by Sionna Fox
But she’d paid her fee, and she’d spent some of what little money she had on a cheap pleather corset and fishnets to wear to the evening play party, so she did a shot at the hotel bar, wriggled into what felt like a ridiculous costume, and went in anyway.
Ian had been across the room, sitting in a chair, observing the scene with a woman at his feet. He was dressed like he’d just left the office, in a well-tailored suit and tie and crisp dress shirt. Kate was sweating like any minute someone was going to spot her and kick her out or make an example of her. You want this, girl? Then get ready to take it. Part of her wanted that, but she knew that wasn’t how this worked. No one was going to bend her over their knee, strip her out of her boyshorts, and spank her for trespassing. Not unless they’d both agreed on that.
She had watched the woman kneeling at Ian’s feet, serene and beautiful, sure of her place at the side of this austerely beautiful man. Kate wanted to be her. Desperately. To be owned by someone like him. To be owned by him.
She had watched as he tied the other woman to a table and flogged her until she was pink and red from knee to shoulder. Kate’s whole body had throbbed with want and arousal. She’d never desired anything as intensely as she had while watching an unknown woman be unraveled in front of her. When they were done, Kate had stood and stared as he’d untied her and wrapped her in his capable arms, soothing her back to Earth.
And that’s how he found her. Slack-jawed and staring, desperately aroused, rooted to the spot, watching that moment of tenderness that came after the brutality. He could have been angry that she had been intruding on them post-scene. But he understood. When his partner had come down enough to be entrusted to the care of friends, he found Kate. He’d asked her questions, patiently answered hers. The other woman was a friend, a sometime scene partner. Kink didn’t have to lead to sex, but if Kate wanted it to… And that was it. She had been his.
She lay in bed, parsing her memories of that night and the weekend that followed. The way he’d taken her under his wing for the rest of that night, showing her things she hadn’t imagined, teasing out her needs and desires. Making sure, when they went up to his room, that she had someone who would be expecting her to check in later. He’d been so careful with her.
Kate had burned to be the woman at his feet, but why? She couldn’t untangle her feelings. Did she want the control, to be his pet, his little one, on her knees for him? Or did she want the catharsis of pain? She could armchair psychoanalyze herself and her parental issues all day long, but it didn’t change the fact that last night’s disaster proved she needed someone else to be in control for sex. She didn’t want to take the lead. She didn’t want to have to fumble around in a sloppy tangle of limbs because some sweet guy was afraid to hurt her. She wanted it to hurt.
She reached into the nightstand drawer above her head—the one drawer her temporary landlord had emptied for her—and took out her vibrator. She could hate herself for it all she wanted, but thinking about that weekend, the way Ian had stripped her, spanked her, licked her clean, then bent her over the edge of the hotel bed and fucked her, still had the power to render her as desperate to come as she had been that night when he’d made her beg for it over and over.
Fuck. She still wanted him. A swift, bright orgasm washed through her, bringing with it a tide of shame. She had to get out of bed and stop thinking about him. She had a dissertation to write and a syllabus to finalize.
Her stomach was rumbling anyway, and if she didn’t get caffeine into her system soon, her day would be shot by a splitting headache. She pulled open the bifold door that hid her kitchen, turned on the gas under the much-loved cast iron skillet she’d been lugging around since her first undergrad apartment, and pulled eggs and bread from the fridge. She put water in the kettle for coffee and set it to boil. Toast had to be done in the oven, so she turned that on too. There were days she severely missed Ian’s kitchen. But she had traded an espresso machine and perfectly programmed toaster for independence, so she wouldn’t complain. Much.
With an egg sandwich and a pot of French press coffee, she sat at her tiny table with her laptop and her book list and attempted to divvy up reading assignments that were achievable, but still allowed them to get through the material. Doing the page count math kept her occupied through breakfast, and she was busy jotting down notes for the next chapter of her dissertation when her phone rang with Evie’s tone again.
But she’d gotten a solid amount of work done, and not even a phone call from Evie would derail her. She would get it over with and get back to work.
“What do you want, Evie?” So she was maybe still a little irritated at the interruption.
“Hello, Kate. How are you?” She was as calm and polite as ever.
“I’m fine, Evie. In the middle of something, so can you dispense with the pleasantries and tell me what it is you want?”
“And how is your dissertation coming? I hear you’re teaching again this semester too. I hope that won’t set you back too much.”
Evie could, and would, do this dance all day. She’d been trained for it since her extremely WASP-y birth. But Kate, however, lacked the social conditioning or the patience. She’d only been trained for sweetness when it came to eligible men. Thanks, Mom. “Evie. Tell me what you want or I’m hanging up.”
She sighed, and Kate could practically see the corner of her mouth turn down through the phone. “You need to talk to Ian.”
Then it was Kate’s turn to grimace. She propped her elbows on the table and rested her head in her hands. “I really don’t. And I don’t see how it’s any business of yours, anyway.”
“Katherine. You may feel that you owe him nothing. You may, in fact, owe him nothing. But if he failed you in some way, he should know. If he harmed you, he should know. You owe that much to the women who may follow you.”
“This isn’t a consent violation at a party. It had nothing to do with anything like that. Why does everyone expect me to talk about it?”
“Kate. People like us talk everything to death, why would you expect the end of a five-year partnership to be any different? No one is saying you have to get back together with him, but he deserves to know what happened.”
Kate grumbled into the receiver. She hated when Evie was right, which was most of the time.
“Talk to him, Kate. And come home, already. Everyone misses you.”
Kate had come back to Boston, but Evie was right that she hadn’t come home. She’d peeked in on everyone at Matt and Jolene’s engagement party, and she’d hung out with Jolene that one night, but she’d been holding herself apart from everyone she used to think of as family.
“Maybe. I’ll think about it.”
“Good. Thank you.”
Evie hung up, and Kate dropped her hands to the floor so her head was between her knees. She waited until the urge to throw her phone into the wall had passed before sitting upright again.
She was going to have to talk to him.
Five
Ian needed to be at work on time. He needed to not act like a fucking adolescent stalker and creep past the window of the shop where Kate liked to work on the weekdays. But he’d been checking up on her basic well-being for five years, why would his brain or his heart think he should stop now?
He paused outside long enough to see her ruffling her hair in what he knew was a gesture of frustration. How many times had he seen that exact movement when she’d been wrestling with something at their kitchen table, papers and books spread around her? He went inside.
He ordered a coffee and a cinnamon roll from the pastry case, unsure if he should even talk to her or just nod, acknowledging that she had been right, it wasn’t the time or the place.
But Kate spoke first. “Ian.”
“Hello, Kate.” He took a bite of the cinnamon roll—overworked and slightly dry—and regretted the purchase. “Not as good as yours.”
She used to bake when she was stressed, kneading dough on the kitchen counter, making
sense out of the world through baking’s careful measurements. She’d make cinnamon roll dough on Saturday afternoon, letting it proof overnight while he had her naked and tied to their bed. She’d get up before him and have them in the oven, waking him with the scent of sticky brown sugar and cinnamon wafting up the stairs. God, he missed her.
He missed the space she used to take up in their house. He missed their shared history. The inside jokes and the encyclopedic knowledge of her body. He knew the things she secretly hated, and the things she loved. Like she knew his every weak spot.
“The muffins are a safer bet.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“You’re going to be late for work.”
He glanced at his watch. “Probably. I’ll let you get back to it.”
Kate nodded and turned back to her screen. He bit his tongue and left without asking if they could talk. She’d only told him that she was done, that she wasn’t in love with him, before she left. He knew he’d failed her somehow, had failed to see how far apart from each other they’d grown, how stuck in their routines they’d been, but he wanted to hear it from her. And if that never happened…
He ghosted through his work day, like he had for the last year, doing the minimum amount of checking in on projects and deliverables, communicating with clients and project managers on live dates and bug fixes. His job was functionally unnecessary. Should he ever be forced to justify his position, he’d be hard-pressed to do it. Most of the spec questions he received from clients, he forwarded to engineering, they sent an answer back to him, and he emailed the client. He was nothing more than an intermediary in a decent suit, a vestige from a model of doing business that assumed software engineers, people who wrote communicative code for a living, were somehow bad at dealing with clients.
Some of them were. But his team wasn’t. And so he had made himself obsolete. Pushing figurative papers and being a face to a name. He missed being one of them. They’d promoted him because he could play the part. He cleaned up well enough and most of their clients still assumed coders were orange cheese-dust-stained twenty-year-olds in comic book T-shirts, so Ian got trotted out in a nice suit and tie to show them an adult was in charge.
His phone buzzed in his pocket as he rode the elevator down from his office at the end of the day.
Kate: We should talk.
His heart and stomach rushed in opposite directions. He expected another text, naming a time or place, for her to set the terms, but nothing came. Play it cool, kid. Girls’ll walk all over you if you jump when they say jump. His father’s bullshit advice for dealing with the opposite sex rang in his ears. He wanted to see her, but he waited until he was back at the house, behind his own closed doors to message her back, unable to shake the voice in his head that told him to wait, to not let her see how he’d been waiting, phone in hand, for that text since the moment she’d touched down at Logan.
Ian: We can. Whenever, wherever you’d like.
Not exactly playing it cool, even with the lag between messages. But fuck it, he’d take any olive branch she was willing to offer.
Kate: Let’s get this over with. But I have to be up early.
She texted an address a few blocks from the coffee shop. He rushed to put his coat back on and get out the door before she could change her mind.
The building she’d directed him to was old, the intercom at the door apparently broken, so he texted again to ask her to let him up. She came down in her battered old slippers and led him through the small lobby with its cracked and peeling yellow linoleum, into the tiny enclosed space of the almost miniature elevator. He could smell cardamom and cloves on her hair from the home-brewed masala chai at the shop and had to stop himself from leaning closer to find the smell of her skin under the spices.
Wordlessly, she opened the door and turned in a circle to give him the grand tour. He’d had dorm rooms bigger than this place. She arched an eyebrow, challenging him to comment on where she chose to live, what she could afford. He knew even this tiny dump must be stretching her budget.
“Go on. I know you want to say it.”
“That’s…quite the shade of pink.” The walls looked like something out of a bordello fever dream, hot pink and draped in black lace.
“Sublet beggars can’t be choosers.”
Ian felt too large in the small space, too tall for its low ceilings. The two chairs were piled with books and papers, leaving the bed the only place to sit. He didn’t trust the structural integrity of the coffee table to bear his weight. He perched on the edge, waiting for her to either join him or stay put on the clashing purple rug in the middle of the room.
She sat on the coffee table, their knees almost touching, twirling her hands in her lap. He half expected her to say never mind and kick him out without another word.
“You wanted to talk to me?”
She looked up, her brown eyes seemed larger without a curtain of hair to hide behind. He broke eye contact, not wanting her to know how much he wanted to pull her into his lap and not let go. To beg her to let him have another chance. She didn’t belong to him anymore, and he didn’t belong to her. But he hadn’t counted on how much he still wanted her now that they were alone in her tiny room.
“You keep showing up at the café. You said you wanted to talk to me, and now I’ve got Evie on my back. I want to get this over with. You want closure? Have at it.” She crossed her arms over her chest and arched a dark eyebrow. Defiance. Defensiveness. Ian knew how to read these gestures, the tone of her voice. She’d learned over the years that it was easier to be very clear with him. And apparently easy to make him believe everything was fine, until it wasn’t. She’d left with a slump in her shoulders and come back tougher, angrier. The desert had sharpened her edges.
“You know whatever Evie does is under her own steam. I would never ask her to intercede on my behalf. I wish she wouldn’t, to be honest. But we know how useless that is.”
“I am aware of how our puppet master likes to make us all dance.”
“She’s only trying to protect Sarah. She needs her big, happy family in one piece.” From the outside, Sarah might look like the den mother, but once she let people in, she kept them close and took losses hard. Evie had made it her mission in life to avoid as much loss as possible for the woman she loved.
“I know.” Kate took his hand.
They’d always done that, remained touching while they had any sort of serious discussion, even if it was the barest brush of toes from opposite sides of the bed. It had comforted him, grounded him when his vision blurred and his breath started to come too quickly. He’d almost managed to forget.
“Are you talking to me because you want Evie off your back?” Ian ran his thumb over the back of her hand, her knuckles dry from the cold. He inched closer, brushing his knees against hers. She didn’t back away or drop his hand.
“Only a little.”
He squeezed her hand. “I missed you. Every day,” he whispered.
“Don’t.” She leaned her head on his shoulder, this pattern of seeking and offering comfort as familiar as breathing.
“Why?”
“Because we shouldn’t be doing this.”
“What are we doing?” Ian slipped his fingers under her chin, raising her gaze to meet his. She chewed her lip and looked down at her knees.
“I don’t know.” She bridged the gap between them, threading her knees between his and kissed him.
An experiment, a provocation, it didn’t matter; Ian pulled her back and looked at her, nervousness, arousal, familiar comforts all flashed across her face. He kissed her back.
* * *
This. This was what Kate had been missing in her ill-advised hookup with Owen. Ian grabbed her by the waist and swung her onto his lap, two hands pressing firmly into her flesh as he positioned her to straddle his hips. All his twitching nervousness melted away as he took control of her body.
He bit her lower lip, and she opened her mouth to let him in as sh
e wrapped her arms around his shoulders. His hands slid up her body to cup her breasts through the thin T-shirt she’d changed into when she was done for the day.
When they’d been together, she’d worn lingerie and silky nightgowns, but T-shirts and leggings had proven more practical for sharing rooms with other fellows and the shifting weather between desert heat and frosty air conditioning. Ian didn’t seem to notice the change.
He pinched and pulled at her tender skin through the fabric, skin that had gone almost untouched for a year, and a low moan escaped her throat. A voice in the back of her mind was telling her to stop, before it was too late, before it went too far, before one or both of them got the wrong idea. Before she remembered how good this could be between them. But the pleasure swirling into her bloodstream drowned out the voice. Poor Owen. He never stood a chance against this.
Ian sucked and bit his way down her neck, scrambling all thoughts of telling him to stop. She leaned back, holding onto his shoulders for leverage, as he dipped his head and sucked a nipple into his mouth through her shirt. The damp fabric was rough and chafed as he tongued her through it. He moved to her other breast but yanked the scoop neck down to expose her skin before he latched on and bit down as he sucked. She arched into his mouth and made small, high sounds as she wriggled in his lap, only half-conscious of the way she was grinding against his cock.
He lifted his head with a soft pop. “Arms up.”
He pulled off her shirt, picked her up, and tossed her on her back on the mattress. She bounced slightly as she landed, a breathless giggle escaping her lips as she settled.
He gripped the waistband of her leggings. “Up.”
She lifted her hips, and he scooped her underwear and leggings at once down her legs, leaving her completely naked while he was still fully clothed in a dress shirt and wool trousers. Ian rarely did casual and being naked while he was impeccably dressed had always been one of her favorite ways of feeling the imbalance of power between them. Was it her favorite? Or had she learned it from him? Did it matter if the end result was that being naked in front of a fully clothed man in neatly cut slacks and a fine cotton shirt made her wet?
