by CD Reiss
My fingers were soaked. I could lube her ass with her own juices and fuck it until she begged to go home. My cock was ready.
I put my wet finger against her asshole, pressing just enough. She clamped down.
“Please,” she said softly. “I know I didn’t cross it off…”
“Hush.”
I circled my finger around it. I could do it with only a little pain. Her hurt would be only emotional, and she’d go home.
“What would you do if I insisted?” I asked, gathering more lubrication and drawing it back up.
“I don’t know.”
One finger. Pressure. Circles. Pressure. Circles. She loosened up.
“Would you leave?”
“Yes,” she said as I put more pressure on her ass. “No. Maybe. I…” She didn’t finish.
“What?”
“I trust you.”
I thought she’d reveal some core dishonesty with herself or me, but she only ever spoke the truth as she saw it, even if one of us was hurt by it. Maybe it was about time one of us was honest.
I pushed inside, sliding against her own juice. One finger, all the way in.
Every woman has a vowel. Diana’s was O. The sound came in a long moan, beginning when my finger entered her and continuing until I couldn’t go any farther.
My cock throbbed.
“Do you trust me?” I asked, pulling out the finger.
“Yes but—”
Two fingers, all the way in.
She bucked. I took a fistful of her hair and pulled her head back so she could see me.
“If you trust me, there’s no but.”
“Okay. Yes.”
“How does this feel? When you stop worrying about it, how does it feel?”
A smile teased her mouth. “Good, actually.”
Diana had arrived. She was still bratty and demanding. She was still barely a novice, but something in her bones had submitted, and the rest of her body liked it. I hadn’t expected that, yet I knew it would happen. I held one reality in each hand and balanced the contradiction. Now to balance her and keep her off balance at the same time.
This, I could do. This was my game.
Fuck Stefan, we were staying.
I kissed her lower back and took my fingers out of her. “Let’s wash up and eat something, huntress.”
We ate dinner, listened to the radio, breathed the same air until bed. I pulled the covers over her and kissed her cheek.
“Stay,” she whispered, eyes drifting closed.
“Not tonight. Sleep well. You’re going to need it.”
I planned the rest of the week in my mind, running through the days and hours.
The only things that could interrupt were work and the pair in the studio. Another week of slight contact. Comfort. Building trust. She said she trusted me, but she didn’t even know what that meant.
I had something to do besides feel sorry for myself. Diana’s submission was my distraction from Diana’s betrayal.
The windows shook with the wind with a tick tick tick of driving snow and the sky glowed the flat orange of snowy nights.
I wanted her to go.
I wanted her to stay.
I wanted her on my terms.
I wanted her on any terms.
I wanted to be cured of the disease of love.
I wanted to be cured of want.
Part II
Diana
Chapter 57
PRESENT TENSE – DAY SEVEN
How long has it been?
A week. He hadn’t slept next to me. He hadn’t put his dick inside me.
Is that true?
We hadn’t had intercourse, and night seven would be no different.
What is he trying to prove? That I want him?
I did and I didn’t.
Am I a monster?
I asked my journal questions, but they were beside the point. I knew what he was doing. Keeping me off balance. Making me pay attention. Showing me his attention.
Adam was gone, the storm beat the windows, and I could still taste the flat bite of his come on the back of my tongue. He’d just taken my mouth as if he owned it, instructing me how to please him.
Instead of being irritated, I was grateful. If you’re going to give a man a blow job, it should please him.
Doesn’t he wonder if I’ll use the skill on another man?
I’d expressed myself in questions since a journaling class in college. It felt less like talking into a void and more demanding the void to fill itself. It also kept me from getting lazy. I may have known the answers, but posing questions meant I never took them for granted.
What do you want? Do you want him?
Him, no. Still no. His body? The one he’d barely used to touch me? The one that hadn’t fucked me since Manhattan? Only delivered orgasms that were powerful, but somehow left me wanting him more?
Even when we sat together, talking about McNeill-Barnes, I wanted him. Even when we signed payroll checks across the table, the tension in his fingers as he held the pen, the veins in the tops of his hands, the way they moved in and out of me…
What do you feel?
I still felt like a monster. I wasn’t some careless, unfeeling, heartless bitch, but if you asked me, “Are you a good person?” I’d say I wasn’t.
I’d married young because I fell in love young. I married a man with a strong jaw and a heart shaped for me to fit inside. I couldn’t resist him, and I admit, in the back of my mind, I thought, “You’re young. If you have to bail, you bail and your life won’t be over.”
So maybe I was a monster.
He just got so far away. I called for him and his body came to me. He showed up physically. But the him inside? He was elsewhere.
I shouldn’t pretend I understood him, or me, or why I married him besides the fact that I loved him. I loved him so much that when I stopped loving him, it was as if I’d lost an arm or a leg. Not loving him hurt me. I didn’t leave to find someone else. I left because he was there, every day, reminding me I’d lost something I cherished. I could deal with the hole in my life if he wasn’t there at the edge saying, “Look at this hole, how deep it is, how wide, how empty. Look how our hearts fit into it so well.”
I carried guilt and shame. I couldn’t even face him because he didn’t see the hole. He didn’t think it was a hole. He thought it was… I didn’t know what he thought it was. He didn’t even see it as a hole. He didn’t see it at all. He just created it.
I needed out. I only feared the divorce. I was a bad finisher. I was afraid that if he dragged it on, I’d cave and give up anything worth having.
He’d offered the impossible. A cheap ride. An abrupt fall into the heart-shaped hole. I’d heal sooner, start almost immediately the life I didn’t know how to imagine and I wouldn’t have to risk much more than a month.
I’d have to have sex with him. Probably a lot of sex. I could do that. I wouldn’t have married him if I didn’t enjoy his body. But I didn’t want him to take me to Montauk as a strategy to get me back. I wanted to be clear with him that if he was trying to get me to love him again, he should rescind the offer.
I must have looked like the biggest bitch in town, but I was already hurting him. If I made it worse by being dishonest, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.
Is that what it means to say, “I care about you, but I don’t love you”? Is it another way of saying, “I don’t love you, but hurting you makes me feel shitty about myself”?
Why do you turn everything back around on yourself?
My therapist, Regina, always tried to boost me without blaming, but when I told her about the club, she spun it fearlessly.
“Maybe you knew,” she’d said with a glint of satisfaction, as if Adam’s admissions were her victories. “Maybe you always knew he wasn’t what he said he was.”
I never told her I’d had an orgasm when he spanked me, or that, at the Cellar, the paddling on the other side of the glass turned me on. I denied it
to her. I said it was disgusting. I said, with real conviction, that it undid decades of women’s progress and legalized domestic abuse.
Once I decided to join my liar of a husband in a house he’d never told me he owned, I couldn’t face her.
I told myself it all happened too fast, but I’d canceled our last appointment before the trip, telling her I was taking a vacation. The fact was, I didn’t want to tell her about the offer. I didn’t want to tell her I was curious and that I trusted my husband. He’d lied. He’d kept the house and a huge chunk of his past from me. He’d pretended to be a different man than he was, and I couldn’t ever forgive him for that. If there had ever been a chance we’d get back together, his lies ruined it.
But I trusted him with my body.
Crazy.
I was crazy.
You ever going to grow up?
I put my hand flat on the paper, covering all the questions. I usually asked about the world around me, but the past few month’s entries were filled with questions about who I was and what I wanted. I had four pages that asked only one question.
What do you want?
The previous night. In the kitchen. On my knees in the middle of the room with nothing but the gauzy nightgown covering my hard nipples. Out the window, the ocean made an eternal meal of the shore.
His feet came toward me. He was fully clothed and I was practically naked. He stood so close I could smell his cologne and the dry cleaner’s softener on his suit. His erection stretched his pants. It was right in front of me like a loaded gun.
Why did it turn me on? Wasn’t he just standing still?
But so close and for so long. The anticipation. The unknown. I stopped writing when I came to the part where he took out his cock. I’d always admired it, but it wasn’t just my husband’s penis. It was an instrument of domination.
My domination.
My pussy swelled remembering it and I stopped writing, laying my hand on the page like a starfish. He hadn’t let me touch him last night. My hands had been behind my back, each hand grabbing an elbow. After telling me how to please him, how to push the back of my tongue down, how to open my mouth and not close my lips around him, how to take it instead of give it, he came down my throat.
Do you want him to use you? Insult you? Do you want to give up control of what your body’s used for?
When I thought of it that way, that he used my mouth to come in, I was mad. Sure. I was better than that, but my god… I was turned on.
What do you want?
Chapter 58
PAST PERFECT
After my mother died, I thought my father would leave their Park Avenue co-op. It was too expensive and too big. Every scrap of wallpaper, every deeply-hidden dust bunny, every swatch of fabric on the upholstery or drapes held a memory of her.
I’d fought with him, cajoled him, shaken my fist at him. He had to move. Start a new life. Instead, he got so depressed I had to leave college and run the business for six months, then forever.
But when Adam and I got rid of our baby because its life was going to consist of a few days of extraordinary pain, I was glad Dad still had the apartment. I needed familiarity. I’d left my first day back at work after two hours, saying I was going home. I didn’t clarify where that was.
“What do you want?” Dad asked, turning off the heat on the whistling teapot.
“I want a normal baby. And I want to stop bleeding.” I was hunched on a chair, hugging my knees. My tear ducts hurt because they wouldn’t stop production for five freaking minutes. They’d been at it all damn day.
“No, I mean what kind of tea do you want?”
“Chamomile.”
Dad got a box down from the cabinet. He’d put his oxygen back on when I arrived in tears. I knew I was stressing him out, but I didn’t know what to do about it. I needed him.
“Did you call Adam?” he asked, pouring.
“He’ll find me.”
He would. Eventually. Once he took his head out of the ledgers. After he realized I wasn’t at our SoHo place because we’d started talking about the baby on the couch, and sat on the balcony applying for school waiting lists, and named her while listening to the cars out the window. And because I wanted him to come and get me, dammit. I didn’t know why and I didn’t have to explain it. I needed him to ride in and scoop me up without me giving him instructions on what color the horse should be or how shiny his armor needed to be. He needed to figure it out.
“You should get checked,” Dad said when he put my teacup on the table in front of me. “If you have the same thing your mother had.”
“I don’t. They tested me. Not yet.”
He sat and pulled his oxygen tank close to the seat. “Then you can try again.”
I nodded into the hot liquid. “I can.”
Gilbert, Dad’s helper/housekeeper/butler/whatever poked his head in from the back stairway.
“Mister Steinbeck,” he said, and opened the door. Dad took his mask off. He hated looking weak in front of my husband.
Adam stood in the frame, looking at me. Disappointment? Pity? I was too blind with sadness to see what was on his mind. But his armor did shine, and his horse was a fine white stallion.
He scooped me up and took me to the couch, placing me on his lap while I cried. He told me it wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t meant to be. He said a lot of things that didn’t mean anything.
The couch faced the window that overlooked Park Avenue. There was nothing out there. Just the building across the street, a polygonal-shaped night sky, a barely visible reflection of us on the couch. But he looked out it. Not at me. He shushed my tears away. And when his hand got tired of cupping my shoulder, he patted it absently, as if comforting a child who had dropped his ice cream.
I stopped crying.
He shushed.
He stared.
He patted my shoulder as if I were a puppy.
And that was the beginning of the end for me.
Chapter 59
PRESENT TENSE– DAY EIGHT
Stefan stood in front of the stove, where a teapot hissed. Serena sat on the counter in a sage-green polo and a skirt hiked up to her waist. The corners of the tea towel on the counter peeked from under her. Her legs were spread so wide, one rested on the edge of the sink, and the other on the kitchen island with another tea towel under her heel.
She had one hand behind her for balance. The other was between her legs.
I stopped short. I couldn’t go in there.
They’d come back the previous night. The motion-sensor light had woken me up briefly.
“I think it’s boiling,” she said.
“It’s not whistling, pet.”
She squeaked. I saw the game. She couldn’t come until the teapot whistled for no other reason than her Master said so. The scene was disturbing and probably the sexiest thing I’d ever witnessed. I took half a step back. I didn’t want to disturb what was happening, but I couldn’t walk away. The tension held me. I had to know if she made it. I wanted her to succeed.
“Let me turn it down,” Stefan said playfully, turning the knob to lower the heat. He got two cups with excruciatingly slow movements and placed them on the counter.
“Please,” she said. “I need to slow down.”
“Don’t be silly. You can hold it.”
“I think the whistle is broken.”
He pulled two teabags from a box and swung them into the cups. “It’s not broken. Do you want the pekoe or the jasmine?”
“J-J-Ja—”
“Don’t you dare come.”
His voice was so firm and direct, I probably would have obeyed. The cups ready, he stood in front of her and watched her play with herself.
The teapot whistled.
Serena’s head leaned on the cabinet and her ass came off the counter as she opened her mouth and came onto her hand. She didn’t cry out or make a sound, but with her mouth open, it looked as though she screamed the sound of a teapot whistling.
Wh
en she put herself back on the tea towel, Stefan turned off the burner.
“I knew you could do it,” he said, pouring the tea.
She hopped off the counter. “Thank you.”
He looked at her with pride and warmth, placing the mugs on a little bamboo tray. “Wash your hands and meet me in the gym.”
I stepped into the shadows when he walked out the back door.
“I saw you,” Serena said, still rubbing her hands together under the tap. “Diana. It’s not a big deal.”
Shit. The crust of my shelter cracked and fell away. I was wet from what I’d seen and the object of my arousal could see right through to it.
I stepped into the kitchen. “I was rooting for you.”
She shut off the water and dried her hands. “He makes it harder every time. Sometimes I come too soon on purpose.”
“Why?”
“He punishes me.” She flicked her hair behind her shoulder.
“How?”
She picked up her skirt a few inches. Horizontal welts healed over her soft flesh. She drew a finger over the length of one, then dropped the hem.
The night I came home from the Cellar, I attacked the internet for fifteen minutes before I freaked out and shut the laptop. I’d seen pictures of caning marks, and now, in front of me, was the real thing.
I’d thought a lot of things when I went to the Cellar and when I saw the pictures. My husband was part of that world, so I wanted to understand it. Instead I felt sorrow and anger. When I saw Adam after that, I added betrayal to the list. And with Serena right in front of me, I had to sweep it all away. I couldn’t dismiss a living, breathing woman who clearly had her own will in the matter. I was curious.
“You don’t get it,” she said, half statement, half question.
“No, I don’t get it. I wish I did.”
She leaned on the counter and put her hands behind her on the edge. Was she getting more comfortable or ready to launch? “What don’t you get?”
