Identity Theft
CHAPTER 3
by Dr. Carlo Lombardi
Adam clasped Chelsie’s shoulders and pawed her all along her length. He brazenly cupped her left bubbie through her blouse, pausing to knead it, working his fingers over her ribs to the middle of her, down over her stomach. He tugged at the hem of her cotton blouse to raise it, baring her navel and lean, tan belly.
“Like what you see?” he asked his roomies, feeling her heat.
“Fuck, dude,” said Jake. “She’s lettin’ ya do that?”
Adam chuckled again. “Not exactly. The satellite program I tapped into isn’t letting her stop me.”
Pete shuffled in his seat, uncomfortable. Was all this wrong? Even if he had his own reasons to detest Chelsie, using this bizarre device to control her struck him as sinking to her level, and certainly taking advantage of the situation to cop feels off her… well, that wasn’t even legal, was it?
If Jake or Camille shared any of his misgivings, though, they sure didn’t act it. Jake smiled on eagerly, holding his palms in front of him as if gearing up to pat them together like a dimwitted child. More reserved, Camille nursed another Ultra-Light and studied Adam and Chelsie with dispassion, a shrink evaluating test subjects through one-way glass. But an approving smile played over her lips as well.
Now transfixed, Adam was upping the ante on stoic young Chelsie. He pressed his nostrils against the soft crook where her neck netted the tendon of her shoulder and slid his other forearm around her lower chest in an embrace of kinds, just under her muttony coconuts. Having already worked her blouse up over her bellybutton, Adam now started playing with the waist of her trim shorts. He seemed to be trying to snake his fingers under them—get in her pants, as it were—but they were so form-fitting he couldn’t even manage to shoe-horn his fingertips between them and her slender lower stomach. Giving up, he instead plied his hand down her lap, over one hipbone to the high thigh-hole on the outside front of her shorts. He stopped to give her sheer, tanned drumstick some searching, probing gropes, making her wobble as he wound around from the front of her upper leg to her inner thigh. Then, as Pete followed along with a rising tide of adrenaline cocktailed from fear and excitement, Adam played his way to the delight between Chelsie’s quivering legs, guarded from his touch only by the stripling crotch of her wispy shorts and presumably the lining of her panties.
As Adam’s fingers glided over Miss Brookhaven’s luscious quim, Jake—forgetting propriety—clutched his own groin to realign the swelling mouse in his trousers.
But no sooner had Adam’s fingers acquired their summit than Chelsie bucked wildly. She put a girlish elbow to Adam’s sternum and wriggled with such vigor she broke Adam’s hold on her. The front of his pants, Pete saw, were wet. Ew.
Chelsie turned on Adam.
“Ew!” she sneered. “Don’t touch me there! And stop rubbing your dick all over my ass, you nasty pervert!”
She comforted herself, pouting wetly, by looking back over her own shoulder and squeezing her rump, maybe hoping to wipe up the spot Adam had dribbled on her shorts there. She acted oblivious to the effect this display would have on Adam and the other men in the room but of course, it revved Adam’s engine into the redline. Once again, Chelsie recoiled from her surroundings with a twisted sneer, as though she’d been tossed in a weevil-infested dungeon.
“So gross. I feel like the girl in the well in that scary movie.” She gulped, anxious. “With the lotion.” She hugged herself and brought her naked knees together chastely.
“Fuck me runnin’, man,” barked Jake, sitting up in alarm while still playing with his own stiffness, “Did it wear off?”
Adam studied the girl.
“I don’t think so. I think I just broke one of the rules.”
“A rule? There’s rules?”
“Yeah. I said. I’ve only got level three access. I guess a level three you can’t feel her up down there.” He shrugged. “Live and learn.”
“But does that mean the phone isn’t working anymore?” hollered Pete, suddenly seeing expulsion, and maybe courtrooms and gray bars, in his future. “Shit. We shouldn’t have done this.”
“Chill out, chief,” said the man in charge. “Phone should still work.” He cleared his throat. “Chelsie, relax and put your arms down.” Theatrically. Maybe he too was scared that the spell had been broken. And indeed Chelsie tensed and hesitated, searching for some interior resolve to fight against the impulse to obey.
But she eventually returned her hands sullenly to her sides. A sigh of relief went through the room.
“There. Problem solved,” pronounced Adam. Pete looked at his hands. They were shaking.
“Cam,” said Pete, and he gestured at the Marlboro Camille was snuffing out in a spotless ashtray. “Can I get one of those?”
“Thought you quit,” replied Camille, acquiescing.
Pete tapped the Ultra-Light awkwardly, out of practice. “Me, too. But suddenly I’m a nervous wreck.”
Camille lit Pete up and smiled. “Yeah, I hear that,” she chuckled gratefully.
Having established that the spell hadn’t loosened its snare on Chelsie and so feeling emboldened, Adam closed the distance with his prey once more. “Okay. We just saw what’s against the rules,” said he. “Let’s find out what’s not against ‘em, shall we?”
Grinning, he shimmied the shoulders of Chelsie’s blouse to the middle of her upper arms to expose her sheer bra and the grapefruity bouncing shape of her perky cheerleader funbags beneath. As the bottom of her shirt had already been pulled up to her ribs and her diminutive shorts gave the impression of being undergarments anyway, there was already starting to be a look of advanced undress about her. Her will to resist, so explosive just a moment before, had completely left her.
“See? A rulebreak usually just jars the system for a minute. It takes a few violations in quick succession to disrupt the routine entirely. I think.” He cleared his throat. “Remember, I’ve never done this before.”
Jake slapped himself on the thighs and stood. “I can’t stand it,” he said. “I gotta get in on this.”
Adam backed away, shrugging and gesturing toward impassive Chelsie to indicate his willingness to surrender her.
“Have at it,” he told Jake. “Just remember: rules. If she gets antsy, you gotta dial it back a minute.” With that he stepped back away from the melee like a referee, meanwhile fingering the Bluetooth, hamming it up. “Auxiliary menu,” he whispered into the device, but then literally fell back into a shadow and at the same time retreated from Pete’s range of hearing. Pete could make out individual orders from out of the dark, but not their detail or meaning.
Jake stepped up to Chelsie, surprisingly calm, almost affable.
“Chelsie Alders Brookhaven,” he said. Slapped hands. Rubbing. “How’s tricks over at Delta Delta Delta?”
He bounced on the thrice-repeated word, affecting a typical airhead blonde. “Can I help’ya help’ya help’ya?”
Chelsie winced into her shoulders. She knew how angry he was, and Pete suspected, without having heard what Adam had said into the Bluetooth, that he’d done something to knock her off her balance the way he’d done before. Or in some new way, Pete mused. He’d already seen oddities this afternoon that he’d never imagined possible. That he’d never imagined at all.
His heart raced in his own chest the way he imagined her heart raced in hers. In fact, he was sure of it.
“You remember me?” asked Jake.
“Yes,” whispered Chelsie, sadly supplicant in a way Pete recognized from his own once-upon-a-time schoolyard humiliations. “What do you want? I’m sorry for what I did to you.”
Her pretense of remorse didn’t convince Pete; she rang that same nervous note, the spongy voice of hollow apology, Pete had always conjured in the playground when surrounded by bullies.
“You and your knuckle-dragging gorilla of a boyfriend, you two brought me a load of grief for no goddamn reason. Why’d you do that?”
Chelsie shrank further into herself, her elbows locked past straight, to back angles. A vacant, childish sob took her lower lip. Pete saw that her eyes were watering up with tears.
God, he thought. She’s not gonna wet herself or anything, is she?
“Fancy fucking brat, remember how you used to egg that shit on?”
Jake tensed his ample body formidably, dwarfing Chelsie, who suddenly seemed kittenishly frail.
“What’d you get out of that? Huh, bitch?”
At the crescendo of his accusation, his voice surged and with a jolt of the arms and a lunge of the shoulders he feigned a punch at defenseless Chelsie. She cringed, unstruck. Not a gentlemanly gesture to say the least, Pete thought, even as another part wondered whether Jake might be spinning out of control, and yet another stewed silently, secretly, that Chelsie really deserved as much.
Jake’s chest bellowed as he hyperventilated with rage.
“Auxiliary menu,” heard Pete. He turned to see Adam rise back out of the shadows and storm at a hunch to the sofa, hollering into his Bluetooth. “Mood mod calm one, repeat, mood mod calm one.” Adam gathered himself busily on the sofa and ignored Pete, transfixed as he was in a matter of supreme urgency. “Physical resistance cleared, point two five level.”
At this Chelsie gave Jake’s shoulders a lazy push as if worried about wet nails. She turned toward Pete and Camille; her eyes narrowed and Pete saw into them; a lake in summer, overflown by circling birds. Meanwhile a distracting ringing rose in his ears, the sort he used to get as a teenager after masturbating. It seemed to be coming from Adam’s Bluetooth. Perhaps, Pete mused, the hypnotic apparatus of the Influence Phone had a spillover effect. Didn’t cellphones leak stray rays?
“It’s getting a little out of control,” Adam, who had been undivided in his attention to whatever technical matter, confessed to Pete. “But it’ll turn out kosher. Um. Pretty sure. The phone signal is bleeding out, I think. It’s affecting Jake, but I can only control Chelsie. I’ve got to try and bring it down through her.”
He continued.
“Chelsie, say, ‘I know I’m guilty. Punish me any way you want.’”
Gulping, Chelsie duly recited the provided text verbatim, her memory impeccable in a way Pete could scarcely credit the poor girl with. Not in her apprehensive, distracted state. Pete suspected the Influence Phone of feeding the line to her somehow. But her voice trembled as though she were cold; the trembling seemed to really be hers.
“I know I’m guilty,” she mewled. “Punish me any way you want.”
Then she heard what she’d said, coming out of her own mouth but beyond her will, and blanched. She had just given herself away. She was so scared. Pete felt this through the ringing in his ears.
“Now go …” Adam dictated into the Bluetooth, but Chelsie interrupted him.
“You can punish me however you want, but please, have mercy.”
She flinched like a squirrel in a busy street now. Abject.
At the same time Jake reached out and clutched Chelsie’s neck tightly, squeezing her papery gullet. Pete looked in Jake’s narrowed, delirium-fueled eyes; he saw nothing familiar. Chelsie gasped and raised up on her toes.
“PleeEE – guh,” pled she, her plea cut as Jake cinched the air in her throat.
“Oh, shit. Here we go,” said Pete, wincing. “I don’t know how to stop this. I just hope by calming her down I can get her to calm him down.”
Her lips parted and she tensed in the urgently vacant way someone with food lodged in her throat would, fighting her obstructed windpipe for a breath.
“Look at that, though,” Adam added, pointing. “Her hands are still at her side. Guess choking ain’t against the rules.”
Yes, that was delightful news. Pete sure was relieved that Adam could manage to coax up intellectual curiosity about his experiment, seeing as how he and Pete were about to become accomplices to assault, if not worse. If not the worst thing.
By degrees, though, Jake started to relax. It was a process that took too long for comfort—Pete looked on nervously as Chelsie’s face started to flush red with dammed blood and she quaked pitifully, desperate to draw oxygen—but eventually the tension drained from him and he released her to a grateful gasp. Then he laid his hands softly on her trembling shoulders.
She tried to turn her head further but it was turned as far as it could go.
“Guh.”
A tear spilled down her cheek.
“I accept any penalty you choose,” she sobbed. “Only please have mercy.”
“No, no,” Jake stammered. He caressed her cheek. Suddenly the mood had changed and Pete felt horrible for the weeping girl—a glance at Camille found that she’d reacted likewise; sitting up at attention next to Adam on the couch and smoking her cigarette past the filter, her brow turned up in a look of compassion.
“Fuck,” said Adam. He reached under the couch, pulled out a laptop and started plugging cables into it. “We got side effects.”