by CD Reiss
I shouldn’t have asked. Shouldn’t have put it all in her lap. And the question was meaningless. What is it to want? Wanting is compulsive. Want sneaks up in the middle of the night and infests the soul with dissatisfaction. Want becomes an obsession. Want isn’t real.
I needed her. My need was physical. It came in chemical bursts of sexual desire and protective rage. Did I love her? Did it matter?
“It’s midnight,” she said again. “Day thirty. Time’s up.”
What could I say to that? I couldn’t argue that she needed to finish her training or that we needed to stop this disaster before we both did something even more stupid.
“I don’t care,” I said.
“I can’t live like this.”
“Me neither. But I can’t live without you. I can’t live with how I acted. I was trying to break what we had, but I didn’t. I made us better, and I couldn’t see that. Please forgive me. You have to forgive me.”
“Okay.” Her voice was husky in those two syllables, as if the word was made up of half-digested pieces of other answers.
The cabbie’s voice came from the front seat. “I’m turning on the meter. Where to, lady?”
“Come back to Murray Hill,” I insisted.
“Out or in?” the cabbie said urgently.
Her eyes, the color of tempered glass that shattered when I cared about her more than myself, had never looked more opaque.
“In.” She tried to close the door, but I held it.
“You shouldn’t do this alone.”
“Let go.” Her voice came in the loudest whisper I’d ever heard. “I mean it.”
“Please!” the cab driver begged. “Out or in? Pick one!”
“Let go,” she said.
“Come to my place. I’ll make you believe I love you.”
“No, you won’t. It’s not about how much you say you love me. I’m ashamed of what I just did. I won the game, but at what cost? I degraded myself. Not sexually. I degraded myself morally. I used to be better than that. Now I’m an awful person. I hate what I’ve become. I hate being a winner, and I hate playing games. I can’t do this anymore.”
“We’re going!” The cabbie shouted.
The car jerked forward as he put it in drive. The door came out of my hand and she slapped it closed. The cab took off.
Maybe I should have chased it, but I thought a few hours away from me would be good for her. I’d let her stew, then look for her little green dot on my phone. I’d go wherever she was.
As Rob and Carol came toward me, I took out my phone.
“Mr. Steinbeck,” Rob said, “there’s a big mess in observation seven. Serious damages. Your name came up.”
“Yeah.” I smiled at him while my tracker app opened. “That would be me. Let’s settle up.”
I went inside without a fight. I’d pay through the nose for the glass then go to Diana. The green dot of her phone appeared on my screen, making a turn east onto 14th street.
I was about to put the phone away as I entered the darkness of the club, but before I could, the green dot disappeared. She’d cut me off.
Chapter 39
The sun rose with me alone in my bed and Diana half a city away, I just didn’t know in which direction. The green dot hadn’t reappeared. I stood outside the loft, but the lights didn’t come on. I went up to Riverside Drive, but I didn’t see her in Zack’s window. I went past her father’s building on Park. The doorman said he hadn’t seen her.
The thirty days I’d demanded had been more crowded than I’d intended. I’d planned to fall out of love with her but hadn’t planned on her falling back in love with me. I’d planned to leave her but hadn’t planned on wanting to stay.
—What do you want to do?—
My finger hovered over the send button. If I asked her like this, I’d find out when she woke up in a few hours. Yes, no, maybe, or a torrent of a hundred texts slicing what had happened between us and what it meant for our future.
But it could be no. A flat no.
Until I got a flat no, I had hope, and I needed it. I wouldn’t forgive myself otherwise.
So she wasn’t going to decide through the phone. She was going to tell me to my face, and I was going to remind her why I was the only man who could dominate her.
It was five in the morning. I had a couple of hours to answer some emails, go for a run, make myself presentable, and ask her what she wanted face to face.
Chapter 40
I waited in her office.
Our office.
I got there early and sat on the couch, answering email from my phone. I felt strong and sure. Ready to grab her, hold her, convince her that I was back one hundred percent.
But she didn’t come. I built a tower out of Legos and still she didn’t come.
Kayti didn’t come.
The office was empty as a church on Monday. A temp sat at reception. She was as surprised to see me as I was to see her.
“Where is everyone?” I asked, tapping my watch.
“Don’t know. Just got a call from the agency. Should I get someone on the phone for you?”
McNeill-Barnes was my company and I didn’t need a temp receptionist to find out why the fuck no one was in the office on a weekday.
I called Diana while I waited for the elevator and called Diana. No answer. Got in, hit the button, and sent a terse text asking after her whereabouts. Undelivered, naturally, because I was in a fucking elevator.
By the time I got down the block to the loft, I’d texted three more times and none had been delivered. All my calls went to voicemail. She’d been in my sights eight hours before, but she’d disappeared. New York was playing a shell game with me, picking up all the cups one at a time only to reveal she wasn’t under any of them.
I was about to open the door of her building when the city turned the first shell again, and there she was. Through the glass, wrapped like a Christmas present in light refractions from the moving doorway, she stood near the elevators.
She was with a man. He was so close to her, I thought he was moving past her to get to the elevator. But he wasn’t. He held her in his arms. I couldn’t see well. Was it a hug or a kiss? Or, in other words, did I want to kill someone?
Which I’d wanted to do the night before.
I craned my neck to see who it was. If it was Chris, I would break another window. I would break windows all over Manhattan. I would pave the sidewalks in broken glass.
It wasn’t Chris.
If it had been Chris or any other Dominant in the known universe, I would have done harm to myself and others. If she was going to have a Dom in her life, it would be me. But as the light refraction moved, I was relived of that burden. It wasn’t a Dominant I knew of.
It was Zack.
Chapter 41
TWO DAYS LATER
I walked to work every morning. Two mornings since I’d seen her, but it felt like a year. I kept intending to hop the subway or grab a cab, but my legs kept moving, rotating the wheels in my mind with a push-pull-push-pull.
Push—She was mine. She’d always be mine. Even as confused as I was about what love meant between us, she’d never stopped being mine. Not for a second.
Pull—I couldn’t compete with vanilla. I could never go back. If she wanted the old me—but not me—I was powerless to change her mind. And though the feeling was much the same as the day I’d found her note on the counter, there was less I could do about it.
I texted her and heard nothing. Her green dot didn’t reappear. She’d blinked out.
I’d lost the love of my life. I had to accept that.
Acceptance was freedom. I went with it for two days. I pushed down a pain in my chest that said wrong wrong wrong until I couldn’t bear it. Couldn’t sleep. Ate nothing. I was sucked dry. I texted again. No answer.
Freedom sucked. Freedom wasn’t more than losing the fight. Signing a treaty of complete surrender. Giving up the homeland to the opponent and watching it burn day and night from a for
eign land.
I said my good mornings at R+D. Push-pulling down the hall through a tunnel that led to my desk.
I didn’t like losing. I wasn’t used to it. Not in business and not in the personal. Losing this fight was like walking the length of a swamp and coming out on the other side covered in leeches. Each one had to be pulled off painfully. My pride. My sense of self. My imagined future. My culpability. My love might never come off. That one would bleed me the rest of my days. I’d hemorrhage love.
I closed the door to my office and opened the top drawer, where I’d put her divorce papers. They clearly outlined her ownership of everything. She’d earned it. She’d tried to make it work. She’d come back from her own swamp, gone through it again, and come out the other side. I’d thrown her efforts back in her face.
Well, fuck me.
I clicked my pen and hovered over the dotted line. I had to release her if I was ever going to be free.
I didn’t want to be free, but she did.
A knock came at the door, and Eva poked her head in. “Adam?”
“Yes?”
“I set up a meeting in half an hour. We’re doing the Theesen property projections. Have you looked at them?”
“No.”
She stepped all the way in and closed the door. “Are you all right?”
“Not really.”
“Is it Diana?”
“That’s a personal question. We don’t do personal questions.”
She wasn’t put off. She came deeper into the office, pink from head to toe in a wide lapel jacket and flowing silk pants. She was a beautiful woman I couldn’t be attracted to. How many more would there be?
“If you didn’t want me to ask a personal question, you would have said you were fine.”
“I’m not lying anymore. But that doesn’t mean I’m explaining.”
She sat on the chair in front of the desk and crossed her legs. Her pumps were pink. “Noted.”
I signed the divorce papers. Dated next to my name. Initialed by the tabs. Folded the pages in threes. Regretted it then let it go, then regretted it again.
“Do you know why I decided to work with you, even though you were younger and had shit for brains?” she asked.
“My acumen?”
“You had no fear. You pitched me projects so risky, no one had even thought of them.”
“I was young and stupid.”
“And lucky. But I didn’t know that yet. What I did know was that you had real upside. You were a winner.”
“Well, you were right. Up to a point.”
“You’re still a winner. Even when you lose.”
There were a few occasions over the years when Eva had tried to be a big sister to me. I hadn’t been able to let her go there because I needed to be her equal in the office. Had the distance been necessary? Had I distrusted her with my confidence, or myself?
“Thanks,” I said. “Can you have Britt send these?”
She took the papers and tapped them on the heel of her hand. “It’s hard to see now that this can be a new start.”
“Noted.”
“You can make your life whatever you want from this moment.”
“What if I don’t know what I want?”
“You can figure it out. You’re handsome. Successful—”
“Are you making a pass at me?”
“You’re too good a catch. I prefer pathetic losers.” She stood. “It’s a weird fetish.”
“You can make your life whatever you want from this moment.”
“Touché.”
“I’ll review Theesen and see you in the meeting.”
“Good.”
She went out and left me alone with a life of infinite choices, minus one.
Chapter 42
I couldn’t sleep. A full glass of whiskey didn’t cure the insomnia. I went to Crosby Street and watched the loft window for signs of life, but even at eight in the morning, four hours into my vigil from the coffee shop, I saw no sign she was even there. I asked the doorman if he’d seen her and he hadn’t.
I was supposed to be letting go. Signing the divorce papers had done nothing to quell the anxiety that screamed wrong wrong wrong.
I went back to the coffee shop and ordered another. I just wanted to see if she was all right. That was what I told myself. But by nine thirty, I knew she wasn’t coming home. I went back to Murray Hill to get ready for work.
So much for being free. So much for the breadth of choices. So much for giving up on her. Maybe I was tired, and in the exhaustion, I fell back into old patterns. I was married. She was mine. My wife. My lover. My sub.
Even though I felt the truth, I knew another truth. Equally accurate yet diametrically opposed.
She was less mine than she’d ever been.
When I got out of the shower, I took off my ring and put it in the medicine cabinet. My hand didn’t feel any lighter. The skin at the base of my finger was pressed smooth and shiny. Even after I rubbed it, an indent remained. Even in winter, the bottom of my finger was a lighter color than the rest, as if the metal was gone but the ghost of the marriage remained.
I got dressed. I didn’t have the energy for formality, so I put on jeans and a sweater. Then I decided that maybe today was the first day of a new life, so I put on a charcoal-grey suit that was narrower in the shoulders. Back when I dressed for Diana, I’d avoided it. It was time to stop caring what she liked. It was time to be alone with my preferences.
Single Windsor knot.
Shit.
Wrong shirt for that. It looked dinky with the wide collar, and the wide collar wasn’t right with the jacket.
Double Windsor or change the shirt?
Jesus Christ, asshole. Get it together.
The doorman buzzed the intercom.
“Yeah,” I said into it, pulling off the tie.
“Good morning, Mr. Steinbeck. I sent a guy up with a package.”
“Thanks.”
I made coffee. Fuck the suit. Fuck the whole thing. Let it all unravel. Maybe I’d just go to Tahiti for a year and wear nothing but cut-off jeans and puka shells. I could learn to surf. Sit in the sun and tan this white ring off my finger. Let it burn this pain out of my chest. Maybe I could throw away this damaged soul and grow another. One that worked right.
When the bell rang, I went to the door. I signed for a small package, not looking at it until I’d tipped the delivery guy and closed the door.
Mrs. Steinbeck - Congratulations! Your silent auction prize is enclosed. Thank you again for supporting the Literacy Project.
I’d forgotten she’d bid on something at the event. What had it been? Who even knew? I dropped it on the front table. I could send it to her. Or I’d deliver it personally. I could ask her how she was doing. See if she was with Zack. Ask if that meant she was going vanilla. Pretend I was all right with whatever she said. Look right into her eyes and see if she was lying when she said she was fine. Maybe I’d see Zack at McNeill-Barnes and commit murder. Get myself arrested before noon.
Talk about a new life.
As I finished getting ready, going back to sweater and jeans, I decided using the package as an excuse to see her wasn’t in line with starting fresh without her.
Having used my entire store of willpower in the decision to send the package rather than deliver it, I was powerless against my desire to see what was inside the box. Maybe she was sending me a message. Hope could be in the bottom of that box. I opened it. A certificate lay on top.
Dinner for two at Le Bernardin. I knew the place. Sauces swiped across white plates like impressionist pigment and cooked scallops placed back in the shell. Lighting so dim the menus came with little gold-plated flashlights. Nice. Great. She’d probably take Zack. Maybe her father, but if she was sleeping with that weasely little motherfucker, she’d have every reason to take him.
I didn’t have to deliver it at all. Then she couldn’t take Zack out to a six-hundred-dollar, pre-fuck dinner.
Maybe she had
n’t won this thing. She had no way of knowing, and I wasn’t made of stone. The money would go to the charity whether she went out for dinner or not.
I was being an asshole. I was being petty and immature. I was jealous. Ravenously jealous.
I folded the voucher to remove it from the box. I was throwing it out. I only had so much patience for this shit, and it had just run out.
If she wanted to go back to vanilla and it had just been me she didn’t want vanilla sex with, I would let her have that.
I hated it.
The thought ate at me.
I had no choice.
Like a bell from a heavenly host, my phone dinged. It had buzzed and dinged all day long. I didn’t stare at it or answer it when I was doing something else, but this time, I looked at it.
Hello,
Sorry for the mass email. This is going out to all contacts.
As some of you know, two days ago, Lloyd Barnes passed away from complications associated with emphysema. He was a fearless leader and a shining light. We will miss him.
The wake will be at Costa Bros. Funeral Home. Address and viewing schedule are enclosed.
Thank you so much for your constant support.
~Kayti McTeague
PS: Business at Mc-Neill Barnes Publishing will continue on Monday. Please forward all inquiries to this email.
Chapter 43
Lloyd Barnes had had a long life. He’d made hundreds of friends, and every single one of them seemed to have shown up at his wake.
The funeral home was huge. Located in a double-width brownstone off Lexington Ave., it was a study in small rooms and dark woods, still life paintings and noise-absorbing carpets. She’d be in the front, by the casket. I had to push through a press of people and perform a thousand niceties before getting there.
Lloyd was laid to rest with a rosary in his folded hands. I’d forgotten they were Catholic. They had too. Even when Diana and I were married at City Hall, no one had brought up a church even though I was Catholic too.
