by AM Hartnett
Tongue pressed to the roof of her mouth, she watched him close his fist around the shining head, and the need ate through the wonderful pulsations going through her body.
This isn’t good enough, she thought, even as she ground against the edge of the table. The fantasies she had indulged in with him seemed so hollow today. She didn’t want that little glass bulb hitting the sweet spot, she wanted his fingers curling there. She didn’t want the unrelenting tremble of those ears on her clit, she wanted the tip of his tongue stroking side to side.
More than anything, she wanted those large hands pushing her thighs apart and that thick shaft stretching her.
She needed to block him out before she wept from her need. She pushed down on the vibe’s control and turned it up to full strength, then ground her frustration through gritted teeth as the pulsation blocked all of it out.
All around her were the sounds of his continued exertions. She opened her heavy lids as much as she could, in time to see that glorious shaft spitting fluid on his fist.
She groaned and dropped her forehead on the surface. ‘I can’t do this any more.’
He said nothing.
She pushed herself up and saw that his chair was empty. She took the opportunity to strip off the harness. Holding up the funny-shaped vibe at the end of it, she conceded that Taureau did have fantastic taste. The dual pleasure had left her as wobbly as a newborn faun.
She faced away from the screen as she dressed, not looking back as his chair creaked and announced his return. She let him watch while she replaced her skirt, tucked in her blouse and sat on the edge of the table to replace her shoes.
And then, her back to him, she said it again. ‘I can’t do this any more. I’m not going to do this any more.’
There was nothing from the speakers at the centre of the table. She glanced over her shoulder to make sure he was still there, and annoyance jabbed at her as she found him in his customary pose: elbow propped on the arm of the chair, chin on the heel of his palm, the other half of his face obscured.
‘Did you hear what I said?’
‘I heard you.’
He was as calm as ever, but she detected the slight menace in his words. She turned fully around and faced the screen, hands on hips. She refused to let any of the turmoil she felt inside show on her face.
‘Don’t you want to know why?’
‘I’m sure you’ll enlighten me.’
Whatever had prompted him to watch the world from afar served him well that day. Had he been right in front of her as he delivered his flippant response, she would have slapped him across the face.
She maintained her cool and leaned forward, hands flat on the surface of the table. ‘Every day for almost a month, even on the goddamn weekend, I come in here, pick up whatever your fuck fairy left in my desk, then give you what you need to blow your load. I can’t take it any more. For Christ’s sake, fire me if you don’t like it, but I can’t take this torture. I’m not saying what I was doing before was healthy, but it was less frustrating than having an affair with an iPhone and a laptop.’
He merely raised the eyebrow visible to her. ‘Is that it?’
She slapped the tabletop and growled. ‘There are pieces missing, Jacques. You have to know that.’
He kept his silence, and she left it to him as she snapped the elastic off her wrist and pushed her hair off her neck. ‘I’m not some gold-digger.’
‘I know,’ he said, his tone infuriatingly level.
‘It’s … just this. No plastic or silicone or glass can make it as good as when there’s a man between my legs and I’m holding on to keep from hitting the roof as he fucks me.’ Grace sank into the nearest chair and folded her arms on the table in front of her. ‘You know what I’m talking about. You said yourself that first night that you pay for sex sometimes. You know there’s sweat, and friction, and pressure, and pain, and knowing that what you’re doing to another person, what that other person is doing to you, you can’t experience with anyone else, anywhere.’
He said nothing. He didn’t move, and Grace felt the queerest frost in her blood. More than ever, she felt his self-imposed distance – not just physical, the miles between them, but emotional. It was as though he wasn’t even on the same planet as she was. He was some detached alien creature who couldn’t understand her words.
She rubbed her bare arms and stood. ‘When you tell me all the things you would do to me I want more than just telling, and the desperation is setting in and turning everything black around the edges.’
The lump in the back of her throat burned as she endured the silence while the rest of her went cold. She was on the verge of losing control, of screaming at him to say something and show some sort of emotion, when he finally spoke.
‘I know what you want,’ he said after a moment, flat and emotionless. ‘And I can’t give it to you. You know why.’
‘No, I don’t,’ she said, pushing her words out on the breath she had been holding. Her heart was beating a little faster. She couldn’t bring herself to just say it, to plead with him, to challenge him to take this, this thing that had burned between them these past few weeks and set it ablaze.
‘I really don’t, Jacques,’ she said, and went to the door. She grasped the handle, twisted it and then turned to stone.
The sound that exploded all around her was an echo of their first encounter. A man’s panting, broken only by an occasional grunt.
Grace turned her head.
The image of Taureau on the screen had been replaced. There, larger than life, was a torrid scene from months ago: a one-time lover reclining on Caroway’s sofa, his pants where she had dragged them to his knees. And there she was, half-dressed and kneeling over him. She squirmed as the shadow of his fingers moved between her legs. Her eyes were closed, her brows knit together, as she sucked his cock.
Seeing was different from merely hearing. Facing what he had been watching in secret for months … she really hadn’t expected it to be so explicit and raw. For the first time, she saw the vantage point of his camera in Caroway’s office, from the row of bookcases that faced the sofa, set low enough to be eye-level.
She watched, frozen, as the other version of herself pursed her lips around the shining tip, then whorled her tongue around. The camera zoomed in, stopping just as she ran her tongue along the smooth underside.
The image flickered, and the scene changed: the boardroom, from above the door where she stood. She couldn’t see her partner’s face. She could scarcely see her own body, save for the top of her blonde head and her legs hidden behind his. She was pressed up against the edge of the table and he held onto her hips as he slammed into her.
Yet again, the picture changed. Her doppelgänger sat on her own desk, skirt shoved up to her waist. She leaned against a former employee who had since moved on, and stroked the erection that tented his pants while his fingers moved beneath the band of fabric over her pussy. His face was pressed into her hair, and she felt a shot of heat as she remembered his hand at the back of her neck, holding her there as he hissed filthy words into her ear.
That woman’s laugh as he released her made Grace flinch. That other woman was so shameless, licking her lips as the man went to his knees and pulled her panties down. The camera moved in as he pushed her legs apart, going in and out of focus as that wet tongue licked her from stem to stern.
‘Turn it off,’ she said.
Taureau was back in an instant. God damn him, he looked the same, except that his mouth was pressed into an unforgiving line.
She crossed her arms over her chest and lifted her chin to meet his challenge head-on, but in reality she wanted to throw up all over the conference-room floor.
‘What exactly was the point of that? Was that just one big “fuck you” because I’m not going to play with you any longer?’
‘I told you that if you wanted to end this, I would let you,’ he said. Though his voice was even, his hand curled in a fist on the arm of his chair, his knuck
les white. ‘There would be no repercussions to your job – but that doesn’t mean I intend to make it easy for you if you want to end it.’
Grace clasped her hands together as anger flooded her. ‘I don’t want it to end. I just want it to –’
‘Do you want me to treat you like some sort of whore?’ Out of nowhere, he suddenly sounded angry. ‘To bring you here like I do the others? To keep you and pay you so I can do what I want to you?’
It took only seconds for shock to turn to red-hot anger. She opened her mouth to curse him, but he held up his hand.
‘I could fly you here for one night or two, enjoy you and send you back to your little desk until the mood strikes me again. This could go on for months. Those visits would get longer and longer, until the time would come when your little desk would belong to some other woman. She’ll fetch Caroway’s coffee and write his reports, and you’ll sleep until noon or later because I’ve fucked you as long as it suited me, sometimes until the sun comes up. Your life will be one of leisure and you’ll become complacent in it, and then one day you’ll realise I’m taking care of you in exchange for what’s between your legs. You’ll realise what you’ve become: my whore.’
There was a sharpness to his words that cut her deep. It wasn’t the insult. No, she’d been called worse by former lovers when she told them something they didn’t want to hear. It was the conviction behind his words.
He wasn’t insulting her at all. He wasn’t warning her. He wasn’t trying to tear her down. He was stating a fact, but underneath it all Grace had caught the tremble of fear and mistrust.
She turned her attention from the screen to where she now knew there was a camera looking down on her. It was the best she could do to make him look her in the eye.
‘I see you’ve thought this through, and since we’ve both made up our minds, there’s nowhere else to go, is there?’ Keeping her gaze above the door, she moved along the length of the table towards the laptop at its head. ‘Do what you want, Jacques, but I’m not going to do this to myself any longer.’
She looked back at the screen and, in that second before she disconnected the call, Jacques leaned forward.
Her brain couldn’t communicate with her hand fast enough to stop it, to take a good look at the face that had been denied to her for weeks.
And so the screen went dark, and Grace was left in the empty boardroom with the phantom of that face slipping quickly from memory.
* * *
Grace drew the bath with the intention of chasing away her thoughts but, once she was nose-deep with nothing to occupy her but the fizz of the bubbles, it was clear her mind would have no reprieve.
She hated that she hadn’t been able to hold on to that image of his face, his whole face. For whatever reason, he’d chosen that moment, when she made her last stand, to reveal himself.
Did he want a reaction? No doubt about it, but what sort of reaction?
The urge to be reconnected had struck her immediately. She simply stood there, finger still over the ESC button, paralysed by her surprise.
He didn’t try to call back in and she didn’t ask. She didn’t even look up at the camera above the door as she powered down the computer, not when she left the room. She treated her exit with calm composure, returning to her desk to collect her purse and coat and trying not to think about his eyes upon her. She didn’t feel completely free of his scrutiny until she was home and had turned the deadbolt on her front door, the contents of her lone stop along the way tucked under her arm.
The paperback sat on the toilet seat as she soaked. Grace stared at it, cynically doubting that it would give her any insight into the mind of the man with whom she had enjoyed a strange series of sexual encounters with over the past few weeks, but hopeful that it would tell her something about the disorder he had thrown into her life.
For a time, the whole world had been engrossed in the sordid tale of the drug-addled playboy and the damaged woman who had tried to kill him. Dozens of books and documentaries had appeared, claiming to have all the details. Burnout, published shortly after Elizabeth Laurin’s death, had stood out. Its success could be attributed to Everly Ledger, an investigative journalist and acclaimed author whose gentle but thorough coverage of the most harrowing tragedies in the country had earned him the respect of many.
Grace’s mother had owned a hardback of the book and passed it on to Grace when she first started working for Taureau-Werner. She’d leafed through it and shelved it, and somewhere between moves the book had ended up in the garbage.
She reached out and picked up the paperback, careless about the wet fingerprints she left on the pages as she leafed to the introduction. An hour later, a shiver alerted her to the chill in the water. She quickly dried off and wrapped herself in her robe, then stretched out on the bed to read.
With the arrival of dawn, her eyes itched and her throat was dry. The spine of the new book had been roughened and began to rip as she reached the second-to-last chapter.
She set it aside. She couldn’t stay awake any longer, even though there was just a little more to go, and yet, as she turned off the bedside light and dragged the covers over her eyes to block out the light, she couldn’t turn her brain off.
The book had been written like a work of fiction. The dialogue flowed and Ledger had attempted to get into the heads of his ‘characters’. The protagonist had not been Taureau but Bette Laurin, the book beginning with what could hardly be called a happy childhood and delving into her chaotic adolescence in the years between leaving home and landing on Jacques Taureau’s radar and ending with her peaceful last moments in a morphine fog.
Though it was evident that Ledger had taken considerable creative license, it struck Grace as she read on that Ledger dwelt on the smallest details of Taureau and Laurin’s relationship: the bitter smell of coffee in the diner where Taureau and Laurin had had breakfast after their first night of partying together at a Montreal nightclub; the details of Taureau’s deep depressions that always followed a visit with his father; and the plans they made together when their world finally stopped spinning and they could, as Ledger put it, ‘see a glimpse of the true, kindred souls who needed one other.’
By the time Ledger described the attack, Grace knew that Taureau had recommended Burnout because it was the one true authority on what had happened leading up to and following the attack. She lay in the dark and wondered which of them had worked with Ledger, whether the book was Laurin’s attempt to cleanse her troubled soul before her death, or Taureau’s to purge himself of his demons by breaking his silence.
She rolled onto her stomach and hugged her pillow against her. What was his reason for directing her to read what was essentially the truth? When he’d said it, she thought he had been teasing her for taking a second look into his past, but now she wondered if he had been offering her insight into himself. She doubted the last few chapters of Burnout would provide any answers about the way Taureau lived now.
It was like he had invited her through the gate of a fortified enclosure, but then, once she crossed the drawbridge, refused to open the door.
She closed her eyes and replayed their meeting yesterday backwards and forwards in her mind, trying to make sense of it all, real events mixing with dream, until sleep finally took over.
Chapter Five
Grace stepped onto the elevator and pressed the button to the thirteenth floor. She leaned back and, as the doors closed, she sucked in a deep breath and tried to burn off some of the tension that coming back to the Taureau-Werner building had injected into her every day since things ended with Taureau.
As she made her way between two rows of cubicles, Grace’s gaze fell on those working around her. They all knew the floor was being monitored by security, but what would they think if they knew Taureau himself was keeping a close eye on them?
Did Caroway know? Did any of them know?
Her attention turned now to the women, and she wondered if any of them could take her place with Taur
eau.
She wondered if she had been the first.
When she arrived at the office the Monday morning following their last meeting, she half expected another toy left in her desk, for things to continue simply because Taureau wanted it that way, but there was only the usual office flotsam and jetsam of her work life. Crushed by disappointment, she pulled out her cigarettes, but tossed them in the trash once she reached the lobby.
The toys she had used for him had disappeared from Caroway’s credenza, along with the phone and headset. She felt a queer shock every time she entered the boardroom or Caroway’s office. It was like touching a live wire: she would step over the threshold and the current would hit her and leave her aching.
There had been no calls and no private messages. Once, in the first week, she had lingered late at her desk to bait him, but again nothing.
It was like it had never happened.
Now into the third week, she genuinely started to wonder if it was true, if the whole thing had been a figment of her imagination.
The sting had subsided. She was beginning to feel like her old self again, but not quite all the way. She still didn’t feel quite right.
As soon as her ass hit the chair, Caroway called her.
‘Clear my schedule for the afternoon, Grace, and hold off on anything that’s on your plate until tomorrow. Something’s come up and I’m going to need you handy.’
‘Something important?’
‘Simon Reeve,’ he said with a sigh. ‘Apparently there’s been some slip in the Breton-Craig deal; something about a lawsuit they’d known was coming when they rushed into negotiations with us. Reeve is Taureau’s fox.’
‘I’ll clear my desk.’
She hung up and slipped her purse into her bottom drawer, patting the side compartment to make sure the contents were still there. In the aftermath of this thing with Taureau, her libido had decided to go into hibernation, and she hadn’t been inclined to coax it back out until now. On her way home the evening before she’d picked up a new vibrator, but had been too exhausted to enjoy it the previous night and so it had stayed in her purse.
