Checkmate

“So.

How long have you lived in New York?” he asks as his fork scrapes against the plate. I try to keep my eyes on his perfectly sculpted face, but I’m distracted by the sound of metal on glass ringing in my ears. There's too much going on in this restaurant. The hazy saccharine walls are overindulgent (there’s no way to ever please both New York visitors and natives alike) and the enthusiastic conversations are competing with the music pouring out of the speakers mounted in the upper corners of the walls. Everyone in here is a performer, desperate for a fleeting feeling of relevance or recognition. It’s pathetic. I feel my focus slipping, but I try to pull myself back in. “Excuse me?”

“Don’t make a habit of this, doll. I don’t like to repeat myself,” he responds with a wink. I try and fail to hold back my grimace, but I think I saved myself by hastily rubbing my shoulders. It’s hotter inside than it is outside, but my date hasn’t proven himself to be the most perceptive.

“How long have you lived in New York?”

“My whole life.”

“Really?” he asks, shoveling his fork into his mouth before he can finish getting the words out. For someone with such a striking face, it’s a shame he was never properly trained. His manners are abysmal. I don’t know why I ever agreed to go out with him. I was caught up in the meet-cute of it all. I repeated the story of how we first met over and over again, trying successfully to commit it to memory. He was at the bar I stumbled up to, two drunken bodies separating us from each other. I was holding back tears since I had just been stood up at another location. I shouted “fuck” when I stubbed my toe on the stool, and he retorted “Any girl with a mouth like that needs herself a good drink!” We both leaned back behind the other patrons at the same time and locked eyes. The rest was to be expected. We spent all night laughing and chatting, eventually moving to another lower table with a giant fucking chessboard in the center. DTUT was a neighborhood staple, a relic from the introductory days of hipster gentrification before it spread through the city like an indulgent plague. You could enjoy everything from fondue to cocaine to IPAs to Connect Four to cheese plates to chess.

I was so drunk that night I had forgotten the number one rule to interacting with men–never let them know the full potential of your intelligence. I accidentally beat him in our first chess game. “Beginner’s luck,” he smirked, finishing off his bottle. After my third victory, I could practically taste the kindling that was beginning to burn behind his eyes. It was a look I recognized very well. It’s the split moment in an adult man’s psyche when he is trying to decide what to do with his simmering feelings of inadequacy. It was the look that flashed across his features when he was trying to decide if he was going to fuck me or insult me into submission. 

“Don’t think this makes you special, Rose,” he huffed. I had already told him my name was Jasmine, but I chose not to take the bait. Rose was the name of someone we both knew, he openly and me in private. She was someone as brown and insignificant as I was. Thank god I never gave him my real name anyway. Instead of taking the bait, I shuffled forward in my seat, propping my elbows on top of my knees so that my blouse could lower ever so slightly. “I’ll try to keep that in mind. Just let me know when you’re up for a rematch.”

And now we’re here. In some stupid little Midtown steakhouse, an establishment awash in red and black. I swirl my straw around in my drink, trying to recenter myself. Although he is beginning to annoy me, there is still no denying that Ryan is one of the most conveniently attractive men I’ve ever been out with. I remember my decorum before it’s too late, eking out a lame response.

“Where are you from?” 

“Illino–I mean, Chicago. I almost said Illinois but I doubt you’d know where that is.”

I almost corrected his grammar, but I had to remember my role in this exchange. “I know Illinois,” I say, faking cheer. “My grandmother is from Chicago.”

“Huh?”

Am I missing something? “What?” I hesitate.

“I thought you were like, Mexican or something.” Oh, brother. “I’m definitely Black.”

Ryan throws his head back in a fit of laughter, showing off his expensive veneers. “Sure you are!”

Whether he came to that conclusion because he needed a way to justify his attraction to me or because he enjoyed the power of negging me until I was pliable in his grasp, I didn’t actually know. I just knew that in order to keep up appearances, I had to establish my own moves, ones he wouldn’t be able to anticipate.

The rest of the evening flowed as you’d expect it to. He told jokes and I laughed, even when the punchline evaded me. When the check was placed on the table in front of him, I gave a little reach even though I had no wallet nor cash. I wanted to have nothing that could be traced back to me. Plus, I knew he liked a little chase before he chose to dominate. 

When we left the restaurant, I could feel my heart picking up speed. We were in his neck of the woods, no more than twenty minutes from his house. He didn’t know that I knew where he lived, but I doubt he would have cared. The night was breezier than anticipated, and the asshole didn’t even offer to walk close to me to give me a hint of body heat. And I was walking on the street side. He was pathetic.

A fact that became all the more apparent when I realized that we were walking directly past his building. I turned back to double check, and that’s when he got me. My first slip-up of the night and it was a rookie mistake. He yanked my wrist so hard I thought he dislocated it, pulling me back into the building. He slammed my back against the wall, kissing my neck while tugging on the collar of my shirt. 

“Wait, Ryan, please–you wanna at least give me a minute to catch my breath?” I tried to huff out a chuckle, but it was too late. I could feel the pressure rising in me and I had to use all of my resolve to not headbutt him square in the forehead. It was my only defense at the moment–he had at least ten inches on me and his head felt like it was crushing my windpipe.

“You don’t need a minute when you’re with me,” he murmured into my neck.

“Get off!” I yelled as I slammed my shoulder into his chest. There was no way it could have hurt him physically, but I knew it bruised his ego. His tiny, delicate, submissive little ego.

“You’re gonna want to come with me,” he snarls, picking his head up. I watch the pupils in his eyes dilate, forcing out the golden hazel until there is nothing left but black. He grabs my wrists and holds them over my head. I can hear the echo of his beating heart in the lobby of the empty building. He shoves them back down, letting them go in disgust. I briefly reach into my pocket, allowing my fingers to close around the folded sheet of paper I've been carrying since Tuesday.

Ryan Callahan.

Thirty-seven. Senior Vice President of an educational publishing house. Upper East Side. Two complaints filed with Human Resources, with the initial victim threatening to escalate it further to the EEOC. One complaint was withdrawn after the woman who filed it was transferred to another department. Another complaint was dismissed for “insufficient evidence.”

But there were still three women who remembered him. And one who didn't want to be the fourth. 

She was the one who hired me. That’s how all of this started actually, through secrets. I wasn’t always the proprietor–I was once a client. The client, one without guidance or a fact sheet. I was just young and eager, too trusting of my talents and the world they were fostered in. I thought all I needed to do was keep my head down, do my work, and I would get what's owed to me. But no one ever does. And when I got my first taste of my own insignificance, I was offered not even the illusion of justice. Justice.

Justice is what women were promised when we’re told our whole lives to “do the right thing,” but it’s a lie. It was always a fucking lie, lying in the violence or chaos of womanhood waiting to strike. It’s with you when the police officer processing your complaint tries to follow you into the bathroom. Or when the friend you confide in laughs at your confession before sleeping with the enemy, her own initiation into the world of cheap feminine suffering. The truth burns as you watch your rape become the office gossip, enforcing the established hierarchy that says a woman must always take and never give. But being just a taker wasn’t something I was comfortable with.

My work started out simple enough, shrouded in innuendo and unspoken truths, the way it so often is amongst our kind. “Are you sure you can handle this?” my first client asked me after she read about what happened to the unfortunate fuck who thought he could take advantage of me. “No,” I replied. “Can you?”  

She just smirked and shrugged before handing me a little fact sheet. “Nope.”

Ryan reaches for my wrist, and I can’t help it. I can’t keep up the illusion when I’m this close to finishing my mission. I smile because I can almost taste the finality.

That’s why they come to me, my clients. They come because they want something final, a taste of the callous demise that they so often receive but never sample. It’s why I don’t see myself as some rogue vigilante. I know I’m something more vicious, more vile, more utterly disruptive than anyone could guess and I don’t see why I can’t act on my fucked up nature the way everyone else gets to do.

That’s exactly why Ryan doesn't know that inviting me upstairs will be the last mistake I’ll ever allow him to make. 

I’m not special. I’ve been trained since birth to keep my true intentions hidden, just like everyone else who shares the unfortunate branding of ‘woman.’ He's never had to hold back every muscle when all he wants is to be seen. He has no idea what repression can do to someone who was never meant to be held back.

I let my smile soften into one I know he’ll read as submission.

“Oh, uh–okay.”

His smile returns. “So what the fuck are we waiting for?” 

“Nothing, I guess,” I say as he spins me around and slaps my ass. 

“Walk.”

Checkmate.