by Tiffany Sala
“I keep count of everything, Aileen.” He was pushing something under my knees to better adjust me into the position he wanted, caressing the backs of my legs and my arse, and I was not sure I had escaped anything at all. “Now, I’m going to be very gentle, but if you need to stop, just yell out… patent.”
“You fucking—”
I started and squealed at his first slap. It wasn’t too hard to bear, but it was shocking, embarrassing, to be reminded I really could enjoy something like this.
Axel slapped me again, then leaned over so he could murmur into my ear. “You’re eighteen, aren’t you, Aileen?” I made some collection of sounds that might have been a confirmation. “Let’s try sixteen more, then. That’ll be one for every year you’ve been alive.” He delivered the third. “One… for every year you’ve been on this planet giving men grief.”
“I’m pretty sure I wasn’t giving anyone grief for at least the first—”
Number four was a bit harder. I whimpered and shut my mouth.
Axel leaned closer again. “You okay, baby?”
I was fairly okay. I was starting to get pretty turned on by this sort of handling, and that was very okay… until I realised he hadn’t resumed his procedure, and it was probably because he’d noticed.
“Oh, Aileen.” He inhaled, then chuckled. “You’re supposed to take your punishment seriously, of course… but this is something else.”
I felt his legs brushing against the outside of mine, which made me realise just how much of an idiot I’d been, that he could still take whatever he wanted this way and I’d be less able to resist. That word I did not want to say was a second from being out of my mouth when I felt him move away again. “Remember, Aileen, I’m not that sort of monster. You’ll need to take yourself to the table.”
When I did feel something between my legs, it was just his fingers, conducting a careful exploration. And yes… I wanted it.
He didn’t need to puzzle over things for long to decide what he was going to do. I stiffened at the intrusion into me, a new and startling pain that faded slowly. I was impaled on him, and when he resumed those light, deliberate slaps, the sensation vibrated through me in a new way.
“Count, Aileen.”
“I—what?”
“We’re up to seven. I want you to count for me.”
He slapped me again, and waited until I said eight. One hand was sliding back and forth: smooth, rhythmic, reassuring; the other struck me whenever he felt like it, and then he expected me to be on the ball.
I made it to fifteen before the sensation swelled into something I couldn’t contain. “Axel…”
He slapped me for sixteen. “Count.”
I opened my mouth to obey, but only a moan came out, my body revealing in its clinging to his intruding fingers exactly what had gone wrong. I pushed back against him as he continued to pump in me, gentle, riding me all the way down.
When my body was only quivering he withdrew from me and turned me over, settling me completely on his bed. My dress was falling down at the top and up at the bottom, my knees were parted. He could see just about everything he’d put into that fake photo of me when he sat down alongside me, and he looked like he was happy enough with what was there.
“I should stay the hell away from you, you know,” he informed me the way some guys might remind a girl of some event the next weekend they were planning on taking her to. “You’re a big fucking pile of bad news.”
“This, from someone who has completely upended my life—and not only my life—because of his own issues and goals.”
The creak of a loud footstep elsewhere in the house had both of us scrambling. Axel jumped up and fidgeted with his clothes with his back turned to me like he had something that needed a bit of adjusting. I was pulling bits up and down and searching for my panties, hopping across the room with tremendous dignity while I yanked them up. I felt like I was in a real post-intimacy bubble, and I was barely able to make sense of what I was seeing when I realised the thing Axel had been fiddling with on his desk before wasn’t actually his phone.
An old music player? Had he been trying to create a mood, or something?
Axel turned back towards me and spoke up, “Aileen,” but I’d already pressed a button to wake up the screen.
This thing was old, it didn’t have a lock screen or anything. I saw exactly what it was doing.
“Axel… have you seriously been recording us, this whole time?”
“Aileen, I…”
I stopped the recording and went back through it, just to be sure. I misjudged coming out on a point I thought was going to be relatively safe and got my own voice, sounding almost nothing like I usually sounded, counting twelve, a strange repetitive wet noise in the background making my head feel so hot I thought I might set Axel on fire just looking at him.
I din’t want to look at him, to put this knowledge of what he had been doing between us.
“Aileen, it’s not what it looks like.” Axel might know how to drive a hard bargain, but when he was on the back foot chances were he sounded like an idiot. “I record interactions all the time, just… just in case. You never…”
He didn’t want to finish, but I was happy to do what was needed. “You never know whether you might get something really good to use as blackmail material, huh? I’m not sure you’re going to have any luck this time, I mean pretty much everyone in the world already knows something is going on between us, now they’ll just have more evocative audio than you could mock up without my assistance.”
“I wasn’t planning on using any of this to blackmail you, Aileen, I swear.” It was coming out weak, more stilted than if he had tried to mock up a recording of an intimate scene between us. I wished I’d had the sense not to listen to that thing. The sound of his voice against mine, high-pitched and desperate, was going to screw with my sleep for a long time to come, I knew it. “I… I don’t know why I did it, I just always do when there’s a private conversation. It’s not like I can even do anything with it, you know it’s pretty illegal. I just…”
“I get it, Axel, really. You don’t trust anyone, you try to make sure you have something to protect you. Maybe I would too, in your position. But the two of us coming in here together… did you really think you were going to need protection from that? You’ve always had all the power since you started messing with me. I’ve just been doing whatever I needed to barely hold my own.”
“I’m sorry, Aileen.” The shocking thing was he actually sounded sincere, quite stricken. “I didn’t think. It was just in the moment.”
It was too much to have gone from that scene of total intimacy, total trust, into this. “I’d better get out of here. The bus takes a while to get here, never mind the twists and turns of the route.”
Axel stepped forward. “I’ll drive you—”
“No thanks. I’d just like you to leave me alone, please.”
I strode past him and opened the door for myself, and he had the decency to refrain from stopping me, at least. The only thing I knew was that I needed to be away from him to clear my thoughts.
I staggered down the long driveway from his house with a powerful awareness that this was not going to be okay. How could it be? I’d given him power over my life now. He’d taken the one thing that mattered to my dad, and if he wanted he could require just about anything of me to keep Dad from needing to realise what he’d given up. If he wanted me back there the next weekend, doing everything we’d just been doing, could I really afford to refuse? I’d wanted to give Dad a way to stay in the boys’ lives no matter where Marcia’s life took her—this was that way.
Actually I was okay with all of that. The one thing I’d realised about life, that Dad never had, was that sometimes you had to do what you had to do to get what you wanted out of it. I could think of many worse things to be doing than getting intimately involved with Axel—the way he’d touched me was still making my head spin, even as the hurt from this betrayal was numbing my limb
s. I wasn’t likely to have another partner any time soon, either, not with Dad to chase after… and if I did find someone by chance, I could get him to knock Axel’s block off for me.
That thought made me giggle, and then I stopped on the street, laughing harder and harder until tears filled my eyes that were definitely not joyful. The funniest part of it all, the most pathetic part, was that I wanted Axel to catch up with me while I was stopped there. I wanted him to come running after me with an explanation for what he had done. Even though I knew there was no explanation that could satisfy me. Axel was just too caught up in his suspicions and manipulations, he couldn’t stop for one minute to trust someone else even when I had never been anything but straightforward with him.
“Aileen?” It was Matt coming towards me. I tried to wipe my tears away as he drew near, but there was no keeping him from seeing. He tried to put an arm over me, then seemed to realise just how little I was wearing and settled for a hand on my shoulder. “What’s happened? Is it…”
“I didn’t know,” I gasped. “Why didn’t you tell me? No, I’m sorry, I realise it isn’t mine to know.”
Matt was as obviously bewildered as any guy who was probably resigned enough to the reality of his situation he didn’t think about it every minute of the day any more. “Tell you what? Do you need to come sit down, have some water?”
“I’m sorry if you never meant for me to know. I’m talking about with your dad and Axel’s mum, together…”
Matt scowled at me like academic-type guys do when you say something they can’t work their logic through, but then he started to work it out. “They… no. They didn’t, they never. I didn’t—Someone would have told me.”
“Not necessarily,” I said, almost wanting to apologise for mentioning it but having a sense he wouldn’t be able to take my regret or sympathy. How had he been left clueless for so long? “Sometimes people only say what they think you can stand.”
Matt turned back to his suburban mansion, shaking like there were ghosts or monsters or both there. “I need to… I have to ask her, Aileen, will you come with me?”
I was in so deep at that point I didn’t think I could really say no. That was how I ended up in the middle of a very uncomfortable and emotional discussion between Matt and his mother, in which she apologised for just about everything except having him, which was the only thing on the list she would have been at all responsible for. And there was me alongside all the tears and assurances, in my flimsy little sundress looking exactly like I’d been strategising to give Axel Bennett a stiffy—which, of course, was exactly what I’d been trying to do.
It went on for so long without a convenient moment for me to slip out I ran out of buses, and had to call Dad to get in the car to grab me. I was always nervous about that, because he was a crap driver and liable to get himself pulled over for drug testing and come up with weed in his system. But for once I felt happy to have him there when he stepped into the house, because he looked just as dismayed as I felt about the free-flowing emotion in the Ehrlich household. I guessed Matt’s poor mother was stuck with her ex’s name now, like my mother and Tamara’s. It must be like he was pissing on her all over again every time she had to write her name down on a form or answer to it over the phone. Why did men have to be like that?
When we finally managed to excuse ourselves and I was walking to our car alongside Dad, I couldn’t help grabbing his ear to yank his head down closer and kissing him loudly on the cheek.
He pulled away from me, grimacing. “What’s that for? Don’t tell me you have to confess you’re pregnant or something.”
“I don’t think anything I’ve been doing yet today can result in that.” Dad gave me this look like he’d definitely noticed what I was wearing, but he didn’t say anything because Dad didn’t care about claiming me or my sexuality any more than he had cared about claiming his invention.
For all his faults, thank goodness I’d grown up with him instead of with some messed-up pre-divorce parents in this world of high-flyers who would sell out the people they were supposed to value most for a better deal. I didn’t belong in that world… and that was why I needed to make sure I stayed far away from Axel.
Chapter Fifteen: Axel
I avoided being seen with Matt during school hours most of the time and he’d accepted that without questioning why, so when I saw him striding towards me when I was in the midst of my usual group, I knew I was in for it.
I took a few steps forward to meet him, and had to duck a punch while I was still walking.
“Matt, what the fuck?” I swerved left, then right.
“When were you gonna tell me, huh?” Matt shouted. I knew exactly what he was talking about then, but I let him spill it. “Your scummy mother—”
I put my hands up and he hit one of them down with a weak fist before he started to look self-conscious and stopped trying to fight me. Glancing behind, I saw Luc and Mic looking pretty amused by this scene, and Ash rolling her eyes like she just wanted these things to stop happening on her watch. Callie and Carlene had barely noticed, of course. Probably talking about fucking dresses again. “Look, the decisions she’s made in her life have nothing to do with me, man.”
“And the man my dad is—or, you know, isn’t—has nothing to do with me either, but that hasn’t stopped you from making it my problem all these years, has it?” Matt’s fists were up again. “All this time you’ve been screwing with me, making me do—”
I cuffed him around the back of the head and dragged him away from my group. This was getting to be something for the two of us only.
“What do you want?” I asked him, as soon as we had enough distance to be properly alone. “Would you like me to turn back time, make it so none of this ever happened? So we can just go back to being who we were to one another before the bullshit hit the fan? Because that’s not happening, Matt. For better or worse, this is what we’ve got.”
Matt gave me a shove. “Fuck off with the lecture, Axel. You’re the one who’s been giving me shit for something I never even did!”
And he was right, wasn’t he? That was what had really burned about Aileen’s reaction to my recording her. It was all very well defending myself against the rest of the arseholes out there, but she knew she hadn’t done anything wrong yet to earn it, and I didn’t really believe I had any reason to suspect she was about to. I’d just done it. If I wouldn’t stop myself then, when would I stop myself?
Matt was practically on fire now. “And I never wanted you to go back to being my friend like when we were kids, I never asked for that. I think we’ve gone in way too different directions now. But I would have liked for you to treat me like a human. Like the minimum anyone on this planet deserves. The problem is I don’t think you have that in you. Because someone who had the slightest care for other human beings wouldn’t have intimidated and manipulated me the way you did, using me just because I trusted you once… and, you know what? I don’t care any more what you have to threaten me with. I thought I did, but what does my reputation matter really? I’ve got money and the ability to go wherever the hell I want after school’s done, so give me the worst you’ve got. Smack me with it the way you did Aileen; if she can get through it then I can do the same.”
“You’ve really got it going for Aileen,” was all I could think of to say.
Matt’s look was as filthy as if I’d bent her over and started flogging her arse in front of him. “Not like that, Axel. I actually care about her as a human being, I think we’re starting to become friends. It’s nice to have someone who wants to rely on you, even when you’ve done things that mean you don’t really deserve it.”
That stopped me in my tracks. Having her trust without deserving it… that sounded like me all over. I thought about how she’d given herself to me, as much as she was able, and I felt like I needed some time to be alone.
That was gone now, of course. She was never going to trust me again.
“Of course I’ve got no idea wh
at the hell you want from her,” Matt added, seeming to anticipate my thoughts in a way I hated, with friends. Aileen had sometimes managed to do that exact same thing. “But she deserves so much better than you’re willing to offer. That’s all I’m saying. And from now on… I don’t care what you think you’re going to do to me, I’m going to fight on her side.”
It was weird to hear him talk like that, because I had no intention of doing anything else to Matt. But he knew me too well now, better than Aileen for sure. He had no reason to expect anything different.
“You do what you’ve got to do,” I said, and he nodded as he backed away.
I turned helplessly back to Luc and Mic—and apparently Callie, who was hiding behind Lucas. Maybe she felt like she had to audit this because her friend was involved.
“Keeping that girl perfectly in line I see.” Mic was really loving this, me at a disadvantage. Luc and Steve were probably having the time of their lives too. I was only realising now just how much of a front I’d managed to put up for everyone in my life, because I’d let Aileen slip behind it just enough to remember what it was like. When had the last time been for anyone, though? I guess I’d been close with Mum when I was younger, she was the sort of person who managed to get that kind of relationship out of everyone she encountered.
And that had turned out so well for Dad and I. But did I really believe Aileen was going to turn out the same?
The thing with Mum was, she’d never been so shocked about the way things were in our world of money and enterprise, compared to Aileen. She’d grown up in the same sort of family she’d helped construct for me. I remembered her laughing once as she told me, that’s just how these men are, sweetheart. She’d done what she did, because as a woman in our world that was the way to get ahead.
The thing was, if I wanted Aileen to turn out just like my mother, wasn’t the best thing to do to turn on her before she ever did anything wrong, to make her feel like she needed to be ready for an assault at all times?
