Sell My Soul Read online

  I didn’t realise I was staring at the back of Carolyn’s head until an elbow reached out to me from the desk at my side. It was Holly from my dorm, kicking back with a smirk as I turned to meet her eyes.

  Her whisper was supposed to be subtle, but I could hear her words with no strain.

  “You’re thinking about her dirty sister, right? Crazy, isn’t it? Thinking of that disgusting filth she got up to. Some people are unreal.”

  My belly lurched all over again, and there, in the middle of the sensation, was a full-on bloom of guilt. I met her words with a shrug.

  “I guess people do what they need to do.”

  Holly laughed a husky little laugh. “Like anyone would need to sell their soul to filthy randoms for sixty days straight. You could offer me ten times what they’re offering and I’d still hold onto my dignity.”

  I didn’t doubt she believed her words. Her eyes burned with disgust as she stared down at the fellow student with the newly-rich sister. Still, Holly wasn’t like me. She was from a comfortable family, two older sisters already graduated, one a doctor and one a pregnant military wife with an online interior design consultancy. Her father was some barrister from London, and her mum had looked like the centre spread model of some upmarket older women’s clothes magazine when she dropped her off at the dorm on day one of campus.

  A girl like Holly wouldn’t understand desperation for financial security, or having a sister in such dire straits that you’d sell your very soul to see them safe.

  “I wouldn’t be so smiley if my older sister was that much of a skanky bitch,” Holly hissed, and the guilt bloomed again. Guilt and distaste of my own.

  Holly was nice, but she was judgmental. Judgmental wasn’t a quality I liked in people, not at all. Being judgmental never makes you a better person than the people you are casting down, it only makes you an asshole.

  Holly, as nice as she seemed on the surface, was definitely straying into asshole territory. I could feel the holier-than-thou bristling under her smile, fingers rigid as they shuffled papers on her desk in prep for our lecture as the professor took his position up front.

  I wondered if she would judge me like that, if and when the time came. I wondered if she’d turn her back on the friendship we’d cultivated over the past few months in favour of sneering and head shaking and calling me a skanky bitch along with anyone else who didn’t live up to her good girl standards.

  Maybe word wouldn’t get out in the same way as it had with Carolyn Lane’s older sister. Maybe I’d be able to keep my earnings hidden, and come up with some convincing reason for a random, unscheduled sixty-day departure from college life.

  Or maybe, just maybe, I wouldn’t give a shit.

  One thing I was sure of, as I sat there with Carolyn’s easy sloping shoulders relaxing back below as she took the lesson in, and Holly’s bristling distaste buzzing to my right all the way through the presentation, was that I’d be finding out if I could.

  If sixty days would see my sister with anything like the chance of a new start, I’d give them gladly. Screw Holly Marsh and the rest of this campus and what they had to say about it.

  I waved her off as soon as we were done with the lecture, hovering back and pretending to dig in my bag for papers as she disappeared on up the corridor. It was instinct that led me to hanging back long enough to slip in behind Carolyn as she headed away from the lecture room. Lunchtime was upon us, and I couldn’t hold back the hope that hanging close by her as she went about her day would lead to even a snippet of insight about the sixty-day gig and how to get on board.

  She too was alone; her friend had gone on ahead before she stepped out of the lecture hall. She headed outdoors as the corridor reached an end, turning right and checking her phone as she strolled along the side wall and out towards the tennis courts. I’d never been a nosey girl, but right then I’d have given my soul to see her messages, let alone set my sister up for a new life. The desperation was horrible, deep and dark and painful. The thrill of maybe finding a way out of this mess made me shiver with cold relief.

  I needed this, whatever it took and however it came. For Phoebe and for me.

  And that’s when a strike of luck found me in the darkness. A random divot of upturned earth took Carolyn by surprise, her attention firmly on her phone, and I was close. So close. Close enough behind that I could reach out on instinct when her flailing feet sent her hands flying into the air. Her phone was tossed as she tumbled, and a dart and a dive saw me catch it in nervous fingers, bouncing it off my chest and clutching tight in a bid to keep it safe from the ground.

  Carolyn stared up in relief as she gathered herself together, and her smile bloomed as she realised her phone was safe.

  I offered her a hand and helped her up, and she took the handset back with a happy sigh.

  “Wow, that was close. You’re a lifesaver. I thought that was a goner.”

  “Lucky I was near enough to catch it,” I said, trying to keep my smile as innocent as possible.

  “My own guardian angel phone saver on my shoulder,” she laughed, and I found myself laughing along with her. “Were you heading to the snack bar?”

  I’d never been to the snack bar on campus. Not once in the previous months. Snacks were a luxury I didn’t entertain. Still, I kept my smile bright, and she took it in the affirmative once she’d finished checking her handset and shoved it in her pocket.

  “Come along with me if you like,” she said. “I’ll grab you a donut as a thank you. Paige, isn’t it? From dorm ten?”

  My heart prickled at the recognition. I had no real idea she knew my name, let alone which dorm I was in.

  “A donut sounds fab,” I replied, and it did. It really did. Just not as fab as finding an in with her older sister’s sixty-day tormentors.

  The snack bar wasn’t far past the tennis courts. Carolyn went up to the counter and grabbed a tray of iced donuts which had my stomach rumbling before she’d even set them down on the table between us. I knew this was my shot at small talk and conversation, bridging a gap I’d never have imagined being able to reach out and bridge between us just a few hours earlier.

  She made it easy.

  She asked me questions about me and my study and my dorm friends, and I answered with the easy smile I’d learnt to paste on so well here. I told her I liked my friends and was loving my study in this place. I told her I wanted to be some kind of occupational therapist in the future, helping people make the best of their life in challenging situations, and it was true, I did. And then I ate a donut, nodding my head in absolute pleasure as the thick white icing danced on my tongue.

  “Good, aren’t they?” she asked, and I exclaimed in a grunt as I finished up my mouthful. “I love the snacks here, they are awesome. My sister loves this place down at the pier, she says they do the best donuts around, but I say these are the best in a ten-mile radius at least.”

  The fates were really lining up for me.

  It made a real change.

  “You should bring her here,” I managed. “See if she changes her mind.”

  She shook her head as she munched on a mouthful of her own. “She’s been here, she was at uni here until a couple of years back.”

  “Studying psychology too?” I asked, and she shook her head again.

  “English lit. She wanted to be a university professor.”

  I could feel my heart pounding. “Sounds great. Did she make it as one?”

  And there it was, the weird flash across the eyes of someone trying to weigh up another person. A stranger. A stranger sharing a donut with a smile on her face.

  “Not exactly,” she said, and leaned in a little. “She was all on track for it. She’d done some placements. But then…”

  I did my absolute best not to react to her shifting composure. It must have worked.

  “You haven’t heard the rumours?” she prompted.

  “I don’t really listen to rumours,” I told her, and usually it was true.

&n
bsp; It seems she believed me. In another time and place I would be glad for the fledgling signs of an actual friend around here. Her eyes were bright and blue and genuine. Her attention all real and all on me.

  “My sister had an opportunity. A weird opportunity,” she told me. “People are talking about it all over these parts. I’m surprised you haven’t heard it all already.”

  “A weird opportunity like a job opportunity?” I quizzed, and the girl opposite me looked totally awkward, even with half a donut in her sticky fingers.

  “Something like that,” she said. “Enough of an opportunity that she doesn’t need to be racing into university lecturing for a while yet.”

  “Sounds interesting,” I said, and my words were entirely genuine this time around.

  She leaned in close, her hair hanging dangerously close to the remaining donuts and their sticky icing. I fought the urge to recoil, the prospect of icing in my own hair sending bristles up my spine. My sticky fingers were already wrapped in the accompanying napkin, my strange urge for cleanliness rearing up high.

  “People are saying she’s a slut,” Carolyn confided. “They say she’s disgusting. A whore. Like she’s given herself to every dirty guy in the country or some shit like that.”

  I waited. Quiet. Didn’t say a word until she took a breath.

  “Sorry,” she continued. “I’m just… sick of it, hearing the whispers. I’m sick of people giving me side eye and thinking I don’t notice. The snidey sniggers, and the bitches thinking I don’t know what they’re talking about. I’m sick of all of it. This place seems so nice when you’re on the good side of everyone. When you’re not, the whole campus turns into a bitch fest.”

  And there it was.

  My opportunity.

  Maybe the only opportunity I’d ever have to find my pitiful salvation.

  But more than that.

  Something real and raw and genuine mirrored back at her in my eyes, I was sure of it.

  Once again, my experiences were proving themselves true all over again. Looks really can be deceptive, and under Carolyn Lane’s easy laughter had been so much more.

  “Sounds like you could do with a friend,” I said.

  Chapter Four

  Brandon

  Day two of sixty and the slip of a girl recovering on the bed looked exhausted. No. More than exhausted. Defeated and defiled in the most intoxicating of ways. Exactly how I wanted her, but not even slightly for my benefit.

  My smirk was at full force as I switched the cameras from live mode onto standby, session over. Her eyes followed me across the room as I retrieved my jacket and shrugged it on. I could feel her stare on me all the way – already burning with that heady mixture of fear and awe I’d come to know so well.

  She wasn’t on my favourites list, this girl. Nowhere close. She was pretty, but that wasn’t enough for a man like me. Her wide blue eyes were expressive but didn’t sing any kind of song to my dirty, dark soul. Her lips were a fuckable enough plump little pout, but I didn’t have any pounding desire to slam my cock between them. I didn’t have the pounding desire to slam my cock into anything of hers, in fact, but I rarely did anymore.

  My actions were increasingly for the pleasure of the patrons behind their private login screens and not for my own, even if the dick in my pants was still standing proud to attention.

  This was a job, pure and simple. A lucrative one.

  Annabel Fisher was merely a generous figure in my bank account, as I was to be a generous figure in hers.

  Our ideas of generous were poles apart, but we’d both be getting what we wanted from this sordid little arrangement when the sixty days ran to the end of their road.

  Our previous sixty-day offering, Rebecca Lane, had been much more to my tastes, even if her dirty mouth running away with her was causing irritation enough to warrant a threatening telephone call. Keep the money, or keep your mouth flapping – which is it going to be, Miss Lane?

  They signed a contract, watertight in both sentiment and conditions if not entirely enforceable by law. Rebecca Lane had signed hers willingly, and she’d be pulling herself into line and sticking to every last word of it if she had even a scrap of sense in that dirty little head of hers.

  The girl on the bed became composed enough to speak, eyes still holding me tight as I ensured the live feeds were disconnected.

  “Why do you like fucking people up for money?” she asked with genuine curiosity beneath her disgust.

  Her naivety was impressive enough that my smirk stayed bold.

  She hadn’t been anything like fucked up for money, not even close to it.

  I’d pinked up her pale white butt cheeks with a decent set of slaps, then stretched that tight little asshole of hers with greedy fingers while telling her what a nasty little slut she was for the people watching. That was all – the total sum of her degradation and boundary pushing.

  I’d be doing a lot worse to her as the weeks went on, and as the weeks went on further still she’d be begging me for more.

  She didn’t know that yet, still rolling around in tepid ignorance on the surface waves. She’d have no idea what was coming, even if I spelled it out to her. Her body was screaming as she gathered herself, but not a single cell in her was screaming in want.

  Not yet.

  I hadn’t ventured near her clit, not even a graze of a finger along her more sensitive petals. Hadn’t given any attention to the sweet pink buds of her nipples, or the tender flesh around them begging for touch. I hadn’t turned her on, not with even the slightest scrap of contact. Hadn’t teased her into enjoying the process at all. But there was method in my madness, and she hadn’t done anything to warrant even a sliver of satisfaction.

  You could call me a selfish asshole and you’d be right, but that wasn’t the reason why I was avoiding tempting this girl’s bodily pleasures at this early stage. Annabel Fisher looked like the scared little mouse I’d expected whenever I entered the room, but there was a simmering edge to her that glared out under the pressure. A defiance that raised my hackles and beamed itself through loud and clear to the seedy voyeurs looking on via our decadently expensive pay-per-minute log-ins.

  I wanted them to witness me drilling the defiance right out of her, and be picturing the joy at doing it for themselves in a few short weeks’ time. Their pockets would grow all the deeper as her barriers crumbled and crashed into oblivion before their eyes.

  “I despise it when people make assumptions,” I told my little pay-day slut. “Ignorance is both mindless and ugly. Do you enjoy waiting your tables on the beachfront?”

  “Obviously not,” she hissed, and there was that defiance in her tone again. “Hence I’m here, earning your disgusting money.”

  I adjusted my jacket until the tailoring fit snug. “I’m just doing my version of a nine to five at the diner, sweetheart. That’s all you are to me. Don’t flatter yourself by thinking this is anything more.”

  Her laugh was bitter, endorphins from the slap and finger fest doing little to float her happy. “People don’t usually have a hard on right the way through a nine to five at the diner.”

  My reply was instant. “They don’t need a hard on through a nine to five at the diner.”

  My eyes narrowed on mouthy little Annabel’s, and she must have seen the true fire glaring back at her, because her pouty lips trembled for a moment, enough that it tickled my pulse. She raised herself onto her elbows as I made for the exit.

  “How long will you be gone?” she asked, and the nerves in her tone made my dick twitch, just a little.

  I gave no reply as I plunged her into darkness and stepped out of the room.

  I took the stairs down at an easy pace, turning the corner at the bottom to find Eric smirking the family smirk at the screen in front of him.

  “Five bids already,” he commented as I stepped up close.

  My eyes scanned the listings. Impressive, but not mind-blowing. The Dubai twins bidding for a long double penetration session in
three weeks’ time. Standard.

  Our elderly oil baron patron with his sadistic entourage bidding on a single tail-whipping session in seven days.

  Two newer members missing the finer point of the exercise and bidding purely on sex with the exact same cash value. Clearly a collaborated effort.

  Their fantasies were seriously lacking, and so were their fund values.

  And the last entry – the corrupt politician from southern Europe, who’d be using the general populous’ money to fund his disgustingly inflated anal fisting bid.

  I couldn’t stand that prick. It wasn’t the brutal anal stretching that I was opposed to, or even his lack of social morals. It was more than that. It was him. The slippery insincerity in his handshake. The sly manner in which he bent even his own pre-agreed rules of conduct.

  I’d intervened in no less than four of his scenes already, and he was on his final warning.

  Maybe this one would be it.

  I clicked accept, then slapped Eric on the back.

  “Good enough for day two.”

  “Just the one click?” he asked as I lit up a cigarette. I stared at him, eye to eye as I took my first decent drag.

  “How many would you have clicked, brother of mine?”

  His shrug conveyed that his conviction was lacking. Small mercies.

  “All of them? The Dubai offer is good, right? And the flogger?” He gestured to the screen. “And the new guys. Surely you want to get them invested?”

  One of these days I would communicate with a slap across that pretty-boy face of his. Praise be that I was the first born, the intelligence genes were certainly allocated in my favour.

  “Sex? You really want to approve sex for five measly grand? What the fuck does that even mean?”

  Another shrug. It made me clench my teeth.

  I’d loosened them enough to take another decent drag on my cigarette before he’d ventured an answer.

  “A taster? Maybe they like it more… straight?”

  My laugh was low. “Straight? You think two corrupt billionaires browsing the dark web for vastly overpriced little English fuck-dolls want it straight? Please tell me you’re not serious.”