Salvage

You blink.

“Sorry, could you repeat that?” you say.

“Do you want to fuck me in the ass,” Penelope says.

You and Penelope have been flirting really really hard for the past few hours. Actually, flirting tends to involve a degree of implicitness, as you understand it, and you’ve left that far behind: she’s explicitly said she wants to suck your cock. She’s explicitly said she wants you to not only fuck her, but cum in her. She’s explicitly said she wants to masturbate while she watches you fuck other women. She’s explicitly said she wants to lick your cum out of other women.

This feels different.

“Uh… sure? If you’re offering? I mean, I’ve… I’ve never done it, but… I mean, wouldn’t we need lube? And… and you don’t mean right here, right now, do you?” You gesture at the wreckage of your burnt-out apartment and your ruined bed. “…do you?”

“The important part is that you’re okay with not doing it,” she says. “Even if you want to. Right?”

You blink again.

“Of course I am. Do you… do you not want to do it?”

She doesn’t answer.

“Penelope… I don’t want you to do anything that you don’t want to,” you tell her.

Of course, the kink-sharing Attribute means that she will want to do anything that you want to, but that’s something you’re gonna have to explain to her.

She pulls out her phone and shows you a picture. You’re not quite sure what you’re looking at, although it’s very colorful.

“My dad liked to make art,” she says. “A lot of abstract stuff. What things are, not what they look like. What you feel, not what you see. And when I was nine, he asked me if I wanted to do it with him, on the same canvas. And this painting was the very first one we made together.”

You have no idea what this has to do with anal, but you assume Penelope’s going somewhere with this.

She takes a deep breath.

“You don’t have to pretend it’s great,” she says. “I was nine. But it was really fun to make art with my dad, and after he died, this one was very important to me. And when I told Eric no, I didn’t want him to fuck me in the ass, he put his foot through it.”

Her voice is steady, but her eyes are wet.

“Also,” she says, “this was supposed to be ‘and this is why I understand how important it is to keep souvenirs from your parents who’ve died’, but halfway through I realized it was an Eric story, but I couldn’t stop telling it, or it wouldn’t make any sense.”

You hug her. “So that’s when you called the divorce lawyer?”

She snorts. “God, I wish. No, it was another year of that bullshit. I’d do something wrong – no, dammit, not wrong, something he didn’t like – and he’d throw a fucking tantrum, and lose control and break things. And then when he calmed down he’d be so upset with himself, he’d cry and cry and cry, and he’d swear he loved me, and I’d feel so bad, and I’d apologize and apologize and apologize. No, Eric, I’m sorry, I know you didn’t mean to smash my diploma, you just couldn’t help yourself. I know I shouldn’t have humiliated you. It’s my fault. I’m just not ready to do a gangbang with a bunch of strangers from online.”

Your eyes are wide. You’ve read Penelope’s profile in the Multiplier, but you didn’t look at what it said about her sexual experience.

“Um,” you say cautiously, “I know this isn’t the point, but did you actually –”

She shakes her head. “Do a gangbang? No, after I apologized for kicking them out and making him melt down, he didn’t bring it up again. Probably would have eventually.” She looks you in the eye. “I know I said I’d do anything for you, but… you don’t want me to fuck a bunch of other guys, do you?”

“Absolutely not,” you reassure her. She gives you a faint smile.

“Anyway,” she says, “I don’t wanna keep talking about Eric. We’ve got more of your stuff to rescue. Kitchen?”

“Sure,” you say, and walk five feet into the apartment’s kitchen space.

For the next fifteen minutes, while you and Penelope sort through the remains of your kitchenware and your canned goods, she tells you about her dad – how he and her mom met, how they founded the company together, how he got cancer, and how she’s sure he would have liked you. Eventually she mentions his art again.

“Oh, um, that reminds me,” you say. “I know you don’t want to keep talking about Eric, but… if it wasn’t smashing the painting, and it wasn’t setting up the gangbang, and he never hit you, then… what did it?”

She sighs. “He took me to a tattoo parlor. It was a surprise. He wanted me to have ‘Eric and Penny Forever’ on my ass. Right about here.” She undoes her jeans, pulls them down, and lifts her panties to show you her bare ass. There’s no tattoo, although there are a bunch of freckles.

You’ve already seen her completely naked via the Multiplier, but that’s something else you’re gonna need to explain to her. Not that you’re complaining about this demonstration.

“And I was trying to figure out how to tell him no, I didn’t want that,” she continues as she pulls her jeans back up. “Then his beeper went off. There was some crisis at his job and they needed him right away, and thank god for that because I don’t know what I would’ve done if he’d stayed.”

You offer her your hand to hold, and she takes it, interlacing her fingers with yours.

“So I’m kneeling on the bench table thing with my pants down, and I don’t think I’ve ever told you this, but I’m afraid of needles. Eric knew that, by the way. Charles – he was the tattoo artist, he’s in his sixties, he’s really nice – he comes over to do the, the surface drawing thing, and the second he touches me, I immediately start crying. Like, heavy, heavy crying. Sobbing and wailing and thrashing and going ‘no, no, no’. And Charles says, Penny, I’m not gonna do this if you don’t want me to. And I tell him, no, I have to, because it’ll make Eric upset if I don’t. And Charles says, that sounds abusive.”

Her voice is trembling, and tears are flowing down her cheeks. It genuinely hurts to watch her like this.

“Do you need to stop?” you ask her gently.

“No,” she says. “I need to finish.” She squeezes her eyes shut for a moment. “So Charles and me, we have the basic talk about abuse – I tell him Eric never ever hits me, and he asks, well, what would be so terrible about Eric getting upset, and I tell him about the tantrums and the stuff that gets wrecked and how Eric is so so so emotionally destroyed afterwards and it hurts me to see him like that and to know that I did it and it’s my fault. And Charles asks me… does Eric ever smash his own stuff? And I realized… no. Sometimes he smashes our stuff, and usually he smashes my stuff, but he never ever does anything to his stuff.”

“Ah,” you say.

“And… fuck. That’s a lot simpler, isn’t it,” she says, wincing. “I could’ve just said a friend asked me that question, and that would’ve been enough for you to understand.”

“Yeah, but would that have been as cathartic?”

She sniffles. “I guess not. Anyway, I tried arguing a bit, and Charles asked me what was my most prized possession that I still had. That hadn’t been wrecked. And I told him it was my flute. And he said, I predict that when Eric finds out you didn’t get the tattoo, he’ll smash the flute. So the next day I went back with a bag of broken flute parts, and Charles helped me find a lawyer.”

You shake your head. “God, no wonder you were afraid of me if I was reminding you of him!”

Her grip tightens on your fingers. “You are nothing like him. He was a manipulative controlling piece of shit. Fucking twisting my feelings. After I told him it was over, he threw another tantrum and smashed a hole in the wall with a chair, and when he calmed down, I asked him, aren’t you going to cry now?, and he said he didn’t need to any more.”

Oh fuck. Explaining to Penelope about the Multiplier might be a lot more difficult than you had anticipated.

“You are so much better than him in every possible way,” she says. “In fact… here.”

She pulls out her phone and gives it to you. “First six digits of pi, plus first six digits of e, mod ten for each pair,” she says. “I trust you.”

You hand the phone back. “Mine is working fine, thanks.”

Her mouth twitches. “Look in the photo gallery,” she says. “Pictures from earlier today.” She gives you the phone again.

You shrug, and type in 585977.

There are three selfies with today’s date in the gallery app. They’re of a woman sitting on a toilet in a stall. In the most recent one, the woman’s shirt is lifted up, concealing her face, but revealing her pale blue bra, which has been tugged aside to expose half the nipple of a very freckled left tit. The picture before that is the same, except the bra is properly concealing what it’s supposed to conceal. In the one before that, the shirt is in its normal position and Penelope’s face is fully visible. She looks very excited and eager.

“I wanted to make you a nude,” she says. “Maybe even a pic of me fingering myself. But there were other people in the bathroom, so the most I could do was move my shirt and bra a bit. And then the smelly lady got into the next stall.”

“Well,” you say, “thank you for wanting to show me your tits and pussy. And for showing me your bare ass.”

She grins, then lifts up her shirt, grabs the hem with her teeth, and uses both hands to pull down her bra and expose her left tit for a few seconds. Then she puts everything back. “You’re welcome,” she says. You laugh.

“Anyway,” she says, “let’s get these bins down to the car, and then… one more load?”

You look at the detritus of your life and assess how much of it isn’t ruined. “Yeah, that sounds right,” you say.

Ten minutes later, you and Penelope have stashed the full bins in her car, and are climbing back up to the top floor. She looks like something’s bothering her.

“What’s wrong?” you ask her, as the two of you return to the apartment.

“This is gonna seem weird, but… it’s way too bright outside.”

“Uh? What?”

“It should be past sunset by now.” She hesitates. “Shouldn’t it?”

When Callie’s time perception got fucked up earlier today, you were willing to grant that maybe it wasn’t connected to the Multiplier. But now it’s affecting Penelope.

You wonder if Sigrid has noticed anything weird. Or Tammy and Molly, for that matter.

“What time do you think it is?” you ask.

She shrugs. “I thought it was maybe seven? Seven fifteen?”

You pull out your phone and check, then show it to her. “It’s not even five.”

She stares at it, and then checks her own phone. “The fuck?” she says. Then she shrugs again. “Well… at least we’re not late for dinner. I was starting to wonder why you hadn’t called Tammy to explain.”

You take the lids off the storage bins and begin filling them with the stuff that’s maybe saveable – the shirts that you’d written off because they stink of smoke, the books that are scorched.

Then your phone rings.