The Taxi That Rewrites Fate - 9
"Uuuunngh! Mmph!"
The fingers kept stirring my pussy with a lewd squelch, utterly indifferent to whether I'd climaxed or not. A tongue still wound around me as if it hadn't gotten its fill. And a hand was guiding mine toward that cock and those balls.
Ba-dump. Ba-dump.
As a man, handling somebody else's balls wasn't an experience I'd ever been keen on. But laying my palm on something that pulsed hot and eager, diligently brewing the seed it meant to rape me with... that was pouring oil on a body already burning with heat.
"Haa... haa..."
(Your lips taste sweet, and so do your hands. This time, give me the kiss yourself.)
The face pressed to mine drew back a little, and the fingers toying with my pussy slipped away. Then, from that slight remove, she looked at me dead-on and spoke: this time, I was to do the kissing myself. She would wait right there, lips parted — so hurry up, and kiss her.
'Ah... no. No way.'
Pleasure taken from you by force and pleasure you produce through your own active choice are two different animals — and I was hopelessly weak to the latter. To be precise, I crumbled at the mere act of being asked to perform, in a moment when the mood had been assembled this perfectly.
Squelch... chup.
But my body betrayed my will yet again. The instant the words reached me from that face beside mine, I was leaning in close, gently suckling her soft lower lip once, then her upper lip once, then opening my mouth to match her parted one and swallowing it whole, slipping my tongue inside to twirl it round and round.
'I'd only ever done this in my imagination.'
I truly had meant it to be nothing more than a kiss. But instinct whispered that going further would keep the heat of the moment alive, and my uselessly good brain sided with instinct, petitioning my reason — when else in your life will you ever get to kiss like this? — and so this kiss was born.
Chuuup... chup.
Our tongues entwined. Damp and clinging, they slipped back and forth between her mouth and mine with no boundary at all, as if the two had become one; and the hand that had at some point climbed to my back, though it bore no force whatsoever, had become a perfect restraint — one I could not escape this kiss from.
"Haa... haa..."
The moment I pulled my head back for breath, her lips released me, meek and obliging. But no sooner had I gulped down air than she opened wide like a fish sighting feed and dove straight back onto my mouth. Reduced to tender prey, I was kissed again, tongues stirred together, robbed of even a moment's rest.
'I think I'm losing my mind.'
This wasn't the stalker's method — shoving me into a corner through raw coercion. It was harmonious, careful, choreographed like something meant to say: let's enjoy this together, each of us minding the other.
(Shall I do a little more for you?)
Kindness soaked the voice — but the essence was unchanged. A male that seized its female by force, and a male that danced a courtship dance to prove how badly it craved her: that was the whole difference.
'Lose, and the outcome's identical anyway.'
Gazing up at that expressionless face — which had somehow, somewhere along the way, grown dear to me — I squeezed my eyes shut. Losing would be hellish on this end too. A stalker who'd make me her complete and utter sex slave; a taxi driver who'd turn me into a spare part of the cab, some thing kept around to vent her lust on. However meek a sheep's fleece she wore, defeat would be every bit as brutal — and the three-year slave contract, settling early, just as horrific. Being scooped up like a kidnap victim and forced into a slave's life I never asked for was, flatly, too much by any measure.
(Judging by your expression, I see.)
(You were weighing what happens should you lose — or thinking the slave contract is simply too cruel. Yes?)
I flinched.
With my head turned aside and my eyes closed beneath that steady stare, the taxi driver spoke, as though she understood precisely why I was refusing. Her read was so dead-on it startled me anew — but I had no intention of opening my heart any further. Getting swept up in a fleeting feeling into something I'd regret later was not permitted. Winning came first and last, so I fought to nail my resolve down.
(Then how about we compromise?)
"What?"
(A slave contract is, at bottom, a bribe paid to me. Naturally, the more your value rises, the roomier and kinder a contract you can command.)
(So rather than three years, let's haggle over the days instead. All you need do is keep me company on the weekends.)
(Five days in seven, you live exactly as you always have. Only the weekends pass as I please. Think of it as a kind of date.)
She murmured it all in that low, flowing voice, hugging me snug against her. And the contents were staggering on several levels — because the terms had shifted from sex slave to something like a lover: all I had to do was see her on weekends.
"Th... that's—what even—"
(I want you far too much.)
(So, so that I never earn your resentment, I will bind us in something like a lover's contract, win your heart across those three years, and after them keep this love going, on and on and on.)
(My goal is for this taxi to be remembered not as 'the horrific taxi I was abducted onto' but as 'the taxi where, abducted, I still came away with a lover.')
(Do my previous victims trouble you? The women I am currently seeing number exactly two. I will sever ties with both. Consider them fully released.)
(From now on, I will look at you alone.)
"Haa..."
A declaration — nothing less than a confession — delivered with a gaze that never so much as wavered. My head, working perfectly fine only moments ago, overheated and stopped turning altogether; my ears flared hot in an instant and, I was certain, had gone scarlet. Walking out of the taxi I'd boarded like an abduction victim with a lover... Living well even after a defeat, the way one might with a stalker — that much I could fathom. But a confession offensive, mid-ghost-story? Never once crossed my mind. And never once did I expect it to slam home, hook and sinker, into a heart already melted to mush by a lover's kiss. I was flustered beyond all sense.
(In this ghost story: if I win, I gain you.)
(If you win, you gain me.)
(And if this ghost story ends in a draw — is it not only natural that we gain each other?)
While I sat there agonizing far longer than I should have, the words kept coming, as if to drive a wedge deeper into my hesitating heart. Not the taking of another, but each of us gaining the other — the very notion sank... so impossibly deep into me.
'How is she this devastatingly good at confessing...'
That a being I'd pegged as a pervert not five minutes ago could confess with such grave sincerity was lethally effective. Because I had never imagined the possibility, I had no defense prepared for it either.
(Hmm... a mind as sharp as yours might object that a sex-slave contract leaves me doing whatever I please.)
(Then how does a lover's contract sound? We meet on weekends, enjoy ourselves, and end the night in bed — or we meet at your home or mine, play, have fun, and only join together when we both want to.)
(In effect: no bindings whatsoever. We would simply meet, and play, and enjoy each other.)
"Then what the hell do you get out of it?"
With confession piling upon confession and the restraints loosening further and further, curiosity had slowly begun to gnaw at me. Give away this much — what exactly was left for the taxi driver to gain? Harvesting emotions from the defeated was the kaui's staple, and slaking lust on a beautiful woman her stated purpose; give me this much rope and she'd walk away with nothing...
(I have money to spare. My ability is one that even the Company cannot replace.)
(Through Fate Conversion, this taxi can trade places with a Company vehicle in any other country — which is to say, it can teleport.)
(There is almost nothing I lack. The only thing missing is something to draw my emotions out.)
(And that something — the thing I have longed for — is you.)
The face that had held its distance came close again. It stopped just before mine — near enough to feel each other's breath — and she went on.
(Even while being kidnapped, you understood your captor, empathized with her, and deliberately chose to be taken so as to raise your own value — that judgment of yours.)
(The wisdom to sift truth from lie and unearth the exit condition: vacation.)
(And a face I could look at forever without once tiring.)
(For a woman any kaui would covet — if I wished to have not just your body but your heart, I judged the first priority was to begin from something like a lover's bond, speaking honestly, without a single lie.)
Her ability, the motive behind her conduct, even the naked truth that she wanted me — she poured it all out. Not a moment ago, this had been beyond imagining. I had believed the kaui's way was the stalker's way: bind me, collar me, press me to the very end. That she would come for me instead by unbinding me — by ensuring I felt no discomfort whatsoever — in a manner utterly opposite to the stalker's, I could not have dreamed.
"Hold on, just..."
Against words so kind, so gentle, my body and mind, paradoxically, began to settle. It wasn't that I'd vowed to win. It was that the future on offer was so unreasonably good that my mind insisted on cooling its head and thinking it through — and that insistence briefly smothered the chaos in body and spirit alike.
'If I accept that, here and now...'
Eyes closed, I pictured a future in which I took the lover's contract. The first three years would be peaceful. Between a taxi driver on the Company's payroll and me, holder of an Invitation, the odds of colliding with anything truly unreasonable were vanishingly small. We were both flush with funds and both capable of compromise; we might squabble, but it would never spread into anything serious. We'd hold hands, take what we wanted, do what we wanted, and live happily.
'Happy. For a little while.'
...But at year nine, when the great calamity that had swallowed even the stalker came around, everything would change. I didn't know how the entity called the Company might shift, but presumably, if she had the means, the driver would take me — her lover — and my family along with her. And I would never manage any preparation of my own. My information came from the bad endings of other ghost stories — their epilogues, strictly speaking — and this monstrous power of seizing the future only proved its worth if I kept getting tangled in new ghost stories. And knowing the driver's nature, she would keep me clear of any ghost story that might make me another kaui's slave, or see it smoothed over before it began.
'And I would come to lean on her for exactly that.'
...No — even without it, I would be the one begging. Because thrashing about inside a ghost story, on ground the kaui wants you on, is hopeless and agonizing past all words. Of course I'd come to depend on the taxi driver — the one being I could trust.
'In a future like that... could I ever actually press the save?'
Regression. The most convenient power there is — and the most terrifying. If I could fire the save the moment the contract was signed and I stepped out of the cab, I would sign it this very instant. But if not? If it only unlocked three years from now? Could I truly throw away the driver, and the three years of history we'd have woven by then, and walk back into the past?
"I'm sorry."
I never could. I'd stack bond upon bond upon bond, until losing them would hurt too much to bear; I'd keep staying on, rationalizing that I was only lingering to glimpse whatever came at year nine before going back; I'd lose every last thing — and only then, with a heart in ribbons, would I gather myself and use it. And... that would hurt worse than anything.
(...Is there a reason you cannot?)
"Yes."
(Then it cannot be helped.)
The face that had drawn so near withdrew once more. Disappointment colored her bearing, and I, in turn, held regret and apology in equal measure — but I had no confidence I could drain a poisoned grail and rise unscathed, so I nailed my heart shut.
(In that case, I will employ a different method.)
The taxi driver spoke in a languid voice, her words somehow slower than before.
(Do you happen to know what duties fall to the front passenger?)
"What...?"
(The front passenger. It is etiquette to keep the driver company in unbroken conversation.)
"Why is that coming up now?"
Gooseflesh crawled over me at that soft, drowsing drawl. I knew this feeling... I'd felt it once before. When the stalker grinned a grin that curdled the blood and declared she would break the rules. That was when.
(Before this ghost story began, I drank sleeping gas.)
(That gas I sipped under the name of air freshener — that was it.)
"What... did you just say?"
Those languid eyes. She had been expressionless from the moment I boarded, so I'd assumed that was simply her face. It had sparked when I told her I was a TS woman, and burned with arousal while I masturbated her — so I'd taken the dead calm as her resting state. But I had been wrong. That drowsy gaze had been sleepy from the very start.
(A front seat granted to one untouched by the gas. Don't you think I surrendered it rather too easily?)
Truthfully, I had been suspicious when she handed it over. Trading the front seat away for nothing more than a feel of my breasts and thighs meant discarding a genuinely enormous advantage.
(Kaui follow common sense. Which would mean... there may well be common sense, even etiquette, attached to one's seat...)
"Negative fare! I'll spend every won I have! Give me the information on the front passenger seat, right now!"
My instincts were screaming. To take something, you sacrifice something of your own. That was what the driver was doing right this moment — and the something she meant to take was me. Stop it. Now.
(Dra...gging things out with words like those is already too late.)
(The front passenger's duty is to watch over the driver's condition, and should something be wrong, to treat it before it becomes one.)
(In my case... that would mean waking me up.)
"You insane—! You drank that sleeping gas of your own accord!"
(Swallowing a poison before the ghost story begins violates no rule...)
(It was a gamble... Had you not taken the front seat, then had an accident occurred, you could have used it as your excuse to step off.)
(But in the front seat, it is different... If you fail to wake me, a penalty of equal weight will follow...)
As if she could no longer hold the sleepiness back at all, the driver explained in slow, dragging words.
"An accident?! What happens if there's an accident?!!"
(Rest assured... we are presently between the Anomaly World and reality, so there will be no loss of life...)
(Only the two of us will be hurt — or rather, only me, the vehicle.)
(But in that case, because you failed to wake me, a certain measure of responsibility will fall upon you.)
(It will not count as defeat, but I will collect... the fare. A few times over, I should think.)
And the whole design snapped into focus. Before the ghost story began, she inhaled the sleeping gas. Then she used the front seat as bait and seated me in it. And once she had dropped off as though drugged, she pins the neglect of the front passenger's duty on me — and collects her penalty.
"Are you out of your goddamn mind, you bitch?!"
Looked at one way, it was a stretch. She had seated me in the front without ever breathing a word that such a duty existed, and now that the driver herself had slipped into sleep and crashed, she was shifting a share of the blame onto her passenger. 'And the rules have nothing to say about that?!'
But the rules stayed silent. And when the rules that preach equality fall silent... it means the counterweight the driver has staked is every bit as heavy.
'So it is a trap... right? Or is this just insurance fraud?'
It was certainly meticulous enough to earn the name of trap. But the result was self-harm extortion. And not just any — an incomprehensible one that handed over the front seat, that absurdly weighty prize, as the purchase price.
"You went to all this trouble... just to get laid?!"
However many times I turned it over, it was absurd. All that trap-craft, and the take was a few rounds of fare collection. Grand as "fare collection" sounded, boiled down it amounted to nothing more than the sex she wanted, a handful of times. For the sake of a few lousy fucks, she had pre-drank sleeping gas and set her own body to be rammed into a guardrail at better than a hundred kilometers an hour. She had even handed over the front seat — the single most vital component of the ghost story. ...All of this, designed and set in motion, for the sake of getting laid a few times.
(When I wake, it will hurt a little... but we will be able to have sex.)
(A price more than worth paying...)