“He was a mistake. I knew better.”
“Don’t we always?” Alex asked.
“And we still do it. Always. Why?” I took another slow swig of my cooling coffee. “Why are people so stupid when it comes to this stuff?”
“Because the heart wants what the heart wants. Sometimes, so do other parts. I read that in a book once.” Alex grinned, but only a little, and without a whole lot of humor.
I groaned and let myself rock back in the chair. I closed my eyes, not wanting to think of Niall, but his face flashed into my head anyway. I thought of Esteban, too, though I had an easier time pushing away his face. And finally, predictably, another man’s face forced its way out of memory. I opened my eyes to look at Alex.
“I should have known it wouldn’t work out, long-term.”
“How could you know that in advance? That’s what people say when they’re too afraid to try it.”
“That’s a hell of a thing to say to me, when you’ve plied me with pastry and boozy coffee,” I snapped. “Either you’re understanding and sympathetic or you’re not. Quit trying to swing both ways.”
At that, he burst into guffaws. Loud, genuine laughter. Taken aback, I narrowed my eyes. Alex rocked back in his chair, actually slapping his knee.
“What?”
He swallowed his chortles and propped his feet back on the desk. “You have no idea.”
I put my cup on the desk and turned it around and around in my hands. “So, tell me.”
“It’s not my day for telling stories. It’s yours. Okay, so, you met this guy. You knew right away it wasn’t going to work out, but you fucked him anyway. And then you broke up. Am I getting it right so far?”
“Yes.”
Alex gave me a sympathetic look that was as sincere as his laughter had been a moment ago. “So...why the broken heart?”
“It’s not... I’m not...” I stopped myself, appalled at the way my throat closed. At how bitter the words tasted. At how close to tears I was. Again.
“Elise,” Alex said gently, “I didn’t have to overhear you talking to him on the phone to figure out that you’ve been head over heels for this guy for the past couple months. It was in everything you said or did. You kind of had it all over you.”
“Like a rash,” I said bitterly.
“I’d have called it a glow. But sure. A rash. A glow. Whatever it was, you walked like you were floating.” Alex took another long sip of coffee, watching me over the top of his cup. “You were happy.”
Tears threatened to throttle me, but I forced them back. I would not cry over this. I would not cry in this office. Not in front of Alex. I would not let myself lose control.
I. Would. Not.
I shook my head. “He knew me before I knew him. I mean, about...”
I hesitated. I liked Alex a lot. We worked great together. He’d seen my pictures.
“He didn’t like what I like,” I finished. “And he made it into a really big deal.”
“Dumbass,” Alex said promptly.
It urged a small laugh from me that helped to quash the threatening tears. “Like I said, it happens.”
“Tell me what happened.” Alex shifted in his chair. “I know I’m not your best girlfriend but trust me, I can pretend.”
I laughed again, giving him the eye. “Weirdo.”
“From one deviant to another,” he said, “lay it on me. Confession is good for the soul or something like that. And it’s eating you up inside, Elise. I can tell.”
“You’re awfully observant.” I bit the inside of my cheek lightly, rubbing at the sore spot already there with my tongue.
“I hate that he’s making you sad.” Alex frowned. “I’d like to punch him in the junk.”
This surprised me. “You would?”
“Fuck, yes.” He looked surprised, too. “Why wouldn’t I?”
This pricked tears into my eyes for a very different reason. “He’s not making me sad. It is what it is.”
Alex said nothing. He waited. And the longer he stayed quiet, the more compelled I felt to unburden myself.
“He made me laugh,” I said.
Alex nodded. “Heavy. He also made you cry.”
I shook my head again. “No. I just won’t anymore. It’s not worth it. I was that girl once, that one who let a man carve her up and toss her out to feed the sharks. I won’t do it again. Not for anyone.”
Alex shrugged. “We all go through it. Sometimes we’re the ones crying, sometimes we’re the ones who made someone else cry. Love hurts. That’s how it works, even when it does work.”
“I didn’t love him,” I lied aloud, trying to make myself believe it.
Alex said nothing.
“Fuck my life,” I whispered. We both said nothing until finally, I sighed and downed the last of my coffee. “When we were together, I thought that maybe it could work.”
“Sure,” he said as though that made sense.
I shrugged. “We had fun. And it got complicated, that’s all. The way things do. And I let myself be an idiot. I just didn’t think...”
Alex waited. I hadn’t wanted a hug. I refused to cry. I didn’t want to spill myself out to him this way, but I could not hold it back. My words ground out of me, rusty and raspy and harsh, tasting of the grief I was trying so hard not to let myself feel.
“I didn’t think I would care so much,” I said. “I didn’t think he would matter to me.”
“You can’t choose who you love.” Alex took his feet off the desk and put them flat on the floor. His cup on the desk. His elbows on his knees, he leaned forward with his hands linked in front of him. He didn’t look at me for a few seconds, and when he did, his gaze glittered.
“He didn’t love me. I thought he knew me, but he didn’t,” I added bitterly. “He had this idea of me, but it was a fantasy. Not real. But I was the one who let him in. I let him get close. I knew I shouldn’t, but I did, so in the end, who’s the dumbass? Me.”
Alex frowned, and I kept talking.
“There was no point in being with him, not when I knew that in the end, he was never going to let me be who I am. Oh, sure, he said he was fascinated. Intrigued. But when it came right down to it, he was never going to give me what I need and want and like.” I drew in a breath then swallowed hard. “Even if what I want and need and like doesn’t have to be the same thing all the time.”
“Sometimes I like peanut butter on a sandwich. Sometimes I like a grilled cheese.” Alex shrugged. “So long as when I’m hungry I get a fucking sandwich, I usually don’t care. Unless it’s liverwurst or some shit like that. Then forget it, I’ll starve.”
My mouth twisted into what might’ve passed for a smile, if you tried very hard to pretend. “Yes. That. Exactly that. But I’m the asshole who let it hurt so much.”
Alex sighed, linking his fingers tighter. “That’s rough.”
“It’s life,” I said coldly. “I’ll get over it. I did the first time.”
He looked at me, his mouth twisting. “Sounds like you didn’t.”
My mouth opened in protest, but I had none that wouldn’t be a lie. I gripped the desk, my fingernails scratching at the polished wood. A small, broken sound escaped me, no calling it back.
“You have a story,” Alex said. Before I knew it, I was telling it to him.
* * *
Sometimes love takes you by the hand and leads you to run through fields of flowers while butterflies weave you a dress out of rainbows. Other times, love takes you by the throat and chokes you until all you see is the bright, sharp trail of shooting stars right before everything turns to black. The problem is, you can never tell in advance which way the story ends, not until you’re too far into it, and you have no choice but to keep turning the pages.
Four years ago, I met him.
I didn’t think there was anything special about it at the time. I turned around in a dance club when he jostled me as he tried to get past me toward the bar. I made a smart-ass comment. He gave one b
ack and offered to buy me a drink. We danced, fast at first, and then at the end of the night, slow.
He pulled me in closer than I’d have let anyone else. My face found the curve of his neck, and I breathed him in. His hands settled on my hips. The song ended, but we kept dancing even when the “fuck you, time to go home” lights came on.
He asked for my number.
I gave it to him.
He called while I was still in the cab on the way back to the house we’d rented, not beachfront but one block back. My friends, shouting with laughter, cried out obscenities when I tried to talk to him. They hooted and hollered. By the time we got to the house, I’d already decided I was going back out to meet him again.
We walked on the sand, his hand in mine, dodging the late-night beach patrol who’d have thrown us off if we hadn’t ducked into the shadows, standing still. Pressed against him, barely daring to breathe while we waited for the patrol to find us, I shivered in the chilly late-June sea air, and he warmed me. First with his hands. Later, his mouth, sweet and cautious when he kissed me. He could’ve done it harder. I wouldn’t have minded.
It was the last day of my vacation but the first of his. I didn’t expect to hear from him again, much less while he was enjoying the sun and sand and the possibilities of dozens of other girls at dance clubs who’d let him take them for late-night walks on the sand. But he called me every day. Texted me, too. He sent me pictures of himself on the beach, at the bar, grilling burgers with his buddies. And by the next Friday, he was urging me to come down and spend the weekend with him—because he wasn’t renting a house, he owned it, and though he did have to go back to work on Monday, he could stay those two extra days.
Did I cancel all my plans to spend the weekend with a man I just met?
You bet your ass I did. And it was glorious. He grilled me steaks and asparagus on his deck, plied me with expensive wine, made love to me and then slept beside me with the sounds of the ocean rocking us into dreamland. He made sure I wore sunscreen so I didn’t burn. He made sure to send back the salad I ordered that came with bacon bits on it that I’d requested not be there. I left late Sunday night, already missing him.
That was our summer. Weekends at his place by the ocean, and though the three-hour drive put too many miles on my car and got boring as shit really fast, I didn’t care. During the week, we talked every night and texted throughout the day. With another nearly three-hour drive between us when he was at home in DC, getting together during the week was out of the question. We had to make do with technology. As summer heat became autumn chill, he shut down the beach house, and I spent my Friday and Sunday nights traveling to Washington, instead.
I knew I was in love with him the first time he let me tie his hands.
It started off silly. We’d been watching a movie, the typical sort of porny femdom type scene played for laughs as the black-vinyl-clad woman whipped a fat, sputtering businessman who vowed to empty his bank account for her. My chilly bare toes were tucked beneath his thighs on his oversize leather couch, because even though winter was sniffing around us, I was determined to hold on to summer as long as I could. He had a beer. I had a glass of wine. We’d stuffed ourselves on homemade lasagna I’d put together from my mom’s recipe, one of the few things I could proudly say she’d taught me to manage in the kitchen. When the woman on the screen planted her stiletto heel in the small of the businessman’s back and snarled, “And I want the stock options, too, you worm!” I coughed out spurious laughter.
“Why’s it always got to be like that?” I said. “All degradation and humiliation. They never, ever show how beautiful it should be.”
His fingers curled under my calf, and he looked at me with shining eyes. “How beautiful what should be?”
“A man on his knees.” I leaned close to kiss him. The wine had made me sleepy and sexy and warm. So did he. “Worshipping a woman, adoring her. That’s beautiful.”
He slid from the couch and got on his knees in front of me, between my legs. His hands on my thighs below the hem of the summer-weight dress I was still so stubbornly wearing despite my goose bumps. He pressed a kiss to my bare knee, and the shudder that rippled up and down my spine had nothing to do with the temperature.
I put my hand lightly on his hair. He turned his face to press his cheek to my flesh and gave me a wicked, tempting grin. My fingers tightened in his hair, testing him. When his eyes fluttered closed and his mouth thinned, I might have taken that for distaste, except for the soft moan that slipped out of him.
We’d fucked a hundred times by that point. Backward, frontward, side by side. We’d never talked specifically about how I liked to pin his wrists above his head when I was on top, or how he so often urged me to straddle his face while he stroked himself.
On the television screen, the dominatrix had cuffed the businessman’s hands while she wielded a flogger with a multitude of leather straps. The movie was still playing the scene for shits and giggles, semi-mocking the entire exchange. It wasn’t very sexy to me at all, nowhere near as arousing as the man on his knees in front of me.
“Would you let me tie you up?” I breathed into his ear, leaning forward to take his chin in my hand. I nuzzled his cheek and found his waiting, eager mouth.
“Yes. If you wanted to.”
I stood, drunker than I ought to have been. Not from the wine. From possibility. I took him by the hand and led him upstairs. I didn’t look at him along the way. My heart pounded in my ears loud enough to block out everything else. I was dreaming, wasn’t I?
But it was better than a dream.
I’d played around with control in high school without knowing it, only that I liked it best when my boyfriend was underneath me when we dry humped our way to mutual orgasms. In college and thereafter I’d tried to find my pace, led by the sorts of movies George and I had been watching. Porn, too. I demanded things of the guys I dated. I was bossy. A bitch, even when I didn’t want to be, because that was how I thought it was supposed to work. But although the idea of some of what I watched excited me, humiliating the men I was supposed to love—or at least like enough to fuck—left me cold. I liked the clothes a dominatrix wore, high heels and lingerie. But I didn’t care for being a dominatrix if it meant hurting someone else in order for them to give me what I wanted, and that was the only way I’d ever seen women on top behaving.
In his bedroom, I said, “Take off your clothes.”
He pulled his polo shirt off over his head and tossed it to the side. I loved his body. He’d been an athlete in high school and college, and it showed. Smooth skin that didn’t tan, against which my own olive coloring looked even darker. He undid his braided leather belt and pushed his khakis over his hips, down his thighs. He was self-conscious about his legs, complaining that no matter how much he worked out, he couldn’t bulk up his thighs. But I loved his legs like I did the rest of him, lean and strong and sleek.
He wore dark blue boxer briefs, but hesitated with his thumbs in the waistband. “Elise.”
“Those, too.”
Then he was naked in front of me, his cock already stirring as I watched him without so much as lifting the hem of my skirt. We stared at each other for what seemed like forever before I deliberately and obviously let my gaze roam over the rest of him. Assessing. Judging.
Owning.
He was fully erect by the time I looked into his eyes again. His breathing, short pants. His fingers had curled into fists.
I’d waited for him to refuse me somewhere along the way, or to move or somehow to take control the way so many men did, even those who seemed to like it when I took charge. But he didn’t. He gave me what I wanted, and it turned him on as much as it did me.
Later, I would learn how to choose rope that wouldn’t rub his flesh raw, how to tie knots and decorate him in silken cord. But that first time, all I had was the necktie I grabbed from the rack inside his closet door. I’d never seen him wear one—our time together had so far always been casual dress. I sn
apped the fabric between my fists, making it taut.
I didn’t have to ask him to go to his knees. Or to put his hands behind his back, crossed at the wrists. He did those things with only a look from me, and at first, I couldn’t move. I was afraid to. My knees had gone so weak, I thought I might fall.
I tied him sloppily, without finesse. At first too tight, so that the edges of his tie cut into his skin. Then too loose, so that he could have easily gotten free, if he tugged. He didn’t. He let me take my time. He let me bind him. And when I urged him forward on his knees to eat my pussy as I lay back on the edge of his bed, he did that, too.
I came three times with him tied up in front of me. I came a fourth with him inside me, his hands no longer bound but moving over my body. He fucked me so hard something rubbed raw inside me, bringing blood, but no regrets.
“How many times have you done that?” I asked him when it was over, in the dark and quiet as he spooned me.
“Never.”
My heart lifted even as my head told me he had to be lying. “Oh, c’mon.”
“No.” He nuzzled the back of my neck and pulled me closer. “You were the first.”
* * *
“He was not the first,” I told Alex. “Not the first man I’d ever loved or the first to let me play around with being on top. But he was the first I’d ever gone that far with in terms of domination, the first I’d ever felt fully like myself with. The first relationship I didn’t doubt myself in. With George, I was always beautiful and always strong, at least until the end, when it all fell apart.”
“Why’d you break up?”
“That,” I said, “is the question, isn’t it?”
Alex looked thoughtful. “You were crazy in love with him.”
“Yes. Too much.”
“Did he love you?”
I let out a low, strangled laugh. “Ultimately, not enough. So does it matter if he loved me a little, or at all? I don’t know.”
“Shit.” Alex leaned back in his chair and ran both hands through his dark hair, standing it on end though it usually fell haphazardly into his eyes. “What happened?”