Lessons

With all things required of her done, Delilah changed into her regular comfy clothes as though it were any other day where she had no evening plans. Her laptop was there, sitting untouched—not exactly the cause of all this, but very much the reason her necklace was listening to her. If Delilah had the language, or if her parents hadn't pulled her from sex-ed class, she might have had a stronger grasp of her own desires beyond the binary of dominant and submissive. Opening the document in her word processor, she realized that her grasp on erotic language at the time was basic at best. Working past the cringe crawling up her spine and the desire to start editing the unfinished piece, she started running down the list. The morning was there—that was over and done with. The blackmailer was going to start out slow: the belt, the outfit, the choker. Then it was going to start escalating. Outright sadism wasn't on the menu except with the scene in the park. "Why the hell did I write that?" was a phrase that left her mouth every twenty minutes or so. It was all the sins of a new writer: enthusiasm over experience, leaps in logic to justify particular scenes at the cost of narrative cohesion, characters with all the emotional depth of a puddle.

The climax—or what currently was the climax—was only half finished. She had vague memories of the intention, however. She wanted it to be like *Eyes Wide Shut*, but something more natural: a big bonfire in the distance, miles of trees in any given direction with no hope of escape. The cherry on top was the crowd. A group of other dominants only vaguely visible from the light cast from the bonfire, casting hungry predatory shadows.This was what the story danced around. Public play was part of the story, the blackmailer sending out the self insert into increasing risky situations. But something about the attention from this crowd, when she wrote a narrative left turn to feed a hunger she couldn't feed on her own or soothe with any rational explanation. But it wasn't going to get to that point if she could help it. "Let's see if this works," she said, highlighting everything in blue that will follow this day. "And delete," she said, her fingers going to Work, re-doing the ending so that when she wakes up the next morning, the money would be in her account and a promise that she would never be bothered again.

Setting the laptop aside for the moment, she had to tend to a hunger of an entirely explainable kind. She left her spite grocies to sit for a while longer.Boiling what's left of her rice and heating one of the chicken patties in the microwave, the whirring noise offering a nice soundtrack to the neighbors' nightly conflict she has the joy of hearing. She let the garlic-flavored protein sit in her mouth, the carbs of the rice filling her stomach. It was food, it was warm, and that was more than enough. Settling in, she was actually very grateful to have a bed instead of a mattress on the floor. Flinging the covers over her she let the sandman body slam her into unconsciousness. She slept for a full eight hours without waking for the first time since she moved in. When she awoke, she found neither riches nor apology. Instead:

"Motherfucker."

---

SUNY WolfJaw's business building looked like a concrete bunker cone designed by someone who hated students. Delilah climbed the stairs to the third floor and slipped into Professor Hartwell's lecture hall ten minutes late. Not the first time this happened nor would it likely be the last time.

Hartwell was at the board, drawing something involving curves and risk assessment. She had her terrible haircut—the one everyone pretended not to notice, a mullet that had gone wrong in the 80s and never been corrected—and her voice carried the particular exhaustion of someone who had been a hippie, then a corporate raider, and was now trying to find balance in academia. A blessing and a curse to her students depending on whether they needed her for something like a recommendation letter or be on time for office hours.

"...and so we see that the Black-Scholes model assumes constant volatility, which, as anyone who's actually traded knows, is complete nonsense..."

Delilah slid into a seat in the back row, Hartwell could easily disappear into her own world up there, next to a girl with cherry-red hair who was typing furiously on a laptop. The girl looked up, smiled vaguely, and went back to her notes. She looked familiar—maybe from the library? Maybe from the coffee shop? She had that kind of face. Pleasant. Forgettable. The kind of face that belonged to someone named Sarah or Emily or something equally generic.

"Hey," the girl whispered. "You're Delilah, right? Who did the presentation on wage inflation?"

"Yeah," Delilah whispered back, opening her notebook. The signal in this place was terrible, so a lot of students used old-fashioned pen and paper. She briefly mused that it probably meant the choker was not able to phone home, or however it sent out the tracking data.

"I'm Abigail. I think we have Hartwell's office hours together sometimes? I never go. She's always 'finding herself' and cancelling."

"Yeah," Delilah said. "She's... inconsistent."

Abigail laughed. It was a nice laugh. Normal. "Tell me about it. Hey, are you okay? You look kind of... flushed."

"I'm fine," Delilah lied. "Just hungover."

"Rough night?"

"You could say that."

Abigail nodded sympathetically and turned back to her notes, and Delilah tried to focus on the lecture, on the mathematics of derivatives and risk management, on the complex formulas that would supposedly prepare her for a career in an industry that had probably collapsed by now anyway.

But her mind was elsewhere. Instead, her hands had traced a web in blue ink. Rewriting her story hadn't worked out like she hoped; in hindsight, Delilah realized it was not going to be that simple. So now she would have to beat the narrative to the punch, get to the ending before the other characters reach their destinations. The bile in her stomach churned, and it wasn't the coffee. It was the rock-solid realization that she really had to play the blackmailer's game. She built her theory around three pillars. First: access. It would have to be easy for whoever this was to get around the apartment without attracting attention—not discounting the possibility that all of her stories were in play, in which case she would need a cross and some garlic to ward off the coven of vampires undoubtedly sleeping somewhere in the mountains. Second: technology, which should have been money, but the choker mattered because of its components, not the pendant itself. Third: motive. Who would want to own her aside from the metaphysics of the story compelling them? The idea that she could be desired on her own merit flew over her head unconsidered. The first considered and first discarded was her landlord, Mr. Midwell. He had access and still had enough wealth to sustain himself in his maddening state for the rest of his life. But he was afraid of anything that ran on electricity, so he was out. There was Jane—Delilah put the name down under Midwell—who was the new assistant to her crazy landlord. Delilah guessed she had access but no motive, and technology was unknown. Sebastian could fit the bill, but why? They had been friends since middle school, so there wasn't a lot of good reason there. It could be her neighbor; that one shut-in had express deliveries with fancy computer company labels delivered to her apartment, but Delilah barely knew her name, so that was out too. She also wasn't delusional enough to think it was either Riley or Dominique, though the idea did bring some extra color to her cheek. Then her phone was buzzing in her pocket.

Delilah shifted in her seat.

"I don't know what you're talking about," Delilah typed under the desk.

Hartwell droned on about volatility smiles. The redhead—Abigail—scribbled notes about something. Delilah sat in the back row, her heart hammering against her ribs, a chill spreading down the back of her neck. Hartwell wrote equations on the board, and Abigail took notes, and the world continued spinning like nothing had changed.

Delilah sat there, pretending the world was just as normal as it always was, and took notes that spiraled into a web of names and ideas while her phone buzzed with the warnings from a stranger who had somehow become the most important person in her life. Delilah adjusted her sweater, feeling more vulnerable, and wondered how she was going to make it through the rest of the day.