by Helena Maeve
It wasn’t how it rang to Jackie. Dominance and submission, D/s for short, was porn and erotic novels. It was handcuffs and paddles and she’d never given any of those things more than a passing thought. She couldn’t deny finding them sexy, but it was one thing to masturbate to an idea and another to consider bringing it into her actual sex life, where egos were brittle and people could easily get hurt. Just like threesomes. Marten wasn’t the type to take the paddle anyway, she knew that instinctively.
She felt the mattress shift as Marten settled down on Tony’s other side. “We’re not,” her boyfriend said, speaking for them both with little conviction. He looked to Jackie for confirmation. She nodded, though she felt equally uneasy with the answer.
“We’re really not into anything, um…”
Even if he wasn’t convinced by their tepid denials, Tony didn’t seem interested in arguing the point. “Could’ve fooled me,” he murmured, eyes drooping shut. “Do you guys mind if I rest here for a bit? I’m only going to need a couple of minutes to get my shit together and then I’ll be out of your hair. Just need a few to…” The rest of his meandering rationale was lost to a yawn.
“Take as long as you need,” Jackie interjected, shamelessly burrowing closer. “I’m pretty beat myself. Marten?”
“Yeah, me too. Besides,” he added with a crooked grin, “it’s still my birthday.”
If what Tony had said before about their proclivities was bothering him as much as it was bothering Jackie, then he did a very good job hiding it. His smile only vanished as he slowly drifted to sleep.
Chapter Five
“I don’t feel thirty,” Marten moaned as he stabbed disposable chopsticks into his shrimp noodles. “Should I?” He was sitting cross-legged on the floor, half a foot from Jackie and her garish but much beloved hand-knitted quilt. Leaving the bedroom had been a slow unravelling, with Jackie being the first to disappear into the bathroom for a shower, then Tony pleading a need to take a leak, and finally Marten complaining about the lack of dinner. His rumbling stomach had been the direct cause of the takeout cartons spread all over the coffee table.
The sun had already crept out of the sky by the time they had emerged from the bedroom sluggish and staggering like vampires. Their chance encounter was no longer fuelled by desire and Tony had kept intimating that he might like to get home. Jackie had suggested with takeout from a nearby Thai restaurant to diffuse the tension she’d felt building between them. It only meant the inevitable goodbyes were postponed, and the sense of awkwardness lingered.
Marten got his own birthday wish in the end—takeout on the couch and an old episode of Star Trek playing mutely on the TV. No pressure, no more surprises. Jackie did her best to jazz up the experience with a bottle of red wine, uncorked long before Tony had made short work of their pretexts and postponements, but even so it wasn’t much of a celebration. Maybe it didn’t have to be.
“I didn’t feel any different either,” she said, shrugging. “Same old student loan payments to struggle with, same old tiny frustrations…”
“Same here,” Tony breathed, licking wine from his lips.
“You’re not thirty,” Jackie protested.
“Power of imagination, love!” He was propped against the backrest with both legs dangling off one end of the couch, a picture of leisure and calm belied only by his wandering eyes. He seemed content to listen to them speak rather than participate and Jackie couldn’t make out if that was supposed to be a sign that she was infringing on that fine line between hospitality and invasiveness or just a matter of preference. She made do by telling herself that Tony was a big boy, he could handle himself if things got too uncomfortable.
Marten must have sensed her unease, because the next words out of his mouth were, “So Tony… How does an Englishman end up in Rotterdam?” An Englishman, he asked, not a porn star. His tact was to be envied.
“Welshman,” Tony corrected gamely. “Not that it matters. I, uh, followed a girl.” She had been a friend from high school, he explained, translating ‘sixth form’ to ‘high school’ and terminology Jackie would more easily understand. Apparently after his A levels, Tony had decided to do a bit of sightseeing. His girlfriend at the time had wanted to backpack through Europe and he had been just smitten enough to follow. “You have to understand, we weren’t the richest of kids, so the thought of roughing it for a couple of months wasn’t much of a deterrent. We started in France, went down to Spain… Spent a couple of days in northern Italy, hoping to see celebrities sunning themselves by Lake Como. Then it was off to Eastern Europe.”
“That sounds like what we did,” Jackie murmured, grinning as she nudged Marten with her toes. “Except for us it was after we finished college…”
“Did you stop in Minsk, too?”
“What happened in Minsk?” Marten asked aloud, the question already perching on Jackie’s lips.
Tony smiled. “My girlfriend decided she wasn’t my girlfriend anymore. Big Belarusian soccer player versus Welsh bloke with no real future? Soccer player wins every time.” He reached to set his wine glass on the coffee table, the muscles in his forearm straining under a rumpled shirtsleeve. Jackie bit back the sudden urge to run her tongue over the green-blue veins so clearly drawn beneath the skin.
“That’s rough,” she said instead, trying to muster empathy. “So you started back for the UK and wound up in Rotterdam instead?”
“Something like that…” Tony yawned. “Guys, I should probably head home.”
Marten’s voice cracked, “Already? I mean—what time is it, anyway?”
Jackie confirmed that it wasn’t so late, only nine p.m. They had spent a good part of the day in bed and the other part talking over each other, but disaster had been narrowly avoided and there were hours still to go before sunrise.
“Do you want to stay?” Jackie pressed Tony. “You should stay.”
“I should leave you guys to it,” Tony insisted. He levered himself to his feet slowly but steadily, as if red wine wasn’t enough of a shackle to keep him down. Their entreaties couldn’t manage it, either.
Jackie walked him to the door. “I’ll call you in the morning. If you’d like to meet up again…”
“Would you?” he asked, brow arched quizzically.
“I… Yeah. I would.” Was that strange? Judging by the look on Tony’ face, it wasn’t exactly common. If he didn’t want to see her—them—again, he could always just refuse to take their calls. Jackie’s ego could take it.
Marten shook Tony’s hand, strangely officious now that they were dressed and behaving like rational beings again. “Thank you. For tonight. It was, uh…”
“I’m glad you had a good time,” Tony said, smiling crookedly. “And happy birthday. Again.”
The lift doors closed on his slightly forced grin. Jackie was left to lock up behind him feeling oddly bereft. “Think we should’ve tried harder to get him to stay?” she mused.
“You like him,” Marten said. Silhouetted in the glow of the kitchen spotlights, he looked almost alien, all shadow and a sharp, toothy smile.
“I like you, too,” Jackie answered, sidestepping the question as she went to fold herself in her boyfriend’s arms. Their misunderstanding wasn’t yet put to rest. She could feel it thrumming like a frayed chord just about ready to snap.
Marten seized her shoulders, tilting back at the waist. The light caught on his cheekbones and the slant of his upturned lips. “It’s okay if you like him. You have good taste.” He kissed her before Jackie could misconstrue his meaning as some kind of reprimand.
She remembered the way Marten had touched Tony, his hands so sure, so deft on that chiselled body, and she couldn’t help the flare of excitement that burned within her at the memory. It would be a nice experience to hoard inside her mind, even if it never happened again, but it would be even nicer to repeat it. If only Tony were interested, too. The swiftness of his escape made her wonder. He’d probably only waited so long out of politeness.
&n
bsp; “Maybe he’ll call,” Marten suggested, pecking her on the nose.
“Maybe,” Jackie echoed and went to toss away the empty takeaway cartons.
* * * *
By Monday, he still hadn’t called.
“Your phone’s been silent all day,” Clara pointed out over lunch. They weren’t exactly friends, but they knew enough about each other to share meals and gossip. Jackie’s role was mostly as listener. Clara was still new enough to the firm that she was only now discovering all the many pitfalls of the print industry, but being new wasn’t the same as being deaf and blind. When it came to paying attention to the little things, she could be as sharp as a blade. “Last week,” she said, “you were texting every half hour. And you were grinning, so I’m guessing we’re not talking about just any old kind of texting… Now it’s all quiet on the smartphone front. What happened?”
Jackie viciously stabbed a piece of broccoli before drowning it in dressing. “Nothing. Why should anything be happening?”
“Wasn’t it your boyfriend’s birthday last weekend? Did something go wrong?” Clara seemed to be salivating at the thought. She couldn’t be so lacking in entertainment that she relied on Jackie for ways to brighten up her day, surely. Then again, Clara rarely spoke of her own romantic life, so maybe there was some kind of vicarious living going on.
It wasn’t enough to bother Jackie, who had gone to an all girls boarding school all the way through to her eighteenth birthday and was well used to living in a tiny, reclusive world of women. Their way of marrying war and friendship wasn’t so foreign to her. And for better or worse, Clara was her only outlet. “Hypothetically speaking, if you had a one-night stand with a guy you barely knew and you wanted to see him again… How would you go about it?”
Clara’s lips curled into a moue of mock disappointment. “First of all, what makes you think I haven’t? And second of all, am I not supposed to remind you of the aforementioned boyfriend?”
“Hypothetically speaking, remember?” Jackie insisted, regretting ever bringing up the subject. She should have known better—by the end of the day, the boys in the mailroom would know she was cheating—or thinking of cheating—on Marten. That it wasn’t true wouldn’t delay the grapevine.
Though she looked far from convinced, Clara set down her veggie wrap and sighed. “Hypothetically speaking, I’d call him and say hi, remember me? I’m the girl you had sex with last whenever. I want to do it again.” Given that this was Clara and her convoluted, slightly Machiavellian approach to life, it was a refreshingly straightforward answer.
Jackie filed it away along with all the other things she wasn’t brave enough to do. “Say things ended a little awkwardly. Maybe you didn’t say what you should have—”
“Oh, I always say what I should,” Clara boasted. “Besides, it’s a one night stand. As long as you didn’t give a performance review at the end and bullet point ways to improve, you’re fine. Just, you know…”
“What?”
“Bite the bullet,” she encouraged. Platitudes about seizing the day might have followed if Clara hadn’t recalled just at that moment that Jackie was already spoken for. “You know what I don’t understand? If you and Marten love each other so much,” she said, sighing a little, “and you’ve been together six years—”
“On and off,” Jackie threw in, for the sake of clarity.
Clara didn’t let that tiny detail upset her argument. “But firmly on for the last three, right? Then, well… Why aren’t you married?”
The answer, Jackie already knew, was going to seem very contrived. She attacked a carrot stick with her fork, but the assault did nothing to alleviate her lingering discomfort. “It’s never been something either of us wanted.”
“But hypothetically speaking,” Clara insisted, “you’re having one-night stands with men you want to see again?” Her insistence was raising Jackie’s hackles.
“Well, it’s not like I’m the only one…” Jackie bit her lip. Too late, the words were out and Clara’s green eyes had already widened a little behind her frameless glasses.
“Wow, you two don’t screw around. Well. You do screw around—”
“Clara…”
“Is this, like, an open relationship? Or are you more like on that show—”
“Clara.” This time, the sound of her name on Jackie’s lips was enough of a warning. What could Jackie say? Drop it? She had brought up the topic, she had sought the wisdom of a twenty-something-year-old who was only just opening her eyes to the world. Not that Clara didn’t mean well, of course, but she was still so young and there were times talking to her when Jackie felt irrationally, irrepressibly old. Most of what Clara found exciting by way of office gossip Jackie had already come to regard as par for the course. It had been a mistake to choose her as a confessor. “Can we just,” Jackie begged, “pretend I didn’t say anything?”
Her appetite was already gone and she slammed down the plastic lid on what was left of her pasta salad with a defiant click.
Studious attempts to avoid Clara’s gaze were all brought to an end when the younger woman said “Okay” very softly, like she’d finally clued in to the magnitude of what she wasn’t being told. An avid conversationalist, Clara couldn’t be totally devoid of discretion or she wouldn’t have got this job.
“For what it’s worth,” she told Jackie on their way up to the office, “you should still call him. You’ll never know otherwise.”
“Know what?” Jackie heard herself ask, unwillingly re-entering the game.
Clara shrugged. Something knowing and sharp was hovering in her smile, but Jackie couldn’t make sense of it. “You’ll know if it really is just a one-time thing.”
Jackie didn’t get the chance to ask what else it could be because they were already parting ways, each bound for different ends of the office floor. She didn’t have an answer to give herself.
Her still-silent phone seemed to be mocking her when she plucked it from her purse. There were no missed calls, no new text messages.
Poor impulse control had once been the bane of Jackie’s existence—it could stand for courage in a pinch. With that in mind, she brought up the new message screen and drafted a quick hello. Pressing send turned out to be a bit of a struggle. Was she cheating? Was she stalking? Her thumb jerked with a spasm, brushing the touch screen.
When Jackie next looked down at the phone, the message had already been dispatched into the ether of electronic communication. She could no more call it back than she could scratch printer ink off a page.
The nitty-gritty of busy work kept her from darting impatient glances at the clock until the end of the day. Clara swung by her desk to offer a ride home and Jackie, having no reason to say no, agreed. “I wanted to apologise,” she said as they eased their way into traffic in Clara’s tiny Renault. She had been a little short with the PA at lunch and that at least merited contrition. “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea,” Jackie added, darting a glance at her driver. “I’m not the kind of girl who—”
“It’s never as simple as it sounds,” Clara shot back, smiling a little tightly.
The reprimand reduced Jackie to silence. She was relieved when they finally pulled up to her building and Clara brought the car to a standstill.
“Did he answer? Your hypothetical one-night stand guy?”
“No.” And how crushing it was to discover she’d been hoping he would.
“I guess that’s that, then.”
Jackie made an acquiescing sound, low in her throat. She hastened her steps to the front door, not for fear of the rain that drenched the streets, but in a last ditch attempt to outrun Clara’s parting words. She was right—Tony clearly didn’t want to have further contact with them. And who could blame him, really? Saturday had been a fluke, an experiment. Jackie had successfully set up something Marten never would’ve organised for himself and now the sane thing was to withdraw, to gather her memories like photographs and put them in a box.
Tony wasn’
t their friend. He was a guy in a video online who’d happened to put up with her company for a few would-be rendezvous. That he was good in bed she’d already figured out before he’d even taken off his clothes. It was no doubt in the job description. The rest was just—water under the bridge. No harm, no foul.
There were no text messages on her phone, but when she fired up her laptop, Jackie was surprised to find, among all the spam and useless Facebook updates, a singularly important email waiting in her inbox. She recognised the address as Tony’s. When Marten called to ask what he should pick up for dinner, she was rereading the email for a third time. “You sound strange,” he noted astutely. “Everything okay?”
“What? Yeah.” She was only listening with half an ear. “Totally. Listen, how would you like to go out tonight?”
“I’m a little tired,” Marten temporised.
Jackie didn’t give him a chance to bolster a negative with further evidence. “Tony is asking us out on a date,” she blurted out instead, scrolling down to that part of the email with the odd sensation of butterflies fluttering in her belly.
“He is?” Vocal denials morphed into strange wonderment. Marten hadn’t been expecting this any more than she had.
“Yeah. Tonight.”
“Should we go?”
Jackie hesitated. “If you want.” Her cheeks felt hot, a pleasant tremor coursing through her body to pool in her nether regions. She couldn’t help remembering the worshipful glide of Tony’s tongue between her folds, or the heat in his eyes when he’d looked up at her—or, better yet, the grounding weight of him when he had eased his hard cock into her. So much for boxing up those memories.
“Do you want to?” Marten pressed her. “Because if you want—”
“Yes?”
“I think we should go.” His voice was small on the other end of the line, like he wasn’t entirely sure he was giving the right answer. Was that really the case or was Jackie just trying to bolster her own desire to see Tony again by hoping it was shared?
