by Linnea May
He gets back up on his feet and places his hand on my head, stroking my hair lovingly as I look up to him, unsure how I’m supposed to feel about this.
He’s smiling down at me. “It’s time to eat.”
24
Loran
Disappointment flashed in the green of her eyes when I locked the restraints. I don’t know if she realized it, but I took her earlier question as an insult.
Are you letting me go?
Her voice was high-pitched and so full of naive hope that I couldn’t help but get angry about it. It was one of the few reminders that she doesn’t want to be here with me, despite what her behavior in other moments may lead me to believe. She’s so eager when it comes to getting fucked, spanked, or forced to come after she thinks she’s surpassed her personal limit. But she’s very closed-up and resistant otherwise, especially for a girl who’s usually getting paid to entertain men with her body. I’ve always noticed that a paid woman speaks less of herself than a regular date. Most girls I’ve picked up in exclusive VIP clubs or at other events were so chatty and obnoxious—an open book—that it annoyed the hell out of me. I’ve always appreciated the reserved nature of a paid girl, because I didn’t want to hear their stories. I never cared who they were, and I never asked. On the contrary, the only part I enjoyed was making them stop talking by pushing my cock between their luscious lips.
But Ruby’s dismissive nature bothers me. There have been sparks here and there that have told me a little bit about who the person behind all those naughty desires might be, and each hint has made me more curious.
“You see, I could help you with that if I wasn’t... indisposed,” she says, as I walk over to the kitchen island to prepare our plates.
“I prefer it this way, toy.”
She shifts on her seat, restless and visibly nervous. It’s hard to tell whether she’s scared or happy, and the most likely answer is probably an equal share of both.
Her eyes widen with appreciation when I serve the food. I place the plate in front of her, and can’t deny the pride that’s spreading through my chest when it’s obvious how much she adores it.
“Filet Mignon,” I announce. “The sides are nothing special, but I promise you, I know how to handle a good piece of meat.”
She looks up at me, a blend of confusion and amusement on her face.
“You made this yourself?”
I sit down opposite her.
“Why do you sound so surprised?”
“I just... I didn’t expect you to be able to cook.”
“I don’t,” I answer. “This is the only thing I can make, and I didn’t say anything about the quality of the greens or the mashed potatoes, because I’m not giving you any guarantees there. But the steak is good. You’ll see.”
A shy smile travels across her lips.
“This is very sweet, thank you,” she says, picking up her fork.
We eat in nearly complete silence for a while, only exchanging awkward remarks about the food. She likes what I served, and I enjoy watching her indulge, but it’s unsettling to see how uneasy I feel about her being up here in this part of the house. I vowed that I wouldn’t bring her here, that the one time when I comforted her upstairs in my bedroom would be an exception, and was not to be repeated. Yet here we are. I tried to tell myself that this was okay because she’s wearing cuffs around her ankles and won’t be able to move around a lot without me allowing her to. Having her tied to the chair like this is not so much out of fear that she could run away. It’s a reminder of our roles, hers and mine. She’s my captive, my possession, and not allowed to do anything without first asking and receiving my permission. She had no choice in this. She had no choice in the dish that was served, and she has no choice in where she moves or how long she’ll be allowed to be up here.
I’m the one in control. I’m the one who decides all of this. That’s the only way it can work for me.
And because I’m wired that way, I also see only one way to start a conversation with her, to make her talk.
I will have to command it.
“You said you started this job of yours out of necessity,” I say, starting her into raising her eyes in question as she’s chewing on a chunk of steak.
“Yes,” she replies simply.
“What did you mean by that?”
She sighs and tilts her head to the side, looking at me as if I’d just posed the dumbest question ever.
“I needed the money,” she says nonchalantly, shrugging her shoulders.
I make a twirling motion with my hand, beckoning her to elaborate. But she just looks at me skeptically through narrowed eyes.
“Is this an interrogation?”
“No, a conversation.”
“What if I don’t want to talk about it?”
“You will talk about this, because I’m telling you to.”
She fixes her eyes on me with an expression that’s hard to read. For a moment, she looks indignant, then confused, and finally, her face relaxes, suggesting that she likes the idea of obeying my demand.
“All right,” she agrees. “Well, the short story is that I needed the money.”
She shrugs and scoops up some mashed potatoes, giving me no indication that she plans on continuing with her story.
“And what’s the long version?” I press.
She sighs. “You don’t really want to hear that.”
“Yes, I do,” I insist. “Don’t tell me what I do or don’t want. I wouldn’t ask if it didn’t interest me.”
“I don’t want to bore you.”
“I’ll stop you if it gets to that point,” I say, winking at her. A gesture that obviously puzzles her. “Go on. Long version.”
She swallows her food and and takes a deep breath.
“The long version is that I really wanted to go to college,” she begins. “But my parents didn’t support that decision. We weren’t a family of means. Or no, that’s putting it too nicely. We were fucking poor. Like, we were as poor as you can get without becoming homeless. Blue collar working class would have been a huge step up.”
She pauses. Her eyes wander around the room, a veil of sadness casting a shadow across her face.
“I never imagined I’d ever find myself in a place like this,” she says somberly. “It may be a cage, but at least it’s gilded.”
She redirects her attention to me. “There. That may give you another explanation why I don’t fight this as much as you want me to. Being the captive of a rich as fuck man like you beats the environment I grew up in.”
“A rich as fuck man like me?” I repeat.
She blushes.
“Come on. It’s obvious that you’re loaded,” she mutters, shyly lowering her eyes before adding, “It’s also obvious that I’m attracted to you.”
I feel flattered by her words, but refuse to let it show. It shouldn’t surprise me. I’m well aware of the effect I have on women, and I’ve seen the way she looked at me from the start. It’s more than simple attraction, and I want to think that it’s more than the early signs of something like the Stockholm Syndrome. She went with me because she thought I was her client and had no choice but to come with me, but I could’ve just as easily picked her up and taken her home from a club or a bar like a normal date.
Only I didn’t.
And she still says these things.
“What did your parents do?” I ask, diverting the subject back to her upbringing. “Work-wise.”
She scoffs. “You mean when they worked at all? They were both unskilled and had the worst work ethic you can imagine. They weren’t smart, not even street smart, and they didn’t try to make up for that with hard work.”
The way she speaks about her parents reminds me of my own. Her voice is full of contempt and repulsion, lacking the soft undertone of understanding and affection that’s usually apparent when someone speaks about their family, even if they’re annoyed with them.
“They jumped from part-time job to part-time job,
” she continues. “Their ability to hold even the most basic jobs was... limited. They were fired more often than I was able to count. And they always blamed their superiors or their coworkers or the work environment—anything and anyone but themselves. They didn’t bring anything to the table, but they still saw it beneath themselves to take the jobs they were offered seriously, not even for our sake.”
“You have siblings?” I interrupt.
She nods. “Yes, an older sister. But I haven’t talked to her in a long time. I respect her because she turned out way better than our parents, but she’s very different from me.”
“How so?”
She looks at me, and the expression on her face cuts through my heart like a knife. She looks... hurt and sad in a way that I haven’t seen with her before, but it’s mixed with a hint of wonderment.
“You don’t want to talk about this,” I say, verbalizing what was meant to be a question as a simple statement. “But I’m unwilling to lay off just now, even if it hurts you, my toy.”
This is all part of it. At least that’s what I keep telling myself. Unraveling her, baring who she is, exposing the person underneath. To me, that means more than fucking her senseless.
“No, it’s fine,” she says, lowering her eyes before she adds, “It’s just that... no one has ever asked me that before. About any of this. No one ever wanted to learn about... me.”
Her words and the sorrowful way in which they’re spoken fills me with guilt.
I feel guilty because I know why she’s saying this, why she never met anyone who showed a real interest in her, why she’s not used to being allowed to talk about herself. The men she’s been with during the past few years were clearly interested in only one thing: her marvelous body.
I know, because I was just like all the rest.
I’ve been one of those men for as long as I can remember.
25
Ruby
My insecurity surprises me. Why don’t I trust him when he says he wants to hear about these things? Why do I keep feeling like a bother, like I’m boring him to death?
Because that’s what I’ve been led to believe my entire life.
That I don’t matter. That none of it interests anyone but me.
He looks at me expectantly, his eyes attentive, and his silverware resting on the table next to the plate of half-eaten food. His chin is resting in his hand as he observes me, patiently waiting for me to continue speaking.
I almost feel pressured to keep talking, just so he can continue eating his steak. I feel bad for making him pause. He was right when he said that he knows how to prepare a piece of meat. This piece of filet mignon is one of the best things I’ve ever eaten. I can’t say the same about the sides, and I want to remember to tease him about that later, if only to do something to incur the punishment that I crave so badly.
“Well,” he says. “I do want to hear about this - and I’m growing impatient over here. Trust me, that’s not what you want to happen.”
I nod. “Yes, but-”
“Your sister is different than you how?” he cuts in.
I smile. I still don’t know what to make of this, but it’s hard to deny that his interest in my stories reaches a part of my heart that hasn’t been touched in years—or possibly ever.
“She’s very... put together,” I answer. “She’s married, has a kid, a job. She never did anything out of the ordinary.”
“Did she go to college?” he inquires. “Is that why you wanted a degree - to keep up with her?”
I can’t stop myself from laughing at his question. His assumption couldn’t be further from the truth.
“No, she didn’t,” I reply. “In fact, she made fun of me for wanting to go to college and get an education, just like my parents did. They all regarded it as a way for rich people to spend their money, nothing useful for ‘our kind’, as they called it. My sister graduated from high school, and then she started working right away as a non-retail sales worker. Her main goal was to make enough money as soon as possible so she could move out and have a life of her own. And she’s doing very well; she was promoted to supervisor the last time I talked to her. Climbing the ladder instead of falling after the first two rungs over and over again as my parents did.”
I pause as I recall that time she left our family home. The time right after my sister moved out was probably the worst of all. I was fifteen and still had most of the high school years ahead of me. I was dreading every single day of it, especially now that I was faced with having to deal with my parents all by myself.
“I was so fucking jealous of her,” I recall. “To get out of that goddamn house. I wish I could’ve gone with her, I even asked her if I could, but she didn’t want me. I was just a nuisance, a burden that she didn’t want. And I get that, I totally do. To be honest, I would have done the same thing if I’d been her.”
“You’re not mad at her for leaving you?” he probes.
I shrug. I’ve never really thought about it that way, because I could empathize with her decision too much to hate her for it. She did what she had to do, and in the end, her decision wasn’t that much different than what I would have done.
“Maybe I was a little mad at her at the time,” I admit. “But she’s not the one to blame. It wasn’t her responsibility to take care of me. She never asked to be born in that household, just like I didn’t.”
He nods, casting a contemplative look out the window. There are big french doors to my left that lead out to a terrace and the rolling property that belongs with this estate. For miles and miles, there’s nothing but wide-open countryside, a green valley with trees dabbled across it in a random pattern. I have no idea where we are, but I doubt that he’d tell me if I asked. It’s clear I wouldn’t get far, even if I was able to escape the house.
Unless he’s gone or... unconscious.
The ideas have occurred to me again and again. I have a knife in my right hand, a sharp steak knife. It surprises me that he thought of chaining my ankles together, but yet had no issue with giving me a knife. Did he seriously not consider the possibility of me stabbing him? Or does he just not think I’d have the guts—or smarts—to do it?
I’ve been studying the knife, playing the scene through in my head, wondering if I could reach him over the table, if I could be fast enough to get out of his reach when he tries to stop me. He’d have no trouble overpowering me if it came down to sheer strength. Once he gets a proper hold of me, there’d be nothing I could do. And there’s no way to predict what he would do if I tried to hurt him or escape.
I might be too scared to find out.
“I understand what you’re talking about,” he says, pulling me away from my dark thoughts.
His eyes are still on the landscape outside, but his face is darkened by sorrow. I feel guilty thinking about potential ways of hurting him or getting away from him, especially considering how emotionally engaged he appears in our conversation.
“You understand?” I ask. “How so?”
He turns to me, a somber smile gracing his handsome face.
“I have an older brother,” he explains. “And just like you and your sister, we’re not very much alike, but each of us carried a burden very different from the other when we grew up.”
“Burden?” I wonder. “Did you grow up in poverty, too?”
He scoffs, shaking his head. I knew it. I didn’t think he was one of those self-made guys. He’s too nonchalant about all the luxury that surrounds him to be someone who just recently acquired it. He’s obviously used to it and has been in a financially comfortable position for a long time, most likely his entire life time.
“Poverty isn’t the only hardship one can endure while growing up,” he says.
Now I’m the one huffing with indignation. “Well, it is a fucking big hardship, I can tell you that.”
“I’d never deny that,” he says, angrily. “And I’m not trying to play a who-suffered-more game with you.”
I feel dumb for
implying that he couldn’t have possibly suffered any hardships himself just because he grew up in a wealthy family. It’s a simple-minded assumption that comes across as convincing all too easily.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t want to-”
“I know we’re not troubled by the same sorrow,” he says. “In fact, our experiences are polar opposites when it comes to that whole college thing.”
I cast him a quizzical look.
“You said you received little support when you decided to go to college,” he elaborates. “For me, it was unthinkable not to go to college, because it was naturally expected of me, even though that was probably the only thing they ever expected of me.”
“Doesn’t sound too bad to me,” I say, carefully. I’m still confused by all of this and don’t know what to make of this conversation. It seems we couldn’t be any more different, except for the fact that we’re both the younger sibling, the one who feels like his or her burden was bigger than theirs. But there’s one other thing we appear to have in common. Just like me, he doesn’t seem to have anyone to talk to.
He smirks at me.
“I’m not trying to make it sound bad,” he says. “I’m just telling you how it is. My older brother has always been treated differently because he’s the heir to my family’s empire, the one who’s supposed to make sure our business will continue to thrive. Sadly, he’s not very good at it.”
“What kind of business is it?”
He looks at me, unsure whether he should confide in me.
“Construction,” he says eventually. “My grandfather built the company, and my brother almost destroyed it.”
“How?”
He sighs and shakes his head.
“That doesn’t matter,” he says, meaning that he doesn’t want to tell me. Fair enough.
