Truth By His Hand

by Casey Cameron

  Like a moth to a flame.

  I drove off as quickly as I could, because I really didn’t need Ellison to see me having an existential crisis. I kept glancing down at my hand as I drove, at the Gray Hairstreak so carefully inked there, at the bright spots of orange against softly textured wings.

  Was I looking in the wrong direction? I’d always been too worried about dwelling on my past, but for once I wasn’t looking back and doubting every event and decision that had brought me to where I was. Despite all my doubt and turmoil, I knew I could never go back to my pre-Ellison, pre-kink life. He’d shown me too much about myself, too many possibilities, for me to ever wonder if I should turn back.

  But looking forward right now seemed just as dangerous as looking back. What if—and this was a big “if”—he actually did want a long-term relationship? No matter how hard I tried to picture it, I couldn’t imagine what that future would look like. What could it possibly look like, when we couldn’t fuck at my place and couldn’t sleep at his? Were we going to cobble together a relationship out of bits and pieces held together by 18-minute drives from one home to another?

  I didn’t have a plan, didn’t have an ideal. I only had this deep, gnawing craving—this sure certainty I wanted him there.

  And maybe that meant I was looking too far inward, too closely at the present. He made me feel good in the here and now, but was that sustainable? Would I still be this hungry for him when he was done teaching me, when he’d led me all the way through this journey of self-discovery? And would he still want me when that novelty was gone?

  If the past, present, and future were all off the table, which way could I safely turn my head?

  You know, maybe I was looking way too hard for meaning in a metaphor I’d thought was really deep when I was 22. If I was actually a Gray Hairstreak, I’d have been eaten by a bird as an adolescent because I was fixating on the spacing of the veins in a leaf or something.

  I sighed, focusing my attention back on the road. This, at least, was something where I knew I should be facing forward. I could try to figure out the rest later.

  18

  Realistically, there are only so many ways to respond to the soul-crushing horror that results from telling a guy you’re in love with him and hearing crickets in response. Almost none of them are healthy.

  A huge part of me just wanted to wallow in it—drape myself artfully over a chaise longue and waste away, covered in smeared eyeliner and expensive silk like the heroine in a depressing art house film. I looked good in eyeliner; it would be aesthetically pleasing, at least.

  But the thing is, life goes on. Barring actual death or end-of-the-world scenarios, the world keeps turning whether you want it to or not.

  It sure didn’t feel like it was going to that night—I fell into bed and slept for almost 14 hours, and woke up feeling like possums had nested in my mouth and brain. But my body’s basic needs for food and hygiene overruled my emotional hangover, and once I’d eaten, showered, and brushed my teeth, the possums had mostly cleared out. Obviously I didn’t feel good, but I was at a point where a performative attempt at depression sounded like more work than just getting up and getting some work done. So I got some work done.

  Even though I was feeling shitty on a romantic level, work seemed to take up a different space in my brain. I knocked out three pages of Boundless Fate in two days, which I was pretty sure I hadn’t done since the earliest days of the comic, when I was riding the rush of “new project” excitement. It seemed easier somehow, like the words and the panels just flowed better than they had done. Which, of course, made sense if I thought about it. I’d worked out some issues with my plot that had given me trouble, and found a fresh take on the next bit of the plot line, so of course I would be having an easier time making things flow.

  I tried briefly to harness that extra energy to start outlining a new project, but when I dragged myself away from Boundless Fate, my mind kept going to Ellison—his face, his voice, his frustratingly cryptic texts. Though they seemed to be getting a little less cryptic than usual, if I wasn’t imagining things. I wanted to believe he was making an effort to volunteer more information about his day. He even sent me a photo of his lunch, which was supremely weird because he’d never done it before. Just…out of the blue, a picture of a pork confit sandwich, with a tiny adorable salad sitting next to it. Fancy plating, too—it had probably cost a fortune.

  > RIVER: Looks good.

  > ELLISON: It is.

  My thumb hovered over the camera button on my phone as I considered my own lunch: a ham sandwich I’d thrown together in a minute or two, with a side of slightly wilted salad that tasted just fine even though it didn’t look especially pretty. What kind of message would that photo send? Would it come off as a thinly-veiled “poor me” gesture? Or would it simply be unattractive?

  Jesus, I had officially started overthinking everything. I was looking for meaning in a damn sandwich.

  Still, I didn’t send Ellison a picture, because some little part of me was convinced that if I could make myself look attractive enough, he would change his mind and tell me he was madly in love with me. No, it wasn’t a healthy outlook. I knew full well that I couldn’t trick someone into falling in love with me, just like I couldn’t bludgeon feelings out of them with a sack of my own feelings. But there was also no particularly compelling reason to send him a picture of a salad with rust-colored streaks in the lettuce, so I didn’t.

  Neither of us brought up the conversation we’d had in the car, which suited me just fine. We probably needed to talk about it—that sounded like a thing reasonable adults would do—but there was only one way I wanted that conversation to go, and seeing as that outcome was pretty unlikely, I was pretty okay with just not having it. I was no stranger to living in denial where relationships were concerned.

  Yeah, it didn’t escape me that I’d walked right into another Dan situation. “Walked” wasn’t even the right word for it—I’d charged headlong into it, yelling a battle cry so loud that every frighteningly intelligent, devastatingly handsome, emotionally unavailable man for miles around could probably hear. “Validate me! Or don’t—I wouldn’t want to be a bother!”

  Now here I was, once again tied to a man who liked having me around, but didn’t love me. On a logical level I knew it wasn’t a crime to not love someone back, but part of me still resented him for it. Part of me even kind of wished he’d cared enough to lie to me.

  I remembered wishing the same thing with Dan, too. How desperate did a person have to be, how afraid of being alone, to crave a hollow, rote declaration of love?

  Ellison wasn’t Dan—I had to keep reminding myself of that. God, it would’ve been so much easier if he were a giant asshole who was transparently using me to bolster his own ego. If he had been, I probably could’ve just walked away. But Ellison was kind and tender and he obviously did care about me, in his own way. He might even decide he loved me someday—some people just took longer than others to get there.

  So I would wait, and I would pine, and I would do my best to remind myself that Ellison kept asking me to come back.

  Thursday was awkward. I spent most of the day unable to work because I was stressing about our date, and then I had a sudden burst of inspiration about an hour before I had to leave—most likely my brain making a frantic last-minute attempt to get me out of facing the source of my stress. I was scribbling notes and sketches into a notebook until about five minutes after I should’ve left, and I was so stressed out by being late that I missed the turn onto Ellison’s street and had to make an illegal U-turn, which did nothing to help with the stress. By the time Ellison opened his door to let me in, I was frankly a little surprised I was still standing.

  Once I was inside with him right in front of me, all polished grace and sharp blue eyes and knowing smile, the few thoughts remaining in my head fled me. I’d gone over this scenario a million times, with countless combinations of speeches and questions and meaningful looks, but
now that I was actually here, I didn’t know what to do with any of that.

  In the end I kind of threw myself at him. There were a few seconds of awkward staring, and then I was just…all over him. I had no goal, no plan; I was just desperate, greedy, grasping for any reassurance I could find in his kisses. It was probably breaking every unwritten rule of our relationship, violating the power dynamic we’d so carefully maintained, and it frightened me that he was allowing it.

  With anyone else, I’d consider this a sign he was finally letting me in; with Ellison it felt like pushing me away.

  My fears eased a little when he finally took the reins. His hands slid down my arms to capture my wrists, and he pinned them to the wall high above my head as he took control of the kiss, slipping his tongue into my mouth and battering mine aside. He held me firmly in place as I gasped and writhed, and he captured my lower lip between his teeth, biting down hard enough to make pain flare hot and red behind my eyes.

  God yes. This was the Ellison I knew.

  It said a lot about the shifting standards in my life that I considered the sex that followed “pretty vanilla.” He dragged me to the bedroom by my hair and called me a slut while I disrobed for him. He spanked me and scratched his nails across my skin over and over again until my entire back was on fire. His fingers pinched throbbing red spots into my thighs that I could tell would bloom into deep bruises tomorrow—dark, secret little tokens of his affection.

  Ellison fucked me like someone was keeping score. Every movement was deliberate and controlled, and don’t get me wrong—he did a damn good job of it. But the whole time, he was full of this strange mix of focus and detachment that unsettled me even as he took me to pieces. Every facial expression, every roughly-spoken word, everything he did seemed calculated for maximum effect. He wasn’t getting carried away, wasn’t playing me like an instrument for his amusement—he was following a script, carefully measuring out tiny hits of bliss so he could drive me right to the edge and back again, building my pleasure up to a thundering crescendo under the dual assault of his hands and his eyes.

  But of course I still screamed for him, begged for him, came for him. How could I not, when he knew all my raw, tender spots?

  After, we were in the same place we always ended up: me curled against his body, head against his chest while our bodies cooled and our hearts slowed. This was when we sometimes talked, when I would spill all my secrets, and in return he would sometimes hand over tiny tidbits of himself. Tonight the silence in the room was oppressive, and I grasped for something I could do or say to get us back to where we’d been, something that might mend this half-obscured rift between us.

  I wished he would just ask me questions like he used to. Still, relentless interrogation can go both ways.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about your books?”

  I felt him stiffen under me. Good.

  Reluctantly, I stuffed the vindictive part of me back down into the box it had come from. “I’m not trying to start a fight. I just don’t understand.”

  “Mainly, it just never came up.”

  “I do distinctly remember asking you what you do for a living,” I pointed out, frowning.

  “I don’t do it anymore.” His voice was a little soft, maybe even regretful. “I had a two-book contract, and I nearly burned out finishing the second one. Teaching is my real passion, and the books were draining energy away from that. So after I turned in the second one, I quit. That was nearly five years ago.”

  Well, that neatly circumvented my concerns about him hiding things from me, and was so perfectly “Ellison” in its analytical, emotionally mature approach that it was almost charming. I’d never been so annoyed to be relieved.

  True, it would have been better if he’d been naturally communicative and I hadn’t had to find out in the middle of a bookstore. But expecting spontaneous communication from Ellison would have bordered on delusional, so it would’ve been pretty futile to stew about it. Wisdom to accept the things you cannot change, yada yada yada.

  Wisdom was seriously unfulfilling sometimes.

  “I did write another book once,” Ellison said, drumming his fingers on my shoulder.

  Okay, so now I was delusional. Cool.

  “I thought I had the next Great American Novel,” my hallucination continued with a chuckle. “It got rejected by a couple dozen publishers before I finally realized that fiction wasn’t my forte.”

  The idea of getting a glimpse of Ellison’s creative mind was absolutely delightful. “Would you let me read it?”

  He puffed out a breath through his nose as he shook his head. “I recycled the last copy of the manuscript a couple years ago. I think the world is better for its loss.”

  “Oh come on,” I said with a roll of my eyes. “You’re a smart, articulate guy who wrote a couple of damn good books. There’s no way it was that bad.”

  “Granted, it probably didn’t actively make the world a worse place just by existing. But it was flat, dull, cliched, and full of plot holes. Fiction and nonfiction are very different areas of expertise, and I just don’t have innate talent or the drive to learn the skills I’d need to do it well. I admire people like you, who do.”

  “I wouldn’t be so quick with the compliments,” I said with a dark laugh. “For all you know, I could be a talentless hack who coasts by on boyish charm and flashy artwork.”

  Ellison’s fingers dragged their soothing, familiar line down the top of my head. “You’re not a hack. I’ve read your work.”

  I pushed myself to my elbow, gaping at him. “Seriously?”

  He nodded. “I started reading Boundless Fate shortly after I started seeing you.”

  I groaned, flopping over to bury my face in his stomach. Great, just what I needed—Ellison the indisputable expert reading my first fumbling attempts to write about kink before I even knew what kink was.

  God, I wanted to ask him. I knew I shouldn’t, but I really, really wanted to ask him.

  “What do you think of it?”

  I braced myself for a lukewarm “good,” or worse, a cagey “interesting.” I would take a flat-out “I hate it” over “interesting” any day.

  “The art is stunning, and the writing is very compelling. You’ve got well-developed, believable characters, and the plot sucked me in right from the first few pages. I enjoyed reading through it.”

  I raised my head to give him a curious look. “Even with all the disgustingly inaccurate and dubiously-consensual BDSM stuff?”

  “Yes.” A hint of a smile curled his lips. “It had some issues, especially early on, but the story was enjoyable anyway. And that’s gotten a lot better in the last few months.”

  “Yeah, I, uh, started asking for Mariah’s help somewhere around a year ago. It took me a while to actually work what I was learning into the comic, but I’ve been adjusting things more and more as time goes on.”

  “I was surprised to see what you added to last week’s pages.”

  I swallowed, hot blood rushing to my cheeks. He could only be referring to one thing. “What, the rope? I’ve done that before.”

  “Yes, but not with that level of detail. Even the knots were accurate—they could have come straight out of a how-to manual.”

  “Some of them did,” I said with a wry laugh. “I used a lot of reference material for that scene. Photos. Books. Boy Scout Handbook.”

  “Was it uncomfortable to immerse yourself in it like that?”

  There was the Ellison I knew: always far too obsessed with me being uncomfortable. I only wished I didn’t enjoy it so much of the time.

  “A little.” I drummed my fingers against his chest, watching the tips press ever so slightly into his skin millimeters closer to his heart. “But not as much as I’d thought it would. I approached it a little like…this is going to sound weird, but like a conversation. It was something to communicate, rather than something to experience. I guess it kind of helps having a dedicated fan base that will nitpick for days over any e
rrors—I could sort of detach myself from it while I drew and just focus on getting the knots right.”

  “It doesn’t sound weird,” he said, planting a kiss on the top of my head. “It makes a lot of sense.”

  Of course. Everything always made sense to Ellison.

  A question lingered on the tip of my tongue—just one of many I knew I shouldn’t ask, but the silence of the room stretched on so long, so full of missed opportunities and unspoken promises, that I had to fill it with something.

  “Would you do that to me? Tie me up?”

  “What?” Ellison’s voice was flat and uninflected, like I’d just proposed something so thoroughly absurd it didn’t even deserve to be laughed at.

  “I don’t mean…not like in the comic or anything. Just a little. Just my wrists, and not too tight. I want to know what it’s like.” I looked up to see his gorgeous face painted with a deep frown that tugged painfully at my chest. “I want to see what it could be like…with you.”

  “River,” he sighed, and damn it, my name in that tone of voice never signaled anything good, “I’ve told you again and again that I don’t care if you let me restrain you. Your hard limits are your choice, and I don’t need or want to change them.”

  I pushed myself off his chest and sat up, shoulders straight and defiant. “Well, changing them is my choice, too. I’m tired of being so jumpy about this I can’t even let someone put a pair of cheap fuzzy handcuffs on me. That’s not the kind of person I want to be.”

  “Your fears don’t make you any kind of person.” He sat up to face me, his expression grave. “Fear isn’t always rational, and feeling it doesn’t mean you’re a coward.”

  I couldn’t decide if his tone was kind or patronizing. Maybe a little of both. Either way, I couldn’t help but feel a little irritated by it. However smart he was, however wise in the ways of kink, that didn’t mean he knew what was best for me.

  “Could we just try it out? I mean, I haven’t tried in…I don’t know, probably almost ten years.” I gave him a shrug that I hoped looked casual. “Maybe my outlook has changed, and it’s not that big a deal anymore. And I’m not talking extreme predicament bondage or anything—just a little rope around the wrists. This is practically kid stuff.”