The Body #2: Lucio and Janie

Chapter 30 (Janie): Papa's Rule Number Six

Copyright © 2024 by GroveltoHEA

I messed up my first escape plan because I got tired of moving around. I missed home desperately, so I settled by someone who was as close as I could get to home. Butcher's a cold motherfucker so I wasn't sure how he could help with my homesickness, but as I said, he was as close to home as I could get, which was a pretty frightening thought. 

My years away were freeing. Since I couldn't really list good at killing people on my resume, my only other marketable skill was cleaning. Every Body girl, from a very young age, learned to keep an immaculate house. So I applied to and got a job at Crystal Cleaners and the owner, Lark, and her friend Leona took pity on the new girl in town and became my first non-Body friends. Eventually, they became two of my closest friends and through them, I discovered an entirely new way of life. 

Dating was eye-opening, and I had a great time meeting men who actually smiled and laughed, who weren't always looking like they wanted to kill everyone around them and who had an entirely different concept of body count. 

The first time a man asked me what my body count was, I'd leaned toward him and whispered, "You really just talk about it in the open like that?"

He'd looked at me strangely and told me point blank his body count was fourteen, as if it was no big deal to discuss that in public where anyone could be listening.

"Oh, well, maybe a little on the low side but not a bad number," I'd said encouragingly, thinking Lucio had probably twice that number by the time he was only twenty. I could only imagine how high it was by the time he'd married me. "I'm sure you'll get it up there soon. So, how did you do them? Do you have a preferred method or do you try different things? I've always done it the same way, and I like to stick to that."

That had earned me another strange look and the date had kind of gone downhill from there. Leona and Lark had educated me afterward on what body count meant in the real world, and I'd just passed it off as my having grown up in a religious cult where such things weren't discussed. That actually wasn't far off I discovered as I became acclimated to the non-Body world. Outsiders knew what the Body was, but they weren't aware of the ins and outs of it, so I kept those details to myself and tried to learn as much as possible about this new world I was adjusting to and navigating. On my calls with the girls, they were fascinated when I told them about the experiences I was having, the decisions I was making and the liberties I could take. They were also spellbound by my dating stories.

When I told them about the first time I had sex, we realized I was the first Body girl that we knew of who'd lost her virginity to a man who wasn't her husband.

"Was it good?" Moxie had demanded.

I'd shrugged. "It wasn't bad."

That was a lie. The guy, when he realized I'd been a virgin, began crying about the gift I'd given to him. Body men -- except my father right after my mother had been killed -- didn't cry so I had no fucking clue what to do. Going on some instinct I didn't know I had, I patted his shoulder awkwardly until he got himself under control. Then I took the fuck off like my ass was on fire. Each time after that got better until I could tell the girls oh, yeah when they asked if it was good yet.

Some of the men I dated I liked well enough, but I never let them get too close in case I had to take off and so I didn't get to the point where I was expected to share about my past. And though some of them considered themselves manly, I found their ideas of masculine and mine were quite different. I wanted to know that if enemies came into a restaurant, the man I was with was packing enough firepower so that both of us could hold them off until reinforcements arrived.