Kris sat in silence for a while, digesting his words. At last, she asked:
“Did she have it?”
“Who?”
“Karen?”
For a moment, Daniel’s face darkened and she worried that she had said the wrong thing, but then his rugged features smoothed. When he answered, he looked a little wistful.
“She had her own it,” he said at last. “It wasn’t the same as yours.”
Again, for a moment, there was silence between the two of them. She, however, could not leave her questions unanswered.
“What was it like?”
He smiled, looking downwards. “You’re never going to rest, are you? Well, I’m not surprised. It’s difficult for me to answer: I’ve spent so many times building barriers against the world that I’ve forgotten what it’s like when someone gets past them.”
He paused. “I suppose that like you, she did submit to me completely, but it wasn’t the same. I wasn’t the same man, for a start. What I wanted from her was nothing like the demands I make of you.” Again he went silent for a moment. “So many things have happened since... I guess they broke the man I used to be.”
“So, I corrupted you?”
He laughed. “Hardly. You make pure what was corrupted. To the pure, all things are pure, and that’s you, certainly. Still, she gave herself up to me, and I won’t lie, I was completely wrapped up in her. I guess that’s what you call love.”
“And is this thing between us, is that love, too?”
He didn’t reply, but instead looked at her, a half smile—sincere and thoughtful—on his lips. “You know,” he said at last, “when first I met you—God! I wanted you. Wanted you in a way that hadn’t affected me for a long time, a very long time. But... and I know this will sound fucked up, I wanted to hurt you, punish you.”
“Yes,” she agreed, her mouth twisting at the unpleasantness that the thought brought with it. “That does sound fucked up.”
“Of course, it wasn’t you I wanted to punish, but her. Shit. Here was I, lost in thoughts of her like I had always been at that time of year, our dark anniversary. I wanted to punish her, for dying on me. And then you turned up, like her ghost, and... all this buried anger, this... emotion inside, it burst through. And of course I wanted to punish myself.”
“Do you still want to? Punish her, punish me? You?”
He shook his head. “What’s the use of punishing ghosts?” he asked, staring back at the buildings on the banks of the Seine for the moment, enjoying the view of a bridge as it passed over the boat. “You can’t kill them after all.”
She moved around on her seat so that her shoulder was touching his and looked up at him as she placed her small hand over his. “Don’t punish ghosts, Daniel. But... don’t fuck them, either.”
He looked down at her, watching her intently with his hazel eyes. “No,” he said. “I want you, not her. I’m afraid the man she would have known also died that night in the car. They pulled the body out of someone else.”
His mood was a little subdued as they continued through the afternoon, but as they posed as regular tourists—a handsome, confident pair visiting the Notre Dame and Musée d’Orsay—he began to smile again. And when they made love that night in their hotel on the Champs Elysées, she did again surrender to him completely. There was no other way she knew to be with him.
When they returned to London, however, she surprised him by asking to spend a night at her old flat. He looked shocked and disappointed, and she thought at one point that he would forbid her, but she raised a finger to his lips. “No,” she said. “This isn’t about you. This is about some of my own old ghosts. They haven’t quite disappeared just yet. Give me tonight—just tonight. That’s all I ask.”
Letting herself into her apartment, she was immediately struck by how oppressive and small it felt. After the space given over to her in Chelsea, indeed, in their hotel in Paris, the flat was minute. Daniel, indeed, was surprised that she still paid rent on it, but she knew after the weekend spent with him, after the intensity of all her time together, she required one thing. She didn’t know if this was the right and proper way for a submissive lover to behave, but she didn’t care. She realised that if Daniel did love her, then it was also for being herself: and what she needed now, more than anything, was a little space.
Certainly, for all its faults, its damp and cramped corners and slightly decrepit furniture, her flat felt as though at least it had been a home once to someone, if not precisely her. Unlike Daniel’s penthouse, this old house could not simply afford for the cleaners to move in and strip out every ghost, every remnant of human contact before the next occupants moved in. Its flaws, its faults, were the old marks of everyone who had ever lived here, the boring, mundane human world in contrast to the ethereal sphere of the masters of the universe to which Daniel Stone belonged.
It was a little depressing to be back here, she had to admit. This wasn’t the world of Ralph Lauren and Paul Smith, and she had an inclination that she wouldn’t remain here for much longer. However, for this night at least, she knew what she had to do. Finally, after so long avoiding it, something had sparked again inside her.
She found out the drawing pad she had taken with her to Dalrigh and Comrie, leafed through the charcoal and pencil sketches. She smiled at them, and also viewed them critically, seeing where her technique was flawed or could be improved.
Changing into one of her old jumpers and a pair of jeans, she took up a new drawing pad and crouched down cross legged on the floor. It was far from ideal—she had not been entirely lying to Daniel when she had told him that one of the things holding her back was a lack of space—but at least there was enough room here to stretch out a little.
She took up her charcoal again. She looked forward to the day when she would be able to paint once more, but that day hadn’t quite arrived, not yet. Instead, she held the long, thin stick of burnt wood in her hands and moved it lightly across the white paper. Black and white, night and day, chiaro and scuro. In the end art, like so many things in life, was the attraction of opposites, the meeting of dark and light, the marriage of heaven and hell.
Before, it had been the birdman who obsessed her, the recognition and reaction to something deep and dark that she had seen in Daniel. Now it was a similar but different creature that appealed to her. She recalled again Ernst’s Robing of the Bride, the resplendent red plumage reserved not for him but for her. Long, delicate fronds of charcoal flickered across the page, feathers rising from the spines of wings extending towards the edges of the page, beyond even.
The woman to whom these wings were attached was no angel—that was not what this was about. Rather she was one of the old daemons, easily with the capacity to be one of the Erinyes, the Furies, but also the winged Victory of Samothrace. This was not a ghost that she drew, but a psyche, winged and full of fury and desire.
Turning page after page, Kris continued to draw late into the night, a pool of light from the lamp she pulled down onto the floor next to her capturing her features as she stared with complete concentration at the pages below her.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Over the following few days, Kris would occasionally return to her own, old flat. Realising that, for whatever reason, she could not create in his apartment, Daniel offered to set her up somewhere else. She could not quite explain her reaction, but Kris held back from this. What they had would have to change somewhere down the line, but for the moment she was content to trust the fragile ecosystem that existed around them.
She also realised (although Daniel was too gentlemanly to push the matter) that she no longer had to work. Again, however, she had become intrigued by the possibilities of the current status quo and did not wish to break things apart just yet. Her reasons here, however, were psychologically less complex: to her utter surprise, she found that the Chiado contract was one which genuinely stimulated her and she wished to see it through to its conclusion. This had never been a career she had chose
n, nor did she really have an aptitude for such business, certainly over the long term. Nonetheless, the ability to finish just one task, to complete it to her own satisfaction, filled her with a contentment that she had not expected.
If there was only one flaw in her daily life, it was the fact that Daniel himself appeared to be called away by necessity and real life more than before. He had invited her out to New York with him, but as it was a fleeting visit—seven or eight hour flights each way for a mere handful of hours in the city itself—she had decided to stay. Unfortunately for her, when she had wandered around his apartment, the plush living space, the kitchen with all its mod cons, the bedroom where he had taken her so many times (as, indeed, he had in almost every room of the house), the gym and wet room, she felt even more strongly than ever what an alien place this was.
This slightly disturbed her. She had known Daniel—Logan as well as Stone—for approximately two months now. That she felt she still did not entirely know him was hardly surprising: in many respects, she knew him more deeply than any other man she had been with before. After all, her affair with Mark had lasted, on and off, for a year, and she realised that her knowledge of her boss was much less intimate than that she shared with Daniel. But that was because she had quickly realised she was not that interested in Mark, and to tell the truth he had not been that interested in her. For Mark, it had been an opportunity to fuck a reasonably attractive young woman and feel young again. For her, it was little more than a break in the ennui she had felt at that time in her life.
Two months with Daniel were worth more than an entire year with Mark—damn it, an hour with him allowed her to see a world in a grain of sand. And yet, though she felt that he had opened up to her perhaps more than any other person since the death of Karen, yet she also intuited that a number of bars remained around his heart. It was clear that he gave little of himself away willingly, which was one of the reasons why his Chelsea flat felt so anonymous and alien.
Kris was also a little scared to admit that she was jealous when Daniel was not near her. But when she thought of the possibility of him with another woman, even if it was merely some beautiful, slender, elegant escort whose services were brought for an evening, she had to close herself down. She simply didn’t know how she would react were she to find out about another, but she knew it would not be good.
Daniel gave no indication that he was being especially furtive, but the way that he occasionally brushed aside a question, or pretended not to be listening when she spoke, or—indeed—was not listening but staring off into the distance thoughtfully, made her worry slightly. For some reason that she could not quite pin down, he was slightly less attentive to her than he had been before, and subtly, insidiously, this caused her old armour to form about her.
The reasons for his introspection became clear one day when, to her considerable surprise, he arrived at the offices of Hardy, Briskin and Sorrell unannounced. There had been a flurry of activity that morning among some of the senior members in the firm, all of whom looked rather worried, and when Daniel arrived there she had sat in shocked silence when she saw him being led into Mark’s office. She had been too stunned to go up to him, and he had not looked in her direction, but instead appeared business-like as he followed her boss.
When Mark re-appeared half an hour later, the office was abuzz with gossip, not least when someone called out that the business pages were filled with news about a possible hostile takeover bid of HBS. He came across to Chris, and the look on his face almost made Kris sorry for him, an emotion she had not felt towards him for a long time. A number of other members of staff were floating around him, trying to find what was going on.
“I’ll explain to you all what I know in a minute,” he told them somewhat testily as they crowded around him. Turning to Kris, his eyes looking as though they were brimming with tears, he said: “Mister Stone would like to see Ms Avelar.” This caused another round of speculation—mixed with outright incredulity—among her co-workers, and Kris attempted to block them out as she stood up, pushing her way past Mark.
As she squeezed between him and another colleague, he grabbed hold of her arm. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me who you were sleeping with?” he hissed, his face plainly fearful now.
“I didn’t think it was any of your business, Mark,” she told him, somewhat coldly, then left and went to his office.
Knocking on the door, she felt a little strange. This was almost a flashback to that time six months previously when Mark, not simply her boss at that point, would summon her to his office to arrange assignations that were anything but businesslike. What the hell was Daniel doing?
She entered after he had called her in, and she saw him sitting on the desk, a lopsided grin on his face as he spoke on his phone. “That’s just the way it is, Ronnie... I’ve taken an interest in things here, and just think I can make a better go of them.” He waved at Kris as she stood by the door, motioning with his hands for her to close it. “Yes, yes, I’m sure Frank is equally furious, but I know for a fact that Sally was keen on the move... I’m sure. Look—something’s come up here, Ron. You’ll just have to speak with the lawyers. We’ll hammer out the final details soon... I’m sorry you feel that way—I only took the call as a personal favour... yes, yes, goodbye.”
He rolled his eyes as he switched off his mobile, but Kris could tell from his general demeanour that he was in incredibly good spirits.
“I’m sorry I didn’t say anything before,” he told her. “This had to be very hush-hush, and I didn’t want you to say anything out of hand.”
“What are you doing here, Daniel?” she asked. Although still incredulous at seeing him in her office, her anger was also mounting as she had horrible suspicions about what was going on. “Are you trying to fuck up my life?”
For a second he looked hurt. “If anything,” he told her, “I’m about to make your life a whole lot better.” He could not resist a smile. “It’s been far too long since I did this—I tend to leave too much of it to Felix these days. Anyway, HBS is now a part of Stone Enterprises.” He spread his arms wide. “Aren’t you going to give a hug to your new boss?”
Kris crossed her arms and looked at him furiously, tapping the toes of one foot in frustration. “Why on earth are you doing this, Daniel?” she asked. “And, in any case, why the hell are you here instead of your accountants or lawyers or whatever?”
Ignoring the first part of her question, Daniel stood up from the desk where he had been leaning and looked around the office. “Yeah, well the real action is going on in the New York office, where the first of the early birders are starting to discover that there has been a successful takeover by Stone Enterprises. From a purely business point of view, I would really like to be there, but I wanted to be the one who delivered the news personally to Mister Travis out there.”
As he walked around the office, a dawning realisation began to occur to Kris and she opened her mouth in surprised horror. “Wait a minute,” she said, almost gasping in disbelief. “Do you mean to tell me that you bought out this company because I once had an affair with him?”
Daniel did not look at her directly, but instead was peering at the collection of golf trophies in the corner. “Tell me you didn’t fall for a guy who was into golf,” he said, standing and pointing at the shelves. “I suppose he is better looking than me, though—if you prefer baby-faced men who have let themselves get out of shape.”
“Answer me, Daniel! Goddamit!”
“It may have... influenced my decision a little, that and Briskin’s flirtation. But mainly, I did it because I could.”
He came closer and took her by the arm, pulling her closer to him. Kris could almost smell the testosterone coming from his body, flushed as it was with pride and success. To her own surprise, she found it both enticing but also somewhat disgusting. Then she realised: it was the first time she had really seen Daniel Stone in the full flush of his own arrogance.
“So, how does it feel to b
e working for me now?” he asked, dragging her to his chest. Her resistance appeared to be more exciting to him than anything. She didn’t respond, but he barely seemed to be aware of her disapproval. Instead he glanced around the room with a disdainful eye.
“Don’t tell me you fucked him in here?” He looked down at her. “You did, didn’t you?”
“What business is that of yours?” she asked.
He let go of her and moved backwards, loosening his tie as he did so. “I think this calls for a celebration, don’t you?” Undoing his button, he slid off his jacket and grinned at her.
“I don’t know, Daniel, I’m not really in the mood.”
“Well I am! Hell! I don’t think I’ve been this horny in years! Come here! You wouldn’t let me down would you?”
The fact that she didn’t respond immediately made him frown and, perhaps for the first time since she had entered the office, he looked at her properly. As he did so, his face took on a more serious expression.
“So, you’re mad at me for some reason, but one day you’ll understand just what I’ve done for you.”
“No, Daniel,” she said quietly. “You did this for yourself.”
He laughed at this, but it was a dry, sarcastic laugh. He stood up and took a step towards her. Even in her heels, he was a head taller than her and his posture was a particularly macho one that made her tremble for a number of reasons.
“Bend over the desk, Ms Avelar,” he said, bending down and speaking very quietly in her ear.
“What?” she asked. “Here? Now?”
“You fucked him in here, didn’t you? Yes. Here. Now.”
“We never... I never did it... when there was anyone else in the building.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” Daniels tone was cold, challenging. “But I think you need to learn what it means to be an employee of Stone Enterprises. Now, I shall tell you only one more time, Ms Avelar. Bend over the desk, raise your skirt, and lower your knickers. Remember our agreement. I’m calling it in.”
Fractured Crystal: Sapphires and Submission Page 19
