Ourselves : A BL Horror Novel

Chapter Two : Flower Girl

Agnes Young is the wife of Boss Charlie Young, the Head of the White Lotus Syndicate. Agnes and Charlie's ages were impossible to guess by the many reporters who knew them only as their public personas. To the world Agnes Young runs one of the most successful Pharmaceutical Companies that serviced many parts of the world. While her husband Charlie ran one of the most illustrious shipping companies. In photos the pair look as if they never knew a day of hardship, always smiling and seducing the camera with their eyes. They both look younger than any would imagine a pair of fifty year old people to look. To the point the folk tale is that they sold their souls for youth and beauty. One rumor said that a woman said to Agnes that Good China doesn't crack. She was never heard from again, or so the rumor goes.

The mysteries behind these two exist because no matter how many interviews they gave during the eighties and nineties, the pair were shrewd about any personal details. Neither appeared publicly since nineteen ninety nine, and no one knew why. No one but Agnes possesses the number for Charlie's phone. He never felt the need for phones in the eighties and saw less need of them now. He came from old China ways where anything said could be said to ones face or shouted from across a room. Despite his age and his work, he still didn't trust technology. Agnes was the opposite and found it splendid, she was fascinated with the modernizing of things. So much that she immersed herself in technology, going to great lengths to further it along in anyway she could.

Many leaps in computers were made from silent donations from one of her many front businesses. Just to see what a super computer could do. She made sure to have the best smartphone, the newest smart car. Just to take them apart and put them back together to understand. Thirty years of marriage and he had never stepped out on his wife. He watched her in her work shop silently marveling at her explaining how things work and it truly enthralled him. She was and is his window to a world where guns and teeth don't solve problems, but he never told her his age. She didn't understand what it was like to live for one hundred and forty years. Frozen by the blood in your veins to look forever twenty four years old.

Charlie is devoted to her as much as he is devoted to the White Lotus Syndicate. Agnes gave her life to him in her teens when they had both lived in China. Dirt poor and barefoot in the eighties, she had been on her way to being the wife of a much older police officer when she had met Charlie. His family lived in Singapore and were wealthy even then.

She had been as thin as a reed, doe eyed with dark tangled long hair. A young woman who sold flowers on a street corner in a large city in China. It was flowers in the summer and coal in the winter. People paid for these items, while the men offered more for her body. She had never given it believing her dignity was worth her life. In the early light she would travel by truck to the fields and find the best flowers to pull from the ground roots intact. At her home she would moisten them before wrapping them in rice paper so they would live through the day as she stood on corners selling them. Every yuan went to her family who worked menial tasks to keep the roof over their heads and food on the table. When the men had cat called her she had pretended to not hear their lustful voices one early foggy Tuesday.

The boldest man, a tall muscular ginger haired man with a bushy beard in a nice tailored black suit had stomped across the busy street. He didn't care about the cars that had to swerve out of the way to avoid him as he slapped her hard across the right ear. The world burst into sparkles in her vision from the force of the blow as she fell sideways to the ground. Her flowers flew into the street. Tires made short work of them. She watched them get torn apart by the cars and then his large fingers were around her arm. So large the fingers met the thumb as he wrenched her up to meet his blazing green eyes.

"Listen here you dumb yellow cunt, my friends asked you a question and if you pretend you don't speak the Queen's English I will drag you back there and beat you before I fuck you," the man shouted. Agnes had looked around her, had searched the faces of the strangers who continued on with their days. All avoided her, none looked at them as they pretended not to see her. Her worth to them was nothing, slowly she looked up at those green eyes.