One Hot Fall Term (Yardley College Chronicles Book1) (8 page)

The door opens and a girl slips out past me, red-faced with embarrassment. The guy sashays to the threshold, where he hold my gaze and zips up his pants slowly, like he’s making a whole testosterone-induced sexual threat.

I really have to go. “Get out,” I say, and I grab his shirt sleeve and pull him out in mid-zip. He yelps, but I feel no sympathy. I dart in and shut the door. Unlike the other bathroom occupants, I am done in five minutes.

When I come out, I see Lara running down the corridor toward the stairs. She’s muttering something and she grabs the bannister so she can take the steps three at a time. She brushes at her cheek, and her hair is streaming behind her. Obviously, she’s running away from Jonathon.

What happened?

I follow, but lose her in the mass of people. I almost run face-first into the chest of a older guy with long grey hair, who I suspect is a professor. He is bringing an armload of drinks to a group of pretty female students. I dark around him and chase after Lara.

I can’t find her anywhere on the main floor, nor on the terraces or the lawns. I end up in a small room with a table that is a sheet of thick glass. A computer screen sits on it, with black wireless keyboard. There’s a black leather couch and a painting above the couch. The painting is an impressionist view of a Parisian café in the rain. I’m drawn to it. It’s real paint, not a print. The signature is strong and black, but not a name I know.  

There’s another picture at my feet, leaning against the wall, not mounted on it. It’s in a heavy black metal frame. I tilt it away from the wall, curious. It’s a woman with dark hair, wearing a man’s white shirt over a black bikini. It’s a black and white photograph, which makes the woman look like a blend of Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn, but I think the picture is more modern than that. She’s laughing in front of the ocean, blowing a kiss at the photographer. Carefully, I put the picture back.

There’s a door leading out from this room and it’s the only one I haven’t tried. Wondering what lies behind, I open it.

It takes me into a small garden, one surrounded by a stone wall. It’s perfectly square, with a square stone walkway, and a small statue in the middle. A stone satyr…

It’s the garden off the morning room at Manderley.

From the description in the book, this is just the way I would envision that garden.

Who designed this place? This is the kind of house I would design, if I had the money to do it. Except my house would not have as much glass.

I walk outside, and I quickly have the creepy feeling I’m being watched. Whirling, I find no one in the doorway. I can’t see anyone in the small computer room.

I look up. There’s a terrace above me with a glass railing. Jonathon is standing there, leaning on the railing, a glass dangling from his hand. He wears jeans, a dress shirt, and I can see a pattern of blue ink on his forearm near his wrist—a tattoo. Was he looking down at me? He’s not now. Jonathon is looking toward the lake, looking out over the crowd who are laughing, drinking, dancing, and playing touch football on the lawns.

Watching Jonathon lean over the railing, surveying his crowd while he stays solitary and distant makes me think of that moment when Nick sees Gatsby at the end of his dock, alone, washed in moonlight looking at the light across the bay.

I had assumed he’d broken up with Lara, or she’d caught him cheating on her because of the anger in her stride. But Jonathon exudes a sense of deep unhappiness.

Suddenly he looks down at me. Like the Girl in
Rebecca
, I am tempted to look away and pretend I did not notice him and walk back inside.

But I don’t do that. I look at him levelly, with an expression of disapproval. He crooks his finger, motioning me to come upstairs.

***

When I find Lara, she is getting supremely drunk. A bar has been set up in front of a wall of windows in the living room. A white cloth covers tables, and behind them, there are tiers of glass liquor bottles and wine bottles, along with a dozen plastic coolers that must be filled with beer. All the bottles refract and reflect the sunlight, which makes the multi-colored liquids inside them glow. The rear of the bar looks like an enormous stained glass window.

Lara is propped on her elbows on the white-topped bar, sucking on a piece of lime, while a good-looking bartender with gorgeous tattoos and a shaved head shakes up a drink. He pours it in a long stream into a margarita glass, never taking his eyes off her. Then he slides it to her. His eyes meet mine and he mouths two words.
Last one.
That is worrying since she hasn’t been there that long.

Lara skewers the margarita glass between the V of her fingers and scoops it up. Half of it disappears in the time it takes her to turn away from the bar. We are underage—most of the crowd must be less than twenty-one—but like in high school, that isn’t stopping anyone and the bartenders have obviously been paid enough not to care. However, they aren’t completely turning a blind eye. This one is looking out for Lara.

She totters toward the windows on her platform sandals. “I don’t care if he thinks this is the last one. It’s not. I. Am. Getting. Blitzed.”

Considering Lara won’t eat meat, agonizes over the healthiest vending machine decisions, and worries about how well the cafeteria washes its lettuce, I know something is seriously wrong for her to be drinking so much.

She weaves through the crowd, her drink sloshing here and there. Until she finds a bathroom, a different one than the one I used. There’s a couple in it, making out, who didn’t bother to lock the door. She says, “God, get a bedroom. Some of us have to
pee
.”

The couple stop and I’m pretty certain the guy intends to say something rude until he looks at Lara. She looks so upset the guy shrugs and leads his partner outside. Lara grabs my wrist and hauls me in.

“Uh, I don’t have to go,” I say.

“I don’t either. I wanted somewhere to talk. In private. You have to promise not to tell anyone. Jonathon made me do that—at least he didn’t ask me to sign some sicko
contract
.”

Not tell anyone? “What happened? I saw Jonathon from the terrace. He was on an upstairs balcony, looking out over the lake and the mountains as if he’d lost his soul.”

“He lost that a long time ago,” Lara mutters.

I pull the drink out of her hand and set it on the edge of a bathtub—one I could swim in. I put the lid down on the toilet and make her sit there. “What did he do to you?”

She looks longingly at her drink. “What would you do if you found the perfect guy and he turned out to be a perverted creep? Or do I mean creepy pervert? God, I feel like I’ve walked into Fifty Shades of Grey, except there is no way I’d ever let any guy go within fifty feet of me with a whip.”

I blink. “A what?”

“He has this room, Mia. His domination room, filled with all sorts of wacked-out, kinky things. That’s what he likes, what he wants, and there is no way I am
ever
going there. Not with him. Not with anyone.”

Jonathon is into BDSM. In my head—based on books—I imagine the room. Various images flit through my head. Red leather benches for spankings and whippings and a rack for tying up a woman. A selection of whips on the wall. A décor of red and black to make the room look hellish and wicked. Or maybe the room would be sleekly white and silver. Or filled with heavy dark wood, illuminated with flickering candles, featuring medieval torture instruments…

Wait. That one is probably devil worship, not BDSM.

“Maybe he was presenting it as a suggestion. He was hopeful you would say yes,” I say.

“It wasn’t a suggestion. It was an obligation.”

“Oh. Maybe you can come to an arrangement where he doesn’t do that stuff with you.”

She gets up and grabs her drink, downing it. Then she sinks back onto the toilet lid. “So he does it with someone else while he’s dating me. Then we get married and he does kinky stuff on the side with trashy women? That’s not my idea of happily ever after. I wasn’t into him for his money. I liked him, and now I find out that I was totally wrong about him. I guess everything I thought I saw in him was totally fake, since he’s really a perverted, self-centered creep.”

I can’t really argue with that.

Lara drops her face into her hands. “I was really falling for him.”

“It happens, Lara. It was just a mistake.”

She looks up at me, agony in her expression. “I can’t do that kind of stuff, Mia. You don’t hurt someone if you love them. I don’t believe that crap at all. I don’t believe it’s just some fantasy. When my parents broke up, my mom remarried. My stepdad used to hit her. She was in denial for years, but no matter what bullshit she told herself, I tried to make her understand that hitting does
not
equate to love. Finally, I confronted him, because she wouldn’t do anything to stop it. She told me, seriously, that if she could just be more perfect, he wouldn’t get angry. She stopped working because he asked her to. She turned herself into a brainless Stepford wife for him. How could she
believe
that crap?”

Lara gets up off the john, impassioned. “What is this whole ‘take away your choices, your strength, your decisions’ crap? Oh yeah, I’ve seen how great it is. Every dime my mom got she had to ask my stepfather for. Yeah, he was so generous at first. Then he refused to spend any money on her at all. Women who aren’t independent are
idiots
.”

Her mother’s story is much like mine, except without the physical abuse.

“You are very wise.” I mean it sincerely, honestly, and with a huge degree of awe for her positive strength. I wish I’d had so much strength. Lara looks like such a…golden girl. I never pictured her as having a tough past involving abuse or pain.

I always saw my flaws and screw-ups as an obvious manifestation of my past. I wore my fucked-up psyche every day. I fought it, determine to act like I’m normal. Do I look as convincing as Lara?

But she looks at me warily, as if she’s not sure what I mean by what I said. “I am so impressed by you,” I explain. “I know how hard it can be to recognize that you don’t have to be a victim and then stand up for yourself. You did both.” Then I ask, “What happened when you confronted your stepfather?” I’m curious, since I never had the courage to do it.

“He hit me across the face, so I threw him to the floor and pinned his arms. The advantages of judo training. After that, I walked out the door and went to live with my sister. Until my mom kicks the asshole to the curb, I am not going back.”

Tears spring into Lara’s eyes. “It’s been so hard, but she won’t do it. She chose him over me. Now I find out that Jonathon wants to control women sexually. Abuse is all about control.”

This startles me. I’d never thought of it that way before. I had thought people did bad things to you when you lived in the house because they were making use of you. If they had to support you, why shouldn’t they get to use you to work out their anger or sexual frustration? It was supposed to be your price for the roof over your head, the clothes on your back, the food you ate.

I remember Jonathon’s lost, agonized look. Had he wanted me to come up to talk to me about Lara? Did he want to apologize, tell me that her refusal had made him see the light, and that for a good, beautiful woman like Lara he was willing to change?

Maybe I should go up there and find out.

***

It takes me a while to figure out how to locate the room with the terrace. Seriously, since I plan to design buildings, I know I should have a better sense of direction and layout. I have to stop at the stairs, armed with directions I gathered from party goers, and really think out where the terrace must be in relation to where I’m standing.

Finally I reach the double doors I am certain must be Jonathon’s room, and knock.

He opens one, lets me come in and closes it behind me. I turn around and open it again, and at his raised brow, I point out, “I don’t want anyone getting the wrong idea as to why I am here.”

“Why do you think you are here, Mia?”

“To discover why you were insane enough to scare Lara away. I assume you wanted me to come up to talk about her. I assume you want me to help patch things up.”

There’s a pause and he sips his drink—a rich bronze colored liquid in the bottom of a balloon-shaped glass. “Come here.” Then he turns his back and walks across the room to another door, which he nudges open.

I follow, assuming I’m about to get the tour of Castle Kink.

“There is nothing to discuss,” he says as he goes inside. “Lara made her position clear. Mine is also clear. This is what I require in a relationship. I don’t force or coerce women to do this. I put the proposal to a woman. If she’s not interested, I move on.”

“Just like that, without even an ounce of heartbreak?” It is official: I don’t like him. He may be gorgeous, but he appears cool, completely unconcerned about the pain he’s just caused Lara.

He makes me miss Ryan. Why am I here, in his bedroom, having this discussion, which is pointless since he is obviously heartless? I wish I were in a bedroom with Ryan, laughing, making love to him, licking and sucking and pleasuring him all over.

Jonathon flicks a light switch in his mystery BDSM room and I walk inside.

It’s far bigger than my dorm room. The walls are deep purple, with recesses built into each one to house displays of whips and floggers. Soft lighting is sprinkled here and there to give an aura of depth, mystery, and elegance. The furniture is black leather—I got that partly right. A thick oriental carpet in black, purple and silver covers the floor. Ornate mirrors stand around the room—eight in all. I notice silver spot lights on the ceiling—none are turned on, but they point at a leather chaise, a couple of benches, and a recess in the wall that contains silver rings fastened at various heights.

Jonathon sits on the edge of one of his black leather benches, pushing the silver buckle of a strap out of his way. Even in this muted light, I can see how green his eyes are. His lashes are thick and black; his brows are dark slashes, his lower lip full and pouty. He has the bad boy look down to a fine art. Even though I suspect manipulation—but what does he want?—I feel a tug inside.