Eyes Like Sky And Coal And Moonlight by Cat Rambo

confused.
    “ What you call a naked woman that you find on a river bank?” Trevor said. “It sounds like a bad joke. She’s not a Heather or Brittany or Tiffany.”
    “ Mara. Marina.” Ivory said, leaning forward. The girl did not respond. “Minnie.”
    And Minnie with its mouse-like connotations stuck.
    I found my reaction to her unsettling. I’ve worked hard at eliminating reactions to women. Too much potential trouble. Too much potential scandal. Here in Thailand it wouldn’t matter perhaps. Back home it would. Children in my family are raised by nannies, governesses, tutors. Strictly vetted of course but a few oddities slip through here and there. Mine was Ms. Andersen. Tall, blonde, Danish. She had certain similarities to Ivory but was more magazine beautiful. She started teaching me when I was twelve, and that was the year I learned my cock had a mind of its own. There she’d be, talking about basic algebra, and under my desk my cock was shouting LISTEN TO ME while I sat there trying to will it down. After a while I started carrying a book bag around that I could swing in front of my crotch as a concealing shield when necessary.
    This would have been all right, I think, except for her sadistic tendencies. Some sort of quirk. I found her out in the back yard killing mice in the humane trap that my tenderhearted aunt had insisted we use. It was early morning and she didn’t think anyone else was around. She’d reach her hand in, take out a mouse, and then squeeze, her face expressionless. I watched her kill six of them that way, my cock as hard and rigid as a ruler. And when she raised her hand to her mouth to lick off a smear of blood, I came, right there in my pants. First orgasm.
    That experience left its traces. It’s why I don’t date much. My family would kill me if I caused a scandal. But I know that I’ve got a taste for it. A taste for pain, courtesy of ice princess Andersen. I just keep it hidden away, like a sorcerer keeping his heart in a box, safe from threat.
    Minnie was so passive. Ivory treated her like a doll, dressed her, brought her to meals, dragged her with us to sit in the shade and watch the ocean. “She keeps away the vendors,” she said. “Have you noticed?”
    And it was true. None of them came near her. Usually sitting there we’d be besieged by fruit sellers, masseuses, men carrying monkeys, hawks, and snakes, asking if we wanted our pictures taken with the animals. Instead we sat at the bar, drinking shots of lao kao and playing Connect 4 on the battered plastic sets that seem the staple of every Thai beach bar.
    “ You’ve been here, what, a month?” Ivory asked me.
    “ Two, three weeks,” I said.
    “ What tourist things have you done?”
    I shrugged. “Went down to Lampang and saw an elephant paint. That’s about it.”
    “ We should do tourist things,” she said. The lao kao mixed with whatever else she was on had taken hold. Her eyes glittered with a frantic edge. “See the kick boxers, the dancers. Show your little friend around.”
    “ She’s not my little friend,” I said. I didn’t look at Minnie because I knew she’d be staring at me. “And she’s a local, anyhow.”
    Ivory tilted her head to drain her shot glass to the dregs and slammed it down hard enough to crack it. “No,” she said. “She’s not a local.”

    The kick boxers are all show, or so an Australian man once told me. He said the displays put on for the tourists, it’s just costumes and a few flashy, inauthentic moves. But they looked real enough to me, moved faster, quicker than my clumsy American self ever will. They were followed by the dancers, who wore clothing that looked too tight to dance in and six inch gilded fingernails. Their faces were heavily made up, painted masks.
    Minnie danced with them. The women eyed her but made way as she stepped down from where she had been sitting with us. She moved with them, keeping her body as straight and upright as theirs, bending only