by Ella James
And with that thought hanging around my neck, I turn the game off and reach onto the mahogany end table beside the couch. I keep a stack of post cards by the coasters where I sit my iced tea. Also a fountain pen.
Most of the time, after I pick a card and prop it on my thigh, I can’t write a word. My hand freezes. My throat feels thick, as I stare down at the paper. This time, like almost every time before it, my fingers, wrapped around the pen, are cold and still.
What can I say? I’ve got nothing for her.
Fury rises in me: sharp, then suffocating.
I crush the card—a picture of CC’s campus in autumn—in my fist and stab the pen into the couch cushion. I watch the ink spill out of it, creating a small, black cloud on the cappuccino suede.
I duck down over my lap and curl my arm around my head and take deep breaths. Now, before I lose my nerve, I grab a fresh, clean post card and try the pen’s bent tip against it.
I’m surprised it works. It’s my surprise that jars me into action, so I’m able to write a few words. Five... six... seven.
That’s all I can.
I fold the card into my back pocket, stand up, and stretch. I look at the stairs that lead from the living area up to my room. I could change clothes, but I don’t feel like trudging upstairs.
I walk into the kitchen, where I serve myself some ravioli and slam back a shake. I grab a few sticks of beef jerky for the road and a glass of sweet tea. I might be a Southern transplant, but I love this shit.
I grab my bag off the front staircase, then open the top drawer of the massive, Victorian-era table beside the stairs. I pull out a couple of notebooks, an extra calculator, and my old Calculus 1 text book. I sling the items into my bag and pull the front door shut without locking it or setting the alarm.
It’s a cool night—cool for September in Georgia. The air feels lighter than it has in months. It’s breezy on my cheeks; taunting me with all that I can’t have.
I press “unlock” on my Escalade’s key fob, climb into the front seat, and turn around so I can lean into the back. There’s a white laundry basket on the seat behind mine, filled with thick, pink fleece blankets. Manning must have dropped it off while I was watching the game.
I had to call and let him know I wouldn’t be at the trustee meeting—I dipped out early—and to bring it here instead. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised he did what I asked, when I asked for it. He’s my manager of operations, and efficiency is his middle name. Actually, Manning is. He’s Adam Manning Smith—and using an alias just like I am.
I can smell what’s in the blankets as I drive. I roll the windows down, jack the heat up, and listen to The Doors. And then the Dead. And then the Stones. And then The Strokes. And then nothing.
I’m too damn edgy.
Because I need her: Cleopatra Whatley.
I can’t decide if it’s her impertinence, her blasé, or my own urge to circumvent both and make her submit to me in every way—but I ache when I imagine her in the glass-walled room upstairs.
I park in the U-shaped lot behind the Tri Gam house and carry the basket under my left arm. I’m not afraid of getting caught. Not now. I’ve lost fear.
I open the front door and climb the old ass, creaky stairs like I own the place. The “executive suite” is on the front of the second story, arranged around a rocking-chair littered balcony that juts over the first-floor porch. If my sources are correct, there’s one door that leads to the “suite,” which houses all the officers’ bedrooms. I knock twice and listen to light footfall, hoping it’s Cleo’s.
The door opens, and Milasy appears. She’s got a pretty, oval face, with deep brown eyes and glossy, straight black hair. She sees me and smiles. “Kellan. How’s it going?”
“I’m here for Cleo,” I say. My lips are caught between a smile and a smirk.
Milasy looks me over. I can see the approval on her face, followed by her curiosity. “She’s got you doing her laundry?” She seems to think this is unlikely. Then her face lights up. “Is there a puppy hidden in there?”
I decide on smirk. “Not a puppy,” I tell her.
“Okay. Well come on in.” I step inside a small but nicely adorned living area, and Milasy points to a hallway just beyond the kitchen on my right. “She’s down the hall there, on the right.”
“Thank you, Milasy.”
My long legs carry me through the living-kitchen area quickly enough. The hall is short: only a few strides. I stand on the lilac carpet outside Cleo’s door and knock twice. When the door swishes open, I smell her before I see her: some kind of soft perfume that reminds me a little of tea leaves. At first, she’s just a curtain of dark hair. Then she swings it back behind her shoulders and I see her face.
Her green eyes are wide, long-lashed, and topped by thin, elegant brows. Her cheeks are high and always just a little pink. Her lips are slightly parted with surprise.
My cock stiffens.
“Kellan?” She’s holding a letter, which she lowers as her gaze sweeps me. She frowns at the basket, like she thinks I’ve got a snake inside.
I surprise her and myself, leaning over and rubbing my thumb along her lower lip. “Cleo...”
She jerks back. “Stop! And come inside, I guess.”
She steps back, and I step inside her room. The first thing I notice is it’s blue: green-blue. It reminds me immediately of the ocean, viewed from high atop a cliff. And that reminds me of home. My chest aches.
I roll my gaze around, noting a white iron bed with way too many plush blankets and quilts. It’s more blanket pile than bed. There’s a yellow dresser, topped with various frames, and a full-length mirror on one wall. A night stand with a delicate, yellow-shaded lamp, casting cheery, amber light across the room. A window, decked in gauzy red curtains. And on the ceiling, glow stars. Belatedly, I notice that the walls are dotted with canvases. I step closer to the nearest.
It’s an abstract painting: red, maroon, and purple. But something juts out of it. I lean in closer and realize there are strips of paper melded into the bold oil strokes. A quick glance around confirms that the other canvases are similar: lovely abstract art, with strips of paper—and maybe even small objects—melded in.
I reach out, compelled to touch, but at the last second, I sideline my hand to the wall outside the frame. I look at Cleo with my eyebrows raised. “Is this your art?”
She glares at me. “Are you a critic, too?”
I remember her calling me a comedian earlier and feel a twist of excitement. This girl is fiery. Complicated. Sexy. Taking her home will be rewarding in so many ways.
I look again at the red, maroon, and purple piece before me. I look more closely at the strips of paper. I catch the words “Though absent long... But oft, in lonely rooms...” and my chest tightens so it hurts to talk.
“‘Tintern Abbey’?”
She steps closer. “I’m surprised you know it, math nerd.”
Wordsworth was my mother’s great-great-great grandfather, but I see no reason to share that factoid with her. My mother was an artist, and while I have none of that talent, I’m not bad with words—finance is a double-major, along with English—but again, what’s the point?
If she wants to see me as a math nerd, I can roll with that. There’s not much point in me sharing anything. Conversely, there’s not much point in me holding anything back...
“I’m a Wordsworth fan,” I tell her simply.
These words in her painting, I can’t stop staring at them. It’s like they’ve grown, until they fill my vision, and I feel the need to write.
I’d like to write about her body. Which means I need to see it again. I turn around and find her still holding the letter.
“What’s that?” I ask.
She cradles it against her chest. “Private Cleo business.”
I find myself chuckling at her puckered lips. “That sounds dirty.”
“Maybe if you have a dirty mind.” She sets it on the edge of her dresser with some reluctance,
and I close my hands around her waist, turning her toward the spot on her rug where I sat the laundry basket.
“A gift for you,” I murmur by her ear.
She crouches down, forcing my greedy hands to release her. “Blankets?”
She reaches into the basket, and I walk around to stand at the foot of her bed, so I can see her face as she digs... ah, she found it. Her eyes pop open wider. Her jaw drops.
“Holy shit! Are you kidding me? Is this a brick?”
I nod, and she pulls out a pound of weed, wrapped dozens of times over in Saran Wrap. It’s about the shape of a masonry brick.
She “Ooooos” and “Aaaaaahs” over it, and I hold my poker face, even though I want to smile. “I told you I’d take care of you.”
She drops it on her bed and runs her hands over it reverently.
“Smitten?”
Her eyes crinkle as she beams. “It’s my baby,” she croons. “My weed baby. What do I owe you?” She looks a little worried, so I’m happy to tell her, “Nothing. It’s a show of good faith.”
Her eyebrows jut up, and the smile falls off her face. “And if monkey can’t learn math?”
“Then you got lucky. Or your clients will come find my guys when you run through this, so I get all your ex-clients.”
She comes at me, and I’m stunned to feel her arms around me. “Thank you for this!” She presses her cheek against my chest and squeezes me around the waist. “I’ll give you fifty percent at least, I swear!” She releases me, still grinning like a little fool, and I feel a tug in my gut as she turns back toward her gift. “It smells like heaven.”
“So do you,” I say to her slim shoulders. “You smell like tea.”
She turns back around and smiles at me, a mega-watt grin that streams charm through the little room like sunlight. “I wear Green Tea perfume. You’ve got a good nose.”
“Part of the job,” I kid.
“I want to know more about it,” she says eagerly.
“My nose?” I’m surprised to find myself smiling again. I press my lips together, because my cheeks are aching.
“The job, silly.”
I arch my brows. “Does this mean we’re... associates?”
I’m actually thinking of making her my partner, but it’s too soon to tell her.
I fold my arms over my chest and watch her leggings stretch over her nice, round ass as she stashes the brick under her bed. She ignores my ‘associates’ comment as she turns and sifts through the basket. “Snuggly blankets.” She presses her face into one of them. “They smell like fresh detergent.”
“They are freshly detergenterized.”
“By you?”
“Who else?” I ask. For some reason, I want her to think I laundered them myself. “I’m courting you, Cleo. You said you like fleece.”
“When did I say that?” she asks, almost accusingly.
“Last night.” I run my eyes over her bed, and Cleo’s cheeks stain red.
“I don’t like to be embarrassed,” she says. She leans her butt against the mattress and her green eyes peer into mine.
“So don’t be.”
“I was going to do that anyway,” she says softly.
By “that” I assume she means “masturbate,” not “have phone sex.” I can tell she’s trying to be casual and failing. Even her neck is red now. I’m surprised I’m having this effect on her.
She recently got out of a relationship with Brennan. That guy is boring, and a douche. Maybe he just never really did it for her.
I assume she was referencing him; the guy who bound her wrists with his tie. I wonder if it was on this very bed... I grit my teeth. I can’t stand to imagine her body stretched out under his.
Instead I ask, “What else don’t you like? Teach me your mysterious ways.”
Her green eyes blink, wide and more solemn than this moment calls for. “I don’t like surprises.”
The intensity of her expression makes me smile a little, teasingly. Cleo seems, to me, like exactly the sort of girl who would enjoy a nice surprise. “So I need to promise never to surprise you?”
She nods, chewing her lip. “Unless it’s good. Like that.” She nods to where she tucked the brick under the bed.
I’ve got nothing good at all, so I promise, “No more surprises.”
She seems appeased by that, as if she’s moved past whatever serious moment had its claws in her.
“Sixty-five percent,” she says lightly, grabbing a leather book bag from one of the bed’s posts. “Because that deal of yours is so not happening. I can barely add two plus two. You’ll see.”
I reach down to work the bag’s strap from her fingers.
“Don’t think that wins you any points,” she warns. She grabs a water bottle off the dresser, stuffs the letter she had earlier into her bag, and sprays the room with linen-scented air freshener, while I check out her art again. I like the bold brush strokes and the way that she blends color. The texture of the paper adds a 3D effect.
The one I’m looking at now is Sylvia Plath. The colors are a translucent sort of jade, pale gold, and, in a few places, milky white. Running jagged and clear, horizontally, through the middle of the canvas, is a line I recognize immediately and, after a long second, place as a line from the poem, “Daddy.”
“So I never could tell where you put your foot, your root, I never could talk to you...”
Where in the Wordsworth-inspired painting, the colors are a blunt amalgam, making any intention beyond the feeling of discord difficult to discern, the colors here are elegant; almost ghostly. They fade in and out of each other, like billowing clouds backlight by glowing light.
The pale spots—clouds—are beautiful. Blooming. Swelling into whatever they will be. The painting stirs a feeling of inevitability, and catches something at the bottom of my throat, so it’s hard to draw my next breath.
I look up and find her staring at me with a poker face. “Criticism?” she snips.
I shake my head. “It’s lovely.” I want to say more, to rave about the particular feeling she just thrust into my chest, but I can’t find the words. I’m only good with words on paper, so I just stand there, hoping that I look sincere.
“Thank you,” she says eventually. She sniffs, standing a little straighter. “I don’t like fake compliments, you know.”
“Then you’ll be glad to learn, I don’t like blowing smoke up asses.” I hold her gaze for a moment, just to show her I mean it. Then I hold out my arm, and she slides her tiny hand between the crease of my forearm and my bicep.
I walk her down the creaking stairs and out onto the porch, down the stairs into the lawn, then through the lamp-lit, car-filled parking lot. A balmy, grass-scented breeze tosses her dark hair, filling my nose with her light, sweet scent.
“That’s your car, right?” she asks, as we approach the Escalade. A street lamp shines off the hood, making the black paint look like wet ink.
I nod. It belonged to my father first, but that’s just another thing not to mention. He’s not someone I care to talk about.
“You know it’s called the Sexcalade,” she says as I steer her around the hood and toward the passenger’s door.
“What?” I stop with my hand stretched toward the handle.
Cleo gives me a smirk that has a distinctly chastising tilt to it. “People call this thing the Sexcalade. Because the last four months.”
“The last four months.” I repeat the words once more in my head, trying to make sense of them. The last four months are significant to me personally, but I don’t associate them with sex. In fact, I’ve never had so little. I pull her door open, and in her soft, prim, Southern drawl she says, “Before that, you didn’t ever seem to go out hooking up with people.”
She hoists her small self neatly into my passenger’s seat, and I press my lips together. So that’s what people think. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that I got noticed.
After I dismissed Gina, my last submissive, I thought I could termina
te all sex. I made it all of thirty-seven hours before I admitted that would never work. So I started bar-hopping.
I always took the women I picked up to hotels. I couldn’t fuck them how I like, because word would get around—as evidenced by Cleo, looking smugly down her nose at me right now. I fucked them hard and fast and sent them on their way. They may have told their friends I like it rough, but they couldn’t say they didn’t enjoy it.
All those liquored, perfumed, ropeless fucks weren’t satisfying. By coincidence, about the time I started to feel restless, I was sniffing out my “rival.” She’s been my distraction ever since. Everything about her, from her slow, casual gait to the way she throws her head back when she laughs—like a bad actress on a sitcom—strums some cord inside me.
I think I knew earlier than I’ve been willing to admit that I need Cleo in my windowed room.
I walk around the car without corroborating her story about the “Sexcalade” and slide behind the wheel. I can feel her watching me. I ignore the urge to meet her eyes as I back out of the spot.
It doesn’t matter why I was never seen out socially with women, then suddenly was. She doesn’t need to know. Keeping Cleo in the dark about me is the only way I can know her.
I pull out of the parking lot onto a crosswalk-striped campus street. She crosses her legs and props her hands on her knee. She looks at me, and I can feel her expectation hanging in the shadows.
“So that’s kind of weird, right?” she asks me, in a chipper, prodding tone. “Aren’t you going to tell me why you didn’t you date before four months ago?”
My throat stings with the question. Four months. It’s hard to believe it’s been that long. I wish I had met Cleo before. I want to have her thoroughly, and now I’m worried that there won’t be time.
I keep my feelings off my face, because, again—she doesn’t need to know this shit. I twist my lips into a smug smile and try to project the Kellan Walsh she thinks she knows. “Maybe I was in a committed relationship.”
