by CD Reiss
“Should we leave? For safety?” I asked when I handed the phone back.
“We should. But Thierry and Willa took the car into Queens yesterday, and if I tell them to come back to get us, all four of us will be stuck.”
“Five. Serena’s five.”
“Five. We’ve done this before. It’ll be fine.”
“Okay, what’s the other problem?”
“It’s a pricing problem on two retailers.” He turned the laptop toward me, and I bent to look at it. One of our biggest retailers had discounted a title and the other one had matched it.
“Crap. How much have we lost?”
Adam handed me my phone. “A few thousand. Which one do you want to take?”
“I’ll call Lake and you call Shonda.”
“Good.” He sat down and slid his chair over. I didn’t know why until he pushed the laptop halfway over to me. He was making room for me to sit next to him.
“Adam?”
“Yeah?”
What did I want from him? I couldn’t get an answer together. He answered me as if reading my mind, his face opening into a knowing smile.
“I’m still punishing… Shonda! Hey, we were just looking at this price and…”
He went on like a normal person. I shook away the submission I’d just accepted and got on the phone. I could accept it again later.
It was half an hour before I realized I’d used his name and he had no problem with it.
Chapter 67
PAST PERFECT
I was wearing my favorite blouse. The one with the flying birds. We’d gotten a table at Metropolis for the company’s anniversary dinner, and I wanted to look extra special.
Adam wore a suit, as always: navy blue with a crisp white shirt. Tall and straight, with wide shoulders and a tight waist, he fastened platinum cufflinks shaped like smooth pyramids. He ignored me and spoke to me at the same time. Something about work. Blah blah blah. It was important, but I didn’t care. All I saw was his hands, how muscular and wide they were. How each finger was active and articulated when he straightened his cuffs.
As he threaded his belt through the loops, my knees turned to jelly. We’d been together long enough to have bedroom routines, but at least not long enough for them to be tedious.
That day, I wanted something different. I couldn’t communicate it, but I felt it in my marrow. I wanted to bend in ways I’d never bent before.
No, I wanted him to bend me. The thought of him pushing me down, moving me, using me turned my insides into a pool of warm liquid.
“Adam.” My voice cracked. All I could see were his hands holding the belt.
“Yes?”
I was supposed to tell him what I wanted, but I couldn’t. I wanted him to tell me what I wanted then demand it. I wanted to be free of want. Of decisions. I wanted those hands and the beautiful monster that belt locked away.
I still don’t know what came over me, but I got on my knees in front of him.
He didn’t move. I didn’t look at him, because I didn’t know what to do. I could have taken his cock out, but that would have broken the spell.
He touched my cheek. I turned toward it, just a little, lips parted, and took his fingers in my mouth.
With an authority that shocked me, he put them down my throat, and I took them. All the way. He shoved them in as if testing how deep he could go. I held back my gag reflex because if he wanted me to take his hand, I would. Just to please him. To prove how much of him I could swallow.
I looked up at him.
He was Adam. Same guy, but different. I didn’t have the words to explain it, but I knew he’d heard what I wanted. He took out his fingers, and I breathed.
I wanted him to get his dick out. I wanted him to give it to me. I didn’t want to show any aggression.
So I put my hands behind my back. I looked forward, waiting for his hands to come into my vision and undo his pants.
And waited.
“We have to go,” he said. “We can pick this up later.”
Fear pinched the corners of my heart. I was on my knees in front of him with my eyes cast down and my hands behind my back.
I looked up at him. He was too tall in my vision, rising up in perspective, his crotch huge and his face a tiny dot on the horizon.
I put my hands on my hips. “Fine.”
I got up, and we went to dinner, driving to Union Square in silence. He’d been right. We hadn’t had time for a quick blow job. What stuck with me was the pressure on my knees, his fingers owning my mouth, the way my chest jutted forward when I locked my hands behind me. He’d rejected my posture. He didn’t want that from me. I was glad we were equals in all things, and when I thought of it, I held his hand as it rested on the gearshift.
When we got to the restaurant, I was cranky. I assumed I was hungry or dehydrated. Even after the first course and a glass of water, I was still sour. I chalked it up to a bad day and didn’t connect it to the aborted blow job. That was nothing. That was a tight schedule cutting off a good time and it wasn’t new.
I’d bitterly changed my stockings because there were holes in the knees. It bothered me more than I admitted, and the bother had the rank stench of a disappointment you couldn’t admit to. So it festered and curdled until I got to dinner, unable to tell myself the truth. I’d wanted to be dominated. I’d wanted to submit and he’d stopped it because, he said, time was tight.
But I knew he was saving me from my worst impulses, and the shame of even having them sealed my lips tight. By the time we got to Metropolis, (early, I’ll note) my gratitude and disappointment mixed together to turn my mood muddy and dull.
If the pat on the back on my father’s couch was the beginning of the end, that night was the middle of the end.
Chapter 68
PRESENT TENSE – DAY ELEVEN
The stockings were black and stretched to mid-thigh. The lace tops had clear silicone on top that kept them up. After I’d put on a pair of black stilettos, I looked at myself in the mirror. The stockings made a border around my triangle, and when I twisted to see my back, my ass looked rounder and more appealing.
“Turn around,” he said from the doorway, catching me admiring my own body.
He didn’t say please or ask. He didn’t add an upswing to his voice at the end to suggest a question. He hadn’t even said hello. I turned so he could see me from behind, then from the side, then front.
I could tell from the way he looked at me, leaning in the bedroom doorway with his arms crossed, that I was the sexiest thing in his universe. In five years with him, had he ever looked at me like that? He’d looked at me as if he wanted to eat me alive, looked at me as though he desired me, but there was an edge to him now, and that edge cut my own desire, opening it like a wound.
“Last night.” He pushed off the doorframe. “You took what was mine. I trusted you, and you fucked the footboard.”
He came in and put his hand under a lampshade, clicking one, two, three times until it was at its dimmest setting. Then he stood behind me. I felt him there, looking, planning. He moved around me, stood in front of me and over me. His silence was predatory. His posture was feral, yet completely in control.
I’d had no idea who I’d married. Had I been stupid and naïve, or shrewd?
“Your breathing’s heavy.” The back of his hand coursed from my collarbone, over my breast, the hard nipple, to my belly. Inside his manner was the threat of the threat, just enough to bring my awareness to the surface of my skin. “Hands at your side. Legs shoulder width. Don’t look at me unless I tell you to. Don’t make a move to touch me unless I say.”
I dropped my eyes to his shoes. Not being able to look at him meant I couldn’t see what he was doing or tell what he was feeling. It was disconcerting, and at the same time, the mystery was sensual. I listened. I felt the air stir. I paid more attention.
“I’ve been thinking of how to punish you, since I can’t use paddles or crops. My hands would get tired giving you all the s
panking you deserve.”
I tried not to smile. I bit my lips. Pressed them together. Thought about kittens trying to cross Fifth Avenue at noon.
He leaned into me. I resisted the urge to turn around and face him.
“It wouldn’t be funny if I really did it the way it was meant to be done.” I couldn’t swear it because I couldn’t see him, but it sounded as if he was smiling too. “Not a stroke count. No. I’d stop when your ass was the right shade of pink and you’d surrendered so fully you stopped begging me to end it.”
He grabbed the flesh of my bottom and squeezed. The surprise made me gasp and the flood between my legs came so fast it hurt.
“You want to come so bad, you’re going to come. You’re going to come until orgasms are agony. You’re going to beg for pain.”
He stopped. I didn’t think he was done, but he cut himself off. I thought to agree. I considered “sign me up,” discarded “when do we start?” and opened my mouth to give a simple, “yes,” when we were interrupted.
I was working late at the office one night. It must have been eleven o’clock. Adam came in and asked me something. I jolted, surprised to find I’d been sleeping sitting up.
That was how it felt to hear footsteps in the hall. They yanked me from a fugue of sexual promise and churning hormones. I looked over at my husband. His head was turned toward the door, his clenched jaw a fierce line at his throat.
He leapt for the door, blocking it just as Serena showed up wearing a puffer coat, jeans, and boots. She looked at me and I looked back, frozen in place.
It took a second for us to regard each other. Her in boots and a puffer. Me, naked and still, my hands at my sides. When Stefan had pulled her into the driveway on a leash, I’d been disgusted and frightened. She was an animal. A slave. A piece of flesh to be used. And what was I, standing stock-still in the middle of the room in stockings and heels, held still not by ropes or chains, but by a man’s will?
An understanding passed between us. She knew why I didn’t cover myself in the dim light. She wasn’t disgusted with me the way I’d been with her. My shame was my own. In the split second she saw me, I couldn’t deny the shame was there and I couldn’t blame her for it.
My body broke out into prickly pink heat.
I was ashamed and I was safe at the same time. I felt the shame physically as a weight on my hips. A liquefying warmth. A tightening of my nipples.
“What?” Adam barked, blocking the doorway.
She cast her eyes downward.
Look at him. You fucking bitch, look at him. Do not submit to him.
“I’m sorry,” she said, hands at her sides. Their position filled me with unreasonable rage. I wasn’t the jealous type, especially not over a man I was leaving, but I was boiling over her posture. Even her voice, which wasn’t weak or warbly, just submissive, made me want to slap her. “There’s cold air coming from the vent.”
Adam’s shoulders lowered a quarter of an inch. My body reacted by subtly leaning on one hip. I balled my hands into fists.
“Wait downstairs.”
She spun and was gone.
Adam took his hands off the doorframe and turned. “It’s going to be below zero tonight.”
“She needs to fix her own fucking furnace,” I said.
He let out a short laugh. “Her mother was the only female plumber in the tri-state area too. You’d think.”
“Yeah. You’d think.”
He put his hands on my biceps and drew them down, unclenching my fingers to weave his into them. “Give me a minute. It might need to be reset.” He circled his arms around me and clasped my hands behind my back, pushing his body against mine.
“The furnace isn’t the only thing that’s going to need a reset,” I groused.
“You’re not usually so self-interested.”
“I’ve never gotten this much attention before. It’s making me selfish.”
My comment was meant to be funny, but it wasn’t. I was telling him he hadn’t paid enough attention to me when we were married, and though I didn’t mean exactly that, and though I would have denied it if he asked, that was the only one way to interpret my comment. I realized the sharpness of the remark as the last syllable came out.
“Lie on the bed,” he said before I could rush to apologize. He let go of my hands and stepped back. “I’ll be back in a few minutes. If your fingers or the footboard smells like Friday cunt, we’re skipping agonizing orgasms and going straight to pain.”
As I got my leg up on the bed and he had one foot out the door, I called him back. “Adam?”
He stopped and turned to me.
“What’s on Friday?”
“Gratitude.”
“What?”
“Thank God it’s Friday.”
I laughed so hard I didn’t hear him leave, but I swore he was laughing too.
Chapter 69
PRESENT TENSE – DAY ELEVEN
Ten minutes had passed since I heard the back door whoosh open and slap shut. Ten agonizing minutes since the front light of the studio had flashed on and nine minutes since it went dark. Six minutes since I’d gotten under the covers. Three minutes since I slipped out of the bed and looked out the window. A minute since I put on pants and a sweater.
Thirty seconds since arriving at the front hall closet. A pocket of cold air surrounded the door, and my nipples tightened when I approached the front window.
I put my fingers on the glass. The sky had turned the orange of low clouds lit from below and the air was heavy with freezing rain and snow.
Wait for him? Do as he commanded? Or satiate the wild, predatory hunger of my curiosity?
The ocean seemed louder than ever, and the breaking waves looked more like toothy jaws ready to eat us alive.
This was more than curiosity. It was bitter cold. Deadly cold. The kind of cold inside the kind of storm that killed children and old people. My husband had been put in charge of a woman who played at incompetence for her own gain, and though I was sure he could handle her, there was nothing wrong with offering him support. I didn’t know a damn thing about furnaces, but I could calm Serena down, hand him a wrench, boil water… whatever. Anything but lying in bed doing nothing.
My coat smelled of Manhattan and my scarf poked out of the pocket. It had embroidered hawks on the ends. He’d handed it to me at the door of the loft. I didn’t put the coat on right away, just stood there with the lapels in my fists.
I’d given up being his wife, hadn’t I? Surrendered my role as partner. Relinquished rights, privileges, and duties. What good would it do to go out there? I’d be taking advantage of my past intimacy with him. Breaking him down and leaving him anyway, and why? Pretending to be his life partner was wrong, unethical, and almost immoral. I was sure it wasn’t simple curiosity. I cared deeply. But the curiosity sat in the room with its arms crossed and its foot tapping, saying, “Are you sure it’s not about me? Are you sure?”
I was fucking sure. I might have given up on loving him, but I’d never promised to stop giving a shit about him.
And I admitted, as I laced up my boots… I wanted my orgasms.
Smirking, I slipped through the dark house and out the side door.
Chapter 70
PRESENT TENSE – DAY ELEVEN
It was colder and wetter than I thought possible. Wet snow fell on the ground layer of drier snow and immediately froze to a hard shell. My feet cracked it into ovals as I walked. I hadn’t had a hat or gloves on the warm day of the drive from Manhattan, so I wrapped my scarf over my ears and tucked my hands under my arms.
Good thing the little house was just across the yard. Thirty steps at most. I curved my path to match Adam and Serena’s steps, putting my feet into the cracked ice of Adam’s footprints. The wind burned my exposed skin, and the sleet singed my cheeks.
Snow started filling the footprints. I rushed to step into them, but it was hard to see anything through the storm.
He did right to come back with her. He w
as a good man.
I got turned around in the wind and wound up on the side of the studio building. The light from the window was diffused by a layer of frost. Was there a door here? I would have sworn there was a side door, but I found no seam and no knob. I rubbed the frost, not feeling the cold glass or anything. Maybe I’d mistaken the warmth of the light for actual warmth. But the heat from inside the house had melted the inside of the frost just enough to let the fractal ice slip down.
Through the window. Quickly. Because I only saw for a moment.
Adam. Pointing firmly and talking.
A painting. Red. In human-not-human shapes.
Serena, hands on a low table. Feet on the floor.
A long cutting board in Adam’s hand.
Serena was naked from the waist to the knees.
The cutting board was a paddle.
I wasn’t cold, because my anger was so hot.
My feet were no more than weighted blocks, so when I went to lift one to go inside and choke someone, I didn’t feel that it wasn’t moving. The rest of my body spun around with the intent to move, shifting with inertia and falling on the handrail for the side steps.
The door had been three feet away and I couldn’t see it in the snow.
All I had to do was walk up them, but I was falling. The foot that had tripped me—the one that had frozen in place—loosened and I went into free fall, smacking my hatless head on the stone steps.
As my vision erupted into sparks, I had a last question.
Do you love him?
Chapter 71
PERFECT
Hold your breath.
You can hear the night birds call.
His face blue in streetlamps.
His feet warming yours.
The breeze clicking the blinds.
A car alarm a million blocks away.
His hand on your cheek.
What should we name her?
You’re not even pregnant yet.
