As he said it, his fingers tightened a little, but not enough to bring back the tumble into nothingness. It was worse somehow, that restrained threat.
“Please,” I begged. “I’m so afraid.”
“I know, baby.” He nuzzled me, moved his hips against mine and licked a line from my neck to my cheek, and along the edge of the blindfold. “I love how afraid you are. But I swear, I promise, I won’t hurt you. I would never kill you.”
The more he said it, the more I shivered, because his fingers were pressing on either side of my esophagus, bringing death a little increment at a time. Then he was gone. I heard a condom wrapper ripped open, and the snap of him adjusting the tip once he rolled it on. I was so concerned for my breath, and my life, that I’d forgotten about his cock. Within seconds he was back on top of me, nudging open my legs and sliding deep within me. I clenched around his thick length and remembered. Oh, yes, I remembered.
He moved in me slowly, taking his time. I luxuriated in the feeling of fullness and wished I could hold onto him. My shoulders ached from my arms being bound over my head, but it wasn’t enough to overcome the other pleasure I felt. I moaned and groaned and arched to him. Then his hands were back at my neck.
“No,” I said.
“Yes,” he replied, and gave me just enough oxygen to feel fear and panic and not pass out. At the same time, he kept fucking me, driving me across the sheets with powerful thrusts so the rope tethering my wrists went slack. I struggled like I might free myself, like he might ever let me be free.
“Please, don’t,” I said, but at the same time, those alternating forces were working on me. Fear, need. Breathlessness, bliss.
“You’re mine,” he said in response. “I can do what I want to you.”
You’re mine. I was thinking how weirdly happy and euphoric those words made me feel when his fingers tightened and set off pastel explosions behind my eyes.
The last thing I remembered was his cock filling me up, all of W filling me to bursting. And when I came to, he was still there, deep inside me. “There you are,” he said. My cheek felt hot, like he’d just slapped me. “Want to go again?”
“No,” I gasped.
“No, Sir,” he reminded me.
“No, Sir, please. No more.”
“Time for your assfucking, then?”
I didn’t answer, just let him flip me over and give my ass cheeks a few spanks. I was weak as a kitten. No more fight, no more energy to do anything but cry and lie there as he went for lube.
“Don’t choke me out while you’re in my ass,” I begged. I didn’t know why, but the idea terrified me, that he might be in that sensitive, vulnerable place while I was gone to the world.
“Don’t choke me out while you’re in my ass,” he repeated in a mocking falsetto. “Really, Chere, why would I? I want you to feel every minute of this, from the moment I force it in until the moment I come deep inside you.”
I cried some more as he pried open my ass cheeks and shoved the head of his cock against my hole. The ritzy white Four Seasons bedspread had to be smeared all to hell with my juices and tears. For $1500 a night, they could deal with it. I braced as he straddled my hips and eased his shaft into my passage. Ow, ow, owww.
I was exhausted, but not too exhausted to feel every inch of his length. I tried to be open, especially since he wasn’t giving me much choice. I couldn’t defend myself or wiggle away, which made it feel worse.
“That hurts,” I groaned.
One hand gripped my hair again, and the other clamped over my mouth.
“It ends when you come,” he said. “So I suggest you stop whining and figure out a way to get off. This doesn’t end until your ass milks the cum out of my cock.”
Fuck. There was no way I could come when it hurt so bad. But then, the idea that I had to come to make all this stop...that was a very powerful mindfuck.
“I hate you,” I said against his hand. I truly hated him, but there was something about his cruelty and perversion that turned me inside out in a wondrous way.
“That’s right,” he said. “Feel me taking your ass, tearing you up. You can pretend I’m raping you if you want.”
I tried to shake my head but he only laughed.
“I’m waiting for you to come,” he goaded. “Do you want me to help you?”
I feared what his “help” might entail, but when he let go of my hair and grasped my pussy instead, it felt much better. Way better. He hurt my clit, but it was a good kind of hurt that blended with all the other hurt to make me sub-spacy and hot. I was his, trapped, blind, used, manipulated. I groaned, wanting this to be over, only because the torment and feelings were so overwhelming.
“Please, please,” I begged.
“Come on, you horny little bitch. This fucking doesn’t stop until you realize this is the only reason you exist. To please me. To amuse me. To surrender to me. To take my cock in any fucking hole I want, however I want.” He punctuated each assertion with a pounding thrust, and then he slapped my pussy hard, and my body and my mind decided this depraved treatment was worthy of an orgasm after all. I tipped off the edge of the cliff and fell, fell, fell into a powerful climax.
“Oh God. Oh Jesus,” I babbled. He groaned and pounded me harder, and yes, I think I milked his orgasm right out of him. My pulsing release went on and on, too intense to feel very pleasurable.
“I can’t. I can’t,” I repeated weakly. “I can’t. Let me go.”
I didn’t even know what I meant by I can’t, except that I knew I couldn’t bear any more stimulation. I had to be released. I had to recover.
He withdrew from my limp, ragdoll body and went into the bathroom. I heard water running. Not the shower. A bath.
Oh, yes, I needed a bath. When he returned and untied my wrists, and lifted me from the bed, I huddled like a baby against his chest. It wasn’t until we were together in the water that he undid my blindfold and let me see. The lights were dim, but they still seemed too bright. There was too much glass and mirror and chrome. I whimpered.
“Close your eyes if it’s too much,” he said.
I did, just for a minute. He washed me, running hands over my skin and down between my legs.
“I’m finished now,” he said. “I’m finished hurting you for today. I’m finished fucking you, I promise. Look at me, Chere.”
I blinked my eyes open.
“Are you okay?” He asked it very slowly, and very kindly, and I was okay. My body still hummed from arousal. As usual, he’d taken me from too-much to too-fucking-much.
“I need to touch myself,” I said.
“Be my guest.”
I rubbed one out there in the tub, straddling his legs, pressed against his chest. I could feel him get hard again but he kept his promise and didn’t stick it in me. Maybe he rubbed one out too. For a while, I was too oblivious to care.
After that orgasm, it was like my body came back to itself and I was able to settle down. The water had chilled by that point, but it felt good. W watched me steadily, leaning back against the lip of the Four Seasons’ fancy soaking tub. This was luxury and depravity, and no one did it like him.
“You weren’t better this time,” I said when I felt able. “You were worse. Scarier.”
“No. You were more scared at the Empire, when you thought I was a serial killer.”
I splashed him as he smiled. “You shouldn’t be proud of that,” I said. “And I came back again today because you said you wouldn’t be as scary.”
“I don’t know if I used those exact words.”
I curled up in the water, studying him, trying to understand how someone so sadistic could be so handsomely beautiful at the same time. “You shouldn’t choke people out,” I said. “It’s creepy and sociopathic.”
“Breath play is a common enough fetish.”
“It shouldn’t be.”
“That’s probably true.” He shrugged. “I won’t do it to you very often. I did it today because I felt very close to you, and
“You choke people when you’re happy to see them?”
“I choke people who move me, who surrender to me and make me feel energized.”
I gave him a skeptical glance. “Not energized. Powerful.”
He shrugged again. “Yes. It makes me feel powerful to put my hands around your neck and watch you struggle for breath. I’d like to do it again someday, but without the blindfold. Next time, I want to see the fear in your eyes.” He touched my leg. “That blindfold was a kindness, by the way. You would have been more scared without it, because you would have seen what was in my eyes.”
“Murder,” I said.
“No. Don’t even joke about that. I’m careful with you.”
Your vision of careful and my vision of careful are different. I didn’t say it out loud. What was the use?
He took my wrists and kissed them, and kissed me. I could always count on the kisses, no matter how much he hurt me beforehand. I used to think the kisses were an apology, a way to make things up to me, but now I wasn’t sure. He made no sense. Violence and poetry. Choking and kissing. Degradation and caring.
What’s your name? Please tell me.
“Can I stay here tonight?” I asked. “It’s really beautiful. You choose the most beautiful hotels.”
He smirked at me like I was sassing him. I wasn’t. It occurred to me that I’d paid him very few compliments in our escort/client relationship. He at least deserved a few.
“You can always stay the night,” he said. “The room’s paid for, and I don’t mind. You can even order room service and dirty movies.” He kissed me one more time. “But I have to go.”
The water was cold, and he was suddenly restless. We got out and dried off, and I put on the fluffy Four Seasons robe, while he went out into the other room to dress. When I joined him, he was sitting at the desk, his pen poised over paper.
I walked over to stand beside him. After all I’d gone through, I wanted my poem. I wanted to watch him write it out with his own hands.
“What’s our selection tonight, Mr. Cumming?” I asked.
He smiled and looked up at me. “You remember my name.”
“Your fake name.”
His smile faded. He stood and took my chin, and tilted my head toward the light. “What happened to your face?”
The makeup. My tears. The bath. All my makeup had washed away, exposing the bruise from when Simon backhanded me in the kitchen. It had been an accident, mostly. He hadn’t been in his right mind. I said what any self-respecting idiot would say in this situation.
“I walked into a door.”
“You’re a fucking liar,” he said in an icy tone. “A bad liar, too. Your addict boyfriend did this.”
I blinked at him. We both knew he was right.
“This happened that night?” he asked, staring between the bruise and my eyes. “That night we were on the phone, and he was banging on the door?”
“No. It happened a few nights later.”
“Jesus fucking—” He let loose a string of epithets.
“It was an accident.”
His blue eyes snapped. The lights seemed way too bright now, and his grip on my chin was starting to hurt.
“Are you fucking kidding me, Chere? You’re telling me he accidentally hit you in the face?”
“You hit my face all the time.”
Now his fingers were around my neck, not my chin. He gave me a sharp little shake. “Do not compare me to him. You have a bruise on your face. I’ve never bruised your face. I’m not even bruising your neck right now.”
I pushed away from him and he let me go. We retreated to opposite sides of the room—I slunk over by the TV, into the shadows, while he stood looking out the window at the dark.
“You’re an idiot,” he muttered, not looking at me.
“It was an accident,” I repeated. “He was raging around and I got in his way.”
“Did he apologize?”
“I don’t remember. And it’s really none of your business.”
I could see his eyes close from across the room. He stood like that for a while, with his eyes closed. Then he opened them and turned to me. “You’re right. It’s none of my business if you want to live with someone who—”
Who hurts you. He couldn’t say it. He would have been the world’s biggest hypocrite to say it, because he hurt me all the time. He got off on hurting me; he intentionally hurt me, which was way worse than Simon, because Simon never meant to hurt me. Simon hurt me for reasons outside his control.
“Do you need money to move out?” he asked. “Is that the issue? Do you need help finding another place to live?”
“I don’t need you to rescue me. It’s my life. My problem. I’m working on it.”
“So what’s your plan?”
I could tell from his hard expression that he wasn’t going to let this go. I sighed and shrugged.
“He has a show next week. The plan is...” As I started telling W about it, I realized what a hopeless, flimsy plan it was. “Well, the plan is that he’ll sell some work, and build up a little momentum so he can take time off to go into rehab. It’s all about momentum in the art world. He’s trying to get to a place where...” My voice trailed off.
“A place where he can stay high all the time?” W suggested.
“Where he can get better. Speaking of which, I can’t see you next weekend. One of the week days would be fine, but we’re having a big reception on Saturday at the gallery. I’ll have to be there Sunday too. This show is consuming him and he...he needs me. He needs this to be a success. I’m sorry. It’s just the one weekend.”
W’s lips tightened. He looked at me with such anger, such irritation that I added, “If you even want to see me again...”
“I want to see you again,” he snapped. “Preferably without a bruised face.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” I snapped back.
The nerve of him. He’d choked me until I passed out—more than once!—and he had the gall to judge Simon for accidentally hitting me. I drifted away from the corner to sit on the bed. He leaned over the table and started writing on the Four Seasons stationary. As soon as he started, he stopped and put down the pen.
“You know what, Chere? I’m not in the mood for poetry.”
“You promised me poetry.”
He gave me a dark look. “I’ll give you a poem next time I see you. In the meantime...” He wrote out something quick, ripped it off the pad, folded it over a couple times and brought it to me. He pressed it into my palm and touched my bruised cheek. Then he brushed a kiss across my lips and left without looking back at me.
When the door closed, I unfolded the paper and smoothed it in my lap, and read the two words, dark and bold, in W’s handwriting.
Love lies.
In Between
Simon might be a fuck-up, but he’d built a lot of relationships in the art world, and everyone came out to support his comeback attempt on opening night. His parents and his sister were there, his family’s friends, even former college professors, and art teachers who’d developed him as a rebellious child. There were people who had touted him when he was first appearing on the art scene, and people who had torn him down when his star shone too bright.
There were critics and buyers, gawkers and socialites and glitterati, and the magic of Simon was that he didn’t care. He stared through them until he could escape their attention, and then hung out with his current circle of friends, the drug users and losers. When people tried to engage him about the art, he acted disinterested and precious. It worked for him before, and maybe it would work again, but it irritated me.
Why couldn’t he be professional? I was trying to be professional. My hair was done up in a neat chignon, and I wore a classy, knee-length Pucci dress with Fendi pumps. Simon was in paint-stained jeans and a baggy black viscose button-up. For weeks he’d been telling me how important this was, and now he wasn’t taking it seriously because he was either drunk, or high, or both. Probably both.
Of course Rachel was there, in her raccoon makeup and a sloppy dress carefully designed to look like she didn’t care, but oh, she did care. She followed Simon around, fawning over him and basking in his attention, while I dealt with Boris White, the gallery owner, and Josh Jacobs, Simon’s agent. I was also the one who directed the caterers and decided where to set up the bar. I did it because this felt like Simon’s last chance, and a little bit like our last chance. But under my busy focus, under my frenetic efforts to make this work, two words whispered, over and over.
Love lies.
Whatever. I knew that love lied. If I had a dollar for every time my clients claimed they “loved” their wife while they snuck off to me for twice-weekly sessions, I’d be a gazillionaire.
Sometimes it seemed to me that love was a complete and total lie, but then I’d remember times with Simon that I knew I was in love. Love was definitely out there sometimes, in fleeting moments. Maybe it was more accurate to say that Love flies.
Screw W and his platitudes and poetry. He was as precious as Simon in a lot of ways, with his elevated self-worth. At the height of the party, when people were packed into the gallery like lemmings, I stood off to the side and thought about what I was worth. I couldn’t make art. I didn’t have a real career. I didn’t have money for a room at the Four Seasons. I barely had money for the basics, thanks to Simon and his money-draining addiction.
Speaking of which, was anybody going to buy his new work?
Some things were selling, some paintings flagged with discreet red dots. There was a lot of talk, a lot of nodding heads and scrutinizing and pointing. Simon’s art blared from the walls, irritating me because I didn’t understand it. I was tired of not understanding anything about my life. While people chattered and postured with champagne glasses dangling from their fingers, I shrank into a corner and struggled to discern the essence of myself, the purpose of my life and why I was here, and what had brought me here. Chere: vibrant, flexible, caring, pretty.
The one thing I didn’t feel was worthwhile.
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