The smell of pancakes and bacon woke me just after sunrise the next morning. I slid into my robe and slippers, as softly as I could, and stole out onto the second floor landing. Listening there for a  few moments, I heard steam rising, the clatter of utensils and plates, and the sound of a spatula scraping and flipping something in a pan. The fire hissed at intervals, so someone was at the stove.

“Alan?” I called down. “That you?”

“Morning Charlotte!” he called back.

I hurried down the steps, and turned the corner into the kitchen. Alan had two of the burners going, one for blueberry pancakes and the other for bacon, popping and sizzling, bubbling up from below in long, crispy, greasy strips.  

“Bacon’s ready,” he said, cheerily.

“Great.” I had a sudden, impulsive urge to give him a peck on his cheek. I gave in and kissed him.

“Want any?” He was beaming.

“Yeah. Thanks so much.” I paused, wondering about his transformation between the night before and the morning. What was going on?

He dropped two long, deep-fried, steaming strips of crispy perfection onto my plate, and then nodded toward the pancakes. “They’ve still got a minute.”

I smiled, and made myself comfortable on one of the stools at the kitchen island, pulling up the hem of my robe underneath me. I pulled my hair back, tied it, and then poured myself a glass of cold orange juice. Alan had set up all of my cereal boxes in a long row on the countertop, beside a bowl of fruit, powdered sugar, maple syrup, and milk.

“How’d you sleep?” I asked him.

He looked up quickly from the stove and smiled at me. “Best I had in years,” he said, and turned his eyes toward one of the sunny, partly-open windows above the sink. Birdsong poured in.

“Charlotte, let me tell you something: it was like a weight was lifted off my chest last night, after I started talking. It was like – I could breathe again.”

I nodded, munching on my pig fat.

He continued: “And I wanted to thank you somehow – I was restless, and had to get up and just do something.”

“Thank you,” I said, sincerely.

“How’d you sleep?” he asked, turning around and flipping a few pancakes.

“Not well, sorry to say.” I had one bad dream after another, and Alan and Sadie were in each one. I wasn’t about to share them.

“Oh -- ” He paused mid-speech, and I guessed the reason for his silence.

“Nothing to do with what you said, last night,” I lied. “Just bad dreams.”

“Sorry to hear it, Charlie.”

He hadn’t called me by that name since high school. It thrilled me to hear it, to know he remembered. “I’m not used to bacon like this,” I told him. “It’s amazing.” He turned around, in mock disbelief. “I’m not kidding!” I said, with a smile. “I should keep you here to cook for me every morning.”

“I used to cook it all the time, when I was young,” he said, turning toward the table with a full platter of pancakes. “Mom – my Mom taught me.”

After Alan had taken his seat on the other side of the island, and speared a few blueberry pancakes for himself and me, I set my fork down and looked across at him.

“Alan,” I said, with a serious face.

“Charlotte.” He responded with a grin, eying me sharply above his plate. Sleep or no sleep, he was a different person this morning. Or seemed to be.

“May I ask you one question – one quick question – about last night?”

He winced, and then regained his composure. He met my eyes, and smiled again – it was half-forced, though (so he did have something on his mind). “Of course. What is it?”

“I’m sorry, Alan – this was bothering me all night, and I couldn’t sleep at all. Just before you stopped talking, last night, you said that – anyhow I thought you said that – part of you felt betrayed by Sadie – but that there was another part of you that felt differently? Right?”

I waited, as he reached for the orange juice, and took a long, cold gulp – probably to buy himself time. Sighing, and glancing away from the window, where the sun was just beginning to peek in over the horizon, his eyes met mine again, and he answered.

“I was confused. Early on, I was scared – terrified, actually.”

I didn’t know where I was going with this, yet. “But later, you changed...”

“Sure, if you want to put it that way.” He was curt. I was treading on thin ice – or his ego was still fragile, delicate, even five years after the torture. I wondered, vaguely, if he had ever gone back to her, sought her out, after their separation – I wondered if he still cared for her.

But I had one more turn that round – before he could refuse to answer me –  and pressed him with one more question, the one I needed an answer to (I needed the answer for me, and not so much for the Bureau).

“When did it change, roughly?”

At first Alan was diffident. “It changed gradually, Charlotte. I remember being afraid, and then feeling angry, and then depressed. And then, honestly, after that I just wanted to survive. I don’t know, maybe a month later, I got used to it, to her, to being with her all the time.

“I began to notice things differently – smells were different, charged somehow with her mood, her thoughts, the time of the day. She kept me in the dark most of the time, and there were long periods – especially in the winter, when she wore boots, or during exam week in the spring – long, very long periods where I didn’t get out more than three times a month. I started to see and hear everything in a different way, not with my eyes, you know...I forgot some things. I still forget…well…”

“Oh,” I said, and slit open a pancake with my fork.

“I mean you don’t know what it’s like, Charlotte, every second of your life being tied up with another person’s well-being. To know that you’re part of all her successes and failures, that you’re a cause of them, or can be a comfort, at least in a small way.”

His eyes suddenly lit up, and he went on, rhapsodically: “Sometimes just to be in a pocket of the clothes that covered her –  or maybe the lotion or ointment that she wore – or the water that she used for her bath – or strung up against her hairpiece, tied up in her hair, as she worked at her desk, like a pen behind her ear –  or the insole to a shoe, so that you’re at least pressed against her foot – or enclosed in her panties, in the good weeks during the month, against her…  – to be anything, as long as it made her happy. I know what that’s like, now.”

I almost snapped my fork in half, listening to this tripe, this disgusting, rambling... “Alan, Sadie was a horrible person – and she is a horrible person.”

He woke up for a moment, and agreed with me, flashing a quick look my way. “Horrible, yeah. It’s different though, looking back. The pain of being with her doesn’t seem as bad as not…well…you know what I mean?”

“You’d change your mind in a hurry if it ever happened again.”

“Yeah,” he said, absently. “You’re right. I’m sorry, Charlotte.” He took a bite of his pancake, and then added, “That’s why I always liked you in high school. I could trust you.”

“What?” This sentimentality, after his twisted confession, was beginning to make me gag.

“All the other girls kept slaves – only you – ”

He stopped because I shook my head and waved my fork side-to-side. “No. You’re wrong, Alan.”

“Really?”

“Well, partly.” I swallowed. I decided to strike back, now, and see if I could turn the conversation back my way. “My girlfriends bought me one of the ready-trained slaves, for my sixteenth. Everyone on the basketball team had one – not on the court, but in the locker-room. For the junior varsity, they used to keep them there on one of the upper shelves, next to the cupcakes and cookies, after a win. But all the varsity girls had their own personal males – anyway they all did by junior year. Except for me. I was the last one.”

I looked over the table to gauge Alan’s reaction. He was listening closely now – no longer eating.

“This was when they were engineering, tooling slaves from the get-go, adolescence onward, and orienting them, predisposing them genetically toward specific lifelong tasks. I guess I was used to non-specialized slaves, or maybe I remembered what my mother told me – about my father, I mean. What they were like.”

“Together?”

“Pre-reduced, before she convinced him to shrink. This was maybe a few months after I was born – costs were going up, she’d said. Things like that. I never believed any of it then – maybe I believe a little more of it now. But I never knew him at his pre-reduced size.”

“I haven’t seen your family in years.” Alan took a sip of orange juice. “He’s still living?”

“Living, yeah. He doesn’t talk much anymore, but yeah, he’s still alive. What was I talking about?”

“Specialization.”

“Right. So this was when they were beginning to design slaves for that kind of work: in-shoe slaves, accessories to sports shoes, or heels, or mules, moccasins, the works. And of course there were the adult options. These were slaves that wouldn’t only live, they’d thrive in a girl’s shoe, slaves who’d really be unable to live anywhere else, as strange as that sounds. They were designed not to live anywhere else but underneath a girl’s foot, not to be anything else but her insole. Alan?”

Alan coughed, and frowned uneasily. “I’m listening.”

“You know all this. You’ve seen more than I have probably. I don’t have to tell you. But I couldn’t keep one for more than a week. After practice every day, there he would be, in my flats, waiting oh so patiently for me to change shoes. There was a little slot in the insole they’d carved out, and he would be there for hours, massaging and scrubbing away, moving from heel to toe as I was driving, or taking the bus home from practice or work. And I admit, for that week, my feet felt incredible: I never had muscle pains, sores, cramps. Though I sweated much more – but only because I was nervous, knowing that someone was in there, a grown man fulfilling his life’s purpose underneath my foot, ingesting my sweat, my toenail crud, cleaning whatever he could, surviving in my shoe. And knowing that, after a while, made me physically nauseous. After the second day, I dreaded putting my shoes on in the morning or after practice. And I mean this was a visceral dread, one you felt in the pit of your stomach, one that made you super depressed and anxious even to avoid. There was no way out of it.

“So I wondered at first if he really liked my shoes and my feet, if he was really happy, even though I knew he was trained to be happy – so I tried to take him out once or twice, talk to him, you know, because maybe he wanted conversation, or a better place to sleep.” I sighed. “Because I didn’t want him to like it. But he did! And his obedience, his fawning, his ridiculous enthusiasm revolted me. Whenever I took him out, and put him on the floor, he would shudder, have these convulsions nonstop, rolling around on the carpet in these terrible spasms, like his skin was burning or something. So I’d throw him into my ratty old basketball shoes again, to calm him down. It disgusted me – he did, I mean. Or maybe they did, the people who’d genetically design a man for one thing like that, and make him happy into the bargain. I promised myself never to buy a man like that for my own daughter – never to get used to those slaves. They weren’t people.”

“Re-humanized, is what Sadie called them,” Alan said.

“Re-humanized?” I stopped and looked at my plate. “That’s comic. As for that slave, I just couldn’t do it. So I returned it.”

“Was that the only time?”

“Well,” I thought back. “For my seventeenth, another friend got me one of those dildos. Which squicked me even more than the foot-slave. The whole idea of using him night after night, without any bond between us – if he were a friend or a former boyfriend, I’d probably have kept him, but something really unsettled me, Alan. I gave it up and never told anyone.”

Alan took a bite of his pancake. His hand was shaking. “Thanks, Charlotte.”

I felt bad immediately. I stood up and crossed to the other side of the table, behind him. “I’m sorry, again. I should have watched what I was saying.”

“No, no…I’m happy you told me. It makes things clearer for me.”

“Clearer?”

“Well, not clearer, exactly, but – I know what you mean.”

I wanted to keep talking, to lighten the mood. “Maybe there’s something in there that made me want to be a police officer.”

“Maybe. You’re a good person, Charlie. I’ve always felt that.”

I went back to my plate, and started gathering my dishes. I think I knew how Alan felt, partly, when he talked about that weight being off his chest. “Alan.”

He walked over, picking up with trembling hands his own plate, and carrying it to the sink. “Let me help you with that.”

“Hey, let’s go for a walk after breakfast, you and I.”

“It'll have to be quick,” he said, suddenly very serious. “I want to get back to the tape. Have evidence down before tomorrow.”

“Right, right. Also – ”

“Let me finish that for you,” he offered. I moved away from the sink, and walked out of the kitchen toward the stairs. With one foot on the staircase, I looked back at him again, and felt so much pity for him. I didn’t know what to say. “Alan.”

“Charlie.”

“Things might have been different. I wish I had asked you out, back then. But it was your mother—“

He turned around and gaped at me. “My mother?”

I pressed on. “But I think if I ever had a man, Alan, I’d want that man to be you. And that was the real reason I couldn’t do it.”

And with that last word, leaving him staring, I leapt up the stairs three at a time. He could take it however he wanted. It was the truth.