wake up.”
Her voice was a scratch in the silence. It sounded pathetic.
“I won’t go near him again. I’ll sell the store. I’ll move. Whatever. Just… open his eyes. Let his sister take him home. Let him be okay. I’ll take the blame. All of it.”
The words felt hollow, transactional. As if the universe operated on deals. She was offering terms to a void. The memories barged in, unbidden, not of devotion but of degradation.
A month ago. The back room was hot, the air conditioner broken. Jay was on his hands and knees, the G-cup breasts hanging heavy and absurd, slick with sweat. The chastity cage was a smooth, pink curve between his legs, a cruel joke.
“You’re a mess,” she’d said, circling him. She’d been drinking vodka from a plastic cup. “A big, sweaty, fucking mess.”
He’d moaned, pushing his ass back towards her, the black plug she’d installed an hour before still nestled deep.
“You want it?” she’d taunted, sliding the strap-on harness over her hips. The silicone cock was veined, absurdly thick.
“Please, Chantelle. I need it.”
“What do you need?”
“I need you to fuck me. Please. I need to feel it.”
She’d poured the last of the vodka over the fake cock, the liquid clear and shocking in the dim light. “Clean it first. Use that dirty mouth.”
He’d obeyed, lunging forward, taking the head between his lips, his tongue working clumsily, lasciviously. She’d grabbed the back of his head, forcing more of it into his mouth until he gagged. “Suck it like you mean it, you fucking whore.”
When she finally entered him, it was with a single, brutal thrust that drove the air from his lungs in a pained gasp. She’d set a punishing rhythm, the sound of plastic meeting flesh a wet, rhythmic slap. She’d leaned over his back, her mouth at his ear. “You’re nothing but a hole. My hole. You understand? This,” she’d grabbed a handful of the silicone breast and squeezed, “and this,” she’d slapped his ass, “is all you are. Decorated flesh.”
He’d come, screaming into the concrete floor, his body seizing around the invading toy, the untouched cage still firmly locked.
She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to crush the memory. That was the prayer she should be saying. Forgive me for I have sinned. I turned a man’s vulnerability into my own personal abattoir. I got off on his annihilation.
But the words wouldn’t come. Only the deal. Take this from me. Take the want. I’ll give it up.
A door hinge creaked softly at the back of the chapel. Chantelle didn’t turn. Footsteps, hesitant, then moving down the side aisle. She saw Diane’s shadow first, long and distorted, before the woman herself slipped into the pew across from hers. She didn’t kneel. She sat, staring blankly at the altar.
Minutes passed, measured by the soft tick-tock of the unseen clock.
“His fingers moved,” Diane said, her voice sandpapered raw. “Just for a second. Around the rosary.”
Chantelle’s breath hitched. A stupid, traitorous hope flared.
“The doctor says it might not mean anything. Just spinal reflexes. But they’re… cautiously optimistic.” Diane turned her head. Her eyes were caverns. “I told them you left. That you wouldn’t be back.”
Chantelle nodded. “I won’t.”
“What were you to him?” The question wasn’t an accusation now. It was a plea for a map to a country she’d never visited.
“I was the lock,” Chantelle said, the truth leaving her lips flat and cold. “And the key.”
Diane absorbed this, her gaze returning to the crucifix. “He sent me a text. Weeks ago. It was late. It just said, ‘I think I found a place where the pieces fit.’ I thought he meant a job. Or a therapist.” A single, sharp laugh escaped her. “He meant you.”
“The pieces didn’t fit,” Chantelle whispered. “I just hammered them together until something broke.”
Diane stood up. She looked down at Chantelle, her expression unreadable. “If he wakes up… he won’t be yours anymore. You understand that? Whatever debt you think you owe, you pay it by disappearing.”
“I know.”
Diane left, her footsteps fading. The chapel was silent again, save for the ticking. Chantelle’s knees ached. She’d gotten her answer. A twitch of fingers. Cautious optimism. It was more than she deserved.
The deal was struck.
She rose, her joints protesting. She had to go to the store. To face the motion alert. To begin the process of ending it all.
The alley behind “Erotique” was dark, smelling of garbage and wet brick. The security light was out. Burned out, she thought, fumbling with her keys. Or broken.
She unlocked the back door, the familiar click too loud in the silence. The store was a pit of blackness. She reached for the light switch.
A hand closed over her mouth from behind. An arm, like a steel cable, wrapped around her chest, pinning her arms. She kicked back, her heel connecting with a shin. A grunt, hot breath against her ear.
“Scream and I’ll crack your skull on the doorjamb.” The voice was low, garbled. Not someone she knew.
He shoved her forward, into the dark store. She stumbled, falling against a rack of latex dresses. They swayed, whispering. He was on her before she could rise, rolling her onto her back, a knee driven into her stomach. The air left her in a whoosh.
In the faint emergency exit light, she saw a shape. A ski mask. Gloves.
“Where’s the cash?” he growled.
“Register… up front…” she gasped. “Just take it.”
“Already empty.” The knee pressed deeper. “The safe. Where’s the fucking safe?”
“There isn’t one.” It was mostly true. She kept the real money in a floor safe under her desk. He’d never find it.
He backhanded her. The blow snapped her head to the side, filling her vision with white stars. The taste of copper bloomed in her mouth. He grabbed the front of her shirt, ripping it open. Buttons pinged on the floor.
“Then we’ll do this the other way,” he snarled. His hand groped her breast, rough and clinical.
A strange calm settled over Chantelle. This was the punishment. This was the collection. The universe calling in her debt. She went limp beneath him. Let it happen, she thought. Let it be paid.
But as his other hand fumbled with his belt, his knee shifted, knocking against something on the floor. It skittered away with a plastic clatter. The broken plug. The one from the biohazard bag. It must have fallen from her pocket when she’d fled the hospital stairwell.
The man glanced at it, then back at her. In the gloom, his masked face tilted. His breathing changed. Not excitement. Recognition.
He released her abruptly, scrambling back as if her skin had burned him. “Holy shit,” he muttered, his voice losing its gruff disguise. “You’re her. The one from the hospital.”
Chantelle froze, propped on her elbows.
He stood up, backing away towards the door. “Fuck this. Fuck this crazy shit.” He turned and ran, crashing out the back door into the alley. Silence rushed back in.
She lay there, half-naked on the cold floor, the ripped fabric of her shirt gaping. The adrenaline drained, leaving a terrible, hollow emptiness. He hadn’t run from the police. He’d run from her. From the story that clung to her. The story of the woman and the poisoned man.
She pushed herself up. Her face throbbed. She walked, unsteady, to the front of the store. In the dark, the neon from the street outside painted the displays in garish streaks of pink and blue. She stopped before the glass case where the high-end toys were kept. Her reflection stared back—a pale, bruised ghost with wild eyes.
Her hand went to the lock. It was keyed. She unlocked it, the glass door swinging open with a sigh. Her fingers bypassed the jeweled vibrators, the delicate lace harnesses. They closed around something heavy, cool, and familiar. The demonstrator model. The one she’d used on him. She hadn’t cleaned it since that last time.
She took it out. Carried it to the shipping table in the back room. The same table. She didn’t turn on the light.
She unfastened her jeans, pushed them down her hips along with her underwear. The vinyl of the table was cold against her bare thighs. She leaned forward, bracing her hands on its surface. She looked at the dildo in her hand, glinting dully in the streetlight filtering through the high window.
This was the prayer now. The only one left.
She didn’t bother with lube. The dry, silicone head pressed against her, a blunt, unforgiving intrusion. She pushed back, forcing it, a sharp, tearing burn making her gasp. This was not pleasure. This was an excavation. A penance.
She fucked herself with it, hard and fast, each thrust a punishment. The sound was crude, wet, and lonely in the dark room. Her mind supplied the missing pieces: the smell of his sweat, the sound of his choked sobs, the feeling of absolute dominion. She had loved it. She had loved reducing him. She had loved the power more than she had ever loved him.
“I’m sorry,” she grunted, driving the toy deeper, her body protesting. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” The words were a mantra, lost in the rhythmic slap of plastic against skin.
She came with a violent, shuddering convulsion that had nothing to do with pleasure and everything to do with expulsion—a raw, physical vomiting of guilt. She collapsed onto the table, the toy slipping from her, clattering to the floor.
She lay there, spent, shaking. The cold vinyl stuck to her cheek. From the floor, her phone lit up with a new notification. She reached for it, her arm leaden.
It was the hospital. A number, not a name.
Her thumb hovered. The deal was struck. She had promised to disappear.
Her thumb slid across the screen. She put the phone to her ear. She said nothing. She just listened.
And on the other end, through the static of distance and machines, she heard it. Not a voice. A sound. A low, rattling, painful, beautiful, human cough.
The cough dissolved into a wet, ragged inhale. Then a voice, shredded and thin, wire-scraped from disuse. “Chantelle.”
Her name. Not a question. A statement carved from pain.
She couldn’t speak. Her throat was sealed shut. She pressed the phone harder to her ear, as if she could crawl through the signal.
“Come.” A pause filled with struggling breath. “Hospital. Now.”
“You’re awake.” The words were dust.
“We need to talk.” The line went dead.
The silence in the back room was absolute, more profound than before. The object on the floor glistened. The torn fabric of her shirt hung open. The side of her face pulsed where he’d hit her. None of it mattered. The deal was null. Void. The cosmos was a cruel comedian, and she was the punchline.
She moved. Function. Zipped her jeans. Found a clean black tank top in a staff cubbyhole. She avoided the mirror. The drive was a blur of streaking streetlights and the hollow boom of the freeway under her tires. She didn’t think. Thinking was a minefield. She just acted, a responding machine to his call.
The ICU waiting area was empty. The night-shift nurse at the station glanced up, her eyes narrowing at Chantelle’s disheveled hair, the faint red mark on her cheek. “He’s not accepting visitors. Family only.”
“He called me.”
The nurse studied her for a long moment, then sighed, relenting. “Room four. Keep it brief. He’s very weak.”
The corridor was a tunnel of fluorescent light and low alarms. Room four. The door was ajar. She pushed it open.
The room was dim, lit only by the monitors casting a greenish glow. He was propped up, a giant against the piled pillows. The massive bulk of him was still there, but it seemed deflated, tied down by tubes and wires. An oxygen cannula bisected his face. His eyes were open. They found her instantly, dark and lucid and utterly exhausted.
Diane was not there. Her purse was gone from the chair. A half-filled water pitcher with a bent straw was the only sign she’d ever been present.
“Close the door,” he said. The voice was still a ruin, but it held a familiar command.
She did. The click was final. She stood just inside, her back against the cool wood, arms crossed over her chest. A defense. “Your sister…”
“Gone.” He swallowed with visible effort. “I sent her home. Told her I needed to sleep.”
“You shouldn’t be alone.”
“I’m not.” He stared at her, his gaze traveling from her boots, up her legs, over the tank top, settling on the mark on her face. “What happened?”
“Nothing. It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me.” He tried to shift, winced, and abandoned the effort. “Come here.”
She didn’t want to. The space between them was a chasm she had pledged to never cross again. Her feet moved anyway. She stopped beside the bed, within reach. The smell of him was different now—antiseptic, starch, the coppery hint of blood—overlaying the deeper scent of his skin she still knew.
“You look like hell,” he breathed.
“You died,” she said, the words tearing out of her. “You died on a concrete floor because of a piece of toxic shit I sold you. You think I give a fuck about my face?”
He was silent for a long time, just breathing the oxygenated air. His hand, a large paw threaded with an IV line, lay on the sheet. He lifted it, a slow, heavy motion, and let it fall back down. An invitation.
“I remember… fragments,” he said, each word measured. “The pain. Like glass inside. The lights. Your voice. You were screaming.”
“I was calling 911.”
“You were screaming my name.” He corrected her softly. “Not ‘customer.’ Not ‘hey you.’ My name.”
Chantelle looked away, at the monitor tracing the jagged mountain range of his heartbeat. “Diane said I should disappear. I promised I would. I was in the chapel making deals with God when you…”
“Fuck Diane.” The vehemence sparked a coughing fit. He rode it out, his face flushing, his hand clenching the sheet. When it passed, his eyes were watering, but blazing. “And fuck your deals. You don’t get to be the martyr. You don’t get to vanish and leave me here alone with this… this scared, fucking thing inside me that only you know.”
“It almost killed you, Jay.”
“It is me!” The monitor beeped a faster rhythm. He lowered his voice, a strained, intense rasp. “That night… before. You remember?”
She remembered. God, she remembered.
He’d come to the store just before closing, vibrating with a strange, desperate energy. He’d locked the door behind him, flipped the sign. “I need to not be me for a while.”
In the back, he didn’t wait for her direction. He shucked his jeans and boxers, his thick cock already half-hard. He presented her with the chastity cage, its faux-pink folds gleaming. “Put it on me. Lock it.”
His hands were trembling. She took the device, her fingers cool and steady. She guided his cock and balls through the silicone ring, the anatomy so familiar to her now. She felt the heat of him, the throb of his pulse against her palm as she pressed the cage closed. The tiny lock clicked with a sound of terrible finality.
“Now the rest,” he’d begged.
She’d helped him into the G-cup breasts, tightening the harness around his broad back. She zipped him into a tight black dress that strained over his shoulders. The transformation was always unsettling, a collision of monumental masculinity and caricatured femininity. It aroused her, this grotesque theater. It always had.
“On the table,” she’d ordered.
He’d obeyed, climbing onto the shipping table, presenting his ass already prepped and glistening with lube. She’d used the biggest plug from the glass case, a obsidian black thing with a flared base. She’d worked it into him slowly, watching the muscles of his back jump and clench. “Take it, you greedy slut,” she’d murmured, and he’d moaned, pushing back to sheathe it fully.
She’d stood before him then, unbuckling her own belt. “Get off the table. On your knees.”
He’d knelt on the concrete, the dress pooling around him, the silicone breasts bulging from the neckline. She’d freed her own cunt, already wet. “Eat me,” she’d said, grabbing a fistful of his wig. “Make me come with that filthy mouth of yours.”
He’d buried his face between her legs with a starving hunger. His tongue was rough, insistent, lapping at her folds, sucking her clit with a desperation that was about more than pleasure. It was worship. It was annihilation. She came quickly, gripping his head, shuddering as she rode his face.
“Stand up. Bend over the table.”
He was sobbing openly now, reduced to pure need. She hadn’t even taken the plug out. She’d just unfastened the straps of the harness she wore, freeing the thick, realistic dildo. She’d lined it up beneath the plug’s base and pushed. The double penetration made him scream, a raw, animal sound of overwhelming sensation. She’d fucked him like that, pistoning into his ass while the plug shifted and pressed inside him, a brutal fullness.
“You’re nothing,” she’d chanted, driving into him. “You’re a hole. A dressed-up, pretty hole. My hole. You come when I say you can come.”
And he had, screaming again, his locked-up cock straining uselessly against its pink cage, violent orgasm ripped from him purely from the brutal fucking. He’d collapsed forward, a massive, weeping, overdressed ruin on the vinyl tabletop.
“I remember,” she whispered in the hospital room, the ghost of that power chilling her. “I remember what I did to you.”
“You gave me what I needed,” he countered, his voice gaining a shred of strength. “You saw the worst, the weakest, the most pathetic fucking cracks in me and you didn’t look away. You poured yourself into them.”
“That’s not love, Jay. That’s damage.”
“It’s the only thing I’ve got!” He lunged forward, a movement halted by wires, a gasp of pain. “Don’t you get it? Diane wants a brother who fixes cars and goes to ballgames. The world wants a man who fucks women and wears a tool belt. That man is a ghost. He aches. He hates himself. The thing you fucked on that table… the thing that got poisoned… that’s real. That’s the only real thing I am.”
Tears cut tracks through the stubble on his cheeks. They weren’t quiet tears. They were heaving, ugly things that shook his shoulders.
“I choose you.” He said it like a vow forged in sepsis and coma. “You. The woman who sells the poison and administers the cure. You don’t get to disappear. You don’t get to leave me here to pretend to be that ghost again.”
He was breaking apart in front of her. The massive, fragile architecture of him was collapsing inward. And he was handing her the wreckage, insisting she hold it.
She took the final step to the bed. She didn’t take his hand. She placed her palm flat on the center of his chest, over the rough hospital gown, feeling the frantic, vital drumbeat of his heart against her skin. It was a claim. A terrible, irreversible acceptance.
“Okay,” she said, the word the barest exhalation.
The monitor beeped. His breathing began to slow, syncopating with hers. The choice was made. The path back was closed. There was only the poisoned, undeniable truth ahead, and they would walk into it together.