I screamed as he took me, there in the middle of the street, as shadowy figures gathered around us to watch. And then, finally, as the monster grabbed me by the hair and forced my neck up, forced me to arch my back, arch it so hard I felt like I was about to snap in half--it was only then that I awoke with a start, panting and gasping for air.
There was a knocking at my door.
"Tara!" the voice called. My name was pronounced with a Y as opposed to a J. It was Sven.
"Um... Yeah?"
"It is time for your workout," he said, obviously impatient. "Where are you now, darling?"
"Wait, just a moment. Sorry, sorry, sorry..." I murmured. God, how late was it? My alarm clock told me it was already ten o'clock. I had been up by eight every day for the last two weeks.
My body also ached worse than any of Sven's workouts had ever caused me to. So, that was why I ended up sleeping in so late--I was almost impossibly exhausted. God, but Boss had really done a number on me...
I staggered out to see Sven, finally, who was on his phone. Sven was slower to open up to me than Bobby or Dr. Fernandes, but eventually, he too began to confide in him. Like the others, he was gay--I once again wondered if it were only a coincidence that Boss seemed to employ solely LGBT professionals--and he had a stormy relationship with a model that I actually knew fairly well. We had, in fact, been at the same parties several times and had perhaps even met in my previous life.
"Quinn is being such a diva," Sven scowled, putting his phone away. "He will not go to Fire Island with me next weekend if his friend Morgan does not come--and I hate Morgan. Morgan annoys me."
Morgan annoyed me too--he was another model, and I was hesitant to tell Sven that Morgan and Quinn had, for several years, had an on-again-off-again fling. But I restrained myself.
"Yeah, Morgan's a dweeb," I said simply, returning his scowl.
"I would throw him out a window if I could," Sven said very seriously. "I mean, I could do it very easily--he weighs, perhaps, forty-seven kilos? Forty-eight? But, no, there are laws--I must not throw him out a window when we are on our boat tour."
They had chartered a boat, and this was also a subject of near constant complaint and discussion.
By now, I had changed into my Lululemon workout clothes--new iterations of my outfits seemed to show up in my drawers as if by magic as my body changed--as I gained weight and muscle. Not that I wouldn't have fit into the ones Sven first brought for me anymore, but they would have gotten tighter, certainly.
I went through my big lifts, my muscles still aching from the night before. Sven must have noticed, because he clucked his tongue sympathetically.
"It is good that we got an earlier start. Before he got a chance to chew you up."
"Who?" I asked, gasping and trembling after a particularly exhausting deadlift set.
"Your Mister Boss, of course."
"He's taking me to a party tonight," I commented, beaming. Sven raised his eyebrows.
"Be very careful, then."
"What? Why? It's just a party."
"Of course. Of course, it is a just a party. But still--be careful in general, with a man like your Mister Boss. That is all."
My face darkened. What the hell did he mean by that? I wanted to know what he had in mind--what I had to be careful of. But I couldn't wrestle anything else out of Sven and, I swear to god, he gave me a long series of kettle bell swings to do just to shut me up, knowing full well that I wouldn't be able to question him while I was so out of breath.
I was damn near starving after my workout, and so I inhaled both my breakfast, which I ought to have consumed promptly at eight o'clock, plus my post workout smoothie and lunch. Pleasantly full and bloated, I didn't worry so much now about the part Boss was taking me too. I was sure that Sven's warning had just been that--a general warning. Of course, Boss was a powerful, wealthy man. It didn't take a genius to know that one should be... Careful, so to speak--with such men.
The hours wore on and I found myself back in the library, doing some reading, answering a few emails I had gotten over the course of the last few days but which I hadn't had the wherewithal to answer. One was from my mother, asking how things were, when I would be calling next--if I didn't call every week or so, she got anxious, and here, I hadn't called in over two weeks! I resolved to give her a call that evening, before the party.
The day slipped away and after finishing an old, 1960's pulp novel and watching some TV, I drifted back to my room to select an outfit for the party. New outfits had been showing up in my closet, coming presumably from the same place as the new Lululemon workout clothes, ever since I had arrived. Initially, I interpreted them as a kind of cruel joke. All beautiful designs from prestigious designers that fit me perfectly--but where was I going to wear them? I supposed I would wear them for Boss, and indeed, I had worn one for him--but I hadn't had any other opportunities to wear any of them.
As I was going through my closet, I noticed a text from a blocked number. I guessed, immediately, who it was.
"Looking forward to our outing tonight," the text read. "Don't bother wearing underwear."
Boss. Of course. Of course, there had to be that one little aspect of control and domination, present even in--"date night."
I selected, finally, a tight, white dress that made me look like I had more curves than I really did. It looked beautiful and striking next to the mask when I tried both on--between my strawberry blonde hair, the white dress, and the purple mask, I could stop traffic--I was sure of it.
With that decided, I finally got around to calling my mother. It was nearly seven o'clock now. I warmed up the dinner that had appeared in the fridge--a tasty looking risotto--and dug into it while the phone rang. My mother, an elementary school teacher, would just be getting home from work. My father wouldn't be home for another half an hour or so, and then they would have dinner together. They were the perfect picture of a quiet, loving, Midwestern family. We were never wealthy, but nor were we poor when I was growing. We were comfortable and happy, able to go on little vacations to Florida or Mexico once in a while, and I was even sent to the local Catholic school--not exactly a prestigious institution, but quietly dignified and warm compared to the chaos of the public school system in which my mother taught.
Their life was something I both craved and feared. It would be so easy to move back to Wisconsin, find a husband there, settle down and start popping out kids. I could walk into any bar in Milwaukee and have men hanging off of me. Find a guy, a nice quiet guy, or not even--a bro, a dude, whatever--who works as, I don't know--an engineer or an accountant or a lawyer, even a doctor--get married, move to the suburbs, and I'd be pregnant within months. Maybe I'd continue modeling or maybe I would, I don't know--teach yoga. Go back to law school and defend poor kids wrongly accused of crimes they didn't commit. Maybe all of the above.
There was so much more to life outside of New York, just as my introduction to Boss proved that there was even more to life in New York than I had fathomed... So much to see and do, and so much to be afraid of.
The phone rang and rang, finally, on what I knew from experience would be the last ring, my mother picked up. That's how it always went. She was one of those women, constantly a bit harried, who managed to do everything at once, but never made it look easy. She was not a superwomen, the kind of woman who never displayed the costs of her success and her hard work. She was often tired--working long hours at the school, then helping me with my homework and my childhood dyslexia or taking me to a modeling gig--and it was always apparent on his face.
But she never complained. Complaining, I had intuited from an early age, was distasteful. It was inconsiderate, since everyone else was dealing with the same issues, and the most important thing, always and everywhere, was to be considered. Be considerate, Tara--that's what mother always said.
She picked up and answered with the same tired, harried "Hello?" I remembered from my childhood, from calling my mom to come and pick me up after volleyba
ll practice as a teenager.
"Hi, mom. It's me," I said, unsure, exactly, of what I ought to say in this situation. I hadn't talked to her in about three weeks and I was sure that I was about to get an earful.
"Oh, Tara, Christ, would it kill you to call a little more often? We worry about you so much. Daddy says I shouldn't bother you. I know you're busy but..."
"I know, mom, I'm sorry--" I said, lamely, as my admonishment and scolding went on. It was starting to get old when she finally dropped it, being satisfied that I had been convinced, apparently, to call a little more often--just a little.
"So, how's life in the Big Apple?"
"No one calls it that here, mom," I said with a sigh. This was a common routine in our conversations--she referred to New York as the "Big Apple," and I assured her that no one ever actually called it that.
"Life is fine, though," I said with a shrug. What should I say? What could I say? "Well, mom, I moved in with a mysterious billionaire who won't tell me what his real name is and always wears a mask in my presence. He uses me as a sex slave, but the food is great and I even have a personal trainer, so I guess it evens out? I'm definitely getting fucked over less by my rent here!"
I felt the expect silence hanging over us. I finally blurted it out.
"I've got a new boyfriend."
"Really? A boyfriend? Well, that's great news... God, you haven't had a boyfriend since..."
In fact, I had had many boyfriends and pseudo-boyfriends and friends with benefits and fuckbuddies and one night stands that my mother didn't know about. But the last real, serious, monogamous, honest to god boyfriend I had was...
"Tony O'Neil? That was him, right? Gosh, he was a nice kid," my mother said, half-way dreamily, as if she had wished that Tony O'Neil would come and sweep her off her feet, rather than me. I had always joked about that at Tony. That was a surefire way to make him blush.
Tony was a nice kid. We had met at Fordham. He was brutally hardworking and much smarter than I was. He had grown up in a project in South Boston, had gone to Boston College on a scholarship, and then to Fordham Law on an even bigger scholarship that basically paid him to go to school. He used to joke that he had grown up in The Departed and when he described life back in "Southie" as he called it, it sounded pretty accurate: crack dens, Irish gang bosses on the street corner, fierce proud and loyalty amidst grinding urban poverty. Two of his siblings had died under pretty unsavory circumstances: his older sister, Kayla, lover of a drug dealer in Roxbury, a mostly black neighborhood, was murdered by local Irish Southie types--both as punishment for fucking a black guy, and as a message to any drug dealers trying to move into Southie from outside the neighborhood. His older brother, Tim, overdosed on heroin on the subway late at night. They somehow didn't find his corpse till the morning and it made all sorts of headlines for a week--"RED LINE OD VICTIM DEAD ON ARRIVAL" and other tasteless stuff like that.
But Tony was immune to all of it. A devout Catholic, he was strangely reluctant to sleep with me at first.
"You're special, Tara. I could see this going somewhere," he told me as we sat, entwined on his couch, my hand on his crotch. "I don't want to ruin this with sex so fast."
But he came around. He certainly seemed to think we would get married and maybe, you know, for a while, I thought we might too. After all, here was a nice guy, good looking and athletic--he had rowed crew for Boston College, and had boxed as a kid, even coaching a local team here in the Bronx of underachieving kids who called him "Coach O'Neill" and all seemed like they'd give up their left kidneys for him in a heart beat if he need it--and he was clearly going places. He was one of the top three in our first year class at Fordham--he clearly could have gone somewhere more prestigious, had he had the money. He was already being recruited by fancy, giant, international law firms. He would come home from their networking events, late, exhausted but happy after being plied with drinks and encouraged to consider a summer internship here or there.
But it hadn't lasted, as you might expect. I was modeling more and more. I was taking more and more drugs. He did not approve of the drugs--he was fine to get drunk with me; indeed, he probably drank more than I did, since he had an inherent and unresolved anxiety problem which had had carefully self-medicated since high school with whatever ethanol happened to be around. But the drugs represented a further step which he could never bring himself around too. He smoked pot with me a few times, did not like it, and refused to touch cocaine, let alone any of the motley collection of prescriptions I was using intermittently.
Connected with this, he did not approve of the models and hangers-on who went with them--my friends and colleagues, people with whom I was rapidly coming to have more in common than with my boyfriend.
I remember him scowling as I brushed off studying for a final exam at the end of our first semester to go to a party in the Hamptons. To him, such things were unthinkable. But how was I to explain to him that his world simply wasn't for me anymore?
We broke up in February after that, after a particularly strained Valentine's Day. I had already dropped out of law school--actually, I had taken a leave of absence, but everyone understood what that meant, essentially. Meanwhile, he was working even harder, determined to maintain his position at the top of the class, even as the competition heated up. He had put on weight from drinking, from neglecting exercise--he still boxed with the kids up in the Bronx, but I could tell it exhausted him more than usual. It wasn't that he was fat; he was just starting to look less like the preppy model of Irish-American ambition and athleticism that I had sort of fallen in love with and more like a regular, stressed out New Yorker.
Valentine's Day had been at a fancy restaurant in Manhattan. A place that I knew he was trying to impress me with. A place I knew he couldn't afford. I didn't have the heart to tell him that the restaurant was no longer fashionable, that no one who was anyone ate there anymore. Indeed, we were surrounded by out-of-towners and old people during our dinner, which began at six--much too early--and were the only ones left in the restaurant by eight, when the tourists and seniors disappeared.
But that wasn't the deal breaker. In fact, I was even a little charmed by his attempts to impress me. Most girls, nay, all girls like it when a guy tries as long as it isn't too obnoxious. But he wasn't feeling it--so to speak.
We met for coffee and a few days after that, and he broke up with me--told me we had grown apart too much, that he felt like he needed to focus on his studies and his career and that even though I was good for him, my lifestyle wasn't, and he didn't think it was good for me either, but I was an adult and I had to make my own decisions, of course. But he hoped we would stay friends and he said he would be praying for me, so thanks for that, Tony.
I wasn't actually particularly bitter. I had known the break was coming sooner or later, and I knew it before Tony did. I expected it; he did not. But the way he phrased it rubbed me the wrong way--the high and mighty attitude twisted my stomach up in knots, made me want to lash out, but fortunately, I had taken an oxycontin before dinner--to my credit, my first in a week--and that had left me pleasantly numb and relaxed, so I was able to accept the break with relative grace as opposed to anger.
"So, do we get to know this boyfriend's name? This new boyfriend?" my mom continued, her voice interrupting my reverie and memories of Tony.
"Oh..." I murmured. "Boss."
Silence on the other end.
"I mean, his first name is Boston," I said, quickly, a cover story rapidly forming in my mind. "Boston Powell. He's Jamaican. He's a DJ. They'll do weird names in Jamaica sometimes, I guess? He just goes by Boss--DJ Boss. He even thinks his name is weird: his parents met at Harvard--well, his dad was at MIT and I guess his mother was at Radcliffe? But so, they met in Boston, and he was their first child, and so they named him Boston. But his brothers and sisters have much less interesting names--Margaret, Jackie, Henry..."
I had to say, I was impressed with myself. I didn't think I had it in me to invent an en
tire genealogy of a family that didn't exist, from a country I had never been to, centered around an American city that I had never spent more than a day in at any given time.
"Well, a DJ? That's not much of a career?" my mom said after a pause. Phew. At least she bought it to the point where she could start asking me about his career.
"Well, you'd be surprised. He's a creative professional, you know. He owns his own business. He used to work for a big accounting firm but DJing was always his passion and so he quit after a few years to start his business. It's still fairly young--it's a start up, basically--but it sounds like they're doing pretty well for the market. It's a competitive market, I know. It's hard for small businesses to start these days, unless it's like a tech company..."
"Okay, okay, okay--" my mom cut me off. Phew. That probably meant that she had bought it. Nice job, Tara.
"So when do we get to meet this Mr. Boss?" she asked suddenly.
"Oh, I don't know--he's very busy and, I mean, so am I. He's especially busy over the holidays because of parties and stuff like that. We'll see. I'll ask him."
"Maybe we could come out to New York? We haven't been since you were in college. We're definitely starting to get cabin fever back here."
I froze.
"Um, well, maybe. We'll see."
My mom was silent for a few moments before sighing.
"Well, fine. You just let us know when we can come and see you, I guess."
"Sure thing, mom."
We went through the rest of our normal pleasantries--how my old, seventeen-year-old German shepherd was doing, about how my mom had started feeding a group of feral cats in the neighborhood and had set up a little shelter for them, about my dad's hobbies--he was an engineer by day but, to my undying horror as a teenager, he was an eager and enthusiastic Civil War re-enactor. We had often gone to re-enactments of Gettysburg, Shiloh, and other boring battles when I was a kid and he had even started a chapter of a local group that would get together once a month to, I don't know, role-play as Civil War soldiers? He was very proud of having researched a local unit that came from our town back in the day, and each member of the group would assume the persona of a specific, historic soldier.
Insatiable: A Dark Billionaire Romance Page 11
