by Ava Sinclair
He’s on his feet now.
“Lindsay, whatever you think…”
“And don’t lie,” I say. “I found your book. My picture is already in it.”
He’s speechless for a moment. “You plundered my private things?”
“Why not? You plundered my private desires. You unearthed them, lit a flame under them. And now you’re going to turn me back out in the cold.” I start to cry. “You bastard. You cold, fucking bastard.”
“It’s not like that. You don’t understand. When I took you in…”
“You did not ‘take me in,’” I say. “You blackmailed me into staying, keeping me here until you got bored, until you could relegate me to your collection.”
Silas sighs and tosses the pen down. “Well, Lindsay, if your opinion of me is so low, then I’d think you’d consider this all for the best.”
I step to the desk. “No. I don’t think it’s for the best. You want to know what I think is for the best? For you to stop hiding from whatever it is that’s got you so afraid to care about another person, Silas. For you to focus on your own flaws for a change instead of obsessing over the flaws of others.” I pause. “Maybe the next girl will be able to teach you that, since it obviously won’t be me. I’m just the desperate little frog you threw against the wall.”
He keeps his eyes down, but I can see color creeping into his handsome face. Is it rage or embarrassment? Either way, I don’t care.
“You can drop whatever exit routine I was going to be treated to. You can keep your letter and your locket. I’m leaving. I’m leaving, going back home, and I expect to be compensated for my time here per our agreement. I’ll be showing up at work tomorrow. I suggest you let my supervisor at Lindel know. And if you feel like you want to go through with your blackmail threat, feel free to do it. At this point, I can’t imagine that I could be brought any lower. And no prison could be more painful than this anyway.”
It’s Mina who interrupts the conversation. I hear a noise and turn to see her in the doorway. Silas looks past me to her.
“Mina, would you be so kind as to collect Miss Clement’s things and return them to her?”
She walks over and looks at me. Her expression is one of deep discomfort as her eyes dart from his face to mine. “So soon?” she asks quietly.
“If you would also ask the driver…”
“No driver,” I say. “Call me a cab. Surely you can afford one willing to come out, even in this weather.”
“As you wish.” He looks back at the maid. “Mina. Do as I ask.”
She does his bidding, as does everyone in the house. I go back upstairs to find my bag and the clothes I arrived in laying on the bed. I change back into them. It wasn’t so cold when I arrived. The foyer is cold as I sit on a chair by a marble statue waiting for the cab. Mina pops in and quietly offers me a coat. I shake my head.
The cabbie, an affable older Indian man, collects me at the door and shields me with his coat as he bundles me into the back of his warm car. I feel numb, both from the cold and from all that has happened. I want to hate Silas, but I know I bear some of the responsibility for where I find myself. He may have used me, but I can’t deny that I arrived with the intention of using him, or at least the man I thought I was Silas Stanton.
Maybe this is karma. Maybe this is what I get for trying to bail myself out at the expense of others. Maybe we’re both just a couple of users destined to be miserable.
But unlike Silas Stanton, I don’t have a mountain of wealth to shield myself from the harsh realities of my fucked-up life. I tell myself I’ll allow myself this one day to wallow in self-pity. There are no daddies to take care of me anymore—not my real one, not the one I’d fallen in love with.
When I arrive home, it looks smaller than it did when I left. It’s also freezing, and my plants look like hell. I plug my phone in, crank up the heat, and brew a pot of coffee. I change into a pair of yoga pants, which confirm my suspicion that all the good food I enjoyed made me a little thicker around the middle. I throw on a comfy sweater and head to the kitchen.
My phone dings. I pick it up, checking for messages. There are several from Kimberly, wanting to know where I am. She’s understandably pissed at me for not responding to her messages, for taking off with only a cryptic email saying I’d been called away for a work seminar.
I don’t have the strength yet to concoct a cover story. One more day of wondering won’t kill her. I have to think about other things, like groceries and the power bill. I pull up my bank app and am surprised to see that Lindel has deposited my paycheck along with an extra two grand. Silas kept good to his promise. I tell myself I’ll keep the paycheck, but mail the two grand back to him with no note, no explanation. He’ll know when he gets it.
I pour my coffee. I pay my bills. I call down to the corner market and cajole them into delivering some groceries. I’m surprised to realize I’m hungry. When the groceries arrive, I make good old-fashioned middle-class comfort food. No lamb or pan-seared salmon for this girl. Not anymore. Today it’s macaroni and cheese, and afterwards, a bowl of rainbow sherbet.
I go through the mail that’s piled up while I’ve been away. No one seemed to notice my absence. I don’t really know my neighbors very well. I could have been dead in here for all they know. I need to get out more, to make friends beyond Kimberly and the few girls at work I sometimes have drinks with after hours. I’ve always been different, a little out of place, and could never figure out why. Now, after the strangest event in my life, I think I know. I’ve been longing for something I didn’t even know I wanted. I was longing for a simpler life, for order, for the parameters I had as in childhood. I don’t think I’ve ever really allowed myself to grow up. I’m a daddy’s girl, longing for a daddy.
Now, I suppose, I need to focus on growing up.
I sleep well that night. In the morning, I wake up to find the sun is out. I consider that a good sign. It’s still cold; the snow is still thick on the ground, but the local news says the maintenance crews are out and have salted and cleared the roads.
I dress and get ready for work, checking my phone and email before I do. Is part of me hoping to see a text or email from Silas? Yes. I’d be lying to myself if I said otherwise. But I resist the urge to melt down when I realize that I’m truly just a picture in his book now.
It’s time to put on my big girl panties. It’s time to rejoin the adult world. It’s time to go back to work.
My supervisor at Lindel is clueless. She’s been told I was selected for some pilot training for another department. She asks me how it went. I told her I didn’t learn anything useful, and am glad to be back.
My desk, like my townhouse, is just as I left it. I have two new ad projects to work on. I throw myself into my work. On my lunch break, I eat at my desk—a veggie burrito from the downstairs café—and email Kimberly with a bullshit story about the boring seminar. She writes back that she’s still pissed that I didn’t message her while she’s away. Before the end of lunch, she’s obviously forgiven me and wants to know if I’d like to have lunch when she’s next in town. Sure, I say. That would be nice.
And this becomes my routine. The only time I let myself think of Silas Stanton is when I mail his two thousand dollars back to him with no note. I stop worrying about the police coming to haul me away, and promise myself that when I finally get myself together, I’ll hire a lawyer and handle it myself. I decide I never want to be vulnerable again.
Work, home, work, after-dinner drinks with the girls. A guy approaches me at the bar one night. He asks me out. I go two nights later. We kiss, but my heart’s not in it. He’s tender, and his gentleness reminds me of how much I miss being pressed into the mattress, having my hair pulled. This man would not spank me, or fuck me until I scream.
I Google alternative lifestyles. I come across pages on daddies and baby girls. I do a lot of reading, and decide if I have learned anything at all, it’s that I do not possess a conventional sexuality. I may be gett
ing my life together. I may be becoming more responsible, paying my bills on time, living within my means, even reading my paycheck stub like a real grownup. But I know now that the only way I can have a real, hard orgasm is at the command of a dominant man. I also realize I’ll never meet one sitting in my townhouse. I make a promise to myself. This weekend, I’ll open an account on a message board for women like me. I’ll try to find someone. I absolutely will not put an ad on Craigslist, I think, and the thought makes me laugh before I break into the first tears I’ve shed since walking away from Silas.
But I keep my promise to myself. On the following Saturday morning, more than two weeks since I left Silas standing in his study, I log on to FetLife and begin making my profile. To celebrate, I’ve ordered takeout from the Greek restaurant. When the doorbell rings, I grab my wallet, fishing for the bills as I open the door.
“Can you break a…” I look up and my voice dies in my throat.
“Do you have a moment?” Mina is standing on my doorstep, wearing a sleek black coat over her black dress. “Please?” she asks when I don’t immediately respond.
I step aside, not knowing what to make of this.
I let her in and shut the door.
“If he sent you,” I say, “please tell him that whatever he has to say doesn’t matter. I’ve moved on. I’m past—”
“No,” she says quietly. “He didn’t. He wouldn’t do that.”
“Then why are you here?”
She sighs. “May I sit down?”
I consider telling her no. I don’t want to get sucked back in, but having her here makes me realize I missed her, too. I ask her if she’d like tea. That would be nice, she says as she removes her coat. Black, please, with two sugars. I fetch it and she takes it, a housemaid whose movements are as refined as any lady’s.
I take the seat across from her, patiently waiting while she sips her tea and puts down her cup. When she does, she looks around the room.
“Your place is cute,” she says.
“Thank you.”
Mina looks past me to the window. “It’s warmed up. They’re calling for rain.”
“Yes,” I say. “But you’re not here to talk about the rain.”
Her slim white hands smooth her blue skirt. “No,” she says. “And Silas didn’t send me. I came on my own. I’m worried about him. He’s not been the same since you left.”
“The same? You mean he hasn’t been the same entitled multimillionaire with a brag book of women he’s age-regressed and discarded?”
“I won’t argue that point,” she says.
“You shouldn’t, Mina,” I say. “From what I observed, you were complicit. All of you, from the winking butler to Mrs. Kim to you.”
“Yes,” she says.
I sit back and shake my head. “What is wrong with you people?”
She looks at her hands. “The Stantons. They’re an old family. Or they were. Silas’ mother is away now. His father is dead. But they were the kind of people who, in early years, were so incredibly good to those who worked for them that they inspired a sort of generational loyalty. My mother used to be head of household staff until she passed away from cancer nine years ago. Silas took it as hard as I did; he paid all the hospital bills the insurance wouldn’t cover. When she died, I was an account executive for Lindel, the company he would buy the following year. Silas asked me to replace her.” She smiles. “I’m handsomely compensated. All the staff is. Silas sees us as family.”
I take a moment to digest this. “That makes sense. I noticed an absence of pictures of his actual family around the house. No pictures of his childhood.”
“That’s because he wants to forget it,” she says. “His own father adored his mother. It was a May-December relationship. Silas’ mother was a good deal younger than his father, and he doted on her. It was one of those old-fashioned rags-to-riches tales, for her at least. Bertram—that was his father’s name—was looking at some dilapidated row houses he was planning to buy and demolish when he saw a pretty young woman peering from the window. He went to the door and introduced himself and learned that the woman, Miriam, was the youngest daughter of two alcoholic parents. She essentially was kept there as their housekeeper. They barely cared for her. But he was smitten by the dark-eyed beauty. He whisked her away with the intention of giving her a place to live, but fell in love.
“He doted on her, perhaps too much. He pressured her to marry him, and feeling beholden and being a good girl, she did. But Bertram was overbearing and jealous, even of his own son. When Silas was born, he didn’t celebrate the birth. He looked at his infant son as competition. He was cruel to Silas, and the more Miriam doted on her son, the more resentful he became. Soon she realized the only way to keep the father from completely turning on the son was to distance herself from the child. But this caused a deep resentment. By the time Silas was a teenager, he had lost both his parents in a way. His mother, having pulled back, had little attachment to him. She eventually left. His father, obsessed with regaining Miriam’s affection, barely acknowledged him.
“So why did the staff stay? The family sounds horrible!” I’m aghast at the story that Mina has delivered in a near monotone.
“Please understand that Miriam helped pick the staff. Some were young when hired, because Miriam wanted contemporaries in the house. In the early years, before Silas, they fell in love with both Stantons, flaws and all. Of course, the pay didn’t hurt. They were exceptionally generous, and Bertram had a knack for investment that he passed on to his staff.”
“Like father, like son,” I say quietly, remembering the lessons.
“In more ways than you realize,” Mina says, and takes a ragged breath and takes a sip of her tea before continuing. “Lindsay, did you see anything when you went to the balcony?”
I start to say no, but then remember the engraving. “Yes. Someone had engraved ‘nothing lasts’ into the stone. Childish scrawl. Did Silas do that?”
“No,” she says. “Not childish scrawl. The scrawl of a bitter older man with palsy, isolated, and alone. He’d driven away his wife and his son. When Silas did come home on breaks from school, he’d rail about Miriam, how he hoped Silas realized that women only cared about wealth, how no woman would ever, ever love him for himself so long as he had money.”
“Surely Silas knew better.”
“It’s easy to think anyone would, but remember that deep down, Silas was still just a child wanting to please his father. So he listened, and I think it sank into his subconscious.”
“That doesn’t excuse what he’s done, Mina. It gives him no excuse to be cruel.”
“I agree,” she says. “And I’m the only one on the staff who has been brave enough to tell him that these temporary dalliances aren’t good for him.”
“Or healthy,” I say. “Finding women on Craigslist?”
Here she stops me. “Oh, no. You were the only one he found like that. It was really an accident, how he happened on you. I mean, he’s always been attracted to women he considered flawed, but if they weren’t interested in his unconventional relationship demands, he never tried to keep them. Many enjoyed the dynamic, the chores… but something was always missing and I believe it was the connection that he felt with you. I’ve never seen Silas be cruel until he met you, and I believe it was a fear reaction, Lindsay.”
“Why would he be afraid of me?”
“Because you, my dear, made him feel. You made his game real. With you, he found someone he wanted to pour himself into, to shelter and care for as his father had sheltered and cared for his mother. But his father’s words scream in his head day and night. He feels he’ll never be happy, that no one will really love him for himself.
“I heard your cries in the night. I heard the… sounds. I know Silas is a very dominant man with peculiar tastes. I also know you enjoyed it, that you are his match sexually, but also emotionally. You draw him out, Lindsay. With you, he felt as safe as he wanted to make you feel.”
“B
ut he sent me away.”
“Only because he wanted to spare himself the torture of what he considers a self-fulfilling prophecy. He believes everyone will leave him, so he sent you away.”
It’s a lot to absorb. I tell her I’m going to make tea for myself and I do. I don’t know what to say when I sit down. I ask her what she wants me to do.
“I want you to give him another chance,” she says. “If you could just come back.” But I draw the line here.
“No, Mina,” I say. “I’m in love with Silas. As weird as it is, as fucked up as he is, I fell in love with him. But he’s not the only one with a sense of self-preservation. If he wants me, he’s going to have to date me. Like a normal guy. I can’t run back to him like Belle running back to the Beast. I won’t hide in the castle with him.” I sigh. “I’m not exactly proficient where relationships are concerned. I haven’t had many boyfriends. I told Silas my father made me feel like a princess, and he did. He made me picky. He always told me to hold out for a prince.”
Mina smiles. “Could Silas be your prince?”
“That depends,” I say. “Tell him I’m available for dinner out tonight, if he’d like to pick me up at seven.”
Chapter Eight
He’s driving again, but this time he’s not in his chauffeur’s uniform. This time, Silas is dressed in charcoal trousers, a wine-colored sweater, and a mid-length overcoat. If there was any doubt that absence makes the heart grow fonder, the butterflies I feel at the sight of him dispel it. But despite them, I do not rush into his arms. Tonight, we meet as equals.
That means going Dutch, and although he rolls his eyes, I insist. I pick the restaurant, a Brazilian steakhouse that I tell him I’ve worked into the budget I’m keeping. He tells me he’ll do it only if I concede to allowing him to buy us a bottle of wine. Wine is an adult drink. This is a good sign.
It’s a nice restaurant, and once we’re settled, he asks how I’ve been, what I’ve been doing. I tell him I’ve been working—an ad campaign, I tell him. He smiles and tells me he’s sure management will love what I come up with.
