Disciplined By The Dom (Club Volare)

by Cox, Chloe

  Jake shook his head, unable to find the words. Roman was smiling now, broadly.

  “Don’t look so happy,” Jake snapped. “I’ve done her a real disservice. I have no idea what the consequences might be. I—”

  “Relax, Jacob,” Roman said. “It is natural for human beings to have defenses. But then how do people ever grow close unless they cross these lines?”

  Jake didn’t have an answer to that. He didn’t have much experience with the normal progression of intimacy. He had no frame of reference.

  “It is a conundrum,” Roman allowed. Jake remembered that Lola had gotten him a Word of the Day calendar, and chuckled. Roman had scoffed at it, said his English vocabulary was fine. Apparently Jake wasn’t the only man susceptible to the subtle influence of a woman.

  “Are you going to tell me about it?” Roman said.

  “You can tell that something has happened?” Jake asked. The idea made him uncomfortable.

  “Something, yes. Something good?”

  Jake sat silently. He wasn’t hungry. He’d been…perturbed, since his last “session” with Catie. He couldn’t even properly call it a session. It had turned completely on its head—she had turned it completely on its head. Jake couldn’t identify exactly what had happened to him, what had changed, but he had noticed it had begun to bleed into other areas of his life. Perhaps without realizing it, he had slowly grown accustomed to the idea that things were simply different with Catie, that he was somehow more open with her. He had not grown accustomed to the idea of opening himself up to the world at large.

  He hadn’t even been properly aware of how guarded he was, of what defenses he had around him, until they’d started to fade. But then there had been a visit from Eileen to confirm their dinner date, and his skin did not crawl. Whether it was simply the residual glow from Catie—God, Catie—or something more profound, he had no way of knowing. And it was driving his analytical mind mad.

  But there was nothing analytical about whatever was going on inside him, nothing at all. Jake remembered what he had arrogantly told Catie during their first session: some things just are.

  Indeed. Just his luck that he would experience something like that with a woman who was hiding something from him.

  “Jake?”

  Jake looked up. “I apologize, Roman. I am…preoccupied.”

  “I can see that, my friend. You look worried. Is that correct? Anxious.”

  Jake scowled. He had been thinking about whether it had been wise to leave Catie the particular present he’d found for her. At the time it had seemed perfect, meaningful, the sort of thing only she would understand. Since then—since only that morning—it had begun to gnaw at him in a most unfamiliar way. He kept thinking back to what Catie had said the first day she’d come to stay with him, when she’d begged him to continue to train her: that she needed it, the same way he did. Unspoken: she, too, was saddled with some heretofore crippling emotional wound, something she hid, something that had scarred over, forming a barrier between her and the world. Perhaps the same thing she hid from him, perhaps not.

  Perhaps something that meant his little gesture with the book was too much, too fast. Or perhaps not. And round and round his mind went. It was maddening. How did normal people stand this?

  Irritated, Jake said, “Roman, this is not a productive area of conversation. If this is why you wanted to have dinner—”

  Roman shook his head, spreading his arms. “No, no. Forget it. I do have something to ask of you. The Valentine’s Auction.”

  “What about it?”

  “Lola tells me that Lindsey Grunwald has broken her leg skiing, and that this leaves a vacancy in the catalog.”

  “So?”

  “Perhaps Catie could fill the vacancy.”

  Jake put his drink down. “You want Catie to offer herself up for auction at the Valentine’s benefit? To the highest bidder?” He flushed with anger as he thought about what that meant. “No, absolutely not. Out of the question. No. I won’t allow it.”

  Roman laughed, delighted. “But that is not for you to decide, my friend.”

  “We’re not asking you if you’ll sell her, Jake,” Lola’s voice came from behind him. “We’re asking you if you’ll buy her. You know, within the limits of the event. And it’s not my idea, I might add.”

  Jake turned to find Lola closing the door behind her. Her usually beatific face was clouded with uncertainty. These two had been up to something, something to which he was not privy.

  “Is one of you going to explain this?” he said.

  “Roman thinks this is a fantastic opportunity to get Catie more involved,” Lola said, perching on the edge of Roman’s desk. Roman watched her silently. “He insists, rather.”

  “I do. I have already asked Catie.”

  Jake tensed. “You asked her if she’d participate in an auction to the highest bidder?”

  “Yes, with certain conditions.”

  Jake’s entire body went cold. As calmly as he could, he said, “And what did she say?”

  “The conditions are that you would be the one to buy her, Jake.”

  He wasn’t even embarrassed to be so visibly relieved, not even when he realized this might be a patented Roman move: to show him he cared. He already knew he cared. The idea of Catie going to any other man shut down the logical part of his brain and awakened some frightening, primeval part of him. Not for the first time, he wondered if normal people had to deal with this sort of thing on a regular basis. The way people talked about love, you’d think it was a lot more pleasant than this.

  Love.

  “Jake, are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.” He got up, possessed of a desire to be elsewhere. To find a way that everything made sense.

  To see Catie.

  “So you’ll do it?”

  “Of course,” he said. “Roman, enough of this. It’s obvious you have some sort of plan, or ulterior—”

  Jake was interrupted by his phone, a specific ringtone that he had assigned to exactly one person, for one purpose.

  Captain Seenan.

  “Excuse me,” Jake said. Normally he would not do this, but this call… Roman raised an eyebrow, but said nothing. Lola looked between the two and sighed.

  “Captain.”

  Captain Seenan’s voice was hesitant. Uncomfortable. “Mr. Jayson, I have some preliminary results for that inquiry you asked for. About Catie…Roberts.”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, Roberts isn’t her last name.”

  “What do you mean it’s not her last name?” Jake said. He had both Roman and Lola’s attention. It was his fault for being rude enough not to leave the room, and from the raised eyebrows, it was clear they knew who he was talking about. “Please explain.”

  “Well, from what I can piece together,” Captain Seenan said, “it has something to do with embezzlement.”

  Wordlessly, Jake let himself out of Roman’s office. He was already walking toward the elevators, already on his way to Catie.

  “Tell me everything you’ve found so far,” he said.

  chapter 23

  Catie hugged her knees, folded herself up on the red leather couch in Jake’s library, and stared at that stupid book. She’d read it already, of course, as a kid. It had been one of her father’s prop books that he kept around just for appearances: Crossing the Rubicon. An historical narrative of Caesar’s defining moment, when he led his army across the border, the river Rubicon, from the provinces and into Rome’s territory, making his insurrection official and marking the beginning of his coup. He’d famously said, “aleaiacta est”: the die is cast. It had been the point of no return.

  And Jake left her a book all about it. A first edition, no less.

  Catie had been making herself nuts trying to figure out what he meant by it. What die had been cast? What was the point of no return? No return from what?

  Did he know?

  The idea that he might find out, that she wouldn’t be able t
o explain first, and that he’d think the very worst, made her feel absolutely sick.

  Catie had been on edge ever since the last time they’d made love. That’s what it had been, even if it had been…unconventional. There was no mistaking it. It was the one honest thing she’d done in recent memory, the only time she was truly herself: when she was naked with Jake.

  Pathetic.

  And then Roman had called. She was to fill in at the auction, with Jake buying. She didn’t fully understand why it was necessary, but she knew how she felt. The idea of Jake standing up and claiming her was…

  It was trouble, was what it was. She wanted it too badly. And there was no one who deserved it less than her.

  She kept going back to that moment, when she’d told the truth, for once, and he’d looked at her like he loved her. Like he loved her in spite of himself. And she had wanted to believe it, more than anything. She’d wanted to believe she could tell him everything, that she could confess it all, that she could cry her apology to him, tell him how truly, truly sorry she was, and he’d miraculously forgive her. He’d take her in his arms, and together they’d find a way to save Volare from Brazzer’s other source. That moment contained every comforting fantasy she’d ever had. She’d wanted to believe she could rely on him to be there, to love her regardless of her mistakes, in spite of everything. It had been the best feeling.

  But that’s how it always felt before everything went bad. This, Catie supposed, was the hangover. Now she was just scared. Scared, and alone, and in over her head.

  And Brazzer kept calling.

  While Catie had been sitting in the library, staring at that book that meant who knew what, her phone had begun to vibrate at regular intervals. If there was a better way to lose your mind, Catie didn’t want to know about it. She was afraid to move. A decision either way, any positive action on her part, would involve crossing some Rubicon or the other—either she got off her ass and truly committed to trying to save her grandmother by betraying Jake, or she left her Nana out in the cold and tried to do the right thing by Jake and Volare.

  The phone started to vibrate again, skidding across the antique end table. She just couldn’t bear it anymore.

  “Fine! What? What do you want?”

  Brazzer sounded lewdly amused. “Am I interrupting anything? Anything I should know about?”

  “Just tell me what you want.” All of Catie’s frustration and fear was coalescing into one big giant ball of anger, and it was aimed at Brazzer. The rational part of her brain knew that this was not smart. She tried to reel it in. “I’m working on it,” she said through gritted teeth. “But this is not ideal.”

  “Yeah, well, you’d better work faster. I gotta go with this story sooner rather than later, and I like what I’ve got, but I’d like what you’ve got even more, you understand?”

  A chill went through her. She hadn’t actually given him anything yet, besides some general background on the Valentine’s Auction. She’d been as careful as she could be about that.

  “No, I’m afraid I don’t,” she said. “What is it you think I’ve got?”

  “You got Jacob Jayson, sweetheart,” Brazzer crowed. “How come I gotta hear about that from someone else—that Jacob Jayson has been seen with someone matching your lovely description? You got the society playboy who left his brother to die in the gutter and then disappeared to do some charity bullshit, and now he resurfaces in a secret pervert society? You gotta be kidding me. That is newsworthy, believe me. Plenty of dollar signs on that one.”

  Catie’s throat ran dry. She opened her mouth to speak, but thought better of it. The silence seemed to stretch out, time dilating long enough to accommodate every horrible thought that wanted to march through her head.

  Left his brother to die? And then disappeared to do charity? What brother?

  Stephan’s House.

  Eileen Corrigan. Jake said her son died.

  Catie swallowed. “What do you know about Jacob Jayson?”

  “Just what I said. Big scandal, about five years ago, hushed up because his family knows people. Left the kid to die like a dog, his half-brother by his nobody father. Kid was some kind of addict or whatever. But you know these money people, connected up the wazoo, so the New York papers wouldn’t touch it. Me, I don’t give a shit who he knows, that society crap pulls no weight with me. I want this dirt.”

  Secrets. Everybody had secrets. Even Jake.

  Catie’s eyes were drawn to the shelf with Jake’s old movies, the movies he’d shown her that first day, the ones he would watch when his mother locked him away like some unwanted mutt. There’d been a leather case back there. Green leather. Something he hadn’t wanted her to touch, something he hadn’t even wanted her to see. She’d been too distracted by how much she wanted him at the time to think much about it—that was the first time he’d had her in this house, when she’d begged him to train her, when she’d told him she’d needed it just like he did, and the memory made her feel both warm and achingly vulnerable—but now, now that she knew he had a secret, a secret that was possibly even worse than hers, now it was all she could think about. Her head throbbed, and the shelf seemed to pulsate in her vision. She closed her eyes.

  “I don’t know anything about that,” she said mechanically.

  “Well, what the fuck do you know?”

  Good question. She blanked.

  Panicked, Catie dropped her voice to a rushed whisper. “Brazzer, I gotta go. I’ll call you when I have something, don’t call me.”

  And she hung up. She was breathing fast, in a room that suddenly seemed very still. Those stupid movies, and the shelf beyond it, had a certain glow. It was difficult to look at anything else.

  Catie couldn’t even identify all the emotions that churned within her, all the various fears and anxieties and desires that pitched about like so much wreckage of a shattered heart. Jake had kept beating that drum, kept insisting he knew that she was the one hiding something. The fact that he’d been right had kept her from wondering how he might know what that looked like. Jake had been hiding, too, all along. The man she’d come to count on without realizing it, just to be himself, just for this one interlude in Catie’s otherwise wasted life, had his own secret. Catie really did feel sick now.

  Is this what a broken heart felt like?

  No. That wasn’t fair at all. Wasn’t this exactly what she’d just feared would happen to her, with Jake, that he’d find out and she wouldn’t have a chance to explain? She wouldn’t take Brazzer’s word for it, that was for damn sure.

  But Brazzer seemed to know. And what Brazzer knew…

  Catie hesitated for just a moment, and then propelled herself at that shelf like she was afraid she’d never bring herself to do it if she lost the momentum. Maybe this was just a rationalization, but it was another good one: she had to know the truth if she could hope to protect him from Brazzer’s exposé. From the exposé she would theoretically help write.

  And she just wanted to know. She wanted to know what Jake hid from the world. She wanted to know because she suspected that she would love him no matter what, but there was only one way to be sure.

  Love.

  Catie stopped just short of that shelf, her fingers balanced on the edge. Love. She had managed to tell the truth this time, even if she’d done it by accident, even if she’d only said it to herself.

  She was screwed.

  Feverishly, Catie ripped out the film canisters, piling them one on top of the other on an antique desk. There was the little green leather case. It didn’t even have a lock, just latches. Well, why would he need to lock it? He kept himself alone. All these years, he’d kept himself alone. It was hard not to think he’d been punishing himself. Catie had to wonder if he deserved it.

  “All right,” she said to herself. “One last fucked up thing. I’ll do one last fucked up thing.”

  Carefully, almost reverently, she took the case and set it on the desk. She worked the latches—they were worn; whatever w
as in here, he did look at it occasionally—and lifted the lid.

  Papers. Lots and lots of papers. No—letters. Almost retro, actual written letters, written with the uneven strokes of a fountain pen on heavy stationary, the kind a big fan of letters would use. All in the same handwriting.

  Heart pattering, Catie looked. All of them were signed, “S.”

  She groaned. Part of her really didn’t want to read them. Of all the shady things she’d done over the past few months, this felt by far the most…the most violating. She started almost by accident, catching a stray line, naturally following to see where it led, then another, then another. Obviously, she had meant to do this; obviously, she was choosing to do it, but still, she slipped into it almost unaware.

  They were unaccountably sad. Not because they described some great tragedy, but because they were obviously the product of someone who was mentally ill. Or strung out, or both. Variously begging, accusing, laudatory, and insulting, they went on and on and on. Sometimes the writer would ask for money, other times there’d be long, rambling explanations about why he’d quit another program. Some of them were snippets of diary entries—the kinds of thing people do during therapy. Some of them were short stories. All had beautiful, demented turns of phrase.

  Catie sat on the floor, and the letters began to fan out around her like petals. The record of a descending life. They were excruciatingly painful to read, taken for what they were, and instead, Catie turned a critical eye to the sorts of references that would tell her what she wanted to know about Jake. From what she could tell, Jake sent this “S”—Stephan, she supposed—to private program after private program, to hospital after hospital. He’d sent money, too, but apparently that had stopped, as the letters bitterly referenced. Catie recognized some of these patterns. She’d dated a cokehead once for about five minutes; she couldn’t imagine being related to an addict, with all the manipulative stuff they pulled. Couldn’t imagine the heartbreak.

  “S” accused Jake of all sorts of things, but what stuck out the most was the accusation that Jake had no compassion. No feeling. No warmth. Catie felt herself getting angry at a dead man—this was where the poisonous lie that Jake had no heart had gained strength. Jake’s narcissistic mother had started it, she guessed, and Stephan—or the deranged addict that Stephan had become—knew just how to take advantage of it.