by Cynthia Dane
She hurriedly drank the rest of her latte. It was the only way to wash down the realization that she also had some scary skeletons in her closet. Ones Sloan wouldn’t be able to believe.
“Ms. Vaughn.”
Leah didn’t look up from her empty cup. “So,” she said, feeling Sean’s presence behind her, “you found me, huh?”
He said nothing.
“If your boss is hurting to see me, tell her that I’m not in the mood to do this right now.”
Someone pulled out the chair across from her. At first, Leah assumed it was Sean – but when she looked up, she met the steady gaze of a woman she had been afraid to see again ever since she left the apartment a few blocks away.
“You could simply tell me to my face. Sean’s only here to make sure my shitty excuse for a husband doesn’t bother us again.”
Leah bristled, that chill claiming her spine as cold as the ice she willed to grow around her heart. Sloan leaned against the table. Her attempt to make eye contact was noted, but Leah refused to respond.
“Suppose I should explain myself, huh?”
Finally, Leah considered her (ex?) girlfriend with a sigh of disbelief. “That would be nice, I suppose.”
Sloan nodded to her bodyguard before getting up. “Not here, though. I’d prefer not to get into my dirty laundry in public.” Both she and Sean waited for Leah to stand up from the table as well. “I’ll take you home. My real home.”
Leah refused to take a step forward. “He’s not going to be there, is he?”
“Perhaps.” Sloan shrugged. “We live in completely different areas of the house, with different keys and security. We won’t see him.”
“Like we weren’t supposed to see him at the small apartment, huh?”
That slapped Sloan across her cheek. “He has a key to that place. We share it.”
Leah was flabbergasted. I can’t believe this. What kind of woman is she? Doesn’t she have any dignity at all?
She went with Sloan and Sean, not because she wanted to, but because she didn’t know what else to do. She couldn’t afford her own hotel room, and she was afraid to ask Sloan to pay for one. Nor did she have any friends in Chicago who could help her. The best Leah could hope for was a quick end to her misery, and if that meant going to Sloan’s penthouse several blocks away, then so be it.
Gone were the flirtations they showered one another with as late as that morning. Leah kept her distance from Sloan, and in return, Sloan did not offer her hand, a kiss, or sweet words that may smooth things over. She was saving her breaths for a better explanation, apparently, and that would not happen in the car.
Leah knew Sloan was more than rich enough to afford one of the nicest penthouses in Chicago, but she was not prepared for a three-level home near Lake Michigan, nor did she anticipate a plethora of staff people rushing to Sloan’s command. How much were these people paid? Did they work full time?
“This way,” she said, veering immediately to the left as soon as they entered the grand foyer of the penthouse. Another elevator awaited to take them up two more floors. The glass overlooking the foyer allowed Leah to press her nose closer to the golden chandelier ostentatiously glittering above the spiral staircase.
You’ve got to be kidding me. Not even the nicest hotel in Portland was this grand.
“That leads to the shared living quarters,” Sloan explained, catching Leah tracing the steps on the grand staircase with her eyes. “Kitchen, dining room, library and entertainment room… I don’t go in there much. I have the run of the third floor, though. I think you’ll like it.”
Leah glanced at her.
“I decorated it. All this crap,” Sloan motioned to the marble floors, chandelier, and staff members running about in short skirts and cleavage, “is nothing but Aaron.”
“Your husband.” Leah still couldn’t get over it.
“Yes.” At least Sloan didn’t try to deny it. “My husband of almost thirteen years.”
The elevator doors opened. Sloan walked forward, but Sean stayed behind until Leah had also stepped out of the elevator. He’s not sitting in with us, is he? No. Sean disappeared into another room while Leah was led to a large set of double-doors around a corner.
“My chambers,” Sloan said. “I don’t often have people in here, come to think of it. Guess it’s my refuge.”
The room was dark, even in the middle of the brightly lit morning. When Sloan pulled back the curtains, sunlight streamed across the royal purple bedspread. Leah couldn’t help but enjoy the satisfaction of being right about Sloan’s favorite color.
“Have a seat wherever you like.” Sloan opened a closet. Inside was a shelf of mannequin heads, each one sporting a different wig, some of them unknown to Leah until that moment. Sloan removed the black hair from her scalp and softened it against a mannequin head in the middle of the shelf. “If you’d like, I can have drinks or other refreshments delivered.”
“No, thank you.” Leah helped herself to a couch at the foot of the bed. A large TV hung on the wall above the fireplace. It looked like it hadn’t been turned on in weeks.
Sloan sat in the chair adjacent to the couch. Her legs were crossed away from Leah. Here they were again, dividing their feelings and ignoring what was best for them. Whatever that is. Leah didn’t know. She also didn’t care anymore.
“I should hope it’s obvious,” Sloan began, “that I am estranged from my husband in the marital sense, and have no outstanding relationship with him. Like that. Anymore.”
Leah shuddered. “He’s still your husband. You’re still married… you never told me.”
“What was I supposed to say? ‘By the way, kitten, I’m married to my business partner. Long story, really, but I promise we’re not actually a couple anymore, so it’s only a little like cheating on him?’” Sloan laughed. “As if it’s cheating. I broke up with him a long time ago. We’re only married on paper.”
“Why didn’t you get a divorce, then?”
“Are you kidding me? Lose out on the tax breaks being married affords us?” She couldn’t keep up the façade of finding that hilarious. “Honestly… it’s a long story. One that I don’t like to tell people. Aaron and I… we did not have a healthy marriage.”
Leah leaned her elbow against the arm of the sofa and slapped her forehead upon her hand. “When did you plan on telling me? Before or after I said I love you?”
Defeat crowned Sloan’s visage. “I don’t know. I never intended to get this far with someone.”
“Are you really gay?”
“Am I…” Always nice to know that someone like Leah could still shock someone like Sloan. “Am I really gay? Are you kidding me? Of course I am. Suppose you could call Aaron a… blip… in my history.”
“So you did love him at some point?”
“Honey…” Sloan shook her head. “He was my whole fucking world.”
***
Sloan insisted on summoning a drink before daring to continue. Liquid courage wasn’t the issue. Oral fixation was. If I don’t have something to preoccupy my mouth, I won’t know what to do with myself. She wasn’t a fan of leaving Leah hanging like this, but until the drink was in her hand, she’d stay silent on what troubled her the most about her marriage to Aaron Giles.
I was a kid. What the fuck did I know? Back then, though, twenty-five hardly felt like a child. Women got married and had babies at twenty-five all the fucking time, but Sloan? She hadn’t been ready for that kind of upheaval. She had been a grad student on the verge of receiving her degree. Her sheltered middle-class soul hadn’t been prepared for the man who came to speak to one of her classes one fateful spring day.
“It’s simple, I suppose,” Sloan said after explaining the first time she saw Aaron on a college campus. “Until the age of twenty-five, I had spent all of my adult life cavorting with women and dreaming of the day I’d finally settle down and marry one. Then by the time I was twenty-six, I was bisexual and wondering if this was what it was like to grow older.”
�
�What do you mean?”
“It’s not supposed to make sense anymore. I’m forty now. I can look back and call out my bullshit from my twenties. But back then, I was convinced that accepting my attraction for one man meant I had matured.” The drink wouldn’t be enough. Leah could look disgusted all she wanted, but Sloan was going to chain smoke her way through this conversation if it killed her. “You’re thirty. Surely, you must remember what it was like to enter the second half of your twenties and realize things had changed.”
Leah said nothing.
“There was an instant attraction between us. I eschewed his advances for a whole day before finally consenting to one drink, to sate my curiosity.”
Smoke tendrilled from the end of her first cigarette. The nicotine and alcohol can’t hit my system fast enough. This was the first time since getting a therapist that Sloan ever told this tale out loud. It had been bad enough to live it. Did she really need someone else to know about it?
Yes, apparently. If she were determined to make a girlfriend out of anyone, let alone someone like Leah, then she needed to reveal this part of herself. She could be divorced, finally, and she would still have to talk about that period of her life when she fell in love with a man. Hard enough to marry him within two years.
I was so stupid. Such a fool. A complete idiot. There were nights when Sloan called herself every derogatory name in the book. Not only the ones mocking her intelligence, either. Sometimes she couldn’t stop until she had called herself a whore a hundred times over. Her therapist said that was her brain processing the darker parts of her marriage. The times when she rationalized her husband’s behavior as normal, him having a bad day, and stressed out by the fast life they lived.
Another way she divorced her current life from that blip in her history was insisting on a separate name. Margaret was dead, a legality only on federal papers. “Maggie” was the wife of Aaron Giles. The day Sloan walked away from her marriage, she realized she had to divorce her given name as well. She was known only as Sloan from that day forward.
“I didn’t sleep with him on the first date,” she insisted, while Leah continued to look more uncomfortable than someone with food poisoning, “but I left the lounge that night with the feeling that he had changed my life. Back then, I didn’t recognize that look in his eyes for what it was. He counted on that. The bastard says the first thing that attracted him to me was my feistiness. You know what that’s code for? ‘You looked like a woman worth breaking.’”
“You were attracted to that?”
Sloan shrugged off that question. “Like I said. I was dumb. He gave me a sexual thrill I hadn’t felt in forever. He wasn’t the first man I had slept with, but at that point I was fairly solidified in my identity as a lesbian. I guess it also meant I felt like such a baaad girl.” She rolled her eyes. “Christ. This is why I don’t talk about this out loud.”
It’s true, though. After their first date, Sloan returned home with tingles she couldn’t account. Aaron hadn’t even touched her, except to take her hand to help her down from her barstool. An electric storm that would rage for years ignited that night.
His gaze, the aura he carried… those had been enough to turn Sloan into a woman she no longer recognized. It was the adage, “Now the songs on the radio make sense,” only perverted. She heard heterosexual anthems and realized they had come for her. Cupid thought it a cosmic joke to prick her heart and loins with love and lust for only one person – a man. Maybe sexuality was fluid, after all. Maybe she had encountered her one glorious exception. A word she now hated more than when she first identified as a lesbian.
She refused to describe the first night she slept with Aaron, but the memory dwelled in the back of her mind. He took me to his hotel room, and I knew exactly what we would do. Sloan had wanted it, of course. If nothing else, she would get this man out of her system and go back to her life, but when he fucked her like he hadn’t been with a woman in years, it hit her: this wasn’t a fluke. This was some corrupted form of destiny bringing them together.
“He’s the one who jumpstarted my career. He’s also the one who really got me into BDSM.” That was the aura that had attracted Sloan. An alpha male. She was used to those types in business school and beyond, but Aaron was the first one she met who truly embodied what she respected most of the type. He knew when to defer to those who knew more than him. He wasn’t afraid to ask for a woman’s advice – and follow up on it. He also took the time to patiently show her what it meant to be in a relationship with a man like him.
Sloan often wished he hadn’t. If he had tried to jump right into the collars, the leashes, the going commando to business lunches so she was always aware of the sexual nature of their relationship, then she could have run away before she was in too deep. The Margaret Sloan who first met Aaron Giles was savvy enough to recognize a creep, but he also knew that she was. Once Aaron decided he wanted more than Sloan’s body, it was only a matter of reeling her in and manipulating her until she no longer knew who she was.
“Don’t get me wrong. I’ve always been into kinky stuff. I had already tied up my fair share of women before I met him.” Leah didn’t look impressed when Sloan said that, so she continued, “But he was the first one to do it to me, and you know what? I already trusted him by that point. I didn’t worry that he was going to hurt me, or leave me there to embarrass me. He knew how to wear me down. It started with handcuffs and stamina play. When I finally left his bedroom for the final time, we had done everything. Some of it I still dream about, because it had been amazing at the time.” More like had nightmares. Sometimes Sloan woke up, convinced she was tied up to the banister in the foyer and enjoying anal sex for the millionth time.
Leah looked down at her own wrists. Christ. She’s starting to get it. What really, truly made Margaret Sloan the most fucked up woman any other could call her girlfriend.
“I can’t describe…” Sloan jammed her cigarette into the ashtray on the table and closed her eyes. “There are no words for how he changed me. I went from being the most outspoken, aggressive, and take-no-fucks woman I knew. He transformed me into his ideal, submissive wife. I spent almost seven, eight years doing his bidding and going along with everything he wanted. The only time I exerted my mind and independence was when we worked. He made me an equal partner right after we got married. We were equals in the boardroom. It was in private that we reverted to our agreed-upon roles.” He got off on it, didn’t he? Men came up to him and asked how he could marry such a ball-busting feminist. Then he had the honors of taking her into their bedroom and fucking whatever hole he pleased while she begged for more and called him sir. “I both loathed him and admired him for how good he was. The admiration, my love for him completely overrode my common sense. Love is blind, you know. It says you love this man, so you love him. You go along with it. You trust him. You give your heart and soul to someone who doesn’t deserve it. You stop wondering if you love the way he spanks you because it’s your nature, or because he’s convinced you that punishments are better than rewards.”
She couldn’t look at Leah while a second cigarette alit with life. I don’t want to see that look in her eyes. Disgust. Disbelief. Awareness that everything they had done in the bedroom somehow mimicked the shit Aaron had put Sloan through in their marriage.
Pull up her skirt and fuck her over the edge of the couch. Yup. Sounds like a regular Thursday night back in the day. Sloan needed to smoke faster.
“So… what made you leave the relationship?”
“God, I haven’t gotten there yet, huh?”
“You’re painting a picture, that’s for sure.” Leah held her arms closer to her torso. She had never removed the bracelet sporting the diamonds from Sloan’s old wedding ring. “Did you finally realize what an asshole he was?”
“Yes. In one of the most traumatizing ways possible.”
Leah shuddered.
“Not like that. He never… did something like that.” They had done a lot of roleplayi
ng in the bedroom, but Sloan never believed her husband was like that outside of her consenting to it. “No. Something else happened, and I saw his true colors.” Sloan took her time with the next drag of her cigarette. “I got pregnant.”
An icy atmosphere settled upon the room. Leah looked like she wanted to throw up.
“Story as old as time.” Sloan kicked back in her chair and pretended she told a silly anecdote instead of one of the most horrifying moments of her life. “Woman diligently takes birth control, still gets pregnant.”
“You don’t have kids though, do you?”
Sloan stared at the antique chandelier hanging above them. “No. I’ve never wanted them, and he knew that.” Leah remained silent. What else could Sloan do but explain? “As soon as I found out, I told my doctor I wanted it gone. I didn’t tell my husband until later. I didn’t expect him to tell me I couldn’t.”
She laughed, but it wasn’t a jovial cackle breaking the ice that had settled a few moments before. It was pure insanity. Those memories, every time they came flooding back at least once a day, were enough to destroy the last bit of Sloan’s fragile sanity.
“Aaron had the fucking balls to tell me I couldn’t do what I wanted with my body. We fought for days. He attempted to cancel my appointments. He sent people to my office, to our own home to pump me full of bullshit stories about how having a baby would extend my life and give me meaning I never knew possible. Then he pulled out the big guns and told me that he forbade me. He didn’t use religion, which would’ve been rich, because I don’t think he’s believed in God a single day of his life. Nope. He told me that he was my Master, and it was my job as his wife to submit to him.”
“Sounds pretty religious to me.”
“I wish. I knew how to deal with that level of extremism.” Hello, extended family on my mother’s side. There was more than one reason Sloan didn’t have contact with her family. “He was using our lifestyle and all the manipulation he had performed on me over the years to make me do something I didn’t want.”
