Free and Bound

by Chloe Cox

  She said, “I know that you haven’t been close to a sub since, and I know that that makes me sad. That’s it. That’s all of it. I should have stopped people when they started talking, but I didn’t. I knew it was wrong, but…I wanted to know you. I’m sorry.”

  Something flickered across Gavin’s face again, some crack in the armor. He leaned back against his car, rubbing the rag over his hands, looking at them hard. Like he was thinking.

  And then she just couldn’t help herself.

  “But I know that whatever it was, it wasn’t all your fault,” she said, and her own voice sounded somehow fierce. “Don’t ask me how, I just do. And Lord knows I’m not super confident about knowing much of anything anymore, but that I’m sure about.”

  Slowly, Gavin looked up. He’d stopped wiping his hands, stopped all movement. For second she thought maybe what she’d said had gotten through, but now he turned to stone entirely.

  There was a silence.

  Gavin pushed off his car, stuffing the rag in his front pocket. At no particular speed, he walked right past her, back up to the house.

  “We’re leaving,” he said.

  And he didn’t wait.

  Olivia watched him walk up the steps. He walked like a stranger. Like the man she’d gotten to know, the man she’d…

  No. Don’t cry.

  Olivia balled her hands into fists and stared at the ground. She needed this moment alone to pull herself together, and she still didn’t know if she could do it. So when she heard a voice, she jumped about ten feet in the air.

  “Trouble in paradise?” the voice said.

  Male. Smug. Coming from a man in a cowboy hat, walking up the drive from the road, that Olivia recognized as Aaron Black.

  “Are you kidding me?” she whispered to the universe at large.

  Black loped up the road on his own time, looking at Olivia, giving her time to feel nervous. The light had almost completely faded, and the dusk muddied the light coming from the house, leaving everything in ambiguous shadow. She couldn’t read his face until he was right up at the bottom of the steps.

  Black put a hand on his hat and looked up at her, at the top of the steps. She didn’t move.

  “You know, normally I don’t pay much attention to gossip,” Black finally said. “But in this case, I have to wonder.”

  Olivia forced herself to speak, the words scraping at her throat.

  “What gossip is that?”

  “Well, truthfully, there doesn’t seem to be much of it anymore,” Black said. He was still looking up at her, so Olivia tried very hard not to register any emotion—though the fact that the press didn’t seem to care as much about her, one way or the other, didn’t bode well for her career. She tried not to think about the fact that her agent hadn’t called her back in two days, and fixed Black with a hard look.

  Didn’t work.

  Black stared right back, only with an edge.

  “You know,” he said, easily, “I didn’t know what a ‘beard’ was until I read all that mess about you and Brandon Greer. It just sounds like something from the past. A woman hired to make a man appear to be a certain way, by pretending to be his wife?”

  Black shook his head.

  Olivia stood perfectly still.

  “But for a man like Gavin,” Black went on, a little louder now, “a man who needs to show people that he’s changed, that could make a strange kind of sense, couldn’t it?”

  There. That was it. He knew.

  Aaron Black knew about the arrangement.

  A black hole of despair opened up somewhere in the pit of Olivia’s stomach, and felt herself begin to fold in over it, to make herself small. She was obviously not in control of this crazy scheme anymore, she was obviously not in control of her own stupid heart, but she’d thought they could still save the club.

  Olivia opened her mouth then closed it. What Aaron Black implied felt like an insult, even though it was kind of true. Because by now, whatever she and Gavin were or were not, they weren’t nothing.

  She couldn’t tell if she was more scared or mad.

  “Listen,” Black went on, and now he climbed a step closer to her. “I know the other Volare clubs. They have a great reputation. But Gavin is Ford Colson’s brother, and you know what they say about family.”

  In spite of herself, Olivia laughed—bitterly, a sharp noise in the failing light. Black looked up.

  “You’re right about that, at least,” she said. “Family pulls on you so hard it can twist almost anything up.”

  And then she shut up and looked briefly away, because she hadn’t meant to reveal that much of herself. But she couldn’t walk away, because that felt like admitting to the fraud.

  Just hold it together. Just keep control…

  “Miss Cress, I apologize, but I had to do my homework,” Black said eventually. “I know about your father’s business, and I understand why you’d lie for Gavin Colson, but I need you to tell me the truth.”

  It was like a thunderclap.

  In a split-second Olivia stopped feeling sorry for herself, and stood up tall.

  “You did what?” she said.

  She fixed Aaron Black with another kind of look and took a step down, so she was eye-level with him, both of them standing in the middle of the stairs in front of Charlene’s house. If she was quick she could slap him clear off the property.

  “You brought my family into this?” she said.

  “You saying I’m wrong?” Black retorted. “I don’t like being lied to, and I don’t like being tricked, Miss Cress. You saying you’re single? You looking for a good Dom?”

  Olivia opened her mouth, ready to unleash hell, when Aaron Black looked past her—and took a step back.

  Everything grew quiet, even the cicadas.

  “Is he bothering you?”

  Gavin’s voice was low, but somehow boomed across the clearing. It rolled over Olivia, over Black, over the very ground, muting all of it.

  She hadn’t heard him come out, but now she felt him, standing behind her. He took a step down so he stood next to her, and just…loomed.

  Aaron Black backed off the steps entirely.

  Realizing she could, at any time, unleash Gavin on this offending man somehow drained the anger out of her, and she saw that the club she’d promised to save would suffer the consequences.

  “Nope,” Olivia said. “Not worth mentioning.”

  “You sure?” Gavin rumbled beside her. She could feel the heat coming off of him, like a warm wave, wrapping around her…

  “Hey!” The screen door banged behind them, and Charlene came bustling out. “I invited him! I invited him. Don’t you go killing my guests!”

  The two men continued to stare at each other as Charlene walked past, turning to Olivia just long enough to give a “WTF?” look.

  “Why did you invite him?” Olivia whispered.

  “I wanted him to see how sweet the two of you are together when you think no one’s watching,” Charlene hissed.

  Olivia wanted to laugh, but somehow it still stung too much.

  “Perfect timing,” she muttered.

  And Charlene turned her hostess whirlwind powers on Aaron Black, and the man was immediately enveloped in a cloud of fussing and talking, Charlene saying something about Blue not being able to make it, and Aaron registering obvious disappointment—and that was a little piece of information to file away, but Olivia saw it all through a kind of haze, her perception of everything filtered through her awareness of Gavin in the moment.

  His body, close to hers. Protective.

  The way he kept Aaron Black on the other side of him as he walked Olivia to his car, held the door for her.

  The way he walked up to Black after she was in the car, rather than come around to the driver’s side, and whispered something next to Black’s ear.

  The ashen look on Black’s face as he watched Gavin return to the car, the silence as Gavin got in, the silence as he started the car, the silence of the drive
back.

  The heavy, heavy silence that made it feel like this man she’d gotten used to was now on the other side of some impossible chasm. She’d had a partner in crime, and now she was all alone. She cast around desperately for something to say, some line to throw across that chasm, and when they still hadn’t spoken by the time Gavin walked her up to the door separating the room where she slept from the room where he slept, she panicked.

  “Are you going to tell me what you said to him?” she asked.

  “No,” he said.

  Olivia hugged herself angrily, against a breeze that only existed in her mind.

  “You don’t speak for me, you know,” she said.

  “No,” Gavin said. “I don’t.”

  He held the door open, the low light falling from the doorway onto her bed, and she knew she’d be sleeping alone again. And for the first time, that bothered her.

  29

  “Try calling him again?” Charlene said, though her tone wasn’t what Olivia would call hopeful. The two women were holed up in one of the Club Volare’s guest suites, re-purposed as a dressing room and overall pre-terrifying-vocal-performance command center. Only no one was there to take their commands.

  “Even his assistant isn’t picking up,” Olivia said. “As agents go, that’s not a great sign.”

  She’d managed to push it out of her mind for the past few days, but now the big Club Volare “Free and Bound” party was on, the show had already started, and there was under an hour until curtain on her supposedly-big-coming-out performance. The plan had been for her to come out and do a BDSM-themed burlesque number, and then Gavin would join her on stage and they’d have a bunch of photos taken and answer a bunch of questions, charming the pants off of everyone and thus magically saving both her career and the club.

  Only the press hadn’t shown up yet.

  And her agent was ignoring her.

  And Olivia was pretty sure she was completely, royally screwed.

  “What are you going to do?”

  Olivia laughed, and carefully caught a tear that threatened to burst free and mess up her eye makeup.

  “Honey, don’t cry,” Charlene said, smiling softly. “You know the rules: no feelings after your face is on.”

  Olivia looked at her friend and burst out laughing.

  “Oh God, that is messed up.”

  “Right? Seriously, though, suck it up. That eye took me like twenty minutes.”

  “Don’t worry, I got it out of my system earlier,” Olivia said. “That’s just a little after-cry. Toss me that green bag with the lip stuff.”

  “Anything you want to talk about?”

  About how I’ve been performing all my life, and for the first time I feel like I’m about to go up there naked in front of the whole world?

  Or about how this plan totally backfired?

  Or about how last night…

  Olivia didn’t even want to finish that thought. This was one of those really important days that just needed to go right, and ever since she’d woken up, everything had gone comically wrong. She’d gotten toothpaste in her hair. She’d banged her knee on the tub so badly they’d had to give it a nice coat of foundation.

  She’d woken up late to find Gavin gone for the day, and she hadn’t seen him since their fight.

  “It’s Blue,” Charlene said, looking up from her phone. “She says forty-five minutes.”

  “Yay,” Olivia said in a small voice.

  She should be doing vocal warm-ups. She should be getting into the performing zone. It wasn’t something that came naturally to her; she’d always had to work at it. And this was going to be the first time she’d ever sung in front of…well, people.

  First time in a long, long time.

  “Earth to Liv. You there?” Charlene put down her phone, and leaned forward. For the first time, she looked actually worried. “You need some privacy, or you want me to get you something? You call the shots, you draw the lines.”

  Olivia winced.

  ‘You draw the lines’—that was a Volare thing. She’d heard that when she was learning about this whole world, and she’d instantly known what it meant: you draw your own lines, you decide what’s ok and what’s not ok for you, and anyone worth being with will respect them. They hammered that home.

  And then she’d gone ahead and ignored the one line that mattered to her Dom.

  If she still had a Dom.

  “Liv, you look like you’re about to hurl.”

  “I always get like this before I go on stage.”

  “Mmm hmm. You lying?”

  Olivia looked over at her friend, and then went back to applying lip liner with increased ferocity. She’d never liked lying, but now she’d developed a positive allergy to it.

  “It’s kind of funny how bad you are at that, for an actress,” Charlene said, smiling gently at her in the big mirror that, Olivia guessed, usually served a very different purpose. “You know you don’t have to do this anymore if it’s not going to help your end of the deal. This doesn’t have to be your fight.”

  Olivia froze. She stared at Charlene in the mirror as those words ricocheted around her head.

  It didn’t feel that way…

  “Oh Jesus, you’re in love with him,” Charlene said.

  “I’m just a little nauseous!” Olivia said.

  Charlene rolled her eyes. “Same thing.”

  “It doesn’t matter either way, after last night,” Olivia said. She stood up and tossed the makeup bag back to Charlene, who caught it effortlessly. “I screwed up.”

  “By falling in love?”

  By being selfish. The familiar thought popped up like an old frenemy, ready to show her memories of every other time she’d done whatever she wanted, and everyone around her had suffered the consequences.

  “Listen,” Charlene said, her tone changing as she cradled Olivia’s dress in its protective dry cleaner sheathing thing, “Gavin has never hurt anyone on purpose, but I meant it when I said don’t fall for him. I’ve been hoping to see him move on for ten years, and I’ll keep hoping because he’s the best friend I’ve ever had, but…”

  Olivia took the dress, and together they carefully bunched up the protective paper, revealing the silvery rainbow shimmer underneath.

  “That doesn’t sound like Gavin,” she said, focusing on the over-the-top sparkling, slinky, small piece of fabric in her hands. “At all.”

  Charlene sighed.

  “People gotta think it’s worth changing,” she said. “Or that there’s someone worth changing for.”

  Olivia inhaled, sharply. She loved Charlene, and she loved, in particular, her friend’s unwavering honesty.

  But sometimes the truth was really freaking hard to take.

  “You really don’t have to do this, you know,” Charlene said.

  “I know,” Olivia said.

  They looked at each other in the mirror. Charlene zipped her up.

  “Ok,” Charlene said, smiling again. She squeezed Olivia’s shoulder. “Whatever you decide will be right, and I will support you. And you know I love you no matter what.”

  “That I definitely know.”

  Charlene gave her a quick side hug, and made to leave. Then she paused at the door.

  “Hey, how come I never knew you could sing?”

  “No one did,” Olivia said.

  Except Gavin.

  Actually, Gavin didn’t know she could sing—he’d just known, somehow, like some sort of super-powered Dom, that she wanted to. And that she never would have even thought about doing it if he hadn’t—

  “Holy shit,” Charlene said.

  Olivia snapped her head up. The door was open, and Charlene had just bounced off a wall of male muscle. The tension that had been building inside her since she’d fought with Gavin crested and broke in a wave of relief that lasted just long enough for her to actually look at who was standing there in front of a dazed and slightly star-struck Charlene, and realize that it was definitely not Gavin Col
son.

  “Brandon?” she said.

  Nobody moved. Charlene gaped at a real live movie star, Olivia blinked and tried to identify whatever-the-hell emotion was about to bubble over, and Brandon Greer waited to be asked in.

  “Hi, Liv,” he said.

  Olivia had no idea what to say.

  What came out was, “What the hell are you doing here?”

  Brandon smiled, sadly, and it was still a million-watt smile.

  “Trying to be less of an inexcusable jackass,” he said. “And, if I’m honest, trying to get some guy named Gavin, and all of the many, many people he knows, off my back. Who the heck did you hook up with, Liv? Bruce Wayne?”

  “More of a pirate, really,” Olivia said, in the smallest voice yet.

  Charlene sighed.

  “I’ll tell Blue to stall,” she said. “And I’ll be back in a bit to do your eyes again.”

  “Where are they?” Gavin growled. He was staring at the first few rows of chairs in front of the stage he’d spent all morning constructing on the Volare lawn, the section he’d personally roped off and reserved for the press. It was emptier than a damn graveyard while the rest of the place was overflowing with bodies. The turnout was great for the club, but not Olivia’s future.

  “No idea,” Blue said, looking up from her phone. “But we have a few extra minutes anyway. Go find them?”

  “Done,” he said.

  Gavin turned and, for the first time, really took in the scene. And he was amazed.

  Olivia and Blue and Luke had turned the place into some kind of fantasy world. It was like being on a movie set. They’d manage to string lanterns in and out of tents, there were cushions all over the place, scented lamps and hookahs and someone had put in a stream. An actual goddamn stream cut through his property.

  For a second, he was dumbfounded by it. By the effort, the care. But this was how important the Club was—it was a home for people who found it. And if Gavin let it die, all they’d have left was Crennel.

  And all Olivia would have left…

  Gavin shook his head roughly, and made for the secured entrance, shoulders forward. There would be a list of press passes, photos. And he needed something to do.

  He couldn’t stop moving. Ever since last night, he’d been jittery, antsy, his muscles jumping under his skin. Like a wild animal.