Somehow my feet are working. I’m heading toward the door, wearing my serene face—it’s one of my ballet faces, serene and placid, when all I want is for the ground to swallow me up.
I somehow make it to the place where the elevators are and I get in. I have to be away from him.
Back home I’m packing in my servant wife quarters. I don’t know if he’ll give me my papers now. Will I even go on the tour? I don’t know anything that’s going to happen, but I do know that I can’t stay. It’s like I’ve been living in a sandcastle and now it’s all collapsing along with little pieces of my heart.
Fake wife, fake sex.
He thought I was a horrible person. And this charade is my punishment.
I’m so stupid. So naïve. I was wrong to ghost him, yes. But for him to concoct this elaborate punishment?
I hear him come in. “You have it all wrong,” he says.
“I don’t know, you were pretty clear about what you thought about me!” I toss a pair of yoga pants into my bag and spin around. “I always felt like I knew you, and like you knew me, like we were outsider peas in a pod, even before we hooked up, but that isn’t at all the case, is it?” I bunch up some socks and throw them in. “You thought I used you and ghosted you and you were pissed off. I think you never knew me.” I zip up my bag with a loud zrrrrp.
“I wasn’t pissed off, I was devastated,” he says.
I sniff my disbelief and head into the bathroom. He follows behind. I grab my toothbrush, shove it into my travel bag.
“That night in Vegas was the best night of my life,” he says. “You were the most amazing woman I’d ever met, the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. When you left without so much as a word, when you seemed to have forgotten all about me, I was devastated.”
I shove my makeup pencils into my makeup case.
“But I figured out that you’d have to be back. Sooner or later, we’d have to deal with this marriage that you clearly didn’t want. This was a few months after Vegas. By that time James and I had started the company, and it was literally money falling from the sky.”
“And that matters why?” I grab my shampoo from the spa tub area and catch sight of him in the mirror. He seems to be groping for words, looking around as if someone’s going to appear and give him his lines.
Such a Benny way to be. My heart cracks a little.
“I told myself that I wanted you to feel sorry for walking out,” he continues. “That you’d come back and regret what you did. That’s what I wanted.”
I throw my razor in the bag. “So you plotted your revenge? Lying in wait?”
“That’s not it.”
“You just said it!”
“Fine. You want to see the revenge I plotted?” he asks. “I can show you.”
“You can show me?” I ask suspiciously. “I don’t think I want to see the revenge you plotted.”
“I want you to see.”
“Too bad,” I say.
“Jesus Christ.” He snatches up my phone and heads out of my room and down the hall.
“Hey!” I say, following after him. “Gimme that!”
He keeps going. “I will.”
“What are you doing?” I say.
“I’ll give it back, don’t worry,” he says, turning the corner, heading straight for the workout room.
He pushes open the door. I follow him into the empty space. A band of yellow moonlight streaks up hardwood. He flicks on the lights, sets my phone on a ledge, and heads straight for the boxes.
Is he going to show me what’s in the boxes?
“Stand back,” he says.
Stand back? What the hell?
I grab my phone and take a few backward steps.
He pulls a box away from the base of the mountain and a whole bunch of them come tumbling down.
I’m watching, mystified, thinking that whatever is in them must be light as feathers. He keeps pulling them away from the far end of the workout room, digging through them. His movements are abrupt, all harsh angles, familiar in the most painful way.
I wrap my arms around myself. Is there some specific box that he’s going for?
One of the boxes that tumbled down is only a few feet away from me, flap partly open. I go over and give it a shove with my foot. It’s almost as if there’s nothing inside it.
“What’s in there?” I ask.
“Nothing,” he says. “There’s nothing in the boxes. There never was.”
“What?” I don’t understand. “Why store empty boxes?”
He keeps tearing down the wall.
“As revenge schemes go, it doesn’t seem that effective,” I say.
He’s pulling more of them away from the wall, baring something, maybe.
And then I see the mirrors. Floor-to-ceiling mirrors. My belly swoops. More boxes come away
A ballet barre stretches all the way across.
I’m standing in a ballet studio, not a weights room. A gorgeous ballet studio in the most beautiful building in all of Manhattan.
Shivers slide over my skin, my scalp.
He’s standing in the middle of the space now, surrounded by boxes, hair mussed, unsure. Cool, suave Benny is nowhere to be seen. “I wanted you so fucking bad,” he grates out.
My pulse is racing. “All this…”
“I loved you in a hundred crazy flavors that I didn’t have words for! And when you ghosted me…” He flings a hand at the mirrors, the barre. “I told myself this all was about making you sorry. I was young and still reeling, and I thought if I had enough money, if I got fit enough, if I bought a place in the kind of building that you would love to be living in, that the day that you came back asking for the divorce, you’d regret what you did. You’d regret that you couldn’t have me back. But that was just bullshit that I told myself. Feeling angry is so much easier than feeling a broken heart. I never wanted you to be sorry—not really. I just wanted you. I wanted to be the kind of guy you wanted, to help you envision this life we could have together.”
“You made this whole ballet studio.”
“I know. It was…” He throws up his arms as if exasperated. “You never showed. I pretended to myself that I didn’t care, but I was getting worried. I knew you didn’t give a shit about paperwork, but it was extreme even for you.”
He turns around to look at the far wall. The thing that makes this place a true dance studio. Our gazes lock in the mirror. The window behind me blazes with lights and stars and pale clouds sailing across the night sky.
“A year later I looked you up,” he says. “I was surprised that you were living here in New York, just living your life. That’s when it hit me—you weren’t giving us or Vegas a second thought. You probably hadn’t thought about me at all, and there I was building this elaborate nest. What the hell, right? It was a little…”
“Extreme?” I whisper. If he hears the adoration in my voice, he doesn’t show it.
He turns back toward me. “I forced myself to stop thinking about the past altogether. The business was doing great. I focused in on microrobots. I was determined to put the past in the past. I put up the boxes.”
“And then nine years later I show up to ask for a divorce,” I say.
“I’m sorry I jerked you around. I just wanted you, but I pretended to myself…I don’t know.” His tone softens. “Maybe I didn’t want you to leave again. It’s no excuse to force you into this charade, though. Of course your papers will be ready in time.”
I go to him. “This all…was for me?”
“In an entirely bonkers way.”
A smile takes over my face. “How did you know I’d love this building?”
He slides a strand of hair off my shoulder. “How could I not know? Look at it! It’s you, it’s how you dance. It’s how you live.”
My heart squeezes. It might be the most beautiful thing anybody’s ever said to me. “I love it,” I say.
“You do?”
“So love it.” I say. “So love you.”
“Wh
at?”
“You heard me.”
Three tentative fingers touch my cheek, warming my cheek. He’s studying my eyes like he’s not so sure.
“I so love you,” I say. “How could I not?”
His breath comes out in a whoosh. Hungry lips come over mine. He grips my shoulders, fingers harsh with passion.
I clutch his shirtfront and pull him to me. We’re a mad chaos of kissing and clutching, like all the passion is coming out of us in a rush. Rough lips slide to my ear. “Say it again.”
I cradle his cheeks, breathless as he presses against me. “My husband is so amazing. Most guys would just send roses. How pathetic would that be?”
“Fuck.” He wraps me up in his arms, kissing me like he can’t stop himself. He’s all Benny now. Benny who I’m mad over. “God, Francine,” he says.
I’m pawing off his sports jacket while pressing into him. I don’t know who’s humping who at this point, but it’s the best activity ever. We’re furiously pulling each other’s shirts off and it’s wrong and funny and the most sexy thing ever.
He walks me backwards and flops me onto this stack of weight lifting mats.
“Ungh,” I say, bouncing.
“Sorry, I can’t…”
“Be fake?” I say.
He lowers himself over me. There’s fire in his eyes. His breath is uneven. He kisses down my body, down my bare torso, devouring me with his mouth. My hands are on his head, fingers plunged into his hair, urging him on in all his jerky, untutored abruptness. He comes back up and kisses me some more.
“Yes,” I say. I never want to stop this. I reach down and grip his cock, huge and silky.
A groan of pure need twists up from his chest.
“This,” I whisper.
“That?” he says.
“Mmm.”
Two harsh hands slide up my skirt, pressing it up over my waist, bunching it up. His muscles flex with the wild urgency of his movements. “I didn’t know it could feel like this,” I say.
“It’s everything.” He slides his hand over my hips, my belly, roving hungrily all over me like he’s desperate to touch me everywhere—not to control me this time, but to be with me. I squirm with pleasure.
Searching fingers slide over my mound, grazing my inner thigh. A tremor curls through me. Suddenly he’s tearing off my underwear with furious movements. He’s ruining them, and it’s so hot it blows my mind. I want him to shred them, and then he does. I hear this rip.
“Oh my god, sorry,” he says.
“The only thing I hate about what you just did is that you can’t do it again. I wish you could do it again and again. I want you to rip my clothes forever. Shred them to mincemeat!”
“If I spent my time on that, then I couldn’t do this,” he says, and he’s pressing my thighs apart with an iron grip and devouring my sex—there’s simply no other word for it. His oral sex technique—or as he’d probably term it, cunnilingus technique—is raw and hungry and hot as hell. Not like when he was being suave.
For the record, out-of-control Benny is completely wicked.
I’m fisting his hair, gone with pleasure. It’s not even about the orgasm; it’s just Benny being so Benny between my legs—so intense, so single-minded. “Ungh,” I pant.
“You okay?” he halts long enough to ask.
“Ohmigod what? No! Don’t stop! It was more than okay just keep—” I push his head back, and he’s devouring me again, nearly sucking on my whole pussy.
My eyes might be rolling backwards in my eye sockets. My brain might be rolling backwards in its brain socket. My entire person might be rolling back in its personhood socket. My soul might be sprawling backwards into its soul socket, surprising the entire spiritual realm.
And I’m coming hard all of a sudden, clutching at his head, at his hair. His ears are in there somewhere.
He crawls up over me, staring at me with a kind of wonder. He dips his head down to kiss my breast, then my other breast, then the first one, and then he’s up to my lips. And then he pulls back and he’s just staring at me.
“Come here,” I say.
“I am here,” he says.
“No, here.” I urge him nearer and grab on to his cock. I slide my hand up enjoying his specifically Benny topography of veins and velvety softness. I grip a little tighter. The way he sucks in a breath, you’d think nobody’s ever done this before.
“Want you like crazy,” I say. “Just like how you are right now. You are so you and so sexy I can’t even.” I kiss him and stroke him. “We need to go to my servant wife room.”
“We do?”
“Bring me,” I say.
He hoists me up and I’m kissing him wild and free all the way down the hall.
Back in the room, I go into the little zipper pouch that has the travel pack that Tabitha made for all of us one Christmas. Sewing kit, moisturizer samples, condom!
I pull it out, holding it up like a trophy. I go to where he’s kneeling on my bed, him and his hard curves and corded muscles like a map of his tenaciousness, his cock rigid as a flagpole.
“She’s going to put this on you now,” I say, unwrapping it with a crinkle.
He grabs my hair, rasps right into my head. “And he is going to fuck her so hard.”
“So hard,” I say. “She wants it so bad.” I roll the condom onto him. “She wants him inside her so bad.”
“He will so oblige, so much.”
I let out small incoherent whimpers as he enters me. It feels like the first time, us together, rolling around.
I come in a white-hot storm of bliss, followed by him gripping my ass, crying out, artlessly ecstatic.
Twenty-One
Benny
* * *
She’s making breakfast in the kitchen the next morning, wearing my shirt, hair up in a high ponytail. I have this strange sense of déjà vu; not the kind of déjà vu where something once happened and now it’s being conjured back in some way. This is déjà vu from years of fiercely imagining a scene like this.
But it’s not me alone here with my secrets, trying to keep them walled off, trying to keep my pain walled off.
I let her in, and it makes everything feel new.
It’s not about great sex or Francine’s fun sense of humor or how generous and fascinating she is, or even the easy fit of us. It’s the feeling that I’m home.
Now that she’s here, I’m home.
“Are you trying to figure out if I’m basking in the afterglow?” she asks. “Magic Eight ball says yes!” She turns back to her eggs, ponytail swinging. She’s never looked more beautiful.
I go to her and slide my hands around her waist and nuzzle the back of her neck. “Come back to bed.”
She shakes me off, laughing. “I have to get to the studio. If I don’t eat now, I’ll collapse! Is that what you want?”
“Will it get you back in bed?”
“Screw off!” She shoves me away and grabs toast from the toaster. She puts more slices down and heads back to the pan with her spatula.
“Do you always eat half a carton of eggs for breakfast?” I ask.
“We burned off a lot of calories last night.” She turns and gives me a quick kiss. “Tempting as your offer is, me collapsing and being brought to bed by you and all.” She’s buttering while tending to the pan.
I grab a cup of coffee. “I bought that kitchen table imagining us at it,” I say. “It only sounds ninety-two percent psycho.”
“I’d say eighty-seven percent,” she says.
“Oh, thank you,” I say.
My thoughts go to James. I wish he could have met her. He’d like her—a lot. And she’d like him. James knew about the whole Vegas marriage. He’d seen inside the ballet studio room before I’d blocked it off with boxes. He teased me about my invisible wife, and I teased him about playing hacky sack. We trusted each other. We protected each other’s weirdness.
It’s one of the things that I have with Francine. We’re inside looking out. Togethe
r.
She grabs a sip of coffee. There’s a faraway look in her eyes.
“Is something on your mind?”
“I have an important mission. Probably. But right now it’s eggs,” she says. “I didn’t even ask if you want any.”
“I never eat this early,” I say. “I’m sharper if I wait.”
“Maybe you’re sharper because it’s your hunger instincts kicking in. Your body is giving all your fuel to your brain, desperately hoping you’ll help it find food, but instead you’re putting your energy toward that robot takeover. Psych!”
“Right?” I say.
“I could never skip breakfast,” she says.
She arranges four perfectly buttered pieces of toast on a plate, flips six eggs over them, and brings it to the table. I sit next to her and watch her eat. She’s thinking about something, but she’ll tell me when she’s ready. We have time now. She’ll go on her tour, but that won’t be the end of things.
She takes care to get a specific amount of egg yolk on every bite of toast. She’s always been a deliberate eater, liking to portion things. It’s something I can definitely understand.
She feels me watching her and looks up.
“I want to never shut you out again,” I say.
“It’s okay if you shut me out of some things. Let’s not be a married couple that tells each other about their poop.”
“We can’t stay a married couple. Your tour—”
“I’ve made a decision about that.” A serious look comes over her face. “I’m going to the studio this morning, but not to attend class. I need to talk to Sevigny. I’m pulling out of the tour. I’ve been thinking about chocolate chip cookie dough.”
I barely understand what she just said. My mind spins with questions and concerns. “Pulling out?”
She just looks me square in the eye and says, “Yeah.”
“Francine,” I say. I reach out and touch her arm. “Are you sure?”
“I am.”
“You know I’m behind you either way.”
“Of course I know that.” She turns to me, holding her fork. “But for real, what am I doing? With my knee like this? Who am I fooling. Sure, maybe I could make it through the tour, but at what cost?”
Just Not That Into Billionaires Page 20
