“I don’t know.” My voice sounded quavery compared to his. “Whose poem is that?”
“D.H. Lawrence.” I felt him stretch, felt his ab muscles slide against my back. His wet, warm tongue traced my skin from earlobe to jaw. “He was a pervert. Most poets are perverts,” he said when he finished with the tongue bath.
I shivered as he pulled back and left me. I always felt so empty after I’d been assfucked. Not empty enough to beg him to do it again, but still.
“Are you going to untie me?” I asked when I heard him return from the bathroom.
“When you answer my poetic questions.” I felt the bed dip between my legs, and then his palms running up my thighs. “How many stars in your bowl, Chere?”
“I don’t even know what that means.”
He traced his fingers back and forth over my ass cheeks, over the lines he’d put there earlier. They still ached, a sharp reminder of his power, and my hunger for it. He asked me again, in an insistent tone that demanded an answer. “How many stars in your bowl?”
“Let me think about it.”
I closed my eyes behind the mask, and thought about all the things I had to be happy for, and all the things that challenged me, and my intimate circle of trusted friends. “Eighty to ninety stars. Maybe.”
He laughed at that. “Am I one of them?”
I wiggled my ass.
You’re my sun
, I thought.
My main star. No matter how I wish it otherwise, everything in my life revolves around you.
That was a scary thought, because, surrender aside, I still didn’t know if he could be trusted. I didn’t know if the violence or the tenderness was his true face. He was being so tender now, stroking me, soothing all the places he’d hurt.
“How many shadows in your soul?” he asked.
“Shadows?” I thought a bit longer about that one. Simon, for sure. Cantor? Kind of. My parents, definitely. My old clients? How many of them had there been? Hundreds over the course of a decade? “I have a lot of shadows,” I said. “Maybe four or five thousand, if you’re talking about my entire life.”
The bed creaked. He shifted, then pressed his lips to the base of my spine. He kissed me there, a soft, tentative kiss that was over too soon.
“I’m sorry I have to hurt you to get off,” he said. “Thank you for being brave enough to surrender to me. It means more than you know.”
This sudden, and no doubt fleeting, show of sincerity made me feel shy. He was like a star and a shadow, light on one side and dark on the other.
“I want to see you,” I said. “I answered your questions. Now you have to take off the mask.”
“Oh, do I
have
to?”
But I felt his fingers at the back of my head, undoing the buckle. He took it off and I blinked. Every light was on in his room. I strained to watch him as he disappeared to the foot of the bed to untie my ankles. A moment later, he sat beside me to untie my wrists. He was quiet, his expression somber as he manipulated the black rope. Was he disappointed in my answers to his questions? Was I not poetic enough?
When my arms were free, I sat back from the pillows and watched him. My ass still hurt, and I wasn’t sure of his mood. I couldn’t tell if there was going to be more sex, or an argument, or kissing and whispering and making out.
“Shower?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Yes. Please.”
His bathroom was as beautiful and luxurious as the rest of his place. We stood in his huge glass enclosure, a marble and glass structure that raised hygiene to a fine art. There were two shower heads, but he kept me under his, half washing me, half groping me. I closed my eyes when he started to kiss me.
All the time I’d spent tied to his bed, I’d been blind and wanted to see, but now that I could open my eyes and look at him, I wanted to retreat into touch. He held me close, stroking up my back, and then trailing down to squeeze my sore ass. He massaged my nape, a caress and then a grasp to draw me against his muscled front. The kiss deepened, went on for so long I lost myself.
I was drowning in him. It wasn’t only the kisses—although he was great at the kisses. It was the way he held me and stroked me, like he could never have enough of me. It was scary and thrilling, and dangerous to my psyche.
Don’t fall in love again.
I pulled away and looked at him, brushing back a wet strand of his hair. “Why does my surrender mean so much to you?”
“Because you’re a fighter,” he said, without thinking about it at all. He tried to kiss me again, but I held him off.
“I answered your questions. Now I want answers,” I said. “Why do you prefer pain instead of love? What happened to you to make you this way?”
“Jesus, Chere,” he said, turning away. “Shut the fuck up.”
“No, answer me.” I nudged him until he turned back to me. “Why do you say you can’t be with me? I know why I don’t trust love, but what happened to you?”
I couldn’t make anything of his expression. It looked like too many emotions at once, shuttered into a concealing mask. “Love lies,” he said.
“Someone lied to you?”
“Everyone lies.” He forced a laugh. “You and your questions, your stupid girly shit.”
“How many stars in your bowl, then? How many shadows in your soul?”
He shut off the water and got out. The question-and-answer session was apparently over. He’d withdrawn from me in that whiplash manner. One minute he was there, engaged, smiling and caressing me, and the next he was a ghost, impossible to touch. While I sat in his room and brushed my hair, he lay back on the bed with his arms crossed behind his head. He didn’t say anything to me, or glance my way.
How many shadows in your soul?
He had to have a lot, none of which he seemed willing to discuss. I stood to get dressed, but before I could grab my clothes, he held out his hand.
“Where are you going? Come here.”
“It’s late,” I said.
“Come here.”
Our eyes locked. His gaze drew me to the bed and into his arms. He enveloped me in a hug, this confusing man who’d just finished pushing me away. His hands moved over me, drawing me right against his body. Did I love him or did I fear him? Did I want to get closer to him, or should I be running away?
“I don’t understand you,” I whispered.
His lashes flickered, darker golden-blond than his hair. “Is it so important to understand?”
“Yes. For me it is. After everything with Simon, it’s important.”
His languid look wavered into irritation, as it always did when I mentioned my ex’s name. He lifted my arm, stroked his palm up the underside, across paler, sensitive skin. He brought it to his lips and bit the inside of my forearm. I watched his mouth open, watched his teeth close and bite down.
It hurt. I whined and he let me go, and bit my wrist instead. He licked over the place he hurt, and sighed.
“I want you to sleep here with me,” he said.
“Are you going to keep biting me?”
“Biting is the least of my crimes against you. Will you stay?”
I wanted to stay. He was warm and comfortable, and the surrender part was over. For now.
“I used to hate leaving,” he blurted out, before I could answer. “I used to hate the time thing. The sessions. It was so fake.”
“You could have paid to stay with me all night.”
“It still would have been a session. It would have ended. We would get so heightened, you know, physically, psychologically, and then our time would be up. I hated it.”
“You don’t have to leave, not anymore. And I’ll stay.”
He touched my fingers, tracing them one by one. “Remember that time you left? The time you just fucking took off and left me?”
“The Standard Hotel. Yeah, I remember. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that session. That was the first time I realized you were a stalker.”
“I didn’t stalk you. I just dug up a little information on your boyfriend.”
“That’s called stalking.”
He took my chin and gave it a little shake. “No. Stalking is giving someone an apartment so you can watch them with binoculars from across the street.”
He was joking, but it wasn’t funny. “Why did you watch me like that?” I felt like we could hash over this forever, and I’d never come to a place where I was okay with it. “Was it a voyeuristic thing? A sex thing? A control thing?”
He rolled away from me and ran his fingers through his hair. “I don’t know. It was a Chere thing. I told you, it was hard to leave. Every session, it was so hard to leave you. If I couldn’t leave you for a week, how do you think it felt to take an extended vacation from your life?”
“A ‘vacation’? So you always meant to come back?”
“I don’t know what I meant. I wanted you to graduate and start your life, and then, I thought, maybe...” He covered his eyes and made a frustrated sound. “I don’t know. I want too much of you. I still want too much.”
“What does that mean?” I wasn’t in the mood for his vague, distancing conversation. “I don’t understand why you keep saying that. How can you want too much from someone who’s already giving y—?”
“I have a dungeon,” he said, cutting me off. He took his hands away from his face and glared at me. “I have a dungeon, Chere, right here in this apartment, on the other side of this room. It’s got everything, all the furniture and equipment. But I brought you here to the bedroom instead, because...” His voice trailed off.
“Because you thought your dungeon might scare me?”
He gave a mirthless laugh. “I know it would scare you. I would have liked that part. No, it’s... I can’t...” He let out a harsh breath. “Look, I’ve always been straight with you. And here’s the truth: since you came back into my life, I’ve been getting it ready for you. I’ve been buying things with you in mind. I fantasize about taking you in there and...”
“And what?” I asked, even though I was kind of scared to hear the answer.
“Enslaving you. Training you and hurting you and fucking you up until all you know is
Yes, Sir
and
No, Sir
, and
What can I do for you, Sir?
” He frowned. “You’re going to graduate in a month. You’re going to go out into the world and start a career. You’re going to be happy. You and I...” He made a rough sound. “I’m bad for your happiness. I’m not safe. You know I’m not safe.”
“You’re safe,” I argued, like he hadn’t just revealed that he’d been outfitting a dungeon for me. I felt annoyed, because I wanted him to be safe. I wanted us to be two normal people without a bunch of fucked up issues. “You try hard not to hurt me,” I pointed out. “You exercise control. You’re not a vampire, or a lion, or some feral coyote.”
“I might be a feral coyote. That would actually explain a lot.”
He started kissing me again, hard, soft, licks and nips all over my face and shoulders. He cupped my breasts and then reached down to rake his nails across my tender ass. When I complained, he muffled my whimpers with more kisses, violent ones. I lost track of what happened after that. More sex, more pain, more tender caresses. More sex.
I was dying to see this dungeon now.
Yes, Sir. No, Sir. What can I do for you, Sir?
I begged him for details as I drifted to sleep but he wouldn’t answer me. He just left the specter of a Price-designed dungeon hanging over my head. I pictured something awful, cold, and elegantly sadistic. I fell asleep dreaming of a dark, dank cement room with chains looping down from the ceiling, and whips lined up along the wall.
When I woke the next morning, Price was gone. I vaguely remembered him kissing me around seven, and pulling closed the curtains against the morning light. I stretched my limbs, thrilled by the ache and burn. I felt weak and emptied out, and confused as ever about what had happened between us last night.
The dungeon.
I sat up and listened. I didn’t hear him, didn’t hear any sound in the apartment. I grabbed my towel from the night before, wrapped up, and tiptoed out into the hall to look for the dungeon door. He’d said it was right next to his room, but there was no entrance on either side. Damn. The doors on the other side of the hall stood open, revealing tasteful guest rooms and a home office. I sighed and retreated back to his bed.
“You’re fucking me up,” I said to no one, in the luxuriant silence of the room. I curled up in the smooth sheets, then leaned down to smell his pillow. It held his scent, just like my aching body held his marks and bruises. I rolled back to my own pillow and noticed a note from him on the side table.
Went for a run. Back soon.
Help yourself to whatever’s in the kitchen.
I picked up the note and found another one underneath, also in his handwriting.
Number of stars in my bowl: 1
Number of shadows in my soul: 1
Holy fucking shit.
First mistake: taking her to my place.
Second mistake: admitting I had a dungeon with her name on it.
I only left her alone in the apartment because I knew she wouldn’t find it. It was hidden, sort of like our feelings toward each other.
Third mistake: quoting D.H. Lawrence right after mind-blowing sex.
I’d named her the star in my bowl, the shadow in my soul. What was that shit? Most of the time I had my emo side under control, but her fucking questions in the shower had tapped a bunch of unwanted memories. My relationship history was a morass of rejection, castigation, and deceit. I didn’t trust love. I didn’t trust any woman on earth, but I was starting to trust her. That morning, looking down at her snuggled in my bed, I’d confessed too much. My bad.
Now she’d take that paper home and put it with the rest of them, and fantasize that I loved her when my love was a toxic, hurtful thing.
I couldn’t really say where I expected us to end up. I just knew my love wasn’t good for her.
I also knew I was getting worse, not better. I wanted all of her, every day.
On a drizzly April afternoon in Lower Manhattan, Chere graduated from the Norton School of Art and Design. She graduated panty-less, for the record. I thought that was important, and no one could tell thanks to the long, black robe she wore over her dress. My grandmother would have been proud to see the first Stephensen scholarship recipient graduate with high honors. To my chagrin, Martin Cantor handed her the diploma. Fucking Martin.