Alex Rodriguez, 20 year old leaving his internship job

It was honestly a long time before I even thought about that weird dream again. The following morning was a Friday, classes were more lax, but my shift after them was as full as ever. I was an intern at a hospital, working as a psychologist, helping patients cope with their situation and giving them a friendly ear and shoulder. Thankfully I wasn’t in the covid wing, which went for the more experienced psychologists, I just got the normal, less critical patients to speak with. I really liked it this way, gave me time to build up experience and I mostly wasn’t at risk of getting covid.

It was near the exit of the hospital that I finally remembered about that weird dream I had the other night, with the contract and the devil. It felt silly, but why not? I got to a corner and whispered to myself:

“I want to have a friend right now.” Nothing seemed to change about reality, no one poofed out of nowhere by my side, seems like it was really just a dream. Bummer.

I was just crossing the door out of the hospital when a woman shouted:

“Hey, wait up!”

She was running towards me and was waving a paper around. When she finally got to me, she stopped for a second to take a breather, handed me the paper and said:

“Here, you’re supposed to have this. Thank god I got to you before you left, or else who knows how I’d be able to give it to you.” As she was standing before me catching her breath, I got to take a better look at her. She was wearing a plaid red and black shirt over a white tank top, ripped black jeans and black boots. She had wild brown hair wrapped in messy a bun, a pair of expressive blue eyes, a big smile in her panting mouth and a pair of cute B cup breasts going up and down with her breath.

She looked at me expectantly, then looked at the paper and then back at me. I finally looked at what was it she had handed me.

It was an official looking paper, the borders were outlined with fancy white and blue geometric details, with golden lines tracing all the sides of the paper, making a large square around the text. As for the text itself, it read: “Certificate of ownership.” Had I won something? “This certificate declares for all due purposes that Alyssa Sinclair is now property of Alexander Rodriguez.” And it had her signature at the bottom.

“What is this?” I asked, dumbfounded.

“It says right there, right? Yeah, it’s here. You now own me!” she said, pointing at the title of the certificate.

Wait, what?!

“Wait, what?!”

“It says right here on the tin: you, as of now, own a new friend! You got a new friend, I’m yours now, you own me, you can do anything you want with me.” Then she playfully whispered, “Unless you want to break me, huh? And of course, we have to remain friends, if we’re no longer friends, you wouldn’t have a friend anymore, right?”

My brain just short circuited. This cute girl just showed up out of nowhere saying I owned her? Like when someone gets a prize for something? Maybe she was delirious, or had a concussion or something.

“Hey John.” I called my friend John, a junior doctor that was passing by.

“Oh hey, what’s up?”

“I think this girl isn’t feeling well, she’s saying stuff that doesn’t make sense.” I gestured to Alyssa, who looked confused.

“Are you feeling any headaches? Feeling dizzy?” John asked her.

“No, I feel fine, I don’t know what Alex is going on about, it all sounded normal to me.”

“She’s saying that I own her or something.” At that, John stopped checking in on Alyssa and turned to me.

“Well yeah, she’s your property. You’re holding her certificate, aren’t you?”

“That’s what I’m telling him! I don’t think he’s listening.”

“Yeah, he does that sometimes, goes up to his own world for a bit before he comes back down to the rest of us on Earth.”

My brain was short circuiting even more. Was he in on this?

“Wait, are you in on this? Is this an elaborate prank or something?”

“You’re the one not making sense now, man. Looks like this shift was harder on you than you thought, just go outside, get some air and freshen up, cool your head. I have to go, I have patients to check up on now. And you” he then looked to Alyssa “take care of your owner alright? Let me know if he needs any help.”

“You got it.” And she made a mock salute gesture as John was leaving.

I looked at the certificate in my hand. That dream was real after all. Not only that, but that devil had interpreted “having a friend” literally, meaning I literally owned a person now. What the hell (hehe) was he even trying to pull with that?

“Ready to go, owner of mine? Where to now?”

Well, I did have to cool my head off, and I knew just the way to do it.

***

I took a huge mouthful of ice cream. The extremely sweet taste and the incredibly strong brain freeze I got right after were all the distraction I needed to get out of the world and go to my own little frozen corner of the universe.

“You were right, these are incredible.” Alyssa said, across the table from me.

I slowly released the breath that I was holding while savoring the wonders of a well made ice cream and opened my eyes. We were seated in a little café that I liked to visit on my off hours from work, we had walked there and the sunset was still painting the sky in mixtures of orange and pink.

Alyssa was sitting across the table from me, she was eating a slice of cake with a cup of coffee.

“By the way, I don’t think I’ve really introduced myself to you yet. My name is Alyssa, you probably would have seen it on the card already, but all my friends call me Aly, so you can call me Aly too, if you want.” She introduced herself with a shy, barely contained smile sitting or her face, as if waiting to see if I’d call her by her nickname and actually consider her a friend.

“So, Aly, “I started, after a bit of hesitation “I’m your owner now?”

Calling her by the nickname seemed to relieve her of a tension I hadn’t noticed was there until it was gone. The fact I called her something her friends call her by seemed to confirm our friendship for Aly. She was all smiles now, full of energy, she could barely be contained in that chair.

“Yup! Just like you might own a toy, or a dog, I’m your property and am at your mercy now.” She just said all those things with such a genuine smile on her face, like she was truly happy to sit there and answer any question I might ask.

“And how does this owning thing work exactly? Don’t you have a job or a family to go back to?”

“Actually I work doing art commissions independently, so as long as I keep my laptop, I’m good. You’re going to let me keep it, right?” she made a little pout and gave me a playful whine. I wasn’t going to say no anyway, but this whole bit made me laugh and she smiled alongside me.

“As for family, it actually has been just me and my boyfriend for a while now, just the two of us stuck in a small apartment because of the pandemic, a change of scenery might actually be nice. I’m sure he won’t mind once I show him the certificate.”

‘Just like everyone else seems to not mind.’ I thought. In the hospital, in the coffee shop, everywhere she goes she proudly proclaims to be my property and people just accepted it like it was the most logical thing in the world.

“But you asked an important question,” this made me pipe up, brought me down from my torrent of thoughts. “how does owning me work? Well, it works like owning most things really, you can take me around, ask me to do things, deliver things for you, stuff like that.”

“So I can ask you to do anything and you’d just do it?”

“If I could, yeah”

“Without thinking twice?”

“Not. A. Thought.” She punctuated each word with an eyebrow raise.

“If I asked you to take your shirt off right now?”

“Do you want me to?” she asked playfully, biting her lip.

“Let’s keep it hypothetical for now.” I answered as calmly as I could. Which wasn’t much. I couldn’t stop the tent that was growing in my pants, but I hoped she couldn’t see it from across the table. Or notice my slight blush. “What I meant is something out of the ordinary. Like, if I asked you to go steal that convenience store across the street, would you do it?”

“In a heartbeat, but you might not like the consequences.” This made me pause for a second. It was the first time she actually said something she’d do might upset me.

“How so?”

“Well, you might get arrested for stealing a store.”

“Arrested?! But it’d be you doing it!”

“It would be you using me to do it. Once it all gets sorted out, it would have been you that gave me the order to do it. You own me and I’m your thing, so the responsibility of it is on you.”

I surely didn’t expect that. It kinda made sense in a roundabout way though, it would be like someone taking a pet out for a walk and it making a mess out of somewhere. The responsibility of it all would clearly fall on the owner of the pet. I guess the same logic, weird as it sounded, applied here too.

“So that means I could just ask for you to do anything and you’d do it on the spot?”

She sucked on the tip of her spoon for a while, considering her answer.

“Well… I would do the store and the shirt thing after letting you know what you would be getting into, because you are my owner and your word is an order.” She dropped her spoon in her drink, got up while planting her hands on the table and looked me right in the eyes. “But I would feel hesitant doing something that’d seriously hurt myself, or other people, or stuff like that. That’s not something a friend would ask another friend to do, right? Maybe I even consider ending our friendship right there if you ask me to do something very bad. And then, the certificate wouldn’t hold anymore, so I could leave, since we would’ve stopped being friends and that meant you wouldn’t own me anymore.”

She plopped back down to her chair, but it felt like that was me falling down. Up until now, Aly had been all smiles and sweetness, but then she presented her limits in such a strong manner, made me think if it wasn’t the devil putting words in her mouth, making sure some sort of clauses of our deal were clear. This was sobering, in a way. Until now it felt like some sort of dream, with a beautiful girl following me around and vowing to serve me, but then she’d lay down her limits and no-go’s, it made me realize this wasn’t just another power fantasy, I’d have to take care of her, same as someone might take care of a prized possession or a pet.

I turn to her with a solemn look and find her excitedly showing the certificate to an old lady who had come to get her afternoon coffee. The old lady was pinching Aly’s cheek and exclaiming how cute she was and how lucky I was for ending up the owner of someone like that.

“Ok, time to go.” I quickly say.

Both women turn to me at the same time, Aly with her cheek mid pinching.

“Already?! But you haven’t even finished your ice cream.”

I had to come up with an excuse on the spot to make the situation any less weird.

“It was a very stressful and tiring day at work for me, do you mind if we just call this off and go home to rest?” I get up as fast as I can and I feel my arms and legs aching, needing a rest. Maybe this wasn’t as much as an excuse as I thought it’d be.

“You got it boss.” Then she turned to the old lady. “Bye Janine, it was nice to meet you!”

“Oh, you too honey.” She waves goodbye to both of us. “If you weren’t her owner and she wasn’t your property, I think you’d make a cute couple.”

Aly gave her an ‘awwwn’ but I just waved back and went for my car. This had already been a full day and this whole ownership situation wasn’t making it any shorter. I needed to fall down in my bed and relax.