“Will you do it hard?”
“Yes. But I won’t break the skin. Do I have your permission to bite you?”
“Sure, I guess. Yes.”
“Good.” Elle raised Kyrie’s wrist to her lips and sank her teeth deep into the soft flesh at the wrist bone. Kyrie flinched but didn’t cry out.
Then Elle kissed her in the same spot. A warm, soft, sensual kiss on the bite mark and the inside of her wrist.
“Elle...” Kyrie breathed. Elle released her hand and Kyrie pulled it back against her chest, cradling it in her other hand.
“Did you like that?” Elle asked.
“I liked the kiss after you bit me. And the bite, too.”
“What would you say if I said I would do it again, but only if you let me bite you again?”
“I’d say...bite me.”
“What if I said I’d make you feel amazing but only after I hurt you? Would you let me hurt you?”
“Yes.”
“What do you think would happen if every time I hurt you I also made you feel good afterward?”
“I don’t know. I guess I’d want you to hurt me so I could feel good.”
“You’d associate pain with pleasure?”
“I would.”
“You’d want the pain because it meant you’d have pleasure, too?”
“Probably.”
“Would the pleasure mean more to you because you earned it?”
“I think so.”
“If I told you it turned me on to hurt you and then pleasure you in that order, what would you think?”
“I would think you should do that to me then. Hurt me and then pleasure me.”
Elle smiled. “That’s kink. It’s also kink when your deepest sexual fantasy is to be treated like a sex slave or punished by a teacher or tied up like a prisoner or spanked like a child.”
“People do that?”
“I do that,” Elle said.
Kyrie held out her hand again to Elle. “Will you do it me?”
“Kyrie—”
“Please?”
Almost nine months...Elle hadn’t been intimate with anyone in that long. No wonder she dreamed of sex almost every night and woke up coming. And Kyrie...she wanted her. This young virginal...
“You’re a nun.” Elle took Kyrie’s hand but only to hold it. “If we do this—”
“I’m just a starter nun.”
“It’s called a novice, not a starter nun.”
“You know what I mean. I don’t take final vows for two years,” Kyrie said. “I want to know what I’m giving up.”
Elle closed her eyes and shook her head.
Somewhere out there, far in the distance, she heard a sound she thought she would never hear.
“Can you hear that?” Elle asked.
“No, what is it?”
“God laughing at me.”
Elle opened her eyes.
Then she stood up.
She pushed her chair under the doorknob.
Kyrie was already on the bed, her hair down and unbound. She was a vision of loveliness and innocence. And Elle wanted her. Wanted her as she’d never wanted a woman before in her life. But she wasn’t a woman. Not yet. She was a girl, chaste and pure, and she’d never even been kissed. The hunger to be the first lips on Kyrie’s lips was physical in its urgency. Elle wanted hers to be the first hands on Kyrie’s body. But even more than that, she wanted to feel again what she felt those nights with Kingsley, the nights he’d let her hurt him, dominate him, use him. She needed to feel that power again.
She needed to own this girl, body and soul. In two years, Kyrie would take her final vows. In two years, her beautiful long hair would be shorn to the scalp. In two years the door on Kyrie’s life would lock and it would never be opened again. Kyrie would never be opened again.
Innocence had its virtues, but ignorance had none. To let this beautiful girl walk away from the world without ever having tasted the pleasure it offered was more than a crime. It was a sin. A shame. And Elle wouldn’t allow it.
“Are you praying?” Elle asked, seeing Kyrie’s head bowed. The starlight made itself a halo in her hair.
“Yes. The prayer of St. Augustine.” Kyrie looked up at Elle and met her eyes in the dark. “Lord, make me chaste....”
Elle finished the prayer for her.
“But not yet.”
21
Haiti
“WHO WAS SCARED?”
Kingsley closed his eyes. Juliette’s voice carried over the air and the waves and the water on the sand. It carried over the beach like the signal of a lighthouse to a ship lost at sea.
“No one.” He shoved the length of carved bone into his pocket. He turned and found her standing ten feet behind him. She wore a yellow dress, bright as the sun. “I was talking to myself.”
“It didn’t sound like it. Were you praying?” She walked on bare feet across the sand to him.
“Something like that.”
“To God?”
“To a man,” he said. “A man who thinks he’s God sometimes. But he can’t be God, can he? Not if he’s scared.”
“I don’t know,” she said with a graceful tilt of her head, a graceful lift of her shoulders. “I think God gets scared.”
“You do? Seems unlike Him. All-knowing. All-powerful. What is there for Him to fear?”
“Us,” she said. “His people. He loves us and we’re...” She turned her gaze onto the water. “Small. Weak.”
“Fragile,” Kingsley said.
“We’re fragile, yes. And He’s new to us, as new as we are to Him. He doesn’t know His own strength. He doesn’t understand yet how weak we are.” She paused and looked at her feet in the sand. “I’ve seen mother birds crush their own eggs by accident. The mothers aren’t evil. They aren’t trying to hurt their babies. But still, the eggshells, they’re too fragile.”
Kingsley felt something in his chest, something like an eggshell. He felt it in the place where his heart should be.
“Imagine,” Juliette whispered. “Imagine how terrifying it is to know you could crush your own creation simply by loving it.”
“I can imagine.”
“I suppose that’s the price we pay,” she said, looking toward the horizon.
“Pay for what?”
“For loving and being loved by something so powerful.”
Kingsley nodded. God was so vast, and they so small—was it any wonder so many of His children got crushed? And yet, living in a world without God’s power would be like living in a world without oceans.
“How did you find me here?” Kingsley asked.
“I’m good at finding people. I found where your hut was and when you weren’t there, I followed your footsteps. Do you walk here often?”
“Every evening.”
“Can I ask you something?” Juliette took a small step closer to him.
“Ask.”
“Why are you here? In Haiti, I mean?”
“Something bad happened,” Kingsley said, trying to speak as vaguely as possible. What happened between him and Elle was between him and Elle and no one else. Not even Søren. Especially not Søren. “I didn’t handle it as well as I should have, and someone important to me was harmed in the process. If I’d stayed, I would have made it worse for her. And it was bad already.”
“Elle est partie,” Juliette said. Kingsley looked at her in shock.
“How do you know her name?”
“Her name? You talk in your sleep. I heard you say ‘She is gone.’”
In French “She is gone” was “Elle est partie.” He’d been speaking of Elle in his sleep. She is gone. Elle is gone. Same thing.
“Her name is Elle,” Kingsley said. “Eleanor.”
“I see. Were you in love with her, with Elle?”
“No. It was different with us. Love but not in love. Friends but not friends. I can’t explain us.”
“Love but not in love. Family?”
Kingsley smiled. “We were
lovers.”
“I know married couples not in love with each other. But they are family.”
“Family,” Kingsley said, thinking of her and him and Søren and what they were to each other. Would they ever be that close again? “Perhaps she was family. There are two people in the world who know all of my secrets. And she was one of them.” Kingsley’s throat tightened painfully. “I failed her when she needed me the most. But she’s gone and I can’t even tell her how sorry I am.”
“Can I tell you how sorry I am?” Juliette asked.
“For what?”
“I shouldn’t have slept with you if one night was all I could give you. I shouldn’t have brought you into the mess that is my life.”
“We barely know each other. You don’t owe me any apology or explanation.”
“I do. Spending the night with you...it was selfish of me.”
“You aren’t selfish very often, are you?”
She raised her hands in a question. A question, or maybe a surrender.
“I don’t have the luxury of being selfish.”
“Why not?” Kingsley asked.
“Because I’m owned.”
“I know many men and women who are owned. They are quite capable of being selfish. Some of them have made an art of it.”
“I’m not owned the way they are.”
“How are you owned then? What other way is there?” he asked.
“The people you know, they are owned by choice? Because they want to be owned?”
“Yes, very much so.”
“I’m not.”
Kingsley turned and faced her finally. “What do you mean? Slavery was abolished in Haiti two hundred years ago.”
“Don’t be naive,” Juliette said with a smile. Kingsley was certain that was the first time anyone had ever accused him of being naive. “As long as there are men with money and power and women without it, there will be slavery in this world.”
“But you’re here with me right now. On this beach. You can walk away from him. I could take you back to Manhattan with me tonight.”
She shook her head. “No, you can’t.”
“No one can own another person. There are laws against it.”
“This isn’t about laws.”
“How can he own you like this?”
“He owns me because I owe him. A debt. A huge debt I can never repay.”
“And you pay it to him with your body?”
Juliette nodded. “It’s the only currency he accepts.”
“What do you owe him?” Kingsley asked.
Juliette took a step forward and let her toes touch the water. The tide ebbed around her ankles and slid back into the sea.
“My family has always worked for his family and his family has been here since before the Revolution. My great-grandparents, my grandparents, my mother...our families are intimately intertwined. Maman was a housekeeper for Gérard’s father. And more.”
“They were lovers.”
“Of course. I say of course, but you haven’t seen my mother. In her youth, she was beautiful.”
“I can imagine,” Kingsley said, admiring Juliette.
“Gérard was appointed ambassador to Haiti when he was only thirty-three or thirty-four. But it’s an old family, the Guillroys. Old name, great power. That story.”
Kingsley knew that story well.
“Gérard has an understanding with his wife. They own companies together, properties. Better to stay married and live apart than divide the assets.”
“Very practical,” Kingsley said. “Very French.”
“It is,” Juliette said with the smallest of smiles.
“What happened?”
“Growing up in his house? Nothing.” She crossed her arms, shrugged her shoulders. “He was kind but distant with me. He had his own children to occupy him. Twin girls four years older than I am.”
“Something must have changed along the way.”
“Maman changed,” Juliette said. “All her life she was a little unstable. Emotional. She overreacted to things. But she was smart and strong. She took good care of me even if she did scare me sometimes with the things she said. But when I was thirteen...”
She paused. The pause scared Kingsley enough that he said, “You don’t have to tell me.”
“I want to tell you. I want you to know. When I was thirteen, Maman changed. She...” Juliette took a ragged breath. “She went quiet. She was withdrawn, and then in a flash, angry. She grew paranoid and scared. She heard things, voices. And she started hurting herself. I walked into the kitchen one day and found her bleeding from both arms.”
“Suicide attempt?”
“No, she said she saw snakes under her skin and had to cut them free.”
Juliette shuddered and crossed her arms over her chest. Kingsley wanted to hold her and comfort her. He didn’t deserve to hear this story, so personal and painful.
“The doctor said schizophrenia. And Maman must never be left alone. She couldn’t work anymore, of course. I tried to watch her on my own, I did. But it was too much for me.”
“You were only a child.”
“I was but I wasn’t,” she said. “I was smart, too. I had the same education as Gérard’s girls, who were four years ahead of me, and I did better in our lessons than they did. I was smart and I knew...I knew how the world worked.”
“What did you do?”
“When summer came and his daughters went back to Cannes to be with their mother, I went to Gérard and asked him to put my mother in a hospital. A good one where she could get the care she needed. The doctor had mentioned a place in Switzerland where people like my mother got very good care.”
“What did he say?”
“He said such a place was expensive. And that although he was very sorry, my mother no longer worked for him. I told him I would take her place. I told him I would do the work she did for him if he would pay for the hospital. I told him I would do anything he wanted. In bed and out of it.”