Wrecked (The Blackened Window) (47 page)

I glanced at him. He looked lost, his shoulders sloping down, defeated. It was something I hadn’t ever seen in him before. He was always the big, bad scary Dom-Man. This degree of vulnerability was disconcerting and he was diminished in my eyes. He was no longer the infallible conqueror of my bedroom, taking me places I had never been. Taking me beyond the confines of my imagination.

He was just a man, as fragile as me. And I could see in his face that he knew it. He had known it all along. He had asked me to lay myself down for him. He had led me deeper into him, into his darkness, knowing he was faulted the whole time. And recognition flooded through me that this was part of what I was angry about. Not that I was in a relationship with him and there were secrets that I hadn’t learned yet. It was that this relationship was different.
He
was supposed to be different. He was supposed to be solid, strength, security. He was supposed to be my safety, but now that was broken. He wasn’t any stronger than me, wasn’t any more capable of keeping me safe. He wasn’t different than every other guy I knew.

I wanted to get away from him to think about it. My thoughts felt too fast and sluggish at the same time. It was more than fatigue. It was too much to muddle through then.

“Look, we’re both exhausted. Let’s just try to sleep a bit and we can talk about this tomorrow or something.” I sighed, stretched and stood.

He looked up at me, through his lashes, doubt on his face. “Okay, sweetheart.” As I climbed into the bed, he pulled me to him, so I was sitting in his lap, my back to his chest. He dropped his forehead onto my shoulder. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Leda. I didn’t mean to hurt you.” He pressed a kiss onto the slope of my shoulder and shifted me into the bed.

As I pulled the covers over me, he stood, saying, “I’m just gonna splash some water on my face and take some ibuprofen. Do you need anything?” When I shook my head, he added, “Be right back, honey.”

It felt like goodbye, but I murmured my understanding and rolled over. I waited for the sound of the water and let my tears out a little. I had a fast, furious cry and was wrung out when it ended, whimpering against the wet pillow, as fatigue, both physical and emotional, claimed me.

* * * *

My sleep was fitful and I didn’t feel rested when I woke up. Xander was gone, not in the bed with me where I expected him to be. I couldn’t hear water running in the bathroom. Sitting up in the bed, the slurry of emotions running through me was too much to analyze or even recognize. The end result was a vague disgust peppered with a touch of relief that I didn’t have to immediately confront him, followed quickly by fear that he had left in the night without me.

But, his things were still scattered around the room, and when I finally convinced myself to be a grown up and get the fuck out of bed and confront my problems, I noticed the note he left on the dresser.

L—

Working out, be back soon.

Take a shower, we can get breakfast when I get back.

—X

Was this guy still telling me what to do
? I chuckled in disbelief at that, even as I walked to the bathroom and started the shower. Letting the water rush over me didn’t clear my head as much as I had hoped it would.

I was just pulling a sweater over my head when he came back. His hair was soaked and his T-shirt clung to him, saturated with his sweat. I was distracted by the movement of his wet shirt over his torso as he entered and the twist of his body when he closed the door. It was as if, after last night and the thought that whatever we had might be in jeopardy, I was re-noticing the way he moved, the shape of him—remembering the ripple of his muscles under my fingers, the expanse of his shoulders, the way he could wrap his body around mine and how it used to feel like the only safe place in the world.

“Good workout?” It was too uncomfortable to just stand here, looking at him.

“Yeah, just ran some, lifted some weights.” He looked like he had worked harder than that. “Are you hungry? We can get room service, go downstairs or go somewhere else. What are you in the mood for?”

“Ummm, I don’t know what I want.” Truer words never spoken. “Why don’t you shower and we’ll figure it out?”

“’Kay.” He paused before turning to the bathroom, his eyes searching mine. I lifted my chin, challenging him to bring it up. He dropped his gaze and stepped away. The shower turned on shortly after.

We settled on breakfast at a small café a few blocks away recommended by the concierge. We walked in silence, the air brisk around us. We sat in the back of the restaurant and didn’t speak until we ordered.

“You okay?” he finally asked.

A smile quirked at my lips. “Well, no, not really. Do you really want to talk about this here and now?”

“I can’t
not
talk about it at this point.” He looked down again, but when he looked back up at me, his eyes held a mix of anguish and anger.

“Okay…so talk.” It was perhaps unnecessarily bitchy, but I was still pissed.

“What can I even say, Leda? Of course I had relationships before you. Of course there is more to me than you know about yet. I don’t really even know what you’re upset about.” He cut himself off when the waitress brought our coffees.

Once she walked away, I answered him, “Xander. Alexander. I don’t know how to explain it. I’m an open book for you. So open that it feels raw and dangerous. And, you’re hidden from me. Your name isn’t even really your name.”

“I haven’t hidden things from you. We just haven’t gotten there yet.”

“I call bullshit on that! You hid your real name from me. You hid your relationship with Stacy from me. And that’s enough for me to question my trust in you. But that isn’t even it, right? I mean, what was Stacy talking about that I don’t know about—what else is there, Xander?”

“Leda, I never lied to you.”

I cut him off, “No, you just never let me see the truth.”

We held a tense silence as the waitress delivered our food. It was good hangover breakfast—greasy eggs and potatoes, covered in cheesy goodness, thick, rich coffee and, on the waitress’s recommendation, we had ordered a gooey cinnamon roll to split. The food was great, but it was only secondary in my focus. Even after she walked away, we still sat in silence. After what felt like several hours, he responded.

“Okay, what truth do you want from me?”

“I don’t fucking know. If I knew, it wouldn’t be an issue, right?” My tone was heavy with sarcasm, clearly implying he was an idiot.

His expression darkened to something I had never seen in all our sex-play. This was true anger. He was actually getting pissed off at me. “I’m trying to be open here, Leda. Don’t fucking punish me right when you’re getting what you say you want.”

Jesus, that stung, but my pride wouldn’t let me answer in kindness. I just waited, gritting my jaw.

He sensed that he had an edge and leaned into it. “What do you want to know?”

I concentrated on cutting up something on my plate, until he reached across the table and tilted my chin up to look at him.

“Last time I’m asking. What do you want to know about me?” The words were measured and deliberately well-enunciated.

I took a deep breath. “I don’t know, Xander. I don’t know. What was Stacy talking about? Tell me about your relationship with her, because I think she is a big, bitchy cunt of a person and I can’t see how you could see anything redeeming in her.” I knew I was displacing some of my anger on her, but I couldn’t stop myself. In a sick way, I wanted to see if he defended her.

A quick smirk tugged at his lips before he answered, but when he did, he was serious. “Like I said, I grew up with her. She was there when my parents changed and started to hate each other. She was young and silly, a perfect distraction. She was like a sister. My parents’ relationship was why I went into the military—I had to get away from them. My dad was fucking half the interns who came through Noe’s office, but then he’d be weirdly possessive of my mom. Stacy was there and we had a bond that I can’t really explain to someone who wasn’t there.

“When I went to the Academy, she was still in high school. The Army was all-consuming, and got me away from the DC bullshit. But she had to stay back and she was alone. I swear, she was so sweet then. I came home for a long visit one summer and she was just different. Grown up, sexual, beautiful—and aggressive. We started…something. I don’t really know what it was. She was beyond my girlfriends. She was just…her. It wasn’t really a relationship, but it was.

“Anyway, the next summer, we went to the Nymphos show and, it was a crazy. We met the band and they invited us on the tour bus. And then we just… She was wild.” He shrugged.

After a moment, I shrugged back at him and he continued, “We were gone partying and fucking and being crazy for four days. Our parents were freaking out, but no one had cell phones yet and we just didn’t go home. They didn’t want to make a
scandal,
so they didn’t do anything. She felt like her parents didn’t care that she disappeared. After that, she just got more self-destructive—more drugs, more sex. I don’t know—that’s when things changed. There’s a black hole in me that she has seen. I mean, she’s fucking been in it. And there’s a deep part of her that’s angry and mighty. There was huge fallout when we came back… And we stood by each other through it.”

His ode to Stacy’s dark and fucked up beauty was beginning to piss me off. “Okay, so you’re both beautifully damaged. What the fuck have you been doing with me for the past few months?”

He blanched at my tone, realizing that my patience was waning. “Let me finish the story. It was one thing for me to be doing all that shit at twenty-two. It was still fucked up, but not so much outside of the normal wild oat sowing of the early twenties, especially for guys in the military. She was only eighteen. It was different for her. She was actively rebelling and she tied all that to me, switched all her weird dependence on her parents to me. We tried to be together, but she was too fucked up and I didn’t want to be tied down to one person and she wasn’t submissive at all. It evolved into a love-hate thing. We’d fight then fuck. Fuck then fight. When I went overseas, she tried to fuck Jason.”

I started at that, not realizing they knew each other or even had a history, but it made sense. “Does she ever go to the Window?”

“I don’t know, Leda. I don’t have any kind of relationship with her anymore. But I think Christy would let her know how it is if she ever tried to get after Jason again. It’s not really an issue, because he really slammed the door on that. He never liked her. He likes happy girls, like Christy. It’s why he likes you.” He glanced up at me, gauging my reaction to his subtle flattery.

“Finish your story and get to the point that explains why you lied to me, and why you were in the hall with her, in a bathrobe and nothing else,
kissing her
, in the middle of the night when you were supposed to be in bed with me.” He gave me a wry glance, implying that I was being ridiculous, so I added, “Reverse the roles for a minute. What if my close friend from childhood, who I apparently had fucked like crazy showed up in the middle of the night and you woke to find
me
in the hall, talking with him, in nothing,
nothing
, but a robe, and you were sure that he kissed me? How would that sit?”

His eyes hardened and the muscle in his jaw twitched. “Okay. I get it. Because I might kill a motherfucker.”

“Okay. So stop implying that I’m overreacting.” My voice was hard.

“All right, killer.” He thought he was funny, but I wanted to slap him. “Ultimately, I was discharged from the Army and got my job at the Pentagon. Her dad was on the Congressional Defense committee. He helped me get the job. When I moved back to DC, she was in undergrad at Georgetown, so we started hanging out again. And then we started having sex again. And she wanted to try to be submissive again. So we started slow, like you and I did.”

Oh, what an asshole.

“And she was doing great. So one night, she was at the Pentagon, visiting her dad or something. She stopped to see me because I was working late. At this point, I had started visiting dungeons and play parties and I knew more about what I wanted. She agreed to try…more.”

I took a deep breath. Did I really want to hear about this anymore? My stomach was in knots and I stopped eating.

“Are you sure you want to hear this, Leda?”

I laughed as another wave of dread-tinged nausea washed over me. “No. I don’t
want
to hear it. I don’t want it to exist. I don’t want there to be a problem between us. I don’t want to think about you touching someone the way you touch me. I don’t want to think about you being in love with someone else.” My voice cracked.

“I wasn’t in love with her. She was like a sister, and—”

“She was like your sister so you had sex with her intermittently,
for several years.
Thank God you don’t have any biological sisters.” I paused to control myself. I could feel the rising emotions getting out of control. “No. I want to know what happened that changed the course of your life.”

“Okay, stop me if it’s too much.” The irony of that statement stung a little. “You have to understand, we would come together, try to figure out how to be together and then it would implode. We just cycled like that, over and over.”

I nodded my understanding, but didn’t speak.

He continued, “The night that she was talking about, the night that got me fired, was when I was at the Pentagon. She came to my workroom and told me she wanted to try again, that I was the only person she could ever submit to.” His eyes glazed a bit. “I told her it was all or nothing. I didn’t want to just dabble in controlling her. She agreed, and I grabbed her. No discussion of limits or safewords. I realize now how absolutely terrible that was, but I was relatively new to BDSM then. I remember pulling her head back by her hair and asking her if she was sure. She said she was and that was it. I turned her around and flattened her across my boss’s desk, and secured her hands to the drawer pull with my belt.”